Ochi Gallery, 680 North Avenue NE, Atlanta // September 30, 2024 – October 06, 2024
First things first, we want to send our thoughts to the south that faced the massive Hurricane Helene, and we hope that Atlanta Art Week can still be celebrated properly. The highlight of the week will be Los Angeles-based and Juxtapoz favorite Hana Ward’s new body of work, Cowpea Consciousness, showing in a pop-up with OCHI in the third edition of Atlanta Art Wee, taking place at 680 North Avenue NE in Atlanta, GA from September 30 through October 6, 2024.
“This body of work includes figures who have what I’m calling a cowpea consciousness: they see themselves as abundant, connected to the land, and harness their collaborative power to enrich their lives,” Ward says. “As a backdrop to this work, I look to particular moments in history when this kind of consciousness was viewed as threatening and therefore was intentionally undermined, namely, the origins of sharecropping as well as the ‘whitelashing’ against Black wealth and collectivism that occurred in the early 1900s.”
Aligned with two concurrent group exhibitions in Southern California, Against Monoculture at the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum in Long Beach and World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project, an official exhibition within the Getty Research Institute’s Pacific Standard Time initiative, to take place at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, Ward’s participation in Atlanta Art Week aims to engage with the historical contexts of Atlanta and its surrounding communities while echoing a growing national discourse.
