Elevate (Freedom is a Place)
Washington, DC - The Nicholson Project
September 17, 2022 - February 29, 2024
Image by Anne Kim, courtesy of The Nicholson Project
A new public artwork by April Banks serving as a pedestal, a functional piece of public art, as stage or seating, for performance or for rest.
Taking inspiration from the stoop, a common architectural feature in Southeast DC and throughout other parts of the City, Elevate is an echo, a re-imagining of tradition. From the side view, it is a line drawing, a ghost structure, a metaphor for weightlessness, a resistance to enclosure. From the front and top views, words and patterns cut into the structure are an archive of collective memory. The base is constructed as a single piece of metal, folding time into place.
During the recent public art and community engagement work that April Banks has been doing around Black erasure, the subject of reparations always comes up. How does making art repair these systematic and institutional removals? Are you really making a difference? Are you being used by organizations who want to appear on the right side of the conversation? These are difficult questions. What Banks does know is that public art is/should be accessible and has the power to provoke ideas, conversations and actions. Public art is a marker, and a reminder, and ideally, a truth teller. With all lof this in mind, Banks has been examining why she does this work and if/how it matters.
Elevate (Freedom is a Place) was presented by The Nicholson Project, curated by Dashboard, and supported by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities through a Public Art Building Communities grant.
About April Banks
Headshot of April Banks c/o City of Santa Monica
In 2021, we had the honor of recognizing April Banks as a 2021 Dr. Doris Derby awardee. Learn more here.
April Banks is an artist, educated as an architect with a creative career that straddles visual art, social practice and exhibition design. Her art practice sits intentionally between image, space, and experiences. April’s recent work time travels through historical archives and memories, questioning what we think we know of the past and how it informs our cultural positioning systems. She is interested in amplifying lesser known stories, challenging the gaze, and giving narrative to the erased and intentionally forgotten.
April is the producer of Tea Afar, a nomadic storytelling experience, launched in 2016. For over a decade she made art that raised awareness and pointed to the global disparity in food security, farmer's rights and fair trade. Tea Afar was conceived as a salve—bringing us together across borders—for the divisiveness and exploitation that is propagated by a global trade economy and discriminatory travel bans.
Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Daytona Beach, New Hampshire, Maryland, New York, Switzerland, Colombia, Brazil, United Arab Emirates, Senegal and Ethiopia. In February 2021 she completed her first permanent public art sculpture A Resurrection in Four Stanzas in Santa Monica, CA. Her work is in the collection of the Getty Museum and other private collections.
April graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture from Hampton University in Virginia in 1996. She obtained a Master of Science in Environmental Design from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1999. She lives in Los Angeles.
About the Nicholson Project
The Nicholson Project is a paid artist residency program and neighborhood garden in a formerly vacant row house in Washington D.C., designed by Dashboard, Align Development, Love & Carrots, and What Works Studio.
Their mission is to support, provide opportunities, engage with, and amplify artists and creatives from their community and the local artist community—particularly artists of color and those from Ward 7 and 8— while engaging their neighbors through community-based programming.
c/o Carnegie Captures
Photos by Anne Kim