“We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created.”
AUDRE LORDE
The League has been a busy place for our Seedlings this summer, as they have been developing new work, exploring new classes, and learning new skills. This month, we feature stories by Seeds students who view the League as one of many steppingstones on their paths to becoming professional painters, illustrators, designers, and graphic novelists. They also utilize their art practices to support them in navigating challenging emotional experiences. Uma Maldonado shares that art is her “outlet to directly represent myself in ways I could not otherwise communicate or express,” and Anmol Singh expresses how art “has always been there for me through hardship and misfortune.” As these young artists continue to study and develop their artistic careers, we hope they remain connected to the personal roots that drew them towards their practices.
Our inspiration stories this month highlight artists who focus their practice in assemblage and found object sculpture, transforming everyday objects into conceptual works that speak to materiality, identity, climate change, and colonization. Lonnie Holley’s work is celebrated in a current survey show at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, amongst his curated selection of fellow Black artists with Southern roots, and touches on his concerns about pollution and waste, and human relationships with the earth. Jac Leiner’s survey exhibition is on view at the Swiss Institute, where her “meticulous collection and reappropriation of discarded objects,” become a comment on the “loose sketch of the systems and networks that validate” a life. And finally, we feature a review of “El Viejo Griot—Una historia de todos nosotros,” Daniel Lind-Ramos’s solo show at MoMA PS1, where his massive sculptures made from salvaged items are rooted in environmental disaster and migration. He transforms “lost belongings into found objects that are the foundation of his totemic structures.” Dive into these interesting reads!
Visit us next month to read our September newsletter!
monica uszerowicz
Lonnie Holley’s Earthen Monuments Sing in a Survey Including Fellow Black Artists from the South
Maddie Hampton
The Institutional Afterlives of Objects
Caroline Goldstein
