Melvin Edwards, Jennie C. Jones, and Lorraine O'Grady are included in Us Them We | Race, Ethnicity, Identity at Worcester Art Museum.
The institution's press release follows:
Addressing identity as a socio-political issue has been a central theme for artists since the 1970s. Us Them We | Race Ethnicity Identity will consider the ways that contemporary artists accentuate concepts like race and ethnicity through various visual strategies. Four formal devices serve as the foundation for the exhibition: Text, Juxtaposition, Seriality, and Pattern. Artists often employ one or more of these approaches as means of storytelling, protest, and celebration. This exhibition demonstrates how these organizing principles serve as a common tool through which personal and communal social status are explored.
Co-curated by Nancy Kathryn Burns, Stoddard Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at WAM, and Toby Sisson, Associate Professor and Program Director of Studio Art at Clark University, Us Them We | Race Ethnicity Identity will feature over 50 objects across a broad spectrum of media including photography, prints, painting, and sculpture. Presented across two galleries, the exhibition features significant loans and some rarely-seen objects from the Worcester Art Museum’s permanent collection. Highlights include works by Byron Kim, Roberto Lugo, María Magdelena Campos-Pons, and Lorna Simpson.
