Crystal Z Campbell | Nathaniel Donnett | Diane Wah Zuecher

Strange Strings

January 27 - March 9, 2024

Visionary artist Sun Ra released more than a hundred albums: some consisted of anarchic, noisy “space music,” while others featured lush, whimsical takes on classics. Strange Strings fits neither category. Released in 1967, this album presents the highly skilled musicians of his Arkestra playing stringed instruments from various curio shops around New York without any instruction or knowledge of how to play them. Instead of the anticipated cacophony, the songs have a definite ebb and flow and each composition bears a thread that ties it together. This exhibition features artists that embrace the spirit of the eponymous album by Sun Ra and His Arkestra: the toggle between intentionality and intuitive motion. 

“Running like water, an eclipse streams glimpses of irreversible consequence.” The work of artist and experimental filmmaker Crystal Z Campbell begins with the past. Searching through our histories, Campbell casts a light on what they refer to as “public secrets.” A Meditation on Nature in the Absence of an Eclipse (2017-20) focuses on environmental racism and how it affects everyone in it’s vein. Volleying between the known and the imagined, Campbell “I’m playing with that space between what we know and what we imagined, between history and subjective experience,” they explain.

Nathaniel Donnett approaches his practice through the lens of Dark Imaginarence, a concept of art, everyday aesthetic theory, and notion(s) of Blackness that creates through abstraction and representation while forever remaining influx and experientially poetic. Donnett’s process is as much philosophical as it is musical—and concerned with how everyday actions and common materials hold memories and serve as witnesses to lived experiences. His recent works suggest the art studio is everywhere and that the creative or imaginative mind is constantly active, yet not always recognized. 

Diane Wah Zuercher’s photographic works both celebrate the beauty of the everyday and the  impact of systemic problems such as racism on individual bodies, relationships, and spaces. Her piece The Jena Six references the 2006 conviction of 6 Black teenagers in Jena, Louisiana for the assault of a white classmate. Presented here as an album cover, Wah Zuercher looks to preserve these occurrences that consume us before dissipating into the endless stream of tragic injustices that also earn our fervor. 

Crystal Z Campbell (b. Oklahoma), a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts, is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents. and a 2022 Creative Capital award. Other honors include a Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Award, MAP Fund, MacDowell, Skowhegan, Rijksakademie, Whitney ISP, and Franklin Furnace Award. Exhibitions and screenings include MOMA, Artists Space, Bemis, SFMOMA, Drawing Center, ICA-Philadelphia, SculptureCenter, MIT List Center, Block Museum, Walker Art Center, EMPAC, BAM, and DocLisboa. Their latest film received the Silver Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival and was featured in the 2023 Berlinale Expanded Film Forum. Campbell’s artwork and films are held by MIT List Center, Duke University, MAG Rochester, Harvard Film Archive, and other collections in the U.S. and abroad.

Nathaniel Donnett’s (b. Houston, TX) interdisciplinary practice shapes and holds open spaces of phenomenological and metaphysical significance. Utilizing sourced and reclaimed objects, Donnett approaches ideas of materiality through concepts of Blackness, everyday aesthetic theory, and encoding strategies. Donnett received his BA in Fine Arts from Texas Southern University and his MFA from Yale University School of Art. He is a recipient of the 2024 American Academy of Rome Affiliated Fellowship, a 2022 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Dean’s Critical Practice Research Grant and Social Justice Initiative Grant, both from Yale (2020). His work has been exhibited at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK; The Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, VA; Project Row Houses, Houston, TX; The Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, VA; The American University Museum, Washington, D.C.; The University Museum at Texas Southern University, Houston, TX; The Kemper Contemporary Arts Museum, Kansas City, MO; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; and The New Museum, New York, NY.

Diane Wah Zuecher is a Brooklyn-based conceptual photographer and installation artist. Her work explores the cultural constructs of power, media, gender, and sexuality through photographic portraiture. She received her MFA in photography from Columbia University and her undergraduate degree in cultural anthropology and post-colonial literature from The New School University. She is also an adjunct professor at FITNYC and the creative director at bingeclique.