Things in Themselves: Artists in Residence 2012-13

Artists in Residence 2012–13 Steffani Jemison, Jennifer Packer, Cullen Washington Jr. The Studio Museum in Harlem

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Things in Themselves

Lauren Haynes, Assistant Curator

At first glance, the artworks of the Studio Museum’s 2012–13 artists in residence in Things in Themselves may seem to have little in common.

Steffani Jemison (b. 1981) creates photo-based projections, Jennifer Packer (b. 1984) makes intimate representational paintings, Cullen Washington Jr. (b. 1972) paints large-scale abstract canvases. But a closer look reveals that all three artists are invested in the process of art-making and technique. Whether exploring fragile and delicate materials, developing a deeper understanding of painting, or creating systems and networks of materials and objects, these artists are interested not only in the ideas behind the works, but in the things in themselves.

Informed by an interest in literature, Steffani Jemison creates video, performance and photobased works that often use language and narrative as foundations for complex conceptual investigations. During her residency at the Studio Museum, Jemison has continued her ongoing exploration of materiality and permanence. For the past several years, she has created works on acetate, a translucent and fragile material used to make transparencies.

Jemison’s newest acetate works respond to the space of the studio itself. In preparation for Superstorm Sandy, the Museum’s Building and Operations staff taped the windows of the artists-in-residence studios—forming an “X” on the glass—to prevent damage. In the months after the storm, Jemison took photographs of the street through the windows, which resulted in layered images that experiment with light, shadow, surfaces, depth and perspective. With this series of works, Jemison situates herself among many former Studio Museum artists in residence who were drawn to the space of their studios, 125th Street and the cultural and political history of Harlem.

Jennifer Packer is a representational painter deeply engaged in the process of painting. She has a strong interest in and an encyclopedic knowledge of its history and lineages. Packer considers her painting a private process. Not just because her subjects are often friends or herself, but, as she tells Sarah Lewis in an interview in this brochure, “It makes it easier to stick with them. It allows me to keep making them. It’s very easy to think through and past

a painting so that it never gets made. The perspective of being private helps.” Packer’s oeuvre contains images of repeated subjects; she will paint the same friend or the same stack of boxes repeatedly for months or even years, discovering the myriad of possibilities in the most everyday scenes. She also will return some time later to finish a painting that to the viewer seemed complete.

Cullen Washington Jr., creates large-scale abstract paintings on canvas. Washington incorporates assemblage and collage techniques, using found materials, images of his own creation and consumer goods. Continually interested in broadening the idea of abstraction, he is able to find creativity and life in even the most mundane and pedestrian materials. As Aimee Walleston writes in this brochure: “The artist didn’t go out of his way to find interesting things. He went out of his way to make the simple things one finds in life interesting.

He picked things up off the floor, scraped together stuff from around his studio, and alchemized these elements into motion.”

While Jemison, Packer and Washington have exhibited work at the Studio Museum in the past— all three participated in The Bearden Project (2011– 12) and Fore (2012–13)—Things in Themselves allows for an in-depth look at a larger selection of their works, and at the developments they’ve made in the studio over the last year.

Things in Themselves is the latest in the series of exhibitions featuring work by the three emerging artists who have been awarded year-long residencies at the Studio Museum. The Artist-in-Residence program is at the core of the Studio Museum’s mission; it gives the institution its name. Since the Museum’s founding in 1968, more than 100 artists in residence have created and shown work in the Museum’s studios and galleries. Among the program’s alumni are some of the most renowned artists working today, including Sanford Biggers, Leonardo Drew, David Hammons, Leslie Hewitt, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Wangechi Mutu, Alison Saar, Mickalene Thomas, Nari Ward and Kehinde Wiley. This exhibition maintains the Museum’s commitment to highlighting new artistic talent and voices, and continues the Museum’s core mission and vital tradition.

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Front Cover:

Back Cover:

Jennifer Packer Structure, 2013 Photo: Marc Bernier

Steffani Jemison Study for Untitled (X), 2013 C-print, 12 x 8 inches Courtesy the artist

Inside Front Cover:

Cullen Washington Jr. Untitled # 6 (Mondrian), 2013 Photo: Marc Bernier

Inside Back Cover:

Cullen Washington Jr. Untitled #4 (Blue), 2013 Courtesy the artist

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Artists in Residence 2012–13 Steffani Jemison, Jennifer Packer, Cullen Washington Jr. The Studio Museum in Harlem This publication was organized on the occasion of the exhibition Things in Themselves at The Studio Museum in Harlem, July 18–October 27, 2013.

The Artist-in-Residence program and brochure are supported by the National Endowment for the Arts; New York State Council for the Arts, a state agency; Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; Jerome Foundation; Robert Lehman Foundation; New York Community Trust; and by endowments established by the Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Trust and Andrea Frank Foundation.

Things in Themselves was organized

by Lauren Haynes, Assistant Curator.

This publication was produced by Elizabeth Gwinn, Communications Manager; Lauren Haynes; Jamillah James, Communications Coordinator; and Monique Long, Curatorial Fellow.

Designed by Alex Lin, Studio Lin Copyedited by Jessica Lott Artists’ portraits by Paul Mpagi Sepuya Printing by Cosmos Communications ©2013 The Studio Museum in Harlem

The Studio Museum in Harlem 144 W. 125th Street New York, NY 10027 studiomuseum.org

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Binoculars

Lauren Haynes, Assistant Curator

Andrew Blackley

When an artist works in sequence, as Steffani Jemison does, two things regularly occur. First, objects are situated in a determined, purposeful relationship to one another. Second, at the completion of each sequence, that part of the sequence is distinguished by a conceptual break. The components of a sequence, different from the components of a series, depend on an associative relationship for completion. Any individual component cannot assume full responsibility for the entirety of the project.

Yet each component carries within it the structure of the sequence, elements of, and conduits to the adjacent parts. The relationship of part to part is not only important to the project, it is the project.

A particularly clear example of these relationships is exemplified by Jemison’s performative production You Completes Me (2012). Lines of text excerpted from “street fiction novels,” and in their new incarnation (alternately referred to as a poem or script), are composited to mimic the narrative structure of this fictive genre. Rather than representing a collective voice, each line within the composite text represents the particular unnamed place from where it was culled. Each line is both an extension of the original source, as well as reflective of its own current displacement. Each of these lines has a particular tone. Each line, explicitly or by implication, carries the context of the paragraph from which it was removed. If there was foreshadowing in the original text, these future narrative occurrences may or may not be revealed later within the performance of You Completes Me.

Now, let’s consider the relationship between sequences. Each of the lines of text in You Completes Me carries its own marker of time; for example, the date of the novel’s publication or the time period in which the plot occurs and at what point in that plot the selected text comes from. Each line continues to maintain its relational position to time and to the reader. In experiencing the artwork’s poem (or script), there is a once-removed relationship that must be contended with, one that is also a simultaneous accounting of multiple time placements.

Steffani Jemison 2

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Steffani Jemison's studio Photo: Marc Bernier

Steffani Jemison

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Left and Right Untitled (X), 2013 Courtesy the artist

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Steffani Jemison

Now, let’s consider the relationship between artist and sequences. Rather than employing popular contemporary strategies to discuss Jemison’s work—for example: reperformance, reenactment, research-based practice, and artistic engagement with history—let’s instead think through the forms and structures of her artworks and related projects.

Doing so allows us, as an audience, to develop an alternative language with which to engage with her work, and to develop alternative positions, such as reconstitution, orbit, description, readership, disguise, etc. Assembled from incongruent grammars, You Completes Me is a multivalent creative work presented and received as narrative. First presented at perFOREmance, in conjunction with the exhibition Fore, the text was read by Houston-based Autumn Knight. Should Knight be considered reader, performer or narrator? What are the varying implications for those of us in the audience?

Regardless of our position, be it in the gallery, the library, or a seat in the theater, Jemison is keen on drawing our attention to ourselves. Are we the witness or the recipient? Do these narratives describe us or are they written for us? Perhaps both, and perhaps she also ascribes to us the role she navigates herself, as artist. In using strategies of narration to explore the boundaries of narrativization, she is exploring the limits of the descriptive process.

While the tenor, thematic selections, and conceptualization of her projects can be recognized as adjacent to one another, to assume a ready chronology (2009, 2010, 2011, etc.) as a suggestion of progression seems inappropriate. A better metric for reading the “narrative” of Jemison’s work is the varying speeds and editorial sense of time at which each of the projects operate: Same Time (2012) and Maniac Chase (2008) are chronologically adjacent, but as with You Completes Me, they have their own internal semantic structure. If we can continue to use You Completes Me as a “key”: when read aloud, the emphasis on any individual word remains distinct.

Collectively, Jemison’s projects tend to be structured “conically”—as defined by philosopher Henri Bergson—as in a procedural and volumetric state of process or movement of memory, one that competes with the model of a functioning, converting, translating membrane. Individually compared—in following the direction of the cone—her artworks alternate direction, rather than being exclusively internalizing (or, for that matter, externalizing). They are both speculative and revisionist but rarely both; the perspective of the viewer is predetermined, either expanding in scope from a single point or contracting to a single point. In photographic artworks, Jemison metaphorically and materially utilizes the monocular and as a

result, we viewers are faced with the planar, including its determined extrapolated perspective. In other projects, such as Alpha’s Bet Is Not Over Yet (2011–12), the specific points of access are selfselected by the viewer.

A new period is upon us, which the artwork seems to be aware of. Under the threat of inclement weather, the windows of the artist’s studio were taped. The tape, running corner to corner, forms a large “X.” Jemison then photographed the view from her window, at once depicting the outside, and the tape itself. The tape makes it apparent that the photographs are taken through a window.

These photographs are combined to create the artwork, simultaneously presenting multiple views, camera positions, and multiple “X”s.

As a result, we are faced with multiple perspectives in a single artwork. The viewer can oscillate in choosing which perspective to align with, and this choice will effectually negate the options not selected. In selecting one view and negating the other, we posit the real here and the symbolic there. Viewers are razed with the options and effects of seeing that or seeing as. We can entertain both options as equally true despite their individual assertion to nullify one another.

With previous exhibitions of the artist’s, this is an option that is repeatedly suggested. For example, Jemison describes on her website the following exhibition: “The exhibition title Same Time (2013) refers to the artist’s reprisal of a speech delivered in 1970 by Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton that has been reinterpreted by Brooklynbased R&B group SideTrack Boyz as a vocal improvisation.” Reprise, reinterpretation, reprisal: each are corrective terms, and each signify a “redoing,” a doing better. Each can be interpreted as updating, or improving upon, the previous. This raises politicized questions regarding the implications of translation, commonality and access; at what point do we separate utility and revision? We’re forced to straddle the fence, and in doing so become dual viewers, somewhere between here and there, that and as, poem and script, Autumn Knight and Steffani Jemison.

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Steffani Jemison b. 1981, Berkeley, California

Education 2009 MFA Studio Art, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL 2008 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME 2003 BA Comparative Literature,

magna cum laude, Columbia University, New York, NY

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Solo and Collaborative Exhibitions

2009 Gained In Translation, Eel Space, Chicago, IL

MFA Thesis Exhibition, Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, IL 2008 Wight Biennial 2008: Collaboration as Process and Form, UCLA New Wight Gallery,

Los Angeles, CA

(n.) those that from a distance resemble flies, Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, IL 2007 Carking It, Penrose Gallery, Elkins Park, PA

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2013 Steffani Jemison: New Work, Bindery Projects, Minneapolis, MN

Alpha’s Bet Is Not Over Yet Awards, Grants, Residencies

(collaboration with Jamal

Cyrus), Juxtaposition Arts, 2013 Artist in residence, Hermitage Artist

Minneapolis, MN Retreat, FL

Same Time, LA><ART, 2012 Artist in residence, The Studio Los Angeles, CA Museum in Harlem, New York, NY 2012 Alpha’s Bet Is Not Over Yet

Artist in residence, Denniston Hill

(collaboration with Jamal Artist Colony, NY

Cyrus), Royal Danish Academy

Nominee, American Academy in

of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, Berlin Prize, Germany

Denmark

Artist in the Marketplace, Bronx

Such is your luck, Real Art Ways, Museum of Art, NY

Hartford, CT

Van Lier Fellowship, International 2011 Museum as Hub: Steffani Jemison Studio and Curatorial Program, NY and Jamal Cyrus: Alpha’s Bet 2011 Ann Plato Fellowship, Trinity College, Is Not Over Yet, New Museum CT

of Contemporary Art, New York, 2010 Artist in residence, Project Row NY Houses, TX

Artist in residence, The Wassaic Project, NY 2009 Core Program Artist in residence, Selected Group Exhibitions Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX 2008 Skowhegan School of Painting and 2013 AIM Biennial, Bronx Museum of Sculpture Scholarship, ME Art, New York, NY

The School of the Art Institute of 2012 Fore, The Studio Museum in Chicago Skowhegan Matching Harlem, New York, NY

Scholarship

The Bearden Project, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY 2007 Flaherty Philadelphia Fellowship, Flaherty Foundation

Resonance and Repetition, 2003 Phi Beta Kappa, Columbia University

Elizabeth Foundation for the Chapter Arts, New York, NY 2011 Material Difference, The McKinney 2001 Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellowship Avenue Contemporary, Dallas, TX

Hang in There, Co-Prosperity Sphere, Chicago, IL

CORE Artist-in-Residence Exhibition, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX 2010 A Vague Whole, Spaces Gallery, Cleveland, OH

This Means War, Unspeakable Projects, San Francisco, CA

CORE Artist-in-Residence Exhibition, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX

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Steffani Jemison's studio Photo: Marc Bernier

Steffani Jemison

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Jennifer Packer's studio Photo: Marc Bernier

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Jennifer Packer

The Endurance and Privacy in Mastery

Sarah Lewis

I walked into Jennifer Packer’s studio and saw an anomaly of a painting hanging up on the wall, a self-portrait with the direct gaze of intense self-possession. Her work has long had a meditative stillness that feels active, as if she has slowed down thought, air, sounds, so that her sitters’ movements, inner and outward, can be felt. Yet this was a painting of unvarnished clarity, the kind she said she never would have made unless she believed she was painting it solely for herself. She had been hiding it. I was the first to see this work, the kind you can only make when you’re relaxed enough with yourself to sustain a gaze upon yourself and render it truthfully.“I was thinking a lot about my feet dangling, both in my work and in the studio

in general,” she said about her compositional decision.

It was a way for her to talk about control, she offered, an indication of how she actually feels in her studio.

What follows is one of our many exchanges about her process in that space, how Packer creates paintings that load meaning into a line and radiance into the light of the canvas.

Jennifer Packer : I’ve noticed that I make different types of paintings. I’m allowing them to happen as they happen. I’ve been painting for about ten years now, and when I first started painting—for the first five or six years, the value was in the investment, not solely in the time spent, but in terms of integrity. If you are working on a painting for one or two years, you have to really want it. Now, I’m acknowledging that I can work on paintings for one sitting and let them live, seeing their value as separate objects, instead of trying to make them come together. Last time we spoke, we talked about the idea that I’m not invested in a thesis, but an attitude, and that some paintings are outliers. I have to repeatedly confirm that each painting’s difference is of value, and not be jarred by the shift.

My investment in this painting [Packer points to an untitled painting in process] has been very important, and I’m allowing myself to make adjustments as slowly as I need to. In fact, none of these paintings are really finished. So in terms of our conversation about mastery, and the unfinished quality

Jennifer Packer 9

of the long-haul pursuit, I’m allowing myself the time to get it right. I’m learning how to maintain my energy over time so I don’t get tired out by the struggle of the painting. For example, I’m very invested in anatomy, but my relationship to Matisse renders anatomy unimportant. I get exhausted sometimes just fixing an arm, which I know could just be a blob of paint.

Sar ah Le wis : In your portraits, faces and bodies are not identities, as you’ve told me, but represent a kind of “activity, or inactivity, as relating to one’s purpose.” You capture arrested moments that point to an inner life, where you can see all of what has come and what is to come.

JP : I like the moment that isn’t necessarily a moment, but a pause. I think a lot about Da Vinci’s Last Supper [1495–98], particularly the moment when the salt has been knocked over. Or the Pierro della Francesca painting of the baby Jesus on Madonna’s lap [Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels (1460–70)]. She’s holding a flower, and you feel her pulling away, but she’s also reaching. There’s something really moving about it. I’ve never seen a Madonna and Child articulated that way, where very specific actions have been frozen.

SL : The way you situate bodies in space seems to conjure up an invented geography. Your investment in anatomy is often counterbalanced by deliberately abstract space. I first noticed it in a crit at Yale discussing a work that suggested J.M.W. Turner’s painting The Slave Ship from 1840. Your paintings suggest a location that the viewer has seen, but now can’t quite place. The paintings are rooted, but each provides small signals that indicate this is a world of imagination. Some of the eyes in your figures convey medial vision—they are seeing into another world, not the one right in front of them. You handle bodies in this invented space so distinctly, and much of that is done through color.

JP : Picasso’s relationship to difference—well, Picasso and Matisse—where the black line is this defining moment, that’s where I feel I come from.

I’m invested in establishing drawing line on ground.

But in some paintings, I’m asking something else of myself, that things become diffuse or broken apart by light or paint. It’s tough because I’ve also been recognizing Manet’s investment in plasticity, which has been so strong, from Picasso to Guston. My investment in Manet is in this kind of plasticity, which is now starting to feel flat.

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I’ve been trying to see the range of a color, how expressive one color can be. It was a practical decision, but it had a huge effect on the paintings. I get stuck on a color, and whatever I feel its strength is.

So the green-gold has light, but it also has particular meaning.

SL : Color is often loaded to convey identity through a range of shades that deal with racial typographies. But what does it mean to get so far away from color-as-identity such that a figurative color can become a mauve, or a lavender, as if to say, you can’t look at this figure and only consider identity, you have to consider the full spectrum in the world.

JP : I’m allowing myself to have what I think is a very colorful, varied palette. I also want to shift the focus away from the hands as representing the entire image. I like that an underrepresented part of the body could be very active, like an ankle, which creates support for the rest of the body.

SL : Are you shifting this focus to underrepresented parts of the body to get away from the face as identity?

JP : Yes, even though a face is one of the first things I connect with in general.

SL : I wonder if you imagine that portraits will be part of your practice for a long time.

JP : Yes. In our last conversation I mentioned that I was frustrated by their reception and collection or potential collection. Getting back to privacy, that’s where I’d like them to stay, at least in terms of the attitude. It makes it easier to stick with them.

It allows me to keep making them. It’s very easy to think through and past a painting so that it never gets made. The perspective of being private helps.

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Let Me Not, 2013 Photo: Marc Bernier

Jennifer Packer

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Eric, 2013 Photo: Marc Bernier

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Jennifer Packer

Loss in Translation, 2013 Photo: Marc Bernier

Jennifer Packer

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Stacking, 2013 Photo: Marc Bernier

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Jennifer Packer

Jennifer Packer b. 1984, Philadelphia, PA

Education 2012 MFA Painting and Printmaking, Yale University, New Haven, CT 2007 BFA Painting and Drawing, Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Elkins Park, PA 2005 Temple University, Rome, Italy

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Group Exhibitions 2012 Fore, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY

The Bearden Project, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY

MFA Thesis Exhibition, Green Gallery, New Haven, CT 2009 The Philadelphia Story, Raritan Valley Community College, Branchburg, NJ

The Philadelphia Story, Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA 2007 April 27, Art Making Machine Studios, Philadelphia, PA 2006 Will You Please Stop Talking, Please,

Tyler Gallery, Elkins Park, PA

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Awards, Grants, Residencies 2012 Artist in residence, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY

Nomination for the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant, NY 2011 Robert Schoelkopf Memorial Traveling Fellowships, Yale University, CT

Gamblin Paint Prize, Yale University, CT 2007 Senior Painting Prize, Tyler School of Art, Temple University, PA

Packer

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Cullen Washington Jr.

Aimee Walleston

Let’s say there’s an atom that sits at the top of your brain. First, it travels to your tongue. You go to speak, and this atom shies away and hides in the back of your throat. It scuttles down your windpipe, and rests in the shallow of your stomach churning everything up. Then it starts hopping up each of your vertebrae, climbing your spine as if it were a spiral staircase. The atom makes a detour, finding its way into your chest—now there’s a frightened atom, caught right in your heart.

Your heart pushes it out, wants none of it, so this atom travels to your hands, your feet, your voice.

Everyone makes something different with this atom,

this problem, this perpetual thing. Symphonies, sonnets, sculptures, sacrifices. Some combination thereof. Whatever this unspeakable atom wants us to do, we do. The action it demands might be called “the atomic gesture.” Cullen Washington, Jr.’s atomic gesture is in creating shapes that move. His shapes fly up, down and around the room. They race around the walls like superheroes, capes flying. They sparkle in and fade out. They hide; they burst loose.

His work is about the motion we feel inside but can’t really speak about.

The movement in Washington’s wall pieces invites you, the viewer, in—then it tosses you around.

A multimedia work he made in 2012, Blue, combines canvas, tape, tarp and paint into a bricolage structure that demands you step inside—it is an open doorway that resists two-dimensionality. A blue tarp stretching out onto the floor forms the base of the piece, providing a runway to the interior of the work. Once inside, you’re caught in grid of greyscale shadows, screens, scaffolding and collapsing trap doors. These rectangular forms appear to be windows. You want to reach your hand through them, to the other side. But instead of letting you through, the piece suddenly lifts you up—now you’re zooming up this wall of windows like Spiderman. At the very top appears a slice of blue, and a white cloud leading to a hole in the sky.

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Cullen Washington Jr.'s studio Photo: Marc Bernier

Cullen Washington Jr.

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Untitled #8 (Red), 2013 Courtesy the artist

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Cullen Washington Jr.

When I visited his studio, Washington talked with me about his interest in science. We discussed how atoms repel one another, and that every atom is in constant motion—even the nucleus of the atom is in motion. Nothing in our world is ever truly stable, and nothing ever really touches.

On the wall in Washington’s studio is a piece Untitled #6 (Mondrian) (2013) that’s about this kind of explosive gesture. A black rectangle—a starless cosmos—creates a backdrop for another riff of rectangular forms to push their way beyond two-dimensionality, into the space of the viewer.

Composed of paper and tape, in shades of black, white and grey (with a punk little hot-pink middle finger poking out at the top), these scattered shapes create their own Big Bang. The work says, “Break through. Go beyond where others have been.”

Washington used canvas, tape and swatches of found material for this body of work. The artist didn’t go out of his way to find interesting things.

He went out of his way to make the simple things one finds in life interesting. He picked things up off the floor, scraped together stuff from around his studio, and alchemized these elements into motion.

Two large square pieces hung on the studio walls. Each work was going its own way. Untitled #8 (Red) (2013) runs left—horizontal and hard. Bright red acrylic coats the canvas. In the foreground are collaged materials: errant strips of tape, the flap of a black bike-messenger bag. Six enlarged blackand-white photocopies of a torn-open X-Acto knife package are added on top. Washington liked the shapes that formed when he tore the plastic bubble free from the cardboard, so he kept the empty package and used it. The bag’s flap sticks out of the canvas at the right, interrupting the entire structure of the piece. You think about a messenger, cutting through the streets, traveling as fast as possible.

The work says, “Time is running out. Go faster.”

The piece sitting next to this, Untitled #4 (Blue) (2013), says something else: “You’re not high enough. Jump higher.” Scraps of blue, washes of blue, more tape, more shapes, all crawling up the canvas. An errant book jacket clings to the bottom, grounding the piece in a logic it wants to leap away from. All signs point up, and yet small impish swatches of red and magenta say, in hushed voices, “Not just blue, not just up up up. Nothing important is ever so precise.”

Blue and red. These are our two states of America, our two atoms perpetually rubbing each other the wrong way. Maybe we don’t ever really touch. Our atoms can’t really connect. Maybe we need our atomic gestures to do that for us. We need them to touch the world for us, in a way we can’t.

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Cullen Washington Jr. b. 1972, Alexandria, Louisiana

Education 2010 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME 2009 MFA Studio Art, Tufts University/ School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA 1994 BA Graphic Design, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA

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Solo and Two-Person Exhibitions 2011 Cosmic Commentaries: Michiko Itatani and Cullen Washington Jr,

Dominican University,

River Forest, IL

Ceci n’est pas une Black History Month Show, Arthur M. Berger Art Gallery, Manhattanville College, Purchase, NY 2010 Hero’s Story, Bridgewater State College, MA 2009 Black Males, Heroes and Villains in the Art of Cullen Washington,

Museum of the National Center

of Afro-American Artists,

Boston, MA 2008 New Perspectives: Cullen Washington Jr., and Ernesto Cuevas, The Rialto Art Center, Atlanta, GA

Cullen Washington Jr., and James Taylor, Hammonds House Museum, Atlanta, GA

2009 Paint: Black on Canvas, African American Painters of Boston,

Bunker Hill College, Boston, MA

Clemson National Print and Drawing Exhibition: Principles and Perspectives in Progress, The Center for Visual Arts at Clemson University, Clemson, SC

MFA Thesis Exhibition, Aidekman

Arts Center, Tufts University, Medford, MA 2008 Black Creativity 2008, Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, IL

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Awards, Grants, Residencies

2012 Artist in residence, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY

Artist in residence, Rush Arts Gallery, NY

Artist in residence, NARS

(New York Art Residency and Studios Foundation), NY 2011 Artist in residence, Yaddo, NY 2010 Real Art Ways, Finalist STEP UP Emerging Artist Exhibition, CT 2009 Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant, NY

The Drawing Center Viewing Program, NY 2008 Creative Loafing, Critic’s Pick for Best Emerging Visual Artist of

Atlanta 2008

1st Place, Black Creativity 2008, Chicago Museum of Science and

Industry, IL 2007 Bartlett and Montague Travel Grant Selected Group Exhibitions 2002 Arts Ambassadors Emerging Artist Award, The Arts Council of 2012 Fore, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Greater Baton Rouge and La New York, NY Capitale Chapter of The Links Inc.

The Bearden Project, The Studio 5th Annual Tribute to Excellence Museum in Harlem, New York, NY

The deCordova Biennial, Ross Goodman deCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA 2011 “Superheroes,” 516 ARTS,

Albuquerque, NM

16th Annual International Juried Exhibition (Best in Show), Soho20 Chelsea, New York, NY 2010 Joan Mitchell MFA Award Group Show, CUE Foundation, New York, NY

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Untitled #7, 2013 Photo: Marc Bernier

Cullen Washington Jr.

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Cullen Washington Jr.'s studio Photo: Marc Bernier

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Writers Andrew Blackley Lives in New York where he works with artists, writers and archives.

Sarah Lewis Is a scholar, curator and author whose recently completed book, The Rise: Creativity, Mastery, and the Gift of Failure (Simon & Schuster, 2014), is a layered, story-driven investigation of the counterintuitive nature of the creative progress, exploring how innovation and discovery is spurred on by advantages gleaned from the improbable, the unlikely, and moments of possible failure. Her second book, on Frederick Douglass, photography, and American racial formation, is under contract with Harvard University Press. Her writing has been published widely, and she is also an active curator, having held positions at both Tate Modern and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

She received her BA from Harvard University, an M.Phil from Oxford University, and will receive her PhD from Yale University this year.

She is on faculty at Yale University School of Art in the MFA program and lives in New York City.

Aimee Walleston Is a writer and critic working in New York City.

She regularly contributes to Art in America and edits and publishes This Image, a journal for literature and images.

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Exhibition Checklist Steffani Jemison

Untitled (Projection), 2013 Inkjet print on acetate, gesso, hardware and custom panel 36 × 24 inches Courtesy the artist Steffani Jemison

Untitled (Projection), 2013 Inkjet print on acetate, gesso, hardware and custom panel 36 × 24 inches Courtesy the artist Steffani Jemison

Untitled (Projection), 2013 Inkjet print on acetate, gesso, hardware and custom panel 24 × 36 inches Courtesy the artist Steffani Jemison

Untitled (Projection), 2013 Inkjet print on acetate, gesso, hardware and custom panel 24 × 36 inches Courtesy the artist

Steffani Jemison

Untitled (X), 2013 Inkjet print on acetate, gesso, hardware and custom panel 36 × 24 inches Courtesy the artist Steffani Jemison

Untitled (X), 2013 Inkjet print on acetate, gesso, hardware and custom panel 24 × 26 inches Courtesy the artist Steffani Jemison

Untitled (X), 2013 Inkjet print on acetate, gesso, hardware and custom panel 36 × 24 inches Courtesy the artist Steffani Jemison

Untitled (X), 2013 Inkjet print on acetate, gesso, hardware and custom panel 24 × 36 inches Courtesy the artist Same Time, 2013 Two-channel sound installation TRT 02:45:00

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Exhibition Checklist Continued ↓

Steffani Jemison

Exhibition Checklist Steffani Jemison

Untitled (Projection), 2013 Inkjet print on acetate, gesso, hardware and custom panel 36 × 24 inches Courtesy the artist Steffani Jemison

Untitled (Projection), 2013 Inkjet print on acetate, gesso, hardware and custom panel 36 × 24 inches Courtesy the artist Steffani Jemison

Untitled (Projection), 2013 Inkjet print on acetate, gesso, hardware and custom panel 24 × 36 inches Courtesy the artist Steffani Jemison

Untitled (Projection), 2013 Inkjet print on acetate, gesso, hardware and custom panel 24 × 36 inches Courtesy the artist

Steffani Jemison

Untitled (X), 2013 Inkjet print on acetate, gesso, hardware and custom panel 36 × 24 inches Courtesy the artist Steffani Jemison

Untitled (X), 2013 Inkjet print on acetate, gesso, hardware and custom panel 24 × 26 inches Courtesy the artist Steffani Jemison

Untitled (X), 2013 Inkjet print on acetate, gesso, hardware and custom panel 36 × 24 inches Courtesy the artist Steffani Jemison

Untitled (X), 2013 Inkjet print on acetate, gesso, hardware and custom panel 24 × 36 inches Courtesy the artist Same Time, 2013 Two-channel sound installation TRT 02:45:00

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Exhibition Checklist Continued ↓

Steffani Jemison

Jennifer Packer

Jennifer Packer

Eric, 2013 Oil on canvas 19 × 17 inches Courtesy the artist

Stacking, 2013 Oil on canvas 8 × 7 inches Courtesy the artist

Jennifer Packer

Jennifer Packer

Ivan, 2013 Oil on canvas 24 × 36 inches Courtesy the artist

Untitled, 2013 Oil on canvas 10 × 18 inches Courtesy the artist

Jennifer Packer

Jennifer Packer

Let Me Not, 2013 Oil on canvas 12 × 16 inches Courtesy the artist

Untitled, 2013 Graphite on paper 8 1∕8 × 6 inches Courtesy the artist

Jennifer Packer

Jennifer Packer

Loss in Translation, 2013 Oil on canvas 42 × 54 inches Courtesy the artist

Untitled, 2013 Charcoal on paper 9 × 12 inches Courtesy the artist

Jennifer Packer

Jennifer Packer

For James II, 2013 Oil on canvas 48 × 72 inches Courtesy the artist

Untitled, 2013 Graphite on paper 8 × 10 inches Courtesy the artist

Jennifer Packer

Jennifer Packer

Structure, 2013 Oil on canvas 16 × 18 inches Courtesy the artist

Untitled, 2013 Charcoal on paper 9 1∕2 × 8 inches Courtesy the artist

Cullen Washington Jr.

Untitled #4 (Blue), 2013 Canvas, paper, tape and found materials 90 × 84 inches Courtesy the artist Cullen Washington Jr.

Untitled #5 (Line), 2013 Canvas, paper, tape and found materials 84 × 144 inches Courtesy the artist Cullen Washington Jr.

Untitled #6 (Mondrian), 2013 Canvas, paper and found materials 84 × 60 inches Courtesy the artist Cullen Washington Jr.

Untitled #7, 2013 Cardboard, paper and found materials 12 × 18 inches Courtesy the artist Cullen Washington Jr.

Untitled #8 (Red), 2013 Canvas, paper and found materials 84 × 84 inches Courtesy the artist