Dallas, TX—March 30, 2023—This spring, the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) opens an exhibition of new and recent work by the breakout Dallas-native filmmaker and visual artist Ja’Tovia Gary, making a homecoming with her first solo museum exhibition in Dallas. Concentrations 64: Ja’Tovia Gary, I KNOW IT WAS THE BLOOD brings together five artworks and related ephemera created by Gary over the past three years, including a new DMA-commissioned sculpture, with deep connections to her familial experiences in Dallas. Showcasing installation and sculpture, paintings and film sourced from the artist’s family archives, this installation is an evocative memoir that celebrates the power of ancestral knowledge. The exhibition will be on view from April 23 through November 5, 2023.
“It is so special to be welcoming Ja’Tovia Gary back to Dallas with a presentation of work so rooted in formative experiences she had here. We are excited to be working with her on this project and to commission a new work, which will be acquired into our collection,” said Dr. Agustín Arteaga, the DMA’s Eugene McDermott Director. “Contemporary art is a continuously growing area of focus for the Museum. Through collaborations with living artists, the DMA plays an active role in shaping the contemporary arts ecosystem in Dallas and beyond.”
Ja’Tovia Gary (b. 1984, Dallas, TX) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice uses film, installation and language, via a Black feminist subjective lens, to challenge the supposed neutrality of archival sources and the historical record. Often employing intimate and politically charged subject matter, her work subverts the dominant narratives found in mainstream storytelling and visual culture, rejecting flat tropes with rich, complex and personal portrayals of Black subjects. Curated by Dr. Anna Katherine Brodbeck, the DMA’s Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Concentrations 64: Ja’Tovia Gary, I KNOW IT WAS THE BLOOD convenes a selection of Gary’s recent works, including several of her newest, that exemplify the many facets of her practice and conjure a narrative of family, storytelling and personal and shared experience.
The exhibition debuts a new, never-before-seen sculpture, titled In my mother’s house there are many, many . . . (2023), that was commissioned by the DMA and will be acquired into the Museum’s collection. The work takes the form of an armillary sphere, an ancient device used across cultures to visualize the cosmos, which Gary has motorized and covered in cotton, which serves as a projection surface for Mitochondrial Montage (2023), excerpted from Gary’s forthcoming feature-length memoir film. By marrying ancient models with images of strong familial matriarchs, Gary celebrates the wisdom of Black women, which society frequently discards as irrational.
Concentrations 64: Ja’Tovia Gary, I KNOW IT WAS THE BLOOD also features other new works by Gary, including two paintings and additional excerpts from her forthcoming film. These are complemented by two recent works: Precious Memories (2020), a video and sculptural installation that juxtaposes film and objects imbued with personal and symbolic significance, and Citational Ethics (Saidiya Hartman, 2017) (2020), a neon sculpture featuring a quote from the Black feminist scholar about the inherent violence of archival sources, which often obscure or omit the contributions of historically marginalized peoples.
“Ja’Tovia’s practice is multidimensional in all senses of the word, interweaving a range of media and references to both her own life and the broader human experience,” said Brodbeck. “The five works featured in this show feed so beautifully into one another, offering multiple viewpoints onto two of Ja’Tovia’s frequent themes: reckoning with historical traumas and offering a path to healing through personal storytelling and care.”
Gary added, “I was born and raised in Dallas, and many of the works in the exhibition speak to stories and memories from my family life here, so it’s a full-circle moment to be sharing them with a hometown audience. My films are all very large and complex, but in terms of objects, the new sculpture I’m creating for the exhibition is the largest and most complex work I’ve done to date. My tenure in Texas has me considering scale in very concrete and capacious ways, and I’m looking forward to seeing the piece take center stage in the space, and to join the DMA’s collection.”
Ja’Tovia Gary, I KNOW IT WAS THE BLOOD is the 64th iteration of the DMA’s Concentrations exhibition series, which provides a significant solo platform for living artists, often in the emerging stages of their careers or presenting a new body of work. Recent iterations have featured Julian Charrière, Wanda Koop, Runo Lagomarsino and Lucy Stahl.
The DMA thanks the originating curator, Vivian Crockett, the former Nancy and Tim Hanley Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, Dallas Museum of Art, for her contribution to the Exhibition.
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