Arts + Literature Laboratory presents Family Beings, Before the Sea in the Sky's Eye, an exhibition by Ronaldo V. Wilson, organized by the community curation project, LAB^4, on display from Tuesday, July 8, 2025, through Friday, August 29, 2025.
A reception for all current exhibitions will be held on Thursday, July 17, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm.
Ronaldo V. Wilson’s Family Beings, Before the Sea in the Sky’s Eye features three videos, and three related books offering distinct and related configurations of family beings and animated personas enacted through video, drawings, dance, song, and writing, crossing domestic, natural, and urban locations. The videos Who Gets To? (2024); Harbor (2024); and Carmelina’s Farm (2023), reveal art documentation, including family interviews, improvised songs and performances in site-specific landscapes (beaches, mountains, studios, galleries, and urban streets.) Wilson dances, sings, holds conversations, sometimes donning aviary and old white man masks, and playing with a baby doll, all as poetic meditations. Though poetry, prose, 2D collage, video and performance documentation, Wilson’s books Virgil Kills: Stories (2022); Carmelina: Figures (2021); and Lucy 72, Poems (2018) engage the insides and outsides of perceived race and identity, excavating memory, nation, and embodiment, while manifesting grounded, fluid, and soaring poetic imaginaries.
