Author: Adriana Hall

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Sky Hopinka

Sky Hopinka was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent several years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California; Portland, Oregon; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and is currently based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Portland, he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture, and the play between the known and the unknowable.

ja'tovia gary

Ja’Tovia M. Gary (b. Dallas, TX. 1984) is an artist and filmmaker currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Gary’s work seeks to liberate the distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed while fleshing out a nuanced and multivalent Black interiority. Through documentary film and experimental video art, Gary charts the ways structures of power shape our perceptions around representation, race, gender, sexuality, and violence.

Nicole Miller

Nicole Miller is an artist working mainly with video, she lives and works in Southern California. Miller’s work stems from the possibility representation allows for reconstitution. Using video installation and sculpture, Miller proposes that active viewing can be used as a tool to reconstitute personal histories, or even one's own body.

arthur jafa

Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo, Mississippi) is an artist, filmmaker and cinematographer. Across three decades, Jafa has developed a dynamic practice comprising films, artefacts and happenings that reference and question the universal and specific articulations of Black being. Underscoring the many facets of Jafa’s practice is a recurring question: how can visual media, such as objects, static and moving images, transmit the equivalent ​“power, beauty, and alienation” embedded within forms of Black music in U.S. culture?

adriana hall

adriana hall (b. 1997, maryland) is a Landscape Architecture graduate student at Rutgers University. Her work centers around social justice and activism in the landscape through storytelling. Through storytelling, she is able to highlight untold stories of under represented communities in society which in turn brings light to conversations that can sometimes be difficult to have.

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Here before the trees – Sky Hopinka

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Here you are before the trees from Sky Hopinka demonstrates how landscapes, history, and other factors contribute to his identity as an Indigenous American by travelling between reservations in the Hudson River Valley to reservations in Wisconsin. Through this journey, Hopinka explores how indigenous spaces have shaped his identity.

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Go-Go Music – Adriana Hall

Posted on by Adriana Hall

Go-Go Music and Place Identity: The Perseverance of the Chocolate City by Adriana Hall analyzes Washington D.C.’s national sound of Go-Go music and how it can be a catalyst for activism in light of gentrification. Through this analysis, she displays the polylith of D.C.’s dwindling black population to emphasize that they deserve to be heard regardless of how they or their music are viewed.

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The Giverny Document – Ja’Tovia Gary

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 Ja’Tovia Gary meditates on the safety and bodily autonomy of Black women in her film The Giverny Document. Through interviews with black women in Harlem, Gary juxtaposes the stereotype that black women are aggressive and angry by emphasizing the fact that they are the most unprotected person in human society thus proving they need to be protected.

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About

Posted on by Adriana Hall

The outdoor exhibition, Identity isn’t a Monolith, explores how site-specific places and cultures shape identities.  Through the spatial development of our surroundings and the way we interpret them, we begin to understand the places we are embedded into. This helps to form our own identities and our relationship to space. Our identities as humans aren’t monolithic because of place and place identity, and stereotypes negate this polylith idea. Holding this exhibit in an outdoor public space underscores the relationship of site, landscape, and identity.  

On another related level, all the work in the exhibition also addresses the dissonance between lived experience of ethnicities in contrast to stereotypes that are projected onto them by dominant  society and media. As the locational scale of these works travel from very specific Athens, California to very broad America, they each are one ingredient in the pot that contributes to the ongoing battle for equality in America. The way that these works contribute to that battle is to display true ethnicities and cultures in site specific areas in order to show that although our identities and origins are different, we are still human and deserve the same rights and privileges like anyone else.

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