Join us for a special performance by conceptual artist Paul Stephen Benjamin, in which he will activate his sculpture Ceiling with movement and sound. The performance will be followed by a talkback with TK Smith, curator of our current exhibition, Hand to Mouth.
Benjamin’s Ceiling materializes the concept of “the glass ceiling,” which is often used to describe the broad range of social barriers that prevent marginalized people from reaching higher levels of success. To “break the glass ceiling” is to surpass invisible barriers, such as sexism, racism, and ableism, to achieve what has historically been accessible exclusively to white men. At the heart of Benjamin’s practice is a conceptual exploration of Blackness through the senses: sight, touch, taste, smell, and sound. In Ceiling, he performs upon a stage of shattered glass, alluding to the countless ceilings broken before him. Through activations of movement and sound, Benjamin invites us to question the use of the concept when applied to his own laboring body.
Learn more about Hand to Mouth
Bios:
Paul Stephen Benjamin earned a BA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his MFA from Georgia State University. In mid-2021, Benjamin exhibited an installation of stacked televisions and monitors in The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. The exhibition will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX; Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Bentonville, AR; and Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver, CO. Benjamin participated in Yesterday We Said Tomorrow, a Prospect.5 exhibition in New Orleans, LA. He participated in a residency in Morocco, and had a solo exhibition in 2022 at Davidson College in Davidson, NC. Other exhibitions include State of the Art 2020, Crystal Bridges Museum and The Momentary, Bentonville, AR; Great Force, Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA; Reinterpreting the Sound of Blackness, Telfair Museums, Savannah, GA; and Black is the Color, High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
TK is a curator, writer, and cultural historian. TK’s recent curatorial projects include Hand to Mouth at Stove Works (2024), Kelly Taylor Mitchell & Sergio Suárez: Material Memory at Swan Coach House Gallery (2024), Roland Ayers: Calligraphy of Dreams at the Woodmere Museum of Art (2021), Virtual Remains at the Atlanta Contemporary in conjunction with the Atlanta Biennial (2021), and Zipporah Camille Thompson: Looming Chaos at the Zuckerman Museum of Art (2020). From 2022-2024, TK served as Assistant Curator: Art of the African Diaspora at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Most recently, TK completed a curatorial residency at Yinka Shonibare’s G.A.S. Residency in Lagos, Nigeria (2023).