Exhibition At Ramapo College Presents Radcliffe Bailey Installation

(Mahwah) – An installation by Atlanta artist Radcliffe Bailey about his slave ancestors’ arrival in New Jersey will open in the Kresge Gallery at Ramapo College of New Jersey with a reception on Wednesday, April 3 from 5 to 7 p.m. An artist’s talk is scheduled at 6:30 p.m. The exhibit will run through May 3.

Bailey has created a unique installation about spiritual migration that references his own family history in Georgia and New Jersey. Collaborating with students, Bailey transformed the Ramapo College gallery space by painting two of the walls green and building an environment. The installation includes large photographs from family albums and other found sources as well as actual tobacco leaves, glass jugs, preserved insects, text, silk-screened train tracks, and recorded sounds. Wall texts denote places of African Diaspora migration ranging from Richmond, VA to Benin, Nigeria. "His vocabulary," writes Shannon Fitzgerald in the catalog for Bailey’s The Magic City exhibition, "is part fact, part fiction, part nostalgia, and part history – woven together to embrace memory, pay homage, and contemplate cultural identity." The Birmingham Museum has called his installation style "a sophisticated riff on personal history."

Bailey’s work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harvard University, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C, among others. Recent solo exhibitions of his work were held at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City, Fay Gold Gallery in Atlanta, and the David Beitzel Gallery in NYC. Bailey is a painting instructor at the University of Georgia in Athens, GA.

The Kresge Gallery is located in the Berrie Center. For more information, please call Sydney Jenkins, director of the galleries at Ramapo College, (201) 684-7147.