2014–2015 CAPP Committee Curatorial Statement
The 2015 selections by the Stamp Contemporary Art Purchasing Program reflect the urgencies of our current political moment, as well as the specificity of our location as students and citizens pursuing an education between the seat of the nation’s power and a city that has recently witnessed landmark uprisings against systematic economic disenfranchisement, police brutality, and racial injustice. This year’s acquisitions attest to the fact that despite media technology’s ability to make us feel more connected to each other than ever before, we are still living in a world plagued by war and violence, ignorance and misinformation, and everyday forms of devastation wrought by greed. Drawing on the Stamp Collection’s themes, which explore environmental destruction; racial, gendered, and sexual identity on transnational as well as local scales; and labor and migration under global capitalism, we chose artwork that attempts to navigate the spaces between the individual and the collective through portraiture, sculpture, and mixed media. The photography of Elle Pérez and Wafaa Bilal, and the quilted collages of John Paradiso, are viscerally provocative and highlight the fragile materiality of the human body in its contested gendered, racialized, and sexualized significations. Ellington Robinson’s assemblage confronts the viewer with the transatlantic trade in human life that undergirds our current economic and political systems, while Titus Kaphar’s layered portraits challenge our ability to face head-on the ghostly histories of violence that continue to haunt our lives. The prints of Derrick Adams put an entirely new face on such histories, attending to how the objects of popular culture and entertainment are embedded in and generative of complex meanings. Bilal’s miniature sculptures similarly attest to the ongoing destruction and transformation of mythological (and art historical) icons in the wake of time’s forward march, suggesting that the pinnacles of artistic achievement may appear unrecognizable to us soon enough. Marking the tenth year of the Contemporary Art Purchasing Program, this artwork also marks a fraught present that invites all of us, students, faculty, and administrators alike, to contemplate art’s role in political change.
2014–2015 CAPP Committee
James Boyle, Zoe Copeman, Melissa Rogers,
Lauren Jeyoon, Korey Richardson, Makeda Solomon, Charlotte Zhang