Carlos Hernandez, Savannah In Her Bedroom, 2019
The Young Arts exhibition, Home: Reimagining Interiority, curated by Dr. Joan Morgan and Dr. Deborah Willis is currently on view in the Gulf and Western Gallery at Tisch until December 19, 2022.
In 2021, while deeply in the grip of the isolating and lingering precarity produced by what was then a yearlong global pandemic, mass civil uprisings and the daunting economic insecurity faced by so many artists; Dr. Deborah Willis and Dr. Joan Morgan, found themselves searching for the “right” theme for the Center for Black Visual Culture’s (CBVC) programming.
“Home: What is it now?” allowed us to offer our academic, activist and artistic communities a place to ponder, to contemplate new questions about how this collision of unprecedented events changed the ways we define and interrogate blackness. Sadie Barnett, Tarana Burke, Julian Castro, The Louis Armstrong House Museum and Tyler Mitchell are some of the folks and cultural centers we’ve been fortunate enough to have join us in our musing.
We extended an invite to YoungArts award winners to join us in thinking through the changing frameworks of “home.” In doing so, we hoped to amplify the significant ways black and brown visual and textual narratives have responded to the dynamic cultural, political, social, economic and intimate changes of the current moment, while highlighting the direct, mandatory challenge their work poses to previous conceptions of diasporic blackness, home, gender, sexuality and identity. The result is this powerful exhibition, Home: Reimagining Interiority. Taken together, these 20 artists and their visual and written texts demonstrate the concerted power of creative will, unabated by the extreme pressures of extended periods of lockdown and isolation.
Featured Artists: Nina Ahmadi, Priscilla Aleman, Daveed Baptiste, Nolan Baynes II, Catherine Camargo, Eli Dreyfuss, Glenn Espinosa, Phylicia Ghee, Svet Jacqueline, Carlos Manuel Hernandez, Kayla Hunt, Jessica Kim, Ava Kinsey, Dez Levier, Coralina Rodriguez Meyer, Ackeem Salmon, Cornelius Tulloch, Triniti Wade, Nadia Wolff