Deanna Bowen, Allison Janae Hamilton, John Sims, Cauleen Smith, Martine Syms, Kara Walker, Bear Witness

During this extraordinary time, video has become the key medium contributing to the public sphere. Video, often captured on cellphones and shared through social media, exposes social justice issues and matters of civic life to a global audience. For Real This Time features video-based works that examine the current state of American society and pose uncomfortable yet vital questions about personal and collective attitudes toward issues of race and inequality.

Artists in this exhibition are using the immediacy of video to reveal underexposed truths about the darker side of human behavior, offer ways to confront and process traumatic historical and recent events, and to spread messages of hope, each in their own distinctive visual language. Employing varied digital and analogue techniques, along with elements of motion and time, narrative and abstraction, intuitive approaches to the subject and facts, the artists closely examine the past with a deep concern for the future.

Presented in a sequence of individual screenings, each work brings to light narratives of systematic racism and offers a unique inquiry that evokes historical exchange to illustrate the expansiveness of the issues affecting Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) today. For Real This Time opens up a space for deeper reflection on the common experience of resilience across cultures in order to create a shift in our psyches that inspires tangible and effective change.

Image: Allison Janae Hamilton, Wakulla Cathedral, 2019, single-channel video (8mm film), 3:25 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen. © Allison Janae Hamilton

Schedule:

December 20, 2020 – January 7, 2021
Deanna Bowen
sum of the parts: what can be named, 2010

January 8 – January 28, 2021
Allison Janae Hamilton
Wakulla Cathedral, 2019

January 29 – February 18, 2021
John Sims
Recoloration Proclamation, 2020 

February 19  - March 11, 2021
Cauleen Smith
Egungun: Ancestor Can’t Find Me, 2017

March 12 – April 1, 2021
Martine Syms
Lessons I-XXX, 2014

April 2 – April 22, 2021
Kara Walker
National Archives Microfilm Publication M999 Roll 34: Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands: Six Miles from Springfield on the Franklin Road, 2009

April 23 – May 16, 2021
Bear Witness
Woodcarver, 2011

Support for this exhibition has been provided, in part, by the William G. and Marie Selby Foundation Ringling Museum Endowment and the Community Foundation of Sarasota County, Inc.  Paid for in part by Sarasota County Tourist Development Tax Revenues.

Sponsor support was provided by Gulf Coast Community Foundation, Community Foundation of Sarasota County, and Herald-Tribune Media Group.