Process & Practice: Shervone Neckles in conversation with Tatiana Ginsberg
TUESDAY, MAY 21, 2024 1:00 - 2:00 PM EDT
For nearly two decades, interdisciplinary artist Shervone Neckles has undertaken an intimate exploration of her Grenadian-American family's history. Revisiting her family archives, collecting oral narratives, and traveling to her homeland has unearthed a lineage of knowledge production that serves as a continuous wellspring of inspiration for her studio practice. Through her artwork she weaves together primary source materials with mixed media techniques that includes printmaking, sculpture, textiles, and installation. Her work reconstructs narratives that illuminate her own interiority, exploring her relationship to selfhood, memory and home, as well as her family's migration narrative from Grenada to the United States. During her Workspace Residency at Dieu Donné in 2021, Neckles created Memory Works, handmade paper artworks that contain ingredients from Grenadian family recipes. Considering recipes as matrilineal heirlooms, Neckles’s artworks form an archive of family traditions narrating a story of global migration and family history. In conversation with her collaborator at Dieu Donné, Director of Artistic Projects Tatiana Ginsberg, she will discuss papermaking within the context of her multifaceted artistic practice and the process of creating Memory Works.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
As an interdisciplinary artist, Shervone Neckles makes embellished textiles, prints, sculptures, installations, and public art to retell Afro-Caribbean histories and mythologies. Her multimedia installation—an examination of selfhood and memory—was featured in the 2019 Venice Biennale’s Grenada Pavilion. She also recently created an outdoor installation at the Lewis H. Latimer House Museum (Flushing, Queens) to commemorate the life and legacy of the African-American inventor, which has traveled to Downtown Brooklyn (NY), Museum of Science (Boston, MA) and Chelsea City Hall (Chelsea, MA). In 2022-2023, her work was presented in a solo exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art (Jacksonville, FL), a group exhibition at Moore College (Philadelphia, PA), and she participated in a residency Dieu Donné (Brooklyn, NY). She recently debuted a permanent public art installation, The Lunar Portal, at the University of Pittsburgh Mercy Pavilion Plaza (Pittsburgh, PA). In 2024, she has a forthcoming public art installation with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in Bronx, NY.