Do/Tell: Erin Bernard, Heather Hart, Rachelle Mozman, and Akosua Adoma Owusu

“Home for me is both the mysterious and the mythic—the known and the unknown.”
—Carrie Mae Weems

The exhibition and program series Do/Tell draws upon ICA’s 1994 exhibition Carrie Mae Weems to explore how acts of storytelling construct ideas of home, family, and identity.

Heather Hart’s site-specific porch installation structures the exhibition space and represents a transition between home and the world outside. Walk on it or crawl underneath to find an archive of local oral histories collected by artist Erin Bernard, the curators, and Jubilee School students from West Philadelphia.

Akosua Adoma Owusu’s 2013 film Kwaku Ananse narrates a Ghanaian myth interwoven into the story of a young woman returning to the country for her father’s funeral, and shows how cultural stories shape-shift as they pass between generations. Similarly, Rachelle Mozman’s staged photographs featuring her own family members relate larger Latino diasporic experience.

Taken as a whole, these works lace and loosen ties between personal stories and historical scripts that shape identity.

STUDENT CURATORS

Isaac Kaplan, Erich Kessel, Alyssa Laverda, Martyna Majewska, Laurissa Papillion, Kimberly Schreiber, Virginia Seymour, Samantha Sharon, Madeline Smoot, Austin Spence, Ciara Stein

The Spiegel-Wilks Seminar in Contemporary Art is taught by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Associate Professor of American Art, University of Pennsylvania, and Liz Park, ICA Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow.