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This digital catalogue is produced in conjunction with the virtual exhibit organized by the McIninch Art Gallery at Southern New Hampshire University. Support for this virtual exhibition comes from the Samuel P. Hunt Foundation and with permission from the Mandeville Gallery, Union College, Schenectady, NY. This exhibition originated at the Mandeville Gallery.
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January 21, 2021 – May 1, 2021 McIninch Art Gallery at Southern New Hampshire University
Didier William, I see you, we all see you, 2015
artists
Firelei BĂ ez
Amir H. Fallah
Chitra Ganesh
Toyin Ojih Odutola
Simonette Quamina Stacey Robinson
David Shrobe
Aricoco (ari tabei)
Didier William
Saya Woolfalk embody
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or more than twenty years, Kenyan-born contemporary artist Wangechi Mutu’s figurative mixed media collages have represented the “...acculturated body that is inscribed, shaped, distorted and controlled,”1 metaphorically presenting how malice meted out on a body deemed “other” might be visualized. Using Mutu’s work as an inspiration, this exhibition views the figurative form within the visual arts context as a place of rebellion and freedom, and looks to further Mutu’s conversation. EMBODY features contemporary artists of diaspora applying collage methods, both conceptually, and in some cases, literally, as a technique to construct identity and/or selfhood within the mode of portraiture or figuration in the visual arts. Artists in the exhibition include Firelei Báez, Amir H. Fallah, Chitra Ganesh, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Simonette Quamina, Stacey Robinson, David Shrobe, aricoco (Ari Tabei), Didier William, and Saya Woolfalk. Each artist practices a different approach to realizing identity through representation of the body and the creation of a plurality of existences within the subject. These figures embody resistance, defying and challenging a one-dimensional reading of who the figure might be or what they represent. The way these figures are made can be seen as acts of opposition to stereotyping. They resist a narrow interpretation of the figures as constructs. Each image is built to give agency and range to the life of experience the subject has lived. Both Toyin Ojih Odutola and Chitra Ganesh use prints to conceptually collage different versions of the same subject, revealing distinctive aspects of the same person. Ojih Odutola’s Birmingham features different vantage points of the same man, evoking three distinctly singular emotions. In Justice is a Virtue, Ganesh explores a central female figure by presenting three different faces of the same body, illustrating a multitude of qualities found within a single protagonist. Saya Woolfalk and Stacey Robinson use digital means of collaging images together, such as the central figure seen in Robinson’s print, Cosmic Listening, with her battery-operated jet pack and her thought bubble represented by a conch shell. Her wings coupled the 21st century power of technology, give her freedom, and potentially divinity. Looking toward the sky, there is only one place she will be moving toward, and that is the future, her future. More traditional methods of collage are used by Simonette Quamina, Didier William, and aricoco (Ari Tabei). They piece together physical materials to create the whole. page 4: Stacey Robinson, Cosmic Listening, 2016
Quamina’s gray and black tonal narrative works utilize ripped paper and old prints to depict remembrances of her childhood in the Caribbean. William’s mixed media paintings and layered prints, such as Kochon Sa a Lou / This pig is heavy, are scored with eyes carved directly into the figure. These eyes, looking back at us, implicate the viewer as if to say, “We are here, do not make judgements without knowing my story, my family, my ancestors; I do not accept your judgements.” aricoco (Ari Tabei) collages in three dimensions, weaving together fabric, fur, ribbons, and baubles. Creating and donning each new form, aricoco becomes and performs as a new persona, gaining power and confidence to combat her fears and worries, and conquer them. David Shrobe and Firelei Báez employ a painterly approach in combination with ornate frames to reference power and wealth of the ruling classes. Shrobe then inserts African Americans into traditional portrait formats that historically pictured wealthy, white men. When Báez uses frames, she is referencing her Afro-Caribbean background and the power of colonization. She develops a kaleidoscope of colors in each portrait that appear to be liquid, referencing Alessandra Raengo’s filmic ideas of “aesthetic liquidity.” 2 Employing an entirely different approach, Amir H. Fallah paints bodies primarily shrouded from view by decorative cloths and jewels; only the arms and legs of his subjects are exposed. This absence of identity prevents immediate categorizing of the sitter, pushing the viewer to extrapolate from clues found in the everyday objects that are included in the painting. By blurring the form through manipulation of medium, each artist creates an unfixed figure that cannot be metaphorically captured or stereotyped. This exhibition brings together these ten artists to further the work done by Mutu and the conversation about the multifaceted nature of identity. –Julie Lohnes Director & Curator of Art Collections & Exhibitions
[1] Lorraine Morales Cox, “Transformed Bodies, Colonial Wounds & Ethnographic Tropes: Wangechi Mutu,” n.paradoxa, vol. 21 (2008): 70. [2] Alessandra Raengo, “Encountering the Rebellion: liquid blackness reflects on the expansive possibilities of the L.A. Rebellion films,” in L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema, ed. Allyson Nadia Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, Jacqueline Stewart (University of California Press, 2015), 307.
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Firelei
FIRELEI BÁEZ (b. 1981, Dominican Republic) received an MFA from Hunter College and a BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art, and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work is the subject of solo exhibitions in 2019 at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and the Mennello Museum of American Art, Orlando, FL. The artist’s monumental outdoor sculpture, 19.604692°N 72.218596°W, is included in En Plein Air, the 2019 High Line art exhibition in New York City. Her current commission for the Modern Window at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, is on view through November 2019. Báez recently participated in the 2018 Berlin Biennale, and was also featured in biennials Prospect.3: Notes for Now (2014), Bronx Calling: The Second AIM Biennial (2013), and El Museo’s Bienal: The (S) Files (2011). Her major 2015 solo exhibition Bloodlines was organized by the Pérez Art Museum Miami and traveled to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Other recent solo exhibitions of Báez’s work have been presented by the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City; Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, OH; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL; Taller Puertorriqueňo, Philadelphia; and Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, UT. Báez is the recipient of many awards: most recently, a Soros Arts Fellowship (2019), a United States Artists Fellowship (2019), the College Art Association Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work (2018), a Future Generation Art Prize (2017), the Chiaro Award (2016), and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2011).
New York-based artist Firelei Báez reconfigures visual references drawn from the past to explore new possibilities for the future. Incorporating subject matter from a breadth of diasporic narratives, the artist’s intricate works on paper and canvas, large-scale sculptures, and installations explore the ways in which personal and collective identities are shaped by inherited histories. Báez incorporates the visual languages of regionally-specific mythology and ritual alongside those of science fiction and fantasy, to envision identities as unfixed, and inherited stories as perpetually evolving. By rendering spectacular bodies that exist on opposite sides of intersecting boundaries, Báez carries portraiture into an in-between space where subjectivity is rooted in historical narratives as much as it can likewise become untethered by them.
page 7: given the ground (the fact that it
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amazes me does not mean I relinquish it), 2017
amir H.
AMIR H. FALLAH received his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. His most recent solo exhibitions are A Stranger in Your Home at Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles (2018); Unknown Voyage at the Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, OR (2017); and Almost Home at The Third Line in Dubai (2017). Fallah has had solo exhibitions at Denny Dimin Gallery, New York City; Nerman Museum of Art, Overland, KS; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles; and Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel. In addition, Fallah has been in numerous international group exhibitions including We Must Risk Delight: Twenty Artists from Los Angeles, 56th La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy (2015) and the 9th Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2009). Fallah has been written about in Harper’s Bazaar Arabia, Hyperallergic, the Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian.
Born 1979 in Tehran, Iran, Fallah lives in Los Angeles, CA. His body of work includes painting, installation, drawing, and sculpture. Fallah is best known for unconventional portraits of people he encounters (or seeks out), which explore identity and personal narrative through his subjects’ interactions with objects. Fallah collages layers of these objects sourced from his subject’s environment and conceals the human subject of the portrait with patterned fabric. The portraits both reference and play off of longstanding Western and Middle Eastern traditions and uses of portraiture. Fallah’s installations further explore and construct narratives about eccentric individuals and influential artists, whose visual representations invite a larger reflection on contemporary artistic practice.
page 9: The Sun, The Moon, and The Truth, 2018 (installation view) page 10: The Light Within, 2017 page 11: Milk Maid, 2016
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Amir H. Fallah
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chitra
CHITRA GANESH lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a BA from Brown University in comparative literature and art semiotics, and an MFA from Columbia University and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Her work as been has been widely exhibited in the United States and internationally at venues including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Asia Society, New York City; Queens Museum of Art, New York City; the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Berkeley Art Museum, CA; San José Museum, CA; ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; Fondazione Sandretto re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy; the Saatchi Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China; Gwangju Contemporary Arts Centre, Gwangju, South Korea; National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan, China; Kunstverein, Göttingen, Germany; Kunstalle Exnergrasse, Vienna, Austria; the Prince of Wales Museum, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai, India; Institut Valencià d’Arte Modern, Valencia, Spain; and most recently the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, India. She has had solo presentations at MoMA PS1 and the Brooklyn Museum, New York City; Göteborgs Konsthall, Gothenburg, Sweden; the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburg, PA; and most recently in 2018 at the Rubin Museum of Art and The Kitchen, New York City. Ganesh has received numerous awards including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Creative Arts, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. She has been a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts (2017-18); Robina Foundation Fellow for Arts and Human Rights at Yale University Law School (2015-16); US Art in Embassies Program resident at NIROX, South Africa (2015); Estelle Lebowitz Endowed Visiting Artist (2015); Kirloskar Visiting Scholar at RISD (2014); and Artist-in-Residence at New York University’s Asian/ Pacific/American Studies Program (2013-14). Her works are held in prominent collections such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Devi Art Foundation, Delhi, India; Michael Berger Gallery Collection, Pittsburg, PA; Deutsche Bank Collection, Philadelphia; San José Museum of Art, CA; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Phildadelphia; Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
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Chitra Ganesh Sultana’s Dream was inspired by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s early 20th-century story of the same title. The prints—all black linocuts on tan paper—both illustrate elements of the text and use its imagery and themes to explore urgent topics of the political present. Hossain’s 1905 short story begins in reverie: “One evening I was lounging in an easy chair in my bedroom and thinking lazily of the condition of Indian womanhood.” The narrator is soon led on an oneiric stroll through “Ladyland”, a utopian matriarchy where women have harnessed the power of the sun to live prosperously and efficiently. Education and compassion for refugees is paramount, and men remain indoors, in domestic spaces. Ganesh literally interprets certain moments from this pioneering work of feminist science fiction: the opening scene in the easy chair, for example, or a military battle won by wielding an inventive solar weapon. Other images describe and build upon Ladyland’s architecture and environment, further elucidating the vivid atmosphere that Hossain created. Far from merely illustration, however, the portfolio, in the artist’s words, “connects with problems shaping 21st-century life: apocalyptic environmental disaster, the disturbing persistence of gender-based inequality, the power of the wealthy few against the economic struggles of the majority, and ongoing geopolitical conflicts that cause widespread death and suffering.” Like much of Ganesh’s work, Sultana’s Dream engages these subjects through the lens of history, literature, and mythology, not only to examine the relationship between imagined and lived worlds, but also to consider how utopian fantasies might be realized.
page 13: Sultana’s Dream: Justice is Virture, 2018 page 14: Sultana’s Dream: Lions are Stronger than Men, 2018 Images courtesy of Durham Press Printed and published by Durham Press © Chitra Ganesh and Durham Press
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Toyin
TOYIN OJIH ODUTOLA is a contemporary artist who focuses on the sociopolitical construct of skin color through her multimedia drawings. Her work explores her personal journey of having been born in Nigeria and then moving and assimilating into American culture in conservative Alabama. “I’m doing black on black on black, trying to make it as layered as possible in the deepness of the blackness to bring it out. I noticed the pen became this incredible tool. The black ballpoint [pen] ink on black board would become copper tone and I was like ‘wow, this isn’t even black at all!’ The black board was like this balancing platform for the ink to become something else. I instantly recognized this notion, of how we think something is a certain way and in reality it is something else…” according to Ojih Odutola in an August 2013 interview about her show, My Country Has No Name in the International Review of African American Art. When asked why the majority of her figures are black in a recent interview with the Village Voice, Ojih Odutola responded, “Of course they’re black figures because they’re drawn in black pen, but not all of the figures are of African American descent, or at least the reference isn’t. One of the things I like to play with is, ‘What is black?’ Is it because I drew it? Is it because it looks black? Is it because you think the figure is black? Because a lot of it is just a filter, and the filters get more and more obstructed by whatever people think the image is about and not really what it is.” Ojih Odutola was born in Ilé-Ifé, Nigeria, in 1985 and currently lives and works in New York City. Recent solo exhibitions include Scenes of Exchange, 12th Manifesta Biennial, Palermo, Italy; Toyin Ojih Odutola: The Firmament, Hood Museum of Art (Hood Downtown), Hanover, NH; and Toyin Ojih Odutola: Testing the Name, Savannah College of Art and Design, GA. Recent solo exhibitions include Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, and A Matter of Fact: Toyin Ojih Odutola, Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco. Ojih Odutola is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; and Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii, HI.
Birmingham, 2014 Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York Collaborating printers: Bill Lagattuta, Justin Andrews, Maria Erikson. Published by Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque Š Toyin Ojih Odutola
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simonette
SIMONETTE QUAMINA was born in Ontario, Canada, in 1982, and spent her early childhood living between South America, the Caribbean, and New York City. Her diverse upbringing is constantly woven into the narratives of her large-scale drawings, prints, and collages. Quamina earned her BFA from the City College of New York, and a MFA in printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. She is a recipient of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program in New York City, a 2017-2018 Provincetown Fine Arts Works Center Residency, and a 2017 Salem Art Works Fellowship in upstate New York. Quamina’s work has been shown both nationally and internationally, and has been acquired for private and public collections, including Fleet Library, Special Collections, RISD. Her recent group exhibitions include Artists I Steal From, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London; American Psyche, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York City; Coded, Boston Center for the Arts, Mills Gallery, Boston; Bathing, Planthouse, in New York City; and the 2017-2018 Fellows Exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in Provincetown, MA. Quamina lives in New York and is an assistant professor of printmaking at Eastern Connecticut State University.
page 19: Between Mary Jane’s shrouded thoughts, 2018 page 20: Sing a Song my little Kiskadee, 2018
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Simonette Quamina
Through the use of printmaking and collage, Quamina investigates the possibilities of drawing when history, memory, and cultural indicators are reassembled to form new visual allegories. These are narratives that reevaluate perceptions of cultural, racial, and social norms, while simultaneously challenging preconceived, romanticized ideas of the Caribbean. The stigmas that often accompany these modes of thinking are cut, pasted and re-presented in multi-layered drawings that reference traditional aesthetics of printmaking, collage, and art history. Graphite stands as a main medium within Quamina’s studio practice and it offers endless possibilities in constructing the narratives of her drawings. Its inherent nature to reflect and absorb light allows her the freedom to change its physical state in accordance with the needs of each drawing: from a solid form, to powder, to a wet medium, and as an ink used for printing. Through these changes, she creates moments of uncertainty and query with a medium that is seemingly familiar. Within the compositions, foliage, flowers, and various objects are often represented alongside partially hidden figures to create another layer of visual narration. They form a symbiotic relationship between the two, that references ideas of place, time, spirituality, notions of identity, and gender.
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stacey
STACEY ROBINSON, an assistant professor of graphic design at the University of Illinois, is an Arthur Schomburg Fellow who completed his masters of fine art at the University at Buffalo. His multimedia work discusses ideas of “Black Utopias” as decolonized spaces of peace by considering Black affluent, self-sustaining communities, Black protest movements, and the art that documents(ed) them. As the collaborative team “Black Kirby” with artist John Jennings, Robinson creates graphic novels, gallery exhibitions, and lectures that deconstruct the work of comic book creator Jack Kirby to reimagine resistance spaces inspired by Black diasporic cultures. His recent exhibition Binary ConScience explored ideas of W. E. B. Du Bois’s “double consciousness” as a Black cultural adaptation and a means of colonial survival. Robinson’s art installation exhibition, Branding the AfroFuture, investigated designing and constructing Black futures through various cultural, collage aesthetics. His latest graphic novel, I Am Alfonso Jones with writer Tony Medina and John Jennings is available from Lee & Low books.
page 23: Herald of the Fifth Element, 2016 page 24: The Harbinger, 2016
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Stacey Robinson
As a graphic designer/novelist, Robinson utilizes various modes of visual communication that include: graphic/ speculative design, illustration, fiction, and branding to examine popular culture and speculative Black futures through a studio art and emerging sound performance practice. Through his Afrofuturism-themed art-making practice, he sees the Ghanaian concept Sankofa (meaning “go back to get it”) as key to navigating the present political climate that limits Black social mobility. “Going back to get it” means retrieving erased African contributions to civilization while creating a Black speculative narrative that connects Afrocentricity to Afrofuturism. Robinson connects these ideas in his design practice as he theorizes Black-liberated futures through a system of curated exhibitions, lectures, and design exercises. Through design and storytelling, it’s important to create speculative narratives beyond the simplification of Afrofuturism as cool Black visual and sound aesthetics. Robinson’s question has always been the ‘Why?’ in Afrofuturism. Why are we, as Black people, projecting ourselves into the future, away from White people, on other planets, back into segregated spaces, etc.? Through Robinson’s exhibition practice, he creates “temporary utopias” by bringing the marginalized Black and Brown communities together with the regular supporting gallery patrons and activists, who help facilitate conversations between both audiences that typically aren’t fostered in gallery, museum, or library spaces. During the exhibition experience, Robinson also works with the curators and activists to organize public engagement and educational programming that help meet the practical needs of the marginalized community, while promoting knowledge growth in younger audiences.
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david
DAVID SHROBE is a New York-based visual artist who was born in and lives in New York City. He holds an MFA and a BFA in painting from Hunter College. He is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and a Joan Mitchell Artist-Teacher Fellow. Shrobe’s work was recently included in Uptown, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery Triennial, Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University, New York City; Harlem Postcards, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City; and Bronx Calling: the Fourth AIM Biennial, Bronx Museum, New York City. He has had solo exhibitions at Thierry Goldberg New York and Miami; Sugar Hill Children’s Museum, Harlem, and at Russ Berrie Medical Science Pavilion, Columbia University Medical Center, New York City. Shrobe has also exhibited at bitforms gallery and Jeffrey Deitch, New York City, among others. Shrobe’s works are in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Walton Family private collection; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Washington State University, Pullman, WA; and the estate of Peggy Cooper Cafritz.
page 27: Somewhere In Between, 2018 Image courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch
page 28: Regenerate, 2019 2019, oil, acrylic, ink, charcoal, canvas, fabric, paper, wood, and mixed media on paper in wood frame, 30 x 22 inches, purchased by Kelly Williams, (Class of 1986) and Board of Trustee member, for the Union College Permanent Collection, 2019.22 UCPC © David Shrobe, image courtesy of the artist
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David Shrobe
Shrobe uses material reclaimed from the environments he encounters to create work within which new forms and mixes become indigenized. The detritus of the everyday is recontextualized into portraits and figurative works in which counter-narratives emerge through his response to historical iconography and remnants of domestic spaces, while transcending time and space. Shrobe’s work is made in part from discarded materials sourced from multiple geographies and especially from around his familial home. By combining found material (such as furniture parts, cloth, and flooring) with paint, ink, and graphite, the divisions between painting, drawing, collage, and sculpture collapse. Shrobe’s interest and manipulation of everyday objects manifests into acts of decoding and reassembling. Shrobe carves form out of the objects he collects and reconstitutes, shifting their identity and giving new life to items that previously lived in domestic spaces, as they undergo a kind of metamorphosis layered with painting, drawing, and collage. Through various modes of production, the work brings ideas like identity, community, and history into question. The portraits appear hybridized and fragmented—figures traveling through time, who appear to be rendered mute but seem to speak a million miles away and right here at the same time. Although many of the works challenge conventions of classical portraiture, these aspects are fractured and intermingled with the imaginary, creating worlds where nonlinear moments seem to exist in a potential future and create a sense of a renegotiated history.
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ARICOCO (ARI TABEI), born and raised in Tokyo, is an interdisciplinary visual artist, living and working in New York City. She earned her MFA from the University of Connecticut in sculpture and video performance art in 2007. Awarded residencies and fellowships in New York City include: A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship; Smack Mellon Artist Studio Program; LES Studio Program; Museum of Arts and Design Artist Studios program; AIM Fellowship at the Bronx Museum of the Arts; Target Margin Theater Institute Fellowship; BRICworkspace Residency; Culture Push Fellowship for Utopian Practice; Sunroom Project Space at Wave Hill; and NYFA Artist Fellowship in interdisciplinary work. Additional residencies and fellowships include: Sculpture Space, Utica, NY, and Institute for Electronic Arts, Alfred University, Alfred, NY. Aricoco’s (Ari Tabei’s) most recent solo exhibition was held at La MaMa La Galleria, New York City, where she presented her new project supported by the Franklin Furnace Fund.
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Aricoco (Ari Tabei) is interested in how a community could form and function where there’s no central power to thrive. Exploring the non-hierarchical system of social insects (especially ants) and their biological altruistic characteristics within their female-dominated society, aricoco attempts to acknowledge her paradoxical phobia for insects and challenge her own vulnerability as a human, drawing a parallel with the life of an insect. Through creating environments for habitation, sculptural garments/bags and masks that serve as her protective gear, she disguises herself as an insect queen, performing a ritualistic play of surrendering her “powerless” body to the habitat.
page 30: Powerless Queen of PIPORNOT, 2019 page 31: Nurse Ant in action, 2019
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didier
DIDIER WILLIAM is originally from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He earned a BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University School of Art. His exhibitions include domestic and international institutions such as the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York City; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA; Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science, Miami, FL; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Museum of the African Diaspora, and the Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; Fredericks and Freiser Gallery, Anna Zorina Gallery, James Feuntes Gallery, and DC Moore Gallery, all in New York City. William’s work has received critical acclaim from the LA Times, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Harpers
Magazine, New York magazine, and Art in America. He was an artist in residence at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation in Brooklyn and he is a 2018 recipient of the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. William has taught at Yale School of Art, Vassar College, Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, SUNY Purchase, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He is currently assistant professor of expanded print at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, New Jersey.
Williams paintings yield image and form to the physical and psychic spaces occupied by diaspora communities. His work has always been preoccupied with imagining unconventional bodies and specifically materializing black and queer identity formation. William finds no value in demarcating between printmaking, painting, collage, and drawing as they combine, collide, and accumulate to become the surfaces of my objects. He draws on historical content, Haitian Vodou symbolism, and personal narrative to inform not only his research, but also his material choices. In this way, William builds something adjacent to what Audre Lorde calls a ‘biomythography.’ The word ‘camouflage’ functions as somewhat of an umbrella term for him. It refers to an alternative presence that both denies and reaffirms the physical body. In this way the body is omnipresent. The acts of figurative distortion, collage/patterning, and ornamentation synchronize to form a permeable membrane between the body and its failed container. William is just as interested in the persistent failure of this container as he is in the autonomy of the body itself. Camouflage implies no direct adversary but does immediately indicate deep tensions with one’s environment, so much so that a renegotiation of terms is necessary. His surfaces – where the body is formed through cuts, stains, and the residue of historical narratives – become sites of convergence and collision, marking the simultaneous fragility and persistence of black humanity.
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Kochon Sa a Lou / This pig is heavy, 2015
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saya
Born in 1979 in Gifu City, Japan, SAYA WOOLFALK earned her BA in visual art and economics from Brown University in 2001 and her MFA in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. A Fulbright grant to study in Brazil the following year and a 2007 residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem are among the many honors and awards she has received during the past fifteen years. Woolfalk has presented multimedia works and performances at museums, galleries, and alternative spaces throughout the US including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, VA; the Fowler Museum, University of California, Los Angeles; the Seattle Art Museum; the Studio Museum in Harlem and MoMA PS1, in New York City; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Performa 09, New York City, and many others. Solo shows of her
work have been held at the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, MA; The SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska; the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, New York; and the Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ. Upcoming solo shows will be held at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; the Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA; and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI. Recently commissioned works by Woolfalk include two murals for the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority, at the Van Siclen Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue train stations, in conjunction with the Percent for Art Program, and a public school mural in Queens for the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs School Construction Authority in 2017. Works by Saya Woolfalk are in several public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City; the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; the Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA; the Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ; The Zabludowicz Art Trust; and the Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC. A major multimedia work by Woolfalk, Chimatek: Virtual Chimeric Space (2015–16), was recently acquired by the Seattle Museum of Art, where it is currently on view. Saya Woolfalk is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York City.
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saya woolfalk
Saya Woolfalk is a New York-based artist who uses science fiction and fantasy to reimagine the world in multiple dimensions. With the multi-year projects No Place, The Empathics, and ChimaTEK, Woolfalk has created the world of ”The Empathics“, a fictional race of women who are able to alter their genetic makeup and fuse with plants. With each body of work, Woolfalk continues to build the narrative of these women’s lives and questions the utopian possibilities of cultural hybridity.
page 35: Encyclopedia of Cloud Divination (Plate 2), 2018 page 36: Encyclopedia of Cloud Divination (Plate 3), 2018
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David Shrobe, Fleeting Shadows, 2019
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Checklist Firelei Báez
Simonette Quamina
aricoco / Ari Tabei
given the ground (the fact that it amazes me does not mean I relinquish it), 2017 acrylic and oil on canvas 45 x 33 inches
Between Mary Jane’s shrouded thoughts, 2018 graphite, monoprint on paper 48 x 39 inches
Dress for Today #7 The Human in the Ant’s skin, 2019 mixed media dimensions variable
Courtesy of Kelly Williams, Union College Class
Courtesy of the artist
Courtesy of the artist
Sing a Song my little Kiskadee, 2018 graphite, relief print, collage on paper 63 x 48 inches
Didier William
of ’86
Amir H. Fallah
Courtesy of the artist
The Light Within, 2017 acrylic on panel 36 x 26 inches
Stacey Robinson
Courtesy of Denny Dimin Gallery, New York, NY
Milk Maid, 2016 acrylic on panel 24 x 24 inches
Cosmic Listening, 2016 digital collage print on paper 22 x 16 ¾ inches
Courtesy of Denny Dimin Gallery, New York, NY
Union College Permanent Collection 2018.15.1 UCPC
The Sun, The Moon, and The Truth, 2018 acrylic and collage on canvas 60 x 60 inches
The Harbinger, 2016 digital collage print on paper 22 x 16 ¾ inches
Courtesy of Denny Dimin Gallery, New York, NY
Union College Permanent Collection 2018.15.2 UCPC
Chitra Ganesh
Herald of the 5th Element, 2016 digital collage print on paper 22 x 16 ¾ inches
Sultana’s Dream: Justice is Virtue, 2018 linocut on BFK Rives Tan, ed. 4/35 Printed and published by Durham Press 20 ⅛ x 16 ⅛ inches Union College Permanent Collection 2019.17.5 UCPC
Sultana’s Dream: Lions are Stronger than Men, 2018 linocut on BFK Rives Tan, ed. 4/35 Printed and published by Durham Press 20 ⅛ x 16 ⅛ inches Union College Permanent Collection 2019.17.11 UCPC
Toyin Ojih Odutola Birmingham, 2014 four-color lithographs with gold leaf on Somerset satin paper triptych: 24 x 16 ½ inches (each) Union College Permanent Collection 2017.7.1
Union College Permanent Collection 2018.15.3 UCPC
David Shrobe Fleeting Shadows, 2019 oil, acrylic, ink, charcoal, and book cloth on paper in wood frame 24 x 22 inches Courtesy of Kelly Williams, Union College Class of ’86
Regenerate, 2019 oil, acrylic, ink, charcoal, canvas, fabric, paper, wood, and mixed media on paper in wood frame 30 x 22 inches
Kochon Sa a Lou / This pig is heavy 2015 collage, acrylic and wood stain on panel 60 x 48 inches Union College Permanent Collection 2018.1.1
I see you, we all see you, 2015 photo polymer print 13 x 8 ⅛ inches Union College Permanent Collection 2018.1.3
Saya Woolfalk Encyclopedia of Cloud Divination (Plate 2), 2018 archival inkjet print, silkscreen, silver leaf, chine collé on paper ed. 3/14 43 ¾ x 33 ¾ inches Courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects
Encyclopedia of Cloud Divination (Plate 3), 2018 archival inkjet print, silkscreen, silver leaf, chine collé on Hahnemüle Photo Rag Ultra Smooth 43 ¾ x 33 ¾ inches 47 x 37 inches (frame) Courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects Union College Permanent Collection 2019. UCPC
Purchased by Kelly Williams, Union College Class of ‘86 for the Union College Permanent Collection 2019.22 UCPC
Somewhere In Between, 2018 oil, acrylic, ink, flocking, paper, fabric, wood, metal, and mixed media 61 x 42 x 6 inches Courtesy of Richard and Eileen Ekstract
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Acknowledegments I am very grateful to all of artists, galleries, and collectors who loaned artwork for this exhibition. Special thanks to Sarah Mottalini, Curatorial Assistant of Art Collections and Exhibitions, and Pam Poquette, Art Collections and Exhibitions Miekle Fellow for 2018/19, for their assistance and support of this exhibition. - Julie Lohnes, Director & Curator of Art Collections & Exhibitions, Union College
Additional funding generously provided by Africana Studies; Asian Studies; Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies; Interdisciplinary Studies; Latin American & Caribbean Studies; the Department of Visual Arts; and the Office of Multicultural Affairs.
Original Exhibition August 31, 2019 – January 19, 2020, Mandeville Gallery, Union College
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807 Union Street, Schenectady, NY 12308 518.388.6004 For more information: union.edu/gallery ISBN-13: 978-1-939968-18-0 All of the works in this exhibition are held in copyright through the artist unless otherwise noted; all rights reserved. Publication copyright Š 2019 Union College. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission from the publisher and artists. cover: Saya Woolfalk, Encyclopedia of Cloud Divination (Plate 3), 2018 title page: Amir H. Fallah, detail from The Sun, The Moon, and The Truth, 2018
CURATOR: Julie Lohnes EDITOR: Sarah Mottalini, Alexander Stevens DESIGN: Elizabeth Laub Graphic Design PRINTING: Fort Orange Press