Untitled (BLCK-We wear the mask)

PAMM

“Untitled (BLCK–We wear the mask)” is part of a series of multimedia works that Miami-based artist Adler Guerrier created in 2007-2008 in the guise of “BLCK”—a fictitious collaborative comprised of artists of color ostensibly based in Miami in the late 1960s. ?

Guerrier imagines the group’s members living and working amid the warehouses and apartment complexes of Liberty City, a predominantly African American neighborhood that appears in a set of monochromatic photographs that hang on the wall. A monitor on the floor plays vintage video footage, establishing the tumultuous 1960s as the context. Against the wall are black-on-black wood protest signs and collaged prints inscribed with powerful yet hard to read messages jumbled with abstract imagery. ?

Combining the poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the artist’s own meditations, the signs and the accompanying prints evoke artifacts from an era that brimmed with public demand for radical change, reminiscent of our own moment. #ShareBlackStories?

Adler Guerrier. “Untitled (BLCK-We wear the mask),” 2007–08. Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, museum purchase. © Adler Guerrier

PAMM

Installation view from Adler Guerrier : Formulating a Plot, Pérez Art Museum Miami, August 7, 2014 – January 25, 2015. Photo: Courtesy of Miami Fine Art Studio LHOOQ.

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Palabras ajenas (The Words of Others)

PAMM presents  The Words of Others.

…live reading of artist Leon Ferrari’s seminal 1967 publication Palabras ajenas (The Words of Others)—an important Vietnam-era anti-war piece written in the form of a dramatic script that explorers the language of authoritarianism. Palabras ajenas was Ferrari’s first literary collage, composed as an extensive dialogue among various characters, including President Lyndon B. Johnson, Adolf Hitler, Pope Paul VI, and God. The resulting chorus will be read over the course of eight hours by local community figures, artists, and actors and will take place in conjunction with the exhibition opening of The Words of Others: León Ferrari and Rhetoric in Times of War.?

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Performance view: León Ferrari, Operativo: “Pacem in Terris,” 1972
Adriana Banti Archive, Buenos Aires.

Perfomance and show was at REDCAT, as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA.

Exhibition catalogue and an additional book via X Artists Books.
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