Weekly Happenings: August 31 – September 7, 2021

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.

Artists have banded together to write an open letter to the US government calling for the evacuation of Afghan cultural workers—add your signature now.

Events, Exhibitions, & Screenings

Alison O’Daniel
I felt people dancing

In-person exhibition
Kunsthalle Osnabrück in Germany
Through October 3, 2021

For her site-specific installation at Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Alison O’Daniel—who is hard of hearing— asked two Deaf collaborators to visit the space and draw maps of their experience of the sounds. Their maps were then reproduced to scale in the form of a colorful carpet, which captures the chaos of the building’s acoustics. The exhibition include clips from her Creative Capital Project, The Tuba Thieves.

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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. The latest video, published by The Guardian, focuses on Chicago and Washington, DC in 1919, showing how biased press coverage played a role in igniting racial violence.

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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.

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CAConrad
AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration

Wave Books
Book launch party
September 5, 2021

CAConrad is publishing a new book of poems, AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration. His Creative Capital Project, the work stems from a (Soma)tic poetry ritual where CA flooded their body with the field recordings of recently extinct animals. Foundational here are the memories of loved ones who died of AIDS, the daily struggle of existing through the Corona Virus pandemic, and the effort to arrive at a new way of falling in love with the world as it is, not as it was. The book will be available September 7.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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Jeffrey Gibson
To Feel Myself Beloved on the Earth

ART OMI in Ghent, NY
In-person exhibition
Opening September 11, 2021

To Feel Myself Beloved on the Earth is an exhibition of quilts, garments, drums, prints, and video by Jeffrey Gibson. Gibson’s eponymous video To Feel Myself Beloved on the Earth was produced in 2020, amidst both the coronavirus pandemic and a time of civil unrest as citizens took to the streets to demand equity and justice for BIPOC communities.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Marc Anthony Richardson
Messiahs

University of Alabama Press
New book

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.

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Mercedes Dorame
Ancestors Leading the Stars – ‘Eyoohiinkem He’uuk Shishyoota

Begovich Gallery at College of the Arts in Fullerton, California
Through September 30, 2021

This installation by Mercedes Dorame explores the deep connection to her ancestral homelands of Tovaangar, examining loss as means to establish permanent records of Indigenous presence in a country that sought to erase Native people.

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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.

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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?

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Nia Witherspoon
Staging Decadence

HERE Arts Center
Online Talk and Performance
September 9, 2021

HERE hosts this varied night of performance and talks including an iteration of Nia Witherspoon’s Creative Capital Project, Priestess of Twerk: Time Warp 332BC (A Concert Experiment), inspired by sacred sex workers and ‘the “bad bitches” of hip-hop.’

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“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.

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Stephanie Dinkins
On Love & Data

Stamps Gallery in Ann Arbor, Michigan
In-person exhibition
Through October 23, 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.

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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.

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Tamara Shogaolu
Un(re)solved
Two Mississippi Museums
In-person installation & online experience
Through October 24, 2021

Un(re)solved is an installation, podcast, film, and VR experience which uses augmented reality to explore the stories hidden in this living quilt by invoking the names of victims of civil rights era murders, often racist killings, out of the shadows of the past. The project was created by Tamara Shogaolu and her studio, Ado Ato Pictures in collaboration with Frontline.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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In the News

“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.

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“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.”

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“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.

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“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.

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“The Kunsthalle Where No One Can Hear”
Art in America
September 1, 2021

Art in America reviews Alison O’Daniel’s exhibition at Kunsthalle Osnabrück. The exhibition centers around a carpet which reflected maps drawn by two Deaf collaborators of their experience of sounds. “The carpet captures the absurd chaos of the building’s acoustics—and moreover, the feeling of being hard of hearing in a world chock full of incomprehensible sounds.”

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“Maggie Nelson Wants to Redefine ‘Freedom’”
New York Times
September 2, 2021

Ismail Muhammad writes for the New York Times on Maggie Nelson and her new collection of essays, On Freedom: “On Freedom is an argument for how we engage with objects of analysis — and one another — in a way that is principled but not rigid, that displays care for other people’s perceptions, pains and desires, and that has respect for what we cannot know.”

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“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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“Open letter from Arts for Afghanistan”

Artists, filmmakers, performers, writers, curators—including Creative Capital Awardees Mariam Ghani and Eric Gottesman—have written an open letter to the US government calling for the evacuation and asylum of Afghan cultural workers: “…We recognize the vulnerability of the country’s cultural workers, who are already being targeted by the Taliban and forced into hiding. Like Afghan journalists, activists, and citizens who have assisted the US, cultural workers face threats to their lives because of the work they’ve done—and they are unlikely to get out of the country without immediate changes to Washington’s approach to granting visas and providing flights.”

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