Lauren Kelley: Location Scouting: Lauren Kelley, Jennifer Levonian, Margarita Cabrera, and Autumn Knight, Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, October 16, 2021–September 23, 2023

Conceived and designed for conversation, dialogue, study, and contemplation, Location Scouting is the fourth exhibition in a series that invites an artist to re-imagine what a community space in the museum can be. Artist and curator Lauren Kelley reshapes the Tang Teaching Museum’s mezzanine by combining meditations on travel with snapshots of everyday life in her drawings, sculpture, and stop-motion animation videos. Using plasticine, toys, and souvenirs, Kelley’s videos conjure worlds that are malleable and unfixed, inhabited by robust protagonists whose quirks stem from efforts to correct the asymmetrical relationships they encounter. Accentuating the off-kilter, Location Scoutingspeaks to the shifts and rifts inherent in navigating today’s post-pandemic landscape.

The installation is also the setting for a series of transformations over time, created in collaboration with sculptor Margarita Cabrera, animator Jennifer Levonian, and performance artist Autumn Knight. Each guest artist’s interest in place, narrative, and audience will inform the direction of a new stop-motion animation produced collaboratively by Kelley and Skidmore College students to be screened during the last months of the show.

Lauren Kelley was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1975 and lives and works in Harlem, New York. She has a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been shown at the Studio Museum in Harlem; The Kitchen, New York; The New Museum; and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; among others. She is the recipient of a Creative Capital Award and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and in 2020 her work was supported by a grant from the Joseph Robert Foundation. From 2017 to 2020 she served as Director and Chief Curator of the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling in New York.

Installation views: Lauren Kelly: Location Scouting, Tang Teaching Museum, on view October 16, 2021–September 23, 2023.