CURRENT PROJECTS
WATERMARK: ANACOSTIA POOL, 1949-2022 an exhibition at STABLE from March 24-May 14, 2022. This exhibition will include video installation, performance, and discussions between community leaders, artists, and scholars that engage examine the history and contemporary impact of Anacostia Pool’s history of desegregation. The artists are re-appropriating archival photographs from local and Boston-based wade-in protests are being Community participants include Kenneth Carroll, Anacostia-based poet and community This project follows the trajectory of Abrams’ and Strom’s series artworks entitled, WADE Ins that employ participatory practices to examine segregated recreation at public beaches and pools. This new project is being made in conversation with the Anti-Racist Research and Policy Center at American University, the MFA Studio Art Program at American University, the Anacostia Community Museum and through the generosity of numerous individuals with ties to and lived histories in Anacostia.
The project will feature performance, oral histories, and archival media that combines with video projection and sound to tell the story of Anacostia Pool’s complex history and it’s continued impact on Anacostia’s resilient communities. An exhibition at STABLE Arts will include a panel focused on the history(ies) of segregated recreation and workshops with Anacostia residents – past and present.
WATERMARK: ANACOSTIA POOL, 1949-2022 joins a trajectory of art projects by Abrams and Strom that re-examine the history/ies of segregated swimming sites and the lived experiences of the people that participated in the sites’ recreation, demonstrations, rebellions, riots and advocacy for de-segregation. The post-World War II Civil Rights Movement frequently resisted and protested segregated urban leisure venues with “wade-ins,” provoking violent reactions and even riots from recalcitrant, racist whites. During this period, Black activists who attempted to integrate segregated pools, beaches and other public recreational facilities in the United States were met with violent resistance. Pools and beaches were contentious sites because their desegregation resulted in the direct mixing of Black and white bodies.
Abrams and Strom’s series of artworks have been supported by Live Arts, the Boston Foundation; the Mill’s Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts; Tufts University; the Multi- Arts Project Fund; Live Arts, University of Southern California, Roski School of Art and Design.
PAST PROJECTS
The Altars Festival, a cross-cultural ancestral remembrance celebration with The Sustainable Culture Lab.
The festival is inspired by Día de los Muertos and many other ancestor remembrance celebrations from around the world.
Cultures worldwide have numerous ancestor remembrance traditions, but America does not, particularly because American ethnocide does not want people of color to collectively gather, remember their past, and retell their stories.
Ethnocide is the destruction of culture while keeping the people, and the Altars Festival counters ethnocide by empowering people to remember, sustain, and celebrate their culture, while also providing a safe communal space for coping with the generational trauma and loss brought on by American ethnocide. We combat ethnocide through acts of cultural remembrance, activating ancestral knowledge, and creating new traditions that are relevant to our lived experiences.
The Altars Festival 2021 is a collaboration of The Sustainable Culture Lab and STABLE. This year we have commissioned nine artists—Erik Bruner-Yang, Julia Chon, Leigh Davis, Yacine Tilala Fall, Lionel Frazier-White III, Dominic Green, Neha Misra, Seda Nak, and Mojdeh Resaeipour—to create altars with the aim that the greater community will see these examples, and become inspired to engage in their own, culturally relevant acts of remembrance.
The festival is supported by grant funds of the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
BOXWALLPOTS
The Kududunura / Undoing mural project forms part of an ongoing research project RUKA (To knit / to braid / to weave) that uses African hair braiding practices as subject and as a metaphor for braiding; Nontsikelelo Mutiti continues to build on this rich iconography, creating multiple streams of content through fieldwork, archiving, design, and publishing.
The mural project works as a chord that connects the African diaspora through kinship and relational ties and cultural motifs. Mutiti is preoccupied with patterns that are reflected across Black cultures, notes that point to shared ancestry, a connection that has been manilulated through historic power dynamics that produced the long lasting paradigms of slave trade, colonialism, and immigration
The work will be on view June 2021-June 2022.
About The Artist
Nontsikelelo Mutiti is a Zimbabwean-born visual artist and educator. She is invested in elevating the work and practices of Black peoples past, present, and future through a conceptual approach to design, publishing, archiving practices, and institution building. Mutiti holds a diploma in multimedia from the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts (ZIVA) and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, with a concentration in graphic design.
PAST PROJECTS
Exhibition: Shoulder the Deed
Exhibition Dates: June 25-September 30, 2021
Gallery Hours: Friday and Saturday 12-6p
Curators: Maleke Glee, Zsudayka Nzinga Terrell, Zoma Wallace
Artists: Carol Beane, Shroeder Cherry, Nekisha Durrett, Adrienne Gaither, Shaunté Gates, Aziza Claudia Gibson-Hunter, Richard “Rags” Green, Charles Jean Pierre, Marvin Tupper Jones, Gina Marie Lewis, Harlee Little, Juliette Madison, Uzikee Nelson, Melvin Nesbitt Jr., Starr Page, Michael Platt, Amber Robles-Gordon, Gail Shaw-Clemons, Stan Squirewell
Shoulder the Deed is an exhibition that bears the responsibility of sustaining an artistic continuum on Randolph Place, NE that began almost four decades ago. Shoulder the Deed is a multigenerational, multidisciplinary joining of hands around a proverbial table built to sustain and uplift imagination, self-determination, and ingenuity. Works in this exhibition span a variety of theoretical and aesthetic vantages. Not explicitly concerned with cultural legibility, these artists create visual language with self-significant motifs, symbologies, and gestures that signal an inward reflection, exceeding the cultural flattening of Black art popularized in this moment. These works and their artists operate from an authority of centrality.
In late 1985, artists Harlee Little and Juliette Madison arrived on Randolph Place, at the edge of a forgotten railyard. Little, an established photographer, envisioned this shuttered Nabisco horse stable as a state of the art photography studio, where Black photographers could shoot their subjects while trading the latest tech and techniques. Madison, a young fashion designer, imagined a small atelier and collaborating on fashion shoots with her husband. She underwrote their shared vision, and the two became not only the first studio tenants, but pioneering patrons of DC’s own artistic movements towards collectivity, exchange, and resource sharing between working artists.
Over the next 13 years, “The Studio”, was reconfigured, refashioned, and rebuilt from the inside into studios, shooting galleries and photo processing facilities, intentionally made highly accessible in an era where access to comparable amenities was unheard of elsewhere. Its legendary cyclorama, built by Little’s own hands, was the only of its scale in the city, sitting at the gravitational center of Black photographers, sculptors, painters, writers, dancers, and musicians. Here, a foundation was laid for organizations such as the Black Artists of DC (BADC), The Exposure Group, and other overlapping creative collectives to formally establish themselves as entities in solidarity with one another.
Today, the building is occupied under similar auspices, now functioning as STABLE. In honor of the legacy held within this unique property and given continuous new life through contemporary DC artists, STABLE and the Black Artists of DC share an allegiance to steward the deed of creating shared space across the spectra of Washingtonian arts communities.
This exhibition marks the beginning of an unfolding, largely untold story of DC arts history that feeds the root of a thriving arts district in Eckington.
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