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Torpedo Factory exhibit highlights domestic work and labor of Black women

A new exhibition coming to the Torpedo Factory will spotlight a visual, sound, and interactive expression of the struggles Black women face.

The new exhibit is called We, Too, Sing America by Ọmọlará Williams McCallister.

According to the press release:

Target Gallery, the contemporary exhibition space for Torpedo Factory Art Center, presents its annual competitive solo exhibition, Ọmọlará Williams McCallister: We, Too, Sing AmericaMCCallister (pronouns: O/love/beloved) created a site-specific multisensory exhibition that is a place of community contemplation and healing.

The exhibition opened in late May and is scheduled to run through Sunday, July 18. And virtual reception is scheduled for this Friday, June 11, at 7 p.m.

The exhibit is part of McCallister’s series Domestic Work. According to a press release from the Torpedo Factory, the exhibit “confronts the extraction of emotional labor, caretaking and other domestic work from Black women that is expected, depended upon, normalized and erased in public and private spaces.”

The artwork consists of 1,440 muslin squares hand-embroidered with a description of an everyday act of emotional labor, with squares dyed to read “for you,” “for me,” or “for us.”

According to McCallister:

We, Too, Sing America is a memorial to the small everyday acts we have undertaken to support ourselves and each other as we have collectively moved towards building a better future and weathered the storms of COVID, of white-supremacist anti-Black terror, of the intersecting forms of oppression we face/d these past many months. In this work, I use accumulation and repetition of ritual acts, art objects, images, and sound to explore the relationship of the individual act, individual person, individual moment to the collective, and to collective world building.

Photo via Reese Bland/Torpedo Factory

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