Weekly Happenings: July 13–July 20, 2021
Installation view of Jillian Mayer’s TIMESHARE at Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in North Carolina.
Each week, we create a list of exhibitions, screenings, events, and news featuring Creative Capital Awardees of all disciplines. This list can include shows that have recently opened, shows about to close, and noteworthy headlines and interviews that profile artists and their work.
If you’re in New York City, this is the last week to see Lorraine O’Grady’s exhibition “Both/And” at the Brooklyn Museum and Mallory Catlett’s “Archive: this was the end” at Mabou Mines—both closing on July 18. Looking for something to do online? Sharon Bridgforth’s dat Black Mermaid Lady/The Show and Raja Feather Kelly’s The KILL ONE Race are streaming free this month.
Events, Exhibitions, & Screenings
A Global Destination for Art: Mercedes Dorame and River Garza
Fowler Museum at UCLA
Online Conversation
July 17 at 3pm ET
The Fowler Museum hosts a free talk with two Tongva artists, Creative Capital Awardee Mercedes Dorame and River Garza, who created site-specific installations in their galleries prompting viewers to examine the processes by which institutions acquire, catalog, store, and study objects from Indigenous communities.
Alan Ruiz
Container and Contained
The Kitchen in New York City
In-person exhibition
June 17–July 24, 2021
Alan Ruiz’s practice considers the way the built environment engenders social hierarchies through an array of media, standards, and techniques. This exhibition includes three works that explore the redistribution of value and authority through multiple systems.
Bayeté Ross Smith
Red Summers
The Guardian
360 video
Bayeté Ross Smith‘s 360 video series, Red Summers, uses archival photos to reveal the untold American history of racial terrorism from 1917 to 1921. In the latest video, published by The Guardian, he shows how white rioters stormed into an Omaha courthouse and dragged a Black jailed man who said he was innocent out to his death.
Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the arts
New book published by Paper Monument
Out now
This collection of seventy-three letters written in 2020 captures an unprecedented moment in politics and society through the experiences of Asian-American artists, curators, educators, art historians, editors, writers, and designers. Contributors include Creative Capital Awardees Jen Liu, Mel Chin, Naeem Mohaiemen, and Patty Chang.
Cauleen Smith
Stars in My Pocket and the Rent Is Due
Charles White Elementary School in Los Angeles
In-person exhibition
On view starting July 10
From the end of 2020 into 2021, Cauleen Smith conducted virtual visits with Charles White Elementary School classes, inviting students to make videos and dioramas depicting a world they wanted to live in. Inspired by their resilience and imagination during a pandemic, Smith incorporated elements from their videos into a new installation and created embellished banners that reference astronomy, migration, and movement.
Dana Spiotta
Wayward
Knopf Publishing Group
New book and virtual book tour
Dana Spiotta‘s new novel Wayward is out now! The book is about aging, about the female body, and about female difficulty—female complexity—in the age of Trump. Spiotta will participate in virtual book talks with other writers, including George Saunders, Chanelle Benz, Rachel Kushner, this summer.
Faye Driscoll
A Closer Look: Thank You For Coming: Play
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Behind-the-scenes video
BAM released some behind-the-scenes footage of Faye Driscoll’s 2016 debut of Thank You For Coming for their video series, A Closer Look. In the video, Driscoll discusses how the work explored excess, emotionality, and the messier aspects of what it means to be human.
Guadalupe Maravilla
Guadalupe Maravilla & The Sound of Healing
Art21
Online film screening
July 28 at 12pm ET
Art21 premieres their moving short documentary film, which provides an intimate look into Guadalupe Maravilla’s process for and activation of his Planeta Abuelx solo exhibition currently on view at Socrates Sculpture Park.
“Hiding in Plain Sight”
Pace Gallery in New York City
In-person exhibition
Opening July 14
This group exhibition brings together 18 international artists who use the language of Minimalism and abstraction to distill complex subjects into forms that reveal new frameworks of meaning, revelation, and resistance for the here and now. Creative Capital Awardee Jessica Vaughn and National Advisory Council Co-Chair Fred Wilson are among the artists with work on view.
Jillian Mayer
TIMESHARE
Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC
In-person exhibition
Opening July 15
In this exhibition, Jillian Mayer’s fiberglass sculptures, ceramic forms, and paintings explore how art can become functional during times of disaster or when the planet becomes uninhabitable.
Lorraine O’Grady
Both/And
Brooklyn Museum in New York City
In-person exhibition
Through July 18, 2021
Both/And is the first retrospective of one of the most significant contemporary figures working in performance, conceptual, and feminist art. The exhibition features twelve of the major projects Lorraine O’Grady has produced over her four-decade career and also debuts a much-anticipated new installation.
Lynn Hershman Leeson
Twisted
New Museum in New York City
In-person exhibition
June 30–Oct 3, 2021
This exhibition brings together a selection of Lynn Hershman Leeson’s work in drawing, sculpture, video, and photography, along with interactive and net-based works, focusing on themes of transmutation, identity construction, and the evolution of the cyborg.
Mallory Catlett
Archive: this was the end
Mabou Mines in New York City
In-person exhibition
Through July 18, 2021
Archive: this was the end is the afterlife of a performance as an interactive sculpture created by Creative Capital Awardee Mallory Catlett and Keith Skretch, in collaboration with sound artist G Lucas Crane. The installation allows the audience to reactivate the set made of a cabinet wall, walking into and around it following the moving portraits.
Nick Cave
Forothermore
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
In-person exhibition
Through October 2, 2022
The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presents the first career-spanning retrospective of the internationally renowned Chicagoan Nick Cave. The exhibition includes Cave’s immersive installations, textural sculptures, impeccably crafted fashion, and dynamic videos and performances.
“OMNISCIENT: Queer Documentation in an Image Culture”
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York City
In-person exhibition
New work on view beginning July 16
Creative Capital Director of Artist Initiatives Aliza Shvarts and Awardees Anna Sew Hoy and Carrie Moyer have work in this group exhibition looking at the history of queer iconographies in popular visual culture.
Raja Feather Kelly
The KILL ONE Race
Film
Through July 31, 2021
Filmed at Playwrights Horizons during the pandemic, and inspired by the 1963 dystopian novel Kill One, The KILL ONE Race is a reality competition game-play created by Raja Feather Kelly. Over the course of seven days, seven contestants compete in a social and ethical obstacle course to be proven the most ethical—and earn the singular prize of death.
Sharon Bridgforth
dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/The Show
Twin Cities PBS
TV Broadcast and Digital Screening
Streaming starting July 10
Twin Cities PBS will broadcast Sharon Bridgforth’s Creative Capital Project, dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/The Show, filmed at Pillsbury House Theatre in 2018. Centered in African-American artistic and cultural traditions, the constantly evolving project supports the creation of spaces that activate communal wisdom and self-determination.
Will Rawls
Everlasting Stranger
Henry Art Gallery in Seattle
In-person exhibition and performances
Opening July 17
In this exhibition, Will Rawls activates relationships between language, dance, and image through the fragmentary medium of stop-motion animation. Performances will also take place on Saturdays from 12-3pm ET.
Xenobia Bailey
Mothership and Hallowed Be Their Names
Brookfield Place in New York City
In-person exhibition
Through 9/17
Brookfield Place presents two commissioned hand-crochet works by Xenobia Bailey in their Winter Garden Gallery. Mothership, pays homage to the African American homemaker, caregiver, and domestic worker and Hallowed Be Their Names is an installation to celebrate and uplift communities affected by loss.
In the News
“Dao Strom and Brian Harnetty: In Conversation”
Aquarium Drunkard
June 22, 2021
In this conversation, awardees Brian Harnetty and Dao Strom talk about how the intersections of sound, language, music, memory, history, place, and practices of “listening”—to the past, to the present—fuel their respective interdisciplinary practices. Although working in quite different contexts, both artists root their art in a strong contemplation of place and one’s relationship to “place.”
“Dana Spiotta Loves Coming Across Jokes in Really Old Books”
New York Times
July 1, 2021
The New York Times talks to Dana Spiotta about books, her ideal reading experience, and what moves her in literature: “One of my favorite things is laughing at a joke in a really old book: I feel such connection to the human who made it, which delights and moves me. If you can write a joke that is still funny in 100 years, you are great.”
“Artists reimagine monuments through augmented reality”
PBS Newshour
July 5, 2021
LACMA and Snapchat hosts a new exhibition in Los Angeles that reimagines monuments through augmented reality. The project includes work by Creative Capital Awardee Mercedes Dorame, whose monument pays tribute to her ancestry, the Gabrielino-Tongva Indians of California. “When I think about monuments, I think about how they’re often a singular moment or a singular person. And it’s kind of often, for indigenous people, these histories that are really kind of traumatic for us,” she says.
“A Wife and Mother Finds a New House and Decides to Move in Alone”
New York Times
July 6, 2021
The New York Times reviews Dana Spiotta’s new novel, Wayward: “While Spiotta’s previous novels run on Didion-like cold fusion, Wayward reads like a burning fever dream, powered by hot fury rather than icy remove. There is a mythic quality to her narration, as well as a dark strain of humor.”
“Lynn Hershman Leeson: The Artist Is Prescient”
New York Times
July 8, 2021
The New York Times covers Lynn Hershman Leeson’s exhibition, “Twisted,” at the New Museum. “It’s a strong, smart survey that gives her overdue credit,” writes Jillian Steinhauer. “The show strikes me as akin to a greatest hits album: an excellent introduction for newcomers and a dose of reliable inspiration for those familiar with her work, but not deep enough once you’re tuned into her brilliance.”
“Naomi Osaka To Share Her Story In 3-Part Netflix Documentary Series”
Vibe
July 8, 2021
Garrett Bradley directs a new 3-part Netflix docuseries about Naomi Osaka. Set to debut on July 16, it follows the global tennis phenom as she experiences a historic two years in the sport and finds her voice both on and off the court.
“Latinx Artist Fellowship”
Mellon Foundation
July 13, 2021
Guadalupe Maravilla and Carolina Caycedo are among the 15 inaugural Latinx Artist Fellowship recipients. The award supports Latinx visual artists, by providing them with $50,000 each year for five years. It is administered by the US Latinx Art Forum in collaboration with the New York Foundation for the Arts and supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation.
“Cooking with Artists: Wafaa Bilal”
MoMA PS1
July 13, 2021
Wafaa Bilal shares his recipe for Najafi Qeema—Iraqi meat and chickpea stew—with MoMA PS1 chef Mina Stone for their series Cooking with Artists. In the video, Bilal talked about a range of subjects including eating in silence, to the practice of feeding a village, to reinventing ritual in a new place.
More News & Stories
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