Work by a De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) artist has been featured in one of America’s leading venues for cutting edge and avant-garde art.
Lala Meredith-Vula, a Reader in Art and Photography and part of DMU’s School of Visual and Performing Arts, features in a new exhibition called the needle, the haystack and the thread at The Arts Club of Chicago.
Photograph courtesy of RCH Documentation, Courtesy of The Arts Club of Chicago
The Arts of Club of Chicago has been a pre-eminent exhibitor of international art since 1916. It is a forum for established and emerging artists and a celebrated venue for performers around the world.
Among the many artists and scholars who have made appearances at The Arts Club through its many decades of avant-garde programs are: W. H. Auden, Leonard Bernstein, Daniel Buren, John Cage, Le Corbusier, Merce Cunningham, Jean Dubuffet, Philip Glass, Martha Graham, David Hockney, Phyllis Lambert, David Mamet, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Gertrude Stein, Igor Stravinsky, and Dylan Thomas.
Lala’s work is part of a group exhibition which also features work by Aboubakar Fofana and Britta Marakatt-Labba, all of whom are exhibiting in Chicago for the first time, and the late Maria Lai. It is guest curated by Monika Szewczyk, formerly of contemporary art exhibition Documenta 14.
She said: “It was an honour for me to be included in an Exhibition and a space that has hosted such illustrious names as Jean Dubuffet and John Cage...as an Artist who lives between cultures and as someone who is constantly in the middle of a search for my own identity through Art, where I mostly live...Chicago was a still point in my turning home, and offered me a place to reflect, I long to return soon. ”
Her work features photographs from her "Haystacks" series: a project which has been ongoing since 1989. She has collected over 4,000 photographs of farmers' haystacks mainly in Kosova, Albania and near regions.
It is the latest major exhibition for Lala. Last year she was featured in the worldwide contemporary art exhibition Documenta 14, held in Kassel and Athens, with thousands of visitors attending the shows. It is a magnet for collectors, Gallery-owners and Art enthusiasts from all over the world and represents an outstanding display of the achievements of this art world.
The Documenta series is held every five years and the artists invited to be part of the exhibition are considered to be at the cutting edge of their disciplines. She was also part of an Arts Council-curated exhibition which combined work by famed Young British Artists such as the Chapman Brothers, with Pre-Raphaelite masters such as William Blake.
The needle, the haystack and the thread will be open to the public until May 19 in Chicago.
Posted on Friday 6 April 2018