Seattle University’s Hedreen Gallery is pleased to announce Abstractions of Black Citizenship: African American Art From Saint Louis, a new virtual exhibition partnership and series of online public programming. The online exhibition will open on Monday, May 18, 2020, and run online through Sunday, August 2, 2020.

Abstractions of Black Citizenship: African American Art from Saint Louis is a group exhibition of works by Dominic Chambers, Damon Davis, Jen Everett, De Nichols, and Katherine Simóne Reynolds, five Black Saint Louis, MO-based artists. The exhibition presents painting, photography, mixed media, works on paper, sculpture, and video. 

Saint Louis is a U.S. city and region often publicly marked by racially restrictive covenants, redlining, urban renewal/Black removal, and 21st century anti-Black regimes. The exhibition asks: how do Black aesthetic practices emerging from that region abstract these structures? How might an attention to abstraction make aesthetic, geographic, and political space for Black presence and citizenship? Through meditations on leisure, the sonic and the mundane, beauty and care, quietness, and the urban and quotidian, these artists sit with, reimagine, and abstract possibilities for being, belonging, and togetherness.

Programming starts on Monday, May 18 at 5 p.m. PT with a Virtual Opening for the Online Exhibition, and continues throughout May, June, and July 2020. Other events include pre-recorded artist Studio Visits (released over May 2020), a live/virtual Public Programming Artists Talk (Friday, May 29 at 3 p.m. PT), and tours of the online exhibition and educational programming. Find the full program of virtual events here.

The exhibition was originally scheduled to run at Seattle University’s Hedreen Gallery during Spring Quarter 2020. Due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, it has moved online and will open in May 2020 as a virtual exhibition and a series of public programming with continued sponsorship and support from Hedreen Gallery and the Pigott Family Endowment for the Arts. The exhibition is curated by Jasmine Jamillah Mahmoud, Assistant Professor in Arts Leadership at Seattle University.

Access: Seattle University's Hedreen Gallery has suspended all in-person exhibitions and public programs until further notice due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For questions about accessibility or to request accommodations for online programming, please contact Seattle University Galleries Curator Molly Mac by email. One week advance notice of the need for accommodations is requested.

Image credits, top to bottom:

Katherine Simóne Reynolds, Mending Keloid 1 (2020). Image courtesy of the artist. Jen Everett, Unheard Sounds, Come Through (2019). Image courtesy of the artist. Damon Davis, Negrophilia 78 (2015). Image courtesy of the artist.