collage with flowers gems and a woman's face emerging

[b]REACH: THE LIBRETTO :: kai barrow


On View :: Sat. Oct. 8th, 2022 - Sun. Nov. 6th, 2022
Website:: www.kailbarrow.com

Exhibition Dates: October 8th – November 6th
Opening Reception:October 8th, 2022, 6PM – 10PM
Artist Talk: Sat. Nov 5th, 1pm


[b]REACH: The Libretto is a series of mixed-media collages and paintings rendered as abolitionist-inspired tarot spreads. The work introduces a group of divergent characters: a Trickster, an Empire, some Fugitives, a few Magas, and a Chorus of Outlaws. As the fugitives encounter worlds of carceral geographies and radical imaginaries, the cards forecast abolitionist principles, strategies, challenges, obstacles, and contradictions that help them on their way.


Biography

kai barrow (b. 1959, Chicago) is a visual and performance artist who lives and works in New Orleans.

Barrow is interested in the praxis of radical imagination. Experimenting with abolition as an artistic vernacular, her sprawling paintings, installations and sculptures are formed in traditional and non-traditional environments to transgress biological, ideological and carceral borders. Barrow’s found object sculptures, paintings, performances and installations use materials such as coffee, cane, indigo, cotton and bones as a visual and ethnographic language. Together with her four muses: Absurdity, Sarcasm, Myth and Merriment, the work performs queer, Black feminist theory as an aesthetic genre.

A self-taught artist, barrow is a founding member of Gallery of the Streets, a national network of artists, activists, and scholars who work at the nexus of art, political education, social change and community engagement. She has received artist residencies, fellowships, and awards from Project Rowhouses, the Contemporary Arts Center, the Joan Mitchell Center; A Studio in the Woods; the Weavers Project Fellowship, Alternate Roots’ Partners for Change, and the Kindle Project’s “Makers Muse” awards. In 2020, barrow received a “YBCA 100” award for her work at the intersections of art and activism.

For more information see, www.kailbarrow.com and www.galleryofthestreets.org.