Exhibition explores the civil rights movement, gun violence, and hip hop culture
Announcement
Boston, MA —
Emerson Contemporary proudly presents “Louis Cameron: Now is the Time,” featuring billboards, posters and text-based works that explore the civil rights movement, gun violence, and hip hop culture. It is underway, on view through December 14, 2024 at Emerson College’s Media Art Gallery in the heart of downtown Boston.
The free exhibition features several large-scale, wall-mounted vinyl text pieces from the ongoing Hip Hop Onomatopoeia series, a body of work that explores the conversation on gun violence within hip hop music. The works are text-based, using the onomatopoeia of gun shots in hip hop songs as their reference. Cameron focuses on onomatopoeia because of its emotional resonance. Additional works from the Excavation and Displacement series are also on view.
Exclusively for this exhibition, Cameron designed a limited-edition take home poster titled I Got To Have It, serving as a monument to hip hop culture and Black music in Boston. It features a poem that peels back the layers of a song to reveal its connections to the history of Black music. Indicative of hip hop’s sampling culture, the poem is composed of a source song and the song titles that it sampled from.
Notably, these sampled songs touch on key points in the lineage of Black music such as James Brown, the Blues, and spirituals. The poster addresses urban realities and gun violence, the self-determination of the Black Power Movement of the late 1960s, and features the title of a song that refers to the African American spirituals such as Wade in the Water. The choice of typeface provides a reference to hip hop culture for the presentation of the poem.
Additionally, Cameron presents the “I AM… Portfolio” a group of posters addressing the recent violence against Black men and disregard for their lives in America. The title refers to rally calls and protest chants from the 1960s to the present. While violence against Black people is center stage in the current American cultural conversation, presenting a project by Black male artists – including Sanford Biggers, Rashid Johnson, and Shaun Leonardo, among others – offers valuable insights and counter representation.
About the Artist
Louis Cameron is an American artist that lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He earned a BFA from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and an MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia. Cameron's conceptual approach to art making ranges from text-based works to painting and photography that addresses the city environment. Additionally, Cameron has collaborated with other artists by organizing poster portfolios.
Cameron has had solo exhibitions and projects at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; The Kitchen, New York; The Armory Show, New York; and the Saint Louis Art Museum. He has also participated in group exhibitions in the United States and abroad at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; the Contemporary Art Museum Houston; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom; and the Dakar Biennial, Senegal. Cameron has participated in the Artist-in-Residence program at The Studio Museum in Harlem and been a Fellow in Painting with the New York Foundation for the Arts. His work is in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; the International Center of Photography, New York; and the Saint Louis Art Museum.
Thumbnail Image Caption: Gallery Rendering, I Am portfolio, posters, n.d.
About Emerson Contemporary
Emerson Contemporary is the College’s platform for showcasing contemporary visual art. It is focused on presenting living artists, their ideas, experiments and creative practices in the areas of media art, performance art and emergent technologies, while critically examining these works in their social context.
About the College
Based in Boston, Massachusetts, opposite the historic Boston Common and in the heart of the city’s Theatre District, Emerson College educates individuals who will solve problems and change the world through engaged leadership in communication and the arts, a mission informed by liberal learning. The College has approximately 4,161 undergraduates and 554 graduate students from across the United States and nearly 70 countries. Supported by state-of-the-art facilities and a renowned faculty, students participate in more than 90 student organizations and performance groups. Emerson is known for its experiential learning programs at Emerson Los Angeles, located in Hollywood, and at its 14th-century castle, in the Netherlands. Additionally, there are opportunities to study in Washington, DC, London, China, the Czech Republic, Spain, Austria, Greece, France, Ireland, Mexico, Cuba, England, and South Africa. The College has an active network of 51,000+ alumni who hold leadership positions in communication and the arts. For more information, visit emerson.edu.
For more information contact
Michelle Gaseau