About Allison Janae Hamilton
Allison Janae Hamilton is a renowned visual artist who works with sculpture, installation, photography, and video. Her immersive installations and mythic landscapes draw from family narratives, epic folklore, vernacular architecture, hoodoo, and Black Nature writing with an eye towards the social and political concerns of the changing Southern landscape. Hamilton, who grew up across Florida, Kentucky, and western Tennessee, treats the land as an active voice—one that contains beauty and mystery, yet always teeters on the edge of disaster. Fantasy and imminent danger commingle in Hamilton’s work. She is just as interested in the otherworldly as the very real historical and contemporary consequences of land loss and climate change for Southern African American communities. Hamilton’s complex, haunting video and photography is installed alongside sculpture and installation composed of plant matter, taxidermy, and other ephemera. She composes a rich, colorful atmosphere of rural drama and tension that plays out between a magical, effusive Southern landscape and the pain of ecological disaster.
Recent solo exhibitions include Pitch (2018) at MASS MoCA, Passage at Atlanta Contemporary (2018) and Foresta (2017) at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Her work has also been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; MoMA PS1, New York, NY; Storm King Art Center, Hudson Valley, NY; the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; and the Jewish Museum, New York. She is also the recipient of the Creative Capital Award and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant. Hamilton is represented by Marianne Boesky Gallery and will open a solo exhibition in their New York gallery during the spring of 2021.
Photo by Madeleine Hunt