‘a city will share her secrets if you know how to ask’ featured in Impact: Contemporary Artists at the Hermitage Artist RetreatMarch 10–July 7, 2024
Does art play an active role in identifying and revealing the realities of contemporary life? Conversely, how do present-day challenges in the world affect the choices that artists make in their studios? While these questions have no clear or easy answers, the exhibition Impact: Contemporary Artists at the Hermitage Artist Retreat, presented at Sarasota Art Museum, hopes to expand upon conventional ideas of art’s impact on our daily lives through the presentation of recent works made by 10 U.S.-based artists: Diana Al-Hadid, Sanford Biggers, Chitra Ganesh, Todd Gray, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Michelle Lopez, Ted Riederer, John Sims, Kukuli Velarde, and William Villalongo.
A key factor these 10 artists share in common: over the past two decades, each has accepted an invitation to attend an artist residency at the historic beachfront campus of the Hermitage Artist Retreat on Manasota Key—a unique experience that contributed to each of their creative processes in a variety of ways. An even more evident thread running through their works is a collective desire to explore and reveal the ways in which art can represent concepts and situations that reflect and engage their viewers’ (and their own) experience of the world around them. Organized by guest curator and former Hermitage Curatorial Council member Dan Cameron, Impact also represents the first collaboration between the Hermitage and Sarasota Art Museum.
Ganesh’s contribution features a reworking of her 2020 QUEERPOWER! installation at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art in New York, a city will share her secrets if you know how to ask, rendered on translucent fabric panels. Incorporating both historical and speculative imagery, this installation celebrates the queer and transgender histories of downtown Manhattan and the neighborhoods adjacent to the Museum’s Soho location. Ganesh transports the viewer into the past and beyond, including imagery drawn from researching architectures of 19th-century Black settlements Seneca Village and little Africa, as well as 17th-century Lenape settlements and structures that have since been destroyed or erased, alongside flora and fauna indigenous to NYC.
