In the exhibition in Baltimore, today’s painful potential for change emerges – huge
Story has long helped us understand the world and our place within the world. For the Sahel, western West Africa, storytellers are often responsible for sharing oral history and local legends. With generations past and culture shifts, the Painful People join their inherited narrative, which includes contemporary details related to the audience.
A small group exhibition curated by Ky Vassor of Noel Bedolla and Galerie Myrtis brought together more than a dozen international artists to continue the tradition. Appearance: A story in creation Introducing what we call narrative plays a crucial role in collective experience, acts of solidarity and ultimately in social progress to propose a “mirror of contemporary society.”
For Alanis Forde, imagining paradise and its traps is a way to dig out issues regarding internal conflict. She often portrays characters in blue masks and bodies, vibrantly disguised as agents, allowing artists to merge their similarities with virtual versions. Ford subverts the artistic historical and cultural expression of black women “as objects of pleasure and slavery” to form another narrative.
Kachelle Knowles works in parallel practice. Bahamian artists focus on black teenagers through mixed media portraits, with patterned paper, lines and acrylic stones, and claim liquid gender expressions of their rights.
Portrait in AppearKim Rice’s American Quilt invokes the politics of the body without visualizing the characters. Her massive tapestry consists of maps distributed by homeowners’ loan companies, whose already resolved federal agencies are responsible for demarcating which communities are too “dangerous” to obtain mortgages in the process of racism, called Redlining. Rice said the “American quilt” was sewn with red thread, which clearly illustrates the way “white is woven into our daily lives.”
If you are in Baltimore, see Appearance: A story in creation By July 12.
