ROTTERDAM.- Marilyn Nance started making photographs of daily life in New York City at the age of eighteen. At age twenty-three, Marilyn joined the FESTAC ‘77 United States delegation as technical support for the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Lagos, Nigeria, where she created one of the most vibrant visual records of the Pan-African gathering. She continued making images with an equal attention to historical events, family moments, community gatherings, trips abroad, and quiet moments.
While studying and taking care of her photographs, she began using the title Spirit Faith Grace Rage to tie together her work made across different times and geographies. For Marilyn, Spirit is the underlying energy of an event; Faith lies in the belief that everything works towards the greater good; Grace acknowledges the spiral of time and the beauty, love and joy that lives in the everyday; Rage is that built up energy that finds expression and moves us forward.
As Marilyn parses through her images and files with her team, she makes stops along the way to send them to the people she recognizes, or to scholars and artists who can help gather context. From the very beginning of the Internet, Marilyn has set a visionary example for how to disperse archives online to preserve them and put them in relation with others: her website soulsista.com, active since 1995, acts as a partial container, and her social media @marilyn.nance and @festac77archive contemporize her archive.
For this exhibition, the meticulously selected photographs bring together reunions, communions, hugs, dance trains, stages, street or church scenes, demonstrations and living rooms in an interconnected constellation of timeless gestures. Sonic fragments collected by Marilyn over the years and arranged by artist and technologist Ali Santana imbue the space in the social and intimate contexts from which the images emerge.
Across five decades, Marilyn’s works bring forward the importance of seeing oneself historically instead of waiting for history to decide what is worth documenting. The message in her practice remains clear: keep your records, take many photographs, make notes often, back up your files, share them with others. From the multiplication and connection of personal archives, collective memory can be traced and kept safe.
