ADAMA Arts Salon #41
ADAMA Arts Salon is a series of conversations featuring contemporary artists, curators, scholars, and more from across the African Diaspora.
Join us for ADAMA's upcoming in-person Arts Salon featuring Gabrielle Ione Hickmon and Shefon Taylor in conversation with Sierra King.
About Moderator: Sierra King is a multidisciplinary artist, archivist and curator. Her introduction to archiving began with her Great-Grandmother, Annett L. Battle, a well-known child-care provider in the Collier Heights neighborhood of Atlanta, Georgia. She is the founder of Build Your Archive, a memory work lab where Black Women Artists build their archives in real time.
About Panelist: Gabrielle Ione Hickmon: Interested in body memory, waiting rooms, layovers, circles, Black imaginaries, and ocular proof. Her work includes essays, ethnographic research, and coil-built ceramics. Her writing has appeared in Condé Nast Traveler, The Baffler, The Pudding, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. Gabrielle is currently at work on The Boyne City Project, a series of vessels chronicling her family history in Michigan which dates back to before the Great Migration, an essay collection, and a memoir.
Shefon N. Taylor: An interdisciplinary artist interrogating themes of rememory, interiority, and the exceptional found in the Black vernacular.
Her choice of collage as a medium is a fascination with its impulse, delicacy, and compromise. It functions as an aesthetic engagement and an archival effort to amplify the ordinariness of Black life through vernacular photography. As a guide, Shefon points to Toni Morrison’s concept of rememory,” as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past.” The artist connects to the history of found objects and archival photographs and engages their willingness to become a new thing. The combination of the texture of memory and the relics of yesterday serves as a way to encounter the past, present, and future. Shefon cites artists such as Toni Morrison, Carrie Mae Weems, and Lorna Simpson as influences on her work.