On view October 2 - December 4, visiting curator Kalia Brooks presents Abstracted Migrations: Ideas on Embodied Motion in The Galleries at Moore. The exhibition features the work of three artists, Firelei Baéz, Saya Woolfalk and Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, whose practices model new modes of recognizing bodies in motion as emergent from the prospect (and consequence) of social and political forms, geographic and cultural mobility, technology and the stability of the environment in supporting the human condition.
Baéz, Woolfalk and Sunstrum are aware that migration generates identity positions that are not singular, but rather a combination of experiences, or hybrid. Hybrid identities contain within them the sensibility of in-betweenness having been derived from multiple sources. The transience of this kind of identification is made tangible through the aesthetic contribution of these artists. Their work helps the viewer understand how the exchange of materials, bodies and ideas resulting from the colonial project, become a current by which new associations of subjective experience are formed, and traditional histories and typologies are challenged and dismantled.
Join us in celebration of the opening on October 1 from 4 - 7 pm.
Kalia Brooks is a New York based curator, consultant, educator and arts administrator. Brooks holds a PhD in Aesthetics and Art Theory at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, Portland, ME. Previously she was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program, received an MA in Curatorial Practice from the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco and a BA in Sociology and Geography from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Brooks is also an ex-officio trustee on the Board of the Museum of the City of New York.
She has curated and consulted for numerous exhibitions in the United States and abroad including exhibitions at Columbia University; Haverford College; Rutgers, Newark; Gracie Mansion Conservancy; New York City Hall; International Center of Photography; Philadelphia Photo Art Center; Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning; the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA); Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Art Center on Governor’s Island; Rush Arts Gallery; California College of the Arts; and Arts Initiative Tokyo. Brooks is also a committee member facilitating an international conference series titled Black Portraitures, around the image of the black body in Western art and culture.
Image: Firelei Báez, DREAMer (a demand for opacity that weaves no boundaries), 2017. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 105 x 249 in. Private collection, courtesy of the artist & James Cohan Gallery, New York.
