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Dress Up, Speak Up Opening Reception
March 29, 2018 @ 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Free and open to the public.
Please join us for the opening reception of our newest exhibition, Dress Up, Speak Up: Costume and Confrontation. Enjoy a cocktail reception at 6 pm, followed by opening remarks by Chief Curator Alice Gray Stites and a special presentation by featured artist Jefferson Pinder at 6:30 pm.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Addressing how discrimination and injustice have shaped both identity and its artistic representation, the artists featured in Dress Up, Speak Up reimagine, restage, and re-perform iconographic imagery from Renaissance painting to present-day media to expose gaps in both art and history, and to confront the legacy of embedded experience.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Interdisciplinary artist, Jefferson Pinder creates objects, performance, and videos that investigate identity and challenge viewers to think critically about the polarization of society. His work explores the tangle of representations, visual tropes, and myths that reference historical events, invoke cultural symbolism, and examine history, cultural appropriation, and portrayals of exertion and labor. Creating collaged audio clips and surreal performances he underscores themes dealing with Afro-Futurism and endurance. Afro-Cosmonaut/Alien (White Noise)–on view at 21c Louisville–is an escapist video narrative that ends in destruction when the protagonist plummets back to Earth after a mystical space journey. Like the doomed Icarus of Ancient Greek myth, the epic fall comes after reaching a brilliant zenith that is both mesmerizing and lethal. This white-faced Butoh-inspired performance is a crude metaphor of the civil rights legacy.
Pinder received his BA and his MFA from the University of Maryland. His work has been displayed nationally and internationally including at the Tate Modern, London; The High Museum, Atlanta; The Studio Museum, Harlem; The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia; and The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, among others. In 2017, Pinder was recognized at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden Gala, received a Fellowship from United States Artists, received the Moving Image Acquisition Award and was accessions into the 21c collection, and received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.
