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Davis Museum presents Radcliffe Bailey. Memory as Medicine

The Davis Museum at Wellesley College presents the Northeast Premiere of Radcliffe Bailey: Memory as Medicine, the most comprehensive examination of works by the artist to date. The exhibition highlights Bailey’s ongoing experimentation and improvisation with different forms that draws inspiration from African art, his family’s past, world history and jazz. On view February 15 through May 6, 2012 in the Bronfman, Chandler, Jobson and Tanner Galleries, the exhibition is free and open to the public.

Radcliffe Bailey, Notes from Elmina III, 2011.

“Memory as Medicine underscores the Davis’ continued commitment to introducing internationally known contemporary artists to the Boston area,” says Lisa Fischman, the Davis’ Ruth Gordon Shapiro ’37 Director. “Bailey’s art, informed by a strong social and historical consciousness and solidly grounded in family and community, combines a rich, narrative content with a high-level of abstraction and poetic resonance to explore questions of history and memory. The Davis is honored to present his work, and on a personal level, I’m thrilled to reconnect with Radcliffe since our shared days in Atlanta.”

Through exploration of the past, the present, and the unknown, Bailey layers meaning into his art by layering objects. Combining two and three-dimensional forms, he uses various mediums and scale to create a diverse and engaging collection of art. Mixed-media paintings and installations incorporate objects steeped in history, including tintypes of distant family members, African sculptures, disassembled piano keys and Georgia red clay. These items suggest stories of the black Atlantic diaspora and migrations more universal and spiritual, and harmonize an intuitive balance of world history and familial memory. The works make visual connections between art and life, people and places, and ancestors and their descendants.

“Whenever you’re sick, you go to the medicine cabinet. For me, I go to memory. The idea of memory heals me and takes me to another place,” said Bailey, explaining the title of his exhibition. “Growing up, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents and other family members and I feel like that’s lost in most families today. In my art, I try to restore some of the lost kinship between people.”

The New York Times describes artist Radcliffe Bailey’s shimmering, shape-shifting works as being fueled by an exploration of “Black Atlantic culture, the vital, nurturing, agitated link between Africa and the Americas.”

Born in 1968 in Bridgeton, New Jersey, Radcliffe Bailey moved to Atlanta when he was four years old. Growing up, his interest in art was piqued by visits to the High and the art classes he took at the Atlanta College of Art. As a teenager Bailey, who grew up in Hank Aaron’s neighborhood in Atlanta, pursued his early love of baseball and played semi-pro for a year. He ultimately decided he was too small for his position as catcher and followed his mother’s vision for him by enrolling at the Atlanta College of Art, where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1991.
In 1996, Bailey gained acclaim for his large-scale mural “Saints,” a commission for Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. “Saints” remains on view, welcoming travelers entering the airport at International Terminal E. From 2001 to 2006 Bailey taught at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia. In 2004, he received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and was a visiting faculty member of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2006.

Bailey’s work is represented in leading museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

About Davis Museum and Cultural Center:
One of the oldest and most acclaimed academic fine arts museums in the United States, the Davis Museum is a vital force in the intellectual, pedagogical and social life of Wellesley College. It seeks to create an environment that encourages visual literacy, inspires new ideas, and fosters involvement with the arts both within the College and the larger community.

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