A Day at The Arts Center at Governors Island

June 12, 2021, 12pm - 5pm
The Arts Center at Governors Island

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As part of the 2021 River To River Festival, audiences are invited to spend A Day at The Arts Center at Governors Island on June 12, from 12-5pm. 

The 2021 season at The Arts Center at Governors Island pushes us to examine the fixity of the surrounding world and question our social, environmental and personal structures of justice and our understandings of sustainability. In this exploration, water becomes the undercurrent of the exhibited works at The Arts Center: physically, as the vital life source with which we nourish and grow, and metaphysically, as the ever-shifting entity whose flows inform new ways to interact with and reimagine the world around us.

Enjoy large, site-specific exhibitions by Meg Webster and Onyedika Chuke, a participatory sculpture by Muna Malik. Get a behind-the-scenes look at the artistic process at Open Studios with LMCC's 2021 Arts Center artists-in-residence.

Also on view in Studio A4 at The Arts Center at Governors Island is The Stranger by Damon Davis, screening on loop from 12pm - 5pm. 

 

Born in San Francisco in 1944, Meg Webster received an MFA from Yale University in 1983. Her work finds inspiration in the intrinsic beauty of natural materials. Using metal, glass and organic elements like salt, soil, twigs and moss, the artist creates large-scale installations and precise structures rooted in the traditions of Land Art of the 1970s. Webster draws on the rigorous formal vocabulary of minimalism to create simple, geometric forms that directly and perceptually engage the body and its senses.

Webster’s work has been exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; the Rooseum, Malmö, Sweden; the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; and the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, New York. In 2017 Webster participated in the two-person exhibition, Natura Naturans at Villa Panza in Varese, Italy. She also presented her large-scale earthwork, Concave Room for Bees, at Socrates Sculpture Park, commissioned for their 2016 exhibition, LANDMARK. Webster currently lives and works in New York.


Onyedika Chuke is a New York-based American sculptor and archivist born in Onitsha, Nigeria. Often intrigued by international politics, his analysis of history and media are pertinent reminders of social constructs that characterize our collective memory. From 2016 to 2018 Chuke was a fellow at The Drawing Center. In the years 2013 to 2015 he participated in Queens Museum Studio Program. From January 2018 to 2019, Chuke served as New York City Public Artist in Residence (P.A.I.R). The position placed him in the offices of Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) and Department of Corrections (DOC) Rikers Island. He has also held fellowships at Sculpture Center, Socrates Sculpture Park and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His archive has received support from organizations such as The Artist Alliance Inc and The American Academy in Rome. Onyedika Chuke is a graduate of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (2011).


Muna Malik is an immersive artist based in Los Angeles, CA. Her passion in art lies in her pursuit to create cultural awareness and understanding through the medium of art. Her current work focuses on capturing poetic imagery and narratives of women of color and refugees.

Her work has been exhibited at Northern Spark Arts Festival, MCAD, Artworks Chicago and The University of Minnesota—Humphrey School of Public Affairs. She was the billboard artist for North Carolina for the “For Freedoms 50 State Initiative.” She recently completed exhibitions at the Band of Vices Gallery LA, Annenberg Space for Photography LA with Photoville and the International Center for Photography with “For Freedoms.” She currently has work at the Somaal House of Art in Minneapolis, MN for the Ilaaa Shalay/Since Yesterday exhibition. Her latest collage series was featured on Vogue.com and i-D Magazine.


Damon Davis (b. 1985) is a post-disciplinary artist based in St. Louis, Missouri. In a practice that is part therapy, part social commentary, his work spans across a spectrum of creative mediums to tell stories exploring how identity is informed by power and mythology. He is well known for his solo exhibition, "Darker Gods in The Garden of The Low Hanging Heavens", which premiered in St. Louis in 2018 and went on to show at Art Basel Miami later that year. The exhibit explored the surrealist manifestations of Black culture by constructing new mythologies in response to tropes of Blackness. In 2010, Davis founded music collective and label, FarFetched, for which he now serves as creative director. Filmmaker Magazine selected him and Sabaah Folayan as part of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film 2016” for their work co-directing the critically acclaimed documentary Whose Streets? chronicling the Ferguson uprising of 2014. In 2020, critic Ben Davis cited his project "All Hands on Deck", which captured the hands of people who shaped and upheld the Ferguson movement, as one of the “100 Works of Art That Defined the Decade.” Davis is a 2015 Firelight Media Fellow, 2016 Sundance Lab Fellow, 2017 TED Fellow, and 2020-2022 Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow. His work is featured in the permanent collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.


The Arts Center Residency provides short-term, project-based residencies to artists and creative practitioners whose work is concerned with the broader themes of equity and sustainability. The residency takes place in the open plan studios at The Arts Center at Governors Island in two sessions. The first cohort of artists will be in residence from May 4 – August 20, 2021.

2021 Arts Center Residency: Session One Participants

*Residency in partnership with YoungArts. Molly Horan (2008 YoungArts Winner in Writing)