St. Louis Art Museum: Saint Louis Art Museum Will Present Installation Of Works By Damon Davis

St. Louis MO

05 August, 2021

1:55 PM

Description

Press release from the St. Louis Art Museum: August 5, 2021 ST. LOUIS, Aug. 5, 2021—Damon Davis' "All Hands On Deck" is a powerful artwork that addresses social justice and the call for change. The St. Louis multi-disciplinary artist conceived the original photographs of hands held up high during the months-long protests following the August 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown, Jr. in Ferguson. The Saint Louis Art Museum will display six of the large-scale photolithographs in a special installation in Gallery 212S from Sept. 17 through March 27, 2022. A seventh work from the series will be on view in the exhibition "Art Along the Rivers: A Bicentennial Celebration," which opens in October. Davis and his fellow protesters pasted the images onto boarded-up storefronts along West Florissant Avenue, where they shared space with many other rapidly improvised textual and visual statements. Images of the storefronts were broadcast around the world. In the words of the artist: "The project in itself was a protest to change the physical space of the street in the aftermath of the murder of Michael Brown. The boarded-up buildings created a narrative of destruction before anything had even happened, and that fed into the media's biased portrayal of the protesters. It was a way to weaponize art to create a counternarrative centered on the unity and love I saw every time I went out to protest. It sought to raise the morale of the protest community to continue the long fight." Davis photographed a diverse array of individuals who were involved in the Ferguson protest movement. Recalling the protesters' chant "Hands up don't shoot" that was echoed throughout the protests—they were photographed with their "hands up." That signal of surrender, however, is transformed in Davis's photographs into one of resistance, fortitude and community. Davis' documentary film about the Ferguson protest movement, "Whose Streets?," debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017 and received broad critical attention. Among his many other accomplishments, he is 2011 graduate of the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission's Community Arts Training Institute, and in 2020, he was named a Citizen Artist Fellow at Kennedy Center in Washington. The installation is curated by Elizabeth Wyckoff, curator of prints, drawings and photographs; and Hannah Klemm, associate curator of modern and contemporary art. CONTACT: Matthew Hathaway, 314.655.5493, [email protected]   This press release was produced by the City of St. Louis. The views expressed here are the author's own.