You Don't Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows
Artists: Eduardo Cervantes, Alexis de Chaunac, Laura Elkins, Karen Eliot, Shahram Entekhabi, Noël Hennelly, Paul Loughney, Jason Mena, Eugenio Merino & Indecline, Lindsey Nobel, Ghazeleh Seidabadi, Sari Tervaniemi, Etienne Warneck
Proyectos Raul Zamudio and Empty Circle are pleased to present You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows. If the title of this exhibition seems familiar, it may be because one, two or numerous reasons. Originally, the phrase appears as part of the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s famous song Subterranean Homesick Blues. And the other source is equally as famous or in this case, infamous: it inspired the moniker of the American, left-wing, armed guerilla group known as the Weather Underground.
The Weather Underground was an off shoot of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that were political activists in the 1960s, and then a handful of its members decided to take their ideologies to their logical, violent conclusion. This culminated in the destruction of a Greenwich Village townhouse due to their manufacturing of explosives, and the robbery they committed of an armored truck resulting in three deaths.
This international, mixed-media group exhibition is no paean to the Weather Underground; but takes the original source that became a social and political barometer of the 1960s and transposes it to the 2023 global landscape rife with its own social and political turmoil. The artworks exhibited address a myriad of themes that at first sight may seem personal, but as the ‘60s adage goes, the personal can be political. Other works more directly interrogate our current milieu by exploring the topical, while other works address our contemporary quagmire through history. While the artworks can be appreciated through their individual narratives, in unison the act like a social weather report in alerting us to the disasters that await us if we not collectively act to avoid them.