Songs from My Mother’s Sky

January 20 – April 1, 2007

A masterful storyteller and poet, Johnny Coleman creates site-specific multi-sensory environments. This installation is a part of a personal, ongoing series of works in memory of the artist’s mother, Florence McCoy. Following her passing in 2003, Coleman began constructing physical spaces that sought to simultaneously reflect something of her spirit, and to function as a “prayer.” Within each of the prayers, the presence of birds has been central. Coleman writes, “For my mother, and for myself, birds are evocative of a kind of freedom that is chosen and actively pursued. Birds are music. Flight.”

Coleman will transform the Education Gallery into what Coleman describes as sonic narrative.

Johnny Coleman is Associate Professor of Studio Art and African American Studies at Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio.

Join us for a lecture by Johnny Coleman
on Thursday, January 18.