Maya Stovall is interested in what she considers monumental questions of human existence. A contemporary artist and ethnographer, her practice has been recently focused on Detroit, where she grew up, and Aarhus, Denmark, where she spent time over the past year. In her Liquor Store Theatre, a four-years-running, four-volume, thirty-plus video episode meditation on city life, included in the Whitney Biennial 2017, the artist conducted anthropological field research, and, staged and documented dance performances and conversations in the streets, sidewalks and parking lots of liquor stores in the neighborhood where she also lived. As a visiting artist/Ph.D. at the University of Aarhus in the summer 2017, she created a new body of work, Havnepladsen Ballet, staging performances and discussions in the middle of a public fountain in the largest harbor in Scandinavia. Her Liquor Store Theatre is the subject of a current solo exhibition, Maya Stovall: Liquor Store Theatre Performance Films, at Cranbrook Art Museum, on view through March 2018. She also is a participating artist, with a mirror and found glass work entitled, Untitled A, in the Studio Museum in Harlem’s current group exhibition, Fictions, the latest installment in the Museum’s F-show series. Maya has exhibited and performed across the U.S., Canada, and Europe. The artist’s Liquor Store Theatre book is in contract negotiation with Duke University Press and her work is included in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
