The Black Domestic

2023

August 30 – September 29

SITE Sharp Gallery

Curator

Saida Blair and Jordan Barrant

Contributing Artists

Kwame Gomez, Christian K. Lee, Kamau Patton, Brianna Perry, Schetauna Powell, Chris Reeder

Exhibition Statement as Preserved in the SUGS/SITE Archives:

Living rooms have historically been a site of community building; from activist coalition meetings to church services to holidays; The Black Domestic explores the familial archive as a site worthy of deep investigation and discovery. The exhibition focuses on the living room, a space lived and imagined by Black Americans, and centers its history as a site of collecting and archiving. Looking at the intersections between Black artists adapting familial archives, it asks how the exhibition space can facilitate communing through the lineage of Black living rooms and how that communion invites resistance.

 

The Black ​​Domestic is a six-person exhibition, bringing Black graduate students and faculty at SAIC together to speak to Black familial lineages, our current political sphere, and our hopes and dreams for Black futurities. For Black Americans, the living room is a new space, a space that became alive after slavery and one that is still not experienced or afforded to all Black Americans. The Black Domestic invites Black students and faculty to continue to commune and see each other as co-conspirators as we enter the art world and beyond.