Red Bull Arts Detroit Presents Spring Artist Residency Exhibition

Red Bull Arts Detroit will present its first artist residency exhibition of the year will feature new artworks created by Miatta Kawinzi, Tiff Massey, and Patrick Quarm during the artists' three-month long, live-in residency. The exhibition will be open to the public from April 12-June 2, 2019, with an opening reception held on Friday, April 12 from 6-9pm.

From photographs of African-American hair salons to paintings on "Ghanian" fabrics produced in Indonesia, the works in this exhibition explore the artists' own relationships to black material culture and physical space, and the resulting compound identity from their import and export.

The Red Bull Arts Detroit artist residency program is central to the organization's commitment to emerging and established artists. Three times a year, artists at different stages of their careers are brought to Detroit for a three-month residency at Red Bull Arts Detroit. They are provided housing, studio space, and a $12,000 stipend. Over the course of the residency, artists engage with the local arts community and create new bodies of work for exhibition. About the Spring 2019 Artists-in-Residence
Exhibition at Red Bull Arts Detroit

Tiff Massey is an interdisciplinary artist from Detroit, whose practice is inspired by African standards of economic vitality, and counts the iconic material culture of 1980s hip-hop as a major influence. Massey uses contemporary observances of class and race through the lens of an African diaspora, combined with inspiration drawn from her experience growing up in Detroit. For the artist residency exhibition, Massey has created an installation revolving around her interest in traditional African hair-styling techniques. The installation is fitted with custom wallpaper comprised of photos from the interior of a local African-American hair salon, on which she has mounted black canvases that have hair extensions stitched into them displaying a variety of different hairstyles. While still engaging the narratives of adornment, armor, and power that previous bodies of work have been concerned with, by incorporating the politics of black hair and the physical space of the salon, undercurrents of care, nurturing, and the importance of creating space for that (specifically for black women) also come into play. Simultaneously powerful yet tender, Massey's new work deftly unpacks the phrase "Don't touch my hair."

Miatta Kawinzi is a New York-based filmmaker and multi-disciplinary artist known for creating sculptural, sound, and video installations on the themes of selfhood, diaspora, and belonging. Born in Nashville to a Liberian mother and Kenyan father, Kawinzi grew up moving through various geographic, cultural, and linguistic spaces, which informs her work and interest in hybridity. For the artist residency exhibition, Kawinzi will present Libration, a sculptural sound and video installation that is a meditation on the pliability of barriers, and on methods of breaching confinement to find alternative ways of engaging with space. During her residence at Red Bull Arts Detroit, Kawinzi responded to how the land and the city are partitioned-all of the highways and freeways cut across the city, allowing for movement while simultaneously creating stark lines of division. Through poetic, abstract movements, Kawinzi investigates the Detroit's complex history of land use, bringing to mind the city's "urban re-development" projects throughout the 20th century that decimated many African-American communities. There is an inherent hopefulness in the work, as Kawinzi points to the human ability to stretch and maneuver not only ourselves around or through a barrier, but to also move and stretch the barrier itself. The movements she performs in the video speak to the fluid, flexible, and adaptable nature of the human spirit and drive.

Patrick Quarm is a Ghana-born artist currently living in Metro Detroit. Quarm's work investigates the intersection of his identity as both an African and as an American, through representational portraiture, complex pattern work, and textiles that are rich with color and cultural complexity. Quarm's use of oil paint and collage on fabric gives his work a three-dimensional, layered effect that lends movement beyond the two dimensional surface. Quarm's fabrics are shipped from family in Ghana, but the artist explains that the textile itself has a complicated history as it originates from Indonesia. "The reason I use this fabric is because it's African, but it's not African," says Quarm. Like the fabric, Quarm continuously questions authenticity in identity; how communities shape identity through the relationship to place; and whether place is a valid form of establishing identity at all. For the artist residency exhibition, Quarm will present new paintings from his series of portraiture. About the Artists

MIATTA KAWINZI is a NY-based filmmaker and multi-disciplinary artist known for creating sculptural, sound, and video installations on the themes of selfhood, diaspora, and belonging. This past December, Kawinzi was named the winner of the second Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant for her forthcoming work, SHE GATHER ME. Kawinzi's work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, New Jersey; BRIC, Brooklyn; and A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, among others.

TIFF MASSEY is an interdisciplinary artist from Detroit, Michigan. She holds an MFA in metalsmithing from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Massey is a 2015 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellowship awardee, as well as a two-time John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's Knight Arts Challenge winner and a Michigan Chronicle 40 Under 40 award recipient. Massey has participated in several international residencies including Ideas City (in Detroit, Athens, Greece and Arles, France) hosted by The New Museum of New York and with the Volterra-Detroit Foundation in Volterra, Italy. Tiff Massey's work has been widely exhibited in both national and international museums and galleries.

PATRICK QUARM was born in the post-colonial town of Sekondi, Ghana in 1988. Currently living and practicing in Metro Detroit, Quarm received his BFA from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana, and MFA from Texas Tech University. Quarm's work has been showcased around the world at K.N.U.S.T Museum Kumasi, Ghana; Peckham International Art Fair (PIAF), London, England; Caviel Museum of African American History, Lubbock, Texas; and Library Street Collective, Detroit, Michigan. Forthcoming Public Programs:

While working on a forthcoming book about how the myth of neutrality manifests in cultural institutions and museums, Laura Raicovich has been thinking about what neutrality means, how it can possibly exist, and how, if it can exist, might prove useful. In a society that is beyond polarized and in need of repair, can cultural space become a place we hold in common? What might it take to achieve this space? In the form of a slide-lecture, Laura will recount stories and pose questions that have grown from her research, particularly focusing on the writings of Roland Barthes on neutrality, the thinking of Christina Sharpe on the relationship of intergenerational histories on the present, and Jeanne van Heeswijk's prompts to re-imagine spaces and scenarios for living together. Raicovich will offer a space of "practicing for the not yet," in Jeanne's formulation, as a location for collective dreaming, and to seek a cultural space which can hold our differences as well as our commonalities with generosity and resilience.

The Slideshow Series is a programming format shared between Red Bull Arts Detroit and Red Bull Arts New York that invites artists, curators, community activists, technologists, scholars, musicians and others, to present an area of interest or expertise. Employing the customary format of the slideshow as an educational tool to share ideas with an audience, Red Bull Arts Detroit asks each participant to rethink how they can best engage the public on a topic of importance to them, and to consider how the shape of that presentation has the potential to ignite dialogue. Slideshows are intimate in nature and take the form of performative lectures, research presentation, poetry readings, sound performances and more.

Please join in on Saturday, April 27th from 7-10pm to celebrate the launch of the seventh edition of Barbed Magazine with live music and performances. The Red Bull Arts Detroit Micro Grant, received by Arturo Herrera, partially funded the production of this issue, entitled "Southwest Detroit."

The evening will showcase work by some of Barbed #7's featured artists including Karilú Alarcón Forshee, Leslie Rogers, Elton Monroy Durán, and DJ sets by Daniel James and Zbornak. The magazine will be available for purchase at the event.

Of the new edition, Herrera says, "with Barbed issue #07, we wanted to capture artists' perspectives on collaboration in Southwest Detroit by focusing our attention on grassroots organizations and how they function as an occupational model for artists. We sought out to discover autonomy by generating vibrant public spaces, works, and ideas through collaborative performances. As a magazine, we see the need for the return of storytelling in real time. Barbed wishes to share the stories of artists in the region so our readers can understand their impact on the community. We are very proud of our artist selection and the content created for this issue."

Barbed #7 is supported in part by the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Southwest Airlines, and the Surdna Foundation through a grant from the NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant Program, and by Red Bull Arts Detroit Micro-Grant.

The Red Bull Arts Detroit Reading Room series invites artists, writers, curators, community organizers, scholars, and more to present on a text of particular importance to them. Red Bull Arts Detroit asks the presenter to bring the text to a public who might have never encountered it before, and to find a way to translate the importance or meaning of the work to the audience. Following the presentation, the text will be added to the permanent collection of the Red Bull Arts Detroit Library, alongside an artifact created by the presenter.

The first Reading Room session will be held on May 7 with presenter Carleton Gholz, Founder and Executive Director of Detroit Sound Conservancy. Gholze will give a presentation on architectural historian and art collector W. Hawkins Ferry's The Buildings of Detroit, an essential book for a Detroit-located library. Published in 1968 by Wayne State University Press at the height Michigan modernism, Ferry documents and narrates what he sees as the built history of Detroit from the long destroyed "River Rouge Indian Mound" to his own, still standing, mid-century modernist home in Grosse Pointe Shores. In this talk, Gholz will take Ferry's book as a point of departure for a discussion of the pressures on historical thinking, art criticism, and preservation in Michigan since the late '60s. After 50 years of neoliberalism, what capacities and supportive institutions do we have as Michigan and Detroit residents to provide criticism or new monographic support to Ferry's high modern panoramic history? And, attempting to look beyond neoliberalism, can and will there ever be a "Green New Deal" for historians and the libraries that could support their work?

For further programming updates, visit redbullarts.com/detroit/.

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