The Chautauqua Institution

On View: June 26, 2022 - August 07, 2022

This exhibition drew inspiration from the aphorism “All that Glitters is not Gold” and featured artworks that use glitter and gold embellishments to question notions of value. Photographic works from Mikael Owunna’s Infinite Essence series were placed on display here, in addition to the film he co-directed with Marques Redd, Obi Mbu (The Primordial House), which illuminates the Black body as the cosmos. By summoning ancestral narratives into the gallery space, Owunna and Redd called for the revival of traditional African knowledge systems and provided a vibrational recalibration of Black spiritual and artistic production in the early 21st century.