Between Starshine and Clay:

Kiyan Williams, Jean-Marc Superville Sovak, Vinnie Bagwell

Memories of enslaved Africans on the Atlantic Coast manifest in the featured work of Jean-Marc Superville Sovak, Vinnie Bagwell, and Kiyan Williams. Much like the rhetorical question in Lucille Clifton’s poem ‘won’t you come celebrate with me’ — in which the lines “between / starshine and clay” contemplate a life journey against all odds — work in this exhibition reflects on a new moment: a moment of transition and growth, where the mainstream narrative of American history gets a more inclusive retelling. In a-Historical Landscapes, Superville Sovak superimposes figures of 19th century anti-slavery literature onto contemporaneous idyllic American landscapes of the Hudson River School, to reexamine the concept of “historical.” Bagwell’s work also addresses omission. In two public sculpture projects, Victory and Enslaved Africans’ Rain Garden, the Yonkers-based artist makes figurative representations in bronze, humanizing enslaved Africans whose lives were integral to the building of this nation. Jubilant and defiant outstretched arms made of gleaming stones and soil from an African-American burial ground in Queens emerge from the ground in Williams’s Reaching Toward Warmer Suns. This monument along with Notes on Digging channel freedom in catharsis.