Common Ground: Artists Reimagining Community

Nov 5

Jennifer Vanderpool, Ph.D. Curator
November 20, 2020 - March 19, 2021 William Rolland Gallery

Events for Common Ground: Lecture Series
The Common Ground: Artist Reimagining Community multi-part transdisciplinary lecture series pairs an artist and researcher in conversation to discuss concepts of “community” from their disciplines.

Common Ground: Artists Reimagining Community integrates the participatory strategies of social practice art to organize communities in debate and collaboration with modes of curatorial activism approaches that challenge the assumptions and erasures of voices in hegemonic narratives.

The exhibition questions how Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter socioeconomic, racial, and gender equity justice movement have influenced cultural workers’ definition and understanding of Globalism and the Global Art Movement.

The work exhibited in Common Ground: Artists Reimagining Community engages, investigates, and questions the concept of “community” by addressing and querying the following prompts:

• What is a community?
• Who is participating in crafting this definition?
• Who is building these lived, social media, and virtual communities?
• How are lived, social, and virtual communities intertwined?
• What makes a happy, healthy, and socioeconomically thriving community?
• How can art be a mode of communication?
• How can art be a mode of communication with isolated individuals because of age, illness, economics, or other reasons?
• What role does ableism play in this discussion?
• How is the changing definition of “community” influencing the mythology of “The American Dream”?

The curatorial perspective of Common Ground: Artists Reimagining Community is inspired by mutual aid societies that emerged in the eighteenth century to assist members in need, including formerly enslaved peoples and immigrants, among others.

In our moment of global crisis, organizations modeled on mutual aid societies resurged to help those suffering hardships. Elizabeth Merrit identified organizations in her post to the American Alliance of Museums blog, including those in Minneapolis-Saint Paul after the killing of George Floyd and Black Queer Groceries in San Francisco. Similar organizations funding museum staff, artists, and researchers coalesced to help cultural workers. Andrew Yang’s Humanity Forward Political Action Committee distributes funds to help citizens in need is another example.

Featured Artists:

Justin Luis Arroyo, Badly Licked Bear, April Bey, Autumn Bland, Jane Callister, Joshua Cleveland, djones, Walpa D'Mark, Jill Emery, Yusef Ferguson, James Gobel, Michael Hanson, Deborah Martin, Christopher Mason,Tania Jazz Mont, Zameh Omonuwa, Dylan Parsons, Kia Pooler, Arnold Tunstall Christopher Velasco, Joshua Wittenburg, Xarabyte