Call and Response: A Conversation with Tyanna Buie, Folayemi Wilson, and Portia Cobb
Free to members or with admission to the sculpture garden.
We wrap up six months of 2018 Call & Response programming with an informal conversation in conjunction with Tyanna Buie’s exhibition, Im•Positioned. Buie grew up in and out of the foster care system in Milwaukee and Chicago, and photographs and other material evidence of her disrupted childhood are rare. She continues to rely on the collective memory of her family to make connections between her past and present. Im•Positioned also raises the larger question of the histories of Black families by responding to Eliza’s Peculiar Cabinet of Curiosities, Folayemi Wilson’s 2016 installation on the grounds at Lynden. A full-scale structure that is both wunderkammer and slave cabin, Eliza’s Cabinet imagines what a 19th-century woman of African descent might have collected, catalogued and stowed in her living quarters. In 2017, Portia Cobb began her own response to Eliza by planting Lizzie’s Garden in proximity to the cabinet. The Gullah Geechee garden, an homage, in part, to Cobb’s great aunt Lizzie, is at the center of her project: Rooted: The Storied Land, Memory, and Belonging. The three artists will discuss their own work and their place in the “call and response” model that gathers a community of artists at Lynden who share a commitment to the radical Black imagination as a means to re-examine the past and imagine a better future.