“Taking it to the Streets: Grand Center” – a collaboration with Gallery 210 at UMSL

“Taking it to the Streets: Grand Center”
a collaboration with Gallery 210 at UMSL

On display April 7 – May 20, 2017
Artist Talk with Howard Berry & Lois Ingrum – May 20, 2017 (1-2pm)

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“Taking it to the Streets: Grand Center” highlights the work of UMSL art students who have been featured at the Kranzberg Arts Center in the past and will be exhibiting again this year in April and May of 2017. A wide variety of media will be show-cased in this exhibit and create a very interesting visual landscape in which to journey Lois Ingrum’s photographs which vary greatly in content and mood. Howard Barry’s multi-media drawings are graphic and intense as well as rich in hue; Basil Kincaid has used a combination of materials and images to produce fiber wall pieces which will introduce a 3-dimensional component to the exhibition; and at the opening there will be a performance piece by De Andrea Nichols. Something for everyone!

Curator Statement:
Art is disturbing because the reality it releases is disturbing.
From Arthur Danto, The Disenfranchisement of Art

“Taking it to the Streets: Grand Center” is an extension of the “Taking it to the Streets” exhibition at Gallery 210 on the UMSL campus. This program continues the celebration of the establishment of Gallery 210 by Jean Tucker at the University of Missouri Saint Louis forty-five years ago.

This exhibition takes its inspiration from the gallery’s history of addressing social and political issues, in particular the exhibitions organized by Tom Kochheiser between 1987 through 1994. His exhibitions featured such notable artists as Sue Coe, Komar and Melamid, Hannah Wilke, Kerry Marshall, to name only a few, whose work addressed the stubborn problems of race, social injustice, and the then newly evolving politics of gender and sexuality.

The artists of “Taking it to the Streets” are commenting, in large part, on these same issues.  The persistence of violence and injustice informs much of their work in the same way it has in previous decades. However, the strident tone of the earlier generation is largely absent in this work. The narratives and the final form of the artwork by the “Taking it to the Streets” artists are also shaped, in no small way, through the incorporation of storytelling and remembrance, as well as a deep involvement in their community.

Much of the art in “Taking it to the Streets” could be categorized as activist or political art. Such simple labeling makes it possible for some people to dismiss it as being only relevant to a particular time, place or some specific event, perhaps finding some value only in aesthetic appreciation.  But that ultimately is a device to deflect meaningful engagement with the artwork.

It is reasonable to be skeptical of the notion that art, no matter how powerful or elegant its message, can be a catalyst for political or social change. But that is not how it works. Art functions as an agent of change because individually and over extended periods of time it has the power to move the mind, touch the heart and give hope for a better future.

Art making is an act of resistance. Artists taking a critical stance against a post-factual society are pushing back against the status quo, standing as truthful witnesses for their time.
–Terry Suhre, Director
Gallery 210 – January, 2017

Artist Statements & Bios:
Lois Ingrum – DOLL PROJECT
“Since 2008, my work has involved the photographic exploration of sacred folk art and handmade street monuments as an expression of public healing after violent deaths in our communities. In my work, I deconstruct the overlooked issues of class in American society, which seems to place more value on the loss of certain lives than others. As I began to explore my own community through the lens of my camera, my journey led me to 10 other cities across America. My work has addressed violence, grieving, and mourning, depicting an underlying need to place an impermanent reminder that death can happen to anyone, anywhere. My aim with the Doll Project is to create avenues for open dialogue that gives worth to ALL lives lived, no matter their status.” – Lois Ingrum

Lois Ingrum the CEO/President of L.D. Ingrum Gallery & Studio Inc. Ingrum Studio prides itself on its leadership in providing a comprehensive range of photographic/graphic art, installation of fine art and signage. Ms. Ingrum has worked in media arts and conducted community arts programs since 1983. Her community arts experience includes teaching for Ranken Technical College, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the St. Louis Public Schools, North St. Louis Arts Council, COCA interchange, ArtWorks and the Peter & Paul Homeless Shelter. She has a B.S. in Business Management, and was the 2012-13 Executive Director of St. Peter’s Project UpLift. In May 2012 she was awarded a Grand Center Visionary Award for Arts Education. She was a 2001 Fellow of RAC’s Community Arts Training Institute (CAT) and in 2012 she completes the more advanced RAC Institute for Graduate Educational Research (TIGER). Lois technical skills and artistic accomplishments as a photographer and her deep connections to the St. Louis community and its African-American culture make her a valuable resource for the community. In addition to her busy schedule as a professional photographer and teacher, since 2008 she has exhibited and conducted many workshops for The Doll Project where she has extends the L.D. Ingrum Gallery & Studio into community and across the country.

DeAndrea Nichols – BLACK NOTES
“Black Notes is a multimedia exploration of one artist’s life lessons, reflections, and observations configured in the midst and aftermath of protest and racial trauma. The body of work includes a wall of typographic artworks and visualized memories conveyed onto hundreds of black Post-it sticky notes. Stemming from a larger body of work, Sticky Note to Self, these notes represent the most complex and serious creations from the series, reflecting moments and changes within the American political landscape, intersectional ploys for human and civil rights, as well as concerns of gender, sexuality, economic, and racial equity. These notes are paired with a video projection that interweaves footage from moments of protests in Ferguson, MO, with a monologue series of memoirs about blackness and racial challenge. As a collection, “Black Notes” provides a literal visualization of lessons and notes portrayed on black surfaces while probing a larger inquiry into the intersections of race, justice, and the preservation of collective memories.” – DeAndrea Nichols

De serves as Director of Civic Creatives, a social design organization that produces interactive events, tools, and services that foster the discovery, ideation, prototyping, and actualization of community-driven civic solutions. Nichols also serves as a Board of Directors member for Forward through Ferguson and chairs the Board of Directors for Creative Reaction Lab. She is a national public speaker on designing for civil rights and social justice, and she is a 2016 recipient of the St. Louis Visionary Award for community impact in the arts.

De is an alumna of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, where she specialized in communication design, social entrepreneurship, and socio-economic development. She is a John B. Ervin Scholar, Brown Scholar, and Enterprise-Rent-a-Car Scholar. Her works have been supported by the Smithsonian National Museum for African-American History and Culture, Clinton Global Initiative, Women’s Caucus for Art, Gephardt Institute for Public Service, Ideas that Matters, and Pulitzer Arts Foundation.

Basil Kincaid
“I am a Vessel and emerging World Builder. I have been a vivid Dreamer ever since my early childhood, I am driven by dreams in concert with an ardent duty to humanity and the evolution of my family traditions, and I am guided by our connection to ancestral power, insight, and imagination.

My quest is to understand the wild tapestry of my own personal identity and cultural identity within the African Diaspora, contextualized by the framework of my American experience. I use this exploration to cultivate healing on a personal and cultural level, towards the remedy of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome and the unification of the African Diaspora. While I am passionate about all areas of anti-bias work, social justice at the intersection of white supremacy, classism, and environmentalism are at the core of my creative questioning. Within my practice I seek to promote empathy, critical thought, and inclusion. I also observe how perception and prejudice are impacted by one’s relationship to place and a sense of belonging or displacement. My lifelong goal is to co-create healing spaces that stimulate the ancestral memory of universal love as the true freedom within us, while activating participation in shared liberation as communities on local and global scales.

I take an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to creative questioning and the creation of experiences, artifacts and art objects. I meditate, write, quilt, collage, install, photograph, perform, play, and invent games as gateways to understanding aspects of self and others. My work is site-specific and comprised of found, discarded, or donated materials with relevance to the place of cultivation. This methodology is an investigation of how waste is a reflection of lived experience.

The innovations, practices, and cultural products of Black America, West Africa, and Japan influence my stylistic approach.  More specifically, I am interested in Black American folk and fine art, music, poetry, and family traditions.” – Basil Kincaid

Basil Kincaid received his Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art in 2009 from Colorado College in Colorado Springs. He has worked extensively with BlankSpace in St. Louis, Missouri, from participating in exhibitions to planning “Cherokee Reach Street”, a free Youth art camp. In 2016 he was a Guest Speaker for Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Arts in Education Program exhibition. Basil was the receiver of the Arts Connect International Artist in Residence Grant, in which he did his residency in Ghana. His recent work has been called “R3clamation”, an extension of his work he did in Ghana.

Howard Barry
“My artwork comes from both a compulsion to create and a need to make sense of the world around me. This particular installation features work built around the theme of Social Justice. Initially the drive and motivation behind these pieces was purely therapeutic. Although multiple mediums were used, the approach was the same for each of them, working passionately and intuitively, with a focus mainly on releasing my pain, frustration and anger in a non-destructive way.

Unlike any of my previous work, this series, was the first time I allowed myself to interject or release the full brunt of my pain into my work. What began as frantic sketches in my personal journal, using whatever media that was within reach (ink, watercolor, charcoal etc) evolved into quick and dirty narratives and expressive portraiture utilizing the pages of The St. Louis American Newspaper as a canvas. Residuals of a Traumatic Brain Injury quite often find me questioning my perception, and the choice to include the St. Louis American in the work was a way of grounding me and confirming that the events taking place were not figments of my creative imagination. In addition to grounding me, using The St. Louis American as a canvas, taught me a valuable lesson in dealing with my anger issues. The first few pieces I attempted to create on the newspaper were totally destroyed. In my heavy handed, aggressive, passionate attempts to draw on the paper, I kept ripping and tearing it, it forced me to learn temperance, to take the same passion, the same anger and adjust my strokes so that I still conveyed the same message, but didn’t destroy the canvas in the process.

My Goal for the work in this series, is to challenge the viewers to slow down and take a closer look. Many times we feel as if we already know what is going on so we offer a quick glance and move on. As with much of my work, some of the pieces have hidden messages in them. At the very least I hope my work prompts thought and conversation regarding humanity, social justice and race.

“They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and I have thousands and thousands of words concerning the things I see in the world around me, but I keep those words to myself for fear of being misunderstood or taken the wrong way and instead I just keep creating pictures.” – Howard Barry

Howard Barry currently holds an Associate of Arts and Sciences in Graphic Design from St. Louis Community College-Meramec. He went on to pursue his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design as well from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He has described art as his “therapy and release” and says his current work is “an ongoing narrative of my own personal struggle to find peace and beauty in the midst of darkness and pain”.