Ascents and Echoes: Radcliffe Bailey

Painter, sculptor, and mixed media artist Radcliffe Bailey (b. 1968, Bridgetown, NJ; lives and works in Atlanta, GA) utilizes the layering of imagery, culturally resonant materials and text to explore themes of ancestry, race, migration and collective memory. His work often incorporates found materials and objects from his past into textured compositions, including traditional African sculpture, tintypes of his family members, ships, train tracks and Georgia red clay. The cultural significance and rhythmic properties of music are also important influences that can be seen throughout his oeuvre. Often quilt-like in aesthetic, his practice creates links between diasporic histories and potential futures, investigating the evolution or stagnation of notions of identity.

New York-based writer and art historian Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva specializes in queer art and culture. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, with a dissertation titled “Fragments: Art, AIDS, and Lesbian Identity in the United States.” Her writings have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, art-agenda, and various exhibition catalogues. She has curated exhibitions at Candice Madey Gallery, La MaMa Galleria, and Assembly Room. Soboleva was the 2020-2021 Jan and Marica Vilcek Curatorial Fellow at the Guggenheim Museum. She is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and LGBTQ+ History at the New York Historical Society, and Adjunct Professor of Art History at NYU.