Photography – Page 5 – longlistshort

Delaware Art- Open Studios at The Delaware Contemporary

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Conceptual Art, Delaware, Digital Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture, Wilmington

Feb 062025

Lisa Marie Patzer’s studio

Detail from “Chromatic Landscapes” by Lisa Marie Patzer

Along with its exhibitions and programming, The Delaware Contemporary houses several artist studios. Several times a year the artists open their doors to the public. The images included in this post are from the December 2024 event.

The first images are from new media digital media artist Lisa Marie Patzer’s Chromatic Landscapes series.

From her website about the work-

Employing digital chroma-based processes, Patzer sorted, separated, and reconfigured images derived from more than one thousand 35mm slides. Originally captured by photographer Ben Kabakow during the mid-1950’s, the slides reflect his view of life in New York City and international travel. Lisa Marie Patzer’s treatment of this large archive emphasizes the role nostalgia and personal association play when interpreting another’s visual anthology. The result is a colorful set of vignettes and landscapes that are abstracted from the original context inviting the viewer in for playful association.

Below are selections from some of the other artists studios and from the walls surrounding them and their bios and quotes from the museum’s website.

Still life paintings by Jenna Lucente

Jenna Lucente is an artist and educator currently living in Delaware. She recently completed a public art commission that includes 28 glass windows for the above-ground Arthur Kill train station in Staten Island, New York. Commissioning agency: MTA Art and Design; glass fabrication by Franz Mayer of Munich.

Work by Ruth Ansel

Ruth Ansel creates paintings using egg tempera. “My egg tempera paintings are meditations in pigment and brushstroke.”

Sculptures by Jennifer Borders

Jennifer Borders is a visual artist whose sculpture and drawing is installation-based and often participatory. She uses history, personal family stories, and current events to prompt viewers into inquiry.

Painting by Caroline Chen

Caroline Chen paints primarily with oil on canvas. “Painting is personal. The slow act of seeing takes time and hands and grace. I’m striving to express simple truths before me, to paint the emotion as well as the subject itself.”

Work by Caroline Coolidge Brown

Woodblocks by Caroline Coolidge Brown

Caroline Coolidge Brown is a mixed-media printmaker and visual journaler who collects inspiration from her travels far and near. Her playful work combines traditional printmaking processes (etching, monotype, lino and wood block) with collage and paint. “Mixed media printmaking allows me to push expected boundaries of “what is a print?” or “what is a painting?” For me, it’s all about the layers – of color, shape and meaning.”

Paintings by John Breakey

John Breakey– “The familiar space above the horizon line provides conditions that empower my vision. The powerful brevity of Minimalism and the lasting voices of the Abstract Expressionists motivate me to treat the pure instance of looking out not as an act of passive observance but as a call to action.”

Paintings by Lauren E. Peters

Lauren E. Peters– Through self-portraits based on staged photographs, Peters explores the multifaceted nature of identity.

Work by Diane Hulse

Diane Hulse is an abstract, mixed media artist whose work includes painting, drawing, and objects. With a background in science and the fine arts, she explores internal and external landscapes, as found in the psychological terrain of self and the beauty of our embattled Earth. Intensely curious about almost everything, she studies nature, architecture, poetry, spiritualism, and psychology. Just as curiosity is a pillar of her art, so is imagination. A pink ocean or a monster perched on a beach ball are not farfetched for her. In fact, Hulse often pretends that she can miniaturize herself and walk through her paintings. She agrees with Picasso, who said that it is essential for artists to keep alive the child inside of all of us.

Tomorrow, 2/7/25, the studios will be open to the public as part of the monthly Art Loop Wilmington event. The museum will extend its hours to 8pm and there will be musical guests, food trucks, and a cash bar.

Los Angeles Art Shows- “Post Human” at Jeffrey Deitch

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Ceramic Art, Conceptual Art, Digital Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Glasswork, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film

Jan 162025

Charles Ray “Family Romance”, 1993, and Ashley Bickerton “F.O.B.:Tied (White)”, 1993/2018

Charles Ray “Family Romance”, 1993

Maurizio Cattelan “WE”, 2010

Tishan Hsu, “mammal-screen-green-2”, 2024

Work by Josh Kline

“Untitled”, 2008-9, and “Two Breasts”, 1990, by Robert Gober

Mike Kelley, “Brown Star”, 1991 (left) and “The Judge”, 2018, by Jana Euler (painting on right)

Wanghechi Mutu, “One Cut”, 2018, (center sculpture); photographs by Cindy Sherman, 2010/2023

“Pep Talk”, 2024, by Cajsa von Zeipel and Jamian Juliano-Villani, “Women”, 2024, (painting on right)

Post Human, the current group exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch’s Los Angeles location, continues an artistic investigation of humanity that began with the 1992 exhibition of the same name. Some of the over forty artists (and even some of the works) were in the previous iteration, but now their work is placed alongside others made more recently. Seeing them together offers viewers a chance to contemplate the shifts and continuations in culture, technology, and what it means to be human.

From the gallery-

“Post Human was virtually a manifesto trumpeting a new art for a new breed of human,” wrote the art historian and curator Robert Rosenblum discussing the impact of the exhibition in the October 2004 issue of Artforum.

In 1992, Post Human, curated by Jeffrey Deitch, brought together the work of thirty-six young artists interested in technological advancement, social and aesthetic pluralism, and new frontiers of body and identity transformation. Through their art, these artists were exploring the same questioning of traditional notions of gender, sexuality and self-identity that was—and still is—taking place in the world at large. Capturing a developing social and scientific phenomenon, Post Human theorized a new approach to the construction of the self and interpretation of what defines being human. The exhibition set the agenda for the 1990s, and its influence on artists and philosophers led to a new field of academic study.

In her book Posthuman Feminism (2022), the philosopher and feminist theoretician Rosi Braidotti credits Deitch for capturing “the avant-garde spirit of the age by foregrounding the role of technology in blurring binary boundaries between subjects and objects, humans and non-humans.” She adds, “Post Human showed also that art assumed a much more central role as it merged with science, computerization and biotechnology in further re-shaping the human form and perfecting a flair for the artificial.”

The catalogue of the 1992 exhibition, with its visual essay and innovative design by the late Dan Friedman, also proved lasting relevance. Deitch’s influential essay predicted many of the scientific and sociological shifts that have since shaped our cultural and social environment, even the pandemic.

More than thirty years later, Post Human at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, revisits the theme of the exhibition, bringing the discourse into the present. The show includes several of the key figures who participated in the 1992 exhibition in dialogue with some of the most interesting artists continuing the exploration of these themes today. In keeping with the social and technological trends that inspired it, the interest in figuration of the original artists and the younger generations presented in the show is conceptual rather than formal.

Much of the then-new figurative work was descriptive of the “real” world but cannot, in fact, be called “realistic” in the conventional sense. That is because so much of the “real” world the artists were reacting to had become artificial. With the concept of the real disintegrating through an acceptance of the multiplicity of reality models and the embrace of artificiality, Realism as it was once known was no longer possible. This new figurative art may have actually marked the end of Realism rather than its revival.

Fully integrated into our pop psychology, the term “posthuman” is now used in everyday conversations and has come to primarily identify with the trope of the cyborg. This exhibition, like the 1992 show, however, examines multiple declinations and aspects of the postmodern construction of personality and the engineering and transcendence of the human body. The artists in the exhibition embrace notions of plurality, metamorphosis and multi-beingness. Cyber-futuristic, surgically improved, commodified, stereotyped, and politicized, the “cultured body” lends itself to reflect on a variety of concerns that define our age.

Several works in the exhibition will embrace the biometrical aestheticization of the human body to address the decay paranoia, the social conflict over genetic engineering and the use of biotechnologies, and the conversation around the limits of “natural” life.” Artists have long engaged with the threats of biometric surveillance, the possibility of virtual reality overtaking our physical one, the accelerating real-time consumption of experience, and the automation of the workforce. As AI’s ability to fulfill our creative and specialized needs has reached mass fruition, artists are confronting the impact of what was once considered speculative science fiction, an everyday reality.

Post Human was first presented at FAE, Musée D’art Contemporain, Pully/Lausanne (June 14–September 13, 1992) and traveled to Castello di Rivoli—Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli/Turin (October 1–November 22, 1992), Deste Foundation, House of Cyprus, Athens (December 3, 1992–February 14, 1993), Deichtorhallen Hamburg (March 12–May 9, 1993), Israel Museum, Jerusalem (June 23–October 10, 1993). A number of the works shown in 1992-1993 are now in international museum collections. Matthew Barney’s REPRESSIA (decline) (1991) is now in the collection of LACMA, where it was on view in 2023. Posthumanism has since been the subject of countless books, movies and high-profile exhibitions.

Artists in the exhibition: Isabelle Albuquerque,  Matthew Barney , Ivana Bašić , Frank Benson,  Ashley Bickerton,  Maurizio Cattelan , Chris Cunningham , John Currin,  Alex Da Corte,  Olivia Erlanger , Jana Euler , Rachel Feinstein,  Urs Fischer,  Pippa Garner , Robert Gober , Hugh Hayden,  Damien Hirst , Tishan Hsu,  Pierre Huyghe,  Anne Imhof , Alex Israel,  Arthur Jafa,  Jamian Juliano-Villani , Mike Kelley,  Josh Kline,  Jeff Koons , Paul McCarthy , Sam McKinniss,  Mariko Mori , Takashi Murakami , Wangechi Mutu , Cady Noland,  Charles Ray , Cindy Sherman,  Kiki Smith , Hajime Sorayama,  Anna Uddenberg,  Cajsa von Zeipel , Jeff Wall , Jordan Wolfson, and  Anicka Yi

This show closes Saturday, 1/18/25.

New Jersey Art Shows- Dor Guez’s “Lillies of the Field” Series at Princeton University Art Museum in 2023

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Illustration, Mixed Media, New Jersey, Photographers / Photography, Princeton, Printmaking

Dec 252024

“Lilies of the Field #1, Bethlehem, Christmas Day”, 2019–2020

“Lilies of the Field #1, Bethlehem, Christmas Day”, 2019–2020 (detail)

“Lilies of the field #1, Jerusalem, Mosque El-Aksa”, 2019–2020

“Lilies of the field #1, Jerusalem, Mosque El-Aksa”, 2019–2020 (detail)

“Lilies of the field #1, Jerusalem, Jews’ Wailing place”, 2019–2020

“Lilies of the Field #1, Jerusalem, Mount Olives”, 2019–2020

The images above are from Jerusalem-born artist Dor Guez’s Lillies of the Field series, part of his 2023 exhibition Colony at Princeton Art Museum’s Art@Bainbridge gallery project.

From the museum about the exhibition and this series (by curator Mitra M. Abbaspour) –

Guez, whose family are Palestinians from Lydda on his mother’s side and Jewish immigrants from North Africa on his father’s, has developed a practice of engaging historical objects, especially photographs, to reveal unwritten and overlooked pasts. Colony / Dor Guez brings together works that resulted from the artist’s years of research in the archives of the American Colony, a charitable Christian community established in Jerusalem in 1881 by American expatriates. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the artists of the American Colony created hundreds of photographic views of the locations described in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious texts that collectively came to be known as the Holy Land. These photographic prints, albums, and picture postcards, which attracted an international audience, form a substantial visual record of the region from this era. In this exhibition, the contents of the American Colony archive and the vision of the Holy Land that they produced are, respectively, the source materials and subject matter for Guez’s artistic exploration…

Two of the arrangements pictured in Lilies of the Field are captioned “Mosque El-Aksa” and feature delicate pressed-flower arrangements as stand-ins for this site of spiritual significance. Built on an elevated point in the Old City of Jerusalem, the El-Aksa Mosque is adjacent to the Dome of the Rock and the Temple Mount, understood as the point of departure for the Prophet Muhammad’s night journey or the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, depending on one’s faith tradition. Captions for another pair of floral arrangements draw associations between the pictures and Bethlehem on Christmas Day and to the Grotto of the Nativity, the day and site of Jesus’s birth. Through their design and presentation, the botanical samples pressed into the album pages take on the qualities of a reliquary, carrying the trace of a holy site through space and across time.

Turn-of-the-century photography relied on devices such as albums and glass-plate negatives to create photographic objects that would transport their viewers—not just visually but experientially—to the significant sites pictured. It is notable, then, that in the creations of the American Colony, pictures of early twentieth-century Jerusalem are layered with symbolic weight, metaphoric meaning, and set into the viewer’s imagination. Guez’s artworks extend the metaphors to the present—reminding us that as the American Colony constructed an idea of the Holy Land and its inhabitants to meet the desires of international audiences, the idea of Jerusalem as a place continues to accrue meaning over time through the images we create and the stories we tell about it.

Delaware Art Shows- “we are what we lose” at The Delaware Contemporary

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Conceptual Art, Dance, Delaware, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Performance Art, Performances, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film, Wilmington

Dec 202024

Chau Nguyen, “Bài Học Về Phong Cảnh / Landscape Didactics”, 2022, sand painting

Zalika Azim, “Blood Memories (or a going to ground)”, 2023, video

Azza El Siddique, “Vessels”, 2019, ceramic, rust

Suneil Sanzgiri, “Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken)”, 2023, video

Currently on view at The Delaware Contemporary is we are what we lose, an exhibition featuring artists Zalika Azim, Suneil Sanzgiri, Azza El Siddique, and Chau Nguyen. Through sculpture, dance, video and photography, these artists investigate issues of loss through what gets left behind.

From the museum-

“The real phenomenon of loss is both the inventory of what no longer exists and the impossible measure of what survives.” —Canisia Lubrin

What does the fugitive offer to sites of ruins? Is it a hum, a murmur, a cry, a shadow, a haunting, a poem, a memory, a scene, a loved one, a vessel, a movement, a gathering?

Fugitivity routes and unroutes our understanding of topographic terrains created through the unfolding of displacement, relocation, and exile. In the wake of migratory catastrophes, ruins are the aftermath of loss and devastation, leaving behind vestigial remnants and residuals. Reaching for traces, illegibility, and livability, the fugitive attempts to depict and texture multiple lifeworlds within ruins marked in loss and devastation. Gesturing towards the specter, how might placing what happens within sites of ruins —the permeable, usable, corporeal, and inhabitable—at the heart of our critiques and interventions enliven our imaginative possibilities?

Ruins present a set of spatial, material, visual, and psychic dimensions of un/being and becoming, as well as modes of fugitive resistance and expression. Tending to the juxtaposition of being unplaced, we are what we lose focuses on the provoking void that ruins leave behind and expresses spatial, narrative, and material practices actively and painstakingly situated in the hold of the catastrophes as means of reworlding and unworlding towards livable possibilities.

Partaking in worlding decomposition, Zalika Azim, Suneil Sanzgiri, Azza El Siddique, and Chau Nguyen present visual, narrative, and sonic performances that desire and action towards the otherly present meaning and aliveness by uncomposing time and working with the permeability of the artistic mediums. By engaging with the barely perceptible imaginations, unplaced yearnings, and tactile and vulnerable terrains, the artists orient toward spectral terrains that suture, resist, and refuse the knowability of the fugitive. Viewers will reflect on the histories of ruins haunting our contemporary sites and their capacity to mutate to make complicated ways of knowing, feeling, and seeing the world.

More information on Suneil Sanzgiri’s video installation, pictured above, from his website–

How do we live through and narrate moments of revolution and revolt, and how do we understand these experiences across time and distance? Using imaging technologies to meditate on what it means to witness from afar, Suneil Sanzgiri explores the complexities of anti-colonialism, nationalism, and diasporic identity. His work is inspired by his family’s legacy of resistance in Goa, India, an area under Portuguese occupation for over 450 years until its independence in 1961. Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?), the artist’s newest two-channel video installation, combines archival footage, animation, interviews, and a script written by poet Sham-e-Ali Nayeem. The film tells the stories of the mutual struggle in India and Africa against Portuguese colonialism, highlighting the solidarity that developed between the two continents during the 1960s and 1970s.

This exhibition closes 12/29/24.

Florida Art Shows- Peter Menzel at The Ashley Gibson Barnett Museum of Art (formerly Polk Museum of Art) in Lakeland

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Florida Art Shows, Lakeland, Photographers / Photography

Nov 272024

Photographs from two projects by photographer and author Peter Menzel, are currently on view at The Ashley Gibson Barnett Museum of Art (formerly Polk Museum of Art), in Lakeland, Florida- Hungry Planet: What The World Eats, and Material World: A Global Family Portrait. Taken in the early 2000s and early 1990s, respectively, they provide a fascinating look at what people in various parts of the world were buying and eating at the time.

For Hungry Planet, Menzel and his wife Faith D’Aluisio visited families around the world to observe, photograph and record what they eat during the course of one week. They worked with twenty-five families in twenty-one countries. The two families in pictured above are the Revis Family from Raleigh, North Carolina and the Casales Family form Cuernavaca, Mexico.

Below is some additional information on the families pictured, including the cost of food for the week and their favorite items.

For Material World, a project created in the early 1990s, Menzel assembled a team of photographers who spent a week living with families around the world who then photographed them outside their homes with everything they owned. Pictured are the Hodson Family, from Godalming, England, and the de Goes Family, from São Paulo, Brazil.

Los Angeles Art Shows- Sculpting with Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography at The Getty

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Photographers / Photography

Nov 202024

Deana Lawson, “Black Gold (“Earth turns to gold, in the hands of the wise,” Rumi)”, 2021, Inkjet print with embedded transmission hologram in beveled-mirror frame

Detail from the image above- this hologram is of Ron Finley, an LA based food activist and farmer

Matthew Schreiber, “Bowie 1-8”, 2016-23, a series inspired by David Bowie’s death in 2016.

As part of their programming for PST ART: Art & Science Collide, The Getty is showing Sculpting with Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography. The exhibition explains the process and presents the unique ways several contemporary artists experimented with it in their work.

From the museum-

Holograms produce the magical illusion of three-dimensional objects floating in space. They were made possible by the invention of laser technology in the 1960s, and since then, many artists have experimented with the art form. This exhibition presents holograms by John Baldessari, Louise Bourgeois, Ed Ruscha, and other artists who were invited by the C Project to explore the creative potential of the medium in the 1990s. Deana Lawson turned to holography to expand her photographic practice around 2020. The master technician in both instances was artist Matthew Schreiber, whose work is also featured.

Ed Ruscha, “The End”, 1998 reissued 2016

Louise Bourgeois, “Untitled”, 1998, reissued 2014

This exhibition is on view until 11/24/24.

Nov 152024

78th Street Studios, located in Cleveland, is the largest art and design complex in Northeast Ohio. The building is home to several art galleries, artist studios, performance spaces, and businesses, and is a great place to see local art.

Tonight, 11/15, the complex and several of its creative spaces will be open from 5-9pm for its monthly Third Friday event.

Below are some selections from April of this year.

Work by Mark Yasenchack and paintings by Jenniffer Omaitz

“Love Triangle” by Jenniffer Omaitz

Gallery 202 has a variety of work from local artists for sale and also hosts exhibitions. Above is work from Jennifer Omaitz’s exhibition Where Love Lives and mixed media work by Mark Yasenchack.

Sculptures and installations can be found throughout the building like the light sculpture pictured above by Dana L. Depew.

Rebecca Cross’ installation Rock Cloud, was part of her exhibition Mapping the Sensorial at HEDGE Gallery. The gallery focuses on promoting contemporary artists from Northeast Ohio.

Susan Snipes’ work, pictured above was part of a group exhibition at Understory.

You can also see artists at work in their studios. Above is work by Jessica Mia Vito.

Dawn Tekler encaustic wax paintings like the one pictured above, are on view in her studio.

The painting above is by Laurel Herbold, located outside her studio.

Walking through the halls you can also find artwork hanging outside several of the spaces- like the two paintings below.

David King, “Snow Day”, Oil on aluminum

Scott McIntire, “The Birds”, Enamel on canvas

Los Angeles Art Shows- Art Share L.A.- “Plateaus: Art That Resonates”

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Glasswork, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Music, Mixed Media, Music, Painting / Painters, Performances, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture

Nov 152024

Sculptures by Emily Sudd

Sculptures by Kyung Boon Oh

Work by Cheyann Washington

Photography by Kate Turning

Pictured above are some selections from Plateaus: Art That Resonates, a multisensory group exhibition at Art Share L.A. exploring the dualities of life that artists bring into their work.

From the gallery-

Art Share L.A. is pleased to present Plateaus: Art that Resonates a multidisciplinary and multisensory immersive art exhibition that explores dualities: art and craft, death and life, grief and love, and activity and stillness. These contrasts exist with an interdependent bond, reminding us that bonds are intrinsic and often intertwined partners. In multiple materials, processes, and scales, monument-like creations are revealed through thoughtful burnishing of passion. The exhibition curated by Stacie B. London features seven visual artists: Amanda Maciel Antunes, Kyong Boon Oh, Hadley Holiday, Soojung Park, Emily Sudd, Kate Turning, and Cheyann Washington, along with additional contributions of ikebana by members of Sogestu Los Angeles, music by Rocco DeLuca, perfume by Lesli Wood (La Curie Eau de Parfume), and seating by Hunter Knight. Through a shared refinement of intentional experimentation with their mediums – acrylic panels, clay, glass, ink, photography, scent, sound, stone, thread, tree stumps, and wire– these artistic achievements reveal work that is brave, meditative, resilient, and vulnerable.

Our five senses inform our experiences and knowledge and assist us in ordering the world. In Plateaus: Art that Resonates the traditional forms of visual art of painting, photography, and sculpture are broadened to include aural art — via music and sound — and olfactory art. These multisensory and immersive pieces enhance the experience of viewing visual art and introduce additional dualities: sight with smell, smell with hearing, and hearing with sight. The expanded human experiences in an art gallery switch the expected experiences and invite the possibility of a familiar experience in a new way, or a breakthrough!

Breakthroughs often occur after long periods of what often seems like stagnation, or a plateau. It’s instinctual to want growth to be a continual upward trend, but instead it’s usually a series of long, flat periods (plateaus) of work with few visible results. Seemingly out of nowhere the plateau makes space for a breakthrough of creativity or growth—an intermittent moment when everything comes together. Instead of focusing on the result, it’s good to get comfortable in the plateau.

The artists and artisans of Plateaus: Art that Resonates use a broad range of approaches and techniques towards creative creations that are examples of how to grapple dualities, navigate the plateaus of life, and share breakthroughs that transmute our awareness of mortality into loving engagements with life and it’s contradictions and opposing perspectives that inspire and infuse life with meaning, immediacy, awareness, and appreciation.

Below are two of the ikebana created by members of Sogetsu Los Angeles.

This exhibition closes this Saturday (11/16) with a closing reception from 6-9pm.

Los Angeles Art Shows- “Against Dystopia” at Diane Rosenstein

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Digital Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture

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.

California Art Shows- Horace Poolaw at Agua Caliente Cultural Museum in Palm Springs

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, California Travel, Palm Springs, Photographers / Photography, Places to Visit

Oct 142024

The Agua Caliente Cultural Museum opened in 2023 in its new location in Palm Springs as part of the Agua Caliente Cultural Plaza. It consists of several exhibition areas that tell the story of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians. These include an immersive digitally animated film in a theater at the entrance, scale replicas of the Indian Canyons, and videos, historical photographs and documents. The museum also includes several artifacts including those found during excavations for the plaza that are over 7,000 years old.

The museum also has a gallery for rotating exhibitions focused on traditional and contemporary Native American art. Currently on view is For a Love of His People, the black and white photography of Horace Poolaw.

From the museum–

Horace Poolaw (Kiowa, 1906-1984) was born during a time of great change for his people—one year before Oklahoma statehood and six years after the U.S. government approved an allotment policy that ended the reservation period. A rare American Indian photographer who documented Indian subjects, he began making a visual history in the mid-1920s and continued for the next 50 years.

Poolaw photographed his friends and family, and events important to them—weddings, funerals, parades, fishing, driving cars, going on dates, going to war, playing baseball. When he sold his photos at fairs and community events, he often stamped the reverse: “A Poolaw Photo, Pictures by an Indian, Horace M. Poolaw, Anadarko, Okla.” Not simply by “an Indian,” but by a Kiowa man strongly rooted in his multi-tribal community, Poolaw’s work celebrates his subjects’ place in American life and preserves an insider’s perspective on a world few outsiders are familiar with—the Native America of the Southern Plains during the mid-20th century.

Organized around the central theme of Poolaw as a man of his community and time, For a Love of His People is based on the Poolaw Photography Project, a research initiative established by Poolaw’s daughter, Linda, in 1989 at Stanford University and carried on by Native scholars Nancy Marie Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache) and Tom Jones (Ho-Chunk) of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

For a Love of His People: The Photography of Horace Poolaw is organized by the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. The exhibition was curated by Tom Jones (Ho-chunk) and Nancy Marie Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache).

Below are a few selections from the show-

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