Exploring Presence

This virtual program will include a screening of the short documentary film Exploring Presence: Ed Love from the docuseries Exploring Presence: African American Artists in the Upper South, followed by a conversation with filmmaker and curator Angela N. Carroll and nia love and Scott Love about the legacy of their father, esteemed sculptor Ed Love. The docuseries supports the exhibition of the same name which will be on view at the James E. Lewis Museum of Art at Morgan State University, May 26 – July 15, 2022.

Ed Love (1936 -1999), was a prolific sculptor and scholar. Though he created hundreds of sculptures over his career, he remains relatively unknown. Working predominantly with chrome and welded metal as primary materials, Love famously erected monumental constructions and stylized sculptural forms that have been compared to works by the late Romanian-French sculptor Constantin Brancusi, for their physics-defying structures and organic silhouettes. Love's particular aesthetic queried and explored Black identity through form and process.  His work was inspired by mythic and mundane traditions across the African diaspora. An avid reader, Love was also deeply influenced by the improvisational stylings of Black classical musicians including Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Max Roach, and John Coltrane among others.

Exploring Presence: African American Artists in the Upper South, a catalog, exhibition, and short docuseries edited and curated by Angela N. Carroll identifies a succinct selection of prolific visionaries who create from and are informed by the liminal realms between northeastern art metropolises and the South. Featured artists include Schroeder Cherry, Linda Day Clark, Oletha DeVane, Espi Frazier, Aziza Claudia Gibson Hunter, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Ed Love, Tom Miller, Joyce J Scott, and Paula Whaley. Though most were not born or bred in Washington, D.C. or Baltimore, MD, they each found, grounded, educated, and affirmed themselves in the belly of Black enclaves situated at the border of the Mason Dixon line in a region colloquially known as Up’South or the Upper South. Exploring Presence reviews the projects, interventions, activations, and constructions that each artist engaged between 1970 and the contemporary moment. Contributing writers include; Dr. Leslie King Hammond, Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, Charles Moore, Dr. Deborah Britt, Jermaine T. Bell, Martina Dodd, Sarah Stefana Smith, Deyane Moses, Maleke Glee, Monifa Asante Love, and Teri Henderson.