Saturday, September 16, 2023

Works from my Portsmouth series from 2023's summer residency at Kunstram Brooklyn on display



I am thrilled to announce that two works from my latest series of images focusing on the taking down of a Confederate soldiers' memorial in Portsmouth, Virginia are on display at Kunstram in Brooklyn in September, 2023.

The works were selected by Christina Massey in an exhibition entitled 'Memory Mirage' that also includes other Kunstram residents and member artists.

Saturday, July 8, 2023

Sunday, May 21, 2023

Whitewash: Robert E. Lee and the New Iconoclasm published [Jugaad's Project Spring 2023 issue]

Jugaad's Project Spring 2023 issue [https://www.thejugaadproject.pub/home/whitewash]

I am grateful to Urmila Mohan and Emily Levick for bringing to the public this project that has been in the works for the last three years!

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Tent of Reams exhibited at Puertas Adentro Artes in Punta Del Este (Manantiales), Uruguay (December 2022 in person!)

In Fall 2022, I participated in my second round of a virtual residency at Mango (Rio) under the direction of the redoubtable Maria Mercedes Aliaga Pueyrredon (we call her Mechi) and a former colleague from Uruguay from my first Mango residency Maria Soldano who arranged the exhibition in Punta Del Este. These Mango residency exhibitions are a challenge since our roster of participations in the residency that engages artists as widely distributed as Abu Dhabi, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Texas, NYC and Benares, India. In the first of my Mango residencies in Summer 2020, the group settled on theme of language as a common thread, this time, metamorphosis. Tent of Reams was created as the last work of the 2022 residency that lasted for six works and that culminated in an open studio. I kept the emphasis on language that resulted in pieces after the residencies such as Lee(Amerikkka) and added the indeterminacy of metamorphosis, thus transforming figures, settings, text etc. in a representation of an Occupy protest where an equestrian monument was mounted by protesters and draped with a ‘Tent of Reams’. Txs, Mechi and Maria and all those associated with Punta Del Este Artes and Punta Planos that printed a digital version of Tent of Reams. The exhibition is up until the end of 2022 and can be viewed on a variety of Inst sites.

Monday, November 28, 2022

Puffin Grant Awarded

Thank you to the fine folks at the social justice not for profit Puffin Foundation, who sent an award for the continuation of the Anna Pierrepont Series in November 2022. Receiving an award to continue my practice of investigating the afterlife of public monuments in this extraordinary moment of New American Iconoclasm is so encouraging!

Monday, October 31, 2022

Lee (Amerikkka) featured at SECAC 2022 in Baltimore.



At a panel discussing public art and systematic racism hosted by Jason Brown (UTenn, Knoxville), myself (St.Francis College), Rebecca Hackemann-Bahlman (Kansas State), Billy Friebele (Loyola) and Meredith Drum (remotely from Virginia Tech) presented and discussed with engaged participants, the current state of the monumental landscape.

I traced the Anna Pierrepont Series from its hyperlocal origins in plein-air drawings on paper mostly in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

The series then turned its focus on erasure in pictorial essays and eventually to my current large scale studio works on paper documenting our singular moment of monumental reckoning.

I detailed my increased interest in plein-air works on the wear and inscriptions that emerged as lyrical tracery in numerous works on paper such as
pictures increasingly the absence of the monument to J. Marion Sims (plein-air) from 2018 that like the Sims absence, featured the bases of political and funerary monuments.

This practice enabled me to draw out the red 'AmeriKKKa' from the rest of the numerous markings on the Lee as part of the 2020 protests.

This orchestration enabled the word to speak to the legacy of violence celebrated by the Lee and in equestrian monuments in general.

Since the Lee and its inquisition in Amerikkka are no longer extant, the word testifies about the contemporary speaking back in grief and defiance to the legacy and persistence of injustice so embodied by the enormous and no longer extant Lee. The words 'Amerikkka' being lost along with it.

So what remains is my work on paper Lee(AmeriKKKa) as a totem.

Thanks to Jason, Rebecca, Meredith, Billy, our awesome colleagues at a provocative session and conference.