The Gallery Exhibit
Pop Box Gallery collaborated with Durham-based artist Eliza Redmann of Folded Poetry and RTP-based makerspace Hangar6 to design and produce the PROTOTYPE exhibit. Through an open call and invitations, Triangle area artists were challenged to apply their creativity to the pentaprism form however they saw fit. Through inspiration and iteration, amazing sculptures were produced. After displaying forty-one sculptures in their zero-commission gallery exhibit, Pop Box Gallery partnered with DurmPAC to create a digital zine as an archival companion. To create the zine, DurmPAC members reached out to selected artists with a series of questions about their pieces, their inspirations, and themselves. We are extremely grateful to the artists featured both here and in the exhibit for sharing their art with us.
Pop Box Gallery
Pop Box Gallery is a zero-commission pop-up art gallery serving the Triangle area of North Carolina. It is a collaboration between Laura Ritchie and Mavis Gragg, with a curatorial focus on artwork that directly responds to the political, economic, and social issues of our time and prioritizing artists and audiences who belong to historically marginalized groups, including BIPOC artists, queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming artists, and artists with disabilities.
DurmPAC
At the Durham Powerful Arts Collective, we engage in work that builds formative experiences for young artists in our community of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and/or LGBTQIA+ folks within the 919 area through establishing community connections and facilitating artist spaces. We want the young people that we engage to leave with more support, community, and confidence to continue pursuing artistic experiences.
We began creating the zine after Nori McDuffie, DurmPAC's project manager, was selected to serve as a gallery attendant for the Maroon Archive and PROTOTYPE exhibits. Pop Box Gallery and McDuffie wanted to embark on a collaborative effort implemented by DurmPAC's web developer, Jett Pavlica. Together, we sought to immortalize the artwork by creating a digital home for a subset of the exhibited pieces. Decorated with eleven live animations programmed with the JavasScript library p5.js and a few custom CSS stylesheets, this collection of webpages is the final prototype of that home.
We are incredibly grateful to you, the reader, for enjoying our zine.