Cosmologies, the exhibit and the catalogue to make it eternal

Join us online October 20th 2021 at 7pm for a special event featuring artist Mikael Owunna, gallery owner Brian Paul Clamp and designer Caleb Cain Marcus for Cosmologies, the exhibit and the catalogue to make it eternal.

This event is FREE to Griffin Museum members. $10 for Non Members. Interested in Membership and its benefits? See more about what the Griffin offers on our Griffin Members Community.

There will be two parts to this discussion. The first will give insight into Owunna’s first solo show in New York City, the West African Dogon and Igbo cosmologies that animate his work, a glimpse of his debut film, “Obi Mbu (The Primordial House): An Igbo Creation Myth” (co-directed with Marques Redd) and insight into his creative process.

The second part of the discussion will look at the relationship between exhibition and book and the importance of an exhibition catalogue to increase a show’s audience and extend its life after the work has come down. The material, typographic and conceptual choices made in the catalogue that echo Owunna’s work will also be addressed.

About the Panel –

Mikael Owunna is a queer Nigerian-Swedish American photographer and engineer based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Exploring the intersections of visual media with engineering, optics, Blackness, and African cosmologies, his work seeks to elucidate an emancipatory vision of possibility that pushes Black people beyond all boundaries, restrictions, and frontiers.

Owunna’s work has been exhibited across Asia, Europe, and North America and been collected by institutions such as the Nasher Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Equal Justice Initiative; Duke University Pratt School of Engineering; and National Taiwan Museum. His work has also been featured in media ranging from the New York Times to CNN, NPR, VICE, and The Guardian. He has lectured at venues including Harvard Law School, World Press Photo (Netherlands), Tate Modern (UK), and TEDx. Owunna’s first published monograph, Limitless Africans, was released in 2019 by FotoEvidence and he was awarded as a finalist for the FotoEvidence Book Award with World Press Photo.

Brian Paul Clamp is the owner and director of ClampArt, a gallery in Chelsea in New York City specializing in modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on photography. ClampArt mounts ten to fifteen exhibitions per year featuring the work of emerging and mid-career artists. Mr. Clamp opened the gallery in 2000 after completing a Master of Arts degree in Critical Studies in Modern Art at Columbia University. For eight years prior to that Clamp served as the director of a gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side specializing in late 19th- and early 20th-century American paintings. Aside from exhibitions at his own gallery space, Clamp has curated numerous photography shows at various venues throughout the United States. Clamp is the author of many publications on American art to date, and also occasionally contributes written work to various art periodicals.

Caleb Cain Marcus is the creative director of Luminosity Lab, the Brooklyn based design studio where he will design about a dozen books in 2021. He collaborates with individuals, big and small business. He brings his distinct experience and knowledge of poetry and photography (with works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Getty Museum) and compacts it into his design philosophy to make work that is idea driven, experiential and materially distinct.