Joseph Maida

Printed Matter x Printed Justice: Exhibition-in-a-Box

A set of twenty exhibition-ready posters, onto which Maida adhered pivotal US immigration, citizenship, and civil-liberties documents downloaded from the Internet. These documents highlighted pivotal determinations spanning the arc of the history of the United States. As a call-to-action, Maida mailed the poster sets with a letter of explanation to photography curators at institutions with a longstanding commitment to Ansel Adams’s work, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH); and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), Washington, DC.

To commemorate the anniversary of Ansel Adams’ 1944 exhibition Manzanar: Photographs by Ansel Adams of Loyal Japanese-American Relocation Center at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Maida produced an exhibition-in-a-box that can be efficiently and effectively displayed at the institution’s will. While Adams’ own legacy, like that of any artist, is complex, it seems appropriate that institutions, which have a longstanding commitment to his work, should — in this pivotal era — revisit Adams’ political project, which marries Adams’ own sense of social justice with that of Nancy Newhall, whose courage made this controversial exhibition a reality at the height of World War II.

In the 75 years since MoMA exhibited Adams’ Manzanar project, discussions around identity, nationality, borders, immigration, justice and equality continue to dominate political and social discourse in the United States. Over the last few months, American citizens have amplified these conversations in the streets and online, calling for justice from Coast to Coast. While the topics that Adams confronts in his Manzanar project may no longer resonate most specifically with the Japanese-American experience, they do ring particularly true for citizens and immigrants of other ethnicities, whose equal treatment is repeatedly questioned by local governments as well as by the President, the Congress, and the Supreme Court.

Convoke Gallery is pleased to present Exhibition-in-a-box by Joseph Maida. This work contains 20 political posters with a silkscreened cardboard box

Joseph Maida

Exhibition-in-a-Box

20 political posters (21 x 30 inches), artist letter

silkscreened cardboard box

time stamped day of mailing

Edition of 7 + 1AP

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JUSTICE SONIA SOTOMAYOR

"By blindly accepting the Government’s misguided invitation to sanction a discrimi natory policy motivated by animosity toward a disfavored group, all in the name of a superficial claim of national security, the Court redeploys the same dangerous logic underlying Korematsu and merely replaces one “gravely wrong” decision with another."

JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG

"I grew up at the time of World War II. The irony was, we were fighting a war against racism and yet, by an Executive Order of President Roosevelt, people who had done nothing wrong—except they were of Japanese ancestry—were interned in camps far from their homes. That was a dreadful mistake."

CHARLOTTE COTTON

"Maida’s overlays and interventions onto the catalog’s original sequence amplify the prophetic nature of this historic story. It is both a sensitive reanimation of a still-resonant chapter in American history and a hard-hitting meditation upon photography’s complicity with its outplaying."

Poster #2 (An American School Girl)

Pages 6-7 with An Act to Establish an Uniform Rule of Naturalization overlay, 1790

Poster #4 (The Land)

Pages 12-13 with Mapa de los Estados Unidos De Méjico (The Disturnell Treaty Map of Mexico) overlay, 1847

Poster #5 (The Huge Wall Rises on the West)

Pages 14-15 with Executive Order 13767 issued by President Donald J. Trump on January 25, 2017 overlay

Poster #7 (The Place)

Pages 24-25 with Executive Order 9066 issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942 overlay

Poster #9 (The History)

Pages 30-31 with The Immigration Act of 1923 (The Johnson-Reed Act) including the Asian Exclusion Act and National Origins Act overlay, enacted May 26, 1924