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The Johnson Museum actively contributes to the intellectual life of the campus and community, serving as an important educational and cultural resource for Cornell students and faculty as well as residents of the central New York region.
Migrations: A Global Grand Challenge
Funded by a four-year, $5 million–grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative, Cornell University’s Migrations: A Global Grand Challenge project unites scholars across the university and beyond to study the intersections between migration, racism, and dispossession. As a key part of this grant, the Johnson Museum is bringing artists to campus whose research and practice explores issues relating to migration. Four artists have been invited to campus for week-long or multiple stays—to engage with faculty, students, and community members, to explore Cornell’s rich resources for research and inspiration, and to plan for a future project at the Museum or elsewhere on campus.
Guadalupe Maravilla is an acclaimed visual artist, choreographer, and healer based in Brooklyn. He was part of the first wave of unaccompanied, undocumented children to arrive at the United States border in the 1980s as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War and became a US citizen in 2006. Combining pre-colonial Central American ancestry, personal mythology, and collaborative performative acts, Maravilla’s performances, sculptural objects, and drawings trace the history of his own displacement and that of others. Across all media, Maravilla explores how the systemic abuse of immigrants physically manifests in the body, reflecting on his own battle with cancer. His transdisciplinary artistic practice generates powerful symbols of renewal and ultimately nurtures collective narratives of trauma into celebrations of perseverance and humanity. Maravilla has had solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and Museum of Modern Art. Maravilla partnered with the Cornell undergraduate group Anti-Detention Alliance that works with the juvenile detention center in Batavia, New York, in preparation for his 2024 exhibition at the Johnson Museum.
Born in England in 1993, Precious Okoyomon was raised in Nigeria and the United States, and lives in Brooklyn, NY. Okoyomon’s large-scale, immersive artworks explore the entangled fate of humans, plants, and animal species as they migrate around the globe. Approaching artmaking like a poet, Okoyomon mines the metaphorical associations of all manner of found objects and raw materials—from kudzu vine to lambswool—to elicit new reflections upon our complex, interconnected histories. Okomoyon has recently shown their work as part of the 2022 Venice Biennale, in addition to shows at the Aspen Art Museum and Performance Space, New York. Okomoyon was the recipient of the 2021 Frieze Artist Award. Following their visit, Precious will propose an installation in 2024 that explores museum and living collections at Cornell, with key partners in Plant Sciences and Nutritional Science in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
A conceptual photographer, performance artist, and writer, Al-An deSouza was born to South Asian parents in Nairobi, Kenya, and raised in England before settling in the United States. They are a professor in the Department of Art Practice at University of California, Berkeley, and hold an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles and a BFA from Bath Academy of Art, England. DeSouza’s work has been exhibited at the Guangzhou Triennale, 2008, Guangdong Museum, China, and in solo exhibitions at Richmond Art Center, California; Krannert Art Museum, Urbana-Champaign; Montgomery Art Center, Pomona College Museum of Art; and MOAD, Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, among others. DeSouza visited the Johnson Museum multiple times to prepare, install, and share their exhibition curated by Gemma Rodrigues, Al-An deSouza: Elegies of Futures Past.
Shahpour Pouyan was born in Iran in 1979, and now lives and works in Tehran and London. His multidisciplinary work comments on issues of power through the forces of culture and history, influenced by science, archeology, and architectural forms linking past and present. He studied neoplatonic philosophy at the Iranian Institute of Philosophy and received a diploma in math and physics from Elmieh School, Tehran, before earning MFAs from Pratt Institute, New York, and the Tehran University of Art. His work is in many prominent private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Princessehof National Museum of Ceramics, Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, the Abby Weed Grey Collection of Modern Asian and Middle Eastern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Cincinnati Art Museum and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. Pouyan was awarded the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship for Visual Arts in Umbria, Italy, and recently was the Middle East Ceramics Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Kenneth Armitage Fellow in London.
Photo: Anne Katrin Purkiss
