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Effective January 1: Masks are Optional in VisArts’ Classrooms and Studios
Flip It & Reverse It examines the harmful cycles of Black hypervisibility in popular media. The exhibition features a selection of found footage video works from the mid 90s to the present day that sample television, music, journalism, and social media. From MTV’s genre forming reality TV show, The Real World, to the viral coverage of professional athletes endorsing the Black Lives Matter movement, the exhibition’s pop culture citations reckon with pre and post internet mass spectatorship. Flip It & Reverse It also explores the relationship between emerging technology and racial biases as made apparent through Instagram’s algorithm and facial recognition software. Underpinned by humor and poignancy, Flip It & Reverse It offers windows into the fraught economy of Blackness as a spectacle in visual and digital culture.
Participating artists: Cameron Granger, Brett Kashmere, Elizabeth Mputu, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Martine Syms & XPRZ.
Storm Bookhard is writer, curator, and scholar of visual culture based in Los Angeles, California. Her practice centers how artists of color and other marginalized practitioners are inscribed within archival, museological, and institutional histories. This work has included conducting research for the Getty Research Institute’s (GRI) feminist performance art initiative, authoring artist biographies for the Archives of Women Artists, Research, and Exhibitions (AWARE), and programming immersive performance artworks in Southern California. Bookhard also served as a collaborator on the first Los Angeles institutional exhibition highlighting the Guerrilla Girls’ 40 years of activist interventions which will open in the fall of 2025 at the GRI.
She has held positions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and David Zwirner (New York) in addition to several other art institutions. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Getty Foundation, and published by Harvard University Press and the Boston Art Review (forthcoming, 2025).
Bookhard holds a BFA in Fine Art (2022) as well as an MA in Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere (2023) from the University of Southern California. She is currently the Project Manager and Curatorial Director of GĒR Collective, a performance art collaborative, as well as a Gallery Assistant at Regen Projects.
VisArts’ Emerging Curator Program pairs an emerging curator with an experienced mentoring curator to produce new exhibitions and related programming.
Generous funding for this exhibition has been provided by
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