Tatyana Fazlalizadeh: Finding Soft Ground comes to the California African American Museum through August 10, 2024.
Tatyana Fazlalizadeh is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice considers Black image making as a site of protest, contestation, affirmation, and possibility. Finding Soft Ground considers the conditions, precarity, and imaginative determination of safety for Black women. Utilizing the three galleries of A+P, Fazlalizadeh transforms each space into distinct installations examining the street, home, and natural world in relation to terror and refuge. The works in Finding Soft Ground—which include wheat-pasted prints, oil paintings, graphite drawings, a single-channel film, and site-specific materials—are rooted in Fazlalizadeh’s Black feminist theory.
Finding Soft Ground is presented in tandem with Speaking to Falling Seeds, the artist’s installation in CAAM’s atrium of monumental portraits of Black Los Angeles women. Both exhibitions draw upon photographs and conversations that took place in the spring of 2023 while Fazlalizadeh was living in Los Angeles. The portraits ask how safety is presumed, built, and felt for the city’s Black residents.
This exhibition is curated by Essence Harden, Visual Arts Curator, CAAM, and is co-presented by CAAM and A+ P, as part of CAAM at A+P, a five-year collaboration.
