Danielle Deadwyler: Object-Subject: Flaw is the Only Recourse. Curator-Mentor:Tiona Nekkia McClodden by CUE Art Foundation

DANIELLE DEADWYLER

137 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001

cuear tfoundation.org

DANIELLE DEADWYLER Object-Subject: Flaw is the Only Recourse Curator-Mentor: TIONA NEKKIA McCLODDEN November 4 - December 15, 2021

Still from CHOR(E)S, 2020 Film, 12 minutes 59 seconds

THE MANY-HEADED HOLY Danielle Deadwyler

“Before you can go far out You have to know where in is.” —Errol Garner I am encoded to serialize my pursuits. Repeat. Repeat. Difference. Repeat. Repeat. Difference. This coding derives from my experiences on stage. I am a theater baby, devoted to the exploration of a text, the play as bible, night after night. And yet, it is not just that, a rote exploration of beings in conflict. No. It is repeat for text. It is difference in experience. In 2005, the summer following the completion of my first Master’s degree, I wrote poetry. I sought to continue melding creative and academic thought as a member of a poetry group. We were named for the Baobab tree. I was the youth of Atlanta-based lot; fusing hip hop aesthetic with traditional and non-traditional form, I developed a devotion to the practice of Harryette Mullen. Muse & Drudge is my shit…the progenitor of my future stylistic efforts. The wordplay, the themes, the repeat, the difference. With the bravado of an emcee, I composed Bass & Toil, an 4

extended poem of urgency and length. In form stanza repeats, gendered, sexual, historical, racial, spiritual experiences make difference. Break the beat beyond the booty Illuminate the piracy of the drum per syncopation Don’t stop, repeat it, split it Fertilize your system bitches

In one, multitudes (are born) (or are already). There are fragments, divergents, tangents, compatibles, opposites, pluralities. Bass & Toil seeks this in its playfulness. Pauli Murray, a poet, in a life, does too. She cast titles for a serial selfportrait practice. Imp. Crusader. Dude. Multitudes. It is not the image that captivates as much as the caption in tow beneath the image, a tail in text under the head. The declaration and/or definition of a selfdescribed identity; one that is not finite. Murray, a polyglot of academic, social, racial, sexual and spiritual expanse, instructs in life (as lawyer, priest, activist, writer) and image: I can be all things. Murray’s head shots, so to speak, concentrate on the face, the head, a “beyond” of what the body or

clothing or social aesthetics can connote. The faces smirk amidst a side glance, gaze upward as if sun-drenched and complete of all tasks, and resolved in an expression of countenance and austerity. Difference. Difference. Difference. Sharing work was integral to the poetry collective; workshop, presentation, and process connected us. Bass & Toil was a new effort, a freedom and playfulness and writing with buoyancy I’d not enacted before. I felt safe. I sought more. And with only one member, a compass of sorts, I share this newness. They used words like “show-off” to describe it, and without mal-intent I guess, plain spoken, as I sat across from them, recoiling. “Too much.” This was too far out for them? Too far out for me, or too far in? Too much difference showed off?

the falsehoods of traditionalism, ill-fitted spiritualities, societal temporal declarations; it will go dark. I can never get the illustrations of Jon Farleigh out of my mind. The Black Girl, searching, bare, naked, erect in pursuit. Nothing aberrant to witness below the neck, just her simple human body. But her head. Her face. Her gaze. Her equanimity in the face of self-assured men. Her defense. Her consternation. Her queries. Her repose with children. She, in the aesthetics of a restive spirit, a continuous motion toward her work: “I will do the work that comes to me only if I know that it is good work; and to do that I must know the past and the future; and must know God.” And with an addendum, Konoleth, to whom she speaks, offers: “You mean that you must be God,” and she concludes: “As much as I can.”

At each repetitive juncture of falseness, in the shadows of a literal and imaginative wilderness, the Black Girl revs an endurance to repeat and make difference each encounter…to continue seeking a known unknown. She knobkerries “There are too many old men tradition and objectification by pretending to be Gods in this not surrendering to their word and forest” declares The Black Girl in “never [being] afraid of anything.” Search of God. Even as a neophyte, Even to herself, I observe. a Black girl, proselytized by white missionaries, knows there are too And yet, sometimes the fear is many false gods in the wilderness good. To go far out there, far in in George Bernard Shaw’s there…a terror that I cannot look provocative 1933 novella. My body away from. A partner I welcome. knew it then, too, across from the Bass & Toil, still cold and dark. elder poetry member, in my recoil. For a while. Concealed to email It will repeat this knowing in the archives and the bottoms of future, my body. It will curl up from bedroom dresser drawers. those not ready for too far, from Quiet. Enraged. Belittle the beat, behold the booty Constellate piracy of dreams per constipation Repeat it, split it, don’t stop Fertilize your mission mista

Akwaeke Emezi writes of Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s images and works in a post-response to Se Te Subió El Santo: “The idea of existing without concealment is a radical one.” They are addressing McClodden’s statement, “I want to present a full self at all times.” They further question: “What does it mean for me to present a full self? ...the question excludes everyone else and I am left with myselves.” I recall encountering Tiona’s selves when she first exhibited the collection of self-portraits in New York; portraits taken “directly after she awoke every morning while away on a week-long residency in Iowa City, IA at The Center for Afrofuturist Studies in Spring 2016.”

Difference. Re. Difference. Tiona left me with something, in the way Se Te Subió El Santo dedicates to “Ana Mendieta for leaving the key.” Before the beat break starbound Illuminate the prior Richard synthesis Don’t repeat or stop or split Feminize your mission’s system

“The song sung in a strange land asks how can it be sung in a strange land.”1 Diff. Re. ‘ffrence. Re. Re. D’. Peat. Re. Re. Re. ReDiff. Bass & Toil echoes even now. I don’t know where the hard copy resides. Inside a shredder compartment or in shadows of edges of boxes at my mother’s home. Some waste site. It reverberates as selves and spirit in the archive of my email. A digital landscape. For heads. It’s been replicated and sent out to myself. Over and again. I send it to me annually. To not forget. For it to endure.

Each image hung from the ceiling, a white rope at the top corners hoisting and gripping the shoulders of the frame, centered and centering self, always, Tiona. There is no image where you cannot be pierced by Tiona’s eyes, the whole of her face, her head. I am amidst a ritual exhibition. I did not know it then. Some of my In Radical Virtuosity, Genevieve selves did. We are learning, my Hyacinthe defined the text’s title spirit and selves, opacity and openness. We are learning modes and its berth in the life and work to see and be seen. The manner in of Ana Mendieta in a multifold manner: 1) It “speaks to Mendieta’s which Tiona’s first image of Se Te endurance, and her mastering Subió El Santo instructs: masked all black, shirt beaming white, endless [of] both personal and communal survival through her formats;” 2) gaze. Many are here, and they hover, collect, quiet, still, terrorize. It “implies her appropriation and redeployment of black I want to do that. To me and my Atlantic elements according to selves. To take it to the head. her own measure;” 3) and as “a When Tiona and I exit the building nod [to] shared [sentiments] with the artists…in We Wanted a of her exhibition, I conceal those Revolution: Black Radical Women images (her selves), each block 1965-85,” more specifically, on we cross, only to the dark of me “how art and culture could most (the monograph will not emerge effectively participate in and for another couple of years).

lenticularities, 2017-2020 Inkjet paper, acrylic, oil pastels, candles, hair, tape, spray-paint, candle wax Dimensions variable

Still from CHOR(E)S, 2020 Film, 12 minutes 59 seconds

contribute to urgent quests for self-determination and liberation from the polyvalent position of being a woman of color.”

expression of our movement from object to subject — the liberated voice.”2

These progenitors of selfwitnessing are serial arms in my Keys open doors. I’d performed a reimagining of Mendieta’s wilderness in 2017. I take the pursuit of them up as spiritual, Tracks in 2015 for a performance intellectual, and creative weaponry. art exhibition. Through the Clarion calls to a radical virtuosity research for this performance I’d encountered a woman in her of my own design. Murray. The own wilderness. Mendieta leaves Black Girl. McClodden. Mendieta. legacy to mark up the frame, In a silence, I intuit the first leaves bloody tracks that show gestures to quest out from object. Documenting what I was in the you were here, constructs new portals and doors, and does so present of that dark year, I begin a fugitive flight. I employ “the in multiple formats (as Hyacinthe notes). These are rituals. These are materials of [my] surroundings” a quaking Bass. Over and again. like Hyacinthe writes of Mendieta, A rippling through the body. To “rather than disappearing within make opaque and transfigure what it.” I tiptoe into this liberatory work we take to the head. with my iPhone, my child’s acrylics, old candles, the African Diaspora It takes a minimal approach to get spiritualities and whisperings, my fingers, and photocopies to the beyond. The self, a ritual, and whatever natural material is of my selves. I move “with slow close in proximity. It is a “moving temporality [and] patience.”3 from silence to speech,” as bell I endure four years on my Black Girl hooks states, “for the oppressed… search. I ritualize the happening of and those who struggle side myself through my head. I cast new by side a gesture of defiance names with each smudge of color that heals, that makes new life and word. I embrace an ecstasy of subjectivity. Over and again. and new growth possible.” She continues, “It is that act of speech, Big up the beat of bounty of ‘talking back’, that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the Illumine prescience per capita

Don’t stop repeat it Futurize your mission

Diff.uh.Re. –ence. Re. Di. PeatttPePeRePeaaaaaaat Difference DIFFerencePeatRe. “Being beside oneself,” writes Ashon T. Crawley in Blackpentecostal Breath, “beside oneself in the service of the other” is the experience of object to subject making. It is that act of “talking back,” as bell hooks expresses, that becomes the serial self-making of CHOR(E)S and the lenticularities. These transfigured objects, beside one another or oneself, “brings into view, brings into hearing, the way such performances produce otherwise possibilities for thought, for action, for being and becoming,” Crawley writes. I am founding my otherwise.

1 Andrew R. Mossin, "The Song Sung in a Strange Land: An Interview with Nathaniel Mackey," The Iowa Review 44, No. 3 (Winter 2014), http://www. iowareview.org/from-the-issue/volume44-issue-3-%E2%80%94winter-201415/ song-sung-strange-land-interviewnathaniel-mackey. 2 bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (New York: Routledge, 2015). 3 Genevieve Hyacinthe.

Danielle Deadwyler [she/her/ they] is an American-born multidisciplinary performance artist, filmmaker, and actor. Deadwyler’s award-winning experimental film work has been presented at the HartsfieldJackson International Airport, Atlanta Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, Cucalorus Film Festival, and Oxford Film Fest. In the act of becoming subject, of She has exhibited with MAMBU determining selfhood through BADU collective, Mint Gallery, diasporic elements and the cadre Whitespace Gallery, The Luminary, of serial self-portrait makers, of Atlanta Contemporary Museum, enduring beyond false ideals and Spelman College’s Museum of and domestic boundedness Fine Art Black Box Series, among through ritual personal spiritual others. Numerous grants have transformation, and intuitively supported Deadwyler’s works, curating a communal arsenal including IDEA CAPITAL, ELEVATE beyond linear or genre definition, Atlanta, Living Walls, Synchronicity I become ecstatic in my blues body, my Black woman temporality Theatre, WonderRoot Walthall Fellowship, and Artadia. She is head. Crawley continues in a former Atlanta Film Festival Blackpentecostal Breath, “The Filmmaker-in-Residence, MINT blues body, the black woman body, Gallery Leap Year Fellowship is a disruption to notions of civility Recipient, a 2020 Franklin Furnace and decorum.” In this instance of Recipient, and a 2021 Princess object to subject, we witness the blues body and its fleshiness break Grace Award Winner. into wildness and the Black head access the beyond.

I am my sacred quest. We all are. Re-.

TIONA NEKKIA McCLODDEN Curator-Mentor

Danielle Deadwyler and I first met during the Fall semester of 2000 when I was a freshman at Clark Atlanta University, and she, born and raised in Atlanta, was at Spelman University. I dropped out in 2002, while Danielle graduated in 2004. I went headfirst into filmmaking, then transitioned rather abruptly into a visual arts practice almost a decade later. Danielle went to grad school, pursued theater, acting in films, a performance practice, and a visual arts practice—all at the same time. We have met each other repeatedly along our respective paths. Danielle has always reminded me of the pivot, and how crucial it is to stay flexible and malleable in one’s artistic practice. This text that I am writing for Danielle comes after her own language. This is purposeful and due to our relationship as friends and as artistic collaborators. We have worked together for well over a decade and because of this 10

dynamic and how our respective practices meet, I wanted to come after her language. Working with Danielle on this solo exhibition was nothing short of a reckoning. I returned to the concept of mounting in our conversations, which arose thematically as a connector of the form Danielle has embarked on with the lenticularities and her film CHOR(E)S. These works, so deeply interior, allow one to think deeply about the multiplicity of selves that can reside in a single figure. The stretching and breaking of the figure. Mounting as possession and how the body bends to allow the spirit to take hold, briefly and with force. CHOR(E)S demonstrates a performative critique of the rigor of domestic labor with conflict and repetition at play. The body, the shoulders bouncing, the head reversed and the hair as a cover. As an actress/performer, most of Danielle’s practice revolves

around various stages or states of preparation in the practice of mounting and being mounted. She is a vessel of possession in her art-making and her mastery of method-based performance is often so in depth that it can require days to transition out of. For the lenticularities, there is the mounting of the self with the self. On top of the self—layers upon layers of obfuscation and embellishment. The allowance of relating to the lens of the eye of the audience in stasis and motion. What does it mean to look at over 200 selves and know that it is all inside of you as one whole? Through the ritual of this work Danielle allowed herself to create a document of mounting. It's the document of spirit, the document of her occupying herself. As an actress/performer/artist you must occupy many things, you have to let ideas occupy you, as a form of mediumship. I've known

Danielle as a medium. I've seen her be mounted many times, yet I still understand and can see where she is located as her true self within the midst of it all. Danielle is presenting her selves, her practice as actress/artist/performer, and her refusal to hide. I often wonder how there must be something that she has to, in many ways, let forever go to be able to perform? 72, it really is about the texture for me and the fact of the cool mouth. 91, it goes down, down, down. You show the base image. Whatever that base means. The most obscured image. Do you know what I mean? 111, it's just so deeply strange, the color. That pink. The beauty. There are ugly parts, dark parts as the desired figuration. 129, it's brutal. 193, it’s the image behind you. 204, it's the eyes for me, and the hair. It's the smoke. 214, I don't know how you got the white to do what that does up 11

against the photocopy. It is moving, like you caught somebody. You know? And just that confrontation. It is gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous, and terrifying. Just that idea of the white. I have a fascination about white, the haunting. But this is something else. 216, because it terrifies me. It is what spirit looks like. I don't know if you ever saw the film ‘Biutiful’ with Javier Bardem. It really looks like that. Up on the ceiling and clinging to corners. The way the spirit exists like there's a light storm over the face of the skin. 230, there's something on your forehead. It says connection. The eyes, and again that line. This work is personal, it is private, it is hard, and what it confronts often goes unspoken. It is her life, and the privacy that must be demanded to ensure that must be firm. The lenticularities and CHOR(E)S portend reclamation, as the image of the self is the one that is delivered by her hand. This re-figuring is the ultimate image by virtue of intersubjective interpretation.

Tiona Nekkia McClodden [she/ her] is a visual artist, filmmaker, and curator whose work explores and critiques issues at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and social commentary. McClodden’s interdisciplinary approach traverses documentary film, experimental video, sculpture, and sound installations. Most recently, her work has explored the themes of re-memory and narrative biomythography. Her works have been shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia); the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and MoMA PS1 (New York); Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin); MOCA (Los Angeles); and MCA (Chicago). Most recently, she is the recipient of the 2021-2023 Princeton Arts Fellowship, a Bucksbaum Award for her work in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, among others. In 2017-18, she curated A Recollection. + Predicated. as a part of the multi-artist retrospective Julius Eastman: That Which is Fundamental, exhibited in Philadelphia and New York. Her writing has been featured on the Triple Canopy platform, in Artforum, Cultured Magazine, Art21 Magazine, and many other publications. Tiona lives and works in North Philadelphia, PA and is the Founder + Director of Philadelphia-based Conceptual Fade, a micro-gallery and library space centering Black thought + artistic production.

lenticularities, 2017-2020 Inkjet paper, acrylic, oil pastels, candles, hair, tape, spray-paint, candle wax Dimensions variable

PAGES 14-23 lenticularities, 2017-2020 Inkjet paper, acrylic, oil pastels, candles, hair, tape, spray-paint, candle wax Dimensions variable

¡Se Buscan Testigos! [Looking for Witnesses!], 2020 Documentation of happening Dimensions variable Photo by Paula Cury

EMERGE AS IT MUST. Bryn Evans this must be the spook house another song with no singers lyrics/no voices & interrupted solos unseen performances —Ntozake Shange for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf after Danielle Deadwyler runnin ‘round the house nekkid I cut out the light. then ducked cross the hall to the bathroom fore my other selves could catch the blurred sight of my shoulders fallin offa my back n out the bedroom door. poolin onto white porcelain, my cheeks, cool, hung off the sides n puckled where the fat pressed my skin. easy. until my arms came heavy until my arms cut out the light 24

grew light, like mirrors, or crude

wings, i cut out the light n I cut the rug. did you see me dancin? me on that rug, me on those walls, bouncin the way I was, light offa my back lit…you’da thought I was God runnin nekkid ‘round my garden, growin things. cuttin out the light up outta the face of the deep, the core of us, sinkin I saw myself from round the corner n I couldn’t read her face or the one on top of the staircase shook so much the house shook with her. so much I wonder if bein God mean lookin at myself n wonderin whether I should be sad or scared. but did you see me dancin? bouncin the way I was like mirrors, growin things up outta my blurred selves, they pooled, puckled, tired faces of the deep, a chorus n I cut out the light fore they could catch it peekin through the lens of my hallowed eye

a reliance on sonic expectation, A lithe Black woman stands while the reverb warps the audio, dressed in a dark blue skirt that forcing a re-evaluation of the brushes her toes. Her blouse, lyrics. The System's sexy synthpop tucked-in at the waist, blends in ballad morphs into a blaring alarm; with the room’s blue-green walls. Beyoncé’s “Run the World (Girls)” She stands apart from and a part of the scene. Body still, her angled is pared down to a blunt two-word question: who run? arms echo the chair’s arched wooden backing, the half-a-heart CHOR(E)S (read as ‘CHORES' of the coffee mug handles. Her or ‘CHORUS') depicts a chaos hair, glossy black body waves, is of removal as the film's objecta veil over her face, like ebony turned-subject resurfaces through window blinds twisted shut. Her the repurposing of language, clothing marks her as a fixture of the house, or as the domicile itself, the repurposing of flaw. The film the room personified. A white light functions as a clarion call for 232 flashes. The house begins to shake. lenticularities—taken together as one work—a chorus of selfportraits that act as harbingers of Danielle Deadwyler’s self-making. Deadwyler considers CHOR(E)S begins in a blue “flaw” to be that which is “is out of dining room, where a pendant order. Not a negation, however, light above the kitchen table what is an aberration. The lead warms a dim scene. Deadwyler into chaos. The miniscule inviting choreographs her body inside us into grand majuscule,” she tells this Atlanta home to make plain me via our email exchange. the weight of domestic work, which falls disproportionately In this way, Object-Subject: Flaw is on the bodies of Black women the Only Recourse positions three and femmes—a measure of social bodies of work—CHOR(E)S; 232 stratification underscored by antilenticularities; and 3 lenticularities Blackness and heteropatriarchy. posters overlaid with text from An experimental reckoning, the 1881 Atlanta Washerwoman CHOR(E)S depicts the exhausting Manifesto—together as they nature of this labor. Deadwyler perform a distinct choreography. moves in isolated, repetitive Flaw as the loose thread that actions that disrupt the calm, unassuming rooms in the film. Her results in the body’s unraveling, the pull that makes the fabric shoulders bounce vigorously as come undone. a chopped ‘n screwed version of "Don’t Disturb This Groove” begins During our conversation, to play, each repetitive movement Deadwyler describes her accented by a don’t disturb, don lenticularities as “the ‘us’s in don don, dis dis dis, don disturb. conversation, dialogues across The incorporation of a chopped time and space on what we have ‘n screwed soundscape adds to rendered as flaw, and how we the film’s uncanny feel. Skipped have transfigured it, transmuted it beats, exaggerated stop-times, into power…Everything is plural. and record scratching prevent 26

Repetition yields inevitable shifts.” lenticularities bear the breath of admonition. Deadwyler augments Produced over the span of three a limited number of portraits years in three different locations, the lenticularities reflect the artist’s with text from the 1881 Atlanta Washerwoman Manifesto. In July journey through great personal of that year, twenty-four Black changes, across what Deadwyler laundresses convened at a local calls “an era of transgression.” church, where they founded the The word ‘lenticularity’ is a poem Washing Society. In three weeks, itself. It stems from the shape of the group of twenty-four had an eye lens: a biconvex lens, a grown to three thousand through reflection atop another reflection. door-to-door canvassing and The lenticularity represents the expanding support from Black self across multiple planes, a church congregations. The women phenomenon that yields the peculiar terror of becoming lost to demanded greater autonomy for their labor and increased wages: one’s own image. In this way, the one dollar per pound of laundry. word and the portraits that bear its name embrace a reality in which The strike catalyzed labor disputes among other domestic workers in the self can bend across time and the city, effectively dispelling any space, one in which the artist can doubt regarding the indispensable alchemize the terror in the shifts, nature of Black women’s domestic or the flaws accumulated in the work in the city. portraits, to yield multitudes of selfhood. The exhibition’s invocation of the washerwoman's strike and The lenticularities do not focus manifesto is multivalent. Ghosts into one single image—they represent converging perspectives fill the rooms depicted in CHOR(E)S. Deadwyler’s across years of self-making. This jerking resembles the body aversion to convergence, or the of someone possessed. She failed/flawed attempt, yields the moves, encumbered by a weight aberration, which is where the exhibition takes shape.1 That which invisible to the viewer’s eye. is perceived as flaw is where the Could the repetitive act also be resolve resides. Where there is a summoning? Could her body’s rejection of labor’s rituals also aberration, light peeks through. Thus, it is through the lenticularities, be a centuries-old rebuke? In the through Deadwyler’s serial film, viewers look on as a silent performativity, that the possibilities Deadwyler lurches and heaves. within the shifts, within the flaws, Her clarion call bellows out from the mouths of the lenticularities— emerges. “That which terrifies should not be controlled,” she tells the washerwomen’s manifesto, me, “it should just be allowed to survived in the portraits, reckons with the weight of another burden, emerge as it must.” a familiar load. And they talk Witnesses to the domestic tension back, gesturing to the bell hooks seeping through the scenes text and quote from which the exhibition derives its name: “It is of CHOR(E)S, a selection of 27

This text was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICAUSA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers How does one move through that? with art critic mentors appointed Deadwyler posits over Zoom. by AICA to produce original Through the flaw. Learning that essays on a specific exhibiting the flaw is power. And that was artist. Please visit aicausa.org for the experience of the time…from more information on AICA-USA, being one who has been or was or cueartfoundation.org to learn done to, to the one doing. Through how to participate in this program. No part of this essay may be a decolonized understanding of the things I possessed—all of them. reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s * Coordinator for the program this season. that act of speech, of ‘talking back,’ that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of our movement from object to subject— the liberated voice.”2

1 “Aberration” [Optics]: The failure of (reflected or refracted) rays of light to converge to a focus; a defect in an optical system leading to such a failure. OED Online, Oxford University Press, 2021 (accessed September 3, 2021). 2 bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989), 9.

* Bryn Evans is a writer, artist, and curator based in Decatur, Georgia. She situates her work within Black feminist theory and performance, with a focus on Southern Black geographies and vernacular poetics. Evans earned her BA in African American & African Diaspora Studies and Art History from Columbia University. * Mentor Jessica Lynne is a writer and art critic. She is a founding editor of ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Art in America, The Believer, Frieze, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2020 Research and Development award from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and a 2020 Arts Writer Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation.

CUE Art Foundation is a visual arts center dedicated to creating essential career and educational opportunities for artists of all ages. Through exhibitions, arts education, and public programs, CUE provides artists, writers, and audiences with sustaining, meaningful experiences and resources. CUE’s exhibition program aims to present new and exceptionally strong work by under-recognized and emerging artists based in the United States, and is committed to exhibiting work of all disciplines. Exhibiting artists are selected via a hybrid process, featuring solo exhibitions curated by established artists alongside a series of solo and group exhibitions selected by an annual Open Call. In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, curators and Open Call panelists also serve as mentors to the exhibiting artists, providing support throughout the process of developing their exhibition. We are honored to work with the artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden as the nominator of and curator-mentor to Danielle Deadwyler.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS Amanda Adams-Louis Theodore S. Berger Kate Buchanan Marcy Cohen Blake Horn Thomas K.Y. Hsu Steffani Jemison John S. Kiely Vivian Kuan Rachel Maniatis Aliza Nisenbaum Kyle Sheahen Lilly Wei Gregory Amenoff, Emeritus

ADVISORY COUNCIL Polly Apfelbaum Katie Cercone Lynn Crawford Ian Cooper Michelle Grabner Eleanor Heartney Trenton Doyle Hancock Pablo Helguera Paddy Johnson Deborah Kass Sharon Lockhart Juan Sánchez Lilly Wei Andrea Zittel Irving Sandler (in memoriam)

STAFF Corina Larkin Executive Director Beatrice Wolert-Weese Deputy Director Lilly Hern-Fondation Programs Director Sharmistha Ray Development Manager Gillian Carver Programs & Communications Coordinator Cara Erdman Development Coordinator

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Still from CHOR(E)S, 2020 Film, 12 minutes 59 seconds

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