MEET THE ARTIST: Ashon Crawley
Meet the artist: Ashon crawley
Photo by AJ Mitchell for Trust for the National Mall
Ashon Crawley is not defined by one discipline. He cultivates a powerful multitude of talents in art, writing, and teaching, exploring the intersection of performance, blackness, queerness, and spirituality. By wielding different genres and disciplines, he is able to sound out a critique of the normative world, helping visualize the possibility for alternatives, or for diverging choices. His skills across different mediums help deepen the creative process behind each of his projects, often building off each other to create something profoundly unexpected.
Ashon is part of a group of six visionary artists making history on the National Mall this year. Beyond Granite’s pilot exhibition will be the first curated outdoor exhibition in the history of the Mall, featuring original works from Ashon and seven other artists. The exhibition’s central question asks, “What stories remain untold on the National Mall?” and will expand our imagination about what America’s Front Yard can be for our communities and country.
Crawley currently serves as an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, and is the author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press) and The Lonely Letters (Duke University Press). His writings have served as the conceptual and foundational frameworks for art exhibits, including “Enunciated Life” at the California African American Museum, curated by Taylor Renee Aldridge, and “Otherwise/Revival” at Bridge Projects in Los Angeles, curated by Jasmine McNeal and Cara Lewis, further demonstrating the power of multidisciplinary approaches.
Speaking about Beyond Granite on the National Mall, Ashon said…
Photo by AJ Mitchell for the Trust for the National Mall
“[Being] part of [Beyond Granite’s] Pulling Together exhibition on the National Mall is so important to me because it will be an occasion, on a large scale and with an international audience, to begin telling the story of musical genius, love and friendship, loss and spiritual abuse through the lives of people often not considered virtuosos because of limited professional training opportunities or lack of opportunities.”
- Ashon Crawley
Ashon also established the Otherwise Arts Lab, an integrative arts practice and space, to bring together a community of scholars, artists, musicians and community members to exchange ideas, concepts, and practices. Crawley has been granted fellowships with Yaddo, MacDowell, New City Arts Initiative, and Gilead COMPASS Faith Coordinating Center. His audiovisual art has been featured at Second Street Gallery (Charlottesville, Virginia), Welcome Gallery (Charlottesville, Virginia), Bridge Projects (Los Angeles, California) and the California African American Museum (Los Angeles, California).
About Beyond Granite
Photo by Monument Lab
Beyond Granite, funded by the Mellon Foundation, invites visionary artists to create special commemorative exhibits, performances, and installations on the National Mall and throughout the District of Columbia that will expand the public's imagination and understanding and create a more a more inclusive, equitable, and representative process for commemoration on the National Mall – and beyond.
”Pulling Together,” the inaugural exhibition of Beyond Granite, will feature installations and exhibits or prototype monuments, on the National Mall and in Washington, DC from leading contemporary artists that respond to a central curatorial question: What stories remain untold on the National Mall?
The Trust for the National Mall is honored to be working with the Mellon Foundation and its partners The National Capitol Planning Commission and the National Park Service to bring this new series to life to tell the fuller American story in the commemorative landscape.