Wed 9/9 @ 5-8PM
Cleveland-based artist/curator/birthworker M. Carmen Lane is one of the area’s most thought-provoking creators. Lane is the founder and director of ATNSC: Center for Art, Practice and Inquiry, a transdisciplinary art space at a home in the Buckeye neighborhood.
In 2020, they presented an installation at Praxis Fiber Workshop’s gallery called AMALA: She Could Not Stay (In Their Black Bodies), which looked at “the relationship between loss, displacement, relocation and the cost of accumulated histories on black gendered bodies that birth” by making visible African American infant mortality data in Cuyahoga County with cradleboards made from FEMA body bags. Then the pandemic hit and placed new meanings on the show.
Now Lane is following it up with another show at Praxis called Topsy Turvy or Your Story Began Before You Were Born (and a note on Beirut), which opens Wednesday September 9. They say it “explores birth, place, migration, memory, and the ways history continues to live within our bodies. Through digital weaving, photography, assemblage, and letterpress printmaking, the exhibition weaves together personal narrative, Black maternal health, and collective memory, while reflecting on the artist’s recent work in Beirut.”
The show goes on view with a free, public reception Wednesday September 9 from 5-8pm. Prints will be available for purchase to benefit scholarships for emerging birthworkers of color.
praxisfiberworkshop.org/current-exhibition