Join us for an Exhibition Tour of Land Akin, led by curator Gabriel de Guzman alongside Exhibition Artists Rachelle Dang and Athena LaTocha on Sunday, January 17th from 3-4:30 PM.

The tour will also be viewable on Zoom, starting at 3 PM ET. See the full instructions below.

Seeing land as imbued with sacredness, several artists are using soil and mud as materials in their work as a vehicle for communing with past ancestors of a site. Athena LaTocha creates massive drawings using earth-toned inks and natural materials, like mud and moss. Reflecting on her deep investigations into the land, the artist immerses herself in the work to convey a sense of traversing the landscape. This monumental work suggests the vastness and inherent force of nature while calling attention to the besieged environmental terrain. Rachelle Dang’s sculptural work in Land Akin was inspired by the eminent African American scholar, author, and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, paying homage to kinship across continents, islands, and oceans. Dang’s research-based approach led her to a 1937 article that Du Bois devoted to Hawaii, the place where Dang was born and raised. The artist interprets Du Bois’s text as a cry to reconceptualize nature as integral to anticolonial critique, to oppose dominant Western hierarchical views of nature and subjugated populations as knowable and exploitable. 

Participant Biographies

Rachelle Dang. Born in Honolulu, Hawai`i, Rachelle Dang combines a practice based in sculpture and installation with research into Pacific colonial legacies. Her work examines historical forms and complex environmental connections between places, people, and things. She has exhibited her work in New York at Socrates Sculpture Park, Fergus McCaffrey, Nathalie Karg Gallery, Lesley Heller Gallery, A.I.R. Gallery, Motel, and mh PROJECT nyc. Additional exhibitions include the Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii Pacific University, and the Haverford College Art Galleries.  Her residencies include Shandaken: Storm King Art Center, the Smack Mellon Artist Studio Program, the Studios at MASS MoCA, Cooper Union, and Sculpture Space where she received an Emerging Sculptor Fellowship.  She was awarded a 2019-2020 Fellowship with A.I.R. Gallery and will participate in a 2021 residency at Yaddo. Her solo exhibitions have been reviewed in the Brooklyn Rail and Hyperallergic. She earned a BA from Wellesley College and an MFA from Hunter College.

Athena LaTocha. Born in Anchorage, Alaska, Athena LaTocha’s massive works on paper explore the tenuous relationship between the human-made and natural worlds, following in the wake of Earthwork artists from the 1960s and 1970s. She has exhibited her work across the country in venues such as the New Orleans Museum of Art; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM; Shirley Fiterman Art Center, CUE Art Foundation and Artists Space, New York; South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings, SD; and the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Anchorage, AK. In 2019 she had solo exhibitions at JDJ | The Ice house in Garrison, NY; the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, ND; and the MacRostie Art Center in Grand Rapids, MN. Also in 2019, she was an artist in residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, LA. LaTocha is the recipient of prestigious grants, residencies and awards, including the Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2019 and 2016, Wave Hill in 2018, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in 2013. LaTocha earned a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from Stony Brook University. 

Gabriel de Guzman. Gabriel de Guzman is Curator & Director of Exhibitions at Smack Mellon, where he organizes group and solo exhibitions that feature emerging and under-recognized mid-career artists whose work often explores critical, socially relevant issues. Before joining Smack Mellon’s staff in 2017, de Guzman was the Curator of Visual Arts at Wave Hill, organizing solo projects for emerging artists, as well as thematic group exhibitions that explored human connections to the natural world. As a guest curator, he has also presented shows at Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs, BronxArtSpace, Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, Rush Arts Gallery, En Foco at Andrew Freedman Home, the Affordable Art Fair New York, Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance, and the Bronx Museum’s 2013 AIM Biennial. Prior to Wave Hill, he was a curatorial assistant at The Jewish Museum. His essays have been published in Nueva Luz: Photographic Journal and in catalogues for the Arsenal Gallery at Central Park, Kenise Barnes Fine Art, and the art institutions mentioned above. He earned an M.A. in art history from Hunter College and a B.A. in art history from the University of Virginia.

ZOOM MEETING – FULL INSTRUCTIONS

Topic: Land Akin Exhibition Tour
Time: Jan 17, 2021 03:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

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Image: Land Akin, installation view at Smack Mellon. Foreground: Rachelle Dang, Night Blooming Cereus, After Du Bois, 2021; Background, left to right: Esteban Cabeza de Baca, Ohkay Owingeh, 2020; Athena LaTocha, Bulbancha (Green Silence), 2019; Tatiana Arocha, Mi selva, tu selva, nuestra selva, 2019. Photo: Etienne Frossard