The Performative Self-Portrait @ RISD Museum, Providence

The Performative Self-Portrait

RISD Museum, Providence

May 13 - November 12, 2023

The RISD Museum presents The Performative Self-Portrait, an exhibition that explores the complexity of identity through photographic self-portraits. Featuring over twenty artists, the exhibition foregrounds the potential of photography to enact the self, investigate history, and articulate identity. In the fifty photographs on-view ranging from 1930 to the present, the camera is used as an active tool to understand, activate, and perform selfhood.

As questions of identity — from race, gender, sexuality, and ability to religion, nationality, profession, and politics, are increasingly at the fore of national conversations — the artists featured in The Performative Self-Portrait turn the camera back on themselves. In some cases, these artists are exploring the materiality of their bodies or highlighting the ways they identify. Others are locating themselves in history, playing with narratives, or questioning the very limits of what identity can do.

From capturing themselves in shadows and reflections to trying on alternative or speculative identities, the exhibition highlights the ways in which gesture, pose, photographic chemistry, and pre- and post-production manipulation enacts the self. These performative actions establish identity and the self as a site of possibility and transformation.

“We are delighted to present this selection of photographic self-portraits, a number of which will be on view at the RISD Museum for the first time,” states curators Conor Moynihan and Matthew Kluk, “This presentation centers work by LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and women identifying makers, among others, to highlight the dynamic intersectionality of identity as rendered through the medium, processes, and magic of photography.”

Featured artists include Vito Acconci, Laura Aguilar, Andre Bradley, Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore, Harry Callahan, Jess T. Dugan, Erik Gould,  Ann Hamilton, Juliana Huxtable, John Kelly, Mark Klett, Mehdi-Georges Lahlou, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mapplethorpe, Susan B. Markisz, Martine Gutierrez, Ray Metzker, Slava Mogutin, Yasumasa Morimura, Barbara Norfleet, John O'Reilly, Carolee Schneemann, Cindy Sherman, David Benjamin Sherry, Renée Stout, Francesca Woodman. 

Curated by Conor Moynihan, Assistant Curator, Prints, Drawings & Photographs, and Matthew Kluk, Brown PhD 2025, History of Art and Architecture.

RISD MUSEUM

Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design

20 North Main Street, Providence, RI 02903

risdmuseum.org

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Nari Ward exhibition at LSU Museum of Art

Nari Ward, Rooted Communities 
Louisiana State University Museum of Art 
February 7 - August 10, 2014

NARI WARD  

Act of God (detail), 2013 

Basketball cards and stencil ink on wooden panel, 48 x 36 x 1.5 in (121.9 x 91.4 x 3.8 cm). 

Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong 

Rooted Communities coincides with Nari Ward's residency as LSU College of Art + Design's prestigious Nadine Carter Russell Chair and features a group of the artist’s sculptures, works on paper, and mixed-media installations. Ward's powerful yet delicate works articulate multi-layered issues that affect all communities—economics, poverty, race, culture, and how these factors shape a society. Using discarded objects he collects from his local environment, Ward's work gives a presence and new life to these unwanted or forgotten items, the underlying meaning changing within the context of its presentation.

The exhibition includes twenty-five of Nari Ward's works spanning the past decade as well as a new work, Free Weight Bottle Incubator (2013), created during Ward’s residency at LSU. Utilizing bottles recovered from the foundation and ruins of the Alvin Roy Strength and Health Studios, Louisiana's first commercial gym that opened in the 1940s, Ward added plexiglas disks and numerical engravings on the ends, transforming them into free weight sculptures. These works are displayed in an interactive model of the original Alvin Roy building, which the viewer can reach inside of to lift the weights. As part of this project, Ward also photographed members from the Baton Rouge community posing with the sculptural bottle weights. Ward comments: "The idea is to take the unearthed bottles as reference to forgotten history being examined, held and experienced on a visual and physical plane. These delicate excavated remnants of the foundation become poignant vessels of reflection on how history can play a role in the strengthening and maintaining of the spirit."

Nari Ward's use of discarded materials to confront challenging themes is further illustrated throughout the exhibition in works such as Swing (2012), a tire studded with running shoes and suspended from a hangman’s noose, a particularly poignant and raw symbol in the Deep South. In Loisaidas LiquorsouL (2011), Nari Ward rearranges the letters of a neon liquor store sign, a frequent sight in urban neighborhoods, positioning the letters S-O-U-L upright while leaving the remaining letters upside down. Nari Ward uses collectible basketball cards in works including Act of God (2013) to draw connections between sports, entertainment and African American culture. The players have been blacked out leaving only the orange basketballs exposed, creating the illusion of a starry sky. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Nari Ward: Short Biography

Nari Ward's (b. 1963, St. Andrews, Jamaica) work has been widely exhibited on an international level, including solo exhibitions at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2011); Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams (2011); Institute of Visual Arts, Milwaukee (1997); Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2002); and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2001, 2000). The artist has taken part in important group exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennale (2006); Prospect 1 New Orleans (2008); and Documenta XI, Kassel (2003). 

In 2012, Nari Ward was the recipient of the Rome Prize, a yearly award bestowed by the American Academy in Rome to a select group of individuals who represent the highest standard of excellence in the arts and humanities. Additionally, he has received prestigious commissions from the United Nations and the World Health Organization, and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Pollock Krasner Foundation.

Nari Ward’s work is collected by numerous museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, North Carolina; Studio Museum, Harlem; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum, New York. 

Nari Ward is represented by Lehmann Maupin, New York.

Louisiana State University Museum of Art, 100 Lafayette St, Baton Rouge, LA 70801

Francie Bishop Good at Museum of Art (MOA), Fort Lauderdale, Florida - It's All Good

Francie Bishop Good: It's All Good

Museum of Art (MOA), Fort Lauderdale, Florida

April 7 - July 15, 2001

Carly TV, an innovative video installation by rising artist, Francie Bishop Good, is on view at MOA. Carly TV is a series of works utilizing images from television, advertising and famous works of art that are digitally manipulated and added to photographs taken by the artist. Through the use of photography and computer generated imagery, Francie Bishop Good seizes an opportunity to make an intriguing statement about life and society.

The exhibition is part of MOA’s Contemporary Project Series, a program of exhibitions, projects and events engaging the artist, participant and audience in an exchange of ideas, experiences and emotions, challenging visitors by exposing them to new media. The series is dedicated to the exhibition of work by alternative media artists. Carly TV marks Good’s first investigation of photography without painting. After experimentation with painting, mixed media and collage, Good felt the move into digital technology was a natural evolution and that technology helped her to “refine and edit my style, opening creative doors formally and conceptually.”

The work began with snapshots taken of her family in Allentown, Pennsylvania. This show features pictures of her niece, Carly. Francie Bishop Good says, “the juxtaposition of Carly’s innocence against the brashness of the TV creates a disparate dialogue that is a jumping ground for my ideas. The television in the work is a loaded object, acting as both a sculpture and a two-dimensional image.” For Good, the television images represents a specific time in the American culture. She explains: “It allows me to use the screen as a canvas for political, social and artistic statement. Stealing historical paintings and making them my own or the TV’s own is something lusciously sinful and an important part of my work.”

Francie Bishop Good studied at Philadelphia College of Art and received her BFA in painting from University of Colorado in 1972 and her Masters from Florida Atlantic University in 1985. Recently, Good studied at New York’s International Center of Photography and the Palm Beach Photographic Centre. Good was the recipient of the 2000 Fellowship Award from the South Florida Cultural Consortium. More of Good’s work can be seen at the Gallery Camino Real in Boca Raton, Florida and at New York’s Denise Bibro Fine Art. Today, Francie Bishop Good works from her studio in Fort Lauderdale.

MUSEUM OF ART - MOA

One East Las Olas Boulevard, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301

www.museumofart.org