Cedric Harper, Untitled, 2022.Cedric Harper, Untitled, 2022.Cedric Harper: ANCESTRAL LANGUAGE is the seventh exhibition in the 1:1 Exhibition Series presented in the Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts. Each exhibition in this series presents a collaborative project between one curator and one artist, and either introduces a new artist or highlights a new aspect of a more experienced artist.
In ANCESTRAL LANGUAGE, curated by Carol Moses, Boston poet-artist Cedric Harper, creates an immersive environment that takes the form of a forest of vertical artworks. He shapes artworks with influences from varied cultures, borrowing from global gestural languages. Employing both text and symbolism, Harper contemplates love, loss, style, queerness and perseverance.
Drawing on his personal experience as a Black gay man, and rooted in his long exploration of found materials and world languages, Harper’s work is sensitive to what he experiences as the ruinous path of the world in material consumption and environmental devastation. In sculptural as well as two-dimensional works, he innovates in the scrambling of language: the scripts and organic patterns look ancient but are very new, timeless in their recurrence through human history, as they are derived from nature.
To the artist, the relation between art and life is growth —
“When you observe life and live life, the better your art becomes, one uplifting the other.”
— Cedric Harper
Cedric Harper, Untitled, 2021.
Cedric Harper, Untitled, 2022.
Cedric Harper, Untitled, 2019.
PUBLIC PROGRAMS
Public Reception & Curatorial Walkthrough
Thursday, March 16, 2023 | 6–9pm
During the public reception for Cedric Harper: ANCESTRAL LANGUAGE, visitors will also be able to visit Project Room No. 4: Chick Byrne the fourth of the new Mills Gallery Project Room Exhibition Series.
We hope you’ll take the opportunity to see new work from our Studio Residency Artists as well, the BCA Artist Studios Building will be open from 5:30–8pm. Explore the four floors next door and visit some BCA studio residents in their studios. And since there has been some buzz about BCA’s newest space for movement artists, we also invite you to come see Studio 414 and chat with Andrea Blesso, Director of Dance & Interdisciplinary Arts at BCA!
CREATING FROM THE UNWANTED: Artists in Conversation About Working with Discarded Materials
Thursday, March 30, 2023 | 6–7:30pm
Cedric Harper and four artist friends, all members of the i3C (inspiring Change for the Climate Crisis) Artists group (i3Cartists.com), explore their artistic use of materials that have been thrown away. Hear from this group of painters, sculptors, and textile artists in conversation about their paths, motivations, and processes in making artwork from discarded, unwanted materials. Please RSVP.
With: Cedric Harper, Michelle Lougee, Jeffrey Nowlin, Adriana Prat, and Rebecca McGee Tuck.
ABOUT
About the Artist
Cedric Harper: “My creative work comes from manipulation of language symbols and dreams whether that transforms itself into tables, sculpture, totems, or panels as it’s form.
All pieces start from recycled materials. Items that have been disregarded rejected or tossed out as trash. The subject is usually determined by the recycled materials as to what it will become, a table, a totem, a sculpture. Those materials are cleaned, repaired, re-imagined, and become what I see in them.”
Harper’s work is featured in Cedric Harper: ANCESTRAL LANGUAGE the seventh exhibition in the 1:1 Exhibition Series presented in the Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts. Each exhibition in this series presents a collaborative project between one curator and one artist, and either introduces a new artist or highlights a new aspect of a more experienced artist.
About the Curator
Carol Moses is an artist living in Cambridge, MA, who creates non-representational tableaus, employing grids, patterns, repeated linear elements, and biomorphic forms, in a distinctive visual vocabulary. Discrete styles namely calligraphic, gestural, and geometric appear throughout her omnivorous practice that moves between drawing, painting, printmaking and photography. Her artistic work creates balance, moving through color and form to create a visual neologism all her own. In childhood, Moses gravitated towards logic, math, and science, absorbing the nuance and minutiae of patterns in the natural world. Study in cultural anthropology and linguistics also tacitly influenced her sui generis painting and photography.
In her broader art life, Moses concerns herself equally with making and showing her work, and with promoting work of colleagues she admires, and causes she espouses. To these ends, she founded a gallery program in 2009 in a neighborhood community center in Cambridge – head full of visions of bringing artists to light and helping them gain income from selling work. In the end it was more the former, to no one’s surprise but her own. However curatorial experience was gained, and great connections were forged and strengthened.
Currently, Moses has a work studio at Vernon St, and exhibits in Boston at studio 213 at SoWa — 450 Harrison, sharing the space with Cedric Harper and other artists. She participates in international residencies, when circumstances allow, creating fascinating portrait and interview series of expansive demographics. Indefatigable, Moses is hatching new projects and media all the time. Enjoy this impressive curation of Cedric Harper’s rich art brain.
Moses is the curator for Cedric Harper: ANCESTRAL LANGUAGE, the seventh exhibition in the 1:1 Curatorial Initiative series presented in the Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts. Each exhibition in this series presents a collaborative project between one curator and one artist, and either introduces a new artist or highlights a new aspect of a more experienced artist.