Q_RAIDER / BDGRMMR — Know Who You Are at Every Age, curated by Edwin Ramoran, Bronx River Art Center, New York, 2014

Q_Raider and BDGRMMR. Know Who You Are at Every Age. Bronx River Art Center, New York, 4–26 April 2014. Exhibition invitation. Offset-printed postcard; 18 × 12.5 cm. Photographic recto overlaid with dense columns of participant names; institutional information to verso.

Session Four of BRAC’s Curatorial Practice Series, a programme built around guest curators addressing art, social practice and community. The exhibition was initiated by Q_Raider — the curatorial platform representing the Office of Curatorial Work, founded by independent curator Edwin Ramoran — in collaboration with BDGRMMR (pronounced “Bad Grammar”), the New York collective founded by multimedia artist Yulan Grant, writer Justin Allen and sound artist Brandon Owens. The series was programmed by Karine Duteil.

Not a conventional group exhibition. BRAC explicitly called it non-thematic. Ramoran used the exhibition partly as a mentorship exercise in the practical logistics of operating a gallery; BDGRMMR was brought in to work on the layout, their stated concern being with white-cube politics, access and the uneasiness some audiences experience in gallery spaces. The structure divided material into three overlapping systems: Art for All Ages / For Shows presented actual works; S/O consisted of shout-outs and material from the Office of Curatorial Work; The History of Storytelling was an open reading and archive area of VHS tapes, books, CDs, DVDs, pamphlets, mail, music, comics and material kept in Manila folders.

That distinction matters when reading the invitation: not every name printed on the recto was exhibiting an artwork. Some were participants, some were acknowledgements, others entered through archival or cultural material. Directly within Art for All Ages / For Shows: HOUSE OF LADOSHA, Kenya (Robinson), Conrad Ventur, Jaret Vadera, Mary Valverde, Tomiko Pilson, Jeffrey Owen Ralston, Rafael Melendez, Viet Le, Zavé Martohardjono, Hoang Tan Nguyen, Danny Alba, Keith O. Anderson and others. Within S/O: Candice Breitz, Cécile Chong, Roberto Cuoghi, Anthony Goicolea, Heather Hart, Jordan Eagles, Dahlia Elsayed, Terence Koh, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Shaun Leonardo, Aristides Logothetis, Carrie Moyer, Paul Pfeiffer, Jaye Rhee, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, Hank Willis Thomas and Carlos Villa, among many others. Within The History of Storytelling: Laurie Anderson, Kenneth Anger, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Visual AIDS, Andy Warhol, John Waters and others, through books, video, mail and source material.

The invitation’s design performs the exhibition’s logic. The recto is almost entirely overwhelmed by names in narrow columns over Q_Raider’s Untitled, 2014 photograph — image and individual names competing for attention, no heroic reproduction of a single artwork, authorship difficult to rank. The verso returns to institutional order: BRAC logo, dates, opening hours, address, transport, funders. The unruly network on one side translated into administrative information on the other.

This sits in a New York moment — 2014 — when artist collectives, zines, social practice, queer and Black cultural networks, archive-based work and alternative curatorial structures were increasingly overlapping, before many of those practices had been routinely absorbed by major museums. The invitation doesn’t document a finished canon. It records a field before the hierarchy had fully settled.

Condition: very good. Light handling and minor edge and corner wear consistent with circulation.

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