We are excited to announce Identity Measures, our 2019 Open Call Exhibition, which will be on view at the CAC from Saturday, August 3 to Saturday, October 5, 2019! Each year, CAC's Open Call exhibition is organized by a guest curator and features works by artists living and working in New Orleans or the surrounding region in the past year.
We hope you'll join us for the exhibition's Opening Reception on Hancock Whitney White Linen Night: Saturday, August 3, 5:30pm - 9:30 pm, at the CAC!
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
At a time of heightened division both at home and abroad, imagining a world of shared experience and solidarity between ideologically opposed groups seems like the stuff of dreamwork. Difference, and what to do with it, remains the most significant question of our era and forces a consideration of the role that identity—or, the representation of the individual “self” through personal idiosyncrasies, language, actions, beliefs, appearance, experiences, and forms of social belonging and/or oppression—plays in grappling with heterogeneity in the sociopolitical sphere.
Identity Measures presents a diverse group of artists working in a range of material practices that engage identity not as a fixed structure, but as an insistently mobile and often resistant assemblage of traits and vulnerabilities. This exhibition is predicated on the understanding that identity is shaped by a variety of historical, racial, gendered, socioeconomic, geographical, physical, and ideological experiences through time. By opening up a dialogue about difference through the language of contemporary visual art, this exhibition claims that one’s structural location in the world matters to the articulation of personal and collective identity—a process that poses itself as a dynamic site of agency, creativity, resistance, visibility, ambiguity, and belonging.
This exhibition is organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, and curated by Dr. Jordan Amirkhani. Support for this exhibition is provided by Sydney & Walda Besthoff, The Helis Foundation, the Welch Family Foundation, and the Visual Arts Exhibition Fund. This exhibition is also supported by the City of New Orleans through a Community Arts Grant, as well as by a grant from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Office of Cultural Development, Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, in cooperation with the Louisiana State Arts Council.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Dr. Jordan Amirkhani is an art historian, critic, curator, and educator based in Washington, DC, where she serves as a Professorial Lecturer in Global Modern and Contemporary Art History at American University. Jordan received her PhD in the History and Philosophy of Art from the University of Kent in the United Kingdom in 2015, and has held academic posts at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga and Canterbury Christchurch University in the UK and curatorial positions at The Royal Academy in London, England and The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. Prior to her engagement as Juror for the CAC’s Open Call exhibition, she organized exhibitions for The Moon Gallery at Berry College in Mt. Berry, Georgia and The Apothecary Gallery in Chattanooga, TN. Amirkhani has published scholarship on the Franco-Cuban Dada painter Francis Picabia, the British conceptual art collective Art and Language, and the Serbian feminist political action organization Grupa Spomenik, and writes criticism for a number of contemporary art publications including Artforum, Art Practical, Baltimore Arts, and Burnaway.org. Jordan’s work on contemporary art and artists working in the American Southeast garnered her a prestigious Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation “Short-Form” Writing Grant in 2017 and two nominations for The Rabkin Prize in Arts Journalism in 2017 and 2018.
Work by: Nicole Awai, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Chris Berntsen, Dawn Black, Paris Cian & Kelli Scates, Sarrah Danziger, Marianne Desmarais, Paige DeVries, Double Diamond, Abdi Farah, Sarah Hill, Kristina Knipe, Jessica Lagunas, Cora Lautze, Daniela Leal, Robyn LeRoy-Evans, Cristina Molina, Gamil Nassar, REWA, Kaleena Stasiak, and Andy Thompson.
