This exhibition brings together four visual artists and a choreographer whose works offer remarkable methods for engaging history. Each artist tells history—or suggests historical content and the past—not only through evidence and straightforward narrative, but by heavily reworking their source materials to such a degree that they become condensed, dramatically expanded, or referenced in exquisite, curious, or missing objects. These artists’ practices involve language (many are also poets and writers) and entail close attention to materials and form. While photography holds a special relationship for artists who draw from archives, this exhibition also encompasses sculpture, installation, and choreography as simultaneously specific and expansive fields in conversation with one another.

Degrees of Archive encompasses these artists’ research-driven practices conducted over several years. They reckon with intergenerational settler colonialism, theorize and practice Black and queer tactics of refusal and assembly, and embrace the complicated yet playful role of the artist as author and performer. The works on view are often modular and scalable, ready to be adapted for other venues or presented for a specific duration. Unapologetically conceptual and ambitious in scope, these works take up Haitian American scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s provocative description that “archives assemble”—that is, the stuff of history is not passive; but instead gathers us as thinkers and actors in the worlds we want to craft together.

Featuring works by Anna Campbell, Devin T. Mays, Tere O’Connor, Jadine Pluecker, and Charisse Pearlina Weston.

Degrees of Archive is part one of contemporary art and the shape of history, a multiyear series of exhibitions, curatorial research seminars, and performances about contemporary artists engaging history and their calls for historical reckoning in the present and future. 

Curated by Amy L. Powell, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, with research assistance from curatorial interns Sheenjini Ghosh and Brooke Zhang.