jackie sumell and Studio CAJAIR present The Locker Room

2023/2024 Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation Artist-in-Residence jackie sumell and Studio CAJAIR present The Locker Room.

Artist jackie sumell works at the intersection of social sculpture, abolition and healing. With the principle of abolition always in mind, sumell inhabits the physical materials and architectures of oppression and transforms these physical structures into lived spaces of radical hope.

For The Locker Room, a work created especially for Colgate University, sumell worked with a team of students who go by Studio CAJAIR (an anagrammatic nod to the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation Artist-In-Residence program, which underwrites this work). Together, sumell and Studio CAJAIR spent the academic year considering the relationship between athletics and activism, ultimately recreating the architecture of a locker room to envisage how sports and locker rooms can be horizons of liberation. They ask, “What happens if the locker room becomes public, seeded with the best of its potential? Can we make the lockers themselves altars to the future[s] we wish to see?”

sumell and Studio CAJAIR, along with students they invited from Art & Activism (ARTS 132A), transformed 12 lockers into altars to future worlds. They imagine everything from ecological justice, racial equity, and classless societies to happiness after retirement, as wins.

The Locker Room is presented by the Art Department and the Christian A. Johnson Foundation. The Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation Artist-in-Residence was established in 1986 as a challenge grant in support of the arts at Colgate. The residency program permits one or more artists to become part of the Colgate community every academic year.