Strategies Toward Emancipation: Part One

James T. Green Ivan Forde Tiona McClodden Kameelah Janan Rasheed J. Soto

Organized by Lynnette Miranda, Suhaly Bautista-Carolina, Teal Baskerville, and Henry Murphy

Denny Gallery is pleased to announce Present Futures: Strategies Toward Emancipation (Part One) a group exhibition at Denny Gallery’s summer popup location.

The recent mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and the senseless murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile (and the others that the media hasn’t covered) at the hands of police officers have left us with an overwhelming feeling of helplessness. With the exception of a few, there is a generally muted response among the art community to this ongoing violence, injustice, and oppression. But silence and indifference are tools of oppression.

In moments of injustice, how do we think about the future when the present is so daunting and fraught? Present Futures: Strategies Toward Emancipation (Part 1) brings together artists and cultural producers whose practices and work are grounded in the present moment while generating and expanding artistic strategies for making change. The exhibition will enact these strategies through a programmatic component that offers a space for arts practitioners to convene and exchange ideas around, questions about, and methodologies for self-preservation, self-determination, and collective organizing. Together, we can call for cultural spaces to offer us more than a site for reflection, but one for action. As a community, we can strategize through our artistic lens and create a hopeful, yet determined and focused space that pushes for progress.

This is the first of a recurring series of curatorial initiatives that we hope we continue to build and deepen together.

James T. Green is a conceptual artist, designer, developer, podcaster, educator, and writer based in Chicago. His projects investigate information distribution on the internet and unspoken markers of identity. His work has been shown in EXPO Chicago (2012, 2013, 2014), the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (2013), the Chicago Cultural Center (2012), and the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago (2013). Green has completed residency programs at ACRE (2011-2012), Chicago Artist Coalition’s HATCH Projects (2012-2013), and University of Chicago Arts & Public Life/CSRPC program (2014-2015). Currently, Green teaches graduate courses at School of the Art Institute Chicago and co-founded and maintains two businesses: On The Firefly, a design and development consultancy, and Postloudness, a collective of audio shows by people of color, women, and queer identified hosts.

Ivan Forde lives and works in Harlem. His “Transformation” series of photographs received first place in fine art collage at the Lucie Foundation 2012 International Photography Awards and premiered in the “Best In Show Exhibition” curated by Shelly de Soto in Los Angeles. Awards and fellowships include the Vermont Studio Center, Pioneer Works Center for Art and Innovation, the Lower East Side Printshop Key Holder Residency program, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (shortlisted finalist), Sharp Snug Harbor: Edward and Sally Van Lier fellowship and ACRE residency. Ivan has participated in LookBetween 2014, Dumbo Arts Festival “The Fence” exhibition, Harlem Postcards spring 2014, and the Black Artist Retreat. Group exhibitions include Columbia University, The DC Arts Center, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Lower East Side Printshop, Gallery Projekt 72, the International Print Center, and a solo exhibition at The Newhouse Contemporary Art Center Staten Island. Ivan graduated from SUNY Purchase collage with a B.A. in Literature and is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University.

Tiona McClodden is a visual artist and filmmaker whose work explores and critiques issues at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and social commentary. McClodden’s interdisciplinary approach traverses documentary film, experimental video, sculpture, and sound installations. Themes explored in McClodden’s films and works have been re-memory and more recently narrative biomythography. McClodden has exhibited and screened work at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, Project 4 Gallery in Washington, D.C., Vox Populi Gallery-Philadelphia, Esther Klein Art Gallery - Philadelphia, Art Toronto’s VERGE Video program, On The Ground Floor Gallery-Los Angeles, Imperfect Gallery -Philadelphia, @RAUMERWEITERUNGSHALLE in Berlin, MOMA PS1, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; Kansai Queer Film Festival in Osaka and Kyoto, Japan; and the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, among others in a range of international film festivals and film programs. In her most recent exhibition, Dreaming of Kin (2016) curated by Ladi’Sasha Jones at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, McClodden exhibited the full installation her personal and familial biography epic Be Alarmed: The Black Americana Epic, Movement I – The Visions.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is an artist, writer, and former public school social studies teacher. A 2006 Amy Biehl U.S. Fulbright Scholar to South Africa, Rasheed holds an Ed.M (2008) in Secondary Education from Stanford University as well as a BA (2006) in Public Policy and Africana Studies from Pomona College. She has exhibited her work at Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum, Queens Museum, BRIC Art Gallery, Weeksville Heritage Museum, Smack Mellon Gallery, Vox Populi Gallery, TOPAZ Arts, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Leroy Neiman Gallery, etc.

J. Soto is a queer interdisciplinary artist and poet with a focus on project-specific collaborations in writing, performance, and arts organizing. Beginning from writing, Soto’s performance work addresses the intersections of race, class, and gender through dance and incorporating poetry. He received his MFA in performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lives and works in New York.

Lynnette Miranda is a latinx artist, curator, and writer from Miami. She approaches her practice from the perspective of an artist—questioning and challenging established conventions—and an educator—opening up avenues for dialogue and collective knowledge building. Over the last seven years, she has worked at leading art institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, ART21, and Creative Time. In 2015, she coordinated three art conferences, including The Creative Time Summit: The Curriculum at the Venice Biennale and at Brooklyn’s Boys and Girls High School, as well as ART21’s Creative Chemistries: Radical Practices for Art + Education at the Park Avenue Armory. Currently, Miranda is the 2016-2017 Curator-in-Residence at Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, MO.

New Yorker by birth + AfroDominican by bloodline, Suhaly Bautista-Carolina, otherwise known as, “The Earth Warrior,” is an artist, educator + community organizer. Her recent works explore themes of the AfroLatinX experience, Afrofuturism + Memory.

Before joining the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI) as the Director of Public Programs and the Brooklyn Museum as the Community Relations Manager, Suhaly served as the first Engagement & Education Manager at the public art nonprofit, Creative Time. She is the founder of the Afrofuturism book club, Black Magic and has worked in various capacities with organizations such as Artspace, FOKUS, The Walls-Ortiz Gallery and The Brooklyn Children’s Museum. In 2015, she was a panelist at ArtPrize7’s “Reflecting the Times: Arts & Activism” alongside Dread Scott and Arts.Black. She is a 2016 alumna of CCCADI’s Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellowship and a recent graduate of Columbia University’s Summer Teachers and Scholars Institute, “The Many Worlds of Black New York.” Her photographic documents and writings have been published in Insight Magazine, United Nations’ International Museum of Women and Caribbean Vistas Journal. She has enjoyed solo exhibitions at NYU and La Casa Azul Bookstore. As of 2016, she is also a Weeksville Ambassador and a Willow Arts Alliance Weeksville Summer Arts Residency Fellow and scholarship recipient. Suhaly earned her B.A. and MPA from NYU, where she was named one of “NYU’s 15 Most Influential Students.” She is living and loving in Brooklyn.

Teal Baskerville is an artist, researcher and organizer from New York City. Her practice focuses on imagining and enacting new ways of being and learning together that embrace multiplicity and creativity as a necessary tools of social change. Her recent work maps the history of black aesthetic through the framework of location, spatial, as well as temporal and social. She currently works at Creative Time where she is coordinating the 2016 Creative Time Summit DC: Occupy The Future.

Henry Murphy is a Jackson, Mississippi native, technologist, musician, and creative thinker interested in issues of access and equity at the intersection of art and technology. Henry is currently a fellow in Public Programs as a part of MoMA and the Studio Museum in Harlem’s collaborative fellowship program.