Public Talk - Abstraction in the Black Diaspora
December 11, 6PM
with Ayanna Dozier, Tariku Shiferaw, Derrick Adams, Tomashi Jackson, and Erica Cardwell
Adebunmi Gbadebo, Blues People, 2020 | Black hair, cotton, rice paper, indigo dye and printed photographs on rice paper | 110 x 120 in (24 x 20 in each)
FALSE FLAG is pleased to present a public talk on December 11 at 6PM, in the context of the exhibition Abstraction in the Black Diaspora, between the artists/curators Ayanna Dozier and Tariku Shiferaw, who will be joined by artists Derrick Adams and Tomashi Jackson, and writer/curator Erica Cardwell. The conversation will be followed by a Q&A with the participants.
The exhibition is on view until December 20, 2020 by appointment.
Ayanna Dozier
Ayanna Dozier, Ph.D. (McGill University), is a Brooklyn-based writer, lecturer, curator, filmmaker, and performance artist. Her experimental short film Softer (2020) was part of the official selection showcase in several 2020 fall film festivals, including Open City Documentary Festival and the Aesthetica Short Film Festival where it was the recipient of Best Experimental. Her doctoral dissertation, Mnemonic Aberrations (2020), traced the history of Black feminist experimental short film in the United States and the United Kingdom from 1968 to the present. She is the author of Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope (2020). Recently, Ayanna was awarded the 2020 Toni Beauchamp Prize for Critical Art Writing for her piece, "Sound Garden: Ayanna Dozier on Ja'Tovia Gary's The Giverny Document." She was a 2018–19 Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Independent Studies Program. She currently lectures at the Whitney Museum and Fordham University.
Tariku Shiferaw
Tariku Shiferaw is a New York–based artist who explores “mark-making” through painting and installation art addressing the physical and metaphysical spaces of art and social structures. He was raised in Los Angeles, California and currently lives and works in New York City. Museum exhibitions that have presented Shiferaw’s works include the 2017 Whitney Biennial as part of Occupy Museums’ Debtfair Project at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; A Poet*hical Wager at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Ohio; Unbound at the Zuckerman Museum of Art (ZMA), Kennesaw, Georgia; Men of Change, organized by The Smithsonian Institution, and currently held at the California African American Museum (CAAM), Los Angeles; and What’s Love Got to Do with It? at The Drawing Center, New York. His solo exhibitions include Erase Me, at Addis Fine Art, London; and This Ain’t Safe, at Cathouse Proper, Brooklyn.
Shiferaw has participated in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art; in Open Sessions at The Drawing Center; and he was artist-in-residence at the LES Studio Program in New York City. Shiferaw is currently an artist-in-residence at the World Trade Center through Silver Art Projects, where he’s preparing for his first New York solo exhibition with Galerie Lelong in the Spring of 2021.
Derrick Adams
Derrick Adams was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1970. He received his MFA from Columbia University and BFA from Pratt Institute. He is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation’s Studio Program. Adams is a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency (2019), a Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2018), a Studio Museum Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize (2016), and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (2009).
Adams has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Buoyant (2020) at the Hudson River Museum; Where I’m From (2019) at The Gallery in Baltimore City Hall; Sanctuary (2018) at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Transmission (2018) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; Network (2017) at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles; and The Channel (2012) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Adams’ work has been presented in important public exhibitions, including Men of Change: Power. Triumph. Truth. (2019) a 10-city exhibition presented by the Smithsonian Institution; PERFORMA (2015, 2013, and 2005); The Shadows Took Shape (2014) and Radical Presence (2013–14) at The Studio Museum in Harlem; Greater New York (2005) at MoMA PS1; and Open House: Working In Brooklyn (2004) at the Brooklyn Museum. His work resides in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Birmingham Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Tomashi Jackson
Tomashi Jackson was born in Houston, Texas in 1980 and grew up in Los Angeles, California. She was included in the Whitney Biennial 2019, and her first solo museum exhibition, Interstate Love Song, took place at the Zuckerman Museum of Art in Kennesaw, Georgia in 2018. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at MoCA Los Angeles, MASS MoCA, and the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans. Jackson was a 2019 Resident Artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. She will have a solo exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum during the summer of 2020. Her work is included in the collection of MOCA Los Angeles. She has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston; and Cooper Union, NY, and she has been a visiting artist at New York University. Jackson lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts and New York City.
Erica N. Cardwell
Erica N. Cardwell is a writer, critic, and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. She centers Black feminist theory as her primary critical approach, and often writes about print, archival media, visual culture, and interdisciplinary performance. Her work has appeared in BOMB, The Believer, Brooklyn Rail, frieze, CULTURED, Hyperallergic, Green Mountains Review, Passages North and other publications. Her memoir was named as finalist for the 2020 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, and she has been awarded residencies and fellowships from the Lambda Literary Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and most recently the Queer Art Mentorship. In 2016, Erica received her MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Currently, she teaches writing and social justice at The New School.