Curators Talk NXTHVN’s Newest Group Exhibition To Echo a Shadow
The exhibition is on view until May 19.
Photo by Chris Gardner
To Echo A Shadow is NXTHVN’s newest group exhibition at the international art institution in the Dixwell neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut. Founded by Titus Kaphar, Jason Price, and Jonathan Brand, NXTHVN was formed to empower artists, curators, and the local community through education and develop a creative ecosystem by accelerating the careers of the next generation of professional art talent while helping catalyze New Haven into a world-class, sustainable arts community. The exhibition features site-specific installations by Ash Arder and Lungiswa Gqunta and select artworks by Torkwase Dyson and Oluseye Ogunlesi that include “materials of sound, soil, smoke, light, memory, movement and the associated and embedded experiences of ecology, geography, opacity and Blackness. The exhibition contends that the reverberations of enforced migration are unfixed, responsive, and ephemeral, like an echo and a shadow.”
I had the opportunity to speak with the exhibition’s curators and NXTHVN’s Cohort 05 Curatorial Fellows Marquita Flowers and Clare Patrick about how this exhibition came together, the history of Dixwell playing a role in selecting the works on view, and the practice of developing multi-local forms of knowledge. On May 18th, from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., a sound-based performance will feature Ash Arder. This exhibition is on view from March 9 to May 19, 2024. The gallery is open Wednesday-Sunday from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., is free, and open to the public.
Can you tell me how you landed on the idea for this exhibition? And where does the title To Echo a Shadow come from?
Patrick: We started the program at NXTHVN at the same time. We'd never met before. So it was an interesting process of getting to know each other and having the chance to work on an exhibition that was anything we wanted it to be with the support of the NXTHVN team. I'm very grateful for the fact that we have such similar interests and we’re drawn to similar artworks that inspire the shows that we want to curate. We thought a lot about the different themes of migration, and we had conversations around the different routes that we both travel, that all families have traveled, and the biographical influences and inspirations that brought us to the core idea of the show. From there, we started looking at artists whose work resonated with us, and we were lucky that a lot of the work was similar. A significant part of forming the show was being able to have ongoing communication and collaboration with the artists.
Flowers: It took us a while to land on the title. We were really interested in thinking through migration from an ephemeral point of view, a way to think through materiality and how these experiences of movement are reflected in material. Natural and manmade or things that we can carry in our memories. We were also thinking about migration being sonic, where sound, songs, and music from your homeland are things that you carry and share with new communities or new utterances of where you were living. That's sort of how the echo came in. And then the shadow was really thinking about a different way to play off these threads and through lines that we wanted to bring together. The emphasis was migration, and we were playing with the sonic components of the work in addition to their darkness.
Oluseye Ogunlesi: Eminado Series, Reunion 18, 2018 -Ongoing. Found objects, rubber, synthetic hair, and cowrie shells. Photo by Chris Gardner.
When I was reading about the exhibition, I was extremely fascinated by the concept of multi-local modes of knowledge and wanted to know if there were specific examples in the show that illustrate the connection between the artists’ ancestral lineage, their current location, and their individual relationships to New Haven itself.
Flowers: There are a lot of ways we could answer that. As Clare was mentioning, we were very new to Dixwell and New Haven; Clare coming from the UK and Cape Town, and I'm from the Bronx. And so there was an adjustment and a recognition that we were also new to this community to engage with. It felt like the best way to do that was through town history. NXTHVN itself did a lovely job of helping us integrate and be more aware of our surroundings by offering walking tours with the Greater New Haven African American Historical Society. We did that very early on in our fellowship, and through that tour, we became aware of a jazz club called the Monterey Club, which was about two blocks away from NXTHVN and was started by a performer named Rufus Greenlee. There is a really rich, long history all along Dixwell Avenue of different jazz clubs. We also learned about the Winchester Ammunition factory, which was three blocks away.
All of these places were in a very close radius, and we learned about how the folks, particularly black people living in Dixwell at that time, were working and attending both of these spaces. They would move between industrial manufacturing plants and then go into the jazz clubs after a shift ended. We were really interested in that dynamic and thinking through how industrialization is like manufacturing, like all of these sort of more institutional systematized ways of engaging with work and their impact on folks who have migrated or how they are the impetus for why people migrate.
Between our conceptual ideas and the history of Dixwell, NXTHVN really has asked us to be responsive to Dixwell. It's important to them as an organization that the exhibitions are made with an attempt to really bring in the sensibility and awareness of its surroundings. And so we also ask the artists in the exhibition to do that as well. To a certain extent, some of them are engaging with the themes in really particular ways, and some are engaging directly with Dixwell more than others. And so yeah, it was like, ‘Can we think through the sites of NXTHVN, Dixwell, New Haven and interpret or like reimagine a way that you have done this work previously, and come up with a new iteration of it for our exhibition?’ So, all of the works in the show have been exhibited and made before, but they have just been read down in this sort of semi-commissioned way for this exhibition.
Patrick: And drawing on the question of the multi-local, I think, like Marquita was saying, there's so many different types of work in the show; it was one of the first things that kind of came to mind when thinking about the work to bring into the space because of the different understandings of each of the artists’ materials. We wanted to showcase different traditions and ancestral practices and find ways for them to coexist in the same space while also acknowledging the journeying relationship that these things are traveling with people to invite an ancestral presence back into the space. All of the pieces have had some sort of remaking through the installation of our exhibition, and we had the artists respond to the exhibition specifically and reinterpret their work for the space. That was a really wonderful process as well just for us to be a part of, but I think very interesting in relation to the kind of context of Dixwell as well.
Lungiswa Gqunta: Benisya Ndawoni (Return to the Unfamiliar), 2020. Photo by Chris Gardner.
It's interesting. The artists themselves acknowledge their travel, but the work, which is like an extension of themselves, travels as well and can be interpreted in the context of how someone moves when they migrate somewhere. Life changes, yet either you still remain the same person or the same entity, but like something always changes us a little. There is always a new iteration of who we or the work becomes. Did any artists have the opportunity to visit this space physically to gain inspiration for how they would reinterpret their works?
Flowers: No, not before they came to install their works. We shared floor plans, 3D renderings, and a bit of the history that we were also learning. They were able to come, except for two of them, to install their work on-site. It was really exciting to know that some of these installations were made on-site, especially for Ash Arder; it was important for her to do that work. She built prototypes for her sculpture Broadcast #4 in her studio in Detroit, then built a final iteration at the gallery. There was a lot of making on-site, which was a really lovely experience to have with an artist. Sometimes it’s not the case. Most of the time, you load the work, and it comes in a crate, and you put it on the wall. But to be able to work through the process with them in real-time about spacing and sizing, just how something feels, and placement was a really great learning experience, I think, for both of us.
That's fascinating! Were many of the works fabricated on-site? Were the materials from Dixwell itself incorporated into the exhibition space?
Patrick: There was an interesting balance of materials the artist brought themselves and what was sourced near NXTHVN. Ash Arder brought soil, which is the fundamental aspect of the installation, from an area of Detroit and sourced some soil locally. For Oluseye's Good Luck Totem, which is a sort of vending machine with cowrie shells, the base was sourced from a local sawmill in the Greater New Haven area. Some of Lungiswa Gqunta’s materials came from South Africa, but many were sourced locally here.
How did you decide which artists would best illustrate the concepts for the exhibition? Or did the artists that are featured inspire the exhibition?
Flowers: I would say it was a mix. We did a lot of studio visits virtually, and I think it's based on those conversations it revealed itself pretty early on regarding who would be a good fit. We had many artists in mind, and particularly artworks in mind that we were interested in. But it was primarily through talking with each artist that confirmed the direction of the show. Also, the idea of prayer kept coming up in our conversations with the artists, not randomly either. I think a lot of the artists have very varying degrees of spiritual practices, and that was something that we weren't really considering or thinking about in our initial ideas of the show. Still, through these conversations this kept revealing itself. I think that was a moment for me, especially when I was like, ‘Oh, we all seem to be tapped into this wavelength.’ This was a good way to confirm, on top of all the conceptual and aesthetic decisions, that these were the right people to work with.
Photo by Chris Gardner
Did prior exhibitions, writings, or other media influence the ideas present in the show?
Flowers: The obvious one is the Mickalene Thomas / Portrait of an Unlikely Space exhibition, which was on view at Yale University Art Gallery.
Patrick: Yeah, which had just opened as we were getting into the meat of what the show might look like. There was a really special feeling to that exhibition. Conversations with Mickalene Thomas and Keely Orgeman and their description of how intentional the curation of that exhibition was helped land on the ideas that we were discussing. There were broader texts have focused on curating with the sense of creating access and creating spaces that people can move through and engage with directly rather than being a very distanced or dislocated kind of interaction. But that was something we were discussing a lot.
Flowers: Yeah, I think we kept focusing on how things felt. That guided a lot of our thinking and wanting to do a show that was a bit more subdued and settled, and meticulous and detailed. We wanted people to really engage with the works in ways that were very bodily, like even the paintings on the wall, you really have to walk around it to have different parts reveal themselves.
I looked at both of your research interests and what each artist was interested in and thought this exhibition was kismets. Is there anything else you would like to add about the exhibition?
Patrick: I would add something quite beautiful, which came about as Marquita was saying things developed as the show progressed and the ideas were forming. The two of us had always had this idea of a very kind of sonic, ephemeral, and somatic show. I think the ideas had kind of developed and adjusted and shifted, but we both were drawn to work that was installation, sculpture, and sound-based. However, the materials that all of the artists we were working with fit together and speak across different places, and there are so many interesting overlaps across the material quality of all of the works and conceptual alignments. But I think even just from that very physical side of the show, it’s something exciting to experience.
