Seeing/Seen

Seeing/Seen
Presented by the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art
Curated by Erica Vital-Lazare

Exhibition Dates • Friday, September 24, 2021 - February 26, 2022
Opening Event • Friday, September 24, 2021, 5 - 8 pm
Conversation with Faylita Hicks + Erica Vital-Lazare • Friday, December 3, 2021, 7 - 8 pm
Closing Event • Friday, February 25, 2022, 5 - 8 pm
Museum Hours • Tuesday - Saturday, 10 am - 5 pm

Working with a range of found images, videos, slides, archived studio and performance photos, and professional photographic portraits, the Las Vegas writer and scholar Erica Vital-Lazare invites us to share the company of Black women. Confronting and correcting both hyper- and invisibility, Seeing/Seen explores the contemporary and historical presence of Black women in their joy, leisure, work, resilience, and infinite spaces of memory and possibility.

The exhibition will include photography by veteran Black Newsweek photojournalist Lester Sloan and works by the local photographers A. Moss, Carl Summerlin, and Jeff Scheid. Las Vegas painter Q’Shaundra James will exhibit a new painting created in collaboration with Vital-Lazare’s research. Grounding her presentation against a complex and powerful palette of colors, Vital-Lazare has shaped Seeing/Seen to reflect “the ways in which the lives of Black women can differ in kind and at the same time reflect a potency born of a shared history, majesty, and hard-earned shaping of future selves.”

Further describing the ideas behind her curation, she writes: “I am ever mindful of Paule Marshall’s evocation of ‘the kitchen mothers,’ how the stories, laughter, warnings of our foremothers and sisters as they gathered to cook, to clean, to sew, to lay out a body on its cooling board, to run a hot comb over a tender-head, straightened the hem of a skirt, took in clothes off the line, or sat down to a game of cards were baptismal rite, casual and life-determining instruction. I want this exhibit to offer such teaching and learning in a glance—in the posture of hand tucked beneath the chin, in an open laugh. I want each face, each historical moment to resound as clarion call for some and the tug of a coat-tail for others, that gentle urgency and coded message Black Women detect and share in the presence of one another provides an exhibit within an exhibit—completing the circuit between us.”

Seeing/Seen is made possible by Spiegelworld, MGM Resorts International and the WESTAF Regional Arts Resilience Fund, a relief grant developed in partnership with The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support arts organizations in the 13-state western region during the COVID-19 pandemic. Further assistance has been provided from the Psi Upsilon Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha, community wellness leader and Peaceful Warrior Realtor Maticia Sudah, and the UNLV Jean Nidetch Care Center.

The curator would like to thank writers Marita Golden, Aisha Sabitini Sloan, and Niela Orr. Photographers Lester Sloan, Jeff Scheid, Kris Lumague, A. Moss, and Carl Summerlin, as well as MGM Resorts International, Womxn of Color Arts Festival, the Nevada State Museum; Su Kim Chung, Claytee White, and Aaron Mays of UNLV Library's Special Collections, visual-creator Q'Shaundra James, and the Psi Upsilon Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha.

About the Curator
Erica Vital-Lazare is a professor of creative writing and Marginalized Voices in Dystopian Literature at the College of Southern Nevada. She has received grants and awards from the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, Virginia Commonwealth University’s Hilliard Endowment, and the Nevada Arts Council. Her work has been featured in Catalyst, Sojourner, Thrice and Callaloo II. She is co-producer of the photo-narrative installation Obsidian & Neon: Building Black Life and Identity in Las Vegas and editor of Of the Diaspora, a series revisiting classic Black works in literature with McSweeney’s Press.

Audio accompaniment can be found on the exhibition's Soundcloud playlist: https://soundcloud.com/user-986537221-101368684/sets/seeingseen-curated-by-erica-vital-lazare?si=c18e578fbff44f51985f53152cfd7796

Press Release for "Seeing/Seen"

Digital Catalog for "Seeing/Seen"

"CSN Prof Erica Vital-Lazare Talks About Her Twin Passions of Literature and Art," Interview with Erica Vital-Lazare by Amber Sampson for Las Vegas Weekly

Segment by KTNV on "Seeing/Seen"