NEW YORK, NY.- No Longer Empty announces Hold These Truths, a group exhibition that responds to our complex and critical moment in United States history through the works of artists including Sol Aramendi, Alexandra Bell, Natalie Bookchin, Andrea Bowers, Nancy Chunn, Adinah Dancyger & Mykki Blanco, Nona Faustine, Ramiro Gomez & David Feldman, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Shaun Leonardo, Esperanza Mayobre, Loren Madsen, Richard Mosse, Not An Alternative, Jenny Polak, Bayeté Ross Smith, Michael Sharkey, Dustina Sherbine, Unlimited, Ltd., Kamau Ware and Carey Young. Hold These Truths is curated by Rachel Gugelberger, Curator and Manon Slome, Co-Founder/Chief Curator and continues the legacy of No Longer Empty’s Bring in the Reality, a 2015 exhibition at Nathan Cummings Foundation that explored the intersection of storytelling and activism.

A reference to the Declaration of Independence, Hold These Truths embodies both a fragment of a sentence that represents an incomplete history of justice and a call to assert diverse realities. The divisiveness of our political landscape, complicated by such concepts as “alternative facts” and “fake news” serves as a backdrop for works that expose the hollowness of proliferating misrepresentations in the name of power, both historically and in our present moment. Reflecting on narratives from multiple sources in a rapidly changing social and governmental landscape, the exhibition includes work by artists who employ strategies ranging from editing and re-framing to appropriation and-enactment. Their work collectively seeks to dismantle prevailing constructs of national identity, and observe the right to challenge the very mechanisms that exclude expression and participation.

Hold These Truths will be accompanied by a series of participatory programs including walking tours that unpack how meaning and truth are creative processes, Wikipedia edit-a-thons, and performance workshops that locate current events within the body. Collectively, these programs address timely issues such as Immigration, Climate Change, and Labor and Legal Documentation. Programs are organized by Raquel de Anda, Director of Public Engagement, and Mica Le John, Education Programs Manager. No Longer Empty also published a catalog for the exhibition.