Story, Word, Sound, Sway is on view at Stamps Gallery January 18, 2021 – February 28, 2021. The gallery is currently open Tuesdays and Fridays from 2pm to 7pm to U-M faculty, staff, and students with valid MCards only. Learn more about COVID health and safety restrictions prior to your visit:  https://stamps.umich.edu/exhibitions/stamps_gallery
The work in the exhibition can also be viewed online: http://stamps.umich.edu/calendar/event-detail/story_word_sound_sway

Artists: Carisa Bledsoe (BFA Interarts ’14), Schroeder Cherry (BFA ’76), Elshafei Dafalla (MFA ’08), Masimba Hwati (MFA ’19), Caleb Moss (BFA ’13), Senghor Reid (BFA ’99), Valencia Robin (MFA ’08), Yvette Rock (MFA ’99), Wes Taylor (BFA ’04), Levester Williams (BFA ’13), and Elizabeth Youngblood (BFA ’73)

Story, Word, Sound, Sway is an exhibition of work by eleven Stamps School of Art & Design Alumni using performance, movement, text, sound, and design to interrogate systems of oppression and interrupt the status quo. It explores themes of alternative histories, archives, Black identity, collective memory, storytelling; meshing performance and performativity, and the interplay of the oral and aural in one’s experience of the world. An undercurrent of movement explored in multiple variations thread the works together, realized through a variety of methods including painterly gesture, repetitive mark-making, performance with an audience or without, spoken word, ambient sound, and reimagined instruments. The exhibition aspires to pull at the loosened threads of a social fabric in crisis, revealing larger complex histories and art discourses, nationally and internationally, framed through the experiences and trajectories of Stamps alumni during their time in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication that will include interviews with each of the alumni artists conducted by current Stamps’ student and exhibition co-curator Moteniola Ogundipe.

Story, Word, Sound, Sway is co-curated by Jennifer Junkermeier-Khan and Moteniola Ogundipe.

 

Image: Levester Williams, “Shift, Sift, Swoosh Bods,” 2018, (detail, video still) HD video, color, four audio channels; 17 minutes 33 seconds (full length).