Join us this July and August for I AM… a group exhibition that questions and challenges established definitions and historical narratives in regards to personal identity through contemporary art. The exhibition title is abbreviated from a 2013 painting series made by American artist Hank Willis Thomas titled “I Am A Man”. The images are a reproduction and re-appropriation of the simple, declarative protest signs carried by a large group of Black men during the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike. The signs meant to assert Black men’s rights against segregation and racism, affirming their identities as human beings and U.S. citizens. The paintings have many different versions and wordings (i.e.: “I Be A Man”, “I Am The Man”, “A Man I Am”, etc.), levying questions of representation, commodification, and the value of one’s identity.

Over the past few years, we as a nation have witnessed people from several marginalized groups – Muslims, African-Americans, Latinos, undocumented immigrants, indigenous peoples, and members of the LGBTQ+ community – protest on and off the internet in order to fight against the ideological and senseless violence they often face. Unfortunately, the continued passage and implementation of punitive enforcement policies is a painful reminder of the political marginalization of select groups in the United States. While the scope of this topic is large, the exhibition is honed to investigate the question of American identity and how the experience of being American can be impacted due to rampant discrimination. The energy and urgency of identity politics that dominated the 1980’s and 1990’s never really went away, the language just shifted to find viable stakes in the age of social media and Donald Trump.