Main Gallery
Art League Houston (ALH) is proud to present Re-Membering is the Responsibility of the Living, a multi-media, performance based site-specific installation by Brooklyn based Artist Taja Lindley.
“As a memory worker, Lindley explores what has been abandoned, erased, silenced or distorted in our individual and collective consciousness. Moved by the non-indictments of the officers responsible for the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in 2014, Lindley developed “This Ain’t A Eulogy: A Ritual for Re-Membering.” This performance based work served as the precursor for “The Bag Lady Manifesta” - an interdisciplinary project that combines ritual, performance, film and installation.
The Bag Lady is a primordial figure who communes with the ancestors and emerges from the rubble of forgotten histories. Through this central figure, Lindley draws parallels between discarded materials and the violent treatment of Black people in the United States. Rooting her creative process in research about Black lives that have been stolen, she transforms what has been considered disposable into something sacred.
Can we grow gardens out of graves? How can we recycle the energy of protest, rage and grief into creating a world where indeed Black Lives Matter? What is the role of memory in our movement building work? And who will be responsible for this labor? These are the questions that haunt the work of visual and performance artist Taja Lindley.”
-Text by Carre Adams and Taja Lindley for Remembering is the Responsibility of the Living exhibition at the George Washington Carver Museum, Austin, Texas, 2019.
ALH extends our gratitude to On Services a GES Company and Valspar Paint for their support of this exhibition.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Taja Lindley is an 80’s baby born in New York and raised in the South who currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, working as the Managing Member of Colored Girls Hustle. In 2007 she received her B.A. from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study where she designed her own major, concentrating in public policy and knowledge production with a focus on health and women of color. Lindley is a memory worker, healer and an activist. Through iterative and interdisciplinary practices, she creates socially engaged artwork that transforms audiences, shifts culture, and moves people to action. She uses movement, text, installation, ritual, burlesque, and multi-media to create immersive works that are concerned with freedom, healing, and pleasure. Her performances, films, and installations have been featured at the Brooklyn Museum; La Mama Theater; New York Live Arts; the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University; the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma; the Carver Museum in Austin, Texas; the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California; and more. She has received coverage in the New York Times, VICE, ELLE, Blouin Art Info, Art Zealous and Artnet News, and ARTSY. Her 2017 residency at Dixon Place Theater culminated in the world premiere of her one-woman show The Bag Lady Manifesta in September 2017. This work is currently on a nationwide tour in the United States.
In addition to being an artist, Lindley is actively engaged in social movements as a writer, consultant, and facilitator. For over a decade she has worked with non-profits, research institutes and government on policies and programming that impact women and girls, communities of color, low/no/fixed-income families, queer people, youth and immigrants. Most recently, she served as a Sexual and Reproductive Justice Consultant at DOHMH, co-facilitating a community-driven process that created The New York City Standards for Respectful Care at Birth. She continues her work at the NYC Health Department as the current Public Artist in Residence, a program of the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs.
Her writing has appeared in Rewire, YES! Magazine, Feministe, Salon and EBONY. She is a member of Harriet's Apothecary and Echoing Ida.
Please click here to visit the artist’s website for more information and updates.