Kambui Olujimi: Solastalgia: Curated by Hank Willis Thomas

APRIL 7 – MAY 12 , 2016

K AMBUI O LUJ I M I

SOLASTALGIA

APRIL 7 – MAY 12 , 2016

KAMBUI OLUJIMI

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BOARD OF DIRECTORS

ADVISORY COUNCIL

Thomas G. Devine

Lynn Crawford

Theodore S. Berger Thomas K.Y. Hsu Vivian Kuan

Brian D. Starer

Gregory Amenoff, Emeritus

STAFF

Corina Larkin Executive Director Beatrice Wolert-Weese Deputy Director Shona Masarin-Hurst Programs Manager

Polly Apfelbaum Katie Cercone Ian Cooper

Michelle Grabner Eleanor Heartney

Trenton Doyle Hancock Pablo Helguera Paddy Johnson Deborah Kass

Sharon Lockhart

Rossana Martinez Juan Sรกnchez

Irving Sandler Lilly Wei

Andrea Zittel

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CUE Art Foundation is a dynamic visual arts center dedicated to creating essential career and educational opportunities for emerging artists of

all ages. Through exhibitions, arts education, and public programs, CUE

provides artists and audiences with sustaining and meaningful experiences and resources.

CUE’s exhibition program aims to present new and exceptionally strong work by under-recognized and emerging artists based in the United States, and is committed to exhibiting work of all media, genres, and styles from artists of all ages.

The 2016 exhibition season marks the debut of a hybrid artist selection

process featuring solo exhibitions curated by established artists, alongside a series of solo and group exhibitions selected by an annual Open Call. In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development

opportunities, curators and Open Call panelists also serve as mentors to the exhibiting artists, providing support throughout the process of developing

the exhibition. We are honored to work with artist Hank Willis Thomas as the curator of this exhibition.

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KAMBUI OLUJIMI I look to complicate and reconsider established modes of thinking that have morphed into what commonly function as “inevitabilities.� This pursuit takes shape through interdisciplinary bodies of work that investigate these phenomena from multiple angles of inquiry. My work manifests collective psychic space as a means of investigating social practices, policies, and exchanges. I am interested in the seamless process of synthesizing invisible constructs into inevitabilities. I excavate the language and aesthetics of social, historical, and cultural conventions and bring them out of the world of the implicit. Once given gravity, weight, and shape, it becomes possible to reveal their incongruities and their illusory nature.

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ARTIST BIO Born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Kambui Olujimi received his BFA from Parsons School of Design, NY and MFA from Columbia University, NY. He has had solo exhibitions at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, MA; apexart, NY and Art in General, NY. His works have premiered nationally at Sundance Film Festival, Park City, UT; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and The Museum of Modern Art, NY. Internationally he has exhibited at The Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok, Thailand; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina SofĂ­a, Madrid, Spain; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; and Para Site, Hong Kong. Olujimi has been awarded residencies from Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, ME; apexart, NY; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, NY; Civitella Ranieri, Italy; and Fountainhead, FL, among others.

He has received grants and fellowships from A Blade of Grass, The Jerome Foundation, and Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. Numerous periodicals, newspapers and journals have written about Olujimi’s work, including The New Yorker, Art Forum, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times and Modern Painters.

SPECIAL THANKS This work would not be possible without the support, laughter, and love of: Anna Olujimi, Catherine Arline, Djelimory Diabate, Ettice Womble, Hank Willis Thomas, Reverend James Mitchell, Michael Levine, Marjorie Levine, Katherine Cohn, Nat Ward, Cybele Maylone, Ben Wright, Jen Elek, Stephen Sprott, Keigo Takahashi, Shona Masarin-Hurst, Pablo Romo, Sofia Jamal, Nathan Caitlin, Jessica Lynne, Sylvia CarterWilson, Sandra Lassiter Chadwick, Laretta Lassiter, Micheal D. Harrell, Shahnoor Chowdhury, Shaun Leonardo, Chris Myers, Doris Guthrie, Leo Tecosky, Anders Rydstedt, Helena Marriott, Deborah Willis, Kellie Jones, Darwin Brown, Sarah Haze, Heather Hart, Sean Johnson, CUE Art Foundation and its entire amazing staff, Queenspace Art Residency, UrbanGlass, Materials for the Arts, Triangle Arts Association, and Kinder Bueno.

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HANK WILLIS THOMAS CURATOR-MENTOR

Kambui Olujimi is one of the most creative and stubbornly earnest artists I know. His insistence that the human spirit and humanity in general must not succumb to doubt or hopelessness is absolute, but he does not shy from the struggles and injustices of life. Growing up in Bed-Stuy, “Do or Die,” Brooklyn, Olujimi witnessed firsthand the negative effects of crack cocaine and the “war on drugs.” Yet, through his relationships with various members of the community, including drug dealers, police officers, faith followers, and addicts, he also experienced light during an era known typically for urban blight. Amid the chaos, there was an undercurrent of care signaling a local solidarity that often transcended societal and civic boundaries.

However, in the past decade the landscape of urban neighborhoods like Olujimi’s has undergone rapid change. In response, in New York and other cities, increased awareness and refusal of the effects of gentrification, police violence, and negligence have resulted in uprisings and the re-thinking of collective identities.

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In Solastalgia, Olujimi maneuvers amidst a maelstrom of complex and often problematic issues surrounding local law enforcement and the citizens they serve, private developers and public interests, and the intricacies of home and grief. Paying homage to his late neighbor and mentor, Catherine Arline, he maintains, “I barely begin to unpack her time here.” Ms. Arline was an active community member and civil servant for the city and state of New York for forty years. This exhibition addresses Olujimi’s turbulent emotions as he embarks on a spiritual and psychological journey through experiences of home, violence, grief, and dislocation.

In a career spanning nearly two decades, Olujimi has become known for his poetic social commentary and his explorations of transcendence through materiality and media. Solastalgia is a meditation on home and remembrance in a city rapidly building over its people and their stories.

CURATOR BIO Hank Willis Thomas is a photo conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to identity, history and popular culture. He has exhibited throughout the U.S. and abroad and is in numerous public collections including The Museum of Modern Art New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Cleveland Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. His collaborative projects have been featured at the Sundance Film Festival and installed permanently at the Oakland International Airport, The Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport, The Oakland Museum of California, and the University of California, San Francisco. He is also a recipient of the New Media grant from Tribeca Film Institute and New Media Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography for his transmedia project, Question Bridge: Black Males.

He was recently appointed to the Public Design Commission for the city of New York. Thomas is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City and Goodman Gallery in South Africa.

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Walk with Me (series), 2016 11� x 14�

Ink on paper.

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BEARING WITNESS

JESSICA LYNNE

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Presently, there is no system that tracks the number of extrajudicial killings of civilians by police officers in this country. There is no annual tally of the victims, no final grand evaluation outlining the who, what, when, or why. There are only approximations and estimates. What we must do then is draw conclusions based on that which is reported and shared publicly. When the smoke clears, we are most often faced with the following scenario: police officer shoots/ strangles/chokes unarmed civilian. Perhaps more emphatically, white police officer shoots/ strangles/chokes unarmed civilian of color.

This was Oscar Grant’s story. This was Tanisha Anderson’s story. This was Eric Garner’s story.

What results is a fraught relationship between communities and the very individuals responsible for their safety.

In a city such as New York, this tension is palpable. Black and brown neighborhoods have long voiced disdain towards the “men in blue.”

Still, the sustained physical threat of violence at the hands of the state is but one of the ways in which New York City’s most vulnerable suffer. As costs of living rise and wages remain stagnant, poor communities of color must also contend with the consequences of economic travails such as joblessness and dislocation, negotiating the politics of a city in which they continue to be pushed to the outskirts.

This, however, does not necessarily dissuade community members from making attempts to extend the olive branch. Nor should the assumption be made that police officers do not

come from or reside in the very neighborhoods that are most threatened. The processes that shape community relations are nothing if not complex.

The works that comprise Kambui Olujimi’s Solastalgia attempt to reckon with the intersections of these phenomena. Olujimi approaches this dialogue from a personal vantage point that humanizes the macro and names the abstract. Solastalgia refers to the feeling of dislocation in one’s home environment, where the changes to that environment have rendered it foreign or unrecognizable. Olujimi, who was born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, appropriates the term coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht to consider his own emotional response to the changes occurring throughout New York City.

Indeed, Olujimi’s work speaks to the shifts that are occurring in an ever stratifying city.

The process of introspection begins with a series of monochromatic ink paintings of the artist’s late mentor and neighbor, Catherine Arline; although such a word does not fully encapsulate the depth of Olujimi’s relationship to a woman he describes knowing “even before birth.” Trusted friend, surrogate mother, grandmother and guardian angel, Arline was the matriarch of Olujimi’s family—chosen or otherwise. Before her passing in October 2014, Arline had served as president of the 81st Precinct Community Council Board for 18 years. She was a Bed-Stuy resident for 65 of them. In this role, she became a critical liaison between youth, families, and elderly community

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members and local law enforcement. Former NYPD Chief of Department Philip Banks was so close to Arline that he considered her almost a partner, as if she, too, were walking the beat in the 81st. And in a way, she was; so much so that her death brought about an absence that was deeply and immediately felt. For Olujimi, this absence becomes part of the sense of displacement that looms over his evolving relationship to home. With her passing, a layer of intimacy with which Olujimi has always associated with his neighborhood vanishes. So, we bear witness to the mining of grief.

The images of Arline on view in this exhibition are all of her face, and in each drawing she wears a smile that Olujimi describes as characteristic of her warm personality. Arline was acutely aware of the strain between community members and the NYPD and Olujimi has stated she spent much time working to mediate the interactions between the two sides.

In honor of her life and work, Olujimi has created an installation using pieces of Arline’s furniture and personal objects that bring the private space of the public servant into plain view. Throughout the installation that includes a wardrobe, mounted refurbished doorknobs from Arline’s brownstone, and an old suitcase, we find glass wishbones peppered about. His decision to use the wishbone as a motif suggests that the spirit and work of individuals like Arline as well as a small bit of luck are necessary for reconciliation.

Still, as much as Solastalgia depicts Olujimi’s healing from the loss of Arline, it also reflects on how this loss changes the place he calls home.

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For the viewer must also grapple with the fact that contentious relationships between areas like the artist’s home neighborhood and the police are never easily dissolved, despite the noble work of leaders like Arline. Olujimi’s five distorted silkscreened images of blank autopsy reports and police badges remind the viewer of this truth. Unlike the section of the exhibition devoted to Arline, these silkscreens bear no trace of tenderness. Rather, it is as if the distortions become Olujimi’s way of describing his own complicated, blurred connection to the men in blue as a black man, a way of acknowledging a system that does not operate in his favor. Here we must watch as he confronts the danger.

Yet Olujimi avoids didacticism as he articulates his responses to the changes that surround his life in Bed-Stuy. Instead, the viewer bears witness to the artist’s quiet frustration and heartfelt homage.

Though stylistically distinct, each component of the exhibition shares an origin.

Solastalgia emerges from a sense of grief, commemoration, and social commentary. We see these themes explored throughout much of Olujimi’s oeuvre. In Testing, Testing 1,2,3, Testing… (2006), he addresses topics such as colorism in the black community, an intra-racial system of discrimination determined by skin tone. In We Became Statues (2013), Olujimi collaborated with the late Arline in producing a video work in which Arline recounts her time working as a social worker for the New York State Office of Mental Health. Throughout the two-channel video, we listen as she details the grim reality for patients and their families

connected to a broken bureaucracy. As her career demonstrates, Arline recognized that she was committed to working within the system in order to challenge its shortcomings.

In the wrong hands, this exhibition might have become an act of navel gazing but Olujimi resists the temptation. Instead, he uses a personal frame of reference to point outward. In other words, Olujimi links the particular with the universal. The

tremors of change in New York City are felt by so many albeit to varying degrees and with varying consequences. What are the tools we will use to ensure that such change is beneficial to all of the city’s inhabitants? Solastalgia offers a suggestion: hard work on the part of those working within and outside of the system and, well, a little bit of luck.

This essay was written as part of the Young Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which appoints established art critics to serve as mentors for emerging writers. In 2014, CUE joined forces with Art21, combining the Young Art Critic Mentoring Program with the Art21 Magazine Writer-in-Residence initiative. Each writer composes a long-form critical essay on one of CUE’s exhibiting artists for publication in CUE’s exhibition catalogue, which is also published by Art21 in its online magazine. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program.

Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season. For additional arts-related writing, please visit on-verge.org.

Writer Jessica Lynne is a Brooklyn-based writer and arts administrator. She received her BA in Africana Studies from NYU and has been awarded residencies and fellowships from The Sarah Lawrence College Summer Writers Seminar, Callaloo, and The Center for Book Arts. Jessica contributes to publications such as Art in America, The Art Newspaper, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and Pelican Bomb. She’s co-editor of ARTS.BLACK, a journal of art criticism from Black perspectives, and a founding editor of the now defunct (but still special) Zora Magazine.

Mentor Sara Reisman is the Artistic Director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, whose mission is focused on art and social justice in New York City. Recently curated exhibitions for the foundation include Mobility and Its Discontents, Between History and the Body, and When Artists Speak Truth, all three presented on The 8th Floor. From 2008 until 2014, Reisman was the director of New York City’s Percent for Art program where she managed more than 100 permanent public art commissions for city funded architectural projects, including artworks by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Mary Mattingly, Tattfoo Tan, and Ohad Meromi, among others for civic sites like libraries, public schools, correctional facilities, streetscapes and parks. She was the 2011 critic-in-residence at Art Omi, and a 2013 Marica Vilcek Curatorial Fellow, awarded by the Foundation for a Civil Society.

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Testing, Testing 1,2,3, Testing... (2006) 15” x 10” x 12” Mixed media.

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We Became Statues (2013) 21’ x 15’ x 12’ 2-channel video installation, Trash bags, and wooden chairs.

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Where From Here (2016) 10” x 3” x 2” Brass.

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Mercy Doesn’t Grow on Trees, 2016 12.5’ x 4’ x 2.5’ Wood, glass, hair, gold leaf, ratchet straps.

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Mercy Doesn’t Grow on Trees (detail), 2016 12.5’ x 4’ x 2.5’ Wood, glass, hair, gold leaf, ratchet straps.

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SOCIO-ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS OF MOURNING KATHERINE COHN

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The title of the exhibition, Solastalgia, introduces an increasingly widespread experience of dislocation in the world today, an experience that Kambui Olujimi explores in his own period of mourning. Glenn Albrecht, the psychologist who coined the term, compares it to “nostalgia,” a desire to return home, in time or space. In contrast, solastalgia marks a feeling of being lost, existentially, because one’s own environment is changing in a devastating way, such as the devastation to a town’s infrastructure after a natural disaster. In this case, however, Olujimi’s solastalgia is one of the consequences of his personal socio-environmental condition, which in many ways is reflective of a national condition as well. Each of the works in Solastalgia continues Olujimi’s history of investigating and reconsidering traditions of memorialization.

While in the past Olujimi’s work has focused on an individual recipient of his devotion, now his vision looks at a broader social landscape. In 2014, he lost Ms. Catherine Arline, a woman so important to him that he refers to her as his Guardian Angel.

This devastating loss has rippled into all areas of his life and the community. As a social worker who also consulted for mental health services, Ms. Arline played a critical role negotiating

the intimate issues of individuals. In leadership positions, such as President of the 81st Precinct Community Council Board, her commitments positioned her as a liaison for collective concerns.

Although surely someone else has stepped into her shoes, the loss of Ms. Arline, with her knowledge and experience, is the passing of a strong element in the neighborhood networks of accountability and safety. At the same time, the rising national dialogue concerning victims of police brutality and racism called for recognition of the precariousness of Black lives in the United States, and their future. In trying to express the vulnerable position of Black lives in American systems, mass grief is frequently articulated at the expense of private mourning. Nationally and locally, symbolically and intimately, environments of mourning have become synonymous with unsafe environments for living.

Olujimi’s work gives form to such an environment of mourning. With Mercy Doesn’t Grow On Trees (2016), abstract and concrete arrangements of memory find eerie aesthetic stability. A glass wishbone, oversized, but dangerously fragile, is fused together by a glinting metallic vein where the snapped bone has been mended with gold, following the Japanese ceramic mending

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technique “kintsuge.” Preserved beneath a pristine bell jar, enshrined upon a neatly braided bed of human hair, the repairs on these symbolic spent wishes offer an aesthetic in which the memory of trauma is emblazoned and valued.

Despite the preciousness of these mementos, the lack of any dedication or mention of the person to whom the braided hair belonged introduces an element of abstraction. The symbolic relics are posed within reach, on a shelf at waist height, while hovering overhead is the late Ms. Arline’s armoire. Although the provenance is authentically connected to Ms. Arline, the piece of furniture has lost the person whose patterns and memories of daily use gave it personalized function. Raised up and out of reach, it nevertheless feels no less functional than it would were it accessible. The installation’s components occupy disconnected positions of impersonal and personal, reverential and uncannily ordinary, abstract and concrete. Despite the seemingly insecure position of the furniture and the material of the wishing bone display, they are still structurally and compositionally balanced.

An effective co-existence between the dissonant materials is achieved and the installation holds presence as a totality.

When I take into account the simultaneous feeling of unity and spatial incongruity found in the installation as it pairs intimate altars with the floating furniture overhead, I become aware of the psycho-spatial clashing, the sensation that while things might be structurally balanced, something is amiss.

If solastalgia is the pervasive feeling that Olujimi’s individual installations convey, these 26

works together point to layers of systems that produce the state in which he finds himself.

The series of silkscreens featuring distorted images of NYPD police materials provides a new layer of inquiry with which to consider Olujimi’s sense of psychic dislocation. Here I find a meditation on the larger environmental influences on mourning. Each silkscreen displays a drawing of a publicly accessible photograph that documents administrative elements of police roles and procedures related to civilian deaths. These materials include a diagram of an autopsy report, a photograph of the scene where Akai Gurley was shot, and the badge of First Deputy Commissioner Philip Banks. Redrawn by hand and then reproduced using scanners, the subject matter is distorted in the copying process before the final image is reproduced again as a silkscreen. There is a human element alluded to in each of these documents of roles and procedures, just as there is the artist’s hand in the early stages of the creation of the silkscreen.

However, the repetition of filling out forms over time, no matter how vital, threatens to become the drudge of daily paperwork, just as the repeated exposure and circulated photographic documents threaten to dull the significance of salient details. The subject referenced in the documents becomes lost in the layers of reproduction and circulation.

While seriality in these silkscreens on the one hand takes on the role of the de-subjectifying process, the fact that the collective images are representative of an unending series causes me to ask what would happen if production of these documents stopped because the violence and death stopped. The objective element of these

documents speaks to the existence of systems that continue to cause these events. What does it mean to mourn when the system causing loss continues?

In contrast, the Walk With Me series introduces the role of seriality in the performance of mourning a single death. At least once a day, Olujimi made a new painting of Ms. Arline, often drawing from the same photograph, the exercise a daily act of remembrance. Hung as a unit, the paintings become background as the slight differences between the days assume prominence, effectively blurring her face into a series of abstractions. As a result, a level of intimacy is removed from the connection felt by one human with another. The paintings offer a visual for the effect the passage of time has on an absent subject, regardless of the cause or implications of the death. Much as the silkscreens reflect on the context of a collective loss that produces a ripple of solastalgia throughout a community, the paintings of Ms. Arline convey the effect of solastalgia in moments of personal mourning. The paintings depict a spatio-temporal disorientation that results from personal grief, in which what was once familiar feels alien. Together, the silkscreens and sketches reflect on the depersonifying distortion that layers of time and process have on the subject.

solastalgia arrives when the loss of Ms. Arline impacts Olujimi’s surrounding environment while simultaneously local experiences of collective loss impact him as well. The notion of solastalgia is an unstable experience, but sometimes an investigation of instability can be productive.

As Olujimi confronts heart-wrenching and disassociated experiences of lament, his works unearth visuals of grief that merge public and private, personal and collective, temporal and spatial, and in unison create poetics of the socioenvironmental systems of mourning in America.

Katherine Cohn is an M.A. candidate in Columbia University’s Modern Critical and Curatorial Studies program. Previously, Cohn co-founded the curatorial collaborative A.D. Projects, and was Associate Curator at the Calder Foundation.

Recently, she co-curated Collaborative Archives: Connective Histories at the LeRoy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University, NY. She is currently producing the podcast “Lines in Real Time” as critical educational programming for the exhibition Lines of Flight launching April 2016 at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery.

Throughout the exhibition, Olujimi’s works address the spaces in which we process grief collectively and individually. As the disparate experiences are presented together, metaphors of overlap surface. The public narrative and his personal narratives of loss over the past couple of years spill into one another. The feeling of 27

Never the Best Time to Retire, 2016 60” x 50” Silkscreen.

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I Trained for You, 2016 60” x 50” Silkscreen.

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If Not Now, 2016 60” x 50” Silkscreen.

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CUE Art Foundation’s operations and programs are made possible

with the generous support of foundations, corporations, government agencies, individuals, and its members.

MAJOR PROGRAMMATIC SUPPORT PROVIDED BY Agnes Gund Anholt Services (USA) Inc. CAF American Donor Fund Compass Group Management LLC Compass Diversified Holdings The Joan Mitchell Foundation Lenore Malen and Mark Nelkin The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Inc. William Talbot Hillman Foundation New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council

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All artwork Š Kambui Olujimi.

Catalogue design by Shona Masarin-Hurst.

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