RAGGA NYC May 3–June 25, 2017 Fifth Floor
RAGGA NYC will be in residence through the Department of Education and Public Engagement’s R&D Season: BODY. A platform founded by Christopher Udemezue, RAGGA connects a community of queer Caribbean artists working across a wide range of disciplines—including visual art, fashion, and poetry—to explore how race, sexuality, gender, heritage, and history inform their work and their lives. A vibrant community deeply committed to education and grassroots organizing, RAGGA fosters a network and an extended family that makes space for solidarity, celebration, and expression. Their residency will explore Afro-Caribbean diasporic traditions, bringing together works by a group of artists who trace their own relationships to Caribbean history. The exhibition will include sculptures from Renée Stout’s Roots and Charms series, which nod to the hand-painted signs advertising elixirs and spiritual healing on the storefronts of shops in New Orleans and Washington D.C., and to the symbolic objects found within them. Tau Lewis’s foraged, ain’t free series portrays cacti, plants transplanted to radically different climates where they thrive nevertheless, a metaphor for the diasporic condition. Works in Paul Anthony Smith’s Grey Area series layer grainy silkscreened images of male acquaintances Smith encountered while back in his hometown in Jamaica for his aunt's funeral alongside images of a cemetery burial ground, suggesting a complex relationship to an island he left as a child.
Taking up Édouard Glissant’s claim that “the language of the Caribbean artist does not originate in the obsession with celebrating his inner self; this inner self is inseparable from the future evolution of his community [in which] he is his own ethnologist, historian, [and] linguist,” RAGGA NYC’s residency will also feature a number of public programs, including workshops exploring Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions and an evening of performances and poetry by members of RAGGA. This exhibition is curated by Sara O’Keeffe, Assistant Curator.
ABOUT NEW MUSEUM The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding building on the Bowery designed by SANAA in 2007, the New Museum continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas.
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