Derek Fordjour at Petzel in NYC

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Performance Art, Sculptors / Sculpture
Dec 042020
 

Currently at Petzel in NYC is Derek Fordjour’s solo exhibition, SELF MUST DIE, which incorporates painting, sculpture and Fly Away, a performance collaboration between Fordjour and award-winning puppeteer Nick Lehane.

From the press release-

The show, Fordjour’s first with the gallery, is an offering of creative labor in response to our current moment, a deeply personal and collective state of anxiety around death and hyper-visible racial violence. It examines the nature of martyrdom, vulnerabilities inherent to living in a Black body, performance of competency, and the liminal space existing between autonomy and control.

In SELF MUST DIE, Fordjour interrogates the inevitability of actual death, made more urgent by the realities of a global pandemic, and points to the aspirational death of the artist’s ego brought into focus by a burgeoning career. It is both cultural manifesto and personal declaration. The show is comprised of three parts: VESTIBULE, a site-specific sculptural installation; Fly Away, a live puppetry art performance; and a suite of new paintings.

VESTIBULE offers a collection of sculptural objects imbued with biblical allegory and the spirit of James Cone’s Black Theology of Liberation. It refashions the gallery as a secular yet sacred space of memorial. Among its features, the small entry compels visitors to undergo a destabilizing bodily shift that elicits an intimate and reorienting experience. A directional light from above slowly combs the entire room, invoking both searchlight and spotlight, ideas central to the recent death of Breonna Taylor. Constructed of bituminous coal and wrought iron, Taylor Memorial hangs from above.

Fly Away, a collaboration between Fordjour and award-winning puppeteer Nick Lehane, is performed by a stellar cast, with an original score composed by John Aylward and performed live by oboist Hassan Anderson. The puppet is a Fordjour-designed, hand-sculpted figure crafted by Robert Maldonado. The protagonist’s narrative arc rises and falls along a journey of personal discovery. Larger themes that course through Fordjour’s body of work become resonant.

Spanning two galleries are several new paintings, executed in Fordjour’s signature collage technique, representing the latest developments in his studio practice. The first is a suite of paintings based on Black funerary tradition. The second gallery presents a broad range of subjects including several at monumental scale.

This exhibition closes 12/19/20.

Día de Los Muertos Altar at Greenwood Cemetery

 Art, Artists, Conceptual Art, Day of the Dead, Holiday Guides, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Nov 012020
 

Artist Scherezade García’s large-scale community altar at Green-Wood Cemetery’s Historic Chapel for Día de los Muertos. Visitors were encouraged to bring personal offerings to a community altar, including flowers, photographs, and notes, among other objects.

Info from the artist’s Instagram–

Inspired by altars found throughout Mexico and the Mexican diaspora, Garcia’s altar combines her own unique style with this centuries-old celebration of the departed.

The centerpiece of the altar is a weeping, cinnamon-colored Statue of Liberty. By mixing all the colors in her palette, Garcia achieves a brown hue that embodies the ideals of diversity and inclusiveness. Her rendition of the Statue of Liberty, an iconic symbol of New York City, evokes the multitudes of immigrants that have found home here, including large Latin and Caribbean American communities. Garcia has dedicated the altar to all the New Yorkers who fell victim to the coronavirus.

Flip Cassidy’s TV Wall at East Jesus

 Art, Artists, California Travel, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Places to Visit, Salton Sea, Sculptors / Sculpture
Sep 292020
 

One of the many art works in East Jesus, an art museum near the Salton Sea in California. This sculpture by Flip Cassidy is made entirely from found and collected TV sets and computer monitors, with more added as time goes on. The version pictured is from 2018.

Happy Birthday Betye Saar!

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Sculptors / Sculpture
Jul 302020
 

Happy Birthday to Betye Saar who turned 94 today! This work Still Ticking, (2005), was part of LACMA’s exhibition Betye Saar: Call and Response which opened at the museum in September of 2019.

From the wall description of the work-

Made shortly before Saar’s seventy-eighth birthday, the assemblage includes years and astrological glyphs on the inner left side that correlate to various important dates in her life. The work’s title wittily refers both to the timepieces in the sculpture- which, of course, are not ticking; indeed they are either frozen in time or missing their hands- and to the artist herself, who is alive and well, still ticking, now at age ninety-three.

Mark Bradford’s “150 Portrait Tone” at LACMA

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters
Jul 062020
 

Today, July 6th, is the four year anniversary of the fatal shooting of Philando Castile by a police officer during a traffic stop in Minnesota. Castile was shot five times while his girlfriend and her four year old daughter were in the car.

Mark Bradford’s 150 Portrait Tone, 2017, currently at LACMA, is a devastating large scale work that uses excerpts from Philando Castile’s girlfriend Diamond Reynolds’s dialogue from the video she live streamed on Facebook from the incident.

From LACMA’s wall description of the work-

Bradford notes that he was moved by the multiple subjects Reynolds simultaneously addressed and the different spaces they occupied: her boyfriend, Castile, next to her (“stay with me”); the officer outside the car (“please, officer, don’t tell me that you just did this”); God (“Lord, please Jesus, don’t tell me that he’s gone”); as well as the unknown receiver on the other side of her lifestream (“please don’t tell me he just went like that”).

Like many of Bradford’s works, the mural-size composition contains elements of both abstraction and realism. In places, layers of manipulated paint render the text almost illegible. The dark form in the background, however, evokes all-too-real associations with the horrific shooting, such as Castile’s twisted arm and the dark-red bloodstain spread across his white shirt, both visible in the live stream feed.

The title, “150 Portrait Tone”, refers to the name and color code of the pink acrylic used throughout the painting (most conspicuous in a large patch at the work’s bottom edge). Like the now-obsolete “flesh” crayon in the Crayola 64 box (the color was renamed “peach” in 1962), the color “portrait tone” carries inherent assumptions about who, exactly, is being depicted. In the context of Bradford’s painting, the title presents a sobering commentary on power and representation.

Titus Kaphar at Jack Shainman Gallery 2017

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Politics, Sculptors / Sculpture
Jul 032020
 

Absconded From the Household of the President of the United States, 2016

Billy Lee: Portrait in Tar, 2016

Twisted Tropes, 2016

Monumental Inversions: George Washington, 2016

The above images are from Titus Kaphar’s exhibition Shifting Skies at Jack Shainman Gallery in 2017. Kaphar recently created the cover of the June 15th issue of Time Magazine covering the George Floyd protests.

Brooklyn Street Art- George Floyd by David Barthold

 Art, Artists, Brooklyn Street Art, Drawing, Mixed Media, New York Street Art, Street Art
Jun 052020
 

For more of Brooklyn artist David Barthold’s work, check out his website and Instagram

Yayoi Kusama’s Room at Marciano Art Foundation

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
May 212020
 

Yayoi Kusama’s installation, With All My Love For The Tulips, I Pray Forever (2011), was on view at Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles in 2019.

From the foundation about the work:

Kusama’s exuberant sculptural installation “With All My Love For The Tulips, I Pray Forever”(2011) exemplifies the dualism found throughout her work between the organic and the artificial. Shown here for the first time in Los Angeles, the oversized flower-potted tulips made from fiberglass-reinforced plastic are painted with the same red polka dots as the floor, ceiling, and walls, creating an immersive viewing experience while at the same time diminishing the appearance of depth. This work exemplifies Kusama’s singular vision and her distinctive gift for drawing viewers into the work on a deeply visceral level. Kusama currently lives and works in Tokyo.

International Museum Day- Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA)

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film
May 182020
 

 

Two works from Museum of Latin American Art’s outdoor sculpture garden, just one of the great things about this Long Beach museum.

Currently they are showing Arte, Mujer, y Memoria: Arpilleras from Chile; Dreamland: A Frank Romero Retrospective;  En Vision: Picturing the Self -selected pieces from MOLAA’s Permanent Collection in conversation with self-portraits by students of Las Fotos Project, a community-based nonprofit organization that inspires teenage girls through photography, mentorship and self-expression; and the work of Afro Cuban artists José Bedia and Belkis Ayón; in addition to work from the museum’s permanent collection, as part of their Museum en Casa online programming.

Jamie Isenstein at Andrew Kreps Gallery NYC

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture
May 172020
 

Jamie Isenstein’s Onions (Mario to Clown Mouse), 2015, from her exhibition Para Drama at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York in 2015.

From the press release–

… And on the wall are a series of photographs of masks wearing masks. By putting on masks the support masks become anthropomorphized into faces so that these inanimate objects come alive. At the same time, the layering of these masks emphasizes their emptiness. Behind the illusions there is nothing. Absurdly, the more masks the masks wear, the deeper the layering of nothingness becomes. Onions, 2015, is a sculpture of many masks layered over the hollow head of a mascot costume. The title of the work refers to a monologue in the Henrik Ibsen play Peer Gynt in which Peer peels away the layers of an onion as he examines the various roles he has played in his life. Eventually he comes to realize there is nothing substantial at the core.

 

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