This fall, the Stone Center will host a first-ever retrospective of past Stone Center Visiting Artists. The exhibition, With Us Comes the Parallax, opens with a reception on September 13 and will run through November 30. This show will feature fourteen award-winning artists representing six countries (U.S., Panama, Botswana, Dominican Republic, Morocco, and Canada) and eight states. Some works will also be available for purchase during a silent auction to benefit the Stone Center’s arts and cultural programming. Bidding in the silent auction begins online October 1 and will continue through November 10. To see items up for bid, click here to be taken to the auction website.
Artists participating in the retrospective include, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, the first graduate assistant to work in the Brown Gallery, who went on to become an accomplished artist in her own right and is currently on the faculty at York University in Toronto, Canada. Joining Sunstrum is Hamid Kachmar, originally from Morocco, whose work celebrates his Amazigh cultural heritage; Lucía Méndez Rivas from the Dominican Republic; award-winning figurative artist Tim Okamura from Brooklyn via Canada; recent Anonymous Was a Woman-awardee Stefanie Jackson, currently Professor of Art at the University of Georgia; noted New Jersey-based artist Philemona Williamson whose work is prominently featured in the Mint Museum in Charlotte and whose public art can be seen at the Livonia MTA Station in Brooklyn and at the Glen Oaks Campus School in Queens, NY; and Atlanta-based artist Eric Mack, whose abstract work draws on his impressions of our interactions with shape, form and pattern in our daily lives. Also hailing from Atlanta is Wendy Phillips, a photographer, documentarian, and visual artist whose work has focused on the lives of women of African descent in Latin America. Her projects often combine ethnographic interviews with photographic images.
Joining these participants in the show are California native Toni Scott, whose work has been featured in the Stone Center in three previous shows, including 2018’s Aswarm With the Spirits of All Ages Here: Inconceivable Spaces of Slavery and Freedom; Arturo Lindsay, a founding member of the Brown Gallery and Museum’s Art Committee and an artist/scholar/educator whose work is informed by the scholarly research he conducts on African spiritual and aesthetic retentions, rediscoveries and re-inventions.
D.C.-based Michael B. Platt, a photographer and printmaker, and partner Carol Beane collaborated for their first artists’ book in 2001, Forgotten Contours, using her words and his images. Platt creates artwork that centers on figurative explorations of life’s survivors and the marginalized referencing history and circumstance in the rites, rituals, and expressions of the human condition. Beane’s poetry further explores and elucidates those themes. Beane’s artwork is also well-represented in private and public collections around the country. Fahamu Pecou is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose works combine observations on hip-hop, fine art, and popular culture, including representations of Black masculinity and how these images impact both the reading and performance of Black masculinity. Maya Freelon Asante comes to us as an award-winning visual artist whose work was described by the late poet Maya Angelou as “visualizing the truth about the vulnerability and power of the human being.”
The Stone Center has hosted thirty exhibitions and featured seventy-one different artists in its Robert and Sallie Brown Gallery and Museum since opening in the fall of 2004. Gallery events have included historical programs and groundbreaking photographic exhibitions including: Radicals in Black and Brown: Palante, People’s Power and Common Cause in the Black Panthers and Young Lords Organization (2007); Body and Soul: Paul Robeson, Race and Representation (2007-2008); Nina Simone: What More Can I Say? (2012); and James Barnor: Ever Young (2016).
Click here to view the exhibition catalog
Click here to view the pieces up for sale during the silent auction