JILL MONIZ

Los Angeles arts institution Transformative Arts presents an art exhibition throughout the city of LA titled Adornment | Artifact, a visionary project and experience showcasing the aesthetic lineages of ancient Nubia in Los Angeles through the work of 70 LA-based artists. Adornment | Artifact is curated by Jill Moniz and will run alongside the Nubia: Jewels of Ancient Sudan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston exhibition at the Getty Villa.

The first in a series of openings is this Saturday, October 1, 2022 at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza (space 181) and Band of Vices gallery in West Adams, with an opening reception on October 22, 2022 from 6-9p.

Housed at five sites across the city, Adornment | Artifact investigates how contemporary artworks made in Los Angeles by LA-based artists engage and express the traditions, objects, and materials that shaped the cultures of the Nile River Valley. Nubia was an important gateway for materials and ideas that spread from its trade routes, migrations, spiritual knowledge, and socio-political power over millennia. Responsive ways of knowing and seeing the world were shared and deeply embedded in memories, identities, and storytelling, offering artists who engage with Nubian impulses and iconographies a foundational past, a vital present, and promising futures.

Adornment | Artifact recognizes that Los Angeles reflects Nubia as a site of prolific, global cultural production. By coalescing our vision around the symbolic bonds between the past and present, maker and community, impulses and actions, we are reclaiming ancient ideas to craft a better, more comprehensive knowledge about the role of contemporary artists in our diverse and ever-changing landscape.

Approaching the visual language and material of Ancient Nubia from contemporary, diverse perspectives and experiences allows artists to construct meaningful cultural connections through adornment, artifacts, and transcendence acts of making. From ancient jewelry and amulets of the ruling elite to modern-day personal and communal styles and objects, these diasporic relationships continue to influence, liberate and refuse that which does not serve us, including institutional definitions of who we are and what art is for.

Each venue in Adornment | Artifact invites viewers to better understand the Nubian Diaspora from makers of related geographies, from the Middle East to Mexico, to the use of ancient materials and symbols like scarabs, cowrie shells, pyramids and totems. Through objects and digital works, performances, artist talks, art-making workshops, musical celebrations, a culminating symposium, this months-long engagement with cultural organizations throughout the county offers local, dynamic and interpretative opportunities to reanimate the jewels of ancient Nubia.

At Band of Vices and all the sites, Transformative Arts uses a collaborative model to highlight a plurality representing diverse, intersecting communities. These artists share thoughtful approaches that prioritize materials and visual languages enabling a deep resonance with our stories.

Adornment | Artifact is conceived by Transformative Arts, a global initiative led by Jill Moniz. Together with a team of women from around the world, Moniz in partnership with Jeffrey Spier of the Getty Museum are challenging historic notions about antiquities, museums, collaboration and community. The exhibition is generously sponsored by the Getty, Vera Campbell, Megan and Peter Chernin, Greg and Diane Pitts and CAAM (the California African American Museum).