What does it mean to make a home? To create and share space? Space to celebrate, to grieve, to come together? Space to honor those who have passed and those they leave behind? GO ‘HEAD, FIX YOU A PLATE brings together new work by artist Jazzmen Lee-Johnson as she considers these questions of memory, family, and legacy. Alongside new works in this exhibition, Lee-Johnson has carefully curated a collection of photos, books, toys, records, and cassettes that recall her nostalgia for growing up in Baltimore and the familial homes she frequented. Here, she invites artists Becci Davis, Jordan Seaberry, and Dominique Sindayiganza to join her in exploring the universal need for spaces of self expression, cultural tradition, pleasure, rest, and dreaming while reckoning with the complexity of how to be at home in the United States amidst inherited and lived experiences of racism, violence, oppression, and incarceration. Through prints, paintings, textiles, furniture, animations, and installation, works by Lee-Johnson, Davis, Seaberry, and Sindayiganza transform AS220’s Aborn Gallery and evoke Black matriarchal home spaces where families gather to party, resist, mourn, organize, and seek respite.
We invite you to take a seat and consider who and where you come from and how this has shaped you. This exhibition is designed to inspire self reflection, as well as community action. We aim to offer art and space with which to examine the past, witness reverberations across generations, and cultivate connections and care. GO ‘HEAD, FIX YOU A PLATE will be activated throughout the month of September with community workshops and public events. We hope you will join us to share your story, too.
— Jazzmen Lee-Johnson + Persephone Allen, co-curators
GO ‘HEAD, FIX YOU A PLATE is made possible in part through support from AS220 and Providence’s Department of Art, Culture, and Tourism (ACT).