Our America/Whose America? @ FERRIN CONTEMPORARY

Throughout our forty year history, we have used multi-artist survey exhibitions as a platform to explore social issues. We’ve focused on gender and feminist perspectives, broached relationship taboos, and challenged historical notions of ceramics and art. Last summer we partnered with Heller Gallery to present MELTING POINT as a way to use the mediums of ceramic and glass to address issues surrounding climate change. Now, it is time to turn our lens on the racist representations in mass market ceramics.

Our America, Whose America will present a dialogue between contemporary artists and a collection of commercially produced ceramics. This collection of historical objects, collected across the span of several years by Founding Director Leslie Ferrin, are in the form of plates, souvenirs, and figurines from the early 19th through mid-20th centuries. The items were produced in England, Occupied Japan, and various factories in the USA. The exhibition title was chosen from a series of plates produced by Vernon Kiln that features illustrations of American scenes by the painter Rockwell Kent.

In response to this historical collection, contemporary works by nearly 30 participating artists will provide new context and interpretation of these profoundly powerful objects. Seen now, decades and in some cases centuries later, the narratives they deliver through image, characterization, and stereotype, whether overt and bombastic or subtle and cunning, form a collective memory that continues to impact the way people see themselves and others today.

The contemporary artists we’ve invited use their work to assert their autonomy and subjectivity by presenting intertwined cultural critiques through lenses of their own choosing, starting with race, gender, and class. Each of these categories is tentacular and touch upon myriad other ideas including nature, warfare, food and water inequity, and more.

Visit Ferrin Contemporary online for more.

call for entry: New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum Application Exhibition

PurposeTo encourage the variety of ceramic creations and elevate the standard of ceramic industry design, the New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum is welcoming exhibition propositions to be displayed. Any individual or group of creators is welcomed to submit their application for an exhibition so that the Yingge Ceramics Museum becomes a platform to share the works with others.

New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum, Department of Collection and Exhibition

Address: No. 200, Wenhua Rd., Yingge Dist., New Taipei City 239218, Taiwan.

Telephone:+886-2-86772727,Fax: +886-2-86774034, Email: [email protected]

This application can be downloaded on the website of Yingge Ceramics Museum. (http://www.ceramics.ntpc.gov.tw)

Call for Submissions: Reproductive Justice is for Everyone! International Art Exhibition

JAM Humanities invites visual, literary, and performing arts submissions for our virtual exhibition, Reproductive Justice is for Everyone!, an international exhibition in the JAM Museum that will open in August, 2022.

Reproductive Justice is for Everyone! asks artists to explore the myriad manifestations, experiences, emotions, and meanings of reproductive justice from present day struggles and organizing to the aspirational and everything in between.

The term “Reproductive Justice” was coined by Loretta Ross of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective and it applies a human rights framework to reproductive health advocacy. As defined by SisterSong, reproductive justice is “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.”

Reproductive justice centers intersectionality and the experiences of people who are often marginalized in society, including people of color, people who are poor, and people who are queer and and trans. It calls attention to many aspects of reproductive health that are often overlooked, such as maternal death rate disparities for Black women in the US, discrimination in pregnancy healthcare for men who are transgender, economic barriers to abortion and prenatal care for people who are poor, stigmas surrounding menstruation, and effects of poverty and institutional violence on children.

Information about how to apply and what kinds of submissions are eligible can be found on their website!