Weekly Happenings: August 24–31, 2021
video still from Stephanie Dinkins’s Secret Garden, on view at University of Michigan’s Stamps Gallery.
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.
This week, check out Stephanie Dinkins’s new exhibition on machine learning and AI technologies at Stamps Gallery in Michigan, Elissa Washuta’s essay pondering the question ‘why do we write?,’ and Lead Pencil Studio’s virtual exhibition hosted by ‘T’ Space.
Events, Exhibitions, & Screenings
Brian Harnetty
“COMMON GROUND: Listening to Appalachian Ohio”
Miller Gallery at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio
In-person exhibition
August 23 – November 17, 2021
Brian Harnetty’s practice works with sound archives and the communities connected to them, creating encounters that are rooted in place and the transformative power of listening. This solo exhibition features Harnetty’s Creative Capital Project, Shawnee, Ohio, as well as other sound works on Appalachian Ohio.
Elissa Washuta
“Why Though”
Noyo Review
Essay
August 2021
In this essay, Elissa Washuta ponders the question, why do we write?, drawing from her own journey as a writer. “I want to tell you that I cannot answer a question like, Why do we write? I can’t even answer the question, Why do I write? Nobody ever asks me why I think. When people ask me why I write, I sometimes say, at first it was to become famous, and now it’s because it makes me my money. These things aren’t lies, but they’re incomplete.”
Guadalupe Maravilla
Guadalupe Maravilla & The Sound of Healing
Art21
Online film
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.
Guadalupe Maravilla
Planeta Abuelx
Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, New York
In-person exhibition
Through September 6, 2021
This solo exhibition by Guadalupe Maravilla draws on ancestral and Indigenous practices of holistic healing. Maravilla’s sculptures and performance pieces are displayed on the grounds, and the artist will activate the work through healing sound baths—offered on elect dates—which he discovered during his treatment for stomach cancer.
Jillian Mayer
TIMESHARE
Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC
In-person exhibition
Through September 26, 2021
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.
Lead Pencil Studio
Suspended Collapse
‘T’ Space
Virtual exhibition
Through September 26, 2021
Employing models, drawing, photography, and LiDAR-based animations, this new body of work by Creative Capital Awardees Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo of Lead Pencil Studio probes a subject overlooked in the field of architecture. Annie Han is also Creative Capital’s Board Chair.
Lynn Hershman Leeson
“Three by Lynn Hershman Leeson”
The Criterion Channel
Film screening
Criteron Channel is streaming three films by Lynn Herman Leeson: Conceiving Ada, Teknolust, and Strange Culture—all starring Tilda Swinton. These genre-defying works offer a boldly feminist, philosophically adventurous perspective on the brave new technological and political landscape that took shape at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Lynn Hershman Leeson
Twisted
New Museum in New York City
In-person exhibition
Through October 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.
Marc Anthony Richardson
Messiahs
University of Alabama Press
Book release
August 24, 2021
A new novel by Marc Anthony Richardson will be released August 24. Messiahs centers on two nameless lovers, a woman of east Asian descent and a former state prisoner, a black man who volunteered incarceration on behalf of his falsely convicted nephew, yet was “exonerated” after more than two years on death row. In this dystopian America, one can assume a relative’s capital sentence as an act of holy reform—“the proxy initiative,” patterned after the Passion.
Marc Anthony Richardson
Virtual Event: Marc Anthony Richardson and Carolina de Robertis
Green Apple Books
Book talk
August 25, 2021 at 9pm ET
Marc Anthony Richardson talks to Carolina de Robertis about his new book, Messiahs, in this free virtual event.
Michelle Handelman
BLOODSISTERS: LEATHER, DYKES & SADOMASOCHISM
Kino Lorber
Online streaming
During the early 1990s, San Francisco was the epicenter of body modification and gender nonconformity, with transgender pioneers like Patrick Califia and Tala Brandeis fighting for visibility, alongside the voice of a bold S/M community. Michelle Handelman’s provocative and pioneering documentary BLOODSISTERS captures these queer outlaws in their zeitgeist moment, shot on digital video with an unfiltered rawness that mirrors the activism of the era.
Miguel Gutierrez
Are You For Sale?
Podcast
Miguel Gutierrez just launched a podcast examining dance-making, philanthropy, and ethics. Looking to visual art for its tradition of Institutional Critique and protests regarding “toxic” philanthropy, Gutierrez asks – Why don’t we see comparable action in the dance and performance world? Are we too afraid of losing what little we have? What effects has a scarcity mentality bred? Is the entire system changeable?
“OMNISCIENT: Queer Documentation in an Image Culture”
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York City
In-person exhibition
Through January, 2022
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.
Pope.L
Notations, Holes and Humour
Modern Art in London
In-person exhibition
Through August 28, 2021
Modern Art presents Pope.L’s first solo show in London in more than a decade. The exhibition centers on his ongoing project, Skin Set, a constantly growing and shifting group of text-inflected works that consider the construction of language, identity, and stereotype as notation, hole, and absurdity and humor.
Stephanie Dinkins
On Love & Data
Stamps Gallery in Ann Arbor, Michigan
In-person exhibition
Opens August 27, 2021
Stamps Gallery presents the first survey of transmedia artist Stephanie Dinkins. In this exhibition, Dinkins develops a dialogue with the audience on the hierarchies embedded within machine learning and AI architecture and one’s individual agency in transforming the algorithms within it.
Stephen Vitiello
Land Buoy Bells
Pier 62 in Seattle
Public art
Stephen Vitiello was commissioned by Waterfront Seattle to create a site-specific, environmentally driven sound installation on the floating dock at Pier 62. Land Buoy Bells uses industrial materials – steel tank ends – and transforms them into a set of 5 instruments. The bell-like objects are struck at various moments as energy is stored up in an engineered device driven by the rise and fall of the waters that encompass the floating dock.
Travis Wilkerson
Aricadoc
Film screening
August 27 – September 12, 2021
Aricadoc hosts their 5th Documentary Film Festival, with free screening for those in Chile, Peru and Bolivia, as well as artist talks and seminars. They will be screening 13 films by Travis Wilkerson, including his Creative Capital Project, Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?
Wu Tsang
Anthem
Guggenheim Museum of Art in New York City
In-person exhibition
Through September 6, 2021
Wu Tsang’s new commission, Anthem (2021), was conceived in collaboration with the legendary singer, composer, and transgender activist Beverly Glenn-Copeland. This site-specific installation revolves around an immense, eighty-four-foot curtain sculpture suspended from the oculus with a projected “film-portrait” of Glenn-Copeland improvising and singing passages of his music.
Xenobia Bailey
Mothership and Hallowed Be Their Names
Brookfield Place in New York City
In-person exhibition
Through September 17, 2021
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
“Review: Do you see the smile? Why Sanford Biggers’ painting will put one on your face”
Los Angeles Times
August 10, 2021
The Los Angeles Times review Sanford Biggers’s exhibition Codeswitch at the California African American Museum: “Biggers approaches these antique quilts as tangible objects with authentic if anonymous histories, not simply as immaterial pictorial images. He builds from there. Sometimes the result is a painting that becomes a wall relief.”
“Artists and Elders”
The Point Magazine
August 15, 2021
The Point Magazine examines an iteration of Erika Chong Shuch’s Creative Capital Project For You, Artist and Elders, during the pandemic. The project connects an artist and a senior, with creative collaboration as the end goal.
“Carolina Caycedo Centers Social and Environmental Justice Conversation Around Care”
Whitewall
August 17, 2021
Carolina Caycedo talks to Whitewall about her investigation of our relationship to care—in relationship to motherhood, our communities, our environment, our bodies, and support systems. “If you have a woman who puts herself on the front line of environmental justice, it’s because she cares about that place, that river, that mountain, that forest, whatever she’s defending.”
“SXSW Pic ‘Potato Dreams Of America’ To Get U.S. Release In Dark Star Pictures Deal”
Deadline
August 18, 2021
Dark Star Pictures has acquired North American rights to Wes Hurley’s Creative Capital Project, Potato Dreams of America. “Director Wes Hurley has managed to tell a personal story in a humorous yet moving way that strikes an emotional chord with the viewer,” Dark Star president Michael Repsch said.
“Tomorrow’s Anxieties: An Interview of Jillian Mayer”
Autre Magazine
August 21, 2021
Jillian Mayer talks to Kelly Loudenberg of Autre Magazine about the looming ecological and infrastructural collapse, survival and prepper culture, and her exhibition TIMESHARE. “After years of making work, I’ve been thinking about the real future, not our current understanding of the future, but rather beyond that; beyond the sleek aluminum and titanium,” says Mayer.
“Emerging from the Cave”
Sundance Institute
August 2021
This survey conducted by Jesse Cameron Alick, commissioned by the Sundance Institute, an effort to understand the most urgent needs and priorities of the theater and performing arts community during this time. Alick interviewed over 70 artists and thought leaders—including Creative Capital Awardees Larissa FastHorse, Lars Jan, Daniel Alexander Jones, Raja Feather Kelly, and Legacy Russell—about their observations and suggestions on how to create a healthier space for artists. “There is a deep desire for change. And while this report does not give us answers about how to get there, it does ground us in where we actually are, which is key to getting us to where we want to go.”
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