David Adjaye and Rick Lowe, moderated by Thelma Golden c/o Gagosian

Overview:

Tune in for a conversation between Sir David Adjaye and Rick Lowe, moderated by Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, on the occasion of “Social Works” at Gagosian, New York.

Highlights:

On process:

“These paintings come out of, most of my work started, I was trained as a painter early on and got away from it for many years and came back to it through this very odd way of just playing dominoes and watching the patterns of what happens when you play a game of dominoes. And I started to draw them and you know game after game and you layer them and then all of a sudden they start to looking like maps. And then when you draw them out and cut them up they start looking some kind of language. And so these paintings are basically collaged from drawings of games that I’ve produced in the studio. And then just go back I cut them up and start organizing them and making the forms.” —Rick Lowe

On Black space as Earthworks:

“I’ve become especially in this last sorta 5 years very interested in our relationship to the earth. Of course there are issues to due with the climate emergency and sustainability but it’s not really that. I think it’s much more anthropological and biographical in a way and it’s really a kind of return for me to really think about the architecture of the continent really and this idea of this kind of extraordinarily monolithic architecture that really just came from the earth. It was about raising the earth and one that created a sort of symbiotic relationship with earth matter, and then with plant life, the biophilic life. And somehow that has always been Black life. It’s always been Black life. You know the roots of all of our ancestors, the one thing they can commonly touch, until the industrial revolution and colonial products, we lived with the earth.” -David Adjaye

On the National Museum of African American History and Culture in DC:

“The brief was to make a museum but in mind it was to create a trigger-memory to pull you back into a deeper history. And to really create a sort of space that would honor the ancestors as well and future generations at the same time. So it’s a memorial into the future and a memorial of the past at the same time.” —David Adjaye

“So in a way at the same time, the making of the memorial is at the same time as the making of the archive. At the same time for me. So the 3 are sort of the games of this move. The practice isn’t simply just practice, it’s those 3 things at the same time. Memory. Memory operating even as fiction. I’m totally fine with Black fantasy, in fact it’s the most fabulous. It’s so profoundly fabulous, the memory is about that since there’s not much so fantasy is operative, but memory as also a dive into history. Then memorial as a kind of entropy within this moment now. And archive as a projection of the future.” —David Adjaye