I Will Keep My Soul

The California African American Museum (CAAM) and Art + Practice (A+P) presents the first United States exhibition of the work of Turner Award-winning British artist Helen Cammock. The exhibition includes a new film, poetry, performance, archival documents, and books, rooted in the social history, geography, and community of New Orleans, a place Cammock visited for the first time in January 2022 as part of a residency with the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought and the Amistad Research Center. Helen Cammock: I Will Keep My Soul is a gathering of encounters and observations, figured in text and image, of her experiences in the city. Cammock convenes both contemporary and historical voices—from archivists, artists, writers, and musicians to the protagonists of the civil rights movement—and adds her own through poetry, ceramics, and the sound of her trumpet, an instrument that she began practicing in New Orleans. Drawn in part from archival materials in the Amistad Research Center on the campus of Tulane University, I Will Keep My Soul is threaded throughout with the story of artist Elizabeth Catlett’s struggle for agency, creative autonomy, and support throughout her 1976 commission for the Louis Armstrong sculpture in New Orleans’s Armstrong Park. Catlett’s protracted process, revealed through letters and fraught exchanges, acts as a mirror to both past and present, asking how to be artist and activist—and free. “Helen Cammock regularly examines diaspora identities, and this is the first time she has turned her attention to the United States,” says Cameron Shaw, Executive Director of CAAM. “It’s particularly meaningful to situate her internationally acclaimed work in Leimert Park, one of Los Angeles’s liveliest and most important nexuses of Black diasporic cultures.” Cammock lives in London. She observes and interacts with New Orleans as an outsider, yet like so many visitors developed a sense of belonging there. “I have a feeling of tenderness for a place where I can walk down the street and feel seen and unseen in the same moment,” says Cammock. “Being in New Orleans has always been inextricably bound to belonging in New Orleans,” says Andrea Andersson, co-curator of the exhibition and director of the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought in New Orleans. “The answer to the question, “Outsider?” has often been confused with or reduced to a choice between binaries: insider or outsider, French or American, Black or white. What separates New Orleans from the rest of the world is its sheer impossibility to exist apart from the larger fabric from which it comes.” Helen Cammock: I Will Keep My Soul is organized by the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought and the California African American Museum and presented at Art + Practice. The Los Angeles presentation of the exhibition is curated by Andersson; Jordan Amirkhani, Rivers; and Essence Harden, Visual Arts Curator, CAAM, as part of a multi-year collaboration between Rivers and CAAM. CAAM at A+P is part of a five-year collaboration. The exhibition is made possible by the generous support of the RosaMary Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Research for this exhibition was conducted in the archives of the Amistad Research Center as part of the Amistad-Rivers Research Residency supported by the Mellon Foundation. Helen Cammock (b. 1970, Staffordshire, England) uses film, photography, print, text, song, and performance to examine mainstream narratives about Blackness, womanhood, oppression and resistance, wealth and power, poverty and vulnerability. Her works often cut across time and geography, layering multiple voices as she investigates the cyclical nature of histories in her visual and aural assemblages. In 2017, Cammock received the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, and in 2019 she was the joint recipient of the Turner Prize. Cammock has exhibited and performed worldwide, including recent solo shows at Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Photographer’s Gallery, London; STUK Art Centre, Leuven, Belgium; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; Void, Derry, Northern Ireland; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; and Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, Germany. She also recently performed at Hacer Noche Festival, Oaxaca, Mexico. Cammock’s work has been in group shows at Serpentine Galleries, London; Tate Britain, London; and Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany. Upcoming projects include solo exhibitions at Oakville Galleries, Toronto, and Amant, Brooklyn, as well as a residency at Edinburgh Printmakers in Scotland. Helen Cammock: I Will Keep My Soul will be accompanied by an artist’s book co-published in March 2023 by Siglio Press, Rivers, and CAAM. In addition to photography, historical documents, poetry, and interviews, it includes contributions by Jordan Amirkhani, Andrea Andersson, Roshanak Kheshti, and Kristina Kay Robinson, an interview by Courtney J. Martin, and an afterword by Cameron Shaw, Executive Director, CAAM.

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