Three in One: Dialog 21 — Lewis Watts — Oomaka Tokotakiya

Ken Marchionno — Future Generations Ride (Oomaka Tokotakiya)

When: Thursday, June 16, 5:30 PM (Exhibition's Opening)
Where: American Center, Tržiště 13, Prague 1 - Malá Strana

The newest exhibition will present Dialog 21, celebrating Dialogue: Prague / Los Angeles 1989,  and two significant American photographers, Lewis Watts and Ken Marchionno.

Barbara Benish, US artist living in the Czech Republic, will introduce the projects.

You can see the exhibition till August 31, 2011.

Dialogue 21

In 1989, Zdenka Gabalova and Barbara Benish, with  many artists and friends, organized an art exchange between Los Angeles and Prague. It was the first time in nearly forty years that not only art, but also the artists, experienced one another's cultures first hand. It was a landmark show. Fifteen years later, in 2004, the Czech NGO Art Dialogue,  brought the exhibition "Certain Traces: Dialogue Los Angeles-Prague, 2004" to Los Angeles area, and in Prague. The AC exhibition presents an extended selection of the Dialogue artworks.

The Oomaka Tokatakiya (Future Generations) Ride

In 2004 Ken Marchionno was invited by members of the Lakota Indian Nation to photograph the Oomaka Tokotakiya, Future Generations Ride. The ride is nearly three hundred miles by horseback across South Dakota, and takes place every December.

Originally meant as a memorial for those who died at the Wounded Knee Massacre, the ride continues as a contemporary expression of American Indian practice and offers participants an embodied experience of traditional Lakota culture. The ride is a source of empowerment for anyone who participates, but especially for Lakota youth, and is meant to foster pride and leadership qualities in the next generation of tribal leaders.

In 2006, urged on by a local youth organizer, Ken started the Future Generations Teen Photojournalism Project to teach photography to high school students from Lakota Indian Reservations. Together they have produced an extensive archive of this modern tradition.

Evidence

Lewis Watts is interested in responding visually to the evidence of culture, history and contemporary experience in African American communities. He has used photography to confirm things he knows about the cultural landscape and also to raise questions. This investigation has been the basis of his photographic and archival endeavors.

This work includes imagery from Oakland California, New Orleans Louisiana and Harlem New York, communities with strong cultural and historical legacies that are reflected in landscape and people who live and work there.  Much of his work is an examination of the cultural landscape in rural and urban African American communities and the visual traces of the migration between the two.