Jarod Lew: Strange You Never Knew
Curated by Jennifer Friess
University of Michigan Museum of Art
February 1 - June 15, 2025
Strange You Never Knew, artist Jarod Lew’s first solo museum exhibition, explores the limits and potential of knowing—knowing who you are, knowing your family history, and knowing your place in a community. To navigate these unknowns, Lew primarily employs the medium of photography, exploring how it can function as a repository of personal and communal histories. He composes portraits of his family and friends as a way to know those closest to him and to forge relationships within his community. The resulting images render lived intergenerational experiences starkly visible and probe the nature of familial bonds in the wake of the silence brought about by trauma and displacement. Lew also manipulates existing media, such as found photographs, news footage, and video game sequences, in order to surface relationships among historic and contemporary acts of racism and violence toward Asian Americans.
Throughout this exhibition, Lew earnestly examines what is at the periphery of his own knowing. In doing so, he prompts us to consider the impossibility and imperative of our own.
