Taking a Stand
January 17–February 29, 2020
201 S. Division St.
Ann Arbor, Michigan
USA
The Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan presents Taking a Stand, on view at Stamps Gallery January 17–February 29, 2020.
Curated by Srimoyee Mitra, Taking a Stand features work by micha cárdenas, Oliver Husain, Elizabeth LePensée, Meryl McMaster, and Syrus Marcus Ware.
There will be an exhibition opening reception from 5:30–7:30pm on Friday, January 17 featuring a special performance by Detroit-based artist Sacramento Knoxx in collaboration with Bianca Millar & White Feather Woman. On Saturday, January 18, Mitra will lead an exhibition tour at 2pm, followed by a book discussion on Queer & Trans Artists of Color: Stories of Some of our Lives, moderated by Noura Ballout. A full schedule of exhibition and community events can be found online.
Taking a Stand is a group exhibition that brings together lively and energetic work that highlights the ways in which artists build solidarity and shape contemporary culture as active participants in our society. The works in the exhibition encompass photography, interactive drawings, augmented reality, and 3-D film installation. The collectivist impulse of the projects recast the gallery as a catalyst, a site of action and possibility for urgent and meaningful dialogue on culture and politics. The immersive and interactive installations don’t just represent social concerns from our cosmopolitan present, they delve into playful and poetic exchanges with public audiences on empathy and decoloniality to imagine just and equitable futures. Drawing on the themes of science fiction, artists in the exhibition invite audiences to time travel, blurring fact with fiction, weaving fantastical narratives and desires with ancestral knowledge, collective memories, and stories from their natural and urban environments. They acknowledge the vitality of recuperating Indigenous, migrant, and LGBTQI subjectivities and practices to better understand how to heal our damaged planet. Even though these installations are temporary and ephemeral, they foster vibrant liminal spaces for the public to explore what could be done during this time of ever-present ecological and political change.
