Beverly Price and Shaunté Gates
ARtists-in-residence / JaNUARY 17 - MARCH 27, 2023
Duo Beverly Price and Shaunté Gates join The Nicholson Project as our first artists-in-residence for 2023, working on a series of new collaborative mixed-media paintings and video works that reflects and stretch the imagination about the communities in DC that they were raised and still reside, and that are dear to their hearts. Introduced to photography in 2016, Beverly Price witnessed the rapid effects of gentrification around her and felt moved to document its progression so that her fellow DC natives could read a story told by one of their own. But it wasn't until she dreamt of four black boys with royal blue eyes that her documentation grew from pure interest to powerful storytelling. The dream's subjects rose from the grounds of a historic black community in Washington, DC. Price recollects the boys spoke in a sound language, gifting her a camera, and then returning underground. She realized her dream of the "blue-eyed black boys'' was a divine assignment to pick up her camera and visually explore adolescence and the black boy experience in Washington, DC. She uses the camera to highlight the youth's beauty, innocence, dignity, plight against stereotypes, and longing for solutions. Growing up in and around public housing projects during the “war on drugs,” Shaunté Gates witnessed how mythologies produced social constructs, imagination, and how the limits therein inform our reality. Gates produces dreamscape-like compositions rife with cinematic moments of beauty, chaos, and glory depicting the labyrinth of social constructs we are all wading through. He works across mixed media collage and video to subvert landscapes with architecture embedded with cultural symbologies and caste categorizations. Gates’ use of found materials–fabrics, canvas, paper, coins, and photographs–evoke the energy and cultural relevance of the items’ site of origin and the popular culture referenced within these works. Gates refers to these landscapes as “Land of Myth,” and as such denotes, mythologies are layered within the materials. He describes his work as psychogeography, focusing on our psychological experiences of the city and illuminates forgotten, discarded, or marginalized aspects of the urban environment. Friends and family are often the photographed figures transfigured into a half-animal form or other motifs of mythology. They appear concurrently ancient and futuristic, exploring themes of duality, religion, introspection, and escapism. Gates has been commissioned to create many public art works throughout Washington, DC, including Transcending, a painting commemorating the 140th anniversary of Howard University School of Law. His work is included in the Smithsonian Institution’s Men of Change (2019-2022) traveling exhibition, spanning ten museums including California African American Museum, Cincinnati Underground Railroad Museum, and Washington State History Museum. His work in many esteemed private collections, and his work has been acquired by the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Learn more about the work of Beverly Price at www.beverlypricephoto.com and Shaunté Gates at www.shauntegates.com.
Image (L to R): Beverly Price (credit: Leed Oliveira), Shaunté Gates.
Interested in becoming our next artist-in-residence?