The Taubman Museum of Art presents Reclamation! Pan-African Works from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection.  The exhibition charts a dynamic conversation between collector, artist, and viewer.

Featuring nearly 100 works of modern and contemporary art from collector and curator Beth Rudin DeWoody, the exhibition explores recovery, redress, return, belonging, and the experience of being human in a changing world. The 85 artists in Reclamation! invite us to explore the impacts of transnationalism, migration, and globalization. The collected works encourage a reconsideration of who can narrate universal experience, and allows us to witness the evolution of artists as they engage difference, power, and concepts of the self.

This exhibition revels in the opportunity to see anew and to consider what ideas, challenges, and insights are gained by attending to the multiple ways artists engage the world around them. Artists from the African diaspora have long been engaged in conversations that are now at the heart of contemporary art production: Who belongs? What is transnationalism? What is identity in an age of fracture and conflict? How does nostalgia and longing influence how we experience the world? What does it mean to see oneself or to see others? Who do we label as “the other”? How might we come to see the world differently? The artists collected in Reclamation! have created significant work that investigates both personal and collective histories of connection, return, migration, loss, change, and identity. The works are vigorous and intriguing, and in many cases are profoundly linked to the artist’s understandings of gender, race, nation, and class

The exhibiting artists create work that investigates the universal conversation of migration, history, race and representation in art being made today. The exhibition captures the personal stories and collective histories of artists reflected through installations, videos, paintings and sculptures.

Drawn from DeWoody’s significant contemporary African diaspora collection, it features world renowned artists such as Willie Cole, Hank Willis Thomas, Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, Romare Bearden, Samson Kambalu, Kehinde Wiley, Zanele Muholi, Sanford Biggers, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA) among others working in a broad reach of media and conceptual approaches.

Reclamation! Pan-African Works from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection is co-curated by Laura Dvorkin of the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection and the Taubman Museum of Art. The exhibition is on view from March 3 – September 2, 2018 in the Medical Facilities of America Gallery and the Temporary Exhibition Gallery.

Reclamation! Pan-African Works from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection is presented by The Secular Society, with education programming support provided by Virginia Humanities.

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About the collector: Beth Rudin DeWoody, art collector and curator, resides between Los Angeles, New York City, and West Palm Beach. She is President of The Rudin Family Foundations and Executive Vice President of Rudin Management. Her Board affiliations include the Whitney Museum of American Art, Hammer Museum, The New School, The Glass House, Empowers Africa, New Yorkers for Children, and The New York City Police Foundation. She is an Honorary Trustee at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and on the Photography Steering Committee at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach.

In December 2017, DeWoody opened a private art space in West Palm Beach, which presents viewable storage of her collection, as well as exhibitions. The space also holds private tours and events.

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Taubman Museum of Art
110 Salem Avenue SE
Roanoke, VA 24011

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www.taubmanmuseum.org