nwl: Opening Reception

nwl: opening reception

Gathering
In-Person

 
 

Saturday, October 8th, 2022

6-9 pm

 
A black-and-white archival pigment print shows people whose heads have been cropped out wearing printed dresses and bracing each other’s elbows.

Join us to celebrate the opening reception of the fall exhibition, nwl, featuring new and existing works by Kelly Kristin Jones.

The Luminary is pleased to present its fall exhibition nwl, co-curated in collaboration with The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). This exhibition emerged from conversations between Stephanie Koch, Interim Executive Director of The Luminary, and Simon Wu, co-curator and Program Manager of TRII, reflecting on the role of white people in dismantling whiteness. Too often, it seems, exhibitions rely on the crucial work of non-white people to critique whiteness. How can white people dismantle white supremacy within themselves and their own communities, and what would that look like in an exhibition format?

Kelly Kristin Jones (b. 1984) has made work in photography, sculpture, and performance for the last five years that reflects on the role that white women have in upholding and promoting white supremacy. By offering a clearer diagnosis of the problem, she seeks to create space for alternatives. Exhibited for the first time in St. Louis, nwl brings together new and existing work from Jones that draws on various sites: the domestic, the monument, and the media, for the ways that nice, white ladies (or nwls) subconsciously uphold the aesthetics of white dominance, spatialize their supremacy, and place themselves in proximity to power.

 
The LuminaryIn-Person, Gathering