Nov 012024
 

Work by Jani Duerr (left) and Yarissa Luna (right)

Work by Jess Slavic (left) and Andy Vible (right)

Work by Andy Vible (left) and Seth Pala (right)

Work by Roderick Hidalgo II

Tonight is the closing reception for Awakening at Chris White Gallery in Wilmington, Delaware, curated by Seth Pala of Alone Time. The exhibition included 27 artists and 141 pieces of art.

Below is a list of the artists from the gallery’s website-

This event is part of Wilmington’s First Friday Art Loop, an event highlighting the city’s arts and cultural scene.

 

 

 

Oct 312024
 

Adrienne Elise Tarver

Cara Despain

Cara Despain

Ashanti Chaplin

Ray Anthony Barrett

Ray Anthony Barrett

Olivia “LIT LIV” Morgan

One room of the gallery with Margaret Griffith sculpture (center)

Jane Chang Mi

Andrae Green (paintings) and Phoebe Collings-James (sculpture)

Andrae Green

Margaret Griffith

Margaret Griffith (detail)

Against Dystopia, the group exhibition at Diane Rosenstein curated by niko w. okuro, presents a variety of interesting work that speaks to the times we are living in.

The exhibition includes ten international artists representing twelve cities across the United Kingdom, Jamaica, and all five regions of the United States-  Ray Anthony Barrett, Ashanti Chaplin, Phoebe Collings-James, Cara Despain, Andrae Green, Margaret Griffith, Jane Chang Mi, Olivia “LIT LIV” Morgan, Esteban Ramón Pérez, and Adrienne Elise Tarver.

From the gallery-

Presented on the eve of the 2024 presidential election, Against Dystopia is ‘a far-reaching exhibition, both in terms of the diverse backgrounds and approaches of its featured artists, and the social, cultural, and geographic ecosystems those artists represent and critique,’ writes okoro, who is based in New Haven, CT. The exhibition ‘features artworks that inhabit a spectrum of anti-dystopian thought, from mobilizing conceptualism to overcome historic traumas and the precarity of the present, to envisioning future utopias against seemingly insurmountable odds.’

Against Dystopia transforms fear and anxiety surrounding the uncertainty of our shared future into a tangible site of hope—one where collective memory reminds us of our agency to enact change today, and rich cultural traditions empower us to imagine alternative futures. Of significance is the inclusion of artists who identify as multi hyphenates, playing numerous social roles within their communities, such as advocate, change agent, chef, documentarian, educator, father, filmmaker, mother, musician, oceanographer, researcher, and too many more to name.

Artworks are grouped into three thematic sections, each of which explores creative strategies of resistance and works against dystopia at all costs: field research, symbolic interactionism, and speculative fiction.

Ray Anthony Barrett (Missouri), Ashanti Chaplin (Oklahoma), Cara Despain (Utah/Florida), and Jane Chang Mi (Hawai‘i/California) use field research to map histories of frontierism, settler colonialism, and land politics onto ecological and socioeconomic systems today. With a focus on listening to the land and sea to both unearth and atone for difficult truths, these artists name and dismantle dystopian practices on the path to reconciliation. Embracing an appreciation for both hyperlocal traditions and the tenets of global citizenship, each underscores our shared duty to ensuring ecocultural sustainability and Earth’s habitability for future generations.

While Margaret Griffith (California), Olivia Morgan (New York), and Adrienne Elise Tarver (New York) work through markedly different mediums and styles, they share a fearlessness in addressing ongoing tensions and questions surfaced amidst the political firestorm of 2020. Embracing tenets of symbolic interactionism, or the theory that individuals shape and are shaped by society through daily interactions and the co-creation of meaning from symbols, these artists remind us of the power of human connection to bridge difference. Each steers towards social cohesion by processing collective grief and the enduring impacts of the 2020 presidential election, the proliferation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement respectively. Whereas Morgan and Griffith subvert symbols that often polarize rather than unite us within physical space—such as fences, face masks, and smartphones—Tarver reaches into the past to pull forth reimagined symbols that speak to our spiritual interdependence.

Phoebe Colling-James (United Kingdom), Andrae Green (Massachusetts/Jamaica) and Esteban Ramón Pérez (California) boldly envision alternative realities by using speculative fiction and symbolic allegory to sew threads of connection across time and space. Each resists linearity and subverts narrative tropes to instead materialize the fluid spiritual dimensions of lived experience. Through their layered ceramics, paintings, and sculptures, these artists mine the depths of their respective Jamaican/British, Jamaican/American, and Chicanx heritages to comment more broadly on social conditions today, prompting us to dream beyond what’s readily visible or knowable.

Against Dystopia opens concurrently with The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: Art x Science x LA, which similarly explores, “opportunities for civic dialogue around some of the most urgent problems of our time by exploring past and present connections between art and science.” By convening an international group of visionary artists to help initiate these dialogues, Against Dystopia prompts viewers to pursue deeper understanding of shared challenges and solutions, on both the micro and macro levels.’

This exhibition closes 11/2/24.

 

 

Oct 302024
 

Brian Rochefort’s ceramic sculptures for Staring at the Moon at Sean Kelly gallery are an incredible mix of textures and colors. Based on his travels to several natural environments around the world, the work combines the familiar with the unusual to form fascinating results.

From the gallery-

Brian Rochefort’s mixed-media sculptures incorporate a variety of different textures, surfaces and colors to create rich, otherworldly forms. Referencing his travels to some of the most remote parts of the planet, such as the Amazon Rainforest, the Galápagos Islands, and the Ngorongoro Crater, in Tanzania, he internalizes and translates his experiences in these secluded, ancient landscapes into potent sculptural forms.

Rochefort’s sculptures are built up in a unique process of layering, wherein the initial form undergoes multiple firings. Between each firing, he airbrushes the works and applies glazes, many of which he has developed himself through extensive experimentation. This process pushes the technical limits of ceramics in pursuit of evocative, otherworldly new forms. As he states, “Some of the most successful pieces that I’ve done in the past have been works that I’ve built up too fast… but somehow I’ve managed to save the form, and it turns into a different monster.” He works intuitively to build a composition, not unlike an abstract painter, and cites artists such as Albert Oehlen, Joan Mitchell, Franz West, and even photographer Aaron Siskind as influences for their daring deployment of color and texture. His virtuosic control of his medium is tempered by the element of chance inherent to the process of firing the sculpture. In this way, the completed works are the result of a dynamic interplay between his highly developed technique, the distinctive character of each sculpture, and ultimately chance.

Rochefort is equally inspired by his travels to remote and untouched ecosystems, such as barrier reefs and rainforests. A vital form of inspiration for him, the rare and vibrant natural forms found in such locations are apparent in the works. His intent, however, is not to directly represent the landscapes that he visits, a task he describes as “nearly impossible to do.” The sculptures take on the formal qualities of the landscapes through an almost volcanic layering of form upon form, color upon color, and texture upon texture, ultimately blooming into vivid, texturally sumptuous works. His larger freestanding works, which he refers to as Craters, evoke the fundamental quality of his sculptures: a powerful moment of contact with something deeply elemental and otherworldly.

The gallery also posted the video below where he discusses the work.

This exhibition closes 11/2/24.

Oct 172024
 

“Seventh Lagoon”, 1979

VSF gallery is currently showing The Harrisons’ Survival Piece #1: Air, Earth, Water, Interface: Annual Hog Pasture Mix, 1970-1971, part of The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: Art & Science Collide.

On Thursday, 10/17, a local pig will enter the grow box to turn over the pasture in an iteration of the 2012 performance that took place at The Geffen Contemporary at MoCA.

From the gallery-

The first in their visionary series of Survival Pieces, “Hog Pasture,” as it is known by Harrison’s fans, emerged from a direct dialog with the most visionary and boundary pushing artists of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. The impact of the Earth Day movement and the nascent cultural awareness that human beings were rapidly depleting the planet’s natural resources ignited a deep and sincere conversation within the art world about the stakes of art-making in the post-war, post-1968 world.

While later survival pieces highlighted a culminating harvest feast, Survival Piece #1 is focused on growth. The rectangular form of the raised planter bed and the grid of grow lights above echo sculptural innovations by artists like Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Richard Morris;  however, Newton Harrison had by this time decided that a sculpture or a painting was not enough. His artwork needed to not only have a moral purpose, it needed to strive to restore the earth and protect the abundant future of humans on our planet.

In 1971, shortly after their first foray into ecological art, Making Earth (which VSF exhibited earlier this year at Frieze LA and is now in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) Newton and Helen heard from David Antin that Virginia Gunter at the MFA Boston was curating a show titled Earth, Air, Fire, and Water: Elements of Art and wanted to include their work alongside contemporaries including Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Hans Haacke, and others. Exploring ideas of growth and change, Gunter’s vision for the exhibition was meant to challenge conservative, formalist, Greenbergian ideas about art as well as expectations of the museum as an institution that primarily collected unchanging pictures and objects that somehow articulated the best ideas and techniques of the time in which they were made.

Interested in building on his use of artificial lights, Newton decided that he should actually grow something. He commissioned one of his painting students to look through seed catalogs to find a mixture that was “totally singular,” eventually landing on R.H. Shumway Seedsman’s Annual Hog Pasture Mix. In Boston, a large raised planter bed was built in a basement gallery of the museum, agricultural grow lights were installed in a parallel grid from the ceiling, a potent mix of manure, compost, worm castings, and other rich grow media were added to the planter bed, the seed mix was added, and a small pasture grew there with alarming speed. While Gunter wouldn’t allow a hog to come and graze the original hog pasture, subsequent exhibitions of the work, including Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 curated by Miwon Kwon and Phillip Kaiser at MoCA in 2012, have brought the work to its natural conclusion and invited a pig in to enjoy the rich, velvety mix of legumes and grasses. Similarly, VSF has invited a hog to harvest the indoor meadow during the exhibition’s closing ceremony on October 17, 2024. The remaining pasture, earthworms, and soil mix will be gifted to visitors.

Oct 162024
 

Lita Albuquerque’s exhibition of new work for Earth Skin, on view at Michael Kohn Gallery, includes several dramatic blue paintings and a huge installation piece on the floor of the gallery that grabs your attention the moment you enter the gallery.

From the gallery-

Beginning her career in the 1970s with works that intimately connected her to the earth, Albuquerque’s artistic evolution envelops the cosmos and the space between it and us. Her work emanates from years of practicing the exact science of Kundalini breath technique as well as automatic writing; both drive a deep investigation and scientific inquiry of who we are as individual beings on this planet. Albuquerque further connects to the exactness of physics by a meditation she, and astronomers, call the cosmic address. These daily practices are at the root of her art, precisely positioning self to cosmos. It is those discoveries she embeds in works of art that permit us, the viewer, to experience the connections she has made between these internal and external worlds.

Thinking about the exhibition, Albuquerque writes:
Feet dancing above the earth, dancing with fervor, drumming, the increasing drumming of the feet not fragile on the fragile earth.

The wisps of bodies, like skins falling off their frames leaving the planet, the planet strong and our forms ethereal, the strength of us, our feet, on the fragile earth, the wispy lightness of us, detached from the earth, transforming into space.

The earth strong behind us, propelling us upward, giving us her strength, throwing us in the air, while we fly, never falling, the fierce intensity of our rhythm while alive, and the freedom of release from the earth.

Experiments of intensities of emotions and colors, whirling dervishes’ cyclones, Earth Skin is whispered, “Earth Skin” she whispered.

For PST’s Art and Science Collide, Albuquerque transforms the gallery with a titular installation, Earth Skin. A membrane of decomposed granite fills the space creating the illusory sensation of the earth being revealed below the gallery, as if the concrete floor has been meticulously removed. Accompanying this installation is a new series of paintings revolving around the gestures of the body and ancient marks, like a hieroglyphic code only the artist has a key for. With each gesture, Albuquerque embraces the tactile intimacy of painting, reminding us of the power of capturing and transforming the elusive into the material. This installation invites viewers to explore the shared fragility of humanity and earth.

Two of the paintings, picutred below, include poems referencing fellow artist Ana Mendieta, who was known in part for her “earth-body” work and who passed away tragically in 1985.

“Propelling Us Upwards, She, The Earth, Throwing Us In The Air While We Fly, Never Falling, A Poem for A.M.”, 2024, Pigment on Canvas

“Desire and Memory, A Poem for A.M.”, 2024, Pigment on canvas

This exhibition is part of The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: Art and Science Collide an arts event taking place in various venues around Southern California.

For more information on Lita Albuquerque and her work Red Canary Magazine recently published an excellent article that is worth a read as well.

Oct 102024
 

The ceramic sculptures above are from Becky Tucker’s Umbra, currently on view at Steve Turner in Los Angeles. The Glasgow-based artist’s work is inspired by “the history of Britain’s lost villages”.

From the gallery-

Tucker relishes working with fired ceramic, the very material that survives for thousands of years. She uses white stoneware that is glazed several times as well as faux suede dyed with indigo to assemble the pieces of her larger works. The idea of lost artifacts is at the root of her practice and the objects she creates cannot be clearly placed in a specific time period. Her mix of source imagery–Chinese tomb guardians, fossils, motorcycle armor, medieval illuminated manuscripts and Indian theater costumes–complicates identifying the origin of the works. Tucker’s works imply that the past can be as shadowy as the future.

This exhibition closes 10/12/24.

Oct 102024
 

Luca Sára Rózsa, “The Changing (War)”, 2024, Oil on canvas

Luca Sára Rózsa, “The Changing (Peace)”, 2024, Oil on canvas

Dickens Otieno, “Tethered White Cow”, 2024, Aluminum cans woven on galvanized coffee tray mesh

Currently at Steve Turner in Los Angeles is the two person exhibition E-scape, featuring new paintings by Budapest-based Luca Sára Rózsa and weavings by Nairobi-based Dickens Otieno.

From the gallery-

Both artists make works about the environment and humanity’s connection to it. Rózsa uses loose and expressive brush strokes in lustrous color to depict feral humans in nature. Four of her works relate to the elements of fire, water, air and earth while two relate to war and peace. Otieno creates large-scale colorful wall weavings and floor sculptures made of strips of soda cans. Whether depicting a rural or urban scene, he uses aluminum cans to emphasize the impact of humans on the environment. E-scape suggests a new genre of landscape painting, one that conveys the widespread anxiety for our planet’s future.

This exhibition closes on 10/12/24.

Oct 042024
 

Dennis Johnson, “Red Hot Trucking”, Acrylic on canvas

Paintings by Elaine Mathews (two left) and William Nelson (painting on the right)

Mixed media piece by Michael Stanley (left); Center sculptures by Lucia Grossberger Morales; Pair of paintings by Lisa Van Herik (right)

Photo on left by Bill Leigh Brewer; Center painting by Jan Slawson and work by Karen Elizabeth Baker (right)

Painting on left by Dennis Johnson; Center photographs by Andy Nystrom; Right painting by Mariana Maldonado-Pagán

Photograph on the left by D Wallace Colvard; Sculptures by Dean Steiner (center) and photograph by Dean Genth (right)

The Artists Council is a non-profit organization focused on local artists in the Coachella Valley. They host several exhibitions, classes, and workshops in their gallery space in Palm Desert.

Their current member exhibition Hot Times Cool Art is on view until 10/6/24. You can see many of the artworks on view on their website.

Oct 022024
 

Kathleen Strukoff, “Turquoise Bird”, Mixed Media, Kee Gallery

Backstreet Art District in Palm Springs consists of several art galleries and studios and hosts a monthly event on the first Wednesday of every month. For additional information and a list of all of the galleries and their current showings, head to their website.

Below are a few selections from this past summer.

Work by Ernesto Ramirez

Work by Erich Meager

Kee Gallery is owned and operated by artists Kathleen Strukoff, Ernesto Ramirez, and Erich Meager.

Work by Aurora Lucia-Levey at Tom Ross Gallery

Work by Rae Harrell from her gallery

Paintings by Martin Prew at Kevin Goddess’s gallery

Paintings by Kevin Goddess

The studio in the back of Stephen Baumbach Gallery

Stephen Baumbach Gallery hosts numerous photography exhibitions throughout the year and houses a fine art printing business.

 

Work by Gary Wexler

The studio at Gary Wexler Design

 

 

Sep 252024
 

“Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe les Trois Femmes Noires d’apés Picasso (Luncheon on the Grass, Three Black Women after Picasso)”, 2022

“Look at What You’ve Become”, 2005 and “Portrait of Mnonja with Flower in Hair”, 2008, Rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel on wood panel

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love at The Broad presents a beautifully curated collection of work from the artist’s impressive career. Below are a few selections and information from The Broad about the show and some of the individual works.

From the museum about the exhibition-

Mickalene Thomas’s paintings, photographs, video installations, and sculptures celebrate the experiences of Black women. Her work is rooted in the intimacy of relationships between mothers and daughters, between lovers, and between friends. Thomas’s work centers the joys and complexities of self-respect and love, especially at times when they are diminished or threatened.

Thomas was born in Camden, New Jersey, and grew up in Hillside and East Orange, a childhood evoked in the building facades that open this exhibition. After coming out at the age of sixteen, she moved to Portland, Oregon, where the encouragement of a small group of local artists and an inspiring encounter with the work of Carrie Mae Weems led her to attend Pratt Institute, then Yale University, to pursue visual art.

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love begins in 2003, when Thomas turned from making abstract paintings to portraiture and photography. Her first subject was her mother, Sandra Bush, affectionately known as “Mama Bush.” By focusing on their relationship, Thomas began considering identity through the mirrors of family and friends, as well as through public images manifested by Black musicians, fashion icons, actors, and performers.

From early in her career, Thomas built sets in which she would photograph her muses. She wanted her subjects to feel in a place of mutual comfort, respect, and trust. Later, Thomas would take her muses into the environments and scenes of art history, claiming space inside the narratives and imagery from which Black and queer people have been either excluded or shown anonymously. Recent work in the exhibition, such as Thomas’s Jet series and Tête de Femme (seen in Los Angeles for the first time), confronts cultural conventions of beauty, reconfiguring norms in celebration of beauty centered in individuality and acceptance.

Spanning twenty years of Thomas’s career, this exhibition takes its title from bell hooks’s essential collection of essays All About Love, in which the writer argues that in order to counter and reorient a culture of power and domination, one must act according to a set of principles where “everyone has a right to be free, to live life and well.” In the spirit of hooks, the artwork of Thomas aims to make space for Black joy, leisure, and eroticism, both for their own sake and to counteract injustice.

“A Little Taste Outside of Love”, 2007 Acrylic, enamel, and rhinestones on wood panel

“Three Graces: Les Trois Femmes Noires (Three Graces: Three Black Women)”, 2011, Rhinestones, acrylic, oil, and enamel on wood panel

“Afro Goddess Looking Forward”, 2015, Rhinestones, acrylic, and oil on wood panel

About the work above from the museum-

In this work, Thomas is the main subject, the muse of her own practice. In a 2006 photo session, the artist produced a series of self-portraits that has become the inspiration and visual material for many paintings. Early paintings based on these images include intact bodies shown inside of a shifting assortment of collaged patterns that accumulate and fracture around the subject. However, in this 2015 painting, Thomas collages a set of eyes onto the figure, drawing attention to the artist’s gaze of the viewer. This strategy- collaging onto the figure- continues today, as Thomas obscures and asserts different features of the body to investigate the construction of identity and beauty.

Her photography and video work shared a large room in the exhibition.

From the museum about the wall of photos above (image is a section of the full wall)-

Photography has long played an important role in Mickalene Thomas’s work. As a student at Yale, in a class with David Hilliard, Thomas was encouraged to experiment with the medium, to explore a subject that came “from a vulnerable place.” This led to photographing her mother, early engagements with self-portraiture, and photo sessions with women close to her. Initially, Thomas’s photography was used as material in her collages and paintings, but over time, the artist has embraced her photographs as standalone artworks.

This wall contains many facets of Thomas’s photography practice, all “proof of an experience between her and her subject,” as writer Jennifer Blessing observes. Some of the photographs—like La leon d’amour (A Lesson of Love), 2008, and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les trois femmes noires (Luncheon on the Grass: Three Black Women), 2010— became springboards for Thomas’s most well-known paintings. Other photographs speak to Thomas’s success and visibility as a dynamic studio photographer, as in her commission for Aperture in 2019, Untitled #3 (Orlando Series), and in Madame Carrie, 2018, for the New York Times.

About the video installation pictured below-

For this eight-channel video, Thomas was inspired by Eartha Kitt’s 1953 song Angelitos Negros (Black Angels), in which the singer implores artists of religious devotion to paint Black angels and add their depictions to visions of heaven. “You paint all our churches, and fill them with beautiful angels,” a translation of the song records, “but you never do remember, to paint us a Black angel.” For Thomas, the song was a revelation, speaking to the heart of her artistic practice of celebrating and advancing joyful images of Black women. This video is a collage, repurposing found footage from YouTube and enlisting Thomas’s muses to perform, all coming together in fulfillment of Kitt’s wish.

“Angelitos Negros (Black Angels)”, 2016, Eight channel digital video

There is a section of the exhibition devoted to Thomas’s Resist series, which includes The Charnel House (Resist #5), 2021, pictured below.

About the Resist paintings from the museum-

Mickalene Thomas made her first Resist painting in 2017 for the Seattle Art Museum’s Figuring History, an exhibition focused on questioning distorted narratives of history through Black experience. Making new work, Thomas brought her extensive artistic toolkit of collage, her use or rhinestones and other craft materials, and her viewpoint as a Black queer woman to create a direct encounter with the civil rights era of the 1960s. Thomas has spoken of being especially inspired by the work of Robert Colescott, whose satirical paintings offered her a sense of permission and a voice to approach social events proactively.

In the Resist series, Thomas finds echoes of the past in the present, layering archival images from the civil rights era with images from recent protests and uprisings related to Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements. Of central importance in Resist is memory, the remembrance of lives that have been taken by police brutality and injustice. In the works on view in this gallery, protests, such as those in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, are seen in the context of images of activists like James Baldwin and Shirley Chisholm, as well as of photographs of race-based attacks on Black people from many decades

From the museum about The Charnel House

In this painting, the history of civil rights in the United States meets the open conflicts and struggles of the present. The surface is an accumulation of slogans: signs for the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast for children program join the names of Freddie Gray and Alton Sterling (both killed in encounters with police), as well as posters for Black Lives Matter and others from the March for Racial Justice held in September 2017 in Washington DC, specifically “Women of Color Have Always Led Change.” The collision of eras in the work is buttressed and sharpened by deep questions about art’s ability and responsibility to be an agent for political protest and change. Thomas interlaces the panel with patterns from Pablo Picasso’s The Charnel House, 1944-45,  a work that Picasso considered a depiction of a massacre and that (along with Guernica, 1937) is seen as the artist’s most direct engagement with the politics and horrors of the Spanish Civil War and, for some commentators, World War II and the Holocaust.

In 2017 Mickalene Thomas began using Jet magazine as a source in her work, specifically it’s nude calendar which used anonymous models.

From the museum about the series-

Thomas speaks of her Jet series as rooted in desire, in her openness to unapologetically love Black women: “I think there’s something to owning Black women’s erotica-us owning our sexuality needs to be validated as we own and love our own bodies, and want to be desired.
The Black female body is beautiful.”

“February 1976”, 2021, Rhinestones, glitter, charcoal, acrylic, and oil paint on canvas mounted on wood panel and oak frame

About the above work from the museum-

The original Jet calendar image for February 1976 featured a model in an interior populated with plants, one of which served to obscure her genitals. A decorative screen acts as a backdrop and the model is posed like an odalisque, right out of art history. In Thomas’s work, she intervenes dramatically in the scene, leaving the model mostly intact and expressive, while radically abstracting the plants and screen. For the painting’s debut at Lévy Gorvy gallery in 2021, the artist evoked both the grid of the screen and the plants in the space itself, filling the floor with mirrored tiles and greenery, as seen installed here.

 

Jet Blue #28, 2021 Rhinestones, acrylic paint, oil pastel, mixed-media paper, and archival pigment prints on museum paper mounted on Dibond with mahogany and Jet Blue #45 (Neon), 2024, Neon

This exhibition closes 9/29/24.