This is Notes from MoAD: Emerging Artists and Critic Series, dedicated to the Museum of African Diaspora’s 2018-20 Emerging Artist Program. In this episode, visual artist Rodney Ewing and curator/organizer Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen talk about institutions, what the word “emerging” means when you’ve been an artist for fifteen years, and the things we learn about our work when we listen openly. As discussion about fact and truth leads to a deep-dive, head first, into the murky waters of the art market’s influence over what cultures get to have a brief and specific moment in the sun, the erasure of 200,000 years of Black art, and the long path to institutional diversity, they come up for air to affirm the power of creating our own spaces and communal opportunities.

Re-examining complex and marginalized social histories, Longitude + Latitude presented an installation of mixed media works on paper created during Ewing’s residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Exploring social and historical narratives of forced migration or displacement, the exhibition considered mnemonic geography and the intersections of body, place, and memory within the African diaspora. Longitude + Latitude was presented at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco as part of the Emerging Artists Program from May 8 through June 23, 2019.