Imagining the Future: Public Art Confronts the Past

April 12, 2021

Video recording on YouTube

Join us for a conversation about the creation of memories in public space and the power of art in the public sphere. We will be speaking with two artists – Lauren Frances Adams and Jason Patterson – whose work critically engages and analyzes items and symbols created in the nineteenth century. Using their art as a focal point, we will discuss the power of art to encourage the public to think differently about the meanings conveyed, then and now, in site-specific settings.

Introduction & closing remarks by Malinda Maynor Lowery, Professor of History, UNC-CH, and Director of the Center for the Study of the American South (CSAS)

Moderated by Jacqueline Lawton, Associate Professor, Dramatic Art, UNC-CH

Panelists:
Lauren Frances Adams, Artist
Lauren’s wallpaper art, “In Faithful Remembrance of Cornelia Phillips Spencer, and to the Truth-Loving People of North Carolina”, is displayed in Love House, home of CSAS. This house was built in the 1800s and maintained by Cornelia Spencer, a white woman whose decor reflected her Southern ideologies. Lauren’s art puts Spencer’s own words back in a space that is now used in a completely different way.

Jason Patterson, Artist
Recreating and reimagining historical documents, Jason focuses on portraiture and frame-building, modeling the frame after the time period the art represents. His work is a catalyst for things that should happen, addressing “…often unknown histories of white supremacy and racial inequality that have existed in this area for centuries and that continue to influence the social conditions.”

Michelle Lanier, AfroCarolina Folklorist and Womanist Cartographer
Michelle Lanier is an AfroCarolina Folklorist public humanities professional, filmmaker and keeper of memory. This seasoned public humanities professional is the first African American director of the state’s 25 historic sites. Michelle unpacks the complex ways cultural and historic spaces tell stories, which stories they tell, and why.

Rights and Wrongs: 

Citizenship, Belonging, and the Vote

Exhibition website https://www.rightsandwrongs.info/

Virtual artist talk on November 19, 2020 — link to YouTube recording

Dates of Exhibition: October 17 – December 6, 2020

Location: The Peale at Carroll Mansion, 800 E. Lombard Street, Baltimore, MD

Saturdays and Sundays, 12-4pm, FREE

 

About the Exhibit: 

Rights and Wrongs is an art exhibition that contends with the centennial of the 19th Amendment and the 2020 elections  in light of the fact that equitable voter participation is hardly a settled matter in America — threats to citizenship, belonging, and democratic participation continue to be at stake. 

 

Local Baltimore artists Erin Fostel, Antonio McAfee, and McKinley Wallace III have created new artworks, related to the themes of racial, social, and economic injustice, and the various struggles for the vote. Some of their works respond to physical sites and visual records of contested public memory in Baltimore City.  

 

These local artists’ works are on display at the Carroll Mansion, a historic site of enslavement with many layers of occupation over the generations, alongside the work of artists from outside the region who also consider the personal and political dimensions of citizenship and belonging.  The artists in the group exhibition include Stacey Kirby, Julia Kwon, Precious Lovell, JoAnne McFarland, Gina Gwen Palacios, Jason Patterson, and Sarah Paulsen. 

 

These artists approach historic and current events in their work through a variety of methods available to the contemporary artist: abstraction, representation, collage, found objects, textiles, moving image, and interactive works. While the scope of their production methods is varied, their works share thematic and material concerns. These include historic images and texts resuscitated from archives to breathe new meaning into public memory. The artists are also documenting the complex narratives of inclusion and exclusion in historic activist efforts to establish voting rights for women and people of color in the 19th and 20th centuries.  These works reflect distinct declarations of self and collective, bearing out the adage that the personal is political.

 

The works in Rights and Wrongs bring the viewers’ attention to the complexities and contradictions of the history of voting rights and civil right struggles as well as the ways that these struggles continue both in Baltimore across the United States. 

 

Special Events:

• Virtual Exhibition Talk with Baltimore artists McKinley Wallace III, Erin Fostel, and Antonio McAfee // Thursday, November 19, 2020, 6:30-8:00pm // FREE

 

The exhibition will be on display from October 17 through December 6, 2020, at the historic Carroll Mansion in Baltimore. More information about the venue can be found on the website. 

 

About the Peale: The Peale is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, non-profit corporation established to restore the historic Peale Museum building as a center to celebrate the unique history of Baltimore, its people, and places. By creating a more inclusive cultural record of the city, the Peale aims to help people everywhere see Baltimore in a new light. The Peale currently also hosts exhibitions at the historic Carroll Mansion, located 1/2 mile from the Peale Building on Lombard Street. For more about the Peale, visit the website.

 

This project is organized by Baltimore artist and educator Lauren Frances Adams and has been financially supported in part by the Maryland State Arts Council and the Awesome Foundation.

Above: Crazy Quilt installation at the Ackland Art Museum, 31′ x 12′ custom wallpaper print

ART& Lauren Frances Adams
21 September 2018 – 10 March 2019

ACKLAND ART MUSEUM
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

https://ackland.org/exhibition/art-lauren-frances-adams/

This wallpaper design appropriates from the historic American textile technique called crazy quilting. Quilting is a visual and conceptual framework for incorporating images of a variety of objects from the Ackland’s collection, UNC’s historical memorabilia found in the Wilson Library’s special collections, symbols of the state of North Carolina and references to state history, and my own personal keepsakes. These myriad sources converge into a crazy quilt — a metaphor for the overlapping and sometimes seemingly disjunctive influences moving back and forth between the public and private sphere in our contemporary society. A particular emphasis is placed around images from the Ackland’s collection that feature women, remixing the collection to highlight the roles of women in society, politics, labor, and in art history. Historic commemorative ribbons (memorializing the death of Lincoln or a 19th c. veterans’ gathering) are reworked into a new framing device for elevating women’s history in North Carolina and at UNC.

Marx@200 Art Exhibition

April 6 through June 3 at SPACE gallery in downtown Pittsburgh

http://www.spacepittsburgh.org/portfolio-view/marx200/

Karl Marx is one of the most influential and controversial thinkers in history. To explore Marx’s continued influence at the time of his bicentennial, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trustand Carnegie Mellon University’s Humanities Center will present Marx@200 from April 6 through June 3 at SPACE gallery in downtown Pittsburgh.

Curated by CMU’s Kathy M. Newman and Susanne Slavick, Marx@200 will feature more than 25 works by artists from around the world. The artworks represent a diverse range of perspectives on Marx and his critique of inequality and capitalism, as well as his influence on political movements and regimes.

“As artists respond to both historical and current conditions, Marx’s legacy has shaped how and what they create,” said Newman, associate professor of English, who has also organized a series of lectures that examine Marx. “He is also becoming a popular culture icon in the digital age, with his image being used in countless memes and on products. We want to give people a chance to examine these phenomena and to reflect on the themes these artists have appropriated for their own work, from the rising tide of globalization to wealth inequality, to job loss and automation.”

Highlights from the exhibition include:

• Ukranian-born Nataliya Slinko’s gigantic version of Marx’s beard made of steel wool
• An animated Marx wielding a hammer in battle with Charles Darwin by Michael Mallis
• Kiluanji Kia Henda’s photographic triptych of a fishing vessel named “Karl Marx, Luanda”
• Kathryn Clark’s “Foreclosure Quilt,” a stitched urban map of foreclosed homes, block by block
• An embroidered barcode by Rayna Fahey that says, “Don’t just buy it/Make Revolution”

“Artists working within a variety of economic and political systems have contributed to this show, responding to Marx’s complicated legacy with appreciation or apprehension—and sometimes both. They invite us to consider his critique of capitalism and what it feels like to live in today’s globalized economy,” said Slavick, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Art.

SPACE is located at 812 Liberty Ave. Gallery hours are Wednesdays and Thursdays, 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays, 11 a.m. – 8 p.m.; and Sundays 11 a.m. – 5 p.m. It is free and open to the public.

In addition to regular gallery hours, there will be an opening reception on Friday, April 6 from 6-8 p.m. The exhibition will be open during the Cultural District Gallery Crawl on Friday, April 27 from 5:30-10 p.m., and a Marx bicentennial program and reception will be held on Saturday, May 5 from 7-9 p.m.

Artists With Links to the Exhibition

• Lauren Frances Adams, American artist, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains (2018)
• Maja Bajevic, Bosnian artist, Arts, Crafts and Facts
• Nina Beier, Danish artist, Greens (500 Peso) 2014
• Joshua Bienko, Ever So Much More So (2008-2010)
• Matt Bollinger, American artist, The Lot (2013)
• Mel Chin, Revised Post Soviet Tools to be Used Against the Unslakeable Thirst of 21st Century Capitalism (2010)
• Kathryn Clark, American artist, Foreclosure quilt (2008-2013)
• Carol Condé and Karl Beveridge, Canadian artists, Multiple Exposures (2011)
• Jeannette Ehlers, Danish artist, Black Bullets (2012)
• Rayna Fahey, Australian artist, Don’t Just Buy It (Make Revolution) (2010)
• Blake Fall-Conroy, American artist Minimum Wage Machine (2012) and Factory Wheelabrator Baltimore (2017)
• Cao Fei, Chinese artist, Who’s Utopia (2006)
• Claire Fontaine, Italy-based collective, Untitled (2004)
• Coco Fusco, Cuban-American artist, Ted Ethology: Primate Visions of the Human Mind (2015)
• Lungiswa Gqunta, South African Artist, Together Hand in Hand We Will Liberate This Country (2016)
• Kiluanji Kia Henda, Angolan artist, Karl Marx, Luanda (2005)
• Ottmar Hörl, German artist, Karl Marx (2013)
• Alfredo Jaar, Chilean-born artist, September 15, 2009 (2009)
• Andrew Ellis Johnson, American artist, Futures (2009) and Union (2017)
• Tavia LaFollette, American artist, Smoking Marx (2018)
• Steve Lambert, American artist, Capitalism Works for Me! True/False (2011)
• Liane Lang, Marx Engels Support Group (2015)
• Michael Mallis, American artist, Natural Selection: The Rise of the Proletariat (2008)
• Paolo Pedercini, Italian-born artist, To Build a Better Mousetrap (2014)
• William Powhida, American artist, Solidarity Economies (2014)
• Raqs Media Collective, The Capital of Accumulation (2010)
• Pedro Reyes, Mexican artist, Baby Marx (2008)
• Erik Ruin, American artist, Climate Chaos (20120
• Alex Schaefer, American artist, Bank of America, Palm Springs (2012)
• Dread Scott, American artist, Vendome Column, Toppled, 1871 (2011) and Maison Marx (2011)
• Elin Slavick, American artist, Workers Dreaming (1999-present)
• Slinko, Ukranian-born artist, Crowd Pleaser (2011)
• Shinique Smith, American artist, Surface Value III (2007)
• Jina Valentine, American artist, Memoranda (NYSE: GEO)
• Kirsty Whitlock, Australian artist, Losses (2009)
• Imin Yeh, American artist, 18 September 1867, (2018)

For more information, visit http://www.spacepittsburgh.org/.

FACULTY SHOW AT MICA HIGHLIGHTS RACE, GENDER POLITICS IN BALTIMORE & BEYOND

The solo exhibition by B.F.A. Painting faculty Lauren Frances Adams is a site-specific installation that explores Confederate spaces, race and gender and political activism.

The Maryland College Institute of Art (MICA) presents “Germinal,” a solo exhibition consisting of a site-specific installation by B.F.A. Painting faculty Lauren Frances Adams. The exhibition explores themes converging around feminist activists from American history, domestic ornament in service of political messages, and the recent removal of Baltimore’s Confederate monuments.

“Germinal” opens Saturday, Jan. 20, and runs through Tuesday, March 13, at MICA’s Pinkard Gallery, Bunting Center, 1401 W Mt. Royal Ave. A reception will take place Thursday, Feb. 15, 5 – 7 p.m.

Reflecting on contemporary and historical political movements for the advancement of civil rights in America, Adams’ installation and research-based paintings examine the ways in which white women both helped and hindered progress, as well as the pioneering black feminists who fought for racial justice. Specifically, Adams, whose work often focuses on the history of labor and class, looks at the ways in which activists in American history, particularly women of color from the 18th century through the present day, have been overlooked in favor of white causes. Adams also questions the legacy of white activists such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy who advanced Lost Cause myths and neo-Confederate ideology in public monument building and school curriculums, and grounds the idea of white culpability in racial injustice to the present day.

“Germinal” also showcases the recent public battle over removing Confederate monuments, including Baltimore’s Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument or Spirit of the Confederacy, which was located adjacent to MICA’s campus on Mt. Royal Ave. and dismantled by Mayor Pugh in August.

“Given the recent movement to remove Confederate monuments across the country and in Baltimore, I wanted to create work that responds to the dichotomy between these efforts and the palpable civil and political unrest that has taken hold of the national body politic,” said Adams.

The installation of “Germinal” will transform the gallery space by applying custom wallpaper designs and patterns to the normally white wall space, and will feature collections of painted found objects, such as stacks of locally reclaimed brick from Baltimore featuring patterns and designs reflecting resistance to white supremacy, and oyster shells sourced from Maryland’s Choptank River—where Harriet Tubman lived—with portraits of activists painted on the inside of the shells.

The objects will be incrementally added to the installation throughout the exhibition, accumulating (or “germinating”) over time as though growing out of the initial object. The title is also a play on the word “seminal,” acting as the feminine counter to the male dominated concept of historicity and plays up the role of women in enacting—or hindering—social change. “The works on display encourage a consideration of the ways in which public visual culture has contributed to the reinforcement of Confederate spaces and values, while also highlighting the long history of women who resisted (racialized and gendered) oppression and the continuation of these struggles today,” Adams said.

“Germinal” is supported through a Marcella Brenner Grant for Faculty Development and Research, which annually funds projects that contribute to MICA faculty members’ professional, artistic or scholarly research and development. “Germinal” will be accompanied by an exhibition catalog featuring an essay by MICA Humanistic Studies faculty Christine Manganaro.

Lauren Frances Adams’ work engages political and social histories through iconic images and domestic ornament. At the core of her work are critical explorations of labor and class in visual culture. She draws heavily upon the historical decorative arts, such as wallpaper patterns, quilts and paintings, to find contradictions within the contexts they originated. Alongside painting and mixed-media installations, domestic materials take shape in her research on the construction of political identity. Adams earned her B.F.A. at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and her M.F.A. at Carnegie Mellon University. Her work has been exhibited at Nymans House National Trust, Sussex, England; The Walters Museum, Baltimore, Maryland; The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri. Recent projects include Smack Mellon in Brooklyn and Plug Projects in Kansas City. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and has held residencies at the Cite in Paris and the Sacatar Foundation in Brazil. She is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation M.F.A. Award, a 2016 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award and the 2016 Trawick Prize. Adams is a founding member of Ortega y Gasset Projects, a project space in New York City.

A Series of Site-Specific Contemporary Art Installations at Historic Gadsby’s Tavern Museum Shine Light on Overshadowed Stories from Alexandria’s Past

Baltimore artists Stewart Watson and Lauren Frances Adams are part of Time & Place, a public art series commissioned by the Alexandria Office of the Arts

Centennial of the Everyday: May 15 – September 3

Gadsby’s Tavern: 134 North Royal Street, Alexandria, Virginia

#TimeandPlaceALX

May 2, 2017 – Alexandria, Va. – The City of Alexandria’s Office of the Arts partners with Baltimore-based artists Stewart Watson and Lauren Frances Adams for a series of site-specific, all-media installations inspired by the history of Gadsby’s Tavern Museum. Centennial of the Everyday features artistic interventions tucked in among the historic exhibits. It will be on view May 15 – September 3, 2017, at the Museum, located at 134 North Royal Street.

The works reflects the artists’ in-depth research—documented via social media—on the history of women, enslaved people, and anonymous citizens whose stories are overshadowed by other more famous historic figures from the region, such as George Washington and Robert E. Lee.

In Centennial of the Everyday, historic ephemera takes on new contexts. With furniture, stoneware, and textiles as a starting point, Watson and Adams reflect domestic material culture of the past with modern techniques.

For example, in the room of the Female Stranger—an unidentified woman who died in Gadsby’s City Tavern in 1816—the pair created digitally design muslin bedding with a traditional cameo motif that seems to fall away as the pattern continues.

In the Museum’s Ballroom, the artists acknowledge the original Gadsby’s Ballroom, acquired 100 years ago, 1917, by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The woodwork now serves as a backdrop for the Met’s collection of Federalist furnishings in the American Wing.

Watson and Adams seek to turn the archival into the interactive. They identified personal stories of place and family history by interviewing people like the descendants of John Gadsby, as well as Nancy Syphax, an enslaved woman owned by Gadsby in the 19^th century. Also included was a Gadsby’s Tavern Restaurant employee who has worked at the restaurant for two decades. In all, they collaborated with seven subjects, focusing on women and people of color. With these narratives, the pair created a fantastical sculptural installation for the Ballroom.

Using period chairs and altered furniture, these sculptures examine the extraordinary within the conventional. The duo’s artistic interventions are positioned throughout Gadsby’s Tavern Museum. Each highlight points from the Museum’s history and public-record archives and parallel the lived stories of present-day Alexandrians and the region’s rich diversity. Architectural fixtures, portraiture of anonymous women, pattern books, and newspaper articles take on new meaning when framed with themes of anonymity, loss, connectivity, and the fragility of memory.

“We hope our project encourages visitors to see history and identity in a new light,” said Watson. “These sculptures and site-specific works evoke the fragility and personal nature of memory.”

“We are thrilled to present our site-responsive work at Gadsby’s Tavern Museum,” said Adams. “Our work foregrounds the underappreciated narratives of many peoples from Alexandria’s rich history.”

This project is part of the Office of the Arts’ Time & Place series, which explores the intersection of contemporary art with Alexandria’s rich and multifaceted history. Using research-based practices and working in a variety of media, Stewart Watson and Lauren Frances Adams—along with Washington-based performance artist Sheldon Scott—have created thought-provoking temporary works that are inspired by the storied past of Gadsby’s Tavern.

“Time and Place shines new light on familiar stories and uses the arts to draws connections between past and present,” said Diane Ruggiero, director of the Alexandria Office of the Arts and Events.

Time & Place is a public-art program in partnership with the Office of Historic Alexandria. The goal is to foster exploration and dialogue about our region’s history and its continued reverberations within our community today. Follow #TimeandPlaceALX to join the conversation online. For more information, visit alexandriava.gov/94687.

The City of Alexandria is committed to compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. To request a reasonable accommodation or materials in an alternative format, contact Diane Ruggiero at 703.746.5590 (Virginia Relay 711) or diane.ruggiero@alexandriava.gov.

About the Artists
Based in Baltimore, Stewart Watson is the executive director, curator, and co-founder of AREA 405 and co-owner, founder, and president of Oliver Street Studios. She also teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Watson has received four individual artist grants from the Maryland State Arts Council, two individual artist grants from the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts, and was awarded with the 2010 Sadat Art for Peace Prize. Her work has been featured in BmoreArt, Baltimore magazine, Outpost Journal, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, and ArtFCity. Watson received her master’s of fine art from the University of Maryland, where she was an Anne Truitt Scholar and a Daniel Nicholson Olkhe Award recipient. She earned her bachelor’s of fine art in sculpture from the Pennsylvania State University. She lives at Oliver Street Studios with her husband, son, their dogs, and cat.

Lauren Frances Adams has exhibited at the North Carolina Museum of Art; Nymans House National Trust in England; The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Conner Contemporary in Washington, and Smack Mellon in Brooklyn. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and has held residencies at the Cite in Paris, Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, and the Sacatar Foundation in Brazil. She is the recipient of a 2016 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award and the 2016 Trawick Prize. Her work has been reviewed in Frieze, The Baltimore Sun, and Hyperallergic. Adams is a professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

About Gadsby’s Tavern Museum

Gadsby’s Tavern Museum consists of two buildings, a ca. 1785 tavern and the 1792 City Hotel. The buildings are named for Englishman John Gadsby who operated them from 1796 to 1808. Gadsby’s establishment was a center of political, business, and social life in early Alexandria. The tavern was the setting for dancing assemblies, theatrical and musical performances, and meetings of local organizations. George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and the Marquis de Lafayette enjoyed the hospitality provided by the tavern keepers. The Museum offers guided and self-guided tours for individuals and groups. Learn more at alexandriava.gov/GadsbysTavern. Follow @gadsbystavernmuseum on Instagram and @JohnGadsby on Twitter.

About the Office of the Arts

The Office of the Arts promotes the value of arts and culture in Alexandria by nurturing, investing in and celebrating the creative contributions of artists and arts organizations. Through engaging the community, encouraging participation, and facilitating access to the arts, the Office of the Arts works with local artists and arts organizations to build a vibrant community for all of the City’s residents, workers and visitors. The Office of the Arts is a division of the City of Alexandria’s Department of Recreation, Parks and Cultural Activities. Learn more at alexandriava.gov/arts or follow @alexartsoffice on Instagram.

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Contact: Alyssa Ross, City of Alexandria, 703.746.4572, alyssa.ross@alexandriava.gov

This spring my work is featured in four group exhibitions.

‘The Nothing That Is: A Drawing Show in Five Parts‘ @ The Carnegie in Kentucky, March 10 – April 15

Kentucky Derby Party and Auction @ Smack Mellon in New York, May 6

‘Artists in Residence 30th Anniversary Residency Retrospective’, Artspace, Raleigh, NC, May 19 – June 24

Unloaded, traveling group show curated by Susanne Slavick, making stops at the Bolivar Art Gallery at the University of Lexington, Kentucky, and then traveling on to Portland, Maine at the ICA Maine, and Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia, and other venues to be announced later in the year.