“How Did You Get This?: The Spaces We Inhabit” Exhibition

Welancora Gallery

poster for “How Did You Get This?: The Spaces We Inhabit” Exhibition
[Image: Deborah Willis "Carrie at Eatonville Salon" (2009-2010)]

This event has ended.

Co-curated by Ivy N. Jones and Damien Davis

Welancora Gallery presents How Did You Get This?: The Spaces We Inhabit, featuring work by Zalika Azim, Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., Colette Veasey-Cullors, Melvin Harper, Daonne Huff, Anders Jones and Deborah Willis.

Organized by Ivy N. Jones and Damien Davis, the exhibition features photographs, ephemera, and a performance that utilizes the gallery’s location in a 19th century townhouse as the point of departure for unpacking assumptions and expectations about spaces inhabited and controlled by the black body. How Did You Get This?:The Spaces We Inhabit relates to access to architectural space, the body as space, landscape as space and movement and performance as a means of experiencing and navigating through space.

Daonne Huff, Framing [Big White House], Stay in Touch for Mom and Dad, 2020, Text, built in mirror of historic brownstone, windex, yellow rubber gloves, rag, cocoa butter, audio recording, performance in an ethereal floral dress.

Zalika Azim is based in Brooklyn, New York. Through engaging personal and collective narratives her work extends from photography to investigate the ways in which memory, migration and the black body are contextualized in relation to colonized landscapes. Azim received a BFA in photography and imaging from the Tisch School of the Arts and a BA in Social and Cultural Analysis from New York University. Her work has been exhibited within the United States and abroad, including the International Center of Photography, Pfizer, the Instituto Superior de Arte and the Dean Collection. Zalika is currently a curatorial fellow at NXTHVN in New Haven, Connecticut.

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. is a conceptual photographer working on ideas related to intimacy, domestic space and marginality. Constructed as singular moments in ongoing narratives, Brown’s work functions as a documented abstraction of daily life. He is interested in the ambiguous nature of photography, specifically drawing attention to what is omitted from and what is included in the image and what information is compromised in the distance between the image and the viewer. Using the pictured environment to disguise or reference an individual, his photographs encourage imaginative speculation, while denying explanations. Elliott received a BFA in Photography from the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Colette Veasey-Cullors is based in Baltimore, MD. Her work is rooted in investigating themes pertaining to socio-economics, race, class, education and identity. She seeks to question our personal connections to these subjects and how one might justify and rationalize their existence to themselves and others. Colette is Associate Dean of Design and Media and Professor of Undergraduate Photography at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, Maryland. In 2012, she was awarded the Maryland Institute College of Art, Board of Trustee Excellence in Teaching Award. In 2019, she juried the Social Documentary Photography Grant 2019 Awarded by Murthy NAYAK Foundation & Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts and Communication (SACAC) in New Delhi, India. Colette received her MFA in Photography from Maryland Institute College of Art and her BFA in Photography from the University of Houston.

Melvin Harper is based in New York, Los Angeles and London. His practice centers around the identity of a black people, or a white people, or any discrete circumstance of “a people”. Harper’s work tries to deny the ability to generate an authentic identity through the demographic bio-politics of colonial capitalism. Melvin holds a MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts, and a BFA in Design and Photography from the Academy of Art University, CA.

Daonne Huff was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. Huff is an arts administrator, performance centered artist, poet and Black modern flaneuse. Her practice is rooted in observation, vulnerability, process, synchronicity, inviting the inside outside and rendering the invisible visible. She holds a BA in Art History from Vassar College and an MA in Visual Arts Administration with a Not-for-Profit concentration from New York University. She has performed at BLDG 92 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Rutgers University and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is currently based in New York, New York.

Anders Jones is based in Brooklyn, New York. He received a BA in Textile Surface Design from the Fashion Institute of Technology and an MFA in Photography and Video Related Media from the School of Visual Arts. His work examines issues related to social adversity in America, specifically the navigation of social codes faced by people of color. Jones’s work also addresses issues around cognitive dissonance and seeks to remind us of the strategic and dignified ways people of color end up in a desirable but supposedly unlikely position in life. His artwork, including recent forays into sculpture, has been featured in exhibitions at RE: Art, White Box, Welancora Gallery, Five Myles Gallery, HEREart, PULSE Miami Beach art fair 2017, and Spring Break Art Show 2018.

Deborah Willis, Ph.D, is an author, curator, photographer, and historian of photography who has conducted ground-breaking research on the legacy of African-American photography. University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, Willis teaches courses on Photography and Imaging, iconicity, and cultural histories visualizing the black body, women, and gender. She is a recipient of the NAACP image award for the documentary Through a Lens Darkly and for her co-authored book Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery. Her photographic work has been exhibited at The Frick Pittsburgh; University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI; Zora Neale Hurston Museum, Eatonville, FL; and the Gantt Center, Charlotte, NC; among others. Willis has curated multiple exhibitions focusing on historic and contemporary African American photography including those at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, International Center of Photography, Nathan Cummings Foundation, all NY; Joan Mitchell Center, New Orleans and the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle. She is a MacArthur Fellow and has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, among numerous other honors.

Media

Schedule

from March 14, 2020 to April 18, 2020

Opening Reception on 2020-03-14 from 18:00 to 20:00
Performance by Daonne Huff at 8:15pm.

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