Jay Katelansky

press release: Jay Katelansky is the winner of the Chazen Museum Prize for an Outstanding MFA Student. Katelansky, a third-year MFA student in the UW–Madison Art Department, is from Piscataway, N.J., and received her BFA from Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia. Katelansky will work with Chazen staff to mount her exhibition, Hoodwinked: An Installation by Jay Katalansky, at the Chazen museum.

ARTIST'S STATEMENT: Jay Katelansky uses a variety of media to create installations where she explores her interest in collective trauma and the dehumanization of Black folks in the United States using the vehicles of science fiction, dystopic/utopic narratives, and Black joy. She uses PhantomNegro, a shape shifting, gender shifting, time-traveling being, as a tool to explore Black subjectivity, or the Black narrative. PhantomNegro floats through the past, present, and future, placing themselves at scenes of injustices. PhantomNegro is an omnipresent being who rewrites the dominant narrative of current and past events involving the dehumanization of Black people. This rewritten narrative is not utopic, but rather a method of filling in the gaps in these stories of injustice, thereby allowing the artist the agency, or power, to understand and alter the past. PhantomNegro, and the artist, create a space for the collective trauma and experience to be reclaimed and restructured into a sense of belonging, inherently carving out the space for Black joy.

Lecture:  A Conversation with Artist Jay Katelansky and Johanna F. Almiron

Free

Oscar F. and Louise Greiner Mayer Gallery, Conrad A. Elvehjem building

The winner of the 2016 Chazen Museum Prize for an Outstanding UW-Madison MFA will discuss her exhibition Hoodwinked: An Installation by Jay Katelansky with Johanna F. Almiron, Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies, in the exhibition. Professor Almiron will create a dialogue with her about how Katelansky's work speaks to the contemporary social moment within the context of black visual culture, race and politics.