KinoSaito Residency: The Work of Holding | Jessica Caldwell & Sam Vernon

Opening Reception:

Tuesday, February 24, 5–7 PM

Gallery Talk:

Thursday, February 5, 5 PM

The School of Art and the School of Design are pleased to present The Work of Holding, a two-person exhibition of new work by Jessica Caldwell, Visiting Assistant Professor in Interior Design, and Sam Vernon, Assistant Professor in Fine Arts. Guided by the principle of Sankofa—reaching back to move forward—the exhibition treats historical material as living evidence carrying Black knowledge, memory, and survival. At the core of the exhibition, page and thread function as parallel systems of knowledge, holding time as layered and nonlinear.

Caldwell and Vernon participated in the Pratt/KinoSaito Artist-in-Residence Fellowship Program last summer. The works on view were produced during their simultaneous four-week residencies at KinoSaito in Verplanck, New York. Displaying archival images from Hampton and Tuskegee Universities, along with a loom, embroidery, video, and garments, Caldwell reconstructs the architecture of Black textile education and holds space for remembrance and ancestral transmission. Vernon will be presenting three new large-scale works on paper with an accompanying reader. Vernon’s project involves reworking archival imagery from The Black Scholar and other publications—involving collage and text to explore language as visual, sonic, and shaped by inheritance.

This event is open to the public.