January 21 - February 9, 2024
From Texas Woman’s University:
“In partnership with the Denton Black Film Festival and curated by Vicki Meek, TWU Visual Arts present video works by Ja’Tovia Gary & Lauren Kelley. The exhibition will be on view in the East & West Galleries from January 21 through February 9th, 2024.
Join us for the opening reception on Saturday, January 27th from 2:00 to 5:00pm, with an artist talk moderated by curator Vicki Meek from 3:00 to 4:30pm. The opening reception is in conjunction with the Denton Black Film Festival weekend.
Learn more about DBFF opening weekend events, here:
www.dentonbff.com
ARTIST INFO:
LAUREN KELLEY is an interdisciplinary artist who employs a wry wit when commenting on matters of innocence, race, and girlhood. At the core of her practice is a series of short, stop-motion animated videos that combine clay-mation with her brown, plastic dolls. Dolls are Kelley’s vehicle for navigating the space between luxuries and necessities; sweet and unsavory sentiments; Black and non-black worlds.
Kelley’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France and the New Museum, New York, NY. Reviews of her work have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker and Art in America.
JA’TOVIA GARY is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist working across documentary, avant-garde video art, sculpture, and installation. The artist is deeply concerned with re-memory and employs a rigorous interrogation and apprehension of the archive in much of her work. She seeks to trouble notions of objectivity and neutrality in nonfiction storytelling by asserting a Black feminist subjectivity, and applies what scholar and cultural critic bell hooks terms “an oppositional gaze” as both maker and critical spectator of moving image works. Intimate, often personal, and politically charged, her works aim to unmask power and its influence on how we perceive and formulate reality. Gary’s films and installations serve as reparative gestures for the distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed. Black spiritual technologies, ancestral legacies, and the interiority of Black life often pull focus in Gary’s multivalent works.
The artist has exhibited at the Hammer Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1, Dallas Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Locarno Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Anthology Film Archives, Film at Lincoln Center, and Harvard Film Archives, among other spaces. She has received generous support from the Ford Foundation, Cinereach, Sundance Documentary Institute, and Field of Vision. Gary has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Creative Capital, and Field of Vision, and is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow. Ja’Tovia is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery in New York City, Galerie Frank Elbaz in Paris, and WME for Film & Television.
CURATOR / MODERATOR INFORMATION:
BIOGRAPHY
VICKI MEEK, born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a nationally recognized artist who has exhibited widely. Meek is in the permanent collections of the African American Museum in Dallas, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Indiana, Paul Quinn College in Dallas, Serie Art Project in Austin and Norwalk Community College in Norwalk, Connecticut. She was awarded three public arts commissions with the Dallas Area Rapid Transit Art Program and was co-artist on the largest public art project in Dallas, the Dallas Convention Center Public Art Project.
Meek was selected as one of ten national artists to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the Nasher Sculpture Center with the commissioning of a site-specific installation. Meek’s retrospective Vicki Meek: 3 Decades of Social Commentary opened in November 2019 at Houston Museum of African American Culture and marked the end of her concentrating solely on her installation practice as she moves into creating work using video as the primary medium. She dubs these new works video comments since they are no more than 8 minutes in length and are done in a series format.
Vicki Meek has been awarded a number of grants and honors including National Endowment for the Arts NFRIG Grant, Dallas Observer MasterMind Award, Dallas Museum of Art Otis and Velma Davis Dozier Travel Grant, Texas Black Filmmakers Mission Award, Women of Visionary Influence Mentor Award, Dallas Women’s Foundation Maura Award, nominated for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the African American Museum at Dallas A. Maceo Smith Award for Cultural Achievement and was selected as the 2021 Texas Artist of the Year by Art League of Houston.
In addition to having a studio practice, Vicki Meek is an independent curator and writes cultural criticism for Dallas Weekly with her blog Art & Racenotes and also wrote a monthly column, ARTiculate for TheaterJones, an online performing arts magazine.
Meek was an adjunct faculty member for UMass Arts Extension Program in Amherst, Massachusetts where she taught a course in Cultural Equity in the Arts. With over 40+ years of arts administrative experience that includes working as a senior program administrator for a state arts agency, a local arts agency and running a non-profit visual arts center, after 20 years, Vicki Meek retired in March 2016 as the Manager of the South Dallas Cultural Center in Dallas. She served on the board of National Performance Network/Visual Artists Network 2008-15 and was Chair from 2012-2014. In 2016, Meek was selected to be a Fellow in the Intercultural Leadership Institute and also became a Voting Member of Alternate Roots, a national artist service organization.
Vicki Meek currently spends time as Chief Operating Officer and Board Member of USEKRA: Center for Creative Investigation, a non-profit retreat for creatives in Costa Rica founded by internationally acclaimed performance artist Elia Arce. She is also Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson’s at-large appointment to the Arts and Culture Commission and the Public Art Committee. Meek is represented by Talley Dunn Gallery in Dallas, Texas.
#TWUevents #TWUvisualarts #texaswomansuniversity #txwomans”
Reception: January 27, 2024 | 2–5 pm
304 Administration Drive
Denton, 76204 Texas
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