Old Wounds, Dark Dreams

Curated by Dr. Cherise Smith.

The University of Texas at Austin’s Art Galleries at Black Studies (AGBS) is excited to announce its spring exhibition Old Wounds, Dark Dreams. On view until May 19, 2023, the exhibition features video works by contemporary African American artists Carrie Mae Weems, Cauleen Smith, Rodney McMillian, and Charles Gaines.

The video works in this exhibition meditate on anti-Black racism and the wounds it inflicts on the American body politic. Contemporary artists Charles Gaines, Rodney McMillian, Cauleen Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems here engage in appropriation or sampling—quoting other artists’ motifs, methods, and works—to represent troubling events. By adapting other cultural forms and putting them into new contexts, these four artists variously comment on, critique, or amplify the appropriated works’ meanings and create new ones.

In Smith’s Remote Viewing (2011) and Weems’s Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment (2011), the artists re-enact episodes from American history while also citing the work of older artists. Remote Viewing restages how a single-room schoolhouse, used by Black children in Sheridan, Arkansas, was violently destroyed by the local government as part of a forced relocation of the town’s Black residents after the ruling of Brown v. Board of Education. The video, which documents heavy equipment excavating a large square hole, evokes the Land Art of Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson even as it questions those artists’ motivations for forcibly altering the land.

The following free programs are associated with the exhibition: Curator gallery tour, March 2, 2023 at 12:30pm; seminar with Carrie Mae Weems, March 31, 2023; and “Why Black Museums?” symposium, April 21, 2023 at 12pm.

About the Art Galleries at Black Studies
The University of Texas at Austin’s Art Galleries at Black Studies (AGBS) is a collecting institution whose mission is to acquire, preserve, interpret, exhibit, and otherwise make accessible modern and contemporary art and cultural materials related to the Black experience for the benefit of all audiences. Comprised of two principal galleries—Christian-Green Gallery and Idea Lab—and six project spaces, AGBS’s exhibitions and programs serve communities on and off campus and engage with the larger art worlds. AGBS’s exceptional collection—numbering nearly 1,300 objects—is the core of its identity, and it sustains and catalyzes all we do.

Founded in 2016, The University of Texas at Austin’s Art Galleries at Black Studies (AGBS) is the sole on-campus entity, at The University of Texas at Austin, dedicated to art about the Black experience. As a preeminent cultural asset of Black Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, it is a center for teaching, learning, and scholarship. AGBS serves as a forum for the creative and critical expression of artists, historians, and curators.

The University of Texas at Austin’s Art Galleries at Black Studies (AGBS) is open to all, free of charge, and is committed to fostering feelings of ownership of art and visual culture in diverse audiences.