Isaac Julien's America at Jessica Silverman Gallery
"Isaac Julien's America" will be on show at Jessica Silverman Gallery from March 13-April 25, 2020.
A solo show of new and historic works about the struggle for freedom and equality in a globalized world. The show is inspired by three pioneers: Frederick Douglass, an ex-slave, orator and the most photographed man of the nineteenth century; Matthew Henson, the African-American explorer who discovered the North Pole; and Angela Davis, the radical feminist and former Black Panther turned social justice activist. The photographic works in the exhibition interrogate and "creolize" the genres of portraiture, landscape, costume drama and Blaxploitation film.
“Isaac Julien’s America” features large scale color photographs from Lessons of the Hour and small black-and-white tintypes, titled Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow after a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of the first African-American writers to acquire an international reputation, who Douglass once described as “the most promising colored man in America.” Lessons of the Hour is also comprised of a ten-screen film installation, which premiered at Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York, and will open at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco on May 29th.
