Mead Art Museum Like a Slow Walk with Trees: Alicia Grullón

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A Worker Dies and Goes to Heaven, 2023. Single channel video, 10 mins. Courtesy of the artist. 

Like a Slow Walk with Trees is a meditation on land and labor by Alicia Grullón. The body, the banner, photography, and video with text are employed as part of her artistic practice, which centers activism. Grullón’s work continues in the tradition of artists since the 1970s who have critically used photography and written language to address current issues and disrupt the possibility of singular readings of each form as simply documentary or reportage.

The exhibition is a call to consider notions of land and labor as interconnected systems through various mediums. Grullón’s new photographs of trees and pictures of a single masked person are each paired with text. The compilation of texts reflects Grullón’s research of recent protests in a range of industries such as mining, shipping, and entertainment. Grullón poetically knits together the direct language used to make demands—symbols and language of protest—with other references that layer and complicate associations. How do we define labor and  land? How are trees and people connected? And how might one imagine a “Slow Walk with Trees”?

*Please note that this exhibition will be closed to the public May 3-24 while an adjacent gallery is undergoing installation.

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Fruit Picker, 2023. Digital archival print on 100% cotton rag with digital archival text. Courtesy of the artist  

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To Propose, Not Impose, 2023. Photolithograph with digital archival text. Courtesy of the artist.