About the Exhibition
Trained as a poet and visual artist, Huffman uses collaged image and text to address slippage in memory and language, particular to race and visibility. In Now that I Can Dance, Huffman takes a critical look into the subtle negotiations of the creative life and the unspoken expectations of performance—of self, race, and image. Borrowing its title from The Contours’ 1962 song, Do You Love Me, the exhibition includes new video and film installations of deftly edited media from the 1980s and 90s, Huffman’s childhood, that allude to an overarching futility. Applicable to anything from desire to our current state of politics, Huffman’s new work is presented alongside photographic lightboxes and prints of densely overlaid texts and images that collectively dissolve the screen, and its full range of associations, as a singular site of experience and formation.
Huffman’s past exhibitions include Ballroom Marfa, MOCA Cleveland, the Hammer Museum, MOCA Detroit, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, The Jewish Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, The Studio Museum in Harlem and Swiss Institute, New York. Educated at Bard College (BA), Brown University (MFA, Literary Arts), and USC (MFA, Studio Art), his awards include the Grolier Poetry Prize, the Jerome Foundation Travel Grant and fellowships from the Lighthouse Works, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Huffman was a 2015-16 Artist in Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem and lives and works in North Carolina. Huffman is represented by Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles.
This is the first one person-presentation of Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s work in New England. Organized by Dina Deitsch, Director and Chief Curator.