This Penn Cultural Heritage Center lecture explores the complexity of visibility within the institutional exhibition space. Jasmine Wahi will discuss her ‘thesis’ for her first series of exhibitions at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, which will be celebrating its 50th Anniversary in 2021–2022. Wahi proposes that visibility is a primary tenet of social justice as a practice, and will discuss how her exhibitions explore the dichotomy of gaze, systemic institutional racism, equity, and representation. Using two exhibitions as case studies, one past and one future, she will unpack the inherent problematic aspects of creating exhibitions based on intersectionality and identity.
Jasmine Wahi is the Holly Block Social Justice Curator at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Founder and Co-Director of Project for Empty Space. Her practice predominantly focuses on issues of female empowerment, complicating binary structures within social discourses and exploring multi-positional cultural identities through the lens of intersectional feminism. In 2010, Ms. Wahi co-founded Project for Empty Space, a not-for-profit organization that supports artists interested in social discourse and activism. In 2015, Wahi joined Rebecca Jampol to open a brick and mortar gallery for PES in Newark, NJ. In addition to her work at the Bronx Museum and PES, Wahi curates independent exhibitions, projects, and public interventions. Wahi is Visiting Critic at Yale University and a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts: MFA Fine Arts department. She is a former board member of SPEAK Mentorship and the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC), as well as a former volunteer instructor for the Girls Educational Mentoring Services (GEMS) group. Jasmine Wahi received her M.A. in Art History from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. She lives with her Chihuahua mutt, Momo, in Brooklyn.
Free to Registered Guests
Register here: https://www.penn.museum/calendar/554/visibility-as-a-tenet-of-social-justice
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