Hamza Walker
Hamza Walker visited VCU as the Juror for the Anderson Gallery Student Exhibition. Walker is the Director of Education and Associate Curator for the Renaissance Society at the University of Columbia. The Renaissance Society is a non collected museum that is devoted to showing contemporary artists and their work in their amazing 3500 square foot gallery.
The Renaissance Society was opened in 1915 and showed artists like Pablo Picasso, Diet Mondrian and Cindy Sherman. Recently the gallery has shown artists such as Kara Walker and Felix Gonzalez - Torres.
Walker is "known beyond Chicago't art scene not only for his innovative curatorial work but also for his wide-ranging thinking and writing about contemporary art." - From theUniversity of Chicago magazine online.
The 3500 square foot gallery at the Renaissance Society is a wide open space that Walker transforms for every show he orchestrates in the space. He showed us examples of shows and how the space transforms. Walls move and it looks completely new with each new show. It was interesting to hear him talk about some of the shows he has put together. Such as a show about black art, everyone told him not to do it, but he did it anyways.
As the juror for the Anderson gallery student exhibition this lecture was also for the purpose of explaining his decisions about his choices for the show. Walker was interesting to listen to because he is very lighthearted. He described some of his decisions as " I just had to.." with a hearty laugh. It seems he choose some pieces because they were out there and bizarre. He also chose pieces based on their relation to other images by other artists. It was interesting to see how he saw things.. he described how one piece would comment the other and he just had to put them together. The photograph above is Cassie Mulheron's work about identifying as a race. He was intrigued by the painting of the face and how it related to similar images in the show that was of tribal face painting.
That is how he choose the show, by pairing similar things together. Congratulations to all the Photo Seniors whose work got accepted!
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