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Stamps Alumni Featured in “Story, Word, Sound, Sway”

Story, Word, Sound, Sway: Installation View

Work by eleven Stamps alumni is on display in the new exhibition Story, Word, Sound, Sway, online and in Stamps Gallery through February 28, 2021. The exhibition features work by artists Carisa Bledsoe (BFA Interarts 14), Schroeder Cherry (BFA 76), Elshafei Dafalla (MFA 08), Masimba Hwati (MFA 19), Caleb Moss (BFA 13), Senghor Reid (BFA 99), Valencia Robin (MFA 08), Yvette Rock (MFA 99), Wes Taylor (BFA 04), Levester Williams (BFA 13), and Elizabeth Youngblood (BFA 73), and is co-curated by Jennifer Junkermeier-Khan and current Stamps student Moteniola Ogundipe.

Story, Word, Sound, Sway is an exhibition of work by eleven Stamps School of Art & Design alumni using performance, movement, text, sound, and design to interrogate systems of oppression and interrupt the status quo. It explores themes of alternative histories, archives, Black identity, collective memory, storytelling; meshing performance and performativity, and the interplay of the oral and aural in one’s experience of the world. An undercurrent of movement explored in multiple variations thread the works together, realized through a variety of methods including painterly gesture, repetitive mark-making, performance with an audience or without, spoken word, ambient sound, and reimagined instruments. The exhibition aspires to pull at the loosened threads of a social fabric in crisis, revealing larger complex histories and art discourses, nationally and internationally, framed through the experiences and trajectories of Stamps alumni during their time in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication that will include interviews with each of the alumni artists conducted by current Stamps student and exhibition co-curator Moteniola Ogundipe.

Story, Word, Sound, Sway
January 18, 2021 – February 282021