October 23, 2009 — January 03, 2010
Responding to the rapid, often violent transformations of the twenty-first century, contemporary artists have displayed a growing desire to activate art’s documentary capacity: its ability to bear witness to events in the world. The Storyteller focuses on artists who use the story form as a means of comprehending and conveying political and social events. For them, the story functions neither as a purely imagined narrative nor as a piece of verifiable information. It is at once temporal and personal, public and communal, persisting through the listener’s interpretive process and through each subsequent retelling.
Working in video, photography, drawing, mixed media, and installation, the international group of artists in The Storyteller neither take the idea of documentary truth as an object of critique nor abandon fact for fabulation. Rather, they enable individuals—whether themselves, their subjects, or their audience—to construct the story of their unique participation in historical processes, thereby presenting these events in a new and unexpected light.
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The Storyteller is a traveling exhibition organized and circulated by iCI (Independent Curators International), New York. Guest curators for the exhibition are Claire Gilman and Margaret Sundell. The exhibition, tour, and catalogue are made possible, in part, by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; iCI Benefactors Agnes Gund, Gerrit and Sydie Lansing, and Barbara and John Robinson; the iCI Partners and iCI Advocates.
Salina Art Center programs, exhibitions and films are presented in part by the Kansas Arts Commission, a state agency, and by the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency which believes that a great nation deerves great art.