Open Air Artist Talk: Felandus Thames
Tuesday, August 25 • 7 PM - 8 PM EDT
Open Air is a monthly series of intimate conversations with Black artists across the globe, hosted by the Gantt.
About Felandus Thames
Felandus Thames compresses the memory and collective mythology of vernacular objects into distinct arrangements of language, contemporary reference, and popular image as reminders of Afrocentric history and allegory. Through sculpture, assemblage, and installation, Thames compiles vestiges of the joys, anxieties, and quick wit in everyday word as monuments to inherited memory, whose sums are greater than their essential parts. In his widely commissioned installations of beaded curtains, and hairbrushes the artist investigates materials through a fixated repetition, pushing the common object beyond its minutia and into popular resonance. Clicks of plastic hair beads, undulating waves of basketball hoops, and the sharp prickle and drag of boar bristle brushes carry a sensorial record of tender gestures and the exchange of skin contact that shapes Black American adolescence. His works consider the meanings by which material is endowed over time, becoming repositories of memory, personal experience, and collective narratives. Working through processes of accumulation, repetition, and transformation, Thames allows his materials to become active participants in intuited and conditioned epistemologies shared between object and viewer.
About Dexter Wimberly
Dexter Wimberly is an American curator based in Japan who has organized exhibitions at institutions and galleries around the world including the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City; The Harvey B. Gantt Center in Charlotte, North Carolina; KOKI ARTS in Tokyo; BODE in Berlin; Lehmann Maupin in London; SECCI in Milan; and The Third Line in Dubai. His exhibitions have been reviewed in The New York Times and Artforum, and have received support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Wimberly is a Senior Critic at New York Academy of Art, and the founder and director of the Hayama Artist Residency and The Kyoto Retreat in Japan.
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