New York City, USA

Hold These Truths (2017)

  • TRUTH = PROCESS, 2017
    Text-based painting on wood and walking tours
    Courtesy of the artist
    Commissioned by No Longer Empty
Playing off a variety of artistic strategies represented in the exhibition, the painting in tandem with a series of upcoming walking tours entitled TRUTH = PROCESS, explore the concept of truth as a creative process. Ware is a visual storyteller and founder of Black Gotham Experience, an expansive and interactive storytelling project that locates and celebrates the impact of the African Diaspora on New York City through historical research, creative mixers, graphic novels and walking tours. Using devices that engage the body in participatory fact-finding procedures, TRUTH = PROCESS unpacks how meaning—and truth itself—is ultimately an imaginative process that can be agitated and manipulated, but never quite secured.

NLE Lab: Remix Rememory (2016)

Kamau Ware illuminates the underrepresented stories of the African diaspora in New York City through the intersection of historical research, community consciousness-raising, and art making. In 2010, Ware founded the Black Gotham Experience, a collective that shares New York City’s Black heritage with the public through walking tours and visual storytelling, filling the gaping “black hole” of historical records with creative retellings of the past.

  • Black Solidarity, 2016
    Video installation and digital print on canvas
    Video duration: 6 minutes
    Print 45 x 36 inches
    Commissioned for Remix Rememory

Black Solidarity confronts the absence of robust archival material surrounding the enigmatic figure of Tom Lloyd, a sculptor, community organizer, and advocate for Black arts and culture who operated the Store Front Museum in Jamaica, Queens, from 1971 to 1985. Inspired by Lloyd’s rejection of mainstream art institutions in favor of direct community engagement, Ware’s Black Solidarity acts as a creative intervention, occupying a crucial role for re-remembering underrepresented histories that influence the Jamaica of today.

Black Solidarity-Sample from kamau ware on Vimeo.

www.kamaustudios.com
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Black Gotham Experience Walking Tour, August 2017. Photo: Kay Hickman. Courtesy of Black Gotham Experience.

Detail of Digital Print on Canvas. Photo: Alex Escalante.

Exhibitions

Hold These Truths
2017

NLE Lab: Remix Rememory
2016