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In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the unfulfilled promise of the “racial reckoning” of 2020, the dissolution of Roe v. Wade, and the unfolding climate crisis, the current moment feels increasingly dystopian for many. If we are here… explores artists’ response to that sense of impending apocalypse in its philosophical, political, and personal dimensions. The exhibition brings together five artists whose practices explore different approaches to where and when we find ourselves from Black feminist perspectives. In The Distraction of Symbolism, Jamaican artist Deborah Anzinger overlays the natural bounty of Jamaica, named “the land of wood and water” by its first inhabitants, and the risk and precarity of Jamaican life and ecology. Autumn Knight’s Disappointment explores sitting with disappointment and discontent, not only as a motor of political engagement but as essentially human and valid in and of itself. Tsedaye Makonnen’s Astral Sea IV embodies the beauty in aspirations, and grief. And spring artists-in-residence, Las Nietas de Nonó insist that there is always creative potential even in conditions of inhumane confinement.
Black feminist approaches shape the exhibition’s content and form, and the project will evolve over its six-month run with artist residencies, research trips, and lectures by the exhibition artists.
If we are here… is organized by Nicole Smythe-Johnson, 2022-2023 VAC curatorial fellow, with assistance from Melissa Fandos, 2023-2024 VAC curatorial fellow. Lead support for this exhibition is provided by the College of Fine Arts. Additional support provided by the Art Galleries at Black Studies, the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, and the College of Liberal Arts GRIDS Initiative.