Exhibition
RAGGA NYC: All the threatened and delicious things joining one another
05/03/17-06/25/17
Performances · Exhibition-Related
RAGGA Presents
Cover Image:
Renée Stout, I Can Heal, 2000–01. Neon sign and five objects, 28 1/2 × 36 1/2 × 5 in (72.4 × 92.7 × 12.7 cm). Collection Dean Dalton. Courtesy the artist
Marking the closing week of RAGGA NYC’s residency and exhibition, this evening event will feature performance, poetry, and music from a group of artists in the RAGGA community. This program is organized on the occasion of the exhibition and residency “RAGGA NYC: All the threatened and delicious things joining one another,” presented through the Department of Education and Public Engagement’s R&D Season: BODY.
RAGGA, a platform founded by Christopher Udemezue, connects a community of queer Caribbean artists working across a wide range of disciplines—including visual art, fashion, and poetry—to explore how race, sexuality, gender, heritage, and history inform their work and their lives. A vibrant community deeply committed to education and grassroots organizing, RAGGA fosters a network and an extended family that make space for solidarity, celebration, and expression. Their residency will explore Afro-Caribbean diasporic traditions, bringing together works by a group of artists who trace their own relationships to Caribbean history and take up Édouard Glissant’s claim that “the language of the Caribbean artist does not originate in the obsession with celebrating his inner self; this inner self is inseparable from the future evolution of his community [in which] he is his own ethnologist, historian, [and] linguist.” The exhibition title quotes Glissant’s description of a world in which beings can come together under a veil of opacity and create a new model of relation that preserves difference.
Sponsors
Artist commissions at the New Museum are generously supported
by the Neeson / Edlis Artist Commissions Fund.
Artist residencies are made possible, in part, by Laurie Wolfert.
Additional support is provided by the Toby Devan Lewis Emerging Artists Exhibitions Fund.
We gratefully acknowledge the New Museum Council for Artists’ Research and Residencies: Alexandra Bowes, Gregory R. Miller and Michael Wiener,
and Laurie Wolfert, Co-Chairs; Dr. Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip E. Aarons,
Terry Gamble Boyer and Peter Boyer, Isolde Brielmaier, Jenny Choo,
Lonti Ebers and Bruce Flatt, Julia Gruen, Stephen Reily and Emily Bingham,
and the Mimi Saltzman Foundation.
Additional support is provided by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Endowment support is provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; the Skadden, Arps Education Programs Fund; and the William Randolph Hearst Endowed Fund for Education Programs at the New Museum.
