Pace Live

Desire Paths

An Evening with RaMell Ross & Andrea Douglas

Thursday, Feb 23
6:30 – 9 PM EST
Doors Open: 6 PM EST
540 West 25th Street
New York

Event Details:

Desire Paths
An Evening with RaMell Ross & Andrea Douglas
Thursday, Feb 23
6:30 – 9 PM
Doors Open: 6 PM EST
540 West 25th Street
New York

How to Attend:

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Connect:

(opens in a new window) @ramellross
(opens in a new window) @pacegallery

Pace Live is pleased to present Desire Paths: An Evening with RaMell Ross & Andrea Douglas, a program complementing the ongoing exhibition of work by RaMell Ross—an interdisciplinary artist, photographer, and Academy Award-nominated filmmaker—and the late photographer, painter, and sculptor William Christenberry at the gallery’s 510 West 25th Street space in New York.

Taking place on February 23 on the seventh floor of Pace’s 540 West 25th Street gallery from 6:30 – 9 PM, the evening will begin with a screening of Ross’s critically acclaimed 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which chronicles the everyday lives of Black Americans in Hale County, Alabama. The presentation of Ross’s film will be followed by a live conversation between Ross and Dr. Andrea Douglas, Executive-Director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center and former Curator of Collections and Exhibitions Curator of Contemporary Art at the University of Virginia Art Museum.

Reflecting distinct artistic visions and historical contexts, the works of Christenberry and Ross employ radically different modes of engagement to create a portrait of a common place: Hale County, Alabama. Ross’s photographs serve as lush, tender portraits of Black life in the American South, while Christenberry’s images present intimate meditations on place, memory, and time.

Ross began his photography practice while employed as a social worker in Hale County. His work has been deeply influenced by that of Christenberry, whose childhood in Hale County and encounters with the Ku Klux Klan had a profound impact on his practice. Exhibited in dialogue with one another, the artists’ works grapple with the beauty of everyday life over and against the legacy of white supremacist terrorism that has shaped the history of both Hale County and the United States itself.

Please join us as we engage the works of Christenberry and Ross to consider the ways in which memory, time, and history inform our notions of place, and discuss the significance of the interiority of Black life.

RaMell Ross

RaMell Ross is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, writer, and liberated documentarian. His work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in 2021/22. He has also been featured in exhibitions worldwide at institutions including Aperture, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Georgia Museum of Art, Athens; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; International Center for Photography, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Jules Collins Smith Museum, Auburn; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. He was awarded an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, was a 2020 USA Artist Fellow and a 2022 Solomon Fellow at Harvard University. His feature experimental documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening won a Special Jury Award for Creative Vision at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and 2020 Peabody Award. It was nominated for an Oscar at the 91st Academy Awards and an Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Film. RaMell holds degrees in Sociology and English from Georgetown University and is an associate professor in Brown University’s Visual Art Department.

Andrea Douglas

Dr. Andrea Douglas, holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from the University of Virginia and an M.B.A. in arts management and finance from Binghamton University, NY. Douglas has taught graduate and undergraduate classes in African American, contemporary, and art theory, and has published exhibition catalogues and scholarly articles. From 2004 -2010 she was Curator of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of Contemporary Art at the University of Virginia Art Museum.

Douglas was recently appointed to the Governor’s Commission to Study Slavery and Subsequent De Jure and De Facto Racial and Economic Discrimination. She is also the co-chair of the President’s Commission on the Age of Segregation at the University of Virginia and sits on Monticello’s Advisory Committee on African American Affairs as well as the state’s History of Lynching in Virginia Working Group. She has served on the City of Charlottesville Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Monuments and Public Spaces, the University of Virginia’s President’s Commission on Slavery at the University and was chair of the city’s PLACE Design Task Force.