WELLESLEY, MASS.- The Davis Museum at Wellesley College has been awarded a grant in support of an exhibition of the work of Nigeria born, U.S.-based multi-media artist Fatimah Tuggar. The exhibition, which will go on view at the Davis Museum in Fall 2019, will investigate the ways that race and gender shape human understandings of technology and the home. Curated by Dr. Amanda Gilvin, this will be the artist’s largest solo exhibition to date, and it will be accompanied by the first monographic catalogue of her work.

“Working in sculpture, video, digital photography, and virtual reality, Fatimah Tuggar has been innovating across media for decades,” said Gilvin, Assistant Curator at Davis Museum at Wellesley College. “This exhibition will provide opportunities for many different areas of study including art, humanities, computer science, and more.”

In preparation for the exhibition, Gilvin will organize a series of seminars funded by the Warhol Foundation. During five sessions, international artists and scholars will discuss Tuggar’s work with Wellesley faculty members from the arts, humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and computer sciences. These conversations will help shape the catalogue and the exhibition’s public programs.

In order to support a planned commission of a new artwork in augmented reality, Gilvin will travel to Kano, Nigeria, where the artist will be doing her own research into the indigo-dying industry. In Lagos, she will conduct further conversations with the artist, as well as with Nigeria-based new media scholars, artists and producers. Gilvin will also visit four sites of digital innovation. In addition to attending the 2017 Fak’Ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival in Johannesburg, she will meet with artists and curators working with virtual reality and augmented reality in London, New York, and Los Angeles.

Multi-media artist Fatimah Tuggar uses technology as both a medium and a subject in her work to serve as metaphors for power relationships. She combines objects, images and sounds from diverse cultures, geographies, and histories to comment on how media and technology diversely impact local and global realities. She received her MFA from Yale University, and has been in exhibitions around the world at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Whitney Museum of American Art New York), Brooklyn Museum of Art (New York), and Mori Art Museum (Tokyo). Tuggar is currently an associate professor at the Kansas City Art Institute.