Dig

Locust Projects presents Locust Projects presents Room for the living/ Room for the dead, a new site-specific commissioned project by Miami-based artist T. Eliott Mansa.

The immersive and interactive installation merges the concept of Florida / Family rooms as a home’s casual, social hub for gathering, entertainment and play, with that of less-used living rooms that served as shrines for treasured family photos and heirlooms. Inspired/influenced by the artist’s friend and writer Noelle Barnes’ living room and the artist’s own memories of sunken living rooms of the 1970s, the artist considers the cultural phenomena of the living room as unlived, unoccupied, untouched spaces that children and guests were prohibited from using.

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Kerry James Marshall’s exhibition, Mementos, at the Renaissance Society in 1998, is a requiem to the 60s, a decade synonymous with the Civil Rights Movement.

Conceived as an installation for the Renaissance Society, it features three new paintings, two sculptural components, a video projection and is replete with an angelic pantheon of African-American cultural and political figures who died between 1959 and 1979. Marshall uses the genre of history painting to reread the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and the whole of African-American History in relation to a very complex present.

This exhibition traveled to Brooklyn Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Fine Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Santa Monica Museum; and Boise At Museum.

Marshall modeled the settings of the Souvenir series after black middle class living rooms that have the shrine-like quality of Depression-proof interiors, as static and eternal as a plastic plant in a plastic pot. They are rooms where loved ones captured in the first generation of color photography yellow to the tick of a too accurate clock. There is a place for everything and everything is in its place, including the gaudy yet priceless souvenir cherished as a reminder of people and places that make up a life. It is where memorabilia from the births, graduations, weddings, anniversaries and funerals of a hundred distant relatives are preserved. For African Americans, all of whose lives were in some way affected by the struggle for equality, it is impossible to think of a room made claustrophobic with memories that does not double as a shrine to saints Kennedy and King.

Hamza Walker, To Fulfill these Rights