Rome Prize Fellow Karyn Olivier will be inaugurating her latest site-specific installation Because Time in This Place Does Not Obey An Order at Le Murate Progetto Arte Contemporanea in downtown Florence on February 7 at 6:00pm, part of the festivities launching the fourth edition of Black History Month Florence (BHMF)
“The opening talk about the project will provide
students insight into the history of the site and
the interpretation into contemporary language
of themes that grapple with Social Justice
in the past and today and the implications
of vanishing history behind closed doors.”
-- Justin Randolph Thompson, founder of BHMF
Olivier’s exhibition includes a series of site specific installations that grapple with the relationship between justice and spirituality. The works engage the history of the Le Murate site in downtown Florence and its transition from a site of spiritual recluse to a carceral space sifting through the continuity and contrast that these histories evoke. Mental health, social critique, isolation, the closeting of history and the conflation of senses set cloistered gardens in dialogue with the steady words of Martin Luther King Jr. writing from a jail cell and reveal traces of life behind closed doors.
The event will be introduced by Justin Randolph Thompson, NYU Florence; Valentina Gensini, Director of Le Murate PAC, and artist Karyn Olivier.
Check out the full program of Black History Month Florence here
Karyn Olivier received her M.F.A. at Cranbrook Academy of Art and her B.A at Dartmouth College. She has exhibited at the Gwangju and Busan Biennials, World Festival of Black Arts and Culture (Dakar, Senegal), The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Whitney Museum of Art, MoMA P.S.1, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, The Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh), SculptureCenter (NY), Drexel University, the University of the Arts, Ulrich Museum of Art, University of Delaware Museum, among others. In 2017 Olivier installed a large-scale commissioned work for Philadelphia’s Mural Arts program in historic Vernon Park. In 2015 Olivier created public works for Creative Time in Central Park and NYC’s Percent for Art program. She has received the 2018-19 Rome Prize and has been the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, the New York Foundation for the Arts Award, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, the William H. Johnson Prize, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award, a Creative Capital Foundation grant and a Harpo Foundation grant. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, Art in America, Flash Art, Mousse, The Washington Post, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Frieze, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Hyperallergic, among others. Olivier is currently an associate professor and program head of sculpture at Tyler School of Art. Karyn Olivier was born in Trinidad and Tobago.
Mapping Contemporary Florence 