Morgan O’Hara “Handwriting the Constitution & Portraits for the 21st Century”

Mitchell Algus Gallery

This event has ended.

The Mitchell Algus Gallery presents an exhibition of two series of work by Morgan O’Hara, Handwriting the Constitution & Portraits for the 21st Century.

The current exhibition is part of a broader survey of Morgan O’Hara’s work, Six Series in Three Exhibitions, being held concurrently at the Anita Rodgers Gallery (Time Studies, Letterpress and Silverpoint Series) and the Magdalena Keck Gallery at Roll and Hill (Live Transmission drawings) in SoHo. (See information above.)

Morgan O’Hara has pursued rigorous conceptual work centered on the documentation of human activity in space and time since her student days at Berkeley in the late 1960s. O’Hara’s projects fall within discrete series, many pursued continuously throughout her five decades long career. The two series included in the current exhibition at Mitchell Algus includes Portraits for the 21st Century, begun in the early 1980s that comprise large-scale drawings following the movement/geographic displacement patterns of specific people (hence “portraits”) within and between cities and across the globe.

The second series, Handwriting the Constitution, is a social art project began in January of 2017, in response to Trump’s assumption of the Office of President.
Leading public “handwriting sessions” O’Hara invites participants “to handwrite the US Constitution or other documents [such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights] and written to protect human rights and freedoms” thereby creating “a physical and psychological space that explores the practice of concentrated writing as an art form, and a process designed to bring people together in a quiet and calming way, all by focusing on human rights. It has been identified as a powerful and transformative form of “activism for introverts.”

So far O’Hara has overseen 103 sessions across the globe. (The complete list of sessions can be viewed at the project’s website: https://www.handwritingtheconstitution.com.) Set beside materials from previous handwriting session and running the length of this exhibition the 102nd session will be ongoing at the gallery with a table set with documents, pens, paper, envelopes and stamps beside a list of politicians and government officials to whom transcribed portions of the documents, such the Constitution and Bill of Rights, may be sent. These letters can be placed in stamped envelopes by their writers and will be collected for a mass posting at show’s end. (A 103rd session will be held at the Anita Rogers Gallery on Saturday, May 4).