ICA at VCU and Artist in Residence Paul Rucker Awarded MAP Fund Grant to Create New Art Work

Yesterday, the MAP Fund announced that it will award $40k to the new Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (ICA at VCU) in Richmond and Artist in Residence Paul Rucker to realize plans for The Power of the Narrator, an original performance piece that will premiere at the ICA in 2019.

To create The Power of the Narrator, Rucker will reanimate racist 18-19th c. hand-painted glass lantern slides with theatrical and musical performance to illuminate how white Americans create and perpetuate negative stereotypes of black Americans. The work will explore how the narrative of American history is manipulated by those in power to maintain their dominance. The Power of the Narrator will build upon Rucker's previous projects, such as his work Storm in a Time of Shelter, currently on view in the ICA at VCU, which uses reimagined KKK robes and archival material to show the long-term impact of this organization in the United States, through separatist ideology and the normalization of systemic racism.

The Power of the Narrator reimagines vintage lantern slides with animation, new composition, live music, and theatrical performance. This hour-long work will bring to life derogatory lantern-slide stories that portray black Americans as lazy, stupid, crooked, thieves, shifty, and other negative stereotypes that were used to dehumanize and slander the whole group. The Power of the Narrator builds from the extensive lantern slide collection Rucker has amassed in recent years. Lantern slides, which were popular from the 1820s to 1910s, are hand-painted glass slides inserted in a projector called the magic lantern.

Rucker's creation of The Power of the Narrator emerges from his desire to make more people hear and understand how narrative in American history has been controlled by those in power, and the manipulative power of that control. All groups tell stories, but some groups have the power to impose their stories on others, to label, stigmatize, paint others as undesirables-and to have these stories presented as scientific fact, God's will, or "wholesome" entertainment.

Paul Rucker is a visual artist, composer, and musician who combines live performance, sound, original compositions, and visual art. His work is the product of a rich interactive process, through which he investigates community impact, human rights issues, historical research, and basic human emotions surrounding particular subject matter. He is currently artist in residence at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia.

Much of his current work focuses on the prison-industrial complex and the many issues accompanying incarceration in its relationship to slavery. He has presented performances and visual art exhibitions across the country and has collaborated with educational institutions to address the issue of mass incarceration. Presentations have taken place in schools, active prisons, and inactive prisons such as Alcatraz.

A 2018 TED Fellow, Rucker is a 2012 Creative Capital grantee in visual art as well as a 2014 Multi-Arts Production Fund grantee for performance. In 2016, Rucker received the Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, for which he is the first artist in residence at the new National Museum of African American Culture. Rucker received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017. In 2013-15, he was the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Artist in Residence and Research Fellow at the Maryland Institute and College of Art. Rucker is also the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors grant (2015) and most recently Arts Innovator Award from the Dale and Leslie Chihuly Foundation (2018).