MOCA GA / Calendar

A site-based show and meditation on choreography at the intersection of what is social, political, timely, and sincere, that brings together a constellations of people, installations, and experimentation.

Artist Lauri Stallings has fostered an expanded practice that includes public choreographies, place building, green economy and co-dreaming with many communities. Stallings works as an artist, and organizer and her projects aim to manifest live art activities and strategies that advance the idea of public as a genesis and subject for spatial and spiritual change. Stallings has described her work as a migration of body language, ancestral ritual, and civic actions- with collaborators such as preservationists, farmers, and performers- deeply committed to experimentation.

Originally trained as a ballet dancer, Stallings shifted the focus of her practice in 2008 in order to address more directly the immediate social, economic, and cultural needs of the American South. She is the founder of the nonprofit glo platform, a unique hybrid activating the intersection between movement, historic preservation, community development, and spirituality. Stallings graduated from Point Park University cum laude in performing arts. She has participated in national and international art exhibitions and shows since 2006. In 2015, Stallings was artist-in-residence at Georgia Institute of Technology. She as a Rome Prize nominee from the American Academy of Arts in 2011, and a Bogliaso Fellow at Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities in 2010. She served as resident choreographer of Atlanta Ballet from 2006 through 2008. Stallings is a 2017 MOCA GA Working Artist Project Fellow, and she is a finalist for the 2018 Hudgens Prize.

Stallings creations have been exhibited and performed inCentral Park in New York City; Art Basel Miami, South Beach; National Center for Civil and Human Rights; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; City Center, New York City; Atlanta Symphony Hall; Trinity Laban, London; Atlanta Contemporary; Augsburg Opera Haus, Germany, among others. Lauri thrives in bi-medium collaborations that defy ideological conventions, including Maestro Robert Spano, Big Boi and the Dungeon Family, and artist Daniel Arsham. Stallings is the inaugural recipient of Emory University’s Creativity and Arts Award, and Flux Projects public art grant. She has received awards and grants from Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Creative Time, Chicago Music & Dance Alliance, Atlanta Beltline Urban Development, and Artadia.

Stallings was born and raised on the Eastside of Gainesville, Florida. In 2012, Stallings older brother died of complications to AIDS, and to date the artist considers his passing as her most important education. Stallings makes all of her work in a 118-year old factory space at The Goat Farm Arts Center in Atlanta.

This round of Working Artist Project was curated by René Morales, Curator, Perez Art Museum, Miami, Florida.

René Morales received degrees in Art History from Swarthmore College and Brown University. He has been a curator at the Perez Art Museum Miami—previously known as Miami Art Museum—since 2005. In 2014, he organized the museum’s current collection display Global Positioning Systems. Morales organized three well-received exhibitions for the opening of PAMM in 2013—Amelia Peláez: The Craft of Modernity, A Human Document: Selections from the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, andMonika Sosnowska: Market. Recent exhibitions he has organized include a survey of the work of Miami-based painter Victoria Gitman, a discursive installation by Marjetica Potrc, a project that incorporates live parrots by the Rotterdam-based artist pair Bik Van der Pol, a site-specific sculptural work by Miami-based artist Nicolas Lobo, and a selection of Romare Bearden’s 1964 Photostat works. Morales is currently working on newly commissioned projects with Sarah Oppenheimer and Susan Hiller, as well as a major survey of the work of Dara Friedman. Prior to working at PAMM, Morales worked at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.