Artist Bio
Manuel Acevedo (b. 1964, Newark) combines photography, projected image, drawing, flipbook animation, murals and large scale public art to explore how light and movement shape experience. Through various media he employs visual language in ways that transform flat, static images into active spaces of experimentation. Acevedo is the recipient of the 2019 Colene Brown Art Prize at BRIC. He has been exhibiting his work in the United States and abroad for over thirty years. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: Mirror Mirror at Express Newark – Rutgers University (2018); Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography at El Museo del Barrio (2018), Senses, Art in Odd Places, NY, (2017), elmueso@sva at SVA Chelsea Gallery (2016), Then and Now, Center for Book Arts, NY, (2015), Prickly, Tender and Steamy: Artists in the Hothouse at Wave Hill, Bronx, NY (2014), Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C. (2013), Round 36, The House the Alhacen Built at Project Row Houses in Houston, TX (2012) and Al-Ghaib Aesthetics of Disappearance at Maraya Art Centre in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2011). In 2010, Acevedo’s critically acclaimed Keys of Light exhibition was presented at the Latino Cultural Center in Dallas, TX and The Bronx River Art Center. He has had solo exhibitions at Jersey City Museum and the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies. Among his awards and residencies are those received from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Visual Artist Network, Longwood Arts Project, Mid-Atlantic Foundation, Studio Museum in Harlem, and AIR. Acevedo is based in the Bronx, New York.
Cam-Up, 2019
Manuel acevedo
Archival images, hand-drawn proposals, wood, and vinyl adhesive
Military Park
Manuel Acevedo has been thinking creatively and critically about Military Park for most of his life. In the early 1980s, as a Newark Arts High School student, Acevedo walked through the park and began questioning its central landmark, Wars of America (1926). Soon after, he began documenting, reflecting, and envisioning temporary ways to change the physical appearance of the monument. “I was drawn to the piece for its movement, how it was built on an incline, the way it occupied space, and its larger-than-life figures—that upon closer examination, did not reflect the local community I witnessed gathering around the central landmark. I became increasingly intrigued by the social juxtaposition inherent in Military Park,” offered Acevedo. From his photo documentation of the 1986 “End Apartheid Now” rally to aerial views of the park’s symbolic shape, Acevedo’s documentation and research on Military Park spans three decades. His enduring interest in the site informed a series of proposals for public intervention to confront the history of wars, civilian bombings, and systemic oppression. Arguably the most significant revelation about the Wars of America monument lies in the personal narrative of the sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, who was affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan. Acevedo seeks to publicly uncover Borglum’s ignored or forgotten history through a “public happening” in Military Park during the Newark Arts Festival where he will treat the monument with a series of camouflage veils. Drawing on his own archive of documentary images and hand-drawn approaches to grappling with the monument, Acevedo’s project includes a re-envisioned historic sign installed in the park based on his “Cam-Up” proposals.
Fabrication: John Greig and Sedakial Gebremedhin for Traction Company
Design: William Roy Hodgson
Images Courtesy of the Artist
Chakaia Booker is an internationally renowned and widely collected American sculptor known for creating monumental, abstract works from recycled tires and stainless steel for both the gallery and outdoor public spaces. Booker’s works are contained in more than 40 public collections and have been exhibited across the U.S., in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Booker was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. Recent public installation highlights include Millennium Park, Chicago (2016-2018), Garment District Alliance Broadway Plazas, New York, NY (2014), and the National Museum of Women in the Arts New York Avenue Sculpture Project, Washington D.C. (2012).
Serendipity, 2019
chakaia booker
Recycled tires, hardware
Military Park
The central question driving the exhibition, what is a timely monument for Newark, is echoed in an installation of Newark native Chakaia Booker’s Serendipity. Rather than building monuments from bronze or stone, Booker repurposes discarded tires as the raw materials for monumental public art. In Serendipity, she transforms the everyday byproduct of a rubber tire found throughout post-industrial cities into an intricately designed sculptural question mark, held together, piece by piece, in an interlocking system of components she configured specifically for the site of Military Park. The expansive, undulating question mark functions as a frame to view the park anew and a shield from its established sightlines. As Booker has remarked of this work in a previous installation, “the word ‘serendipity’ is about finding something accidentally and then having it turn into something valuable.” Serendipity pushes viewers to consider monuments not as answers, but as starting points to engage memory and presence in the city.
This is the first time Booker’s work is shown publicly in Newark and on the twentieth anniversary of its premiere in the Public Art Fund’s Beyond the Monument exhibition in New York City’s MetroTech Commons.
Fabrication: Adrian Van Putten, Alston Van Putten Jr., and Alston Van Putten Sr.
Sonya Clark is Professor of Art at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Previously, she was a Distinguished Research Fellow in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University where from 2006 until 2017 she served as chair for the Craft/ Material Studies Department. In 2016, she was awarded a university-wide VCU Distinguished Scholars Award. She earned an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and was honored with their Distinguished Alumni Award in 2011. She has a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her first college degree is a BA from Amherst College where she also received an honorary doctorate in 2015. Her work has been exhibited in over 350 museum and galleries in the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe and Australia. She is the recipient of a United States Artist Fellowship, a Pollock Krasner award, an 1858 Prize, Art Prize Grand Jurors Award, and an Anonymous Was a Woman Award, a Red Gate Residency in China, a BAU Carmago Residency in France, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency in Italy, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, a Knight Foundation Residency at the McColl, a Civitella Ranieri Residency in Italy, a Yaddo Residency, and a VCUarts Affiliate Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. Her work has been favorably reviewed in several publications including the New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Italian Vogue, Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, Mother Jones, and Huffington Post.
Monumental Fragment, 2019
sonya clark
Handwoven linen
Express Newark
For over 150 years, the “Confederate truce flag” existed as a rarely known artifact of
Americana. In April 1865, a white flag of surrender was flown by Robert E. Lee’s troops as a sign of Confederate defeat and delivered to the Appomattox Court House in Virginia bringing an end to the Civil War. Several fragments of the Confederate truce flag are owned by the Smithsonian and other historic institutions, despite being overshadowed by the disturbing prevalence of the Confederate battle flag. Artist Sonya Clark sought to intervene and update this imbalanced history when she re-introduced the truce flag back into contemporary consciousness. Earlier this year, she reproduced multiple and monumental replicas of how the truce flag would have appeared when it was whole through a residency with the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. Her residency culminated in the renowned exhibition Monumental Cloth, The Flag We Should Know. Clark’s re-introduction of the flag was an attempt to reckon with unresolved legacies of Civil War memory. Talking with the Monument Lab podcast earlier this year, Clark shared critical questions she intended to pose through her project: “What does surrender mean, what does truce mean, what does reconciliation mean, what does peace really look like, what do we have to surrender to get to true democracy?” For A Call to Peace, Clark created a special handwoven fragment of the truce flag, mirroring an artifact preserved at the American Civil War Museum in Appomattox.
Production and Fabrication: Andrea Donnelly, Meg Roberts Arsenovic, and Stephen Smeltzer
Loan Courtesy of the Artist
Jamel Shabazz was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. At the age of fifteen, he picked up his first cam- era and started to document his peers. Inspired by photographers Leonard Freed, James Van Der Zee, and Gordon Parks, he marveled at their documentation of the African American community. In 1980, as a concerned photographer with a clear vision he embarked on a mission to extensively document various aspects of life in New York City, from youth culture to a wide range of social conditions. Shabazz says his goal is to contribute to the preservation of world history and culture. He is the author of eight monographs including Back in the Days, A Time Before Crack, Seconds of My Life, and Pieces of a Man. He is presently working on a number of new book projects and is and a series of screenplays. He was recently honored by the Gordon Parks Foundation and has work included in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
VETERANS PEACE PROJECT, 2019
Jamel Shabazz
Archival prints on vinyl mesh, wooden frame
Military Park and Express Newark
Renowned photographer Jamel Shabazz is an engaged documentarian whose images serve as a “visual diary” to significant social movements and historical events. Shabazz is the author of several celebrated photo books including Back in the Days, A Time Before Crack, and Seconds of My Life, and his work is held in collections around the country and the world including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. As a Veteran of the U.S. Army, who served in West Germany in the 1970s, Shabazz has made a mission to photograph veterans and the larger struggle for representation and healing. As Shabazz shared, “Since I grew up during the 1960’s, I witnessed a time when the Vietnam War was in full motion, so I started photographing Veterans of various wars from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and all of the conflicts that transpired during the past 30 years. My lens was also trained towards the political and antiwar protests that took place after 9-11, in conjunction with the antiwar movement in America. Like those documentarians before me, I felt a great degree of duty to lend my voice and vision in preserving historic moments in my life time.” For A Call to Peace, Shabazz set out to honor Newark veterans and their families against the backdrop of Military Park. As a joint residency project of New Arts and SHINE Portrait Studio, Shabazz’s Veterans Peace Project invites intergenerational veterans from Newark and their families for free portrait sessions. The first portraits displayed include large scale images facing the Wars of America monument depicting Larry “Free” Dyer (a Newark-born Vietnam Veteran) and Jillian M. Rock (the daughter of the late Jerome Rock, a Newark-born Vietnam Veteran). A dual portrait of Ause and Natasha Dyer, (grandchildren of the late William “Big Man” Roosevelt Lancaster, a Newark- Korean War Veteran) in Express Newark. Additional free photoshoots will take place through Veterans Day. The project builds on a previous projects including in
Philadelphia, Love is the Message, produced with Monument Lab and in conjunction with Mural Arts Philadelphia and the Aces Museum.