On April 26th and 27th, from 1 to 6 pm, artists in DUMBO will open their doors to the public as part of DUMBO Open Studios, offering a rare look inside the art studios along the Brooklyn waterfront. Since the 1970s, DUMBO has been shaped by its vibrant art community. This interview series highlights a handful of participating artists in 2025. Each response offers a glimpse of what’s waiting behind the studio door. Rodney Ewing has been in DUMBO since 2022. His studio is at 20 Jay Street, #M09.
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What will we see in your studio?
During Open Studios, I will be exhibiting completed and works in progress from my latest series The Architecture of Memory and Loss. How do we memorialize the missing, the taken, the cherished, and those confined to the margins of apathy? As a country, and in our individual factions, we have perfected the idea of valorizing the strong, the victorious, and the conquerors, those we feel epitomize the values of righteousness and provide us with the illusion of prosperity. I understand that there is nostalgia associated with these structures, an artifice that represents better days and the projection of a continued manifest destiny, but as we have witnessed during the #BlackLivesMatter movement, people have called out how these monuments do not represent everyone. And to many in the BIPOC community, they are reminders of the painful and persisting systems of colonialism and white supremacy.
Currently, many of these statues and street names have been removed or changed. This has caused a further debate and question about history, and how it should be documented. Some believe that the renovation of these sites is tantamount to erasing their culture, for others the absence of these objects is a restoration of the past. There have been many discussions of what to do with these shrines that range from keeping them in place and including a plaque that details the entire history of the individual, good and bad, to removing them intact and storing them in museums. These suggested solutions don’t address the issues of respectful representation of the past, nor do they leave room for a narrative that informs accurately.
The Architecture of Memory and Loss is a body of work that will address the idea of paying tribute to marginalized individuals and their history. These constructions will be theoretical architectural pieces that function as cenotaphs, monuments for a person buried elsewhere. These works on paper and objects will range from honoring the lives lost during the Triangle Trade to the struggle for maintaining autonomy over one’s self.
This project is inspired by the intersection of two artistic practices that I admire. Lebbeus Woods, and Amiri Baraka. Wood’s detailed drawings and models challenged the common perceptions of what architecture could do and expand the potential of what we see for our buildings and cities, while Baraka’s essay Technology and Ethos argued that any new technology must be spiritually oriented because it must aspire to raise humanity’s spirituality and expand its consciousness—it must begin by being humanistic. With these compositions, I will be focusing on the creation of mechanisms that reflect a new morality and spirit, pieces that focus on reflection and acknowledgement.
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About the artist: Rodney Ewing is a visual artist whose drawings, installations, and mixed media works focus on his need to intersect body and place, memory and fact, and to reexamine human histories, cultural conditions, and trauma. As a topic-based artist, Ewing’s interdisciplinary practice involves extensive research of overlooked historical objects, individuals, spaces, and events of the Black Diaspora. His work has been exhibited at The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Jack Shainman Gallery / The School, NY; The Drawing Center, NY; Veterans Museum, Chicago; The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), San Francisco; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), SF; Minnesota Street Project, SF; Rena Bransten Gallery, SF among many others. Ewing’s work is included in the collections at Tisch Library, Tufts University; Fogg Museum, Harvard University; Institute and Museum of California at UC Irvine; De Young Museum, SF; and The Fairfield CT Museum of Art. Ewing is represented by Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, CA. @ledette