Sadie Woods
she/her/ella
Sadie Woods | Sponsored Artist 2016 | Photo by Seed Lynn
Sadie Wood’s art practice is anthropological in nature and rooted in a post-disciplinary background drawing from personal biography as well as performing and visual arts training, curatorial experience and academic education. As an artist, curator, dj and professor, she works heavily with archives for research and interventions to produce work that embodies liberatory practices exploring cultural heritage of the Americas and Global South. For Sadie, art is a utility for messaging and storytelling that can give rise to social empowerment.
In Sadies words, “Growing up in Chicago during the takeoff of hip-hop, electro, and the proliferation of subcultural and counter-cultural identity movements has been a vehicle for re-examining popular media to create counter narratives that center voices of othered and marginalized communities. Deejaying has been a culminating point between tastemaking and spacemaking, connecting the poetics of music to nuanced cultural memory and personal currents. Coded in the expressive culture such as music are the affects and aspirations, cultural heritage and histories of peoples as well as documented struggles against colonial and imperial encounters. Using DJ aesthetics to sample, blend, edit and recompose ephemera to process historical, social, political and cultural events as a form of articulation zeros-in on tropes that can be excavated to remember times of celebration and resistance.”
Photo courtesy of the artist
The Project
Photo courtesy of the artist
A Study in Rhyme & Song: From Minstrel Show Tune to Children’s Nursery Rhyme, by Sadie Woods, surveys nursery rhyme Ten Little Indians offering a critical perspective on notions of progress and living in a post-racial nation.
Originally written and performed as the minstrel show tune in America and Europe, Ten Little Injuns (Septimus Winner, 1868) and Ten Little Niggers (Frank Green, 1869) song was created to celebrate the violent deaths of American Indian / Negro boys. Due to its popularity, the song was adapted in media formats for entertainment and educational tools, including film, theater, cartoon animation, board games, toys, publications, nursery rhymes, sheet music, and musical recordings. The song was later rebranded as the nursery rhyme Ten Little Indians, widely celebrated and circulated to teach first and second languages internationally. A Study in Rhyme & Song: From Minstrel Show Tune to Children’s Nursery Rhyme explores the nostalgia of children’s nursery rhymes and colonial tropes of social terrorism and conditioning, structural and institutional violence, through archives, vintage ephemera, sonic installations, sound sculptures and gestural choreography.
About the Artist
Sadie Woods is an award winning post-disciplinary artist, independent curator, and deejay. Her work focuses primarily on social movements, liberatory practices, cultural memory through visual and performing arts, and producing collaborations within communities of difference. Sadie has participated in national and international artist and curatorial residencies, including: Arts + Public Life, IL; Bemis Center for the Arts, OK; Comfort Station #pertodela, US/BR; Ecole du Magasin-Centre d’Art Contemporain, FR; High Concept Labs, IL; Hyde Park Art Center, IL; Independent Curators International, NY/SN; Ragdale Foundation, IL; Wave Farm, NY. She has exhibited and featured her work at August Wilson Cultural Center, PA; Busan Biennale, KR; Chicago Cultural Center, IL; Elmhurst Museum, IL; Experimental Sound Studio, IL; EXPO Chicago, IL; Hyde Park Jazz Festival, IL; Krasl Art Center, MI; Lit & Luz Festival, US/MX; Millennium Park Pritzker Pavilion, IL; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; New Gallery of Modern Art, NC; School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Washington Project for the Arts, DC; Weinberg/Newton Gallery, IL. Publications include Harald Szeemann Méthodologie Individuelle published by JRP Ringier with Le Magasin—Centre National d'Art Contemporain de Grenoble, in collaboration with the Department of Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art, London. Sadie received her BLA from Columbia College and MFA from The School of the Art Institute. She is the Founder of Sadie Woods LLC, Co-Founder of The Petty Biennial and Selenite Arts Advisory, and Resident Deejay at Lumpen Radio 105.5FM (Chicago, IL) and Wave Farm 90.7FM (Acra, NY).
For more information, visit www.sadiewoods.com
IG @woodsadie
