About this Event
Please join DC-based artist Adele Kenworthy and Rising Organizers, a community organizing nonprofit, for the opening program of to carry within us an orchard, a solo two-week exhibition by Kenworthy. This exhibition is presented as part of E19: Artistic Interventions, Transformer's 19th annual Exercises for Emerging Artists program.
Asian American women and femme artists and care workers based in the DC metro area are invited to join socially engaged artist organizer Adele Kenworthy and community organizing nonprofit Rising Organizers to participate in their first collaborative art+community organizing workshop at Transformer.
Participants will gather to cut fruit for one another, and also learn the basics of organizing, building community power and creating a movement.
"Be with us as we explore and experiment how to practice a future we want to live and what it means to gather, rest, and to organize with cut fruit and community." – Adele Kenworthy
About the exhibition:
what is the first taste you can remember?
to carry within us an orchard, a line from Li Young Lee’s From Blossoms, is a poem that celebrates community at every point of connection. As a first generation American with immigrant parents – in all the language and cultural divides that separated us – this exhibition explores the embodied gestures and rituals of care that fill the silences between us. In this space of transnational cultural memory, as a femme presenting Asian American, Kenworthy brings cut fruit to Transformer as an intervention in this country’s landscape of care as a commodity.
to carry within us an orchard explores the act of cutting fruit existing as a space of both joy and labor. Tending to the idea of community as emerging, Kenworthy will be at the gallery between 2-5PM each day to cut fruit for passersby, especially for those who choose to rest on the bench in the front window.
About the artist:
Adele Kenworthy (she/they) is a socially engaged artist organizer who creates botanical interventions in public spaces. They explore how flowers have dyed, draped, and nourished social movements and daily reimagine what it means for socially engaged art to exist as an embodied practice of care. They were selected to be among WomenPhotograph’s first BIPOC visual storytellers open call in 2021. They have recently exhibited work for The Fearless Artist Popup Gallery at Art Basel Miami (2021), TREEHOUSE at Brentwood Arts Exchange (2022), and their solo thesis show Lacuna Blossoms at Gallery 102 of George Washington University (2022).
They were the Spring 2022 artist-organizer in residence at the Washington Project for the Arts and participated in their 41st annual benefit auction Your Presence is the Best Art (2022). They recently earned their MFA in Social Practice Art from the Corcoran School of Art and Design. This summer they will be supporting Monument Lab and their newly launched Re:Generation program – a nationwide participatory public art and history project. Her art practice and community is located on the traditional lands of the Piscataway and Nacotchtank (Anacostan) people, also referred to as Washington, D.C.
To learn more about Rising Organizers, please visit: https://www.risingorganizers.org/aboutus
To learn more about E19: Artistic Interventions, please visit: https://www.transformerdc.org/e19
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Transformer, 1404 P St NW, Washington, United States
USD 0.00