The Bridge announces a new exhibition, Miscegenation by LaRissa Rogers, set to open in the community art gallery on March 5.
The exhibition will conclude with a performance piece titled My Body Is the Architecture of My Every Ancestor, on March 26 at 7 p.m.
“Miscegenation applies identity politics to interrogate narratives of cultural hybridity, further complicating ideas associated with the capaciousness of blackness,” Rogers said. “Through creating tension between material, image, and text I explore the cultural construction of identity, particularly that of black female subjectivity, as shaped by the experience of diaspora. Using multiple materials to reproduce the same object, notions of authenticity question the mixed-raced body as counterfeit. Originally stemming from the Latasha Harlins murder that began the 1992 L.A. riots, oranges become a metaphor for the multilayered erasure of black women throughout time and space. Occasionally stand-ins for my body, oranges are subjected to passive and aggressive forms of violence further implicating the audience, and other times they are used as a method of self-preservation, healing and care.
Rogers is an interdisciplinary artist born in Charlottesville. She holds a BFA in painting and printmaking and BIS in international fashion buying from Virginia Commonwealth University. She has exhibited work in institutions such as Fields Projects in New York, ICOSA in Austin, Welcome Gallery in Charlottesville, Target Gallery in Alexandria, 1708 Gallery in Richmond, Art 29 in Doha Qatar, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Virginia Beach.
In 2019 she was selected as the Summer Studio Program Fellow at Virginia Commonwealth University, and the Graduate Opportunity Fellow by the University of California Los Angeles in 2020. She is the 2021 Sutton-Wallace Family Fellow at New City Arts and is currently pursuing her MFA in new genres at the University of California Los Angeles.
The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative is a cultural hub for Charlottesville offering an inclusive space for creative thinking and artistic pursuits while providing resources and methodology for meaningful arts engagement throughout the community.
More information can be found at thebridgepai.org.
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