Supple Means of Connection

The High Museum of Art commissioned its first choreographer as artist in residence, glo founder lauri stallings, to create “Supple Means of Connection,” a new suite of live art designed for the Cousins Gallery, and outdoor campus of the High.  “Supple Means of Connection” is both a gallery installation and a public artwork exploring themes of family, falling and maps with respect to women’s roles. Interrogating the infinite challenges of human co-existence—as well as the blurred lines between the fragility of the human body and the fragility of nature—Stallings mixes forms that defy the boundaries of genre and offers choreography as an invitation to collective action. The choreographies activate the Cousins Gallery on the second level of the High’s Wieland Pavilion—relating and co-existing with installed neon art, text and mixed-media sculpture “trees”—and migrate to and from the galleries through other rarely habited spaces around the interior and exterior of the Museum. The shifting locations ask the public to discover, lean under, peak through and part ways with traditional ways to view art, offering an alternative spatial experience of the Museum.

Since 2014, Stallings has worked with a core group of female moving artists from diverse backgrounds to construct her durational, live-art activations. For “Supple Means of Connection,” glo moving artists will be joined by an intergenerational and interracial group of local women and children, ages 9 to 90. Stallings will not appear in the work herself but will be conducting the live interventions. Along with glo’s migrating choreographies and movement choirs, the schedule of happenings includes: movement workshops twice a week in the Museum (open to all), “People Parades” exploring the High’s grassy campus and the songs and calls of birds on terraces and at entrances, post-activation artist conversations, and a ceremonial duet for two glo moving artists down the Robinson Atrium ramp on Friday evenings.

A first edition pocket glo map and dictionary by Dr. Paul Boshears and Candice Thompson will accompany the project.

SUPPORT
Project support for “Supple Means of Connection” has been generously provided by an artist’s residency at Pasaquan, with support from Columbus State University, Pasaquan Preservation Society and Georgia Council for the Arts. Major sponsorship for “Supple Means of Connection” has been generously provided by the Florence Biennale XII edition, with support from the regional council of Tuscany, Italy.