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Event
PATOIS 2024: Gestures of Refusal Curatorial Walkthrough with Shana M. griffin
NOTE: Meet in the Lobby of the CAC. After online sales close, you can still show up.
Join us for a walkthrough of the exhibition Gestures of Refusal: Black Photography and Visual Culture, with the exhibitions curator and PATOIS Collective member Shana M. griffin.
"Gestures of Refusal: Black Photography and Visual Culture" explores the production of Black visual culture, bringing attention to the ways contemporary photographers and visual artists regularly wield the power of the camera and their creative practices to discern, behold, celebrate, and document people, places, events, collective memories, encounters, and other ever-present moments of Blackness that refuse the violence of erasure and subjectivity.
In the introduction of Listening to Images, Black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art Tina M. Campt states: For blacks in the diaspora, both quiet and quotidian are mobilized as everyday practices of refusal. Such gestures of refusal, which are neither passive nor restrained, are regularly exercised and creatively engaged by Black photographers and visual artists, who challenge everyday forms of violence, subjectivity, and erasure through the lens of their camera and creative practices.
From the invisible to the obvious, the mundane to the spectacular, the overlooked to the known, the erased, and to the rememberedthe works in the exhibition engage multiple aesthetics of Black visuality.
In Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, bell hooks notes, Though rarely articulated as such, the camera became in black life a political instrument, a way to resist misrepresentation as well as a means by which alternative images could be produced. As an exercise in the unconventional and the splendid, Gestures of Refusal is no ordinary exhibition or investigates how we experience and render Blackness visible. Featuring the work of more than one hundred contemporary Black artists with ties to New Orleans, five immersive installations, and over two hundred art objects, this exhibition explores a range of photographic frequencies, styles, tenses, punctuation, and rhythmic scores, creating new visual vocabularies for futurity.
Works in Gestures of Refusal are courtesy of the exhibiting artists and from the collections of the Amistad Research Center, Tex Stevens Collection, New Orleans Public Library, Xavier University of Louisiana Digital Archives and Collections, the Historic New Orleans Collection, The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate Archives, and the Louisiana Public Broadcasting for PBS Digital Studios and Houston Public Media.
Gestures of Refusal is the third in a series of exhibitions organized by SEEING BLACK. First Frame, the preludial exhibition of SEEING BLACK: Black Photography in New Orleans 1840 & Beyond, was on view at the New Orleans African American Museum from October 6, 2022, to June 4, 2023. The second exhibition, In the Spirit of Black, was on view at the Ashé Culture Arts Center and Ashé Power House Theater from March 30 to June 4, 2023. The final exhibition of the four-part series will open in the spring of 2024 at Xavier University of Louisiana Art Gallery.
About the Curator
Shana M. griffin is a New Orleansbased Black feminist activist, independent researcher, sociologist, abolitionist, and artist. griffins practice is interdisciplinary, research-based, and decolonial, centering the experiences of Black women most vulnerable to the violence of poverty, incarceration, polluted environments, reproductive regulation, economic exploitation, housing discrimination, and climate change. She is a 2022 Andy Warhol Curatorial Research Fellow, 2022 New Orleans Center for the Gulf South Monroe Fellow, 2021 Creative Capital Awardee, and 2020-21 John ONeal Cultural Arts Fellow. She holds a Master of Arts in Sociology, a Bachelor of Arts in History, and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology.
About SEEING BLACK
SEEING BLACK is a multimedia, research-based project photography project organized by writer and activist Kalamu ya Salaam, feminist activist, researcher, and artist Shana M. griffin, photographer and historian Girard Mouton,III, and photographer Eric Waters, with design support from Lidya Araya and the curatorial assistance of Renee Royale, alongside input from photographers, scholars, designers, artists, writers, and partnering organizations.
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LocationContemporary Arts Center (View)
900 Camp Street
New Orleans, LA 70130
United States
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| Kid Friendly: Yes! |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: Yes! |
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