Shelter in Place, which in its entirety is viewable from the sidewalk surrounding the museum, is a film, photography, and dance-based interrogation of the social tenets of Sukkot—departing and dwelling, expressing and atoning, striking and shaking. A Black Jewish response to histories of oppression, McKinney’s Shelter in Place is an inquiry into social isolation and the physical and emotional effects of anti-Black racial violence. While the museum is closed, the multimedia installation extends into the museum’s first floor gallery and windows and is completely viewable both day and evening from the sidewalk.
With Shelter in Place, McKinney deconstructs the idea of the sukkah, the temporary dwelling built adjacent to Jewish homes for Sukkot, laying bare the internal tensions of this contemporary moment in history. McKinney shares, “I often think about my role as an artist to bring awareness to the impact of oppression and to the vestiges of historical trauma. I am interested in what might be on the other side of the trauma—and I think it might be each other. I am most interested in what I call ‘the aesthetics of liberation.’ I ask, ‘How do we heal? What is the world we want? And how can we use art to move forward toward liberation?”
Shelter in Place is presented through a collaboration with Asylum Arts, which supports contemporary Jewish culture on an international scale, bringing greater exposure to artists and cultural initiatives, and the Council of American Jewish Museums.