Heads

In recent years, Rhea Dillon (b. 1996; London, UK) has been thinking through Caribbean concepts of family and the histories that land can hold. In this exhibition, new works made with natural materials significant to Jamaica rest on wooden bookshelves or hang on the paneled walls as an intervention to the Library of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. With the sculptures, Dillon transforms a domestic object into a minimal form. Interested in the mutability of gesture, she constructed the sculptures with materials that resist cohesion, causing them to morph and decay over time. Likewise, a work on paper simultaneously suggests the stem of a leaf, a suture, or a route. This kind of slippage is fundamental to Dillon’s work. For this exhibition, the artist’s first institutional show in the United States, Dillon chose objects from Arts and Letters’s archive to accompany her work. Her selection features books from our collection by current or former members, including Malcolm Cowley, Toni Morrison, and Claudia Rankine. To supplement racial and geographic absences in the institution’s membership, Dillon also presents books by non-member writers from the Caribbean or of Caribbean descent. Throughout the show, Dillon sends small works and ephemera through the postal service, extending her exhibition beyond the walls of the Arts and Letters Library. To participate in this mailing project, please sign up here. Founded in 1898 and located in landmark buildings in Washington Heights, the American Academy of Arts and Letters is an honor society of artists, architects, composers, and writers who foster and sustain interest in the arts. Arts and Letters’s members honor and support creative individuals through over seventy annual awards and prizes and champion experimentation and the breadth of contemporary art today through an exhibition program that gives artists space, time, and resources to realize ambitious projects. The program is led by Chief Curator Jenny Jaskey, in consultation with a committee of Arts and Letters artist members including Mel Chin, Charles Gaines, Ann Hamilton, Joan Jonas, and Amy Sillman.