Curatorial Projects
Lina Iris Viktor: A Haven, A Hell, A Dream Deferred
Curated by Allison K. Young
October 5, 2018 - January 6, 2019
New Orleans Museum of Art
Lina Iris Viktor is widely recognized for her exploration of art’s connection to history, spirituality, and prophecy. Recasting factual and fantastical narratives surrounding America’s involvement in the founding of Liberia, Lina Iris Viktor: A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred. explores a mythicized history of the West African nation. Established as an act of American “altruism” following the abolition of slavery, the Republic of Liberia appears as an uneasy utopia, both a paradise lost and a cautionary tale on the pathology of colonization. Central to Viktor’s gilded portraits is the mercurial figure of the Libyan Sibyll; from the Latin sibylla meaning prophetess, she is an ancient figure of fate and foresight, later invoked by eighteenth-century abolitionists as the predictor of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Across the series, Viktor’s soothsayer navigates an evocative landscape which references modern and traditional West African textile culture, contemporary African portrait photography, and the national iconography of both Liberia and the United States. In resurrecting a long-forgotten history collective to Liberia and the antebellum United States, A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred. embodies the artist’s enduring interest in transforming perceived absences into sources of light … and life.
Selected Press
Dr. Sarah Clunis for Antenna.Works
“In her first major solo museum exhibition, Viktor’s work is artfully curated by Allison Young, NOMA’s most recent curatorial ingénue and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art. And in the vein of her other Black Baroque contemporaries, such as Kehinde Wiley, Ebony Patterson, and Yinka Shonibare, Viktor’s new opus is even more excessively adorned than such iconic works as her 2016, Yaa Asantewaa, named after the Ashanti Queen who led the War of the Golden Stool against British colonialism in 1900.” Read More
Victoria Stapley Brown for The Art Newspaper
“As cultural institutions in New Orleans mark the city’s tricentennial with exhibitions that both celebrate and grapple with its complex history, Lina Iris Viktor: A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred (until 6 January 2019) at the New Orleans Museum of Art mines the underexplored connections between the city and Liberia. “The narrative is buried a lot, even though it’s part of American history,” says the British-Liberian contemporary artist Viktor, who made 11 new works specifically for this show, her first solo museum exhibition. Read More
Jasmin Hernandez for Cultured Magazine
“Viktor’s NOMA debut occurs during New Orleans’s historic tricentennial. In homage, a selection of the prestigious Orléans Collection— named, like the city, for the Duke of Orléans and counting Old Masters such as Rubens, Veronese and Rembrandt within its holdings— is also on view at the museum. “I was thinking about what it would mean to have classical portraits in visual conversation. It is significant that the series should debut in the U.S. South, as the history of Liberia is intimately entangled with that of antebellum America,” says exhibition curator Allison Young. “It represents one chapter within this country’s own struggle to reconcile the moral and philosophical contradictions of its early years.” Read More
Sarah Cascone & Caroline Goldstein for ArtNet
“It’s the first museum solo show for Lina Iris Viktor, who has become known for stunning, richly gilded self portraits that celebrate black identity. Here, she’s created a mythologized history for Liberia, founded following the abolition of slavery in the US as a home for freed slaves, depicting the prophetic figure of the Libyan Sibyl, a figure from Greek mythology who seems to offer a warning against the evils of colonization.” Read More
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Torkwase Dyson: Black Compositional Thought | 15 Paintings for the Plantationocene
Co-Curated by Katie Pfohl and Allison K. Young
January 24 - April 19, 2019
New Orleans Museum of Art
Torkwase Dyson employs abstract shapes and forms as a means of exploring the intersections of environmental liberation, movement, and architecture. Within her practice, she has developed a unique vocabulary of abstract lines, forms, shapes, and edges informed by her own evolving theory of Black Compositional Thought. This working term considers how waterways, architecture, objects, and geographies are composed and inhabited by black bodies, and how the properties of energy, space, and scale can form networks of liberation.
Produced for the New Orleans Museum of Art, this new series of fifteen paintings is about composition. These works are inspired by the design systems of architecture, water infrastructure, the oil and gas industry, and the physical impact of global warming. The exhibition also examines the legacy of plantation economies and their relationship to the environmental and infrastructural issues of our current age, which many characterize as the “plantationocene.” Injecting these spatial constructions with a sense of precarity and emancipatory possibility, Dyson asserts new perspectives on geography, imagination, and belonging. As she writes, “I am interested in how the illusion of space pushes up against real space on a two-dimensional surface … and how the compression of the two produces something indeterminate, modular, poetic, haptic, and unsteady.”
Dyson draws a connection between the abstract forms of her art, and the networks of industrialized white supremacist power that shape our political landscape: histories of spatial segregation, policing and vagrancy laws, and other “exclusions of subjectivity” that often hide in the abstractions of machines, maps, and data. Her practice takes up abstraction as a tool for reshaping our current political landscape, and reimagining these systems from within.
Torkwase Dyson, Up South 3 (Water Table) and Up South 4 (Water Table), 2018, Acrylic on canvas, 60 in. diameter
Selected Press
Kristina Kay Robinson for Burnaway
“While uprisings and protests have been underway, monuments to slaveholders across the country have been ripped from their plinths, including the bust of John McDonogh in New Orleans. The day I visited Dyson’s Black Compositional Thought, I considered McDonogh’s early-nineteenth-century manumission scheme in which enslaved people could “buy” their deportation to Liberia after fifteen years of labor. The abstract shapes created by Dyson became new stories as I imagined the persons and personalities of those who animate these abstractions. As such, it is that beam of light—that ethereal moment before the image is “captured”—where freedom and autonomy may lie for Black subjectivity, where the existence of a new or fabulous visual language for Black life arises and introduces the possibility for action, one that might mean Ahmaud Arbery could be alive and jogging again today.” Read More
Erica Rawles for Artforum
“In a particularly distinctive pair of works jointly titled Interstitial Being (Architecture and Flesh #13, 14) (all works 2020), deep-charcoal-colored washes with subtle blue undertones made up the backgrounds, while three large black forms slightly overlapped to create one collaged shape in the foregrounds. The shapes seemed to cover fine white lines that appeared briefly, like accents in Dyson’s vocabulary. Each individual shape was roughly triangular, but with rounded edges, resembling a boat’s sail. While one of the three forms on each canvas had a smooth finish, the remaining two were created from layers of thick black paint. The gallery lights, bouncing off the paintings, highlighted their rich textures and gave them a sheen evoking that of petroleum.” Read More
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Bodies of Knowledge
Co-Curated by Katie Pfohl and Allison K. YoungJune 28 - October 13, 2019
New Orleans Museum of Art
Manon Bellet, Wafaa Bilal, Garrett Bradley, Adriana Corral, Mahmoud Chouki, Zhang Huan, William Kentridge, Shirin Neshat, Edward Spots, Wilmer Wilson IV
Bodies of Knowledge brings together ten international contemporary artists to reflect on the role that language plays in archiving and asserting our cultural identities. Working with materials that range from books and silent film to ink, ashes and musical scores, artists Manon Bellet, Wafaa Bilal, Garrett Bradley, Adriana Corral, Mahmoud Chouki, Zhang Huan, William Kentridge, Shirin Neshat, Edward Spots and Wilmer Wilson IV propose language as a living and ever-evolving document that can counter more staid and static ways of representing our collective pasts. Organized around a series of immersive installation and film projects, Bodies of Knowledge asks us to consider how we might write more inclusive narratives, reshape public space, and account for bodies and histories that have, in large measure, been written out of them. Bringing a new global perspective to current conversations in New Orleans surrounding cultural preservation and historical memory, Bodies of Knowledge draws together artists working with many different systems of knowledge to illustrate how history can be erased, rewritten and asserted anew.
In Brèves Braises, Manon Bellet invites musicians to perform in front of an installation composed of the charred remains of burned paper, letting the paper—a material that typically carries written histories—slowly crumble to dust through the improvisational energy of musicians as they play in front of the piece. Wafaa Bilal’s interactive installation 168:01 commemorates the burning of Baghdad’s libraries during the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, inviting museum visitors to fill the shelves of an austere white library with donated books that will be shipped to the College of Fine Arts at the University of Baghdad at the closing of the exhibition. Garrett Bradley’s immersive, multi-channel film America proposes that there was an entire body of silent films made by and for African American artists, audiences and filmmakers that has since been lost, and reimagines this lost archive through a corpus of new films. Mahmoud Chouki creates a new musical composition and series of site-specific performances for Bodies of Knowledge, titled Safar (Arabic for “to travel”), that will explore how music can speak across cultural divides to create new forms of dialogue between East and West. Adriana Corral’s Memento draws attention to the widespread disappearances of women and girls in Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, through a site-specific installation in which the artist writes these women’s names on the museum’s walls with ashes obtained from burned legal documents. William Kentridge’s animated film Zeno Writing, created in the artist’s signature, stop-motion animation style, layers drawings and texts from Kentridge’s personal journal to reflect on the ongoing transformation of history, politics, and memory in the contemporary world. Zhang Huan’s seminal Family Tree documents a daylong performance wherein he covered his face with words, names, and stories drawn from his family history and Chinese folktales, resulting in the artist’s likeness becoming completely obscured across a series of nine large-scale photographic portraits. Shirin Neshat’s practice—represented here by a photograph from the artist’s Rapture series and a related film program in the museum’s auditorium—probes stereotypes of Islamic militancy and femininity through a series of works in which Farsi text is superimposed over the body. Edward Spots and Donna Crump choreograph and perform Black Magic, an original dance piece that features twelve young dancers from Dancing Grounds on the exhibiton’s opening day, Friday, June 28, at 5 pm. The performance will begin on the front steps of the museum and proceed into the Great Hall after the first of five acts. Wilmer Wilson IV’s installation features his 2012 video Black Mask—in which the artist slowly obscures his face with black Post-it notes—alongside a new series of artist books in which the artist documents a series of recent performances in cities around the world, including Rome, Philadelphia, London, Brussels, Barcelona, and now, for this exhibition, New Orleans.
Selected Press
John D’Addario for Nola.com
“It’s said history is written by the winners: those with the power and resources to create an “official” narrative. But a new show of contemporary art at the New Orleans Museum of Art challenges that assumption. Instead, “Bodies of Knowledge” takes the work of 11 international artists — ranging from photography and sculpture to video, film, and performance — to examine how the languages of art can create alternative histories of individuals and groups that have been erased, ignored, marginalized or otherwise neglected in an institutional context. It’s a cerebral concept for a summer group show, which usually tend to be easy on the brain. Credit NOMA curators Katie Pfohl and Allison Young for assembling a group of works engaging enough to enjoy without feeling like you’re attending a compulsory summer school session on cultural expression and identity politics.” Read More
Peter Plagens for the Wall Street Journal
“Perhaps the biggest challenge for major museums showing contemporary art today is finding a balance between aesthetics and didactics. Since that quite fungible concept we call social justice has become so prevalent in museum exhibitions of contemporary art, those favoring aesthetics first have reason to feel hopelessly passé. On the other hand, if a museum show leans too far toward sociopolitical content, much of the audience feels lectured, if not hectored. In a time when museums are trying to better represent racial and sexual diversity, putting together a group exhibition that’s both socially trenchant and visually arresting is a tall order. With “Bodies of Knowledge” (on view through Oct. 13), however, the New Orleans Museum of Art succeeds admirably.” Read More
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Changing Course: Reflections on New Orleans Histories
Co-Curated by Brian Piper, Russell Lord, Katie Pfohl and Allison K. YoungJanuary 24 - April 19, 2019
New Orleans Museum of Art
Katrina Andry, Willie Birch, Lesley Dill, Skylar Fein, L. Kasimu Harris, The Everyday Projects, The Propeller Group
Changing Course: Reflections on New Orleans Histories marks the 2018 New Orleans Tricentennial by bringing together a group of seven contemporary art projects that focus on forgotten or marginalized histories of the city. Projects by artists Katrina Andry, Willie Birch, Lesley Dill, Skylar Fein, L. Kasimu Harris, The Everyday Projects and The Propeller Group each shed light on the past while also looking towards the future, returning to defining moments in New Orleans’ history that continue to frame art and life in the city today. Reflecting on how these histories have shaped our responses to present-day issues and concerns, the included projects also consider how returning to the past can help spur evolution and change, and make a lasting positive impact on the city. During a year of celebration and remembrance, Changing Course invites the city to consider how the act of commemoration can also be a form of forward thinking: a rejoinder to the present that might also change the course of things to come.
Two additional project components offer spaces for reflection about how these New Orleans histories impact different communities across the city, and spur conversations about how we might use art to shape the city’s future. Willie Birch’s installation will frame an evolving discussion platform at NOMA, one that also refers museum visitors to associated artwork and performances staged offsite at a community driven arts-space Birch is creating in New Orleans’ Seventh Ward. The Everyday Projects, a collective of photojournalists who use social media platforms to combat media-driven representations of communities worldwide, will bring their Pulitzer Center-sponsored curriculum to New Orleans. In collaboration with NOMA and the New Orleans Photo Alliance, this outreach program seeks to encourage participants to use photography to share their unique perspectives on life in their neighborhoods throughout Greater New Orleans.
Selected Press
Jennifer Nalewicki for Smithsonian Magazine
From June 29 through September 16, the multi-artist exhibition focuses on “forgotten or marginalized histories of the city” and recognizes the people and events that helped to weave the social fabric that makes New Orleans the city that it is today. For the exhibition, a team of curators tapped seven artists—all of whom either live in or have a connection to the city—with the intent of having them create contemporary art projects that highlight the city’s past while also looking to its future.“We started working a year ago to conceptualize and put together an exhibit that’s geared toward the city’s tricentennial, but also provides some new ways of thinking about it,” Brian Piper, the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow for Photography at NOMA, tells Smithsonian.com. “We really leaned into this idea that New Orleans is a city of multiple histories that are in some ways discreet, but they’re all connected. We also wanted to include a number of voices and communities from the past that have either been forgotten or marginalized from the mainstream historical narrative of the city. We’re interested in getting these histories into the museum and using NOMA as an institution to boost their signal and remind ourselves that all of these histories—some of which are difficult to think about and painful to remember—need to be part of the tricentennial story too.” Read More
Shannon Sims for the New York Times
“In 1973, the UpStairs Lounge, a bar in the French Quarter here, went up in flames one hot summer night. Thirty-one men and one woman died in what was then the largest mass killing of gay people in American history. (The Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla., which killed 49 people, took that grim title in 2016.) Long considered arson, the case remains unsolved; the prime suspect, who was never charged, committed suicide a year after the fire. As time passed, little attention was paid to the victims. Now an exhibition by the artist Skylar Fein is shedding light on this macabre and overlooked episode. It is part of a new show at the New Orleans Museum of Art, “Changing Course: Reflections on New Orleans Histories,” a collection of seven projects that, through September, puts the city’s marginalized communities at the forefront of this institution.” Read More
Benjamin Morris for Pelican Bomb
“Rivers naturally change course over time, but what does it mean for a city to do the same? How long does it take, and who and what are the driving forces involved? In one respect, “Changing Course” seeks to address (if not remedy) the injustices of the past by offering an opportunity for marginalized communities to come together under one roof, and to champion the enduring aspects of their history—a hugely ambitious project whose ambition can and should be recognized. Whether a single exhibition can overturn three centuries is up for debate, but it is undeniable that within its spaces a fresh perspective emerges: a vision that foregrounds how easily communities can be overlooked by political, economic, and even mnemonic forces—and just how much the city stands to lose should this continue to be the case.” Read More
Interview with Brian Friedman for WWNO
“NOMA is celebrating the tricentennial with a new exhibit called Changing Course, which brings together seven contemporary art projects focusing on forgotten or marginalized aspects of the city’s history. NolaVie’s Brian Friedman invited NOMA’s Allison Young into the studio for a preview of the exhibit.” Listen here
Nic Brierre Aziz for Re-Picture
“After greeting visitors at the entrance of City Park for more than 100 years, the statue honoring Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard was removed from its pedestal in May 2017. It was one of four statues that were removed across the city that year, marking a momentous shift in the city and country’s relationship to white supremacy. (The other three were statues honoring Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, and a monument dedicated to a white supremacist attack on police during Reconstruction.) In July of this year the pedestal that held up the Beauregard statue was removed, truly marking the end of this New Orleans emblem. As construction workers removed the Beauregard pedestal, a fitting banner hung in the background, showing an image of four African-American children next to the words “Changing Course.” The photo of the children, taken by photographer L. Kasimu Harris in 2015, was one of 11 pieces from him featured in the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) exhibition, Changing Course: Reflections on New Orleans Histories.” Read More
Erica Rawles for Hyperallergic
Art museums have historically been tailored to the white and wealthy — determined by their location within a city, the demographics of the museum staff, the art on display and the predominately white, male artists that created it. But what about the design of the museum building itself? How can a museum’s physicality influence the way people engage with it? Read More
Erin Jane Nelson for Burnaway
“Many institutions have been reckoning with the violent and troubled colonial histories tied to their collections and the regions where they are located, but “Changing Course” at NOMA, organized as part of the city’s tricentennial year, stands out as an earnest and brave attempt at allowing artists and artworks (rather than institutional positioning) to do the work of re-shaping narratives. I am still haunted by the Propeller Group’s The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music (2014) and Skylar Fein’s memorial to the Upstairs Lounge arson, the deadliest attack on the queer community in the U.S. until the Orlando nightclub shooting in 2016.” Read More
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"CHANNELS: Media, Culture and Representation"
Curated by Allison K. Young
March 25 - April 24, 2015
2015 Articulture Biennial Arts Festival
Media, PA
Atif Akin, Everyday Africa, Ben Thorp Brown, Foundland Collective, Timothy Furstnau, Dinh Q. Lê, Grace Ndiritu, Joan Oh, Thaís Mennsitieri, Mariangeles Soto-Díaz
CHANNELS: Media, Culture and Representation explores the ways in which images of, and information about, diverse communities, events, or conflicts are circulated and contextualized via contemporary media networks. The exhibition features work by emerging and established artists who consider these relationships in visual culture, from photojournalism and propaganda to online posts on Instagram and Tumblr.
Digital and news media play a major role in determining and refracting our views on global culture. The mainstream media, however, often fails to provide holistic coverage of current events, leading many to form judgments of other cultures and communities based on these accounts. Yet, in the digital age, as media scholar Leah Lievrouw has explained, “media audiences and consumers are now also media users and participants”. This is evidenced by the importance of social media in sustaining the Arab Spring, or the recent #IfTheyGunnedMeDown movement which challenged the perpetuation of negative racial stereotypes by mainstream media.
Throughout CHANNELS, artists reflect on both sides of this equation. Some works pose questions related to mainstream media, by interrogating censorship and network biases, or by problematizing the Western humanitarian or touristic gaze to the Third World. Others engage with globalized social media, addressing its democratization, its role in coordinating social movements and revolutions, and its occasional abuse by anonymous users. As such, CHANNELS hopes to encourage viewers to become critical consumers of visual media and to engage with new technologies to generate positive intercultural knowledge and exchange.
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Re-Tracing the Land
Curated by Allison K. YoungJuly 11 - August 15, 2014
NARS Foundation Gallery
Brooklyn, NY
Stephanie Dinkins, Aikaterini Gegisian, Soraya Marcano, Viviane Rombaldi Seppey, Jared Thorne
Space has been shaped and molded from historical and natural elements, but this has been
a political process. Space is political and ideological. It is a product literally filled with ideologies.
—Edward Soja
Re-Tracing the Land features artworks that seek to reveal the interrelationships between landscape, historical memory, and social experience. By evoking the act of tracing – to conjure the Latin root of geography: ‘earth writing’ – artistic meaning may be found in the Derridian implications of presence and absence, the act of demarcation and tracing borders, or the specters of past histories and traces of memory that inhabit charged spaces. Each artist re-presents landscape using a range of media from photography and collage to video and sound.
The exhibition reflects on the impact of Edward Soja’s and Henri Lefebvre’s writings on social space, which introduced into the ‘hard’ science of geography the possibility that space can be culturally or politically produced. In so doing, their work gave voice to the “personal meaning and symbolic content of ‘mental maps’ and landscape imagery” that express our relationships to the environments in which we live and act, proposing that both are shaped by one another and are continually in flux.
Included artworks by Stephanie Dinkins, Aikaterini Gegisian, Soraya Marcano, Viviane Rombaldi Seppey, and Jared Thorne are each rooted in diverse geographic and discursive sites. Engaging formally with the aesthetic and conceptual possibilities of screens, overlays, borders, and transparency, each artist adds instability and nuance to notions of ownership and belonging, imbuing these concepts with personal significance and affect. Their works present landscapes that are both real and imagined, and allow the viewer to move between historic and contemporary narrative spaces. As Soja asserts, “life stories” and ideologies have their own spatial geographies. Re-Tracing the Land hopes to reveal the implications and poetics of these trajectories.
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