Summer’s Home
Curated by huiyin zhou and Sara Rodrick
Resident Artist’s popup Exhibition
curated by huiyin zhou and Catherine Edgerton
Performers for Queen Boat Floats, the opening reception for the Resident Artist’s Popup Exhibition!
(adé oh, Catherine Edgerton, Clyde Edgerton, Destiny Hemphill, and huiyin zhou)
Trajectories
curated by Maya Ghanem
Photo by Maya Gahnem
Trajectories: Liberated Pathways through Makeup, Photography, and Jewelry, May 10th -June 10!
Trajectories is a multi-media exhibition project that envisions personal and structural trajectories without the shackles of oppression. What paths would we have taken without colonial restrictions? What would we have explored? What mistakes would we have learned from? How would we understand our stories and our concept of time? Trajectories will be on view at Queen Street Magic Boat, a surrealist hub for building and sustaining visionary community connections through water, the arts, and wild imagination.
Join for a series of free events throughout the exhibition, including a reception, a Duke Arts Create workshop, and more.
Open Hours: Tuesdays and Saturdays, 5–8pm
May 10, 6–9 PM: Opening Reception
May 14, 6:30-8pm: Siembra Durham Canvassers Meeting
May 16, 6–8 PM: Dreaming as a Tool: a whimsical collage with flowers and glitter: Duke Arts Create Workshop with Jac Michel
May 22, 4–6 PM: Storytelling and Teach-In: Sudan and Global Liberation Struggles by Doha Medani from Muslim Women For
May 29, 4–6 PM: Teach-In: Genocide in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by the Kotla Collective
May 30, 6:30-8pm: Fierce Gentleness - embodying ostentatious expression as an untamable commitment to Liberation
June 6, 6–9 PM: Community Bingo Night with Dinner Provided [RSVP Link TBA]
June 8, 4–6 PM: Closing Reception with a Slow Art Tour from Gail MD Belvett, DDS
Project Credits:
Makeup: Maya Ghanem and Nashia Ogbuagu
Photography: Maya Ghanem and Nashia Ogbuagu
Jewelry: Maya Ghanem
Meet Maya!
Maya Ghanem
Maya (they/she) is an aspiring researcher, community builder, and artist focusing on queer Muslim solidarity. Basing their work with queer Muslim community in Durham, they organize prayer services, social events, artist workshops, scholarly talks, Ramadan dinners, and political involvement. Receiving a Bachelor of Arts from the International Comparative Studies Department at Duke, Maya wrote their honors thesis on queer Muslims and environmental futurisms, highlighting the interconnected potential to break Orientalist queer/Muslim and human/nature binaries. Maya also published an article in the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Journal on a queer and decolonial approach to sexual ethics while analyzing Arab media. In their first art installation at VAE Raleigh, Maya explored relational subjectivity, incorporating queer and Muslim elements into make-up and photography portraits of her close friends.
Death Planted a Garden
curated by Queen Boat, the Art Chose Me, and Popbox Gallery
Death is pronounced at a discreet moment in time. Yet, as quickly as a green sprig breaks out from a peach stone, the moment passes. The time within that moment blooms – expanding outward to transform the continuum of the living. The moment is the seed, and the seed is buried.
In Death Planted a Garden, 22 artists traverse seascapes, dreamscapes, space-scapes, and soundscapes that span—out, up, inward, and underground—from the moment of a death. Visual, sound, literary, and multidisciplinary creators explore their lived experiences of loss: loss of a loved one, a culture, an identity, a pet, a neighborhood, a potted fern, a coral reef. How do these deaths connect us to rage, to echo, to revival, to breath, to hauntology, to the yellow Dollar General Sign on a hill once-wooded?
If death is a moment, what follows is timeless and fluid. In these post-mortem ecologies, we plant orchards, we fall off wagons, we fuel spaceships, we follow mirages, we float on life rafts. The harvest is at once devastating and gloriously expansive. Despite (or because of) our grief, Death Planted a Garden reflects on the reverberations of severed connection—and the awakening to our inevitable place in the infinite salt water of things.
Film Screening by Vittles, photo by Catherine Edgerton
Installation by Destiny Hemphill, photo by Catherine Edgerton
Front room with images of work by echo hower, Jim Lee, Hiva Kadivar, and Alia El-Bermani. Photo by Catherine Edgerton
Projection of Six or Seven Kaleidoscopes, film by DL Anderson’s of Catherine Edgerton’s kaleidoscopes, projected on the bathroom wall
Quiet Cartographies, by R Stein Wexler, is an invitation to collectively map our shared invisible histories. Photo by Catherine Edgerton
Projection of Wheel In the Sky by Hồng-Ân Trương next to bottle wall