ESSE QUAM VIDERI

ESSE QUAM VIDERI

National Humanities Center

September 1 - December 15

VAE’s first collaboration with NHC will be an extension of an upcoming project, THE EVERYDAY.
 
THE EVERYDAY is a multi-venue, multi-discipline, cross-disability project headed by an international steering committee with the curatorial goal of highlighting universal experiences, told from the disability perspective, presented in an audacious way. The project will be presented throughout August and September 2018 and will showcase talent on local, national, and international levels.
 
Esse Quam Videri (the North Carolina state motto, translating as “To be, rather than to seem”) is an exhibition exploring North Carolina, its history, culture, and landscape, through the lens of disability.  There are many experiences which we all share: romantic and familial love, employment, citizenship, education, and caregiving, to name a few. People with disabilities have typically been erased or considered disqualified from these experiences, yet they too participate in them.  Following the curatorial theme of the overarching EVERYDAY project, this exhibition will showcase works that tell stories unique to North Carolina, using universal experiences or ideas, but presented in audacious ways—particularly based in the audacious knowledge and creativity that disability brings to them. “To be, rather than to seem”: how can we explore through disability representation and disability aesthetics what disability history, knowledge, and culture is relative to North Carolina? This exhibition will serve as an introduction to the National Humanities Center’s fall cohort of fellows who are predominantly from outside the North Carolina and even the United States.
 
JURORS - Ann M. Fox & Linda Dougherty
 
Ann M. Fox, Professor of English at Davidson College

Professor of English at Davidson College, Dr. Ann Fox specializes in modern and contemporary dramatic literature and disability studies, regularly teaching classes about disability in drama, literature, and visual art.   Her scholarship on disability and theater, and disability and visual culture has been published widely, and she has co-curated three disability-related visual arts exhibitions at Davidson College: RE/FORMATIONS: Disability, Women, and Sculpture; STARING(based on Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s book of the same name), and Re/Presenting HIV/AIDS.  She is the 2017-18 Boswell Family Faculty Fellow at Davidson, and is currently working on a project on disability aesthetics in drama entitledAdaptive Activism: How Disability Refigures the Cultural Landscape.

Linda Dougherty, Chief Curator and Curator of Contemporary Art at NCMA

Linda Johnson Dougherty is the Chief Curator & Curator of Contemporary Art at the North
Carolina Museum of Art, where she oversees the contemporary art collection, organizes
exhibitions, and develops artists’ projects for the Museum Park. She co-directed the public art
program for the state of North Carolina for several years and prior to that she was a curator at
The Phillips Collection, a research associate at the National Gallery of Art, and a research
assistant at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC. As an independent
curator and critic based in Chapel Hill, she contributed reviews and articles on contemporary art
to numerous national art publications, and has also written exhibition catalogues and guest
curated exhibitions for museums and contemporary art centers in North Carolina and throughout
the United States. She has a BA in Art History from Wesleyan University and an MA in Art
History from Williams College.