Jeffrey Gibson, Pamela Council & Muna Malik in Another Justice: US is Them: Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY
The Parrish Art Museum has invited Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976, Plainfield, NJ), a conceptual artist working with themes related to identity, commodity, media, and popular culture, and For Freedoms–the artist coalition he co-founded with Eric Gottesman, Michelle Woo, and Wyatt Gallery with the mission to model and increase creative civic engagement, discourse, and direct action—to consider the Museum as a site for works that encourage new ways to experience art, architecture, landscape, and community. On view in the Parrish galleries, outdoors on the Museum grounds, and as digital billboards on the Shinnecock Monuments on Sunrise Highway, Another Justice: US is Them includes nearly 30 works by 12 contemporary artists—many created specifically for the exhibition—in mixed media, sculpture, site-specific installation, wall painting, and photography.
Another Justice: US is Them is a call to the community to reconvene and reconsider what justice can be in a time of imbalance. The participating artists have collaborated with For Freedoms to encourage audience participation through art, collaboration, and cultural strategy. A robust schedule of public programs during the run of the exhibition will delve into overarching themes and specific works.
Planned in conjunction with For Freedoms’ ongoing campaign, Another Justice: By Any Medium Necessary, the works on view will be a call to the community to reconvene, and reconsider what justice can be in a time of imbalance. Together, they will ask the viewer to imagine a just world. How do we get there from here? What is your role?
While Buckman’s embroideries explore joy as an antidote to violence against women, Minaya’s collaged photographs of camouflaged figures address idealization of female bodies. Olujimi’s drawings of U.S. presidential assassins ask who gets to render justice and on whose behalf? Thomas’ large-scale textile works, made of deconstructed U.S. flags and prison uniforms, investigate the fabric of our nation, while Gottesman obscures or reimagines images of violence and appropriated indigeneity by white makers. Council’s sculptures, built from factory conveyor belts and painted in brilliant color, relate to her family’s history working in the nearby potato fields. Outdoors, Malik’s boat evokes a collective travel towards a more just world, and Thomas’ neon sign honors those who actively participate in society but are not often recognized.
Works by Indigenous artists Dennis (Shinnecock), Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw-Cherokee), Miranda-Rivadeneira (Ecuadorian, Chi’xi), and Watt (Seneca), will be shown on the nearby Shinnecock Monuments, 62-foot-tall electronic billboards put up by the Shinnecock Indian Nation along the highway in 2019 to generate revenue for the Nation. The digital billboards included in this presentation engage with the Land Back Movement and invites the viewer to consider their own relationship with the land.
JEFFREY GIBSON (b. 1972, Colorado Springs, CO) is an interdisciplinary artist and a member of the Choctaw and Cherokee nations. His artworks reference various aesthetic and material histories rooted in Indigenous cultures of the Americas, and in modern and contemporary subcultures. Gibson’s work has been featured in exhibitions worldwide, including the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and is held in public and private collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Denver Art Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco. In 2019, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He is a faculty member at Bard College and is based in Hudson, NY.
MUNA MALIK (b. 1993, Sanaa, Yemen) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, CA. Her work has been featured in such exhibits and publications as The New York Times, LA Times, Vogue, Annenberg Center for Photography, ICP and the MOCA Geffen. Using painting, sculpture, and photography, her work explores abstract forms, including elements of gesture and biomorphism influenced by Arabic and Somali thought, the idea of liberation through movement, and the notion of ‘identity formation’. Her work has also been exhibited at Northern Spark Arts Festival, MCAD, Artworks Chicago, and The Humphrey School of Public Affairs.
PAMELA COUNCIL (b. 1986, Southampton, NY) lives and works in New York and Newark is an interdisciplinary artist who uses sculpture, architecture, writing, and performance to create multisensory dedications that both provide relief and prompt exuberance. These dedications – including Council’s iconic “fountains for Black joy” – upend the praxis of the static monument that demands the allegiance of passersby to, instead, serve as sites of deep care: their forms’ “high maintenance” calls viewers to an equally rigorous and cathartic tending of memory. Council coined the term BLAXIDERMY to describe their distinctive Afro-Americana camp aesthetic, which marries humor and horror in the exploration of material, cultural, and metaphysical inquiry.
