Projects
Elsewhere hosts 50+ new projects a year: from artworks to research, from events to extravaganzas, from residency works to collaborative upfits.
Elsewhere In A Box
Turn your home into Elsewhere with seven at-home versions of museum experiences.
Playshops 2021
Playshops is a skill-building and skill-sharing workshop with talented members of our communities. Curated by the Creative Catalyst Fellow, these experiences range form professional skills to skills that can be used in the home.
Perceiver of Sound League: Sound Research Studio
The Perceiver of Sound League teams up with Elsewhere Museum to present a new and unique kind of program for everyone who makes or listens to sounds.
SaturGays: Queer + Trans BIPOC Street Vendors Market
We are launching an outdoor vending space in front of the museum twice per month that will feature up to 8 BIPOC LGBTQIA2S+ vendors. We want to support local vendors as an economic justice effort, leveraging our space, networks, and connections to build with vendors and bring support for their work.
Musical Chairs in the Waiting Room
Chairs are turned into musical instruments in this waiting room for the Bureau of Illumination.
Sukkot at Elsewhere
Sukkot is a weeklong Jewish festival celebrating harvest and the shelters built with it.
Children and adults are invited to decorate and gather in our Sukkah in the Elsewhere garden!
Alumni Buddies
Starting with Residency Cohort #107 in June of 2021, we set up each resident with an Elsewhere alumnus from previous years under a new initiative named Alumni Buddies.
Chris Omni: Breathwork Workshop
Scholar artist, Chris Omni, MPH (@motherearthacademy) invites you to participate in her creative research and participate in a breathwork workshop.
Isolation * Invitation * Inclusion | Chris Omni
Chris Omni (Tallahassee, FL) | Exchange (Kansas City) | October 2021
Chris Omni explored her artist identity through found objects from North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. This piece represents her growth process of moving from a 20+ year career in public health into a new, August 2020, identity as an artist. Being * Becoming * Growing is in direct communication with her second piece, Isolation * Invitation * Inclusion; however this piece speaks to her extroverted side. A side that has been traditionally front, center, and literally on stage. Omni created this site specific installation as a reminder of how we present to others and how we even frame our identities, even if it is not who we are at the core. Through this introspective creation, Chris Omni discovered a new dimension of herself and weaved it into the piece while dancing with the energy of the sacral chakra mantra, “I love all dimensions of myself. I delight in weaving the creative tapestry that is my life.” Being * Becoming * Growing invites YOU to look at your journey and grow in the direction that breathes life to your soul. Ase.
Being * Becoming * Growing: A Journey of Artist Identity | Chris Omni
Chris Omni (Tallahassee, FL) | Exchange (Kansas City) | October 2021
Chris Omni explored her artist identity through found objects from North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. This piece represents her growth process of moving from a 20+ year career in public health into a new, August 2020, identity as an artist. Being * Becoming * Growing is in direct communication with her second piece, Isolation * Invitation * Inclusion; however this piece speaks to her extroverted side. A side that has been traditionally front, center, and literally on stage. Omni created this site specific installation as a reminder of how we present to others and how we even frame our identities, even if it is not who we are at the core. Through this introspective creation, Chris Omni discovered a new dimension of herself and weaved it into the piece while dancing with the energy of the sacral chakra mantra, “I love all dimensions of myself. I delight in weaving the creative tapestry that is my life.” Being * Becoming * Growing invites YOU to look at your journey and grow in the direction that breathes life to your soul. Ase.
The Waiting Room Auditions | Jordan Wason
Jordan Wason (Brooklyn, NYC) | October 2021
Installation of musical chairs, fabric, rocking horses, exercise bike, lamps, magazines, speakers, organ, piezo pickups, CRT T.V., laser etched signage; Happening series; Video ad series; Digital music recordings
The Waiting Room - 15ft x 12ft installation The Waiting Room Auditions - 9 video ad series, approx. 11min total runtime Musical Chairs - 6.5in x 4.5in laser engraved wood panel Rocking Horse - 6.7 x 4.5 laser engraved wood panel Mirror 1 (Musical Chairs) - _ x _ laser engraved mirror Mirror 2 (Rocking Horse) - _ x _ laser engraved mirror Mirror 3 (Cowboy Kid Chair) - _ x _ laser engraved mirror Mirror 4 (Twin Chairs) - _ x _ laser engraved mirror
Seeing that there was a Bureau of Illumination at Elsewhere, Jordan decided that there must also be a waiting room, as there is always waiting involved in any bureaucratic process. In a waiting room there is typically music, seating, and frustration. In this waiting room there are un-upholstered musical chairs, rolls of fabric, and instruments. The room and the objects themselves are put into a state of waiting for completion. Visitors are provided with the materials to work and create while waiting, in a process that both alleviates their frustration and saves the bureau a lot of money. Throughout the process Jordan wrote typewritten letters to the Bureau next door, which record the evolution of the room and its excavation-
Coffin of Curiosities | Richard Moreno
Richard Moreno (Miami, FL) | October 2021
The Coffin of Curiosities was inspired by the artist's body of work. Moreno's practice explores elements of diy culture, community, and mysticism through the lenses of Metal and Punk cultures. A coffin shaped bench was found in the third floor of the museum, and transformed into a musical instrument and cabinet of sorts with installed shelves and speakers. Stairs were built to raise the bench up and allow the audience to climb up and sit on it, as well as pull pieces from the museum collection to fill the shelves and stairs. Knives and paint markers were also provided for the residents and visitors of Elsewhere to deface and carve into the piece making it their own.In this piece Richard flips the normal process of viewership, allowing the audience to be both performer and artist, creating a space for experimentation, and interaction. Absolving ownership he hopes the piece to have multiple lives and iterations.
Toe Walker | Jasmine Best
Jasmine Best (Greensboro, NC) | October 2021
Toe Walker is an exercise in body awareness and personal appreciation. It encourages audiences to consider how they take up space in the world and how their body automatically navigates. The artist naturally walks on the balls of her feet. A trait that is hereditary but was also encouraged in girl children as benign a femme trait. Walking on your toes one is used to moving through the world quietly and minimally. This was interrupted by the very old and loud floors of Elsewhere. Jasmine decided to fight their instinct to walk on the quietest parts of the floor and actively seek out where the floor makes the most noise.
Toe Walker is made up of bright, balls of feet only, painted footprints that directly correlate to how loud the floor is where the most footprints reside. Toe Walker invites audiences to play with how much space they want to take up with their movement and how much attention they allow themselves to draw to their movement in Elsewhere.
Curation Doll in Nana's Chair | Jasmine Best
Jasmine Best (Greensboro, NC) | October 2021
Curation Doll draws power to protect so that we do not have to be strong. The doll figure has skin made of images of flowers arranged from Elsewhere’s own fabric collection. The era of these fabrics informs the aesthetic and associations of the florals. The actual flowers collected from the collection drape the doll and, it’s resting chair, and the frames on the wall creating a protective covering. The artist’s own family would make fabric dolls and place them on chairs both as showcases of skills previously only appreciated in a domestic context but what felt to be as protectors of a domestic space. The Doll figure sits relaxed and reserved in front of an abstracted family photo wall. Pulling more power from the idea of personal black curation in reference to an essay by Bell Hooks about how home photo walls were some of the only places Black people were able to control their own image in a gallery like space.
My Sister and Her Friends | Black Women Comedy Showcase
Monthly showcase of Black women from across North Carolina.
Stained-Glass Storage | David Alpert
David Alpert (Kansas City, MO) | Exchange (Kansas City) | August 2021
Stained-Glass Storage furthers the aestheticization of Elsewhere Museum’s former thrift store products through visually focused storage. Artist—David Alpert—built wood shelves across one of two kitchen windows. He collected and organized stained-glass objects from the Museum onto these shelves, mimicking a stained-glass window. The majority of former thrift store objects at Elsewhere live out-of-reach from museum visitors. In essence, Elsewhere transforms these functional ephemera into aesthetic compositions. Stained-Glass Storage brings this object-use shift clearly into focus. Alpert flips jars, stacks ashtrays on plates, and balances bottles into vases. Traditionally, these items would either be used for initially intended purposes or stored for optimal space efficiency. Alpert reinterprets these domestic objects as purely sculptural, at least for a moment. Because the stained-glass items are placed instead of attached, they can be rearranged to create countless compositions. In fact, Alpert regularly pulled out the step ladder and reorganized Stained-Glass Storage throughout his fellowship, often times with the direction of the other artists who happened to be in the kitchen. In this way, Stained-Glass Storage progresses Elsewhere’s curation of out-of-use goods, inviting ongoing collaboration and enhanced visibility.
Temporary Photographic Archive Office | David Alpert
The Temporary Photographic Archive Office (TPAO) proposes new archival methods for the Elsewhere Museum. The TPAO collects, scans, and shares photographic ephemera from the Elsewhere library—Polaroids, postcards, 4x6” prints, etc. By caring for these objects through digitization, archiving, and dissemination, the TPAO justifies more permanent, interactive methods of conservation for the Museum (permanence being a relative term). At the surface, the TPAO scanned, organized, and digitally shared photographic prints. On a deeper level, the TPAO chose to subvert the Museum’s pre-existing curatorial philosophy. This is to say that the Museum has previously taken an ambivalent approach to their collection, simultaneously enforcing strict rules regarding the former thrift store objects while allowing artist creations to degrade. The TPAO shifts that focus from out-of-circulation consumer products to human interactions—both human-to-human and human-to-object. The TPAO revises the Elsewhere story or rather reinterprets their history as people-centric.
Awakening Bell. Touch and Go. Body of Mind. | Mahedi Anjuman
Mahedi Anjuman (Reno, NV) | August 2021
Upon entering the museum, the sound of the bell will mentally and physically prepare the visitors to experience the museum and collections.
Seven colors of fabric columns and seven white donuts hang in seven different corners, the visitor will be touch each of them. Seven colors represent the chakra that has seven levels of intensity of meditation.
It is a collaborative project with 20 to 30 individuals from the Greensboro community. Where collaborators assisted in making 300-500 fabric balls out of the museum collection. I have collected those balls and sewn them together to create one body.