Contact Traces

Type: Exhibition

Role: Co-Curator

Team: Katherine Jemima Hamilton, Shaelyn Hayes, Youyou Ma, Emily Markert

Location: Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art
San Francisco, CA

Featured Artists: Derya Akay, Lenka Clayton, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Ilana Harris-Babou, and Jenny Kendler

May 2021

What does it mean to care? To care for one another?

The five featured artists question assumptions of care as an act of benevolence, revealing its contradictions and paradoxes but expelling notions of futility. Their works display the value and labor inherent in all scales of care work. They suggest that individuals can disrupt the systems which impede upon our prosperity and survival by spotlighting processes of caregiving and their messy aftermath.

This exhibition opened one year after the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States with sudden force. In that year, support systems failed or fell horribly short of expectations. In the wake of these failures, simply acknowledging our interdependence was no longer sufficient. This exhibition interrogates puritanical notions of care, exposing cargiving as a vital web of interrelations on which individual and collective survival rest.

Access a PDF copy of the exhibition catalogue at this link.

For more information, visit the archived exhibition page on the Wattis Institute’s website.

LEANDRA BURNETT

ASSORTED PRACTICE