Abstractions of Black Citizenship: African American Art from Saint Louis is a group exhibition of works by Dominic Chambers, Damon Davis, Jen Everett, De Nichols, and Katherine Simóne Reynolds, five Black Saint Louis, MO-based artists.
The exhibition presents painting, photography, mixed-media, works on paper, sculpture, music, and video. The exhibition is curated by Jasmine Jamillah Mahmoud.
Saint Louis is a U.S. city and region so often publicly marked by racially restrictive covenants, redlining, urban renewal/black removal, and 21st century anti-black regimes. The exhibition asks: how do Black aesthetic practices emerging from that region abstract these structures? How might an attention to abstraction make aesthetic, geographic, and political space for Black presence and citizenship? Through meditations on leisure, the sonic and the mundane, beauty and care, quietness, and the urban and quotidian, these artists sit with, imagine, and abstract possibilities for being, belonging, and togetherness.
The exhibition was originally scheduled to run at Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University during Spring Quarter 2020. Due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, it moved online, and ran May 18 to August 2, 2020 as a virtual exhibition with continued sponsorship and support from Hedreen Gallery, the Pigott Endowment for the Arts, and Molly Mac, Seattle University Galleries Curator. With support from UCSB’s Multicultural Center, the exhibition ran virtually from February 11 – 28, 2021.