University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach
Fund: $40,000
The University Art Museum (UAM) will present a solo exhibition of new work by lauren woods, a conceptual artist whose hybrid media projects—film, video and sound installations, public intervention, and site-specific work—engage history as a lens by which to view the socio-politics of the present. Challenging the tradition of documentary/ethnography as objective, she creates ethno-fictive documents that investigate invisible dynamics in society, remixing memory and imagining other possibilities. She also explores how traditional monument-making can be translated into new contemporary models of commemoration, substituting the traditional marble and granite for new media. Recently, woods unveiled Drinking Fountain #1, a new media monument to the American civil rights movement, past and present activists/organizers, and the spirit of resistance. Part sculpture, part intervention, the piece is located underneath the remnants of a recently rediscovered Jim Crow “White Only” sign in the Dallas County Records Building in Dallas, Texas, and is included in a larger public artwork, A Dallas Drinking Fountain Project. The UAM exhibition is part of a five year-focus that probes white supremacy and structural injustice and commits to deep and long-lasting investment in the work and ideas of artists outside hegemonic systems.