EMERGING ARTISTS PROGRAM

Cynthia Aurora Brannvall: The Threads That Bind

The Threads that Bind was an allusion to a body of artwork rendered in textiles to evoke memory, presence, labor, trade, industry, slavery, luxury, baptisms, weddings, funerals, gender, and history in the African diaspora. The concept and material of thread created meaning as an ancestral carrier traveling through time across borders through voluntary and involuntary migration from one body to another. The bind refers to shared experiences of trauma, oppression and perseverance that cohere in Black identity.

Nelson: Interlacing Distributed Intelligence/ Noir Care

In this exhibition, Nelson brought together traditional craft practices like embroidery, weaving, and quilting along with digital art to reimagine the Black body as a place for futuristic progress. Nelson created images of the Black diaspora far removed from the historic depiction as servile and without agency, and instead as visually and culturally complex individuals. The work is balanced visually between the dichotomy of Blackness as an expansive unknowable monolithic void and a chromatically intense generator of culture.

Trina Michelle Robinson: Excavation: Past, Present and Future

Using early photography and motion picture processes, Excavation looked at the relationship between memory and migration. Robinson’s ancestry was the catalyst for this exploration, but the work also looked at stories of migration and memory outside of her immediate family. In Paul Virilio’s The Vision, the author talks about capturing the impression of someone or something rather than producing an exact copy when it comes to creating an image. An ethereal copy was Robinson’s approach when considering the excavation of memories. An exact replica might not be possible, but we can get a glimpse, hold on, and sit with what remains so we can move forward

Ashley Ross: 10/27/03

10/27/03 is a body of work that surveys the ways in which experiential dualities can exist within the confines of a religious upbringing. Bringing together staged black and white photographs, familial archive layered works, and installation, this body of work uses photography and personal memorabilia to illustrate ideas about indoctrination and legacy within the black familial structure. Whether through visual allegories or the artist’s personal explorations of religion, each photographic work represents the process of rumination and memory when confronting one’s own former spiritual experience allowing the viewer to contemplate the ways in which we internalize belief systems.

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RESIDENCIES, AWARDS & PUBLIC PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS

ESIDENCIES, AWARDS & PUBLIC PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS