Detail of Borderlands No 2 by Sandy Rodriguez. Photo by J6 Creative.
Simone Leigh
What’s Her Face
What’s Her Face is an installation comprised of sculpture and video that uses gestures, ceremony and rituals associated with Simone Leigh’s biography as a conceptual point of departure. This work will include hand-made ceramic, wood and glass-beaded works, informed by Leigh’s ongoing visual research on contemporary art and vernacular objects in the Global South, as well as found objects repurposed for display. What’s Her Face builds upon a group of works developed in previous site-specific installations, performances and actions.
Simone Leigh works in various media including sculpture, installations, video, performance, and social practice. She is the first Black female artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale.
Lorraine O’Grady
MBN—30 Years Later
Lorraine O’Grady’s performance persona Mlle Bourgeoise Noire transforms into a new avatar who protests a money-driven art world to restore the cultural purpose it has lost. In absurdist actions that take place in live performances, videos, photos, media ads and billboards, all the battles are lost—but memories of her impossible fight remain.
Lorraine O’Grady is an artist whose performances, photo and video installations, and writings locate timeless values in such topical issues as diaspora, hybridity, and black female subjectivity.
Mel Chin
PAYDIRT
PAYDIRT is an art/landscape project, informed by scientific process, that will make New Orleans safe to rebuild on and to return to. PAYDIRT will pay for itself through an even exchange of art for dollars. PAYDIRT will allow for traumatized citizens, the displaced children of the Katrina disaster to participate in the creation and distribution of an artwork while contributing to the rebuilding of a healthy foundation for New Orleans. PAYDIRT will reach out to and reconnect with thousands of people who have left New Orleans, and reunite them with others, deeply committed to rebuilding the cultural and physical health of New Orleans.
Mel Chin makes work that require multi-disciplinary, collaborative teamwork and work that conjoins cross-cultural aesthetics with complex ideas.
Guadalupe Maravilla
Silent Zoomorph
Silent Zoomorph is a performance series that will materialize into a film consisting of wearable sculptures, fictionalized rituals and various esoteric forms of spirituality and ancient medicine. The rituals in the film are inspired by the meditations Guadalupe Maravilla underwent while receiving fifty-three sessions of radiation while living with Cancer in 2013. Silent Zoomorph will serve as a framework to blur the physical and metaphysical line between the body, sculpture sound and light. Silent Zoomorph will take place in a Central American volcano, an ancient burial site, a contemporary Bolivian vernacular building, a radioactive desert, the Amazon, places of natural phenomenon and in trees where jaguars are born.
Guadalupe Maravilla makes work that acknowledges the historical and contemporary contexts of immigrant culture, notably belonging to Latinx communities.
Zoe Leonard
Analogue
Zoe Leonard photographed the demise of small businesses in large cities and organized the display of the photographs in a grid system, categorized roughly by subject matter. Leonard describes Analogue as a “journal of observation on the connected issues of gentrification and the global economy: a look at the vast differences between small local business and multinational franchises, the tensions between individual expression and economic necessity, and the loss of valuable cultural material as commercial areas become more homogeneous.”
Zoe Leonard is a New York–based artist working with photography, sculpture and installation.
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