May Makki

May Makki is Associate Curator at Storefront for Art and Architecture. Her curatorial practice considers the infrastructural possibilities of exhibition-making and the communities, economies, and technologies that develop alongside works of art. At Storefront, she explores how cultural practices can produce new ways of thinking about the built environment and public life.

Prior to joining Storefront, Makki was Co-Curator of the Third Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (2026), where she worked across commissions, loans, and site-specific projects by artists including Agustina Woodgate, Yussef Agbo-Ola, Petrit Halilaj, Nour Mobarak, Nancy Mounir, and Daniel Lind-Ramos. From 2022–2025, she was part of the curatorial team in the Department of Media and Performance at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she curated exhibitions, screenings, and public programs including Martin Beck: Last Night, An Evening with Haig Aivazian, and the collection display of works by Tala Madani.

She was the 2024–2025 Curatorial AIRspace resident at Abrons Arts Center, in partnership with Artists Alliance Inc., and has held research positions at MoMA PS1 and the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University. She holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and a BA in Art History from the University of Chicago.

may.makki@gmail.com

JJJJJerome Ellis: Loops of Retreat

May 25-July 22, 2023
Sweet Pass Sculpture Park with support from Dallas Contemporary

In his album The Clearing (2021), the JJJJJerome Ellis imagines his block stutter to be a point of departure for examining the relationship between music, blackness, disabled speech, and time. The artist's stutter manifests as intervals of silence in his speech. He calls these intervals “clearings,” which shift from compositional tool to metaphor to disruptor of “conventional” time as the album unfolds. For this exhibition, the opening track from the album was presented as an immersive audio and video environment in SP2. Through musical and textual references alike, Ellis expanded on Harriet Jacobs’ concept of the “loophole of retreat,” exploring practices of refusal in Black speech and music. Ellis says of The Clearing: “I hope this album offers the listener some of what my stutter offers me: an opportunity to imagine new ways of being in time.”

The installation was presented in conjunction with a live improvisation by the artist on May 25th, 2023, produced with support from Dallas Contemporary, which reflected Ellis’ research into how themes explored in The Clearing come into contact with ecology. Drawing on materials collected for his book Aster of Ceremonies (September 2023), Ellis sensitively transformed archival material of so-called “runaway slave advertisements,” into an open-ended song for Black ancestors moving through 19th century Virginia. Reimagining these figures as plants in bloom, he sang for their safety, considering the relationship between ecology and practices of freedom.

Photo: Trey Burns 2023. Courtesy Trey Burns and Sweet Pass Sculpture Park.