Bearing Witness
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BEARING WITNESS: WORK BY BRADLEY MCCALLUM & JACQUELINE TARRY May 8 - July 31, 2010 Contemporary Museum & Maryland Institute College of Art BALTIMORE, MARYLAND ©Exhibition Development Seminar 2009-2010, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA: Baltimore, 2010) TABLE OF CONTENTS 5 Foreword: Past and Present Irene Hofmann and George Ciscle 7 Pedagogical Perspective Jennie Hirsh 8 Mission Statement 9 Exhibition Development Seminar 11 About the Artists 13 “The Substance of Things Hoped For, and the Evidence of Things Not Seen” Eva Díaz 19 Participating Venues Contemporary Museum Maryland Institute College of Art The Walters Art Museum Carroll Museums: Carroll Mansion Carroll Museums: Phoenix Shot Tower Reginald F. Lewis Museum Maryland Art Place 62 Exhibition Checklist 63 Exhibition Highlights High Hope Baptist Church, Dawson, Georgia, 1962 (after unknown photographer; United Press International Telephoto, New 64 Acknowledgements York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Library of Congress), 2008; from the Whitewash series EDS Participants FOREWORD: PAST AND PRESENT The inspiration for this exhibition began over a year ago with a conversation between George and me as we reflected on the Contemporary’s now twenty-year history, the imprint that each of us has left on the institution and how we might come together to mark the milestone anniversary of this institution. The Contemporary has undergone many changes in its history. And although nine years separate George’s inspiring seven-year tenure as the museum’s founder and first director and my arrival in 2006 as the institution’s fourth director, our aspirations for the museum align, and we found ourselves with a unique opportunity to collaborate. What followed was my invitation to George to participate in a year-and-a-half-long exhibition series entitled Project 20. Project 20 was conceived as an exhibition program with twenty international artists working in all media and representing some of the most promising talent in contemporary art. Each artist would be selected by one of twenty guest curators—former directors, curators and artists featured in the museum’s exhibitions and initiatives. Involving each of the Contemporary’s alumni who significantly shaped the museum’s dynamic history,Project 20 celebrates the museum’s visionary and experimental past while looking ahead to its future. My invitation to George resulted in the most ambitious, and for me the most personally meaningful, selection for Project 20. Rather than choosing a single artist, he proposed the innovative curatorial studies course that he developed at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), the Exhibition Development Seminar (EDS), which charges art students with curating a professional exhibition. George’s bold choice strongly reflected his curatorial and pedagogical vision, allowing him to re-enact the spirit of the Contemporary’s original mission: to challenge traditional exhibition models and to bring artists’ work directly into the community. Witness: Callbox Tour, 2000; Lower Manhattan, NY; installation view I had been following the work of Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry with increasing interest for nearly ten years. I knew that their powerful videos about their experience as an interracial couple, their public projects engaged with challenging urban concerns and their paintings exploring the imagery of the Civil Rights Movement would be a natural fit for EDS. Their work represented an opportunity to expose the students to community-based work and to the challenge of re-siting many previously site-specific works in new contexts. As they considered the artists’ work in dialogue with Baltimore and its history, the students acquired an understanding of the Contemporary’s mission and unique approach to exhibition-making. Mindful of the city and the audience, they revised the traditional format and exhibition structure of a mid-career survey, transforming the city of Baltimore into the incredibly rich and varied network that is Bearing Witness. — Irene Hofmann, Contemporary Museum Executive Director and Curator, 2006-present and George Ciscle, Contemporary Museum Director, 1989-1996; Curator-in-Residence, MICA, 1997-present 4 5 FOREWORD A PEDAGOGICAL PERSPECTIVE Like all EDS projects, Bearing Witness: Work by Bradley McCallum & Jacqueline Tarry marks a collaborative effort between artists, students, and the arts and culture community of Baltimore. In becoming familiar with the work of McCallum and Tarry, my students gained a solid knowledge of the artists’ practice and its place within the larger context of contemporary art as well as an appreciation of what it means to organize a large-scale, mid-career survey from start to finish. Situating this complex body of work in Baltimore required the careful study of diverse institutions throughout the city in order to mount an exhibition of this scale. With the support of their mentors, this group of MICA students bravely embraced the challenge of creating a multi-venue exhibition whose respective installations would stand alone and, at the same time, function as parts of a larger, coherent whole. With this goal in mind, they have mapped out a unique path of art, culture and history for viewers of this show. Working within their respective teams as project managers, graphic designers, curators, educators, Web programmers and site researchers, these students have produced a professional exhibition of the highest quality, achieving their goal of sharing this work with the MICA community as well as Baltimore residents and visitors. Bearing Witness, the fruits of their labor, demonstrates beautifully how art can at once inspire responses and construct new relationships. Put otherwise, while the exquisite form and bold content of McCallum and Tarry’s art provoke powerful reactions, these students have enhanced the spectatorial experience through their consideration of temporary homes for these works. Bearing Witness articulates connections amongst these works, as seen in the thematic shows at the Contemporary Museum and Maryland Art Place, which respectively underscore performance and identity, and the artists’ prolonged engagement with the legacy of slavery in the U.S. In addition to highlighting how site-specific projects survive in the gallery spaces, Bearing Witness elucidates how work adapts to new environs, preserving its purpose while also morphing its messages to suit a new site. As Eva Díaz has shown, Bearing Witness extends the lives of artworks such as The Evidence of Things Not Seen, The Manhole Cover Project and Bearing by providing fertile ground for growth in the meaning of these works as they acclimatize to their homes at the Carroll Mansion, the Phoenix Shot Tower and The Walters. And the artists’ installation Sacred to the Memory of… at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum exemplifies how a cultural figure—Billie Holiday— stands as a referent for both painful and proud moments in history. Finally, siting Endurance in MICA’s sculptural Brown Center points to the dramatic differences in the experiences Copasetic (after Bill “Bojangles” Robinson), 2009; set of four paintings from the Projection series of today’s young people, while the placement of Witness in the Cohen Plaza heightens our awareness of police violence. I am very proud to have worked with such a talented group of students, colleagues and artists who understood from the inception of this project the potential for this premise on both poetic and political levels. — Jennie Hirsh, Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Department of Art History, Theory & Criticism , MICA 6 7 A PEDAGOGICAL PERSPECTIVE EXHIBITION DEVELOPMENT SEMINAR 2009-2010 BEARING WITNESS is a multi-venue survey of In curating Bearing Witness, we are honored to extend the vision of George Ciscle, who founded the Contemporary Museum in 1989 and established the Exhibition Development over a decade of work by the husband and wife Seminar at MICA thirteen years ago. Ciscle’s choice of EDS as his contribution to the collaborative team Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Contemporary’s Project 20 allows his educational philosophy and socially charged conception of curatorial work to converge. As students working with established artists in an exceptional Tarry organized by the Contemporary Museum curatorial and pedagogical paradigm, we are committed to Ciscle’s vision of learning-by-doing. and the Maryland Institute College of Art’s 2009- McCallum and Tarry’s art reflects the Contemporary Museum’s mission of commissioning and presenting work that addresses and challenges Baltimore’s diverse population. In fostering 2010 Exhibition Development Seminar (EDS). This relationships with various institutions, we seek to extend our influence beyond our academic environment and to amplify the voice of contemporary art in Baltimore. We are responsible for exhibition has a dual mission. First, we seek to every aspect of the project, including curatorial and site research, design and production present an exhibition that connects McCallum and of print and Web materials, and planning and implementation of educational programming. Guided by team mentors, we are invested in exploring our place in the Baltimore community Tarry’s civic, community- and advocacy-based projects and in engaging artists, students, museums and galleries through creative curatorial practice. with their studio- and gallery-based video, painting Our process began with two tracks of research. The first took us deep into more than a