Transformative Arts: I Have Paid a Price for My Commitment

I Have Paid a Price for My Commitment, a powerful quote by revolutionary artist Elizabeth Catlett, is now a Transformative Arts exhibition highlighting Catlett's influences on artists who employ visual language as world building praxis. The artists featured in the exhibition are border crossers, disruptors, and practitioners of maternal care and Black and Brown ecologies visualizing a complex yet accessible iconography that prioritizes communities.

Catlett embodied ontological complexities that both forced and enabled her fugitivity. Raised in a Black Radical tradition, she tended to her children, colleagues, students and friends with fierce maternalism, making space with language and meaning and a powerful materiality that held space open for those who believed that art's purpose is a counter-narrative to normativity and institutional harm.

Catlett also was a conduit for women's stories that were tangential to her experiences but were not her own. Artists in this exhibition come from diverse backgrounds, many are immigrants who work with transgressive visual language born from movement to give voice to narratives that need to be removed from the shadows. These artists embrace cultural, ritual, ethereal and aesthetic knowledge that transcend geographies and otherness to unite us in the practice of storytelling as care. The exhibition runs until October 29 with programming to be announced.