April 10, 2017

The Grant Wood Fellows will culminate their time at the University of Iowa with an exhibition entitled Grant Wood Fellows’ Exhibition 2016-17 at the C.S.P.S. galleries, April 20 through June 25. The exhibition will include the work of 2016-17 visual art fellows Colin Lyons and Tameka Norris and dance fellow Christopher-Rasheem McMillan. Grant Wood Fellows’ Exhibition 2016-17 is free and open to the public, Monday through Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday, from noon to 4 p.m. C.S.P.S. is located at 1103 Third St. SE, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. No tickets are necessary for this event.

Colin Lyons, the Printmaking Fellow, was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1985, and grew up in Petrolia, “Canada’s original oil boomtown”; his years there have fueled his interests in industrial ruins and sacrificial landscapes. His work fuses printmaking, sculpture, and chemical experiments. At C.S.P.S., Lyons will present a collection of printed maps, brochures, and sculptures which propose a site-specific monument to the layered history of Mount Trashmore, and the challenging environmental conditions on the horizon. He will design this project to integrate alongside the proposed Site 1 redevelopment project, and commemorate the significance of the site’s various legacies (Snouffer Quarry, Stumptown, and Mount Trashmore), while proposing new strategies for memorializing and preserving industrial artifacts, re-developing urban brownfield lands, and mitigating ongoing carbon emissions. More information about the artist can be found on his website, http://colinlyons.ca/home.html.

Tameka Jenean Norris uses herself and her community as subjects in her painting, video, photography, music, performance, installation, project-based art, context art, confession, the internet, and institutional critique to explore the internal drives and external influences that shape identity. Norris will exhibit her most recent work, a letter her father wrote to her on September 9, 2001, and The Fabric of Our Lives, braids tying strangers together by the act of weaving their clothing/experiences.   Norris will perform as Meka Jean during the opening reception on April 20, in the C.S.P.S. C Space. Meka Jean is Norris’s rap character alter ego, she explains, “It's not someone I aspire to be, it's someone who I was in the past, when maybe when I was three years old or before I had an awareness of who I was inside of my body.” Examples of her work can be found on her website, http://www.mekajean.com/.

Locked in silent conversation, Dance Fellow Christopher-Rasheem McMillan uses dance and movement to reflect on race relations in America. Starting with the death of Emmett Till and culminating with Black Lives Matter, McMillan re-imagines Trisha Brown's 1975 work Locus to address African Americans' interactions with law enforcement, past and present. He explains, ”She uses points and space and numbers to create a choreography.  I use her structure, but remove her numbers and her letters, and I put people, particularly people of African descent, who have been affected by police violence in the cube structure.  This is the first time in the company's history that they're allowing someone who's not a member of the company to reconstruct one of Trisha Brown's early choreographies.”  On exhibition will be the physical cube in which McMillan performs his Black Lōkəs as well as other documentation of the performance piece. McMillan will perform the work during the opening reception. See http://strategicrebellions.info/ for more information about McMillan and his work.

Related events:

  • April 18: Black Lōkəs by Christopher-Rasheem McMillan performance and panel discussion at the African American Museum of Iowa. More information at http://blackiowa.org.
  • April 20: Meka Jean by Tameka Norris performance at the C.S.P.S. C Space.
  • April 22: Eco Fest talk by Colin Lyons on geoengineering and new art installment at Mount Trashmore at C Space in C.S.P.S. More information at http://www.ecofestcr.org/.