Friday, January 26, 2018 - 'Baggage Claims'
6:30-8 pm | Public Reception. Free and open to the public. Cash bar. No reservations required.
Baggage transports and holds our belongings, and by implication our thoughts. As objects, trunks, suitcases, luggage, and crates suggest the extreme mobility of our global culture. As ideas, in this exhibition, they refer to the humanitarian and political concerns that instigate this mobility and that dominate national and international conversation and policy. The term baggage also carries a psychological meaning: things that encumber one's freedom, progress, or development.
Baggage Claims presents its featured artworks through the lens of this global mobility, which results from political, economic, natural, and social conditions. It affects broad sectors of the population, through the benign commodification of hospitality (think Airbnb) to the horrific displacement of millions of immigrants and refugees as a result of crises occurring around the world. Each work in the exhibition suggests multiple readings. On the one hand, each tells the story of individuals: their journeys, suffering, and memories, their hopes for possibilities ahead. Simultaneously, they refer to the politics and policies that create and shape those individuals' experiences: ethnic cleansing, contested borders, lack of social services, and environmental cataclysms. The works in the exhibition—some humorous, others eliciting heartbreak—address both personal experiences and global policies, as well as the consequences and catalysts of mobility.
This exhibition is organized by the Orlando Museum of Art and co-curated by Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox of c2-curatorsquared. Its presentation at the Weatherspoon Art Museum is supported by a Kohler Grant from UNCG's International Programs Center, UNCG's Keker First Year Common Read, and ArtsGreensboro. On view January 27-April 22, 2018.
Related Programs:
Thursday, February 1, 6:30pm
Film: Human Flow, directed by artist and human rights activist Ai Weiwei.
Wednesday, February 7, 5 pm
Lecture: Yesomi Umulo, Falk Visiting Scholar in Art History
Hear from Yesomi Umolu (Nigeria/UK), scholar and curator of contemporary African and African Diasporic art and global contemporary art and spatial practices.
Thursday, February 8, 6:30-7 pm
Evening Tour: Baggage Claims
Explore the themes of global mobility, migration, and the part baggage plays in our personal and family histories.
Thursday, February 22, 5 pm
Educators Workshop: Identity in a Suitcase (registration required)
Thursday, February 22, 6:30 pm
Panel Discussion: Building Community, Immigrants & Refugees in the Triad
News clips and statistics overshadow the realities of rebuilding one's life in a new country. Hear from individuals who have resettled in the Triad and others who are supporting their efforts, and learn ways to get involved. Co-sponsored by the Islamic Studies Research Network.
Tuesday, March 13, 12-12:20 pm
Noon @ the 'Spoon, Public Tour
Explore the exhibition in this quick 20-minute guided tour.
Friday, April 6, 12-1 pm
Reading: Susan Harlan, Luggage
You can't think about travel without thinking about luggage. Writer Susan Harlan takes readers on a journey with the suitcases that support, accessorize, and accompany our lives. Along the way, she shows how the materials of travel—the carry-ons, totes, trunks, and train cases of the past and present—have stories to tell about displacement, home, gender, class, consumption, and labor.
Guided & Self-Guided Tours
To schedule a visit for your class, please see http://weatherspoon.uncg.edu/learn/university-students-faculty/ or call 336-334-5770.
Image: Avery McQuaid Nelson Lawrence, Arranging Suitcases, 2012, performance still. Photo credit: Ross McDermott © Avery McQuaid Nelson Lawrence. Image courtesy of the artist.
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