Lord, I gotta keep on (movin’) Opening

Join us for the opening celebration of Athi-Patra Ruga’s exhibition, Lord, I gotta keep on (movin’). An artist talk will take place on Friday, September 12.

The multidisciplinary practice of Athi-Patra Ruga (b. Umtata, Eastern Cape, South Africa; lives and works in Cape Town and Hogsback, Eastern Cape) centers on myths—their creation, their unraveling, and their relationship to power and liberation. Through performance, film, painting, textile, and glass, Ruga creates allegorical figures using craftsmanship as a strategy of re-embodiment. His figures move through utopic and dystopic realms, aspects of which in turn draw from Xhosa history and legend as well as post-apartheid South Africa. Since 2012, many of Ruga’s projects have centered on the imagined realm of Azania, an ancient Greek reference to a southeastern region of Africa. Azania was taken up by activists in the struggle to end apartheid, invoking both a precolonial Black homeland and a decolonized, liberated South Africa.

Ruga’s Azania is rife with hybridity, pomp, ritual, and gender play. A “Versatile Queen” helms this non-dynastic Black matriarchal society amid an evolving pantheon of beings who seductively unravel entrenched power dynamics around race and sexuality. Connecting with historical and present-day figures—the biblical Ruth, the dancer and Harlem Renaissance muse Francois “Féral” Benga, the artist Rotimi-Fani Kayode, the South African pop star Brenda Fassie, and Ruga’s own grandmother—his protagonists move through hybrid worlds with the agency of rematriation. In the making and unmaking of narratives, Ruga offers up ways to persevere through a fractured present, marked by the unfulfilled promise of past liberation movements but imbued with the emancipatory possibilities of queer Black femme culture. Learn more about Athi-Patra Ruga here.

Curated by Stamatina Gregory, Head Curator / Director of Exhibitions and Collections

About the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art

The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art provides a platform for artistic exploration through multi-faceted queer perspectives. We embrace the power of the arts to inspire, explore, and foster understanding of the rich diversity of LGBTQIA+ experiences. We aim to be a home for queer art, artists, scholars, activists and allies, and a catalyst for discourse on art and queerness. With a collection of over 30,000 objects and a research library of over 3,000 volumes, the Museum fosters experimentation and research through exhibitions, programs, educational platforms, and publications.

Located at 26 Wooster Street, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art strives to provide a welcoming environment to all visitors. Five external steps lead to our entrance doors: a wheelchair lift is available. All galleries are wheelchair-accessible, and a single-occupancy accessible restroom is located behind the visitor services desk: all restrooms are gender-neutral. Large print didactics are available. For questions or access requests, please email [email protected] with 1 week advance of your visit.

Host or Publisher Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art