Prototype
Westbeth Gallery, 2025
Curated by Juana Berrío
The 2024–25 Elaine G. Weitzen Studio Program Fellows: Nooshin Askari, Paige K. Bradley, Dahlia Bloomstone, Cheeny Celebrado-Royer, Rhea Dillon, Niloufar Emamifar, Valentina Jager, Ash Moniz, Daniel Melo Morales, Iulia Nistor, Pegah Pasalar, Chantal Peñalosa Fong, Alex Schmidt, Julia Taszycka, and misra walker.
The ISP’s Studio exhibition, Prototype, presents new work by the 2024–25 Elaine G. Weitzen Studio Program Fellows. The exhibition will be on view May 9–25 at Westbeth Gallery, a nonprofit fine arts gallery in Manhattan’s West Village.
Founded in 1968, the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (ISP) is an experimental study community dedicated to fostering critical thinking, cross-disciplinary scholarship, and multimedia artistic practices. The ISP cultivates a rigorous intellectual environment where participants are encouraged to engage deeply with contemporary issues through extended conversation and collaboration. Through seminars, reading groups, workshops, screenings, performances, poetry readings, studio visits, and an array of collaborative endeavors, the program nurtures and challenges the creative processes of artists, curators, and scholars who are committed to innovative, sustainable, and activist practices.
View a map of this exhibition here
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“When they, wingspans, open, it’s a place of infinite possibility. A Black Fold. An infinity of absolute death and absolute freedom.”
The standing still of time equates to the standing down of shields. Laid on ground—laid at rest. In a time-related context “wingspan” can refer to a duration of something. Some thing: the distance between the shields is a temporal constriction that constructs the space-time of two islands, two lands, two nations. Two nations: two time periods where one is darker than the other. An old world and a supposed new. The spades remain despite this difference, this duality, this twoness. Despite time, does it still stand that a spade is, in fact, still a spade?
“Jembe la maboka” is considered as “hoes of the spirits”. The hoe was seen as an essential African implement in the mid 1800s. There were a number of spear head monies across West Africa as well as East Africa from roughly 1850-1950 (although they were “scarce” in the east in comparison to the west). There was a degeneration from weapon to currency when the spear blade had become blunted on its edges. The number of native hoes that were needed to buy a male slave or female slave/wife varies per territory. Here are two examples: three hoes were needed for marriage south of Iringa in Wabena of Tanganyika Territory (modern-day sovereign state of Tanzania), and three bolokos were needed for a female slave as exchanged between the Basongo Meno and the Bankutu (both groups from regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo).
– RD
Jembe la maboka (Wingspan), 2025
Iron and wood
8.5 × 122 × 46 cm
Iron and wood
8.5 × 122 × 46 cm
The Whitney Musuem cancelled No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom: Mourning and Militancy, which was to be performed by artists Fadl Fakhouri, Noel Maghathe, and Fargo Tbakhi on May 14 as part of the exhibition a grammar of attention, organised by the ISP’s curatorial cohort of Bea Ortega Botas, Kennedy Hollins Jones, Tamara Khasanova, and Ntshadi Mofokeng. The show is one of the capstone exhibitions presented by the ISP’s cohorts at the end of the year. In response to the cancellation and in support of public mourning of Palestinian lives, myself and many artists in the Studio exhibition withdrew our artworks. I chose to replace my artwork by writing a public score, prompted by the performance scores previously comissioned by the performers from Brandon Shimoda, Christina Sharpe, and Natalie Diaz. As described on the Poetry Project page dedicated to a previous iteration or version of the performance, titled: “No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom”: Mourning, Militancy and Performance, the performance would have interpreted the three scores. I offer mine as a fourth, amongst many, for all:
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