Mending the Sky, New Orleans Museum of Art, 10 October 2020 - 31 January 2021

Mending the Sky brings together eleven artists to respond to a world in distress. The exhibition borrows its title from a Chinese fable in which a rip in the sky causes the earth to split open, bringing floods, fires, famine, and disease—until a goddess takes on the arduous task of mending the broken sky. 

Working across the fields of art, animation, and performance, these artists shift conversations, challenge entrenched views, and subvert the established order. Their work gives shape to the aftermath of chaos and calamity, building towards a more equitable future by helping us envision the new world that might rise in the wake of disaster. Considering the crucial actions of care, healing, and coming together, each of them recognizes that we must address past problems and remedy present issues in order to forge a new path forward. With roots in Brazil, China, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Vietnam, India, Europe, and the American South, each of these artist projects are also acts of world-building that offer us a glimpse of a future we cannot yet see. 

Featured Artists

The exhibition begins with artist Beili Liu’s installation After All/Mending the Sky, in which raw silk clouds and dangling needles picture a sky in the act of repair. Firelei Báez’s painting the trace, whether we are attending to it or not (a space for each other’s breathing) overlays a ciguapa—a female creature from Dominican folklore—onto architectural plans of New Orleans, overwriting the divisive histories the map represents. Diedrick Brackens’s weaving If you feed a river mines the technique of weaving as a potent metaphor for new ways of imagining individual and cultural identity, incorporating influences drawn from European tapestries, West African textiles, and Southern quilting to explore issues surrounding gender, race, and sexuality. Heidi Hahn’s painting Burnout in Shredded Heaven 10 pictures two female figures, loosely based on poses of women from art history, in full possession of their own bodies and emotions, denying their viewers easy access to the world they inhabit. In A Sense of Memory, Ana Hernandez combines found wood, gifted objects, cast glass, and metal, finding in the patterns and forms nature models for greater harmony and balance between nature and people. Baseera Khan’s Braidrage is a video performance that explores the experience of overcoming trauma, based around a rock-climbing wall made from resin casts of parts of Khan’s body that the artist herself climbs. Thao Nguyen Phan’s three-channel video Mute Grain combines film and hand-drawn animation to tell the story of the death of a young woman named August during a famine in Vietnam, who haunts the landscape as a hungry ghost. In Jamilah Sabur’s video installation Un chemin escarpé / A steep path, the artist embodies a shape-shifting figure that communes with sites in the Caribbean to reimagine the surrounding landscape. Brazilian artist Clarissa Tossin’s Where the River Meets the Sea weaves together imagery from the world’s four largest rivers—the Amazon, the Nile, the Yangtze, and the Mississippi. Lorna Williams’s intricate sculptural assemblage of roots, everyday materials and cast plaster teeth, Lore, visualizes how our ancestors speak to us and through us: how our roots help form our identities and ways of being in the world.

https://noma.org/exhibitions/mending-the-sky/#about