Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei
Mar 12--Sept 7, 2025
Seattle Art Museum, Seattle Asian Art Museum, and Olympic Sculpture Park
Curator: Fong Ping, SAM Foster Foundation Curator of Chinese Art
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
Organized by SAM, Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei highlights the artistic strategies of his 40-year career for questioning forms of power. It marks the artist’s first US retrospective in over a decade and his largest-ever US exhibition.
Anila Quayyum Agha: Geometry of Light
Aug 27, 2025--Apr 19, 2026
Seattle Asian Art Museum
Curator: José Diaz, SAM Susan Brotman Deputy Director of Art
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
An in-depth exploration of Islamic architecture, art, and identity, Anila Quayyum Agha: Geometry of Light is the first solo exhibition of a Pakistani American artist in SAM’s 90-year history.
FriendsWithYou: Little Cloud Sky
Jun 27, 2025--ongoing
Seattle Art Museum
Curator: José Diaz, SAM Susan Brotman Deputy Director of Art
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
Little Cloud Sky is a SAM commission from FriendsWithYou, the internationally celebrated duo of Samuel (Sam) Borkson and Arturo (Tury) Sandoval III. The large-scale installation is composed of 40 of the artists’ signature Little Cloud character, each custom made of plastic, four feet wide, and suspended from the ceiling of the Brotman Forum, SAM's main entry lobby.
Tariqa Waters: Venus Is Missing
May 7, 2025--Jan 4, 2026
Seattle Art Museum
Curator: Catharina Manchanda, SAM Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
In 2023, SAM announced that Seattle-based artist Tariqa Waters as the winner of the 2023 Betty Bowen Award, an annual juried award that comes with an unrestricted cash award of $15,000 and a solo exhibition at SAM. Venus is Missing is an exuberant entry in her innovative and multidisciplinary practice that pushes the aesthetics of commercial advertising into surreal, otherworldly territory.
Suchitra Mattai: she walked in reverse and found their songs
Apr 9--Jul 20, 2025
Seattle Asian Art Museum
Organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco
Curators: Christine Koppes, former Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, Alison Gass, Founding Director and Cheif Curator with Meghan Smith, Assistant Curator
Exhibition Manager at SAM: Samantha Best
Indo-Caribbean artist Suchitra Mattai unravels stories of the past to imagine new futures. In her work, she is deeply influenced by the history of her ancestors, who were brought from India to work as indentured laborers in Guyana. She works with materials that honor the labor of women—including vintage saris, beads, and embroidery—and uses techniques passed down through generations.
Following Space: Thaddeus Mosley & Alexander Calder
Nov 20, 2024--Jun 1, 2025
Seattle Art Museum
Curator: Catharina Manchanda, SAM Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
This exhibition pairs wood sculptures by Pittsburgh native Thaddeus Mosley (American b. 1926) with works by the radical inventor of the mobile, Alexander Calder (American 1898-1976).
Joyce J. Scott: Walk A Mile In My Dreams
Oct 17, 2024--Jan 19, 2025
Seattle Art Museum
Co-organized by the Seattle Art Museum and Baltimore Museum of Art
Curators: Cecilia Wichmann, BMA Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, and Catharina Manchanda, SAM Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, with support from Leslie Rose, Joyce J. Scott Curatorial Research Assistant.
Exhibition and Publication Manager: Samantha Best
Joyce J. Scott: Walk a Mile in My Dreams features over 150 works from the 1970s to the present, including sculpture, bead work, jewelry, textiles, artwear garments, performance compilations, mixed-media installations, and a new large-scale commission. This summative career retrospective reveals the full breadth of Scott’s utterly unique artistic vision to challenge unequal social roles, confront traumatic histories, and agitate for freedom.
Nov 14, 2024--May 4, 2025
Seattle Art Museum
Curator: Catharina Manchanda, SAM Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
Bethany Collins is the recipient of the 2023 Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize, awarded biennially by SAM since 2009 to an early to mid-career Black artist—defined loosely as an artist in the first decade of their career. Collins’s conceptually driven work uses language as both subject and medium to explore the nuances and intersections of language, racial identity, and American history.
Meot: Korean Art from the Frank Bayley Collection
Aug 28, 2024--Mar 9, 2025
Seattle Asian Art Museum
Curator: Hyonjeong “HJ” Kim Han, Department Head and Joseph de Heer Curator of Arts of Asia at the Denver Art Museum
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
In tribute to collector Frank Bayley (1939–2022)'s generosity and legacy, this exhibition highlights Korean artworks created by seven of his close artist friends, alongside traditional works that he cherished for nearly half a century. Featuring over 60 artworks, including ceramics, calligraphy, paintings, and wooden works, the Meot exhibition illustrates Bayley's collecting vision: he admired both the continuity and innovation within traditional artworks and contemporary artistic expressions of Korean art.
Calder: In Motion, The Shirley Family Collection
Nov 8, 2023--Oct 20, 2024
Seattle Art Museum
Curator: José Diaz, SAM Susan Brotman Deputy Director of Art
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
In spring 2023, SAM announced the generosity of patrons Jon and Kim Shirley in gifting the Shirley Family Calder Collection to the museum. The collection—one of the most important private holdings of Calder’s art—is the result of 35 years of thoughtful collecting. In Motion reflects the depth and breadth of this collection in a non-chronological narrative that covers Calder’s career throughout the decades featuring many significant examples from his production: mobiles, stabiles, a constellation, paintings, illustrations, and prints.
Poke in the Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture
Jun 21--Sept 2, 2024
Seattle Art Museum
Curator: Carie Dedon, SAM Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
This exhibition celebrates an alternative and oft-overlooked story in art history: the aesthetic practices that emerged in the West Coast in the 1960s and ‘70s as counter to the New York-centric avant-garde. Subsets of artists working in this mode have been categorized as California Funk artists, Bay Area Figurative Painters, and Northwest Studio Ceramicists. However, this antiestablishment aesthetic had roots up and down the coast and encompassed a much greater diversity of artists than is typically recognized by these categories, and this exhibition will draw primarily on SAM’s permanent collection to present a broader, more inclusive view of these overlapping countercultural art movements.
Anida Yoeu Ali: Hybrid Skin, Mythical Presence
Jan 18--Jul 7, 2024
Seattle Asian Art Museum
Curator: José Diaz, SAM Susan Brotman Deputy Director of Art
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
Tacoma-based international artist Anida Yoeu Ali makes her SAM debut with this solo exhibition that celebrates performance, public encounters, and political agitation as powerful art forms. Central to many of her performances is her use of textiles, a practice rooted in her Cham-Muslim refugee migration experience—her family fled Cambodia with only the clothes on their backs.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map
Feb 29--May 12, 2024
Seattle Art Museum
Organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Curator: Laura Phipps, Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, with Caitlin Chaisson, Curatorial Project Assistant
Exhibition Manager at SAM: Samantha Best
One of the most innovative and powerful artists of her generation, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940, citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation) has broken barriers and forged new paths for contemporary American art. This exhibition—the largest and most comprehensive showing of her work to date—brings together over five decades of Smith’s paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures in an immersive journey through her singular blend of modern art strategies and Indigenous cultural practices.
Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence from the Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Feb 29--May 12, 2024
Seattle Art Museum
Organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Curators: Sarah Thompson, MFA Boston Terrie and Bradley Bloom Curator of Japanese Prints, and Kendall DeBoer, MFA Boston assistant curator, Contemporary Art
Exhibition Manager at SAM: Samantha Best
This major exhibition organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), takes a new approach to the work of the versatile master Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), pairing more than 100 of his woodblock prints, paintings, and illustrated books from the MFA’s renowned collection with more than 200 works by his teachers, students, rivals, and admirers.
Renegade Edo and Paris: Japanese Prints and Toulouse-Lautrec
Jul 21--Dec 3, 2023
Seattle Asian Art Museum
Curator: Xiaojin Wu, Atsuhiko & Ina Goodwin Tateuchi Curator of Japanese and Koren Art
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
Through around ninety works drawn from the Seattle Art Museum’s Japanese prints collection as well as private holdings of Toulouse-Lautrec’s work, this exhibition offers a revealing look at the renegade spirit within the graphic arts in both Edo and Paris, highlighting the social impulses—pleasure seeking and theatergoing—behind the burgeoning art production.
Aug 21--Sept 30, 2023
Central District, WA
Curator: Larry Ossei-Mensah and Modou Dieng Yacine
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
The Seattle Art Museum, blackpuffin, and Wa Na Wari are pleased to present Femme Noire, which features the work of women artists from Africa and the African diaspora in an outdoor exhibition that externalizes and celebrates the power of Black women. Installed on lamp poles and at Black-owned businesses and arts organizations throughout the Central District, the project will bring the artists’ works into the community, creating a walking route through the heart of Seattle’s historically Black neighborhood.
Amoako Boafo: Soul of Black Folks
Jul 13--Sept 10, 2023
Seattle Art Museum
Organized by Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco
Curator: Larry Ossei-Mensah
Exhibition Manager at SAM: Samantha Best
Soul of Black Folks is the debut solo museum exhibition for Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo (b. 1984), one of the most influential artistic voices of his generation. Working primarily in portraiture, Boafo is known for his vibrant use of color and thick, improvisational gestures created by his finger painting technique. His work is actively centered on Black subjectivity, Black joy, the Black gaze, and radical care as a foundational framework for his artistic practice. The exhibition presents over 30 works created by the artist between 2016 and 2022.
Jul 30--Sept 25, 2022
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
Curator: Erin Lee Antonak
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
The CAC's 9th Annual Gulf South Open Call exhibition Remember Earth? presents works by 54 artists that explore the complexities of living in an environment already experiencing the ravages of an out-of-balance world. Whether through lasers, sound, video, poetry, paint, collage, found materials, living plants, fibers, or dance, each work depicts a lived human experience and the precarity of our current situation. What will it take for us to consider Earth now so in the future we won’t be asking “Remember Earth?”
May 27--29, 2022
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
Organized by Flyaway Productions
Exhibition Manager at CAC: Samantha Best
The Wait Room is a multidisciplinary dance work that exposes the physical, psychic, and emotional burden on women with incarcerated loved ones. Utilizing a large hydraulic stage shaped as a clock dial, the performance incorporates dance, installation, an original score by Pamela Z, and oral histories of women whose families are fractured by the carceral system.
Mar 12--June 19, 2022
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
Curator: Anthony Spinello
Exhibition Manager at CAC: Samantha Best
#fail is a multimedia group exhibition that brings together works by twenty five artists that expose the systemic failures facing our world. Throughout the exhibition, the systems we are born into are distilled and presented as sculpture, video, photography, painting, printmaking, site specific and participatory installation, and performance. Labor, service and servitude, unexamined caste systems, environmental catastrophe, migration, uncelebrated otherness and the incapacity of language to make meaning whole, are together treated as social and poetic material. Meeting this moment’s crisis with mitigated nihilism, the artists express our existence as a failure worth narrating.
Candice Lin: Swamp Fat and Jamilah Sabur: Bulk Pangaea
Oct 23, 2021--Jan 23, 2022
UNO Gallery, University of New Orleans
Organized as part of Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow
Curators: Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, with Grace Deveney, Associate Curator, and Lucia Olubunmi Momoh, Curatorial Associate.
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
To create Swamp Fat, Candice Lin made lard sculptures using a faux-marbling technique known as scagliola. These sculptures serve as the pedestals for ceramic frogs, lizards, and snakes whose bodies are vessels for solid perfumes. Placed along a pathway shaped like a section of the Mississippi River, these stations are sacrificial altars memorializing marginalized histories.
Named for a cargo ship that transports Bauxite from Jamaica to Louisiana, Jamilah Sabur's seven-channel color video Bulk Pangaea, installed across UNO Gallery and New Orleans Lakefront Airport, juxtaposes scenes of industry, history, and nature—both real and imagined, terrestrial and extraterrestrial.
Ron Bechet, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Elliott Hundley, Mimi Lauter, and Naudline Pierre
Oct 23, 2021--Jan 23, 2022
Newcomb Art Museum, Tulane University, New Orleans
Organized as part of Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow
Curators: Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, with Grace Deveney, Associate Curator, and Lucia Olubunmi Momoh, Curatorial Associate.
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
This presentation at the Newcomb Art Museum brings together an intergenerational group of artists whose labor-intensive practices attest to the ways that the devotional and the secular converge. The tactility, materiality, and unabashed beauty of these works is a resolute statement of presence and insists on the value of making and creation. Each artist engages in a form of intricate world building that reflects the spiritual, the personal, and the social.
Oct 23, 2021--Jan 23, 2022
Xavier University of Louisiana Gallery, New Orleans
Organized as part of Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow
Curators: Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, with Grace Deveney, Associate Curator, and Lucia Olubunmi Momoh, Curatorial Associate.
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
Play Me Home is a multichannel installation and a series of related sculptural objects. This genre-defying new work blends narrative fiction and nonfiction centered around several intertwined threads. One channel features a filmic portrait of the four o’clock flower, a variety of trumpet flower known for its ability to propagate and thrive on land hostile to most plant life. The two larger channels present scenes of McClodden burying and planting a dying flower on land in the Lower Ninth Ward alongside two trumpets (witnesses), as well as filmic portraits of the land where McClodden’s family has lived in the Delta.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed: Future Forms
Oct 23, 2021--Jan 23, 2022
Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans
Organized as part of Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow
Curators: Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, with Grace Deveney, Associate Curator, and Lucia Olubunmi Momoh, Curatorial Associate.
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
Future Forms, a set of prints installed on the surface of the reading tables, is part of an ongoing investigation of Black textual production by interdisciplinary artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and is based on her research at the Amistad Research Center. In the archives, Rasheed reviewed materials on Nkombo, a New Orleans–based literary magazine published between 1968 and 1974.
Simone Leigh: Sentinel (Mami Wata)
Oct 23, 2021--Jan 23, 2022
Tivoli Circle (formerly Lee Circle), New Orleans
Organized as part of Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow
Curators: Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, with Grace Deveney, Associate Curator, and Lucia Olubunmi Momoh, Curatorial Associate.
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
Simone Leigh’s bronze sculpture Sentinel (Mami Wata) is sited at the base of the pedestal that once held a monument to Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The title of this work means “guard” or “watchman,” and it honors the work done by activists, citizens, and New Orleans city officials to remove symbols of white supremacy from public view, while also suggesting the possibility for a new protective spirit at this central downtown location.
Oct 23, 2021--Jan 23, 2022
Crescent Park, New Orleans
Organized as part of Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow
Curators: Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, with Grace Deveney, Associate Curator, and Lucia Olubunmi Momoh, Curatorial Associate.
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
Crocodylus is a bronze sculpture that fuses the forms of a reptile and a human female, both covered in striations that evoke the tides of the Mississippi River. Mutu drew connections between a prehistoric crocodile found in Northern Kenya and its relative in the Bayou, the alligator, a creature connected to ideas of power and stealth, as well as terror—in the American South there are records of babies of enslaved Black people having been used as bait to capture these animals.
Oct 23, 2021--Jan 23, 2022
Joe W. Brown Park, New Orleans
Organized as part of Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow
Curators: Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, with Grace Deveney, Associate Curator, and Lucia Olubunmi Momoh, Curatorial Associate.
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
Prioritizing Black leisure in a metropolitan community, EJ Hill’s Prospect.5 contribution takes as its focal point Six Flags Jazzland, a major amusement park in New Orleans East that opened in 2000 and was shuttered five years later after Hurricane Katrina. Viewing the park’s closure as the loss of space for Black joy, Hill researched what happened to the now defunct theme park and what plans are in store for its future, as the city redevelops it. Particularly taken by the Big Easy Ferris Wheel, a massive and iconic structure, Hill used a gondola, or enclosed seat, from this ride as the centerpiece of his sculpture installed in New Orleans East, the community most impacted by the park’s closure.
Paul Stephen Benjamin, Dineo Seshee Bopape, and Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Oct 23, 2021--Jan 23, 2022
New Orleans Afrian American Museum
Organized as part of Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow
Curators: Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, with Grace Deveney, Associate Curator, and Lucia Olubunmi Momoh, Curatorial Associate.
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
With Sanctuary, Benjamin has constructed an edifice that is inspired by the vernacular architecture of New Orleans, namely the shotgun houses that line the city’s streets. Dineo Seshee Bopape’s Master Harmoniser (Ile, aya, moya, la, ndokh), is presented as a three-channel animated video and sound installation featuring an array of semi-abstract drawings made with clay sourced from ports in South Africa, Senegal, Ghana, Virginia, and Louisiana that once played key roles in the transatlantic slave trade. For the Spirit print series, Kameelah Janan Rasheed incorporates language and texts that are at times difficult to decipher, bordering on visual glossolalia—the religious phenomenon of speaking in tongues.
Dawoud Bey, Josh Kun, and George Dureau
Oct 23, 2021--Jan 23, 2022
Historic New Orleans Collection
Organized as part of Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow
Curators: Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, with Grace Deveney, Associate Curator, and Lucia Olubunmi Momoh, Curatorial Associate.
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
Dawoud Bey's In This Here Place, is a series of large-scale, black-and-white photographs made at Louisiana plantations. A selection of photographs by George Dureau (1930–2014), a New Orleans native described as “a quintessential New Orleans artist" displays studio photographs of many of Dureau’s frequent subjects, as well as images captured in the French Quarter, near Lake Pontchartrain, and other locations around the city. Cultural historian Josh Kun is curator of an Over and Over the Waves, an exhibition recalling the 8th Cavalry Mexican Military Band’s memorable visit to the 1884 World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, which took place on the current site of Audubon Park in New Orleans. In addition to photographs and sheet music, the exhibition, includes a sound installation featuring newly recorded songs once performed by the 19th-century band.
Oct 23, 2021--Jan 23, 2022
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
Organized as part of Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow
Curators: Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, with Grace Deveney, Associate Curator, and Lucia Olubunmi Momoh, Curatorial Associate.
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
The CAC hosts works by 17 internationally-renowned artists across its first and second floor galleries.
Oct 23, 2021--Jan 23, 2022
Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans
Organized as part of Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow
Curators: Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, with Grace Deveney, Associate Curator, and Lucia Olubunmi Momoh, Curatorial Associate.
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
The Ogden hosts works by 10 internationally-renowned artists across its Fifth floor galleries; third floor galleries and Ogden Library.
Anastasia Pelias: It Was My Pleasure
Oct 23, 2021--Jan 23, 2022
Capdevielle Place Park, New Orleans
Organized as part of Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow
Curators: Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, with Grace Deveney, Associate Curator, and Lucia Olubunmi Momoh, Curatorial Associate.
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
It was my pleasure responds to feminist histories of spirituality and power, through a meditation on ancient Greek history. The sculpture is a reimagining of the tripod of the Oracle of Delphi, a position occupied by a priestess known as the Pythia, who foretold the future for individuals and heads of state who travelled to Delphi to seek her counsel.
Cooking Sections: Oyster Readings
Oct 23, 2021--Jan 23, 2022
Seaworthy, New Orleans
Organized as part of Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow
Curators: Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, with Grace Deveney, Associate Curator, and Lucia Olubunmi Momoh, Curatorial Associate.
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
Artist duo Cooking Section's Oyster Readings is a performance and installation that uses oysters to better understand the environment, ecology, history, and future of the Gulf Coast of Louisiana. During the exhibition, visitors are invited for a reading of an oyster, tracing the lines of coastal inhabitation, subsidence, sedimentation, and life in this time of climate emergency.
Oct 23, 2021--Jan 23, 2022
Former Oxalis Restaurant, New Orleans
Organized as part of Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow
Curators: Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, with Grace Deveney, Associate Curator, and Lucia Olubunmi Momoh, Curatorial Associate.
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
Engaging New Orleans, geographically, socio-politically, and historically, as a platform, Sharon Haye's 7-channel video If we had had creates and documents twenty-two queer folx traveling different pathways through the city. Walking, on pedicabs, or taking public transportation, these travelers transport an open set of questions around desire, queerness, civic and public space, and the power and fragility of self-determination.
Nari Ward: Battleground Beacon
Oct 23, 2021--Jan 23, 2022
823 N Claiborne Avenue, New Orleans
Organized as part of Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow
Curators: Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, with Grace Deveney, Associate Curator, and Lucia Olubunmi Momoh, Curatorial Associate.
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
Having taken part in Prospect.1, Nari Ward returned to New Orleans for Prospect.5 to create Battleground Beacon. The title references both the Battleground Baptist Church in the Lower Ninth Ward—the site where the artist worked in 2008—and the portable police floodlights from which the work is made. Instead of illuminating and surveilling spaces, the lights have been replaced by megaphones that amplify sound, becoming a beacon of communication to the public that affirms Black life and calls for social equity and justice.
Jamilah Sabur: Battleground Beacon
Oct 23, 2021--Jan 23, 2022
New Orleans Lakefront Airport
Organized as part of Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow
Curators: Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, with Grace Deveney, Associate Curator, and Lucia Olubunmi Momoh, Curatorial Associate.
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
Named for a cargo ship that transports Bauxite from Jamaica to Louisiana, Jamilah Sabur's seven-channel color video Bulk Pangaea, installed across UNO Gallery and New Orleans Lakefront Airport, juxtaposes scenes of industry, history, and nature—both real and imagined, terrestrial and extraterrestrial.
Rodney McMillian: God Is In The Whip and Preacher Man II,
Oct 23, 2021--Jan 23, 2022
Happyland Theater
Organized as part of Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow
Curators: Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, with Grace Deveney, Associate Curator, and Lucia Olubunmi Momoh, Curatorial Associate.
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
Rodney McMillian’s videos, each on view for the first time, reveal resonant undercurrents within mainstream political speech of the past.
Oct 23, 2021--Jan 23, 2022
Various locations, New Orleans
Organized as part of Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow
Curators: Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, with Grace Deveney, Associate Curator, and Lucia Olubunmi Momoh, Curatorial Associate.
Exhibition Manager: Samantha Best
Performance by Malcolm Peacock."We Served meals are built for one person to experience individually in a private setting of their own [...] You sign up for a date and time and an individual from We Served arrives at the location that you provide upon registration. The experience is for you and only you at that time."
Guadalupe Maravilla: Disease Thrower
Nov 9, 2019--Aug 9, 2020
Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond
Curator: ICA VCU Associate Curator Amber Esseiva
Curatorial Production Manager: Samantha Best
The second commission in the ICA’s Provocations series is created by Guadalupe Maravilla, an artist who, at age eight, immigrated alone to the United States from El Salvador in order to escape the Salvadoran Civil War. Combining drawing, sculpture, and performance, Maravilla’s installation, Disease Thrower, draws on his own experiences with illness, migration, and the anxieties experienced by undocumented peoples.
Oct 5, 2019--Jan 5, 2020
Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond
Curator: ICA VCU Associate Curator Amber Esseiva
Curatorial Production Manager: Samantha Best
Great Force addresses the force of whiteness, the counter-force of black resistance, and the persistence of the color line in the United States. With new commissions and recent work by twenty-four artists, the exhibition presents painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance that examine race in the United States. The exhibition extends from the first floor second floor galleries, and includes offsite works, performances, and public programs.
Exhibiting artists: Radcliffe Bailey, Benae Beamon, Kevin Beasley, Alexandra Bell, Paul Stephen Benjamin, Sedrick Chisom, Tony Cokes, Bethany Collins, Aria Dean, Tomashi Jackson, Richard Kennedy, Pope.L, Charlotte Lagarde, Glenn Ligon, Mores McWreath, Troy Michie, Shani Peters, Robert Pruitt, John Lucas & Claudia Rankine, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Xaviera Simmons, Sable Elyse Smith, Carrie Mae Weems, and The Racial Imaginary Institute
Oct 17, 2018--Oct 13, 2019
Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond
Curator: ICA VCU Chief Curator Stephanie Smith
Curatorial Production Manager: Samantha Best
To launch the ICA’s annual commission series, Provocations, artist Rashid Johnson (b. 1977) creates a new, large-scale work that responds to the soaring, light-filled expanse of the ICA’s top-floor exhibition space. Rashid Johnson conceived this new installation, Monument, as a site of both contemplation and collaboration. Visitors are invited to move around the work and to immerse themselves in its textures and details. Throughout its stay at the ICA, Monument is activated by live performances created in response to the work.
Corin Hewitt: Shadows Are To Shade
Jun 15--Sept 1, 2019
Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond
Curator: ICA VCU Assistant Curator Amber Esseiva
Curatorial Production Manager: Samantha Best
Shadows Are To Shade is a solo exhibition by Richmond-based artist Corin Hewitt (b. 1971, Burlington, Vermont), occurring simultaneously at the ICA and at the artist’s home and studio in the Fan district of Richmond, Virginia. Hewitt describes Shadows Are To Shade as a “parafiction” that conflates his family’s daily life in the building with that of the family of the last recorded landowner of the site, prior to the building’s construction in 1915.
sSummer Sessions: Commonwealth
Jun 15--Aug 19, 2019
Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond
Curators: ICA VCU Chief Curator Stephanie Smith and Noah Simblist
Curatorial Production Manager: Samantha Best
Planned with local hosts, Summer Sessions mix artists, designers, scholars, activists and other experts from within and beyond VCU and Richmond. Formats include: social hours, lectures, small-group conversations, workshops, performances, and screenings. Sessions are free and open to all. Week by week, we hash out what it means to live in a commonwealth such as Virginia and how that commonwealth can and should evolve in the 21st century.
Dialogues: Irina Haiduk and Martine Syms
Feb 16--May 12, 2019
Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond
Curators: ICA VCU Chief Curator Stephanie Smith and ICA VCU Assistant Curator Amber Esseiva
Curatorial Production Manager: Samantha Best
In the inaugural exhibition of the ICA’s annual Dialogues series, artists Irena Haiduk (b. 1982, Belgrade, Yugoslavia) and Martine Syms (b. 1988, Los Angeles, USA) produce new projects for the ICA, titled respectively Tableau Économique and Shame Space. These projects extend Haiduk’s and Syms’ investment in economy and entrepreneurship through ICA-commissioned installations that invite active participation from audience members.
Cauleen Smith: Take It or Give It
Oct 17, 2018--Jan 6, 2019
Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond
Curators: ICA VCU Assistant Curator Amber Esseiva, ICA VCU Adjunct Assistant Curator of Film Enjoli Moon, and ICA VCU Chief Curator Stephanie Smith
Curatorial Production Manager: Samantha Best
This solo exhibition of film, video, and sculpture by filmmaker and artist Cauleen Smith (b. 1967) fills the ICA’s galleries with an overlapping series of immersive installations. Taking its title from a revision of the phrase “take it or leave it,” Give It or Leave It cultivates a spirit of generosity, hospitality, and selflessness, and proposes a new rule for a better world: creating something, offering it, and gifting it, regardless of recognition, acceptance, or rejection.
Oct 17, 2018--Jan 6, 2019
Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond
Curators: ICA VCU Chief Curator Stephanie Smith and ICA VCU Assistant Curator Amber Esseiva
Curatorial Production Manager: Samantha Best
Five artists—Abbas Akhavan, Jonathas de Andrade, David Hartt, Julianne Swartz, and Pascale Marthine Tayou—are each represented by a focused body of work. This international group of artists—many of whom live outside their culture of origin—deploys play, beauty, and poetry to complicate and reimagine interrelationships among nature and culture, bodies and spaces.
Jun 8--10, 2018
Brown's Island, Richmond
Curator: ICA VCU Chief Curator Stephanie Smith
Curatorial Production Manager: Samantha Best
ICA VCU collaborated with the Richmond Symphony and Sound Arts Richmond to commission three new performances by artists Hope Ginsburg, Marinella Senatore, and Paul Rucker. Held during Chesapeake Bay Awareness Week, the Festival of the River included site-specific installations by contemporary artists; performers including dancer Savion Glover, singer Rhiannon Giddens, and No BS Brass Band under the Richmond Symphony’s “Big Tent;” cleanups along and around the river; and family-friendly environmental education activities. Events were made possible through the planning of many community stakeholders, including the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Venture Richmond, the Capital Region Collaborative, the James River Association, the Richmond Symphony, and the ICA at VCU.
Apr 21--Sept 9, 2018
Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond
Curators: ICA VCU Executive Director Lisa Freiman, ICA VCU Chief Curator Stephanie Smith, and ICA VCU Assistant Curator Amber Esseiva with Johanna Plummer and Lauren Ross
Curatorial Production Manager: Samantha Best
The ICA’s inaugural exhibition proposes that artists’ declarations are especially crucial during this intense period of change in the U.S. Emphasizing new work by artists based in Richmond and around the globe, it deliberately mixes work by artists of varied generations, backgrounds and perspectives. Artists: Nidaa Badwan, Martín Bonadeo, Tania Bruguera, Peter Burr with Porpentine Charity Heartscape, Cassils, CHIM↑POM, Sonya Clark, Andrea Donnelly, Edie Fake, Hope Ginsburg, GWAR, Kate Just, Titus Kaphar, Amos Paul Kennedy Jr., Autumn Knight, Lily Lamberta and All the Saints Theater Co., Lee Mingwei, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Noor Nuyten, Geof Oppenheimer, Amalia Pica, Cheryl Pope, Paul Rucker, Curtis Talwst Santiago, Marinella Senatore, Jon-Phillip Sheridan, Deb Sokolow, Tavares Strachan, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Betty Tompkins, Stephen Vitiello, Levester Williams, Winter Count