Alisha B Wormsley: The Temple of Our Survival

Light Work’s Urban Video Project is pleased to present the exhibition Alisha B Wormsley: The Temple of Our Survival  at their architectural projection venue on the Everson Museum facade..

The Temple of Our Survival is new video work commissioned by Light Work for projection at UVP exploring what survival means and looks like through a series of interviews conducted by the artist with local care workers, land stewards, and cultural workers in her nomadic film set and project space.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Wormsley will be present for a special indoor film screening and panel talk on Thursday, March 19.

About the Work

The Temple of Our Survival
2026

While in-residence in Syracuse, Wormsley worked with Sankofa Reproductive Health and Healing Center, setting up her eponymous traveling film set and workshop space “The Temple of Our Survival” for the month of July. A work of art in its own right, the Temple is a massive tent draped in quilts made of vibrant traditional fabrics and sewn by the artist in designs invoking her own ancestral histories of migration and search for refuge.

In Wormsley’s own words, “This set is mobile not just for convenience but as a signifier of our relationship to land and landscape. That relationship is migrant. Ancestrally adapting to weather, plant-life, water and resources in every part of this country and beyond. The resilience is of the spirit.”

The Temple of Our Survival filmset has travelled to a total of eight sites around the country. At each of these, the artist held workshops using herbs grown in her grandmother’s garden and conducted interviews with local care workers, land stewards, and cultural workers, each of whom shared their own stories of and strategies for survival. 

About the Artist

Alisha B Wormsley is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer. Her main concern is to transform the world into a place where people can live. Her work has been shown at REDCAT in Los Angeles, Participant, INC, Cue Arts, and the Bronx Museum in NYC, and at the Andy Warhol Museum and Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, among many other venues. In 2020, Wormsley launched an artist residency for Black artists who M/other called Sibyls Shrine that supports over 150 artists. Wormsley is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts and an Assistant Professor of Social Practice at Carnegie Mellon School of Art.

In addition to being awarded a UVP Residential Commission, this project has won an Anonymous was a Woman NYFA Award, a Pittsburgh Foundation grant and the Sundance Interdisciplinary grant.

Artist’s website: www.alishabwormsley.com

Sponsors

All Light Work exhibitions are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and through a Tier Two Support Grant from the County of Onondaga, with the support of County Executive Ryan McMahon and the Onondaga County Legislature, administered by CNY Arts.