Sir Isaac Julien’s moving image installation Lessons of the Hour (2019) interweaves period reenactments across five screens to create a vivid picture of nineteenth-century activist, writer, orator, and philosopher Frederick Douglass. Through critical research, fictional reconstruction, and a marriage of poetic image and sound, Julien asserts Douglass’ enduring lessons of justice, abolition, and freedom that […]

Artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen creates multimedia installations that blend fact, memory, myth, and mysticism and use lush imagery to draw out these entanglements. By digging deep into archives and collaborating with communities, his projects weave together many voices to reveal other truths about — and strategies of repair from — colonial violence. In this Washington, DC debut, his video work […]

Pictures of Belonging is an unprecedented examination of these three trailblazing figures.  By tracing their artistic development before, during, and after the mass incarceration and displacement of Japanese Americans during World War II, the exhibition offers a nuanced view of how these women continued to explore and experiment with new artistic expression throughout their lives. Created during […]