Tiona Nekkia McClodden
b. 1981, Blytheville, Arkansas
Lives in Philadelphia
Venue
Xavier University Of Louisiana Art Gallery
1 Drexel Drive, New Orleans, Louisiana
Wednesday–Sunday, 11 AM–4 PM
*Gallery is located on the first floor of the Administrative Building. Enter through side doors and follow to the center.
Neighborhood
about the project
Play Me Home, 2021
4-channel HD color video, with sound
Courtesy the artist
Play Me Home is a multichannel installation and a series of related sculptural objects. This genre-defying new work blends narrative fiction and nonfiction centered around several intertwined threads. One channel features a filmic portrait of the four o’clock flower, a variety of trumpet flower known for its ability to propagate and thrive on land hostile to most plant life. The four o’clock grows wild throughout the Delta region, on the same lands where the artist’s family settled as some of the earliest Black sharecropping farmers in the Delta, and where they still own and maintain farmland. This view onto historical Black relationships to land, property, and livelihood in the region is the focus of the channel situated within the sole monitor in the space. The two larger channels present scenes of McClodden burying and planting a dying flower on land in the Lower Ninth Ward alongside two trumpets (witnesses), as well as filmic portraits of the land where McClodden’s family has lived in the Delta.
The leather-bound feature-length script draft, a work in progress for over a decade, centers the fictional narrative of an elderly Black woman’s return to New Orleans, where she once played in an all-female brass band, as she comes to the end of her life. The work’s title references Black musical funerary traditions and honors lesser-acknowledged sites and modalities of “home” for Black people living in the United States. By exploring localized migration in the South, Play Me Home documents and interrogates place, personhood, and vitality as encountered through the sensual experience of Black people and communities.
Presented by the VIA Art Fund.
about the artist
Tiona Nekkia McClodden is a visual artist, filmmaker, and curator whose work explores, and critiques issues at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and social commentary. McClodden’s interdisciplinary approach traverses documentary film, experimental video, sculpture, and sound installations. Themes explored in McClodden's films and works have been re-memory and more recently narrative biomythography. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and MoMA PS1, New York, among others. She recently exhibited work in the Whitney Biennial (2019), for which she received the Bucksbaum Award. McClodden has been the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts.
Tiona McClodden, Play me home, 2021. 4-channel HD color video, with sound, dimensions variable. Prospect.5 Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Xavier University of Louisiana Art Gallery. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Jonathan Traviesa