LIVITY

Curation + Creative Direction

A group show curated, conceptualized, and produced by Azariah Jones, featuring work from members of Princeton's Black Arts Collective.

LIVITY promotional logo

Graphics created with Adobe Photoshop and Figma.

Curatorial Statement

A shrine. An altar. A portrait sitting inside a pendant. A dedication at the opening of a memoir. A cherished voicemail. A tattoo of a birthday.

We etch the permanent loss of loved ones into everyday life in a multitude of ways, attempting to preserve a spiritual essence and replace a corporeal absence. Paradoxically, these acts in memoriam suggest a finality for those lives lost. They insinuate that only in frozen moments dedicated to remembrance can they be invoked—can they serve a purpose in the lives of those they have left behind.

Titled after the Rastafarian ideology of the same name, LIVITY presents 13 Black artists’ reimaginings of these often dormant sites of memory as active portals that the deceased move through, and exist within — as able, fully feeling, and everlasting entities. Death in this show is not the end, but a transition; a simple transfer of the anima from one form to another. The artists in this exhibition work to draw their predecessors nigh, fine tuning their connection to the divine by challenging the confines of finitude, individual consciousness, and temporality.

Spanning textiles, photography, video, painting, collage, and fashion design, the artists in LIVITY deconstruct the metaphysical boundaries that relegate ancestral spirits to a separate realm, revitalizing the geists of lost ones as mobile beings and participants in the life of the living after death.

Curator: Azariah Jones

Promotional Materials