Still Motion

Still Motion

Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, Center Gallery
Co-presented by the Womxn of Color Arts Festival
Featuring Laura Aguilar, Chloe Bernardo, Natalie Delgado, Yacine Tilala Fall, Maureen Gruben, Fay Ku, Ana Mendieta, Quindo Miller, Jung Min, Cara Romero, and Nanda Sharifpour.

The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art and the Women of Color Arts Festival (WoCAF) are proud to present "Still Motion," an exhibition centered on women artists of color who respond to issues of spirituality, place, immigration, and the challenge of locating oneself in a relationship with the Earth and the environment.

Working with sculpture, video, drawing, installation, performance, and photography, the artists refract their ideas through different aspects of the elemental world. The renowned Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta is represented by videos from her "Silueta" and "Rupestrian Sculptures" series, while the Chicana artist Laura Aguilar appears in three works from a groundbreaking photography series that documents interactions between the forms of bodies, plants, and stones. The enduring Indigenous presence in the North American landscape is expressed through portraits by the Chemehuevi photographer Cara Romero, and in pictorial records of "Stitching My Landscape," a powerful performance by the Canadian Inuvialuk artist Maureen Gruben.

Memory and place play a role in a new installation by Las Vegas artist Quindo Miller, who has been inspired by their grandmother’s practice of hanging water bags from the eaves of her house in Guam to chase away flies. Dancer and designer Chloe Bernardo draws on a different kind of tradition to create sculptures based on the metal janggay that accentuate the hand gestures of dancers who perform pangalay, an indigenous dance from the Sulu Archipelago of the Philippines. (Bernardo will perform at the exhibition’s opening reception.) Nanda Sharifpour brings plant life into the galleries to create a living sculpture that illustrates the precarity of migration, while Natalie Delgado, Fay Ku, and Jung Min look for new ways to connect to the natural world through expressive drawings and mark-making. Meanwhile, Yacine Tilala Fall returns to the Barrick (after appearing in the 2021 WoCAF exhibition, "A Common Thread") with documentation of her performance "Looking for God" and a ceramic sculpture that invites us to experience water as scents and sounds.

Please note that Mendieta's videos will not be on view until June 1st. Until that time, her space in the gallery will be a reading area where visitors can learn about her life and work.

"Still Motion" will be on view at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art from March 25–July 23, 2022. Entry to the museum is free.

"Still Motion" is made possible by the Art Bridges Foundation, the Laura Aguilar Trust of 2016, the AlunAlun Dance Circle, and the UNLV Architecture Studies Library, with special thanks to John Stoelting and Art, Architecture and Design Librarian Richard Saladino.

Press Release for "Still Motion"