Crystal Z Campbell,
2022

Oklahoma-based artist, filmmaker, and curator Crystal Z Campbell confronts the “public secrets” of American life, such as racism, gentrification, and resource extraction, by interrogating layers of history and erasure. In the first of two nights of screenings and talks, Campbell will discuss their recent body of work, NOTES FROM BLACK WALL STREET, a group of paintings, videos, and installations exploring the rebuilding of the Greenwood district following the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. In this cycle of works, Campbell activates diverse materials such paint, archival photography, and fired clay to excavate the tactile histories of Tulsa’s African American community, using techniques of assemblage and abstraction to bring these histories to life in the present.

Crystal Z Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipino, and Chinese descents. Campbell finds complexity in public secrets— fragments of information known by many but untold or unspoken. Recent works revisit questions of immortality and medical ethics with Henrietta Lacks' “immortal” cell line, ponder the role of a political monument and displacement in a Swedish coastal landscape, and salvage a 35mm film from a demolished Black activist theater in Brooklyn as a relic of gentrification. Sonic, material, and archival traces of the witness informs their work in film, performance, installation, sound, painting, and writing.