Keli Safia Maksud: worried notes

All artwork © Keli Safia Maksud Photos by Leo Ng CUE Art Foundation 137 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001 Graphic design by Jasmine Buckley

worried notes Keli Safia Maksud January 24 – March 16, 2024 CUE Art Foundation Exhibition Mentor: Abigail DeVille Catalogue Essayist: Jordan Jones Catalogue Mentor: Renee Gladman

Detail of (our) making / unmaking / making / unmaking, 2023 Embroidery and drawing on carbon paper, metal studs, metal tracks

Detail of how then do you position yourself?, 2023 Embroidery and drawing on carbon paper, unistrut channel

About the Exhibition worried notes is a solo exhibition by Keli Safia Maksud with mentorship from Abigail DeVille. The exhibition builds upon the artist’s ongoing interest in the formation of national identity, particularly in relation to post-colonial African statehood. Through sound, sculpture, installation, text, printmaking, and embroidery, Maksud explores notions of replication and standardization as enduring influences of colonialism—and as processes that continue to shape individual and collective understandings of self.

Utilizing musical notation as a starting point, worried notes reflects upon inherited identities, cultural memory, and received histories. A “worried note”— also called a “blue note”—is a term in musicology that refers to a note that falls slightly below one that exists on the Western 12-tone major scale. Present in blues, jazz, and gospel music, and derived from African vocalization that is not based on the major scale, worried notes are often thought—within the construct of Western music—to contribute to sound that is expressive and intense, conveying emotions such as pain, longing, melancholy, and despair.

It is in this space of dissonance that Maksud plays with boundaries often considered to be objective or inherent. Using embroidery as a language, she exposes traces of the past that inform our present context, stitching fragments of sheet music from African national anthems onto carbon paper.

Many of these anthems, developed in the wake of colonial departure from the continent, sought to create shared identities for citizens of newly independent nations. However, they were often modeled after the anthems of former colonial powers in notation, instrumentality, and concept. In repeating the musical norms of the West, they reinforced sonic—and cultural—borders analogous to those created through the haphazardous partitioning of Africa. worried notes engages with the complexities of this cultural legacy, asking us to consider the spaces in between and beyond that which can be measured.

Sound is omnidirectional and difficult to contain. Maksud’s embroidered works map conventions that formalize it into a particular kind of music, but in doing so also reveal entwined, rhizomatic threads on their reverse side, materially referencing the leakage that begs to exist outside of imposed demarcations. Carbon paper functions as a reprographic device that speaks to modes of repetition. The visualization of music in the form of scores—a process that originated from the creation of incisions—evokes the violence embedded in systems of representation. Light and sound interfere with the visual field, creating new frequencies that reverberate and make perceptible forms of resistance.

Through this layering of gestures, Maksud composes both an elegy to the agony of embodied hegemony and a hopeful ode to new hybridities. worried notes provokes an awakening to the lingering traumas of colonial entanglement and its persistence in the tenor of our times.

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Installation view of worried notes, 2024

Artist Statement Keli Safia Maksud The overarching theme in my practice is the politics of identity. I am interested in how national identities are constructed, maintained, and also how they are negotiated through everyday practices of refusal. Through installation, sculpture, embroidery, and sound, my work explores colonial systems that continue to structure the present through modes of replication that shape individual and collective understandings of self. Much of my work examines diagrammatic systems of representation such as maps, blueprints, and musical notation that not only function to fix bodies in space, but also enact an architecture that governs how bodies move through space.

The musical component of my work, in particular, represents African national anthems that were written and adopted post-independence. Most, however, were modeled—through notation, instrument, and language—after the anthems of former colonial powers, thus exposing the contradictory and hybridic nature of postcolonial subject formation, where selfdetermination mirrored the norms of former colonial powers and thus reinforced borders analogous to those created through the haphazard partitioning of Africa. How does one postulate a black self within a language or discourse in which blackness is absent?

My practice points to these various forms of drawing as a political act, and embroidery functions as a tool of their undoing. Stitching fragments of symbols, lines, and notation taken from various diagrammatic systems, my work undoes these systems, abstracting rather than creating meaning. In my work, abstraction is a practice of refusal—a refusal to be pinned, a refusal to be flattened, and a refusal to be translated. It is a right to opacity. Drawing parallels between visuality, audibility, and legibility, my practice considers questions such as: how might we tune out colonial sub-frequencies that constantly hum in our ears? How might we hear beyond them or beneath them, or perhaps hear another future? How might we consider the spaces in between and beyond that which can be measured?

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Keli Safia Maksud is an interdisciplinary artist and writer working in sound, sculpture, installation, printmaking, and embroidery. Concerned with histories of colonial encounters and the effects of these encounters on memory and identities, Maksud’s practice favors the space of in-between and its threshold—working toward destabilizing received histories in order to expose fictions of the state.

Maksud earned a BFA in Painting from the Ontario College of Art and Design University, a Diploma in Art and Curatorial Studies at the New Centre for Research and Practice, and an MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University. Her work has been shown at Goodman Gallery, ACUD Galerie, Salon 94, Huxley Parlour, the Bamako Biennial, the National Museum of Contemporary Art—Seoul, Galería Nueva, and the Biennial of Contemporary Art Sesc_Videobrasil.

Maksud has been awarded fellowships and grants from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Council for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. Her writing has been published in and for OCULA Magazine, the Swiss Institute, LEAP Magazine, and A Space Gallery.

Detail of how then do you position yourself?, 2023 Embroidery and drawing on carbon paper, unistrut channel

Detail of if I say the sky's small arithmetic, its inscription, its echo, 2023 Embroidery and drawing on carbon paper, metal studs, metal tracks

Mentor Statement Abigail DeVille Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured.

—Galileo Galilei Keli Safia Maksud's deconstruction of national anthems inherited from colonialism’s long shadow exist as plains or primordial fields of darkness.

Fragments of tone, note, shape, duration, notation, and flip are pulled apart and pieced together. Is there a sound that illuminates the black? What cannot be measured is how these vestiges of identity-forming frames endure in the collective consciousness of nation-states.

Through the work, we are confronted in a straightforward manner, without the pomp and circumstance and heraldry of cannons and shouts of democracy in the face of a declining and eroding terminology as face is to face. We look and look and don’t perceive anything with true and genuine clarity, other than maybe what had been moments before, and we look again and again. Narcissus was in love with his own image, not realizing it was himself.

Transfixed and swept away by surface love. A ripple, a tear, punctures through the field of the undefined landscape of interiority.

Maksud steps in, mending with a thread of intention a shape or form that could hold a note, a space for catching a glimpse of something else in the sea of unraveled dreams. Galileo said: Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes—I mean the universe—but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written.

Galileo spoke of the language of mathematics, and here is a language of notation, improvised to chart a new course. Maksud’s evolving experiments with light, sound, and varying forms of poetic

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measurements test what is truth. Can a color, a singular word held in heart and mind, open a portal to understanding the parts of identities that can never be filled in the blanks? Does the mother or father tongue of past power struggles define liberty in the present?

Primordial black is blue. How blue can you get?

Black. So your mind needs to go all wintry to see the nothing that is there through the nothing that is not. Understand this as a play of presences not absences—or of presences held within a general absence that is, in fact not there…There are holes and there are wholes. Ours is the deep midnight of category’s beyond.

—Fred Moten, on David Hammons’ Concerto in Black and Blue, from Black and Blur Chapter 21: “Black and Blue on White. In and And in Space” The structure of Maksud’s works acts as a stand between multitudes of presence, absence, breath, and silence. A concentrated effort of erasure through the smudge of imperfection, blue as it is contained on the paper of architecture, with frames linear and as liners that feel irrevocably broken.

Dionne Brand writes in A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, quoting Charles Bricker: “Ludolf, the 17th century German founder of Ethiopian studies, never visited Abyssinia—but relying on the reports of Portuguese missionaries like Father Lobo, he constructed a new map of the region in 1683.”

Without ever having visited himself. Which proves to me something of which I’ve had a nagging inkling—that places and those who inhabit them are indeed fictions. This news has cemented the idea that in order to draw a map only the skill of listening may be necessary. And the mystery of interpretation.

Detail of how then do you position yourself?, 2023 Embroidery and drawing on carbon paper, unistrut channel

Detail of if I say the sky's small arithmetic, its inscription, its echo, 2023 Embroidery and drawing on carbon paper, metal studs, metal tracks

Detail of if I say the sky's small arithmetic, its inscription, its echo, 2023 Embroidery and drawing on carbon paper, metal studs, metal tracks

…So far I’ve collected these fragments, like Ludolf— disparate and sometimes only related by sound or intuition, vision or aesthetic. I have not visited the Door of No Return, but by relying on random shards of history and unwritten memoir of descendants of those who passed through it, including me, I am constructing a map of the region, paying attention to faces, to the unknowable, to unintended acts of returning, to impressions of doorways. Any act of recollection is important, even looks of dismay and discomfort. Any wisp of a dream is evidence.

And this is what Maksud does. Not limiting herself to the understanding of musical notions—the inheritance of bankrupt ideologies—and merely hoping for futures unknown, but structuring her exploration in languages of scientific exploration, measuring the measure. Blueprint paper is a chemical process that was invented by a British astronomer in the 19th century; Egyptians made the first synthetic blue and named the color before all others. The notes that the blue carries are ancient signs of the sky, the universe, creation, fertility, and protection in death. The frames that hold the notes, breaths, and whispers are suspended between studs—a notation of architecture, nothing defined and nothing built. Sandcastles encompass time measured in the act of creation, time in sand, the turning of tides, and communion with the moon.

Against the door, he leans and starts a scene And his tears fall and burn on the garden green And so castles made of sand fall in the sea Eventually.

—Jimi Hendrix, “Castles Made of Sand”

Abigail DeVille (b. 1981, New York, NY) is known for her site-specific installations, sculptures, and performances that conjure vast universes from discarded objects and fragmented archives. In a seemingly boundless practice that transcends codified space, DeVille often sites her dense assemblages anywhere between museums, theaters, public parks, and city streets. By honoring and amplifying the memory of those that once used the everyday components preserved in her work, DeVille urges a reconsideration of what constitutes a historical record and who contributes.

DeVille’s most recent solo exhibitions include Bronx Heavens at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and In the fullness of time, the heart speaks truths too deep for utterance, but a star remembers at JTT, New York, NY (2023). She has also had solo exhibitions and commissions at Madison Square Park, New York, NY (2020-21); Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, AR (2021); the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC (2021-22); Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR (2018-19); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL (2017-18); the Whitney Museum, New York, NY (2017); Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2017-18); and The Contemporary, Baltimore, MD (2016). Her work has been included in numerous group shows, and she has received awards and fellowships from United States Artists (2018); the American Academy in Rome (2017-18); Creative Capital (2015); Harvard University (201415); The Studio Museum (2013-14); and the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2012).

DeVille teaches at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and Yale School of Art. Her work is in many collections, including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco; Kaviar Factory, Henningsvaer; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis; Pinault Collection; and The Studio Museum (New York). DeVille received an MFA from Yale University and a BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology. She was born in New York and works in the Bronx.

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Installation view of worried notes, 2024

Detail of (our) making / unmaking / making / unmaking, 2023 Embroidery and drawing on carbon paper, metal studs, metal tracks

A Series of Openings — or, Ways of Worrying a Score Jordan Jones Keli Safia Maksud presents us with worried notes.

Musically, a worried note, or a blue note, is a pitch that destabilizes the major scale—a sound between a note on the major scale and a note on the blues scale.1 Introducing a worried note unsettles the path of a song, progressing it in a way one might not expect. Worry also unsettles the paths of a thought; rather than progressing it forward, it sits and dives deeper and deeper. Maksud’s practice lives between these two meanings. She imagines a process of worrying that is not just an extension of anxiety, but also one that is a furrowing investigation.

Worrying as adopting an ongoing concern. Worrying as aligned with dis-ease. Worrying as the act of upsetting accepted structures and ideas.

In worried notes, Maksud interrogates the languages of musical scores for African national anthems, architectural diagrams, and colonial cartography.

She worries them. She takes unquestioned symbols and examines their self-evidence, asking, with fierce insistence: “But why?” Turning up shrugs from traditional knowledge sources, Maksud instead turns to more embodied ways of knowledge-making.

Worrying meets the hand, and drawing becomes a means of wayfinding, of navigating through these concerns.

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W(hole) notes Discussing her interest in forensic etymology, scholar Christina Sharpe shares, “I just get obsessed about certain things and I just want to keep staying with it and worrying it and worrying it and worrying it.”2 Maksud’s practice aligns with Sharpe’s in this way.

Worry becomes a durational activity—a slow peeling back of meaning. It turns into a scholarly strategy, a form of dedicated study. Sharpe continues, “I can return to the same thing again and again and again and again because I’m trying to see it from all of these different angles and trying to understand something about it…I just think that staying with

something can open up a different kind of aperture by which we don’t collapse everything into it, but by which we can make an argument or see the world.”3 The long scrolls of Maksud’s work are dotted with such apertures. They are evidence of her worrying— and of her shaping of a particular way of looking.

These apertures appear sometimes as the head of a note, a fermata; other times as an asterisk, a dark star. Worry a piece of paper—worry it further— and a hole appears, through which a needle might be pulled. Where Maksud sees a dashed line, she also perceives a sewn line—a series of punctures.

Perhaps worrying suggests a need for openings.

The holes she creates encourage viewers to also worry the work—to view it from many perspectives.

Two works in the gallery, if I say the sky’s small arithmetic, its inscription, its echo and (our) making / unmaking / making / unmaking (2023) are presented on freestanding metal armatures, angled toward each other in the center of the space. It is easy to circle the works, to move back and forth between the dense blue expanses and the navy notations on white ground; between neat, stitched lines and loose, drooping, tangled threads. A staid text becomes permeable—a double-sided thing that is worried from many angles. There is no true front and back to each work, only the side we encounter first and the side we encounter second, each complicating the other. Instead of prompting us to look head on, Maksud encourages us to adopt an askance and roving viewpoint. Standing perpendicular to the work, you can begin to grasp both sides; moving around it, you can begin to discern the details.

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Unknown Created from carbon paper, a tool used in drafting, Maksud’s drawings are situated in the middle of a process—unfixed, open to edits, but full of possibility.

She is not afraid to linger in a place of unknowing.

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She describes her process as, “denoting things that you haven’t encountered yet, but knowing that you will.”4 In bits and pieces, with time in necessary darkness, the drawings find real world analogs.

Thelonious Monk plays, and for Maksud, it happens like this: I was listening to something of his and I understood it in my drawing. I don’t read music, so most of the time, I am drawing in the dark, placing one symbol next to another—putting them in some sort of affective proximity to one another, creating new connections and layers of meaning. But as I listened to Monk, I could see the lines or notes that I produced on the blue side of the paper. They aren’t straight lines that run up and down a staff, but instead notes that cut across, creating new pathways.5 Maksud is not concerned with learning how to read sheet music through the traditional avenues. In lieu of reading—and driven by a curiosity grounded in the systems of symbols themselves—she draws.

She is drawing her way toward these moments of encounter, of knowing, where a line becomes sound, where a draft becomes something briefly definitive and tangible. Scoring as mark making. Mark making as meaning making. “I think that drawing is the way that knowledge has been produced,” she asserts.

“A map is drawn. Writing is drawing letters. You draw music on paper. You draw architectural plans.

Drawing has always been the element of all these other disciplines. Drawing enacts an architecture, a built environment that organizes bodies and governs how we move through space.”6 For Maksud, drawing both creates and enacts knowledge; it is a political act. A score becomes music. A map becomes the land. These lines become the boundaries we find ourselves placed within or without. Situating her work inside the carbon copy, she reopens previously foreclosed upon space to new possibilities, continued learning, and future revisions.

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Measured Placed on the floor throughout the gallery are three monitors that comprise ttttaappp (2024). This work draws upon footage pulled from a wide array of sources: performances of Thelonious Monk, Zaouli dancers, Jimmy Slyde, and children from a military school in Nigeria. Each of the three channels depicts a film that is cropped in close on the feet of performers who are tapping along to unheard music. ttttaappp rhythmically flips through footage of these performers, lighting up with bursts of movement and then switching to a black screen.

While the feet are silent, Maksud’s sound work, untitled bpm(s) (2024), introduces the tapping of metronomes that periodically punctuate the space. A metronome is a device designed to keep time. Within a score, the symbol (’) is used to tell the musician when to take a breath. Rest marks indicate when and for how long to pause. The time signature “4/4” designates that the music is to be performed in what is known as “common time.” There are many external structures used to regulate the performer. ttttaappp, however, reminds us that the body keeps its own time—that it has its own bpm. Looking closely, the performers in the films don’t simply tap their toes up and down, but rather employ a rich and varied language of movement. They slide and shuffle. They kick up the earth. The tapping is not isolated to the foot; it is an extension of the whole body. They have personality—playful or strict, free, insistent—that drives forward an unheard beat.

Scores, maps, and diagrams can be understood as works of capture—the capture of a sound before it leaves the air and escapes one’s memory; the occupation of land; the control of space. ttttaappp undoes the work of this capture. It centers the performers rather than the score, and allows us to witness their feet scoring their own ephemeral compositions. We can’t hear them, but they are felt.

Low to the ground and close to our own feet, rather than traveling through the language of symbols, their rhythms can circulate from body to body.

Detail of ttttaappp, 2024 3-channel video

Detail of (our) making / unmaking / making / unmaking, 2023 Embroidery and drawing on carbon paper, metal studs, metal tracks

how then do you position yourself?, 2023 Embroidery and drawing on carbon paper, unistrut channel

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Quiet, deep, and low The national anthems that initially informed Maksud’s scores have become just a starting point. Maksud has turned down the volume on these songs to listen to something deeper playing across them.

She describes it like this: The sound of a national anthem for me is very up—it’s being projected down onto the people—so my work has also been about trying to understand what’s happening below, and the complexity of what might be below. A very deep, low…[frequency] can also have a complexity within it that we have to attune ourselves to listen to in a very different way.7 Maksud pushes beyond and below the music— attending to the lower frequencies. The scores shake loose the defined space of the national anthem and become something else. In removing the blast of sound typically produced by the performance of an anthem, they become something you can get up close to. Moving through the gallery, the faint lines and symbols present throughout the work require a keen eye and an even sharper ear. Here, the dynamic markings are piano or pianissimo even. The scores are not merely quiet, but played softly—sounding with a specific texture and pressure. Look and listen closely, and something else comes through: cresc. e pesando con bravura TERRITORY a Tempo THE CAPE COLONY Chants Africains Un poco piu mosso Plan de Léopoldville Andante quasi fantasia Congo Belge sur chaque tem de la mesure COLONY & PROTECTORATE While national anthems are expressed loudly and publicly, Maksud wants us to be aware of what is

internal and quiet within them. She heeds Tina Campt’s warning that, “contrary to what might seem common sense, quiet must not be conflated with silence. Quiet registers sonically, as a level of intensity that requires focused attention.”8 Writer Kevin Quashie offers further counsel, stating, “Quiet is uncertain and it is sure; trembling and arrogant. Quiet is faith in that it can embrace what there is little evidence of. Quiet can exist without horizon, and it has no consecutive. Quiet is like the moon, rarely showing its full wondrous sphere and instead offering slivers of its potent, tide-shifting self. Quiet is to feel deeply and to feel what is deep."9

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Building and building Within the gallery, rather than creating enclosures with suspended scrolls, Maksud has made a series of passages. They create their own loose architecture. They are not rigid barriers, but rather suggestions for space. worried notes offers a set of plans in progress. “Plans for what?” I ask. “What is it building in space?” Maksud answers. “It is a kind of wayfinding. It is like a wayfinding system for me to something—for something—that I am not quite sure what I am looking for. That’s fine.”10

Maksud’s latest focus is the stars. They appear in more places than you’d think. They are in sheet music, on the flags of nations, and on maps to mark points of interest. If you catch the work from just the right angle, the deep blue is, in fact, scattered with constellations of light. Maksud’s punctures, apertures, and openings have yet another purpose. Stars in the night sky have long been used as tools for navigation. A crescendo mark is just an arrow pointing one in a particular direction. The structures Maksud has built help chart a course. how then do you position yourself?

(2024) becomes another kind of compass, with four scores oriented along a set of axes. Until we get where Maksud is guiding us, I am happy to follow: to worry the signs and symbols, to sit in a dark blue space, to listen to the quiet, and maybe even to tap along.

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Endnotes: 1. Ethan Hein, “Blue notes and other microtones,” The Ethan Hein Blog, May 5, 2010. [https://www. ethanhein.com/wp/2010/blue-notes] Aria Dean, “Worry the Image,” Art in America, May 26, 2017. [https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/ features/worry-the-image-63266] 2. David Naimon, “Between the Covers: Christina Sharpe Interview,” Tin House, accessed January 15, 2024. [https://tinhouse.com/transcript/ between-the-covers-christina-sharpe-interview] 3. David Naimon, “Between the Covers: Christina Sharpe Interview.”

4. Interview with Keli Safia Maksud, Brooklyn, NY, November 19, 2023.

5. Interview with Keli Safia Maksud.

6. Interview with Keli Safia Maksud.

7. Interview with Keli Safia Maksud.

8. Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Press Durham and London: Duke University, 2017), pg. 6.

9. Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2012), pg. 134.

10. Interview with Keli Safia Maksud.

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Jordan Jones is an arts worker living and working in New York. She is currently the Exhibitions Coordinator at Independent Curators International (ICI). She has participated in the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program (IATP), the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Museum Education Practicum, and the Center for Book Arts’ Creative Publishing Seminar for Emerging Writers. She has also completed residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Arts Center on Governors Island and The Vermont Studio Center.

Jones received a B.A. from Williams College.

Renee Gladman served as a mentor for this essay.

Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing, and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), and Houses of Ravicka (2017)—as well as three collections of drawings: Prose Architectures (2017), One Long Black Sentence, a series of white ink drawings on black paper, indexed by Fred Moten (2020), and Plans for Sentences (2022). Recent essays and visual work have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The Paris Review, Gulf Coast, Granta, Harper's, BOMB Magazine, e-flux, and n+1. She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), and is a 2021 WindhamCampbell Prize winner in fiction.

Detail of how then do you position yourself?, 2023 Embroidery and drawing on carbon paper, unistrut channel

Detail of if I say the sky's small arithmetic, its inscription, its echo, 2023 Embroidery and drawing on carbon paper, metal studs, metal tracks

(our) making / unmaking / making / unmaking, 2023 Embroidery and drawing on carbon paper, metal studs, metal tracks

ABOUT CUE ART FOUNDATION

STAFF

CUE Art Foundation is a nonprofit organization that works with and for emerging and underrecognized artists and art workers to create new opportunities and present varied perspectives in the arts. Through our gallery space and public programs, we foster the development of thought-provoking exhibitions and events, create avenues for mentorship, cultivate relationships amongst peers and the public, and facilitate the exchange of ideas.

Jinny Khanduja Executive Director

Founded in 2003, CUE was established with the purpose of presenting a wide range of artist work from many different contexts. Since its inception, the organization has supported artists who experiment and take risks that challenge public perceptions, as well as those whose work has been less visible in commercial and institutional venues.

Exhibiting artists are selected through two methods: nomination by an established artist or selection via our annual open call. In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, each artist is paired with a mentor, an established curator or artist who provides support throughout the process of developing each exhibition.

To learn more about CUE, visit us online or sign up for our newsletter at www.cueartfoundation.org.

SUPPORT worried notes is supported, in part, by the Canada Council for the Arts as well as a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.

Programmatic support for CUE Art Foundation is provided by Evercore, Inc; ING Group; The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; The William Talbott Hillman Foundation; and Corina Larkin & Nigel Dawn.

Programs are also supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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