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Innovative exhibitions and arts programming

IN-BETWEEN THE WORLD AND DREAMS Ibrahim Mahama

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Ibrahim Mahama is an internationally known Ghanaian artist and director of the Savannah Center for the Arts in Tamale, Ghana. Mahama uses the transformation of materials to explore themes of commodity, migration, globalisation and economic exchange. Often made in collaboration with others, his large-scale installations employ materials gathered from urban environments, such as remnants of wood, or jute sacks which are stitched together and draped over architectural structures. Mahama’s interest in material, process and audience first led him to focus on jute sacks that are synonymous with the trade markets of Ghana where he lives and works. Fabricated in South East Asia, the sacks are imported by the Ghana Cocoa Boards to transport cocoa beans and eventually end up as multi-functional objects, used for the transportation of food, charcoal and other commodities. “You find different points of aesthetics within the surface of the sacks’ fabric,” Mahama has said. “I am interested in how crisis

and failure are absorbed into this material with a strong reference to global transaction and how capitalist structures work.”

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION: In this multi-venue project led by the Institute for the Humanities, in collaboration with UMMA and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, and with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama explored global exchange, commerce and the troubling histories of colonialism and slavery in the Western world.

At the U-M Museum of Art, massive, quilt-like panels covered 4,452 square feet of the exterior of the building, creating one of the spectacular architectural interventions for which Mahama is known. A related installation at the Institute for the Humanities Gallery could be viewed (and heard) from a sidewalk window. At the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, jute sacks blanketed a wall of the Community Gallery.

RELATED EVENTS: Community Gallery installation, Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit

Penny Stamps Speaker Series with Ibrahim Mahama, a conversation with Amanda Krugliak, arts curator at the Institute for the Humanities and lead curator; Ozi Uduma, assistant curator for global contemporary art at UMMA; Laura De Becker, curator of African art and interim chief curator at UMMA; Neil Barclay, president and CEO of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History; and Ibrahim Mahama.

This exhibition was supported by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Immigrant Song, 2020 a part of Results or Roses by Sarah Rose Sharp.

RESULTS OR ROSES: NEW AND ASSORTED WORKS Sarah Rose Sharp

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Sarah Rose Sharp is a Detroit-based writer, activist, photographer, and multimedia artist. She writes about art and culture for Art in America, Hyperallergic, Flash Art, Sculpture Magazine, ArtSlant, and others. Sarah was named a 2015 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow for Art Criticism and is a 2018 recipient of the Rabkin Foundation Prize. She is a guest lecturer at several universities in Southeast Michigan and served as a mentor in the NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentorship Program in 2018. Sharp has served as guest curator and juror for institutions including Penn State University (State College, PA) and the Scarab Club (Detroit, MI). She has shown her own work in New York, Seattle, Columbus & Toledo, OH, Covington, KY, and Detroit—including at the Detroit Institute of Arts—with solo shows at Simone De Sousa Gallery and Public Pool.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION: Results or Roses: New and Assorted Works is a virtual exhibition by artist and writer Sarah Rose Sharp and part of the Institute for the Humanities’ Andrew W. Mellon Foundationfunded “High Stakes Art” initiative. The exhibition of new and collected fiber-based art incorporates salvaged and found bits of cultural and fiber art that, as she explains, “forms a discourse that is physical rather than textual.” We supported Sharp’s work on Results or Roses during the summer of 2020, but due to COVID-19 were forced to postpone the pop-up exhibition also scheduled for summer 2020. This fall we installed Results or Roses as a pop-up exhibition in the Osterman Common Room and also as a virtual exhibition.

This exhibition was supported by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.