| Description | The Jacob Lawrence Gallery is pleased to present the Jacob Lawrence Legacy Residency exhibition featuring the 2024 resident artist Simon Benjamin. Please join us for the opening reception on Wednesday, April 3, 5-7pm. No RSVP required. A Bolt from the Blue is an exhibition curated as a living space of temporal contemplation. It continues Simon Benjamin’s research of the sea and coastal areas as connected sites of colonial legacy. Through video installation, painting, sculpture, and photography, we are immersed in visual, sound, and material vocabularies that convene relational community histories alongside objects of inquiry. Part of the gallery will also remain in studio-draft, populated with materials that facilitate contemplation, discovery, and discussion through his lens of the Caribbean archipelago to the coastal and island cultures of the Pacific Northwest. “The first dark shadow was cast by being wrenched from their everyday, familiar land, away from protecting gods and a tutelary community. But that is nothing yet. Exile can be borne, even when it comes as a bolt from the blue.” ~Edouard Glissant The Jacob Lawrence Legacy Residency program and exhibition is organized by Guest Curator Berette S Macaulay.
About the Legacy Resident
Simon Benjamin is a Jamaican multi-disciplinary artist and filmmaker based in New York whose practice considers how the past ripples into the present in unexpected ways. Using the sea and coastal space as frameworks, his current body of work explores how lesser-known histories and colonial legacies impact our present and contribute to an interconnected future.His work has been included in exhibitions and screenings internationally, including Kaunas Biennial, Lithuania (2023), Baxter St. CCNY, New York NY (2023); documenta 15, Kassel, Germany (2022); Kingston Biennial, National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica (2022); Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Governor’s Island, NY; Third Horizon film Festival, Miami, FL (2022); trinidad+tobago film festival, Trinidad and Tobago (2021); NYU Gallatin at Governors Island, New York, NY (2021); The 92nd St. Y, New York, NY (2020); Hunter East Harlem Gallery, New York, NY (2019); the Ghetto Biennial, Port Au Prince, Haiti (2018); Jamaica Biennial, National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica (2017); New Local Space, (NLS) Kingston (2016); and Columbia University, New York, NY (2016). Learn More at simonbenjamin.com |
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