October 1, 2020-November 20, 2020
Social artist and activist Adam W. McKinney opens Shelter in Place in the windows and first floor gallery of Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education on the eve of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. Shelter in Place, which in its entirety is viewable from the sidewalk surrounding the museum, is a film, photography, and dance-based interrogation of the social tenets of Sukkot—departing and dwelling, expressing and atoning, striking and shaking. A Black Jewish response to histories of oppression, McKinney’s Shelter in Place is an inquiry into social isolation and the physical and emotional effects of anti-Black racial violence. While the museum is closed, the multimedia installation extends into the museum’s first floor gallery and windows and is completely viewable both day and evening from the sidewalk.
With Shelter in Place, McKinney deconstructs the idea of the sukkah, the temporary dwelling built adjacent to Jewish homes for Sukkot, laying bare the internal tensions of this contemporary moment in history. McKinney shares, “I often think about my role as an artist to bring awareness to the impact of oppression and to the vestiges of historical trauma. I am interested in what might be on the other side of the trauma—and I think it might be each other. I am most interested in what I call ‘the aesthetics of liberation.’ I ask, ‘How do we heal? What is the world we want? And how can we use art to move forward toward liberation?”
McKinney’s creative research on the lynching of Fred Rouse (d. 12.11.1921) produced a collaboration with Navajo photographer Will Wilson in which McKinney sat for tintype photographs dressed as Rouse in the traumatic sites associated with his lynching. McKinney uses tintype photography as a way to confuse the viewer and to investigate memory (“What, how, and why do we remember?”), thereby problematizing the narrow, liminal spaces between past and present violences against Black bodies. “Because I could not locate any photographs of Mr. Rouse,” he says, “I took it upon myself to ‘fill in the blanks’ and use my body as the canvas on which I would remember him.” Three of the tintypes, printed on vinyl, will be included in the installation.
Adam W. McKinney lives in Fort Worth, TX with his husband Daniel Banks, where he is an Assistant Professor of Dance at Texas Christian University.
Shelter in Place is a collaboration of Asylum Arts and the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, made possible with the generous support of CANVAS. The work is part of the national project – Dwelling in a Time of Plagues – which makes new outdoor art possible at museum sites, with organizational support from the Council of American Jewish Museums.
Related Images and Videos
Click here to view Flickr album of Shelter in Place. Photos taken by Mario Gallucci on October 8, 2020.
Shelter in Place – Virtual Tour from Asylum Arts on Vimeo.
Shelter in Place Artist Talk and Virtual Tour with Adam McKinney from Asylum Arts on Vimeo.