RESEARCH - EVENT OR WORK
MoCADA and The Curatorial Fellows Take Verge Art Brooklyn by Storm
From March 3 to March 6, the Curatorial Fellows successfully curated our first space at the Verge Art Brooklyn Fair. The three day event drew local, national, and international artists and galleries to Dumbo. MoCADA was represented in two ways: with a booth, and by the artist Jeff Sims and his piece “Straddle” in the the Brooklyn Art Now Survey exhibition. The MoCADA booth utilized a multimedia approach and functioned as a venue to debut an episode of the Soul of Brooklyn and Diaspora Zine, create an artistic intervention, inform the public about the museum, fund-raise, display past exhibitions, and network.
We utilized a multimedia display in the MoCADA booth to show the various programs that the museum is engaged in. The space was flanked by two projections. One which displayed MoCADA’s new logo and the other projection presented a slide show of images from past exhibitions and an episode of Soul of Brooklyn TV. The TV episode is currently featured on Soul of Brooklyn's website which “is your quintessential online and printed guide to discovering the unique cultural and business renaissance currently taking place within Brooklyn’s African Diaspora”. Several times during the fair, these elements drew a crowd. The Soul of Brooklyn episode features a lengthy segment on MoCADA’s mission. With interviews from the Founding and Executive Director, Laurie Cumbo, the Director of Exhibitions, Kalia Brooks, and the Director of Education, Ruby Amanze. In addition, photographer Barron Claiborne and musician Blitz the Ambassador, along with the trailer of his film, Native Sun (May 2011) were featured.
The Curatorial Fellows created our first publication, Diaspora Zine. The concept of the zine was to employ a DIY aesthetic to can spread MoCADA’s message to a wider audience. The first edition of the Zine was created for Verge Art Brooklyn and included interviews with Shante Cozier, one of the co-curators of our current exhibition, Reimagining Haiti, three artists from our last exhibition, Ain?t I a Woman, and a feature piece on the work of the educational department at MoCADA. The Zine was a good bridge between the museum and the public. It served as a vehicle to the uniformed fair patrons of the museum’s programs. The Diaspora Zine was enthusiastically received by Verge’s audience. By the end of the fair all of the Zines that were printed were sold and/or distributed.
The artistic intervention “Dispersing Planes” (March 2011) was created by Jabari Owens-Bailey, and served as a means to make the e Museum’s theme of African Diasporan cultural production more apparent at the information booth. The intervention was a performance piece that comprised folding African fabric with an aluminum armature into the shape of paper airplanes and then installing them in the space to form a shape that alluded to the continent of Africa. The work filled the floor and wall space that wasn’t occupied by the projections or the information section. This installation/ performative action served as a metaphor for the dispersal of African culture through artistic practice. Some of the planes were sold, which further illustrated a link between capital and the dispersion of culture.
The booth provided a new type of venue for the creating dialogue with the public about MoCADA. We were able to engage the participants in the fair with a dynamically organized space. The choice to be in an art fair as a museum is a controversial one, though by the end of the fair, MoCADA gained more from the experience than many of the other commercial galleries who had anticipated large sales. Our objective was to use the venue as a channel to distribute information about MoCADA and our programming with the intention of widening the scope of our audience. For several patrons, the art fair served as their first introduction to MoCADA. Many were impressed that an institution of its kind existed in Brooklyn and that the museum offered comprehensive programming from exhibitions to education. The Verge audience seemed especially interested in catalogues from past exhibitions, the Diaspora Zine and Soul of Brooklyn TV. Over one hundred new contacts were gained by the end of the fair, and this type of exchange and network building was the goal of this curatorial project.
Contributed by: Jabari Owens-Bailey, Curatorial Fellow