Fall 2026
Projects Archive
On view from August 24 to September 30 in DeKalb Gallery, Projects Archive presents a survey of project documentation of community and site-engaged works from over the course of 2026-27 Fine Arts Civic Engagement Fellow Kamau Amu Patton’s career. The projects included in this survey articulate the broad range of work and working practices Patton has deployed over the years. For this exhibition, Patton shares works which consider the methodologies of place, the body, and the built environment. Through these site engagements, Patton’s practice considers history, memory, and the politics of dwelling. What does it mean to live or stay in a particular place? How do sites compel the mind and work on the body? Do sites as temporary architectures have the power to confound enclosure and to unify communities? How do places inform way-of-life practices, rituals of being, empowerment, and remembrance? Through what processes do sites take shape—in the body and in the world? Communities are formed through a network of concerns in relation. To consider place and placemaking is to grapple with form.
Patton’s work is grounded in a consideration of community building as a process of self-determination and resistance. As the work of being present in place requires a physical displacement, his work is an index of the undoing of familiar modes and ways of being. To be present in a new community or context is to trust that the body articulates itself through experience and memory. Patton’s practice considers the community archive as a means of survival, as a mode or orientation, and as a response to the conditions of capture. To dwell is to speak nearby, to reflect, and to consider community values and infrastructure as one collects and shares a vision of community experience.
See the full gallery guide PDF here: