Projects 110: Michael Armitage

Projects 110: Michael Armitage presents eight paintings that, in the artist’s words, explore “parallel cultural histories.” Here, as in his work more widely, Armitage puts contemporary visual culture in dialogue with art history and the legacy of modernism as it veers toward—and breaks from—the West. Born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1984, Armitage received his artistic training in London. Today, he travels between London and Nairobi, citing each city as crucial to his creative practice.

Armitage draws inspiration from both European avant-garde artists and East African modernists such as Meek Gichugu (b. 1932, Ngecha, Kenya), Chelenge (b. 1961, Kericho, Kenya), and Jak Katarikawe (c. 1938–2018, Kampala, Uganda). The pull of East African culture is evident not only in Armitage’s visual vocabulary but in his use of lubugo, a fabric made from fig-tree bark, in lieu of canvas as a support for his paintings. First encountered by the artist in a Nairobi tourist market in 2010, the cloth is Ugandan in origin. In this mix of materials and cultural influences, Armitage celebrates a living lineage of narrative, abstraction, and color, creating an homage to the rich and complicated history of painting.

Across this body of work, the artist oscillates between the real and the surreal, the celebratory and the sinister. He merges memories of Kenya with media depictions of East Africa, entangling the personal and the everyday in a web of social and political tensions. Through these compositions, Armitage considers how political reportage, African bodies, and the body politic circulate within systems of global capital, highlighting the fraught relationship between Africa and the West.

Organized by Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem with Legacy Russell, Associate Curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem.

The Elaine Dannheisser Projects Series is made possible in part by the Elaine Dannheisser Foundation and The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art.

According to the Library of Congress, around 70 percent of all feature-length films made in the US between 1912 and 1929 no longer exist. In America (2019), artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley imagines Black figures from the early decades of the twentieth century whose lives have been lost to history. A multichannel video installation, it is organized around twelve short black-and-white films shot by Bradley and set to a score by artist Trevor Mathison and composer Udit Duseja. Bradley intersperses her films with footage from the unreleased Lime Kiln Club Field Day (1914), believed to be the oldest surviving feature-length film with an all-Black cast.

“I see America as a model for how... the assembly of images can serve as an archive of the past as well as a document of the present,” Bradley said. Her installation cites historical events, ranging from African-American composer and singer Harry T. Burleigh’s publication of the spiritual “Deep River” in 1917, to the murder of popular jazz bandleader James Reese Europe in 1919, to the founding of baseball’s Negro National League in 1920. By including borrowed footage from Lime Kiln Club Field Day, she also shines a light on a film that was radically progressive for its time by celebrating Black vernacular culture.

Organized by Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator, with Legacy Russell, Associate Curator, Exhibitions. This exhibition is part of a multiyear partnership between The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA PS1.

The exhibition is free and open to the public without a ticket (at limited capacity). Visitors can enter at street level, and must go through a temperature and bag check before heading to the galleries. Masks are required for all visitors. More information about how to visit safely can be found on MoMA's website.

Projects: Kahlil Robert Irving presents an installation of sculpture, digital, and two-dimensional work wrapped around the gallery as site-specific wallpaper. Drawing from the vast scroll of digital culture—which the artist describes as “an everlasting feedback loop of my experience”—he mines the internet as a living archive of Black life, death, remembrance, celebration, and survival.

Irving creates dense assemblages of images and replicas of everyday objects. This exhibition brings together imagery ranging from a Facebook post commemorating the late Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor and a screenshot of an article on Betty M. Wheeler, the founder and longtime principal of Metro High School, a storied “school without walls” in St. Louis, to memes featuring hip-hop duo OutKast and Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, to visual reflections on American protest and the ongoing dialogue about Confederate monuments. From this cache of images, Irving creates decals and applies them to architectural surfaces in a layered compositional process. These decals also appear on his ceramics, which Irving creates using a labor-intensive technique. Firing individual pieces multiple times in the kiln to achieve his intricate layering of image, glaze, and color, he has forged a style that challenges distinctions between the work of the hobbyist, the artisan, and the artist.

Organized by Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator, with Legacy Russell, former Associate Curator, Exhibitions (now Executive Director and Chief Curator, The Kitchen). This exhibition is part of a multiyear partnership between The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA PS1.

The exhibition is free and open to the public without a ticket (at limited capacity). Visitors can enter at street level, and must go through a temperature and bag check before heading to the galleries. Masks are required for all visitors. More information about how to visit safely can be found on MoMA's website.

Projects: Ming Smith is part of a multiyear partnership between The Studio Museum in Harlem, MoMA, and MoMA PS1. 

For Ming Smith, photography is where the senses and the spirit collide through the prism of light, a process she has compared to “getting that precise moment … getting the feeling … like the blues.”

Projects: Ming Smith offers a critical reintroduction to a photographer who has been living and working in New York since the 1970s. She has inspired a generation of artists engaging the politics and poetics of the photographic image in relation to experiences of blackness. Through her use of long exposures, Smith dissolves the boundaries between her subjects and their surroundings, creating dreamlike, abstract images led by intuition and honed through repetition.

The result of the curators’ deep dive into Smith’s archive, Projects: Ming Smith bridges the distance between the present and the past, opening a photographic portal through which to encounter her images anew. The exhibition highlights how Smith’s images collapse the senses, encouraging us to attend to the hue of sound, the rhythm of form, and the texture of vision. As critic A. D. Coleman has written, Smith “sees and thinks in the minor key.”

Projects: Ming Smith is organized by Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, with the assistance of Kaitlin Booher, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, and Habiba Hopson, Curatorial Assistant, Permanent Collection, The Studio Museum in Harlem.

The exhibition is free and open to the public without a ticket. Visitors can enter at street level. COVID-19 vaccination and masks are no longer required, but strongly recommended for all visitors. More information can be found on MoMA's website.

(Never) As I Was marks the third year of the multiyear partnership between The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA PS1, and features new work by the 2020–21 Artist-in-Residence cohort: Widline Cadet (b. 1992, Pétion-Ville, Haiti), Texas Isaiah (b. Brooklyn, NY), Genesis Jerez (b. 1993, Bronx, NY), and Jacolby Satterwhite (b. 1986, Columbia, South Carolina).

With practices spanning new media, painting, sculpture, and photography, each artist proposes dynamic ways of experiencing time, space, and locality set into this current moment of complex transformation. In response to the seismic impacts of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, for the first time in the Museum’s history the artists participated entirely in remote form for the duration of the residency. Communication was deeply mediated by the digital—this way of collaborating presented new modes of being, bending and recharting the territories of domestic, social, and studio space.

Widline Cadet’s photo and video works examine intergenerational memory, selfhood, and erasure within the diasporic experience. Texas Isaiah offers a space for mourning, celebration, prayer, and remembrance, asserting the significance of imagination in the abolition of gender while exploring the healing capacity of rest as a place of connection. Genesis Jerez’s collaged paintings layer family photographs, oil paint, and charcoal to create works that interrogate her own personal histories and reckon with questions of diasporic fracture. Jacolby Satterwhite’s refocus on painting during the residency marked a shift inward: across these paintings, he engages fantasy as a mechanism for healing and a veil for trauma, flaying open a psychic space for transcendent possibility. Each artist took on the challenge of thinking critically and durationally about the ways the tensions and possibilities of private vs. public and interior vs. exterior can be expanded, reimagined, and renegotiated through and beyond their work. The outcomes are tender and lyrical explorations of family histories, memoir, spirituality, and memory. In reflecting on their private pasts, these artists have created works that look toward what collectively lies ahead, to a world that is at once achingly the same and never as it was. 

Curatorial Essay by Legacy Russell, former Studio Museum Associate Curator, Exhibitions (now Executive Director and Chief Curator, The Kitchen). ->

(Never) As I Was is organized by Legacy Russell, former Studio Museum Associate Curator, Exhibitions (now Executive Director and Chief Curator, The Kitchen), with Yelena Keller, Curatorial Assistant, Exhibitions, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Josephine Graf, Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1. Exhibition research is provided by Angelique Rosales Salgado, former The Studio Museum in Harlem and MoMA Curatorial Fellow, and Elana Bridges, former Mellon Curatorial Fellow, The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Support for (Never) As I Was at MoMA PS1 is generously provided by the Tom Slaughter Exhibition Fund and the MoMA PS1 Trustee Annual Fund.

The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Artist-in-Residence program is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts; Joy of Giving Something; New York State Council on the Arts; Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; Jerome Foundation; Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; and by endowments established by the Andrea Frank Foundation; the Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Trust; and Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Additional support is generously provided by The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

In the second year of a multi-part collaboration, The Studio Museum in Harlem is pleased to present its annual Artist-in-Residence exhibition at MoMA PS1. This Longing Vessel features new work by the 2019–20 cohort of the Studio Museum’s foundational residency program, artists E. Jane (b. 1990, Bethesda, MD), Naudline Pierre (b. 1989, Leominster, MA), and Elliot Reed (b. 1992, Milwaukee, WI). With practices spanning new media, performance, and painting, this collaborative exhibition enacts a radical intimacy—a vessel to hold and be held by. In longing, the works shown here find the intersection between queerness and Blackness as a waypoint: one to yearn from, to reach toward, to leap beyond. This Longing Vessel troubles and excites ways of seeing, seeking new language for the building of extraordinary futures.

Curatorial Essay by Legacy Russell, Associate Curator, Exhibitions. ->

This Longing Vessel is organized by Legacy Russell, Associate Curator, Exhibitions, The Studio Museum in Harlem, with Yelena Keller, Curatorial Assistant, Exhibitions, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Josephine Graf, Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1. Exhibition research is provided by Makayla Bailey and Angelique Rosales Salgado, The Studio Museum in Harlem and MoMA Curatorial Fellows, and Elana Bridges, Mellon Curatorial Fellow.

Entry to MoMA PS1 is by advance timed ticket only and capacity is limited. Tickets must be reserved online prior to entering. You may arrive any time during the one-hour window of your timed ticket. Reserve timed tickets.

While The Studio Museum in Harlem constructs a new building on the site of our longtime home on West 125th Street, MoMA PS1 will present the the annual Artist-in-Residence exhibition. MOOD is the inaugural exhibition of this partnership, featuring the work of the Studio Museum’s 2018–19 residents Allison Janae Hamilton (b. 1984, Lexington, KY), Tschabalala Self (b. 1990, New York), and Sable Elyse Smith (b. 1986, Los Angeles). The exhibition is presented as part of a multi-year partnership between The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA PS1. Building on the institutions’ existing affiliations and shared values, this wide-ranging collaboration encompasses exhibitions and programming at both The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1.

MOOD explores site, place, and time as they relate to American identity and popular culture, past and present. The exhibition resituates the often trending social media hashtag (#mood), which describes moments both profound and banal: anything can be “a #mood.” Working across a range of media and materials, each artist manifests their perception of the present moment in the United States, while creating passageways to new worlds. MOOD maps out each artist’s psychic landscape, presenting distinct snapshots that travel through and beyond the fabric of digital culture.

Layering video, haunting sculptural forms, found objects, and photography, Allison Janae Hamilton’s immersive installation explores spirituality and mysticism as tied to the American South. A native Floridian, Hamilton calls on the South’s coastal landscape to navigate the fault lines of wildness and civility. Hamilton’s installation disorients with its sinister undertone, speaking to the enduring traumas of racial violence and economic exploitation of the South.

Tschabalala Self’s new series, Street Scenes, pays homage to the energy of the city, from the frenetic visual culture of bodegas to the communal experience of waiting at a bus stop. These large-scale printed, painted, and collage works create a cityscape that brings the vibrancy and energy of Harlem into focus. Growing up nearby and inspired by her return to Harlem through this residency, Self creates fictional figures rooted in daily rhythms and routines in and around the neighborhood.

Sable Elyse Smith’s conceptual sculptures and two-dimensional works interrogate the instability of economy, language, power, and the construct of social history. Smith’s work underscores the banality of violence at an institutional scale, and explores how trauma embeds itself in the everyday. Smith roots this collection of work in the visual vernacular of the prison industrial complex—visitor tables, coloring books made available in correctional facilities, and commissary ramen noodles used as a form of commerce. Smith’s treatment of these ordinary objects raises issues of labor, class, and memory, evoking new associations within the seemingly familiar.

The exhibition closes at 3 pm on Saturdays through August 31.

MOOD is organized by Legacy Russell, Associate Curator, Exhibitions, and Hallie Ringle, former Assistant Curator, the Studio Museum (now Hugh Kaul Curator of Contemporary Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art) with Josephine Graf, Curatorial Assistant, MoMA PS1.

The exhibition at MoMA PS1 is made possible by generous support from John L. Thomson.

The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Artist-in-Residence program is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Robert Lehman Foundation; the Jerome Foundation; New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; and by endowments established by the Andrea Frank Foundation; the Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Trust and Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Additional support is generously provided by The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The Studio Museum in Harlem | The Museum of Modern Art
Museum Fellowship Collaboration

The Studio Museum in Harlem and The Museum of Modern Art are accepting applications for the fourth Museum Fellowship Collaboration. Each museum will accept three museum fellows—two for curatorial departments and one for public programs. The fellows will spend one year at each museum, then rotate to the partner institution for the completion of the two-year program.

The fellows, under the direction of either the curatorial department or public programs department, will work independently and collaboratively with museum staff to gain in-depth experience through enrichment programming and practical learning opportunities. This joint fellowship will develop the next generation of thought leaders  and museum professionals, and will offer insight into the daily workings of a museum through hands-on work, workshops, public programs, and professional development. 

Curatorial Fellows

The curatorial fellows will participate in the essential activities of a curatorial department under the guidance of a supervising staff member. This may include experience in the following areas: collection management, archives, acquisitions, loans, exhibition research, catalogue production, and administration. The fellows may also assist in the logistics, research, planning, and organization of activities and programming generated in their assigned department.

At the Studio Museum, the fellows will be assigned to either exhibitions or permanent collection. While there will be points of selective overlap in projects and research, each fellow will report to the Associate Curator, Exhibitions, or the Associate Curator, Permanent Collection, contingent on assigned track. At The Museum of Modern Art, the fellow will be assigned to either the Department of Drawings and Prints or the Department of Media and Performance.

The ideal candidate will be an active collaborator with a wide range of staff across the museum, comfortable working in a professional office environment, and willing to embrace a full scope of relevant tasks.

Public Programs Fellow

At The Museum of Modern Art, the fellow selected for public programs will be part of the programs team and under the umbrella of the Education Department. They will be involved in researching, developing, producing, executing and evaluating adult public programs and events, conducting outreach to cultural partners, and brainstorming audience development strategies. The fellows will be responsible for communicating and coordinating with a diverse group of program participants and facilitators, including exhibiting artists, lecturers, performers, scholars, educators, writers, community organizers, and arts and culture organizations.

At the Studio Museum, fellows will be part of a small team tasked with designing public programs and community engagement opportunities for adult audiences. These include artist talks, hands-on art-making workshops, film screenings, book clubs, panel discussions, and artist-in-residence programs. While construction is underway on the Studio Museum’s new building, these collaborative initiatives will take place at partner institutions throughout Harlem and New York City as part of the Museum’s expanded inHarlem initiative.

The ideal candidate is a nimble and creative thinker, willing to take on a wide range of programmatic and administrative responsibilities, and comfortable interfacing with the public on a regular basis. 

Requirements

The Museum Fellowship is a paid, two-year employment opportunity for individuals in the early stages of their career. The ideal fellow will have a B.A.or graduate-level degree, with a concentration in art history, curatorial studies, Africana studies, visual culture, or a related field. Candidates should either have previous involvement within an arts community or arts institution, or write about their desire and specific interests in museums. Candidates for the Museum Fellowship will be reviewed through a selective process by members of both institutions.

Excellent written communications skills are required. A successful applicant functions well in a fast-paced team environment, and can manage multiple projects at once with keen attention to detail, adaptability, and a positive attitude.

Applicants must be members of historically underrepresented groups in the curatorial and museum profession, and have a demonstrated interest in cultural programming, writing, and research. Fellows must have an interest in actively engaging with the mission and scale of both partnered institutions. 

Salary and Benefits

The salary is $42,000 per annum, plus benefits, which include medical and dental coverage and four weeks paid vacation per annum. The program also offers an additional $5,000 per annum housing allowance and $2,500 to cover travel expenses for an approved research trip related to the fellow’s field of interest.

Application

As part of the application process, you must include:

•     A cover letter specifying your interest in either curatorial or public programs, highlighting a particular area of professional or scholarly interest
•     Your résumé
•     At least one letter of recommendation (these can be sent directly to jobs@moma.org by your recommenders)
•     A writing sample of no more than five pages

Applications are closed.

Fellowship begins: March 2022
Fellowship ends: March 2024

Please note that while careful consideration will be given to each submission, the Museum will only be able to contact those applicants whose knowledge, skills and work experience best fit the requirements of the position. No phone calls or faxes, please.