Addressing identity as a socio-political issue has been a central theme for artists since the 1970s. Us Them We | Race Ethnicity Identity considers how contemporary artists accentuate concepts like race and ethnicity through various visual strategies. Four formal devices serve as the foundation for the show: Text, Juxtaposition, Seriality, and Pattern. Artists often employ one or more of these approaches as means of storytelling, protest, and celebration. This exhibition aims to demonstrate how these organizing principles serve as a common tool through which personal and communal social status are explored.
Us Them We | Race Ethnicity Identity features significant loans and rarely-seen objects from the Worcester Art Museum’s permanent collection. The exhibition is presented across two galleries and features over 50 objects covering a broad spectrum of media, including photography, prints, painting, and sculpture. Highlights include works by Byron Kim, Roberto Lugo, María Magdelena Campos-Pons, and Lorna Simpson, among many others.
Us Them We is co-curated by Nancy Kathryn Burns, Stoddard Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at WAM, and Toby Sisson, Associate Professor and Program Director of Studio Art at Clark University. The exhibition opens February 19 and runs through June 19, 2022.
For more information and tickets, visit worcesterart.org.
