Collaborating Performer in Ada Pinkston's, "I'm Not Your Superwoman".

In I’m Not Your Superwoman, Pinkston explores this Black-woman-superhero-complex, Black women’s labor, and the complicated trope of “resilience,” a word often romanticized, exploited, and conflated. These themes are presented through a series of works combining photography, mixed media installation, and video featuring images of Pinkston dressed in a superhero costume as she performs a crawl at three federal buildings. 

Pinkston’s public performance “Recitaf II” on October 19th at Logan Circle Park, a four-minute walk from the Gallery, really brought home I’m Not Your Superwoman’s intentionality. The performance featured Pinkston along with Black women collaborators, including artists Sheila Gaskins and Kelani Redman who dressed in superhero uniforms to take over the park. It was vulnerable and subversive, with Redman and Pinkston sweeping leaves before engaging in a crawl and other calisthenic-like movements. Draped in an American flag, Gaskin continuously recited the chorus of Karyn White’s “Superwoman” and words from Pinkston’s exhibition statement. 

Read more about the project in Bmore Art here: https://bmoreart.com/2024/11/ada-pinkston-is-not-your-superwoman.html

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Writer, Director, Performer: Una Judge, the One That Got Away

Sheila as Una Judge) Una Judge was the enslaved servant to Martha and George Washington. She successfully escaped and never got caught. As an Artist-in-Residence for MICA's Performing Objects Puppetry class; Sheila tells the Una Judge story as a life-size Puppet.

 

Sheila Gaskins and daughter and fellow artist Nia Hampton are featured performers in new single-channel video work by Levester Williams:

Artist Nia Hampton, a current UMBC Intermedia + Digital Arts (IMDA) graduate student, and her mother, artist and arts advocate Sheila Gaskins, both Baltimore natives, are featured performers in this series of works. The filmic work was assisted by IMDA graduate student Bao Nguyen and artist Savannah Knoop, who served as an intimacy coordinator and facilitator. According to Williams, the project underscores the “intertwined history of African-Americans’ plight to self-determined agency and full citizenship, with a rather benign stone.”

Learn more about Levester Williams' work: 

Levester Williams: all matters aside presents a selection of the Philadelphia-based conceptual sculptor’s work from the past decade including sculpture, video, sound art, and installation. Williams’s research-based practice, which includes explorations of diverse archives, studies of materials, and explorations of the charged sites of public spaces, is vitally linked to an art practice that sees the world as a nuanced spectrum of human identities and experiences entangled in designations of race, gender, sexuality, and aesthetics.

Levester Williams’s artworks are steeped in the significance of their constitutive materials and their layered connections to specific sites. When he uses specific media, such as Maryland’s Cockeysville marble, or found objects, such as used penitentiary bedsheets from a Virginia detention center, he channels their layered associations with Black experience, history, and memory into new contexts and forms.

On display in all matters aside are new works with origins in Williams’s 2015-initiated project of a beyond, where he began to examine the connections among blues singer Billie Holiday, Cockeysville marble, and Baltimore’s built environments. During an artist residency at CADVC, Williams continued this research into the histories and mythologies of Cockeysville marble, a material used in both the Washington Monument in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighborhood and the iconic exterior steps of local rowhomes.