Carnegie Museum of Art presents Nearing Each Other
October 18, 2024 – January 26, 2025
Addoley Dzegede
Carnegie Museum of Art | Forum Gallery | Pittsburgh
Nearing Each Other invites us to reimagine our own complex connections to place as a site of unfolding relationships. In this exhibition, place may be an environment, a material experience, or a memory to suggest notions of belonging and transformation. Through material explorations, six Pittsburgh-based artists, including ALMA | LEWIS Fall 2023 Artist in Residence Addoley Dzegede, engage with personal narratives to reveal family histories, childhood memories, and expressions of the landscape and architecture that traverse past and present moments. Representing a range of media, including painting, drawing, photography, textile, and found objects, the exhibition offers a look into the diverse art practices of artists living in Pittsburgh.
Addoley Dzegede’s series of batik portraits, Family Album (2021–2024), features family and friends from her father’s photo album. While looking through these albums, stories emerge about individuals like baby Richard—the artist’s half-brother who passed away from illness at an early age—or her great-great-grandfather Togbe Sosa Adugudu. These reminiscences from her father help to inform who Dzegede features in her work. Batik is a type of handmade wax-resist dyeing technique that is prominently used in textiles made in Ghana today and signifies the material and site-specific relationships of this work. Though originating from Java, Indonesia, Dutch merchants industrialized wax-resist processes during their colonial expansion and introduced African wax prints in the mid19th century to sell in West African markets. Complicating ideas of identity and authenticity, Dzegede’s work explores the potential of materials, textile traditions, and the ways color and pattern are used as a means to assign belonging.
Photo Caption: Installation view of Nearing Each Other at Carnegie Museum of Art, 2024. Photo by Zachary Riggleman, Courtesy of the Carnegie Museum of Art.