Sondra Perry: A Terrible Thing

What turns a random space into a place? What inscribes history into it, or lends it significance? These questions occupy the installation artist Sondra Perry in her current piece, A Terrible Thing, for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland. On Euclid Street in the heart of Cleveland, Perry carries out a kind of archaeological study of the street’s history using video, pictures found online, and digital methods of representation. In doing so, she relates the changing infrastructure of race representation on the street and its gender-political effect in everyday use to each other in order to negotiate issues of identity—of a city, a society, and of individuals. This work became a prism of times and perspectives that can now be imagined with the help of this publication.