The Jacob Lawrence Gallery is excited to announce Seattle-based interdisciplinary artist and writer, Berette S Macaulay as the Guest Curator for the 2024 Jacob Lawrence Legacy Residency.
Established in 2015, the Jacob Lawrence Legacy Residency is a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) funded artist-in-residence winter program that culminates in a Spring solo exhibition. Under the helm of Macaulay, the 2024 iteration of the residency will continue to deepen its focus on community engagement through partnerships with Black organizations offering the resident off-site opportunities for building relationships and expanding cultural and interdisciplinary modes of witnessing a collaborative production beyond the structures of academia. Throughout the duration of the residency, Macaulay will work closely with the Legacy Resident and gallery staff to program and coordinate the residency activities including the exhibition, student engagements, on and off-campus programs, and a publication.
About the Guest Curator
Berette S Macaulay is an interdisciplinary artist and writer with creative and cultural practices in photography, mixed media, curating, and art organizing. She identifies as an Afro-Caribbean Creole woman of multi-im/migrant routes whose heritages guide her deep interests in community and cultural be/longing, the performance and embodiments of identity, trans*national personhood and ghosthood, re/membering love, and the il/legible powers of myth/making. Berette has exhibited and published nationally and internationally, with works acquired by National Gallery of Jamaica and International Center of Photography (as ‘SeBiArt’). She has received grant support and residencies from 4Culture, National Performance Network (NPN), Vermont Studio Center, Jack Straw Cultural Center, CENTRUM, and others. Her photography and writing have been published in academic journals, magazines, and exhibition media, with recent contributions to the O Quilombismo Reader by Archive Books/Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin (2023). Berette organized and curated the MFON in Seattle series of exhibitions and programs (2019/20) featuring Afro-diasporic photographers. She received the UW Ottenberg-Winans Fellowship for African Studies for Embodied Witness - her ongoing research on diasporic Afro-gestural vocabularies. As the inaugural Curatorial Fellow with On the Boards, Berette recently presented a collaborative immersive and site-specific theatre project “UN-[TITLED]”, addressing urban development/displacement histories and community resistance stories in Seattle’s Central and Int’l Chinatown Districts. She is the founder of Black Cinema Collective (BCC) which celebrates African and Afro-Diasporic films, and is a project of her collaborative arts incubator, i•ma•gine | e•volve.
About the Residency
Established in 2015, the Jacob Lawrence Legacy Residency invites Black artists at all stages of their careers to have a residency during February to develop new work and an exhibition during the month of March. Previous Jacob Lawrence Legacy Residency awardees are HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, Steffani Jemison, C. Davida Ingram, Danny Giles, Marisa Williamson, and Ariel René Jackson. Residents work closely with students, faculty, interns, the Director of the Gallery, and community partners to narrow the gap between practice, presentation, pedagogy, and reception. As such, the Jacob Lawrence Legacy Residency has become the signature program honoring Jacob Lawrence and further advancing the gallery’s mission.