Steffani Jemison
Personal, 2014
HD video, color, sound
6:38 min.
Personal portrays actors staged in three different vignettes around the Boys and Girls High School and Fulton Park in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Their forward and backward movements disrupt the narrative order of events: appearing purposeful and yet confounding the viewer’s sense of time and place. Jemison’s related video works explore the challenges and politics of the contemporary Black American experience, the boundaries and potentials of urban environments and architecture, and the social, historical, and physical contexts of narrative and metaphor.
Steffani Jemison was born in Berkeley, California, and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009) and a BA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University (2003). Jemison uses time-based, photographic, and discursive platforms to examine “progress” and its alternatives. Jemison’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Brooklyn Museum; the Drawing Center; LAXART; the New Museum; the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Laurel Gitlen; Team Gallery; and other venues. Her publishing project, Future Plan and Program, commissions literary work by artists of color and has published books by Martine Syms, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, and Harold Mendez, among others. She has participated in artist residencies at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; the International Studio and Curatorial Program, Brooklyn; Project Row Houses, Houston; the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Jemison has served as a visiting critic in the graduate art programs at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Illinois-Chicago. She was a 2013 Tiffany Foundation Biennial Awardee and a 2014 Art Matters Grantee. In 2015, she presented her new multipart commission Promise Machine at the Museum of Modern Art.
Jemison is currently an artist-in-residence in the Sharpe-Walentas Space Program. She teaches at Parsons The New School for Design, the Cooper Union, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
In between exhibitions, BRIC House closes its gallery doors to use them as screens for our Garage Door Video Series, which is FREE and open to the public.
Venue Information:
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