“A Gathering” Exhibition

“A Gathering” Exhibition

HOUSING

This event has ended.

HOUSING presents A Gathering, a group exhibition featuring works by Gerald Cannon, Anima Correa, Taína Cruz, Steffani Jemison, Charles Mason III, Emmanuel Massillon, Glendalys Medina, Nathaniel Oliver, Mitchell Reece, Elliott Jamal Robbins, Rafael Sanchez, Shani Strand
With writing from Shireen Ahmed, Sasha Bonét, Laura Brown, Octavia Bürgel, Gaby Cepeda, Sunday Fall, KJ Freeman, Quincy Flowers, Josie Roland Hodson, Brandon Drew Holmes, Bianca Rae Messinger, and marcus scott williams.

A Gathering is a tribute to and inspired by the work of Steven Cannon, a Lower East Side icon, a Black art icon(oclast), and founder of A Gathering of the Tribes. Inspired by Exquisite Poop, an exhibition at a Gathering of the Tribes in 2012, each artist is paired with a writer who has been asked to create a written representation of artwork for a zine that will be produced in tandem with the exhibition.

“His sonic-visual radar showed a visionary blip about the size of Africa rising with the speed of light somewhere on the left of the screen. He locked his sights. The image danced, sang, rocked back and forth, then became a huge drum. It vibrated like the Earth around the Sun, flashed a message: EVERYTHING IS EVERYTHING.”
-Steve Canon, Grove, Bang, and Jive Around
Curated by KJ Freeman
Organized by Shani Strand

Ánima Correa is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles, CA. She has exhibited at Court Space, Los Angeles, CA; Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York; 67 Ludlow, New York; Kimberly Klark, Queens, NY; A Gathering of the Tribes, New York, Callao Monumental, Lima, PE, among others, as well as through several online and site-specific exhibitions in the US and internationally. Correa has participated in panels and lectures at El Museo de la Nación, Lima, PE, and MoMA PS1, Queens, NY, and was a co-founder of project space AMO Studios, which operated from 2011-2014 in New York, NY. She received a BA and BFA from The New School, is a current member of the inaugural cohort of Dark Study, and will be attending the Mountain School of Arts in 2021.

Taína Cruz focuses on excavating relationships between Indigenous American and West African material, ritual, and visual culture in the ‘modern’ Afro-Latinx experience.

Steffani Jemison (1981, Berkley, California, USA) uses time-based, photographic, and discursive platforms to examine “progress” and its alternatives. Her work encompasses a variety of media, including video, performance, and sculpture, and is rooted in research. In her work Jemison addresses African American culture and vernacular as well as the tensions between the private, social, and political spheres through a variety of means, often examining the limits and structures of narrative storytelling and linear time. Her video works are frequently based around early cinematography, assimilating early cinematic tropes and techniques, to question the inherited narratives that form our perception of the world.

Charles Mason III (based in Baltimore, MD) received his AA in General Studies from the Community College of Baltimore County, 2010, BFA in Graphic Design from the University of Maryland Baltimore County, 2014, and his Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 2019. He has curated several shows in Baltimore and Philadelphia as well as had solo shows in Baltimore, MD at Maryland Art Place, 2016, and Philadelphia, PA, at Spillway Collective, 2019. He has participated in group exhibitions at Hudson Valley MOCA, Peekskill, NY, the Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA, Radical Reading Room, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Harlem, NY, Breaching the Margins, Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, MI, and Proximity, Anna Zorina Gallery, New York, New York, to name a few. He has work in the permanent collection of the James E. Lewis Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD, and he is also a recipient of the Maurice Freed Memorial Prize.
Emmanuel Massillon is an African American conceptual artist working in between Washington D.C. and New York City. Massillon’s artistic practice explores the complex histories of race, identity, culture, and its relation to people of African descent. His upbringing in the inner city of Washington D.C. shapes the unique narrative that he strives to convey through mediums like painting, photography, and sculpture. Language, music, and materials play a vital role in his artwork, allowing for visual puns and street vernacular to craft either the nuances of the day-to-day or politically charged topics.

Glendalys Medina is a Nuyorican conceptual interdisciplinary visual artist who was born in Puerto Rico and raised in the Bronx. Medina received an MFA from Hunter College and has presented artwork at such notable venues as PAMM, Participant Inc., Performa 19, Artists Space, The Bronx Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Vigo, Spain, and The Studio Museum in Harlem among others. Medina was a recipient of a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (2020), a Jerome Hill Foundation Fellowship (2019), an Ace Hotel New York City Artist Residency (2017), a SIP fellowship at EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (2016), a BACK IN FIVE MINUTES artist residency at El Museo Del Barrio (2015), a residency at Yaddo (2014, 2018), the Rome Prize in Visual Arts (2013)

Nathaniel Oliver (b. Washington, DC, 1996) is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in New York City. His practice in painting, sculpture, performance, video, and installations focuses on veracity not being absolute. Guided by perspective, he challenges the normality of the world in which we live. In this digital world, the fact is manipulated and cropped to its beneficiary. Conversely, veracity both builds and dismantles spaces. His works reflect the literal and metaphorical experiences that he has come to comprehend and the attestation of him being there.

Mitchell Reece (b. 1990, Houston, TX) is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist and educator native to Houston, TX. He was taught as an adolescent by his father. After graduating from Prairie View A&M University he began practicing art and design seriously. Interning while working as a gallery attendant at the Contemporary Art Museum, he found enlightenment learning about the works on display. He studied graphic design at The School of Visual Art MFA program and believes his spiritual practice and community come first extending to presenting his research at AIGA’s Fresh Graduate Lecture, Pratt Institutes New Old: Designing for our Future Self group exhibition, and The Black School’s Studio Launch Exhibition. He now collaborates with clients under PLEX design studio and lectures in Pratt Institute’s Communications Design Department.

Elliott Jamal Robbins (b. 1988, Oklahoma City) is an artist who works in a variety of mediums, including drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and animation. In 2017, Robbins received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona. Previously, he attended the University of Oklahoma, where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Since graduating in 2017, Robbins has exhibited his artwork in numerous locations. These include group and solo shows in New York, Oklahoma, Los Angeles, Miami, and Berlin. Robbins has received many awards, both at the local and national level. Some of his honors include the 2018 Phoenix Art Museum Artists’ Grant, National Sculpture Society Scholarship, FJJMA Museum Association Award, the John F. and Anna Lee Stacey Scholarship, and the Momentum OKC 2014 Artist Spotlight. Rafael Sánchez (b. Havana, Cuba, 1960) lives and works in New York. Significant solo exhibitions and performances include Artists Space, New York (2017); Participant Inc, New York (2004, 2005); Thread Waxing Space, New York (1999); X-Teresa, Mexico City (1995); and Hallwalls, Buffalo, New York (1987). Sánchez was a founder of Aljira Arts, Newark, where he had a solo exhibition in 1985. From 2011 - 2015, Sánchez was Steve Cannon’s reader on Fridays. Sánchez has forthcoming exhibitions with Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York, Housing, New York, and Martos Gallery, New York.
Shani Strand (1995, New York, NY/ raised in Teaneck, New Jersey) use local vernaculars and globalized language to perform an exploration of aesthetics that appears across cultures, particularly out of post/neo-colonial conditions of Jamaica and its diaspora: the mythologies of Babylon and Armageddon. She considers what is visible - decor, landscape, architecture as metonyms for what is invisible – ghost and history. She received her BA and BFA degree from Oberlin College and will be an MFA resident at UCLA in the fall.

Media

• Painting

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