Rodney Ewing
PROJECT STATEMENT
With the escalating assaults on the Black community by individuals, law enforcement, and institutions, my community has been discussing how to operate in these violent times—not only for our physical well-being but also for our peace of mind. The African American community has always given their children a set of social instructions about how to survive encounters with law enforcement and private citizens. However, with the escalating violence by police against Black citizens, these operating instructions are becoming obsolete. The feeling of entitlement over the Black Body has violated mundane pursuits, such as waiting for a friend in Starbucks, sleeping in a college common space, and walking into one’s own apartment building. So how does a body take precautions when the rules of engagement are constantly shifting? How do you instruct the next generation on survival, when you are uncertain of the rules?
The funds provided by the Demil Foundation Grant will be used to support this line of inquiry. I started this project while in residence in 2019 at The Headlands Project Space, called “The Devil Finds Work.” The title is taken from a group of essays by James Baldwin on identity and racism in the American movie industry. My work will document how the Black Body has had to navigate physical, social, and psychological spaces in America, forever code-switching, adapting, and morphing. The series will include works on paper, installations, and sculptures that document Black communities’ history of survival techniques, and our continued struggle for autonomy over our physical and spiritual well-being. This body of work will be exhibited at Rena Bransten’s in the winter/spring of 2022.
BIO
Rodney Ewing’s drawings, installations, and mixed media works focus on his need to intersect body and place, memory and fact to re-examine human histories, cultural conditions, and events. With his work, he is pursuing a narrative that requires us to be present and intimate. His work has been exhibited at The Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, Euphrat Museum of Art, Cupertino, CA; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; and in San Francisco, CA at Root Division, Jack Fischer Gallery, Nancy Toomey Fine Art, Alter Space Gallery, Southern Exposure Gallery, and Ictus Projects, and Euqinom Gallery. He has been an Artist-in-Residence at Space Program SF, Recology and the De Young Museum of Fine Arts both in San Francisco, as well as Djerassi in Woodside, California, Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, California, and Bemis Center for the Arts, Omaha, Nebraska. Ewing received his BFA in Printmaking from Louisiana State University and his MFA in Printmaking at West Virginia University.
