Installation Art – Page 10

NYC Art Shows- Hugh Hayden at Lisson Gallery

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Fiber Arts, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture

Jul 312024

For Hugh Hayden’s current exhibition Hughmans at Lisson Gallery, his sculptures remain hidden behind bathroom stall doors. The well-crafted works vary in subject, size, and material, and cover a wide range of social issues. For more information on his thought process and some of the work, Hayden recently discussed the show with Art in America.

From the press release-

Following his solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Hugh Hayden continues his exploration of the prosthetics of power in a new series of works and site-specific installations created for the Lisson Gallery New York space. In Hughmans, Hayden reengages with the concept of the bathroom stall in order to investigate experiences of revelation, intimacy, desire, and sexuality – this time through the lens of the collective experience.

Known for his poignant metaphors and examinations of human existence, Hayden’s work transcends individual experience to probe the collective consciousness. Hughmans maintains his signature use of wood as a primary medium alongside bronze, resin, and silicone, amplifying the depth and texture of his narrative. At the heart of the exhibition lies an ambitious site-specific installation, unraveling the complexities of power dynamics in contemporary society. Hayden transforms mundane elements into profound symbols, inviting viewers to confront their own perceptions and assumptions of daily life.

In the gallery, visitors will find an arrangement of metal bathroom stalls, each concealing an artwork within. This unconventional setup challenges notions of privacy and intimacy, urging viewers to reconsider their relationship with public spaces. Two wooden sculptures embodying the fictional character Pinocchio will be exhibited. Ebanocchio (2024) and Nocecchio (2024) serve as contrasting counterparts, one crafted from ebony and the other from walnut. In the original fairytale, Pinocchio’s name was also derived from his physical, wooden origin, ‘Pino’ being the Italian term for pine. These works employ Hayden’s recurring conceptual gesture of wood and the intersection of materiality and identity. The artist recently unveiled another sculpture, Geppetto (2023), in his comprehensive exhibition, American Vernacular, at the Laumeier Sculpture Park. Named in reference to Pincocchio’s father, the work serves as an antecedent to the pieces showcased in New York. Like much of Hayden’s ouvre, the fantastical story of the marionette is often attributed as a metaphor for the human condition.

In another stall, the artist will present Harlem (2024), a new ensemble of cast iron melting pots and copper pans – works which serve as a metaphor for the creation of America through cultural diversity. These particular sculptures will depict both facial features and functional musical instruments. This iteration of melting pots, made using sand casting, synthesizes diasporic movement and the African origins of the US. Unlike past presentations of similar works which were hung from the wall and ceiling, these works will be suspended from a New York City subway-style handrail.

This exhibition closes 8/2/24.

California Art Shows- “A Shadow Set Free” at Palm Springs Art Museum

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Glasswork, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Palm Springs, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture

Jul 262024

Helen Lundeberg, “Interior with Two Paintings”, 1982, acrylic on canvas

Room with sculpture by Chakaia Booker, “The Privilege of Eating”, 2012, rubber tires, wood, shovel

Max Neumann, “Untitled”, 1986, oil on linen

Liza Lou, “Dog”, 2002, glass beads on fiberglass and plaster

Ori Gersht, “Against the Tide, Diptych Monks”, 2010, archival pigment print on aluminum

There’s a lot of exceptional work on view for A Shadow Set Free, the group exhibition at Palm Springs Art Museum. Above are a few of the standouts, as well as one of two walls on which numerous works are grouped together.

From the museum about the exhibition and its theme-

A Shadow Set Free presents a selection of sculpture, photography, painting, drawings and prints from roughly the last 100 years. Though very different in style, subject matter and historical context, the works are united in their ability to evoke a sense of memory and convey an otherworldly aura.

The artists forgo an interest in the bright light of objective reality in favor of creating dream worlds, maintaining a rootedness in everyday reality while remaining free from specific histories. Together they demonstrate the various ways that modern and contemporary art imbues the familiar, external world with a spirit of subjectivity.

This exhibition closes 8/4/24.

Ohio Art Shows- The Spring/ Summer Exhibitions at Canton Museum of Art

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Canton, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Digital Art, Drawing, Glasswork, Illustration, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Ohio Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture

Jul 252024

Canton Museum of Art’s Spring/Summer Exhibitions include three artists who have created engaging new worlds for visitors to explore.

Ginny Ruffner’s sculptures hide colorful surprises in her exhibition Reforestation of the Imagination. Working with animator and media artist Grant Kirkpatrick, they have created digitally animated fictional plants that burst from the certain sections of the works when using their app on your phone (the museum will also loan you a tablet if you need one). Ruffner has also provided delightful descriptions for these creations, as well as her drawings.

From the museum-

Imagine an apocalyptic landscape. It appears barren, devastated, and hopeless. It is not.

In this traveling exhibition from the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, internationally renowned artist Ginny Ruffner creates a seemingly bleak environment that suddenly evolves into a thriving floral oasis by combining traditional sculpture with augmented reality (AR) technology. In collaboration with animator and media artist Grant Kirkpatrick, Ruffner brings to life a colorful world where glass stumps suddenly sprout mythical flora that have adapted to their surrounding conditions in unexpected, beautiful and optimistic ways. By transforming the CMA lower galleries into a multidimensional experience, Ginny Ruffner: Reforestation of the Imagination calls into question the very notions of reality and fantasy, of concrete and abstract, and of desolation and hope.

Ginny Ruffner is among a vibrant group of artists bringing AR to museum installations. By using this technology as another art media, she transforms visitor experiences. The installation consists of landmasses featuring intricate handblown glass sculptures of tree stumps, with painted tree rings that function as discrete QR codes. These islands surround a landmass that supports a large fiberglass stump sprouting beautifully grotesque bronze and glass appendages. Other than the central stump and the painted shelf mushrooms and tree rings on the surrounding stumps, the scene appears colorless and desolate; however, when viewed through AR’s technological lens an alternate landscape is revealed.

Visitors can download the free app “Reforestation” on their phones or use the iPads in the gallery to bring this second reality to life. When the tree rings of a stump are viewed through the device’s camera lens, a hologram of a fictional plant appears to sprout from the sculpture. These imagined fruits and flowers have evolved from existing flora, developing dramatic appendages and skills necessary to flourish in this radically different environment. In this reality, tulips develop stem flexibility, pears contain windows to the outside world and flowers take on the form of birds. The installation includes Ruffner’s tongue-in-cheek descriptions of her fanciful flora and their remarkable, sometimes humorous adaptations, as well as 19 original drawings by the artist that were the inspiration for the AR images.

“This is nature reimagining itself,” said Ruffner. “The imagination cannot be exterminated. It just re-creates itself. To me, ‘Reforestation’ is about hope.”

The intricate porcelain works Janice Jakielski created for her exhibition Impossible Objects are reminiscent of papercut art. Through her unique ceramic process (detailed in the Ceramics Monthly article linked below) the delicate work takes traditional objects and presents them in new and intriguing ways.

From the museum-

Janice Jakielski is a Massachusetts (soon to be Colorado) based sculptor. By inventing new ways of casting and manipulating ultra-thin porcelain sheets she can create impossible objects of curiosity, beautiful objects to provide focus, retreat and pause in an overwhelming world. Using meticulous detail, familiar forms and uncertain function she coaxes her audience to draw near, closing the physical gap between viewer and object. In this way the details of workmanship and the excessive fragility of the porcelain act as a whisper, flirtatiously demanding investigation. Her impossible objects were also featured in the January 2021 issue of Ceramics Monthly.

For Laine Bachman’s paintings for Beyond Worlds, she has created detailed environments filled with creatures and color.

From the museum and the artist-

“Suspended in the ether of some surreal galaxy, the worlds I create give a glimpse into flora and fauna that exist in a hidden interplanetary realm. Each is a themed bouquet where I explore and study different species that exist in our own world. I relish the details of their structures and include many forms of life I find fascinating. I approach each piece as a puzzle with parts that can coexist, painting a picture of a precious ecosystem that becomes more complex as the work evolves. One may find a frog nestled below a fern or a mole napping under a toadstool. There are many creatures and plants we recognize from the past and some that have yet to be discovered. Creating these planets has been a journey to capture the beauty of nature and elevate small moments that may otherwise go unseen. Though they reside in the mire of a newly formed galaxy, they are truly a celebration of our world and the life that exists within it.”- Laine Bachman

As a young child growing up in a once flourishing town in the Rust Belt of Ohio, Laine Bachman always had an affinity towards drawing and painting. Her parents encouraged her creativity from the beginning which led to her attending art school in nearby Columbus, receiving a BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design in painting in 1997.

Often inspired by myths and folklore, Bachman infuses the worlds she creates with archetypal imagery, underlying themes, decorative motifs, and meticulous details. Working in watercolor and acrylics, her paintings are full of creatures and landscapes, real or imagined, that are all part of the larger story behind her work. Bachman’s work, recognized as Magical Realism, is greatly influenced by Henri Rosseau and his flat, lush, and detailed landscapes and also by surrealist Frida Kahlo.

Representations of life, death, beauty, innocence, and evil are depicted in Bachman’s work. Whether it’s animals, insects, birds or favored objects, they become symbols of different expressions. As owls are a symbol for wisdom or butterflies can represent a transformation, it’s this kind of idea behind the creatures that helps them tell a part of the whole story.

The works expose unique environments in which to explore and pay homage to the various forms of life that Bachman finds fascinating and mysterious in nature. Vast landscapes are used to showcase these life forms, showing the spaces between and the surfaces above and below. The worlds she creates are hidden and untouched by man, and give the viewer a glimpse into the secret lives of their peculiar inhabitants.

These exhibitions close 7/28/24.

The museum is free all day on Thursdays and tonight, 7/25, is the last of their Virtual Reality Nights. From 4-8pm you can create your own reality with VR headsets, guided by a CMA educator.

NYC Art Shows- Mary Heilmann at Hauser & Wirth

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Drawing, Installation Art, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking

Jul 192024

Daydream Nation, Mary Heilmann’s exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, is filled with interesting forms, both familiar and abstract.

From the press release-

Curated by artist Gary Simmons, Heilmann’s friend and former student and colleague at New York’s School of Visual Arts, the exhibition celebrates her talent for distilling complex images and ideas into deceptively simple geometric forms and abstract gestural marks. Through rarely and never-before-seen works on paper from the 1970s to early 2000s, this presentation reveals how drawing functions as a form of daydreaming—of conjuring the sights, sounds and events of her past travels or her imagined future—in Heilmann’s creative process.

Heilmann is known for working across mediums and for installations which playfully combine disparate works. Reflecting on the artist’s approach to exhibition-making, ‘Daydream Nation’ brings together works on paper, ranging from watercolor studies for larger paintings to works that function as paintings on paper in their own right, alongside a selection of her ceramic sculptures and sculptural chairs to create an ambiently whimsical yet conceptually rigorous environment. Heilmann often works in series, revisiting and reimagining certain arrangements of form and color over time, as evidenced here in such recurring motifs as the chair, rosebud, spiral, wave and web. But in Heilmann’s oeuvre, repetition begets difference and from this multiplicity emerges important truths about the functions of memory and our process of translating it.

Drawing has always factored significantly into Heilmann’s practice, manifesting in a variety of forms in ‘Daydream Nation.’ The exhibition features a new mural-like installation that reimagines and expands an existing work into a new form of expression. Heilmann’s seventh wall drawing to date, this installation was developed in conversation with Simmons, who frequently explores the monumental scale of this medium in his own work.

The title of this exhibition is taken from Sonic Youth’s groundbreaking album ‘Daydream Nation’ (1988), beloved by both Heilmann and Simmons. Evoking Heilmann’s longstanding interest in daydreaming as a creative exercise and the importance of travel for her in this process, it also situates her oeuvre within the culture of youthful rebellion in New York City, the California-born artist’s adopted home since 1968 and a constant source of energy and inspiration for her both personally and professionally.

This exhibition closes 7/26/24.

For more about the artist and her work, check out this episode of Art21, below.

Throwback Thursday- Randyland in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Pennsylvania Art Shows, Pittsburgh, Places to Visit, Public Art, Sculptors / Sculpture

Jul 182024

Randyland is a free eclectic outdoor museum located on the Northside of Pittsburgh. The founder, Randy Gilson bought the property for $10,000 using a credit card. Upcycled objects, sculptures, paintings and murals began to fill the space, and the rest is history.

Included in the story of Randyland is how Gilson met and fell in love with his partner, David Paul Francis “Mac” McDermott. McDermott would go on to help Gilson build the museum. Sadly, he passed away from cancer in 2019.

The museum is open year round from 12-7pm.

NYC Art Shows- Joshua Charow at Westwood Gallery

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Jul 092024

“Jeff Way In His Tribeca Loft”, 2023; “Turtle Owl Death Mask”,2018 and “Egyptian Violet Gorilla Mask”, 2017

Kimiko Fujimura “Party-3 (Party at Peter’s), 1990, and “Kimiko Fujimura in her Chinatown Loft”, 2023

For his current exhibition, Loft Law, on view at Westwood Gallery, documentary photographer and filmmaker Joshua Charow photographed artists living and working in the remaining spaces still protected by Loft Law in NYC. The well-crafted portraits offer a chance to see how the artists have made these spaces home over the years.

The gallery has also included artwork by eleven of the artists featured in the photos- Carmen Cicero, Loretta Dunkelman, Betsy Kaufman, Kimiko Fujimura, Joseph Marioni, Carolyn Oberst, Marsha Pels, Gilda Pervin, Steve Silver, Mike Sullivan, and Jeff Way.

From the gallery-

In 1982, Article 7-C of the Multiple Dwelling Law, also known as the Loft Law, was passed in New York City. The law gave protection and rent stabilization to people living illegally in manufacturing and commercially zoned lofts. Hidden behind this legislation were thousands of artists who needed a live/work environment at an affordable rent. These artists protected by the Loft Law changed the trajectory of New York’s cultural landscape.

Three years ago, Charow found a map of the remaining buildings with Loft Law protection. He rang hundreds of doorbells to find and photograph over 75 Loft Law tenants across the city to document the last of these incredible spaces and the creative individuals who made them home. Charow’s interest in the Loft Law and the vanishing history of New York stemmed from his early teenage years when he became immersed in a subculture called ‘Urban Exploring,’ the practice of illegally climbing skyscrapers, bridges, and abandoned subway stations. One of the rooftops he visited was an old factory building in South Williamsburg, where a tenant explained to Charow about the building’s remaining tenants under Loft Law protection.

The photos are a living visual document of the expansive spaces: old flophouses on the Bowery, garment factories in Tribeca and SoHo, glass factories in Greenpoint, and even a former ice cream factory in DUMBO. From the 19th to the 20th century, many buildings in NYC, including SoHo, were manufacturing centers for items from sewing machines to textiles to printing houses. The massive light-filled loft spaces with high ceilings were left empty when these businesses vacated in the mid-1900s and moved to other areas outside of New York City. The industrial-zoned lofts were not legal to live in, as they did not meet the building requirements for residential use, and oftentimes were completely raw spaces without a kitchen, shower, plumbing, or even heat. However, artists were attracted to these large spaces where they could work and create at any hour of the day. At the end of the 1970s, loft living started gaining attention in the media and the wealthy started to become attracted to this lifestyle. Soon landlords began to evict the artist tenants in favor of a wealthier clientele. A group of artists formed the Lower Manhattan Loft Tenants and spent years lobbying in Albany to gain legal protections and rent stabilization. At the time the Loft Law was first passed, there were tens of thousands of artists living in lofts across the city. Today, only a few hundred artists protected under the original 1982 Loft Law remain. This exhibition marks one of the first documentary insights into this vanishing history.

The majority of Charow’s images depict painters, sculptors, photographers, musicians, and filmmakers captured amidst their industrial loft spaces. Notable portraits include experimental music and film artists Phillip (Phill) Niblock (1933-2024) and Katherine Liberovskaya (b. 1961); Phill was instrumental in the avant-garde music and film scene from the 1960s to the present. Visuals artists include 97-year-old abstract and figurative expressionist Carmen Cicero (b. 1926), who has works in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum; Kimiko Fujimura (b. 1932), who in 1965 was selected as “Japan’s Top 5 Female Painters in Contemporary Art” by Geijutsu-Shincho, a Japanese monthly art magazine; minimalist painter Loretta Dunkelman (b. 1937), a co-founder of the all-female artists cooperative A.I.R. Gallery; and Gilda Pervin (b. 1933), whose studio occupies the top floor of a 1790s Quaker building linked to the Underground Railroad and happens to be the old studio space of famed sculptor Eva Hesse, who worked there from 1965-70. Also included is Chuck DeLaney, co-founder of the Lower Manhattan Loft Tenants, an early activist group that was responsible for the lobbying and passing of the Loft Law.

This exhibition closes on 7/13/24.

NYC Art Shows- Joan Jonas at MoMA

Jul 052024

Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning, at the Museum of Modern Art, showcases the artist’s long and varied career. The exhibition includes her videos as well as props, sculptures, paintings and drawings. It’s a celebration of her collaborations (including Volcano Saga with actress Tilda Swinton), performances, installations, and her use of play to create all of these inventive works.

From the museum-

“I didn’t see a major difference between a poem, a sculpture, a film, or a dance,” Joan Jonas has said. For more than five decades, Jonas’s multidisciplinary work has bridged and redefined boundaries between performance, video, drawing, sculpture, and installation. The most comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s work in the United States, Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning traces the full breadth of her career, from works that explore the encounter between performance and technology to recent installations about ecology and the landscape.

Jonas began her decades-long career in New York’s vibrant Downtown art scene of the 1960s and ’70s, where she was one of the first artists to work in performance and video. Drawing influence from literature, Noh and Kabuki theater, and art history, her early experimental works probed how a given element—be it distance, mirrors, the camera, or even wind—could transform one’s perception.

Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning presents drawings, photographs, notebooks, oral histories, film screenings, performances, and a selection of the artist’s installations. Jonas continues to produce her most urgent work through immersive multimedia installations that address climate change and kinship between species. “Despite my interest in history,” she has said, “my work always takes place in the present.”

The museum’s website has several videos of her work online, as well as an interview with the Jonas in her NYC loft (seen below).

Art21 also has some great videos worth checking out to learn more.

The exhibition at MoMa closes 7/6/24.

NYC Art Shows- Martha Friedman at Broadway Gallery

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Conceptual Art, Glasswork, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture

Jun 212024

“Claw Foot”, 2024, steel, glass, rubber

“Throughline”, 2024, steel, glass

“Twofold”, 2024, steel, rubber

“Tail End”, 2024, steel, glass, concrete

“Slipper”, 2024, concrete, glass, human hair

There’s something very visceral about Martha Friedman’s sculptures for Divided Subject at Broadway Gallery. The body parts, the strange juxtapositions, and the metal rods which act like skewers, combine to form works that balance humor with something darker and aggressive.

From the gallery-

The Lacanian reference of the show’s title is a tip-off that the artist will continue her ongoing psychoanalysis of Modernist sculpture traditions. Wielding humor and violence in equal measure, Friedman homes in on art historical givens with a critical eye.

A series of monumental steel skewers form the spines of these loosely figural works. Slotted with outsized hunks of meat and sliced vegetables cast in glass, and cast-rubber body parts made from molds of her muscular dancer muse Silas Reiner, Friedman marshals our collective appetites in a sendup of Minimalism. By reanimating and anthropomorphizing modes of staid Formalism, the sculptures disrupt accepted meaning and expectation via processes that are as complex and precise as they are absurdly grotesque.

Elsewhere, in some smaller works, we see cast cement limbs coated in luxuriant graphite and fitted with found footwear and exotic cast-glass foods such as geoduck clams, like a Robert Gober at the farmer’s market. These pieces are sometimes situated on artist-designed stands evoking anthropological museum display and engineered to accommodate their weight and precarious balance.

As a whole, the complex variety of materials and technique, as well as dramatic shifts in scale across the exhibition, destabilize the viewer placing them at a crossroads of technical precision and the bluntly visceral. Just as the sculpted figure in art history is a metaphorical container for meaning, Friedman’s pierced flesh reminds us that the body itself is, in fact, held fast by a delicate, porous membrane.

This exhibition closes 6/22/24.

NYC Art Shows- Marta Minujín at Kurimanzutto

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Performance Art, Sculptors / Sculpture

Jun 072024

Kurimanzutto is currently showing two bodies of work from Argentinian artist Marta Minujín’s remarkable and varied career. The brightly colored soft sculptures are captivating but the darker pieces provide an intriguing balance.

From the press release-

“Easel painting is dead,” Marta Minujín explained in 1966, “Today man can no longer be satisfied with a static painting hanging on a wall. Life is too dynamic.” This pronouncement on painting’s demise centers a “death v. life” dialectic that propelled Minujín’s artistic experiments throughout the tumultuous 1960s. Her pursuit of a radically dynamic and temporal art that could, in her own words, “register changes that take place minute by minute” turned Minujín into a trailblazer of happenings, performances, participatory environments, and mass media art in her home country of Argentina as well as in France and the U.S.

Such a pioneering trajectory was first set into motion by two bodies of work created before 1965: Minujín’s soft sculptures, known as “Los eróticos en Technicolor [The Erotics in Technicolor]” and her chthonic paintings and assemblages in an informalist style. Together these discrete chapters of her oeuvre form a tensely intertwined conceptual dyad ruled by opposite forces, Eros and Thanatos, respectively. Their common ground—what they evoke as a site registering changes—was the body. Both series generated radically anthropomorphic artworks while implicating the body of the artist, the viewer, and the body politic, too.

For the first time since 1963, when Minujín’s informalist assemblages shared her Paris studio with “Los eróticos”, these two series of work have been brought exclusively together, allowing for their dialogue on the vulnerabilities and joys of the embodied condition to unfold. They speak of crises that go well beyond painting’s purported expiration—houselessness, chronic disease, ailing democracy, and the sexual revolution, among others—and that, though proper to the 1960s, resonate with present circumstances. Yet, by virtue of their Janus-faced nature, Minujin’s early works also suggest the possibilities of community, healing, and jubilant defiance before such upheavals and predicaments.

This exhibition closes 6/8/24.

NYC Art Shows- Arthur Jafa at 52 Walker

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film

Jun 012024

It’s easy to become a bit overwhelmed at Arthur Jafa’s exhibition BLACK POWER TOOL AND DIE TRYNIG at 52 Walker. His latest show includes a large installation, photography, sculpture, painting and a new film. Passing the reflective black surface and walking through his sculptural installation, Picture Unit II, you’ll find portraits of bikers, a photo from the Manson murders, a subway car, and a stripper at a club next to a photo from a Rwandan genocide memorial. Next to where a video plays a collage of clips, an installation of cut out figures includes himself, Miles Davis, The Sex Pistols, and artists Cady Noland and Adrian Piper.

Death plays a large part in the show, as does personal and collective history. His best friend of forty years, cultural critic Greg Tate, recently passed away, also contributing to the heaviness of this recent work.

From the press release-

Lauded for his achievements as a filmmaker and cinematographer as well as a visual artist, Jafa has developed an incisive, chameleonic practice, through which he seeks to unravel the cultural significance and strictures ascribed in tandem upon Black existence in the Western world. In BLACK POWER TOOL AND DIE TRYNIG, Jafa invokes the body’s personal, political, and industrial guises in one fell swoop, deftly interweaving images and objects to create a forceful and maximal space that beckons toward engulfment and revelation alike.

Jafa’s exhibition at 52 Walker brings to the surface questions of form, force, and resistance— in addition to tensions that result from common slips and errors. The title of the show, BLACK POWER TOOL AND DIE TRYNIG, applies strategies of sequencing and juxtaposition, channeling various meanings in its wordplay—including political ideologies, industrial terminologies, and the specter of death—while also nodding to the complexities of the word “black” and its many inflections. Favoring intuitive arrangement over uniformity, the artist eschews traditionally monolithic modes of presentation and instead coheres multiple simultaneous events, applying a decidedly Black and non-Western viewpoint that confronts twentieth-century art historiography and museology’s indebtedness to African aesthetics.

In the video below, also on the 52 Walker website, Jafa discusses the show with screenwriter Judnick Mayard and is worth watching for additional insights.

This exhibition closes 6/1/24.

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