Second Time Around
MARCH 22—JUNE 15, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, March 22, 5:30-7:30 pm
JAC Talk with Dr. Ella Mills: April 11, 6 pm
Our world is layered with history. Personal and collective memories of struggle and triumph, destruction and resilience, pain and joy, all ebb and flow just underneath the surface. Some of the greatest challenges facing our world today are deeply entwined with these shared pasts that continue to influence our present and future. As cultural theorist and writer James Baldwin suggests, we carry these complicated histories with us as they inform our identities, communities, and aspirations. We are constantly shaped by this ongoing encounter with the past, however, this process often remains under the surface, invisible or unrecognized.
How might art bring these unseen layers of history into the visible? What role can objects play in grappling with the complexities of our pasts? How might exploring these histories enable us to imagine new possibilities for the future?
Second Time Around brings together contemporary works that reimagine past stories, memories, objects, materials, images, and artistic practices in ways that further their meaning for the present and future. The exhibition scope emerged in conversation surrounding the change of seasons and the practice of cleaning out of one’s closet. This yearly ritual involves revisiting artifacts that contain the traces of personal histories and passing them on to new owners who will give them new life. Considered in relation to the urgent need to promote everyday practices of sustainability at the local level, this deceptively mundane custom takes on much greater significance for our world now.
The works on display weave together narratives of resilience, revitalization, and repair using innovative conceptual approaches to material. Works cross temporal boundaries to highlight colonial histories and assert the visibility of diverse cultural inheritances. Others evoke the nostalgia attached to images, objects, and clothing, suggesting both the fragility and constancy of memory, as well as art’s ability to heal. The layering of histories on the body is evident throughout the space, as objects play between the absence and presence of the body in images and material traces, or in embodied processes of repair and interactivity.
Second Time Around also centers the concerns and ideas of the present and future generation of artists, scholars, and curators. The exhibition is the result of a unique collaboration between the Jamestown Arts Center and the University of Rhode Island. It was conceived by group of ten Art History and Studio Art student-curators enrolled in the course Museum Studies: Histories and Practices, led by Erin L. McCutcheon, PhD, working closely with the JAC exhibitions team and juror, independent curator, Ella S. Mills, PhD. The result is an invitation to consider our ongoing entanglements with histories and the ways art might offer new ways of thinking through them the second time around.
Zoila Coc-Chang, Junto al movimiento de las estrellas, 2021-2023
Exhibiting Artists:
Click to view full artist statements