The Way Out Is Through

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Leroy Neiman Art Centre,

New York, USA

5 September to 30 December, 2014

The Way Out Is Through is an exhibition conceived as both passage and proposition. It asks how we inhabit cities in flux and how we might reimagine belonging when home itself becomes transient. The exhibition gathers artists who move between disciplines—Nobutaka Aozaki, Peggy Buth, Free Breakfast Program, Paloma McGregor, Akeema-Zane, Nicko Nogués, Kyla Marshell, Mark Salvatus and Phan V.—to think through the entanglement of place, memory and social imagination in the contemporary urban condition.

In a century defined by mobility and rupture, the city is both promise and predicament. It is a site of encounter, conflict, creativity and dispossession. Half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas, a figure projected to rise to two-thirds by mid-century. Yet what does it mean to belong to a city that remakes itself faster than we can name it? Following Doreen Massey’s argument that “space is the dimension of multiplicity” (For Space, 2005), this exhibition takes the city as a living archive—a mesh of coexisting narratives, where individual and collective identities are negotiated, lost and continually reclaimed.

The title, The Way Out Is Through, functions as both instruction and reflection. It borrows its cadence from Robert Frost’s 1915 poem “A Servant to Servants” and its sensibility from the lived experience of cities in transformation. The phrase gestures towards the necessity of endurance: we do not evade crisis; we move through it together. The exhibition positions this act of “moving through” as an ethics of attention and care, recognising, as bell hooks once wrote, that home can be “a site of resistance” (hooks, 1990). Here, the idea of home extends beyond walls and thresholds to include shared memory, public space and collective imagination.

The participating artists give form to this idea through diverse and often participatory gestures. Phan V. presents an interactive installation that materialises the fleeting relationship between stability and transience, inviting visitors to register what endures and what dissolves. Free Breakfast Program’s Breakfast for Dinner intervention turns hospitality into a political gesture, transforming the gallery into a communal dining room where strangers break bread as a form of research and resistance. Nicko Nogués’s Thank You, Harlem establishes a public phone line for expressions of gratitude—a sonic archive that captures the texture of neighbourhood life and the rhythms of everyday civility.

Peggy Buth’s photographic essay on the demolished architecture of East Berlin acts as a counter-monument to forgetting, tracing the erasures and reconstructions that accompany shifting ideologies of space (Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 1974). Mark Salvatus’s animated work juxtaposes global flows of commerce and communication with intimate acts of local exchange, mapping how value circulates within and beyond the city. Paloma McGregor and Angela’s Pulse reimagine dance as urban choreography, where the body carries the city’s memory and movement becomes a form of cartography. Nobutaka Aozaki’s participatory interventions—hand-drawn maps, ephemeral encounters—reveal the invisible circuits of care that sustain public life. Akeema-Zane and Kyla Marshell fold poetry, sound and image into portraits of displacement and solidarity, making language itself a kind of public square.

If these works differ in medium, they share a common pursuit: to make visible the social architectures that underwrite urban experience. Their gestures echo Michel de Certeau’s notion of “the practice of everyday life” (1984), where walking, speaking, and improvisation become political acts. The exhibition foregrounds this practice-based intelligence as a curatorial method—what AbdouMaliq Simone calls “people as infrastructure” (2004)—a living system of relations, networks, and small gestures that sustain the larger body of the city.

To walk through The Way Out Is Through is to move through a landscape of transition. The exhibition refuses nostalgia for an imagined stability and instead celebrates adaptability as a form of care. It honours the resilience of communities that persist despite displacement and proposes art as a civic tool for listening, hosting, and remembering.

Urban theorist David Harvey reminds us that “the right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources; it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city” (Harvey, 2008). This exhibition echoes that call. It seeks to transform spectatorship into participation, observation into empathy, and space into encounter. The gallery becomes a civic observatory—part classroom, part commons—where art operates as both witness and agent.

The Way Out Is Through does not promise resolution. Instead, it offers method: an invitation to think, move and care through the complexity of contemporary urban life. It proposes that our passage through precarity can itself become a form of belonging—a choreography of endurance, invention and mutual regard. To pass through is not to leave behind; it is to remain awake, together, in motion.

Selected References

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
Amin, Ash and Nigel Thrift. Cities: Reimagining the Urban. Polity Press, 2002.
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large. University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, 2011.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life. Verso, 2004.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 1984.
Harvey, David. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review, 2008.
hooks, bell. “Homeplace (A Site of Resistance).” In Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, 1990.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Blackwell, 1991 (orig. 1974).
Massey, Doreen. For Space. Sage Publications, 2005.
Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture, 2003.
Simone, AbdouMaliq. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” Public Culture, 2004.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford University Press, 1983 (orig. 1976).
Zukin, Sharon. Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Curated by Leticia Gutierrez, Ladi’Sasha Jones, Kirstin Kapustik, Zena Koo, John Kenneth Paranada, and Maurizzio Hector Pineda.