University of Pennsylvania Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) and BlackStar Projects in attendance Terence Nance: Swarm, the first solo museum exhibition dedicated to the artist’s innovative and genre-defying practice. Organized by Maori Karmael Holmes, Swarm highlights Nance’s experimentation with film, television, sound and performance through the presentation of six large-scale multi-channel videos and installations that he has reimagined specifically for the exhibition.
As a filmmaker, writer, actor and musician, Nance brings an interdisciplinary approach to his practice, offering unexpected and alternative avenues to create work that layers video, sound, print and live performance in contemporary environments. . He first gained national recognition for his semi-animated feature film, An oversimplification of its beautyat the Sundance Film Festival in 2012. He debuted with another seminal work, Random acts of theftat the BlackStar Film Festival in 2018. Now a Peabody Award-winning HBO series, the show examines contemporary black life in America and returned for a second season last December.
Nance draws much of his influence from the communities in which he creates work, including his hometown of Dallas; his current home, Baltimore; and Brooklyn. His career emerged in the wake of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s; his enduring creative lineage and kinship is revealed in his work, which imagines a future that incorporates the needs, desires and minds of black people. The title of the exhibition, Swarmrefers to a Brooklyn-based group of artists with whom he built a community in the early to mid-2000s.
Terrence Nance: Swarm is visible until July 9. The exhibition and related programs held at ICA are free and open to the public.
For more information, visit icaphila.org.
Terence Nance: Swarm is organized by Maori Karmael Holmes and co-organized and presented by BlackStar Projects and the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Major support for the exhibit was provided by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. This project is also generously supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support was provided by Danielle Anderman, Dorothy and Martin Bandier, Stacey and Benjamin Frost, Christina Weiss Lurie, Lori and John Reinsberg, and Stephanie and David Simon.
