Primetime

From January 4–March 3, 2018, Assembly’s public storefront gallery will host Primetime, a project by Alexandra Bell that will explore the role of stereotypes, messaging, and news media to directly engage issues of racism, gun violence, and police brutality. Similar to Recess’s seasoned Session program, which allows artists to pursue works in progress in a public setting, Assembly grants participating artists the opportunity to activate and add to the space cumulatively, working toward an evolving installation rather than a static exhibition.

Alexandra Bell’s gallery activation will create an evolving and multimedia body of work bridging the original definition of stereotype—a rigid and reproduced impression used for printing a text—with the contemporary notion of stereotyping—the subconscious belief that certain actions or behaviors of an individual defines that of an entire group. Through the repetition of audio, text, and images, Bell’s project will investigate what it means when the circulation of media narratives engenders the reinforcing and proliferating of stereotypes.

Specifically, Bell’s project will unfold across three bodies of work. The first will explore reporting on the “Scottsboro Boys,” a group of nine Black teenagers falsely accused in Alabama of raping two white women on a train in 1931, and the “Central Park Five,” five Black and Latino teenagers from Harlem who were wrongly convicted of raping a white woman in New York City's Central Park in 1989. In another series, Bell will explore press media accounts of mass shootings in America. Finally, Bell will use recorded audio to address the disturbing reality of Black hypervisibility, whereby death becomes primetime spectacle in American news media.

In addition to her work on Primetime in the gallery space, Bell will participate as a guest teaching artist during the educational diversion programs, and she will collaborate with lead teaching artist Shaun Leonardo to incorporate material from her project into the program’s curriculum. Bell will also guide program participants in creating final projects that, once complete, will appear alongside her work in the storefront gallery.

In January 2017, Recess launched Assembly to serve as an artist-led alternative to incarceration while empowering young people to take charge of their own life story and imagine a positive future through art. Through the 40-week Peer Leader program, our young people are exposed to various mediums of art making, careers in the arts, and internships at arts and culture spaces around the city as a pathway to a career in the arts. A guest artist joins each new cohort of the program and collaborates with youth on a project in our public storefront gallery.