The Ringling Presents June Clark: Harlem Quilt

December 5, 2022 – Sarasota

The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art presents the exhibition June Clark: Harlem Quilt in the Keith D. and Linda L. Monda Gallery for Contemporary Art from DEC 17, 2022 – MAR 26, 2023.

June Clark’s solo exhibition at The Ringling marks the Harlem Quilt’s first presentation at a US museum since its unveiling at the Studio Museum in New York City in 1997. Curated by Ola Wlusek, The Ringling’s Keith D. and Linda L. Monda Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, the exhibition is a re-introduction to this immersive installation, which consists of over three hundred individual pieces of fabric, each with a black-and-white photo transferred onto its surface. “We are thrilled to present this significant installation piece once again in the US,” said The Ringling Executive Director Steven High, “it is always an honor to have the opportunity to work with such an accomplished artist.”

June Clark left Harlem for Canada at the height of New York City’s riots and political unrest of the late 1960s. Once in Toronto, the artist began making photographs and co-founded the Women’s Photography Co-op in 1972. Her dedication to photography was recognized in an artistic residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem from 1996 – 1997 where Clark produced her seminal piece Harlem Quilt. In Harlem, for the residency and coming to terms with being home, Clark made photographs of street scenes, building facades, people, and store windows in New York City neighborhoods between 110th and 168th streets. Harlem Quilt expresses the artist’s deep love and sensibility for Harlem’s community through a unique method of quilt-making where a lightbulb above each image creates a sense of intimacy and commemoration. 

Works by Clark on canvas and paper from 1994 to 2022 are also presented in this exhibition. They offer an engagement with issues affecting Black communities in Canada and the United States and allow a broader understanding of Clark’s oeuvre as a record of social history.

June Clark (Canadian, born in United States, 1941) has earned national and international recognition for her photo-based image works, installations, and interventions. She has had solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2018); the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (1997); the Koffler Gallery, Toronto (1994); and Mercer Union, Toronto (1990). Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Textile Museum, Toronto; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Agnès b., Paris; and Linda Kirkland Gallery, New York. She has completed residencies at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Ontario College of Art and Design, among others. Her work can be found in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the James Van Der Zee Institute, New York; and Agnès b., Paris.

This exhibition is on view in the Keith D. and Linda L. Monda Gallery for Contemporary Art at The Ringling.