Director’s Discretionary Funds have allowed for the purchase of a work of art from Des Moines-based artist Jordan Weber. Weber works in sculpture, painting, and installation to explore issues of history, colonialism, and identity. He also constructs his work with materials that carry
meaning, from carefully chosen woods and stone to earth from sites of historic traumas. This work is a keystone sculpture in his ongoing “Chapels” series, and contains earth from the South Carolina church that was recently the site of a racially motivated mass shooting. A previous participant in the Art Center’s Iowa Artist exhibition series, this is the first work by Weber to enter the collections.
Source: News, April, May, June 2018
Images (2)
Audio (1)
Jordan Weber (American, born 1984)
Chapels (series), 2017
Run Time: 1:22
Recorded by Jordan Weber, artist / November 11, 2020
My name is Jordan Weber, Des Moines, Iowa based artist. You are currently viewing Chapels, the first in the series of works based on land masses and black owned spaces where massacres occurred upon the African-American body. This specific piece is a reflection on the Emmanuel Methodist Church shooting that took nine souls. As you look at this work, I would like you to reflect on the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 that took the lives of four young queens, this was fifty-two years ago. Cut to 2020, as I’m sitting here recording this, three months after the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis, we have few spaces to be, we have few spaces to feel safe. As you look at this piece, I really would like you to reflect on spiritual, holy spaces that we go to for refuge, and the things that happen to our black, brown, and indigenous bodies when we were at our sacred spaces in America.
Thank you.
