Mobile Art Gallery
DOUBLE RAINBOW: FUTURE ARCHIVES
COSMIC GARDEN
by Holly Bass & Maps Glover
NOV 5th - DEC 18th, 2022
Gallery Hours: Wednesday - Sunday, 12-5 PM
in the Mobile Art Gallery
The Yards DC
1st & M St SE
Photo credit: MARIAH MIRANDA
CulturalDC and Transformer are pleased to co-present a two-part exhibition
Double Rainbow: Future Archives
by Holly Bass (b. 1971) and Maps Glover (b.1992). Cosmic Garden, the CulturalDC presentation in the Mobile Art Gallery, is an immersive experience exploring the expansive works of Bass and Glover. The exhibition will include videos from Holly Bass’ archive of performances from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, archives of performance works from Glover from 2015-2020, collaborative performances, separate audio and sound as well as tactile experiences. Eschewing the traditional ROYGBIV rainbow, the artists were inspired by the SMPTE color bars, the television test pattern used by broadcast technicians to ensure that the screen colors reflect reality. The SMPTE color bars are a symbol of analog video and represent the changes in video technology, memory, and visual culture.
This work is informed by the Black experience, particularly the way video documentation functions to legitimize and validate Black life in a society that seeks to erase Black people’s humanity. Many have died unseen and unheard. George Floyd would most likely have died without recourse without the brief but necessary videography of Darnella Frazier. The important artworks of Black performance artists such as Adrian Piper, David Hammons, and Lorraine O’Grady would be lost without documentation. Glover and Bass recognize that creating public archives of their own experiences as Black artists and of Black family life emphasizes and preserves their importance in history.
This presentation of archival work shifts the narrative and amplifies the importance of visual representation and is an explicit invitation to DC’s Black community, welcoming and prioritizing this audience, which continues to be excluded by the art world. At the same time, conceptual and experimental artists are often viewed as strange or inscrutable. This exhibition is a physical representation that Black conceptual artists are part of the larger Black community, representing themselves, celebrating cultural lineages, and championing collective futures.
Cosmic Garden transports you into the intense green of the SMPTE color bar. These works, with an installation created primarily by Glover, are a physical representation of years of artistic work in a physical space that transcends time and space. Cosmic Garden is the partner exhibition to PRISMMMs, an exhibition at Transformer.
Contact
info@culturaldc.org
Photo credit: MARIAH MIRANDA
Photo credit: Vivian Doering
PRESS
HOLLY BASS
Holly Bass is a multidisciplinary performance and visual artist, writer and director. Her work has been presented at spaces such as the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian Museums, the Seattle Art Museum, Art Basel Miami Beach (Project Miami Fair) and the South African State Theatre. Her visual art work includes photography, installation, video and performance and can be found in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the DC Art Bank, as well as private collections.
A Cave Canem fellow, she has published poems in numerous journals and anthologies. She studied modern dance (under Viola Farber) and creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College before earning her Master’s from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. As an arts journalist early in her career, she was the first to put the term “hip hop theater” into print in American Theatre magazine.
She has received numerous grants from the DC Arts Commission and was a 2019 Red Bull Detroit artist-in-residence and a 2019 Dance/USA Artist Fellow. She is a 2020-2022 Live Feed resident artist at New York Live Arts and a 2021-22 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow. A gifted and dedicated teaching artist, she directed a year-round creative writing and performance program for adjudicated youth in DC’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services for four years as well as facilitating workshops nationally and internationally. She is currently the national director for Turnaround Arts at the Kennedy Center, a program which uses the arts strategically to transform schools facing severe inequities.
Photo credit: MARIAH MIRANDA
MAPS GLOVER
Maps Glover is a conceptual artist with a desire to create and tell new stories through an Afrofuturist lens. These stories weave together the past and the present projecting visions of blackness into the infinite future.
“My name is Maps Glover, and art is my life. When I was a kid growing up in the cornfields of Maryland, the wide-open spaces and natural environment was the perfect storm for a kid with a big imagination. I would build worlds out of cardboard and sticks. I created games with rules for my friends to play and imagine we were anywhere other than where we were. For years I've continued to explore better ways to create those worlds and the games have become systems. My work is a journey through the mind and body the spaces and illustration are a manifestation of an internal dialogue.”
