Ada Pinkston
On Blackness and Beauty Beyond Buildings
July 27 - September 21, 2021
About the Exhibition
Ada Pinkston’s On Blackness and Beauty Beyond Buildings, a mixed-media installation that is a meditation on the social, physical, spiritual, and emotional architecture of memory on Georgia Avenue and Chocolate City.
The work is a mixed-media installation that uses textile, digital media, nails, and architectural paper to weave together an immersive space. The work layers archival imagery of Washington, DC from the archive of the Library of Congress, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the digital photo archive at Howard University. Starting with the end of the Civil War, Washington, DC was a destination place for African-Americans throughout the United States South. Once arriving, it became a place where people found unfulfilled promises of reparations and partly fulfilled promises of education that were offered to Black citizens in the United States who recently found themselves “free.”
The two-channel video installation includes footage from two digital films that weaves archival footage to consider. The first, called Afterlives After Slavery considers the design and evolution of United States currency. The second, called a Question of Framing incorporates research and infographics from the WEB Dubois prevention in the 1900 Paris Exhibition, Gil Scott-Heron, and other archival footage of cultural producers from Washington, DC. Documentation from a performance at Emancipation Square on June 19, 2021, in front of the contested Freedman’s Monument. The 8-hour-long performance was in homage to the women whose voices and names have been ignored from the canon of United States history, specifically Lucy Parsons. The work aims to illustrate the transparency and layers of a story that we tell ourselves: about ourselves, about our communities, and about the buildings we pass by every day that are often portals of time that hold and illustrate stories from the past that are often overlooked.
About the Artist
Ada Pinkston is a multimedia artist, educator, and cultural worker living and working in Baltimore, Maryland. Her work has been mounted at a variety of spaces including The Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building, The Walters Art Museum, The Peale Museum, Transmodern Performance Festival, P.S.1, The New Museum, Light City Baltimore, and the streets of Berlin, Baltimore, and Orlando. She is a recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Grit Fund Grant in Visual Arts, administered by The Contemporary (2017), and a Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Ruby's Project Grant in Visual Arts (2017). A graduate of Wesleyan University (B.A.) and Maryland Institute College of Art (M.F.A.) she has presented lectures on public space at The French Embassy, NYU, UCLA, and The National Gallery of Art. She was a part of the second cohort of fellows at Halcyon Arts Lab and is a Monument Lab Transnational fellow. She is also a part of the inaugural cohort of artists participating in LACMA x Snap AR Monument Project with her new work: The Open Hand is Blessed.
