ATLANTA, GA.- The High Museum of Art has commissioned its first choreographer as artist in residence, glo founder Lauri Stallings, to create “Supple Means of Connection,” a new suite of live art designed for the Museum’s galleries. Stallings’ site-based work will inhabit the Cousins galleries from Aug. 3 through Sept. 8 during regular museum hours.
A Rome Prize nominee and Creative Time artist, Stallings creates works of very diverse context, scale and textures. “Supple Means of Connection” will be both a gallery installation and a public artwork exploring themes of family, falling and maps with respect to women’s roles. Interrogating the infinite challenges of human co-existence—as well as the blurred lines between the fragility of the human body and the fragility of nature—Stallings mixes forms that defy the boundaries of genre and offers choreography as an invitation to collective action. The choreography will activate the Cousins galleries on the second level of the High’s Wieland Pavilion—relating and co-existing with installed neon art, text and mixed-media sculpture “trees”—and migrate to and from the galleries through other rarely habited spaces around the interior and exterior of the Museum. The shifting locations will ask the public to discover, lean under, peak through and part ways with traditional ways to view art, offering an alternative spatial experience of the Museum.
“Though we’ve worked with glo many times over the years, this partnership is uncharted, and very exciting, territory for us,” said Rand Suffolk, Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr., director of the High. “This is the first time we’ve invited a choreographer and performance group to be in residence at the Museum and to use our Cousins exhibition galleries as their stage. We hope our visitors will enjoy embarking on this journey with us and experiencing our spaces in a whole new way. We can’t wait to see how the project unfolds.”
Since 2014, Stallings has worked with a core group of female moving artists from diverse backgrounds to construct her durational, live-art activations. For “Supple Means of Connection,” glo moving artists will be joined by an intergenerational and interracial group of local women and children, ages 9 to 90. Stallings will not appear in the work herself but will be conducting the live interventions. Along with glo’s migrating choreographies and movement choirs, the schedule of happenings includes: movement workshops twice a week in the Museum (open to all), “People Parades” exploring the High’s grassy campus and the songs and calls of birds on terraces and at entrances, post-activation artist conversations, and a ceremonial duet for two glo moving artists down the Robinson Atrium ramp on Friday evenings.
“I am honored they trust me to do something. They are taking a risk; I think it’s good for museums to take risks, and I am humbled that this practice, which is so fragile in nature, has been recognized,” says Stallings.
A first edition pocket glo map and dictionary by Dr. Paul Boshears and Candice Thompson will accompany the project.
With modest economies, Lauri Stallings creates works of very diverse context, scale and textures, oriented toward the question of instinct. Her works inhabit spaces that have been surveyed by choreography, place keeping and social practice, where she deploys her migrations. A Rome Prize nominee, recipient of the 2018 Hudgens prize and inaugural FLUX Artist, as well as being recognized as a Bogliasco Fellow, Artadia, and Creative Time artist, Stallings has consistently centered her work on the revitalization of the American South, creating temporary hubs and migrations for challenged minorities in remote areas. The work serves as a catalyst for discussions on equity, race, history, and who gets to dance, while researching choreography as a toolbox devised to bring together things that normally would never meet. Along with her peers, Stallings is always trying to carve out space somewhere between live art and social activism.
