ransome: Love #3

September 11 - September 30, 2023

two silhouetted faces look at eachother. the viewer sees them from above, as if they were laying on a floor. the faces and body are silhouettes, but the clothing is bright patchwork collage of texture

On View

The artist ransome creates quilt-like collages that speak to large-scale cultural issues through singular stories and depictions of intimate emotional exchanges. ransome draws from his family's history of migration from North Carolina to the Northeast as part of the Great Migration for inspiration, as well as the lived experiences of other people of color in America. He asks us to consider how the small and overlooked—or erased—details of culture and geography tell the stories of generations.

Love #3 is the first work in our new series, SINGULAR, which invites you to slow down, observe, and participate in intentional looking at a single work from the Permanent Collection of the Museum of Art.

Love #3 is on view in Fall 2023 collaboration with the Global, Racial, and Social Inequality Lab (GRSIL) at the University of New Hampshire.

Love #3 was recently acquired by the Museum of Art through the Edmund G. Miller Art Collection Fund.

About the Artist: Artist Statement

My artwork centers on my African-American lineage, which is traced back to sharecroppers of the American South who migrated to Northern cities along the East Coast. My pictorial narratives are personal, yet the symbols I use are universal and interplay with larger social, racial, ancestral, economic, and political histories that inform our nation to this day. The history of my family is the history of black Americans, which is the history of all of North America.  In my works, I often combine acrylic paint with an array of found, made, and purchased papers. The materials I use are conceptual statements on this legacy of an often-overlooked portion of society that made something out of nothing.

Both my representational and abstract works incorporate a variety of symbols, patterns, and marks to create powerful images filled with the rhythmic properties of music that weave throughout my oeuvre. Born in a generation infused by soul and R&B music, I grew up hearing rap music that freely sampled the music of my childhood, mixing and recomposing these songs to create rhythms befitting to hip hop music. In my work, my natural instinct is to paint and collage on the same surface, applying the same spontaneity of hip hop deejays and the resourcefulness of rural quilters, who use what is at hand, assembling, collaging, and creating. While made of the energy of contemporary culture, my work is also influenced by Abstract Expressionism and draws from the soulfulness of the quilts from the women of Gee’s Bend. For me, there is a visual rhythm to layering these antipodes: found versus purchased objects, figures versus abstract, paint versus paper, busy versus quiet.  My work aims to imbue each piece with a lyrical yet authentic resilience borne of limited resources and frugality that speaks to the struggle and hope, pain, joy, and soul of folks in the black community

For more information about ransome, visit ransomeart.com.

ransome, Love #3, purchased through the Edmund G. Miller Art Collection Fund.

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