Jamillah James

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  print December 2017

  Jamillah James

  1 EJ HILL (PALAZZO CONTARINI POLIGNAC, VENICE; COMMONWEALTH AND COUNCIL, LOS ANGELES; HUMAN RESOURCES, LOS ANGELES) It’s been a busy year for the young LA-based artist EJ Hill, whose primary practice of performance has been given a new and different life through the incorporation of painting and installation. Of these three shows, two—at Human Resources and in Venice—included hand-built wooden models of roller coasters, structures at once thrilling and terrifying. Navigating these unwieldy constructions slowly and gracefully, Hill turns his movements into transfixing meditations on

• previews September 2017

  “SPEECH/ACTS”

  Joining a number of recent exhibitions seeking to define the discursive black radical tradition, “Speech/Acts” reflects on the legacy of the Black Arts Movement, which centered poetry, literature, and performance in its engagement with political discourses and everyday life following the civil rights movement. The exhibition situates an emerging generation of conceptualists alongside contemporary experimental poets and theorists such as Claudia Rankine and Fred Moten, demonstrating the elasticity of language as it circulates as text, image, or utterance—delivered in

• previews May 2017

  “DERRICK ADAMS: FUTURE PEOPLE”

  In recent years, New York–based multidisciplinary artist Derrick Adams has become a key contributor to Afrofuturism’s second wave. In addition to presenting more general meditations on American popular culture, Adams’s work considers the forward movement of black people toward a freer future. Rebuild’s exhibition will present multiple works on paper that continue the artist’s recent engagements with media and futurity, and will showcase a new video and an opening-night performance. “Future People” will also capitalize on the Arts Bank’s many holdings, among them the