Community Calendar

In a new multiroom installation, artist Andrea Chung confronts the legacy and trauma of slavery from the perspective of an Afrofuturist utopia.

For this work, Chung activates the possibility of a new world, a “Black Atlantis” called Drexciya, to subvert the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. Drexciya is an underwater world populated by the amphibious offspring of women thrown from slave ships during the Middle Passage. It was conceived by the eponymous and enigmatic electronic music duo active in Detroit in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Image: Andrea Chung, Filthy Water Cannot Be Washed, 2017; cyanotype and watercolor; 88 x 240 in. Courtesy of the artist.

https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/andrea-chung-if-they-put-an-iron-circle-around-your-neck-i-will-bite-it-away/
Chung’s installation is a meditation on the laws of Black physics. It highlights the ways Black people relate and respond to time and space in order to navigate a world full of dangerous and harmful systems. Within her evocation of this watery realm we can inhabit imagined pasts, presents, and futures to craft alternative realities forged by liberation, adaptation, resilience, defiance, and survival.

Kea Tawana (c. 1935–2016) is known for creating the Ark, an 86-foot-long, three-story ship she built in Newark, New Jersey, starting in 1982, with the intention of making it her home.

For decades prior, she had collected salvaged wood, glass shards, and other materials from abandoned buildings in the city’s Central Ward. Incorporating those materials, she built the Ark on an empty lot; it was still unfinished when the city condemned it in 1987. Unable to find a new location, Tawana dismantled her ship in 1988. She spent the decades after the Ark’s destruction traveling, eventually settling and dying in Port Jervis, New York.

The Arts Center recently acquired the contents from her small apartment there, which included about thirty handmade boxes containing collaged and tied “encyclopedic files” and personal effects; Tawana’s blueprints for utopic, unrealized building projects; handmade stained-glass windows; and hundreds of sketches and manuscripts.

Kea Tawana: I Traveled into the Future in a Dream represents the first museum show of Tawana’s work, and the first exhibition outside of the northeastern United States. Many of the objects are on view for the first time. It recontextualizes her work and life in several ways, including her long-running and largely unknown roles as architect, community activist, historian, educator, and craftsperson.

https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/kea-tawana-i-traveled-into-the-future-in-a-dream/

Image: Kea Tawana, untitled, n.d.; glass and wood; 21 x 17 x 1/2 in. Kea Tawana’s work presented in cooperation with PCK Media, Gallery Aferro, and the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers University.

In 1974, Ruth DeYoung Kohler II founded the Arts/Industry residency in partnership with Kohler Co. Today, the program annually hosts twelve artists who make new works of art in the company’s factory in Kohler, Wisconsin. The artists work in studios located on the factory floor, alongside Kohler Co. associates who offer support and information as the residents encounter industrial machines and materials that advance their artistic practice.

Arts/Industry Highlights presents handwritten letters, postcards, sketches, and photos dating from the late 1970s to the late 1990s to contextualize the meaningful relationships Ruth and Kohler Co. associates developed with the artists-in-residence. These records reveal evidence of friendships that were built during and continued long after a resident’s time in Kohler, and how those affinities contributed to the significance of the artworks created.

Not only do these materials affirm community building within the history of the Arts/Industry program, their presentation honors the kinds of interactions that give shape to kinship.

https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/arts-industry-highlights/

Image: Casey O'Conner, detail of untitled sketch for the Children's Studio washroom, 1998.

Explore the artwork created by the children, ages three to five, enrolled in the Arts Center’s Preschool. Visits to the Arts Center galleries and Art preserve fueled the students’ creativity. Collaborative and individual projects led the children to new discoveries about themselves, others, and the world around them, fostering critical thinking and social-emotional skills. Creating side by side, sometimes hand in hand, the Arts Center Preschool children are active participants in cultivating a classroom culture of respect for each other and for their community. Celebrate the joy and wonder of learning through the arts in this exhibition of early childhood creativity, development, expression, and growth.

https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/preschool-perspectives-hand-in-hand/

Image: Left: Self-portrait by Oliver Janovetz (age 5), 2023; marker. Right: Self-portrait by Lyrik Grossman (age 4), 2023; marker.

In her 2021 essay “A Family Reunion Near the End of the World,” botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer contemplates our kinship with nature and proposes a road map for deepening our care and respect for all living things.
“Being a relative,” she writes, “is more than shared blood from a common past. Real kinship arises when we realize that we have a common future, that our fates are linked.” She goes on to suggest, “Real kinship comes when you live it. It’s not a noun, but a verb, it’s not a thing, it’s what you do.”

The cultivation of kinship with the living world is the foundation for Sharing the Same Breath. The exhibition brings together nine artists who consider the world’s complex web of relations through artworks that emphasize human, nonhuman, and interspecies forms of kinship and connectivity. These relationships are explored through a wide range of mediums including sculpture, photography, drawing, video, film, and installation. Together the works form a kincentric viewpoint that challenges narratives of human exceptionalism and encourages us to regard our symbiotic relationship and shared fate with our more-than-human family with greater attention and care.

Artists in the exhibition include Juan William Chávez, David Freid, Lindsey French, Emilie Louise Gossiaux, Nina Katchadourian, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Marie Watt, William Wegman, and Dyani White Hawk.

https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/sharing-the-same-breath/

Image: Emilie L. Gossiaux, True Love Will Find You in the End, 2021; polystyrene foam, aluminum pipes, papier-mâché, epoxy resin, and acrylic matte medium. Courtesy of the artist and Mother Gallery. Photo: Ronald Amstutz.

In a new multiroom installation, artist Andrea Chung confronts the legacy and trauma of slavery from the perspective of an Afrofuturist utopia.

For this work, Chung activates the possibility of a new world, a “Black Atlantis” called Drexciya, to subvert the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. Drexciya is an underwater world populated by the amphibious offspring of women thrown from slave ships during the Middle Passage. It was conceived by the eponymous and enigmatic electronic music duo active in Detroit in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Image: Andrea Chung, Filthy Water Cannot Be Washed, 2017; cyanotype and watercolor; 88 x 240 in. Courtesy of the artist.

https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/andrea-chung-if-they-put-an-iron-circle-around-your-neck-i-will-bite-it-away/
Chung’s installation is a meditation on the laws of Black physics. It highlights the ways Black people relate and respond to time and space in order to navigate a world full of dangerous and harmful systems. Within her evocation of this watery realm we can inhabit imagined pasts, presents, and futures to craft alternative realities forged by liberation, adaptation, resilience, defiance, and survival.

Kea Tawana (c. 1935–2016) is known for creating the Ark, an 86-foot-long, three-story ship she built in Newark, New Jersey, starting in 1982, with the intention of making it her home.

For decades prior, she had collected salvaged wood, glass shards, and other materials from abandoned buildings in the city’s Central Ward. Incorporating those materials, she built the Ark on an empty lot; it was still unfinished when the city condemned it in 1987. Unable to find a new location, Tawana dismantled her ship in 1988. She spent the decades after the Ark’s destruction traveling, eventually settling and dying in Port Jervis, New York.

The Arts Center recently acquired the contents from her small apartment there, which included about thirty handmade boxes containing collaged and tied “encyclopedic files” and personal effects; Tawana’s blueprints for utopic, unrealized building projects; handmade stained-glass windows; and hundreds of sketches and manuscripts.

Kea Tawana: I Traveled into the Future in a Dream represents the first museum show of Tawana’s work, and the first exhibition outside of the northeastern United States. Many of the objects are on view for the first time. It recontextualizes her work and life in several ways, including her long-running and largely unknown roles as architect, community activist, historian, educator, and craftsperson.

https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/kea-tawana-i-traveled-into-the-future-in-a-dream/

Image: Kea Tawana, untitled, n.d.; glass and wood; 21 x 17 x 1/2 in. Kea Tawana’s work presented in cooperation with PCK Media, Gallery Aferro, and the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers University.

In 1974, Ruth DeYoung Kohler II founded the Arts/Industry residency in partnership with Kohler Co. Today, the program annually hosts twelve artists who make new works of art in the company’s factory in Kohler, Wisconsin. The artists work in studios located on the factory floor, alongside Kohler Co. associates who offer support and information as the residents encounter industrial machines and materials that advance their artistic practice.

Arts/Industry Highlights presents handwritten letters, postcards, sketches, and photos dating from the late 1970s to the late 1990s to contextualize the meaningful relationships Ruth and Kohler Co. associates developed with the artists-in-residence. These records reveal evidence of friendships that were built during and continued long after a resident’s time in Kohler, and how those affinities contributed to the significance of the artworks created.

Not only do these materials affirm community building within the history of the Arts/Industry program, their presentation honors the kinds of interactions that give shape to kinship.

https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/arts-industry-highlights/

Image: Casey O'Conner, detail of untitled sketch for the Children's Studio washroom, 1998.

Explore the artwork created by the children, ages three to five, enrolled in the Arts Center’s Preschool. Visits to the Arts Center galleries and Art preserve fueled the students’ creativity. Collaborative and individual projects led the children to new discoveries about themselves, others, and the world around them, fostering critical thinking and social-emotional skills. Creating side by side, sometimes hand in hand, the Arts Center Preschool children are active participants in cultivating a classroom culture of respect for each other and for their community. Celebrate the joy and wonder of learning through the arts in this exhibition of early childhood creativity, development, expression, and growth.

https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/preschool-perspectives-hand-in-hand/

Image: Left: Self-portrait by Oliver Janovetz (age 5), 2023; marker. Right: Self-portrait by Lyrik Grossman (age 4), 2023; marker.

In her 2021 essay “A Family Reunion Near the End of the World,” botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer contemplates our kinship with nature and proposes a road map for deepening our care and respect for all living things.
“Being a relative,” she writes, “is more than shared blood from a common past. Real kinship arises when we realize that we have a common future, that our fates are linked.” She goes on to suggest, “Real kinship comes when you live it. It’s not a noun, but a verb, it’s not a thing, it’s what you do.”

The cultivation of kinship with the living world is the foundation for Sharing the Same Breath. The exhibition brings together nine artists who consider the world’s complex web of relations through artworks that emphasize human, nonhuman, and interspecies forms of kinship and connectivity. These relationships are explored through a wide range of mediums including sculpture, photography, drawing, video, film, and installation. Together the works form a kincentric viewpoint that challenges narratives of human exceptionalism and encourages us to regard our symbiotic relationship and shared fate with our more-than-human family with greater attention and care.

Artists in the exhibition include Juan William Chávez, David Freid, Lindsey French, Emilie Louise Gossiaux, Nina Katchadourian, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Marie Watt, William Wegman, and Dyani White Hawk.

https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/sharing-the-same-breath/

Image: Emilie L. Gossiaux, True Love Will Find You in the End, 2021; polystyrene foam, aluminum pipes, papier-mâché, epoxy resin, and acrylic matte medium. Courtesy of the artist and Mother Gallery. Photo: Ronald Amstutz.