Adam Odomore
To Harvest a Dream Buried in Dust—On Care and Blackness
September 2–October 1, 2023
In this group exhibition, curator, Adam Odomore, aims to center and provide space and opportunities for reimagination and interrogation of care as it relates to Black bodies in the built environment. Located at the intersection of race and gender equality, artists from the African Diaspora provide a space for healing and rest within the larger context of a patriarchal, capitalist, white-supremacist, imperialist world.
Thus, by imagining, creating, and beholding moments of care, tenderness, vulnerability, and rest, we create safe spaces to rebuild and explore new possibilities. Sometimes what we think is impossible now is not impossible in another decade.
Allowing for a safe space where we can all learn to be more honest and truthful with ourselves, it is the hope that passive viewers, through engagement with the works on view, will be transformed to active participants who will begin to ask themselves, What does my divine identity look like for me?—while asking ourselves what we need and why—What does care look like for each of us?
About the curator:
Exploring the limits of the human experience in its depictions of bodies as lived vessels, as well as the issues at stake when the body is signified as a vessel, this exhibit is about reimagining a way to locate and make visibly tangible modes and expressions that make up the quiet/quotidian acts of refusal when the body is seen as a site/symbol and representation of physical and spiritual nourishment, a messenger linking the present to ancestral memories, and a guide to our own self-examination and self-care.
The exhibit aims to use Afro-diasporic art to help us imagine a world that reveals the “expressiveness of quiet . . . and the quotidian reclamations of interiority, dignity, and refusal marshaled by black subjects in their persistent striving for futurity.” Manifested in “a desire to live a future that is now, because of the precarity of black quotidian life wherein tomorrow is fleeting and often too risky to wait for or imagine” (Tina M. Campt). Thus, by creating and beholding moments of care, tenderness, vulnerability, and rest, we create safe spaces to rebuild and explore new possibilities.
