and we learn to keep the soil wet

The Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) is pleased to announce the opening of a group exhibition bringing together works by Antonio Henrique Amaral, Zheng Bo, Ane Graff, Timothy Yanick Hunter, Kite, Ana Maria Millan, Ebony G. Patterson, Khari Johnson-Ricks, and Suellen Rocca. The exhibition, which will be on view March 18, 2023 through July 2, 2023, invites viewers to consider CARA’s guiding question for 2022–24: How can we dream not only about ourselves? 

Titled and we learn to keep the soil wet, the show marks the second exhibition in CARA’s space, which opened to the public in October 2022 as a place for un-learning, kinship, and care. By placing these nine artists in dialogue with one another, the spring 2023 program explores the ethics of intimacy and interspecies togetherness. Each of the featured artists experiments with visual and sonic vocabularies that consider cybernetics, soil, the body, and the tangled spaces in between—a continuous, sometimes erotic, union of the micro and the cosmic. 

Through this exploration, the body and its environments are understood as porous organisms, challenging ideas of exteriority and interiority. Comprising video, sculpture, drawing, painting, and fiber arts, the show explores the body not as a theme to be defined, but rather, as an ongoing concern and investigation.

The exhibition builds upon CARA’s mission to expand public discourses and historical records to reflect art’s abundant pasts, presents, and futures. By presenting works that weave bodies, land, and borders, and we learn to keep the soil wet invites viewers to consider alternative structures of kinship. It imagines a world that is overflowing with queer joy, where pleasure can act as a conduit for liberation from racial capitalism.

Dissolving the idea of territory as a delineated geographical space of statehood or governance, the exhibition highlights the capacity of the body and the earth to hold histories of both violence and mutual care. From varying perspectives, the artists engage the cyclical and defy their given or imposed territories through works that have grown out of emotional architectures, like the space of dreams, and the resilience and memory of the forest, the flesh, and the gut. Such expanded forms of community are part of the continuous transformation of the earth's life systems.

During the opening from 4–7pm on March 18, Kite will bring in a live sound and video production of her newly commissioned Machine Learning interface.

and we learn to keep the soil wet is curated by CARA’s Executive Director and Chief Curator Manuela Moscoso and produced by Agustin Schang.

CARA welcomes visitors to its bookstore and exhibition-gathering spaces during the hours listed above.