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After Archives exhibit in Northampton, MA

  • 1.  After Archives exhibit in Northampton, MA

    Posted Jan 26, 2023 04:42 PM

    After Archives

    Curated by Amy Halliday

    A.P.E. Gallery. Northampton, March 3 -30, 2023

     

    What happened between or out of or in the holes of the story is the real story...

     Lauren Russell, Descent

     

    Traditional archives – documents, images, objects – are commonly understood as physical sites in which historical knowledge and memory are collected, organized, and preserved. Archives convey a certain air of authority, of neutrality, of completeness: of the record as somehow transparent, given, fixed. Yet bound up in issues of power and posterity, archives embody the ongoing entanglement of social and historical relations: What is collected, cherished, sought after, ignored? Who and what is made present, salient; what slips between the cracks, into the silences? And how do these choices shape future conditions for navigating the past? 


    After Archives brings together the work of two western Massachusetts-based artists, Alexis Callender and Sarah Stefana Smith, who engage archival practices, content, and forms to examine, unearth, interrogate, and reimagine aspects of African American and diasporic history and experience. Working with New England archival collections (including the W.E.B. Du Bois papers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst), Callender explores historic land and housing policies that continue to impact communities of color. Through permeable sculpture and installation, Smith gives form to the interplay of absence and presence in historical records, finding and making space for untold stories, for affect and emotion. Both Smith and Callender are invested in that which emerges "between or out of or in the holes" of the archive, and in the ways that space, bodies, material traces, and forms of (un)freedom intersect.



    Opening reception, Friday March 3, 5-7pm

    Northampton Arts Night Out, late opening til 8pm


    A.P.E. gallery is generally open Weds - Sun, 12-5pm, Fridays til 8pm

    --
    Deborah Richards (she/her)
    Head of Archives and Special Collections
    Library, Information, & Technology Services
    Mount Holyoke College
    Dwight Hall, 50 College St.
    South Hadley, MA 01075
    richards@mtholyoke.edu | 413-538-2013
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    Mount Holyoke College is located in Western Massachusetts on the ancestral land of the Nonotuck people.