Intro (Writing’s On the Wall)

Mills College announce the opening of a new exhibition space, Slide Space 123: A Space for Art and Ideas. The gallery aims to provide a space to pose new problems, working with and against the grain of the exhibition format. Slide Space 123 is a site to exchange ideas, a venue to connect the Mills community (students, faculty, and alumnae) with currents across multiple disciplines.

Opening Slide Space 123 is Intro (The Writing’s on the Wall), curated by Jackie Im, Co-founder and Director of Et al. and Et al.etc., San Francisco. The exhibition will feature artists who grapple with how they are defined, whether by religion, race, gender, or sexual orientation. Beginning with the understanding that one is not simply one demographic or another, Intro (The Writing’s on the Wall) uses as its starting point, Adrian Piper’s letter to the editor asking, “Please don’t call me a black artist. Please don’t call me a woman artist.” This is not to deny either her blackness or her authorship as an artist, rather Piper bridles against a conflation of the two terms at the expense of her being included in either. The different descriptors framing us may in part describe us, but the pictures they draw are incomplete. For some they become qualifiers making one a subset of the whole, addendums that keep one from being referred to as what we desire to be.

The artists in the exhibition address who they are, within and against the narrow confines of identity; how intersectionality can open new paths of thinking of the self, complicating and contradicting identity as something fixable into language.

The exhibition features work by Laylah Ali, Sofía Córdova, Nicki Green, Lauren Halsey, Masami Kubo, and Zanele Muholi.

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Opening: September 14, 6–8pm

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