Featuring the work of 23 artists living or working in New Orleans within the past year, Identity Measures, the latest open call exhibition from Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) will open August 3, 2019.
Guest curated by art historian, critic, curator, and educator Dr. Jordan Amirkhani, Identity Measures "presents a diverse group of artists working in a range of material practices that engage identity not as a fixed structure, but as an insistently mobile and often resistant assemblage of traits and vulnerabilities." Studio Art Professor Nicole Awai's work is featured among 23 other artists' work in the exhibition. Recent solo and group exhibitions from Awai include Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago at the Museum of Latin American Art, Circles and Circuits I: Art and History of the Chinese Caribbean Diaspora at the California African American Museum, solo exhibitions at Lesley Heller Workspace and Barbara Davis, and inclusion in “New Monuments for New Cities” a project organized by the High Line, spanning five cities—Austin, Chicago, Houston, New York, and Toronto.
As CAC describes,
At a time of heightened division both at home and abroad, imagining a world of shared experience and solidarity between ideologically opposed groups seems like the stuff of dreamwork. Difference, and what to do with it, remains the most significant question of our era and forces a consideration of the role that identity—or, the representation of the individual “self” through personal idiosyncrasies, language, actions, beliefs, appearance, experiences, and forms of social belonging and/or oppression—plays in grappling with heterogeneity in the sociopolitical sphere....By opening up a dialogue about difference through the language of contemporary visual art, this exhibition claims that one’s structural location in the world matters to the articulation of personal and collective identity—a process that poses itself as a dynamic site of agency, creativity, resistance, visibility, ambiguity, and belonging.
Identity Measures will be on view at CAC from August 3 - October 5, 2019.