Charity Harris is an interdisciplinary artist from Atlanta, and currently residing in the greater Washington D.C. area. She creates sculptures from found and ready-made materials using her Southern upbringing as the driving force for the content that fuels her work—race, religion, gender, and the human relationship to nature. She combines the use of "humble materials" with her love of natural textures and historic costume to explore Southern identity through her perspective as an African-American woman.
LIVE Art Talk: strikeWare
Baltimore-based collective strikeWare, a finalist for the 2020 Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize, is driven to rethink and breakdown tangible and intangible hierarchies. In conversation with Joy Davis, Manager of Adult and Community Program, its members discuss the collaborative process, the importance of creating art experiences in museums and other historic spaces, and using historic institutions as a catalyst for their work.
Medium: Video
Year: 2021
Details: 40 minutes
Renovations - A Walk-thru Tour
strikeWare's 'Renovations' examines the history of African-American education in Baltimore from the founding of the city's first public high school for Black students to the present day. The show is open 12-4 every Saturday and Sunday at the Carroll Mansion and runs through March 1st. We're also doing a gallery talk on February 8th at 2pm. Renovations uses media such as virtual and augmented reality, interactive sculpture, and immersive projection to draw out the hidden narratives and ongoing struggles in our educational system.
Medium: video
Year: 2020
Details: 7 minutes
Kwame Shaka Opare is a classically trained West African dancer with an MFA in Dance from the University of Maryland. At 14, he became a principal dancer with Kankouran West African Dance Company (Washington DC). As a young adult, Kwame Shaka moved to New York where he established himself as a dynamic instructor and choreographer. In the late 90s, he began touring with the Broadway show STOMP, in the lead role and as rehearsal director where he remained for 8 years.
NO PASA NADA
This performance is a collaboration among Mia Eva, Caleb Duarte, Judy Stone, Francisco Hidalgo and audience participants. The one-night, one hour performance took place in the tiny Galeria El Cerrillo in Chiapas Mexico on March 17th, 2009.
When the performance begins we see a group of men using ropes to lift an eight-inch, 600 pound slab of concrete. While they are struggling to lift the slab, Mia tries to crawl and balance on the cement and a video of Francisco's energy work is projected outside the gallery space. At this point the audience is not fully aware that Mia is paralyzed.
During the performance the public experiences the fear and danger involved in lifting the slab as well as Mia’s fragility and strength. When the slab is lifted it symbolically raises the body of the “lower class” to the eye level of the audience, this confruntation made much of the audience hesitant to enter the room.
The emotional center of the performance is felt when Eva shakes her elbows to balance, and her movement, in turn, causes the ropes, which are connected to the arms of the audience, to tremble. In this moment architectural structures and the human figure are at once trapped in friction, tension, and failure—each looking for definitions, places and goals to be reached. The artists seek to explore how labor and struggle exist alongside acts as simple as breathing, and how the natural forces of balance, compression, tension and expansion can be amplified into aesthetic, local, social and political spheres.
When the performance begins we see a group of men using ropes to lift an eight-inch, 600 pound slab of concrete. While they are struggling to lift the slab, Mia tries to crawl and balance on the cement and a video of Francisco's energy work is projected outside the gallery space. At this point the audience is not fully aware that Mia is paralyzed.
During the performance the public experiences the fear and danger involved in lifting the slab as well as Mia’s fragility and strength. When the slab is lifted it symbolically raises the body of the “lower class” to the eye level of the audience, this confruntation made much of the audience hesitant to enter the room.
The emotional center of the performance is felt when Eva shakes her elbows to balance, and her movement, in turn, causes the ropes, which are connected to the arms of the audience, to tremble. In this moment architectural structures and the human figure are at once trapped in friction, tension, and failure—each looking for definitions, places and goals to be reached. The artists seek to explore how labor and struggle exist alongside acts as simple as breathing, and how the natural forces of balance, compression, tension and expansion can be amplified into aesthetic, local, social and political spheres.
Year: 2009
BURIAL
ENTIERRO/ BURIAL
Elambo Bajo, in Chiapas, is an autonomous Zapatista community not far from San Cristobal de las Casas. Having declared its independence, the mostly indigenous population is removed from the turmoil found in cities with conflicting political parties. At the same time, this separation also leaves it without municipal services and government structures. A number of projects in Elambo Bajo examine the idea of autonomy on individual, communal, and political levels.
This work took place with EZLN community Elambo Bajo. This work is an investigation of how the body and simple actions can bring cycles of experienced tragedy into possibilities for healing individually and collectively. Caleb Duarte, Emory Douglas, and Mia Eva created an action in which indigenous Mayan children buried us: representatives of disenfranchised communities (Latino, Black, disabled) from the privileged United States.
The ideas around burial in Western thought are often of “letting go” and “moving on.” In contrast, burial within Mayan and Latin American communities suggests a continued co-existence with the dead. Here, the men and children of Elambo Bajo break the land to symbolically bury the past in a post-colonial act embracing the harsh histories of slavery and genocide. They create a “living memory” to enter into a new century with assurance, self-determination and autonomy.
Elambo Bajo, in Chiapas, is an autonomous Zapatista community not far from San Cristobal de las Casas. Having declared its independence, the mostly indigenous population is removed from the turmoil found in cities with conflicting political parties. At the same time, this separation also leaves it without municipal services and government structures. A number of projects in Elambo Bajo examine the idea of autonomy on individual, communal, and political levels.
This work took place with EZLN community Elambo Bajo. This work is an investigation of how the body and simple actions can bring cycles of experienced tragedy into possibilities for healing individually and collectively. Caleb Duarte, Emory Douglas, and Mia Eva created an action in which indigenous Mayan children buried us: representatives of disenfranchised communities (Latino, Black, disabled) from the privileged United States.
The ideas around burial in Western thought are often of “letting go” and “moving on.” In contrast, burial within Mayan and Latin American communities suggests a continued co-existence with the dead. Here, the men and children of Elambo Bajo break the land to symbolically bury the past in a post-colonial act embracing the harsh histories of slavery and genocide. They create a “living memory” to enter into a new century with assurance, self-determination and autonomy.
EDELO
In the fall of 2009, over one hundred displaced indigenous community members occupied the offices of the United Nations, located in San Cristobal De Las Casa, Chiapas Mexico. The offices where taken over in hopes of gaining international attention from humanitarian organizations. After a few months of the occupation, the United Nations simply decided to find another building and moved.
A few months later, Caleb Duarte and Mia Rollow. disillusioned with the institutional proposed purpose of art, wished to believe that art could be a radical form of communication, and soon moved into the building and begin an experimental art space and an international artist residency of diverse practice. They began to invite artists, activists, cultural workers, inventors, gardeners, PhDs, jugglers, and educators to take part in creating an experiment on art and social change. This group of artists, disenchanted by the continuing linear path of art history, came to EDELO in favor of art as a vehicle for possible transformation.
Inspired by the 1994 Indigenous Zapatista uprising, where word and poetry are used to inspire a generation to imagine “other” worlds possible, EDELO has retained the name of the UN. It is a part of an investigation of how Art, in all its disciplines and contradictions, can take the supposed role of such institutional bodies: in creating understanding, empathy, and to serve as a tool for imagining alternatives to what seems to be a harmful and violent system that we have come to accept.
A few months later, Caleb Duarte and Mia Rollow. disillusioned with the institutional proposed purpose of art, wished to believe that art could be a radical form of communication, and soon moved into the building and begin an experimental art space and an international artist residency of diverse practice. They began to invite artists, activists, cultural workers, inventors, gardeners, PhDs, jugglers, and educators to take part in creating an experiment on art and social change. This group of artists, disenchanted by the continuing linear path of art history, came to EDELO in favor of art as a vehicle for possible transformation.
Inspired by the 1994 Indigenous Zapatista uprising, where word and poetry are used to inspire a generation to imagine “other” worlds possible, EDELO has retained the name of the UN. It is a part of an investigation of how Art, in all its disciplines and contradictions, can take the supposed role of such institutional bodies: in creating understanding, empathy, and to serve as a tool for imagining alternatives to what seems to be a harmful and violent system that we have come to accept.
IAA
Mia Eve, a multidisciplinary artist, received her BFA with Honors from the University of Maryland and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A native of Chicago, she currently lives in Hyattsville, MD.
Upon receiving her MFA, she moved to Chiapas Mexico with her collaborator Caleb Duarte, where they founded EDELO (En Donde Era La Onu/ Where The United Nations Used To Be). EDELO was a community center and intercultural artist residency that was a collaborative laboratory for people coming from different sides of life. EDELO became a nucleus for their continuing work.
This work is created in site-specific lands of spiritual, social, and cultural resistance. It strives to facilitate the expressions of communities through distributed authorship demanding transdisciplinary creative forms in sculpture, performance, community-based public intervention, and psychomagic. Many of the works organize community participation in ceremonial processions that command a slight moment of hyper-visibility of an otherwise underground community. Through art projects, workshops, interviews, and intimate conversations participants produce and document collectively authored creations that function as aesthetic practices and as humanitarian efforts.
The work focuses on intersectionality as a nucleus for engagement and is centered around the themes of movement, tying together notions of ableism and white supremacy, human displacement, generational traumas, land, and human rights, child labor and femicide, autonomy, and self-determination.
Upon receiving her MFA, she moved to Chiapas Mexico with her collaborator Caleb Duarte, where they founded EDELO (En Donde Era La Onu/ Where The United Nations Used To Be). EDELO was a community center and intercultural artist residency that was a collaborative laboratory for people coming from different sides of life. EDELO became a nucleus for their continuing work.
This work is created in site-specific lands of spiritual, social, and cultural resistance. It strives to facilitate the expressions of communities through distributed authorship demanding transdisciplinary creative forms in sculpture, performance, community-based public intervention, and psychomagic. Many of the works organize community participation in ceremonial processions that command a slight moment of hyper-visibility of an otherwise underground community. Through art projects, workshops, interviews, and intimate conversations participants produce and document collectively authored creations that function as aesthetic practices and as humanitarian efforts.
The work focuses on intersectionality as a nucleus for engagement and is centered around the themes of movement, tying together notions of ableism and white supremacy, human displacement, generational traumas, land, and human rights, child labor and femicide, autonomy, and self-determination.