via Daniel Alexander Jones - Altar No.3: I Choose To Remember Us Whole
Henry Art Gallery, Lobby, April 29, 2023 — August 06, 2023
This project is co-presented by Meany Center for the Performing Arts and the Henry Art Gallery as part of Becoming: At Home in the World, a curated series of events produced in partnership with Bill T. Jones and New York Live Arts.
Henry Art Gallery, Lobby, April 29, 2023 — August 06, 2023
This project is co-presented by Meany Center for the Performing Arts and the Henry Art Gallery as part of Becoming: At Home in the World, a curated series of events produced in partnership with Bill T. Jones and New York Live Arts.
In 1864, Asa Mercer set out to New England to court well-educated white women to move out to the Pacific Northwest, citing concerns of prosperity, as frontier Seattle did not have enough women suitable to become wives of the pioneers. These women were referred to as the original “Mercer Girls”. The “Mercer girls” and local indigenous women gave birth to new lives and generations of families. They exercised their agency (or the lack thereof) differently, but the outcomes converged: in a time that was called “future” back then, the “now” we live in today. Now, facing polarizing politics, policing of bodies, as well as changing climates, we humans, collectively, might want to consider the future we would like to voluntarily give birth to and tenderly cultivate, both physically and conceptually, here and now.
Chestful of Whisper reinvigorates one of the Mercer Girl’s luggage chest by filling it with audio “whispers” of plant seeds – who each has its own migration and belonging story in relation to North America. Participants are invited to listen to a whisper of a seed and let it inspire a future seed that they will plant, or physically / metaphorically give birth to.
