Thu 2/18-Sun 6/6
moCa Cleveland is in a refreshing, try-something-new mode, with the launch of its ‘Getting to Know You Residency,” and now its Imagining Otherwise show, taking place at three locations around the community.
Imagine Otherwise is a four-artist show that, they tell us, “expresses the boundlessness and fierceness of Black imagination and love despite ongoing antiBlack violence as it thinks with Christina Sharpe’s groundbreaking book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being.” It was put together by La Tanya S. Autry, Gund, moCa Cleveland’s first ever on-staff Black curator.
The artists include two from Cleveland — photographer Amber Ford and painter Antwoine Washington, along with film-based artists Shikeith, who works out of Pittsburgh, and New York-based Imani Dennison. The exhibit(s) includes video, photography, sculpture and mixed-media work that “interrogates spatial and temporal tensions of disenfranchisement, resistance, memory, visibility, loss, and (re)invention across Black cultures.” Both Dennison and Shikeith explore Black queer identities, Dennison from a woman’s view in her 2020 Afro-futurist style film NO MAS- Irreversible Entanglements, made on location in Johannesburg, South Africa; Shiekith focusing on issues facing Black men in his two-part 2021 installation still waters run deep / fall in your ways.
Noted local photographer Amber N. Ford, known for her perceptive portraits, offers brand-new work in Strands, Tracks & Naps, zeroing in on close-ups of Black hair, overlaid with color portraits and other collaged materials. Finally, Antwoine Washington’s new And Yeah, About that Seat at the Table (2021), draws on his skills as a muralist, his multi-media installation uses domestic furnishings to show how Black people get around their lack of access to power.
Skikeith’s work is on display at moCa Cleveland; Dennison’s and Ford’s is at ThirdSpace Action Lab in Glenville and Washington’s is at Lakewood’s Museum of Creative Human Art, which he co-founded.
mocacleveland.org/exhibitions/imagine-otherwise
Cleveland, OH 44106