Carl Heyward, founder of The Global Art Project (GAP), an international collaborative social art practice, has curated two exhibitions in New York City and Charlotte, North Carolina beginning in October 2024 running through January 2025.
“Crossing Borders: We Are All Immigrants” is a special and well-timed exhibition connecting a wide range of international and US artists and their work which encourages the crossing of boundaries and borders, necessary for navigating the world.
The exhibition showcases 60 artists from 19 countries who are addressing a range of concerns from the obvious red button topic implied in the title, as well as giving expression to personal, gender-based and psychological barriers that deserve acknowledgement. Heyward’s connecting force as a curator is based on his generosity of thought and commitment to inclusion, creating a haven in a world at a time when fears of the ‘other’ can seem to raise isolating boundaries.
Heyward states, “Institutions, be they social, political, governmental, familial, or any other ‘established order’ is but a body of opinions, albeit with great clout. But a bully has clout (only) until one stands up for oneself, insisting upon the individuality and authenticity of one’s own true self.”
Heyward’s latest installation, The Slave Ships (1000 sq feet) addressing the Atlantic Slave Trade is a monumental new work that crosses the border of time, through the use of a 400-year-old slave ship schematic drawing overlaid on a mirror finished metallic gold background. This in conjunction with the uncannily alluring Cotton Pickin’ Cakewalk by multidimensional artist, chef and choreographer Mia Chambers of Oakland, California, a towering 10-layer King Cotton cake, powerfully centers this exhibition.
Co-curator and Nine Eighteen Nine gallery owner Joanne Rogers, describes art as “a bridge; a universal language and safe space in which to explore.” Her work in this exhibition, The American, “seeks to show that the only true definition of an American is that we have all crossed many borders. We are all immigrants.” In curating this exhibition, Rogers’ goal has been “to be a storyteller and to provide spaces to foster emotional growth and meaningful conversations.”
Continuing with the idea of navigation and connection, Akiko Suzuki, co-curator
and exhibiting artist, writes, “I am convinced that this exhibition will allow us to sense a connection at a conscious level that lies deeper than uncontrollable, unpredictable and superficial human relationships.”
Katie Korotzer is an exhibiting artist and writer concerned with the Southern American past, present and future, as well as the implications upon race, culture and politics. She shares:
A Borders’ Narrative
By Katie Korotzer , an exhibiting artist and writer concerned with the Southern American past, present and future, as well as the implications upon race, culture and politics.
I am a descendent of slaves who’s seen the gates and the door and the lichen on the plank of no return where many entered and none came back except in genetic exceptional flesh as I did in Senegal in Dakar at Goree Island.
I say it proudly to be the other that never bought into what I was never brought here to be a part of in the first place to feed into beaten into to share the wealth of pain torture guilt and misbegotten gains on the backs of slaves of all manifestations colors and creeds who slave to this day chasing a phantom of a sprite of a wisp of a dream that is a lie that is disguised as aspiration and assimilation that’s cog-in-the-wheel time for all materializations of slaves in a caste system garbed as a class system that enslaves as it grinds and blinds like epileptic flash of psychedelic permanent tv and when was the last time you saw a public telephone post 9-11 when the secrets bled out as the towers fell and absolute surveillance arose?
With all that into a seventh decade having seen and done it all seemingly innumerable times the identification of a system’s agenda is digested without enthusiasm like a meal eaten too often with a loss of taste, appetite, expectation or scrutiny.
Age and experience is no guarantee of wisdom and fools come easily and with all that lies a will to continue to hope to reach out to communicate to embrace some semblance of positivity of humanity to bridge the distance between self and others of people and philosophies even to a standstill a standoff a zero-sum game, a mutually recognized tacit agreement that survival and continuance trumps total annihilation … till now…when the confluence of people places politics practices power and decline of positions in the pecking order accelerate fear loss of mythical superiorities police of the world white male/man as the center of the universe and discerner of truths and lies but mainly lies now taken as truth or confused into the morass of manipulation that it all has ever been …
Cross a Border to truth to compassion to patience to hope to tolerance to trust to risk to love to kindness in the face of the madness that is the everyday headline and middle page and comics and sport section and back page blaring unstoppable conflict, pain and complaint as well as ads for a better fuller life of weight loss and Instagram super stardom accentuated by a cute emoticon.
Has it always been such? Snake oil, con man, criminal intent , corruption , double- speak , political hypnosis business of America is Business– monkey business– genocide, appropriation , mind control, keeping up with the Jones’s, feeding that jones, it’s not personal just bozos on the Google bus or niggers packed on a slave ship like the commodities that they are packed into jails and prisons like the commodities that we are aspiring to be Diddy or Musk like everybody else as opposed to Crossing the Border that thin membrane to self to real power and dignity … all sorts of slaves and slavery in lock step in camps of good and evil when it really is the same camp knee deep in the bile of denial and delusion of control
The river is deep:
Cross that Border – G&S
with great thanks to G&S for allowing a platform for established and emerging arts and artist-generated projects; especially this CrossingBorders exhibition which deserves time, attention, thought and action on many levels…