Deana Lawson Planes - Assemblage pieces

In the fall of 2018, I was the Curatorial Intern at the Underground Museum. During that time, my main tasks involved preparing the museum for Deana Lawson’s show Planes. As described by the Underground Museum,

“Every human body carries the memories and marks of its origin story. But bodies are also like vessels that contain all of the knowledge, love, and culture needed to imagine themselves beyond the boundaries of earthly acres, and oceans. Vessels can take many forms: mothers, fathers, brothers, daughters, lovers, kings and queens. Our magnificent bodies can assemble as stars, and also nations. One vessel emerged in Rochester, NY. Her mother worked for over 30 years at Eastman Kodak, the historic photographic film company. Her father was the family documentarian. His photographs inspired her to use the medium for exploring, and imagining, the world.

Her meticulously staged photographs and installations became gathering places for radiant vessels everywhere. Her images proving the beauty and brilliance of their existence. Many of her subjects were strangers she encountered on the street. She put them in familiar domestic spaces, and surrounded them with sentimental artifacts, some of which she collected throughout her own travels, and some that belonged to the vessels themselves. She hoped viewers could see that beyond the surface of her photographs were multi-dimensional planes that connected time and space. Diasporic planes with instructions on how to get to the future.”

Throughout the exhibition, there were assemblage pieces of photographs that Deana had collected, resized, and printed at a Walgreens. Me, and other UM employees, were only given instructions on the general shape of the piece, to not put celebrities more than once, and to not group emotionally intense pictures together. The results were these incredible webs, networks, clouds of visual reference, culture, and history of Blackness globally. It was an intense pleasure to be a part of putting this show together, especially these pieces!