HAND TO MOUTH
CURATED BY TK SMITH
FEBRUARY 9 - JUNE 22, 2024
OPENING RECEPTION - FEBRUARY 9, 6-8 PM
Todd Anthony Johnson, FIELD HOLLA (still), 2016
STATEMENT
Hand to Mouth is a group exhibition of early and mid-career artists who explore labor through movement and performative gestures. The labor undergirding our capitalist society requires a synchronicity of physical movement that functions much like choreography. The repetitive actions of manual laborers—pushing, pulling, lifting— are rarely considered expressive, if considered at all. Essential forms of labor are often devalued as being both menial and expendable, blurring the individuality of laborers, rendering them invisible. Hand to Mouth participates in a multimedia exploration of the intersections of art, process, and labor brought to popular discourse in the mid-twentieth century by feminist and experimental artists. Centering the body, Hand to Mouth explores how contemporary artists are making visible the invisible, how they imbue laboring bodies with value, and how creating performative dissonance can be an act of resistance.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Paul Stephen Benjamin, Krista Clark, Danielle Deadwyler, Todd Anthony Johnson, Derrick Woods Morrow, Kaitlynn Redell, and Cherrie Yu.
CURATOR’S BIO
TK Smith is a Philadelphia-based curator, writer, and cultural historian. He is Assistant Curator: Art of the African Diaspora at the Barnes Foundation. Currently, Smith is a doctoral candidate in the History of American Civilization program at the University of Delaware.
Photo by Zorn B. Taylor