Samantha Hill and Ed Woodham met during their abbreviated tenure in a Macon Arts Alliance residency [read our story here]. The tenure ended on July 26, 2016, when (according to a press release on the organization’s website) MAA terminated the artists’ contracts mere weeks into what was to have lasted several months.
Woodham, whom I knew through a 2014 performance of his at Eyedrum Art and Music Gallery, LET: Emptying of the Extraneous Past, contacted me in advance of the residency’s start and asked whether I would be willing to document his and Hill’s activities in Macon. My immense respect for that performance made me interested in anything Woodham might undertake.
Currently based in Chicago, Hill describes herself as a transdisciplinary artist with a particular interest in archives and collecting oral narratives and histories. Her ongoing Kinship Project incorporates more than 3,000 images of African American family photographs, whose dates range from 1839 to the present.
In our StoryCorps session, we discussed how they each define art, how they both arrived at “social practice” (a label they also both eschew) via a discontentedness with the dialogue around more traditional art forms and spaces, and what the heck is “social practice” anyway?
[This is a condensed eight-minute excerpt of the hourlong conversation.]
Thanks to our partner:
