Newly commissioned work debuts at the Mississippi Museum of Art
Join me at the Mississippi Museum of Art as we celebrate the opening of A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration exhibition. The weekend will include a series of critical conversations and celebrations focused on the themes of family, ancestry, land, and self-determination.
About the Exhibition:
A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration explores the profound impact of the Great Migration on the social and cultural life of the United States from historical and personal perspectives. Co-organized with the Baltimore Museum of Art, the exhibition features newly commissioned works by 12 acclaimed Black artists across a variety of media. The Great Migration (1915-1970) saw more than six million Black Americans leave the South for cities across the United States. Informed by research, explorations, and conversations, the artists’ works explore themes of perseverance, self-determination, and self-reliance, along with the impacts this historical phenomenon continues to have today.
I’m thrilled to be on a panel during the opening weekend titled Memory and Ancestry within and without the Archive, in discussion with Saidiya Harman, Savannah Wood, and Carrie Mae Weems.
About the Panel:
The archive is often a starting point for research, whether it be to piece together memory, an ancestral tie, or a history. Historical archives, however, are often deeply flawed, shaped by those who possess the power to build collections and to determine what is worthy of collecting. As Saidiya Hartman remarks in her groundbreaking book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, “Every historian of the multitude, the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaved is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor.” Join us for a conversation with scholars and artists who account for both the formal and informal archival presences and absences in their work and consider how they incorporate the “archive” into their creative process.
