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.

Jan 032020
 

Black Girls Window, 1969

Mystic Window for Leo, 1966

As part of MoMA’s Opening Season, they are showing Betye Saar’s 1969 work, Black Girl’s Window, along with several of her works on paper.

The exhibition “explores the relation between her experimental print practice and the new artistic language debuted in that famous work, tracing themes of family, history, and mysticism, which have been at the core of Saar’s work from its earliest days.”

This exhibition closes 1/4/20.

Mar 122016
 
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Mom Knows

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Black Flag

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Detail from Black Flag

The mixed media assemblage paintings in Aaron Fowler‘s current solo exhibition, Blessings on Blessings, at Diane Rosenstein gallery, are large, highly detailed, and dense with imagery.

From the press release-

Aaron Fowler, who was born in St. Louis and currently lives and works in Harlem, creates mixed-media assemblage-paintings that depict his experiences and the lives of his family and friends in both a personal narrative and an epic journey through contemporary America. The title of this exhibition, which includes twelve portraits, tableaux, and medallions created in the past year, refers to lyrics from “Blessings”, a 2015 song by American rapper Big Sean.

In these sculptural tableaux, Fowler depicts himself as a “mirror character” called The Pilgrim. He employs oils, acrylics and collage – often pixilated ‘photo print-outs’ based on 18th C. American historical painting – alongside objects like Adidas sneakers, CDs, T-shirts, and plastic bags.  The dynamic, large-scale compositions are enacted on discarded domestic materials including shutters, mirrored doors, windows, and card tables.

This show closes 3/12/16.

 

Dec 132013
 

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From Betye Saar’s :The Alpha & Omega-The Beginning & The End 

Betye Saar’s installation at Roberts & Tilton contains many objects all coming together to contemplate time, identity, nature and the world around us.  Unlike her previous show at the gallery, Red Timewhich challenged the viewer with both its imagery and the power of the color itself; The Alpha and Omega, creates a feeling of calm, both in its color palette of blues and grays but also in the objects chosen like clocks and ships.  In both shows, history is an important theme. This can be seen most clearly in The Challenges of Fate, a sculpture within the work, made up of a black bird perched on a cage housing a ship, which is above a globe resting on a glass box of bones, all set upon a stack of books.

Also at the gallery is Projections Part II: Film As Painting, curated by Aaron Rose. Multiple films by various artists are presented through different projections and monitor displays. The films are very different in content but work together to present the concept of film as not just film, but moving painting. There are thirteen films within the show and their creation dates range from the earliest, Len Lye’s A Colour Box (1935) to Rose’s own The Dress (2013). One standout is Marie Menken’s Go! Go! Go! (1962-4) a frantic speeding up of footage of life in the 1960’s in New York.

Both shows close tomorrow, 12/14.