PARABLE 003
Exhibition dates: September 8 – November 7, 2021
Wed-Sun, 12pm-6pm
Kenturah Davis, Huntrezz, Alima Lee, Josiah Mackey, Chris Martin, Umar Rashid, Boima Tucker, Hana Ward, and Andrew Wilson.
Curated by Alex Jones and Kevin Bernard Moultrie-Daye
PROGRAMMING
“For It Is Written” An experimental music performance by TEIRA in collaboration with Maam (organ) and Karl McComas Reichl (cello).
PARABLE 003 is an exhibition of black visual and conceptual contemporary art rooted in the liberatory possibilities of black community, settlement, and creative expression. Artists’ work incorporates visual, material, and cultural aspects of a new free black state through video, sculpture, textile, sound, and digital media.
Part ode and part elegy to Octavia Butler’s unfinished Parable trilogy, this exhibition investigates the vanishing point of an idea. It is a blueprint for the near future of black sovereignty where California’s histories of migration, radical participation, and experimental living converge into a foundation for the future of Blackness.
To learn more about Parable 003, one can look at the handout here.
LACE’s Emerging Curator Program is designed to discover curatorial talent in Los Angeles and gives an opportunity for an emerging curator to partner with LACE. Applicants are reviewed by a panel that recommends a compelling project to the LACE team consistent with LACE’s experimental spirit.
BIOS
Kenturah Davis
Kenturah Davis is an artist working between Los Angeles and Accra (Ghana). Her work oscillates between various facets of portraiture and design. Using text as a point of departure, she explores the fundamental role that language has in shaping how we understand ourselves and the world around us. This manifests in a variety of forms including drawings, textiles, sculpture, and performances. Davis was commissioned by LA Metro to create large-scale, site-specific work that will be permanently installed on the new Crenshaw/LAX rail line, opening in 2020. Her work has been included in institutional exhibitions in Africa, Asia, Australia, and Europe. Davis earned her BA from Occidental College and MFA Yale University School of Art. Davis was an inaugural artist fellow at NXTHVN in New Haven, CT.
Huntrezz
Huntrezz is a Los Angeles-born, Afro-Hungarian trans woman and digital artist on the verge of developing a new model for sustainable housing. She is an accomplished 3d animator and multi-media artist striving for accessibility in the arts and in life.
Alima Lee
Alima Lee is a transdisciplinary artist from New York City and is currently based between LA & Alima Lee is a transdisciplinary artist from New York City and is currently based between LA & Ghetto Film School Fellow and Co-Host of a monthly radio show, “Rave Reparations” on NTS. Working in an uninhibited range of mediums from video installation and performance, to printmaking and sculpture, Alima is on an ever-constant freefall from structure. Their video work is currently on view at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery Los Angeles and has been presented at the Tate Modern, MOCA, Smithsonian African American Museum, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, and ICA Boston among other global entities.
Chris Marten
Christopher Martin is a multidiscipline artist from North Carolina exploring the African Diaspora. Driven by a desire to push southern history, Martin confronts aesthetic perceptions of contemporary injustice. Cotton fibers are the primary medium of storytelling in order to reclaim the roots of the Atlantic slave trade. Christopher’s hand-cut and sewn monumental tapestry banners in contrasted black and white images tell a surreal story of religion, captivity, and freedom. He has been awarded the first-ever Artist-In-Residence from the Museum of African Diaspora (MoAD AIR 2018), along with lectures both in the United States and Internationally.
Umar Rashid
Umar Rashid’s portraits, drawings, flags, maps, battle scenes, and other artifacts continue the long history of Frengland—an ongoing project Rashid began working on in 2006. In Rashid’s history, the dates of the Frenglish Empire (1658-1880) roughly correspond to the actual English Civil War and the abolition of slavery in Brazil respectively. Fourteen years in the making and spanning almost 140 years of Frenglish time, Rashid’s global empire has developed a complex, global history, much like the trajectory of actual colonial enterprises. Similarly, his work references a panoply of cultures that collapses geography and time. Stylistically, Rashid alludes to Egyptian hieroglyphs, Native American hide paintings and ledger art, Persian miniature painting, and illustrated Spanish colonial manuscripts to name but a few. Rashid’s compelling painting, and illustrated Spanish colonial manuscripts to name but a few. Rashid’s compelling cast of characters are diverse and often of mixed race and ethnicity. His world is not guided by simplistic dichotomies of white and black, master and slave, captor and captive, but challenges viewers to consider the range of humanity involved in a global empire. Thus, his people of color are just as likely to be heroes as villains, revealing the duplicity and complicity of these individuals but also acknowledging their agency as historical actors. The lengthy, sometimes humorous, titles of Rashid’s works often reference hip-hop song lyrics, urban expressions, and current events. The artist intentionally strives to bridge the gap between contemporary popular culture and “official” history, which often seems like a distant, untouchable past especially for many young people today. By making history relatable, Rashid reminds us of the cyclical nature of history and universality of the human condition. -Ellen Caldwell
Boima Tucker
Boima Tucker is a Sierra Leonean-American DJ (Chief Boima), music producer (Dutty Artz), writer (Africa is a Country), and general advocate for music-fueled digital youth culture from around the world. He is the founder of The Kondi Band project and the platform INTLBLK
Hana Ward
Hana Ward is a painter and ceramicist from Los Angeles, California. She earned a B.A. from Brown University in 2011. Ward’s paintings touch on themes of liberation, introspection, and diaspora. Ward’s paintings are often depictions of women engaged with the various layers of their consciousness, what Ward calls “odes to the sanctuary of the mind”. Her work has been described as “sometimes sad, sometimes funny but always intriguingly equivocal” by ArtNews. Hana Ward’s recent solo exhibitions include “an exit from this room and others like it” (2021), “what was there all along” (2020) at Ochi Projects in Los Angeles, and “sing about me” (2019) at Harun Gallery in Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions include “Mutual Friends” (2020) in Oakland, California, “Giant Robot Post-It Show” (2019), “When She Rises” (2018), and “Animating the Archives” (2017) in Los Angeles. Ward’s work will be featured in Mrs. gallery’s forthcoming presentation at the Independent in New York. Ward’s first solo exhibition in New York opens November 2021 at Mrs. (?)
Andrew Wilson
Andrew Wilson is a multimedia artist working in the intersections of ritual and funerary rights honoring the deceased, the ways objects accumulate spirit particles, how these collide to open portals to different dimensions. His work is at once beautiful with an attention to craftsmanship and repulsing in its graphic subject matter. He wants to create an extra moment of confoundment for the viewer to contemplate their relationship to the work and the imagery and histories it evokes.
He received his BFA from Ohio Wesleyan University in 2013 with a concentration in Jewelry/Metals and his MFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 2017. Wilson’s work has been in many galleries and institutions including The Berkeley Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SOMArts, and the Museum of the African Diaspora. He has received such awards and honors as the Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Award, an Emergency Grant from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, the Carr Center Independent Scholars Fellowship, the McColl Center, and more.
Josiah Mackey
Josiah Mackey is a Black visual artist and graphic designer based in the Bay Area.
TEIRA
Teira is a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist whose work incorporates performance art, sound installation, and sculpture. Her practice explores the connectivity between the body and sound, the ephemeral nature of technology, and spirituality. She creates immersive performances using analog instruments and found objects to recreate her inner world, from a dilapidated swap meet to an abandoned baptism pool in South LA. As a singer and producer, Teira layers gospel, alternative jazz, and electronic textures under folk-inspired lyrics.
About the Curators
Alex Jones
Alex Jones is a curator and art historian based in Los Angeles. His work merges curatorial practice with an academic background in African American art history and English. Currently, Alex is a curatorial research assistant at the Getty Research Institute in modern contemporary collections where he also works as a member of the GRI’s African American Art History Initiative. He has given public presentations on topics such as Civil Rights-era photography and will be presenting his research on blackness and contemporary portrait photography at the 2021 American Studies Association annual conference.
He has previously held curatorial internship positions at the Getty Research Institute (2019) and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (2018). He received his master’s in Art History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2019) and a bachelor’s from Brown University (2013).
Kevin Bernard Moultrie-Daye
Kevin Bernard Moultrie-Daye makes music, designs, curates, and fabricates. His work focuses on how issues of climate, identity, material, and culture intersect in spatial theory. As a founding member of SPACE INDUSTRIES, he was a participating artist/curator in the Gray Area Foundation (S.F.) 2020 Experiential Space Research Lab (ESRL), developing the immersive exhibition This Will Be The End Of You, exploring notions of selfhood and identity in ecological thought and specifically focusing on issues of environmental justice and radioactivity in the Black community at Hunters Point/ Bayview.
Previously he co-curated the SOMArts (S.F.) exhibition, Forever, A Moment: Black Meditations on Time and Space. His work has been featured in publications such as The Funambulist, Failed Architecture, and more. He received his M. Arch from the University of California, Berkeley.
Support for this exhibition provided by the Pasadena Art Alliance, the Wilhelm Family Foundation, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.
