Once on the margins, older African-American artists are suddenly a hot commodity. They are relishing the attention while dealing with the market’s grueling demands. McArthur Binion, the abstract painter, at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York. Underappreciated for decades, his work now sells briskly for up to $450,000. “I’m totally ready for it,” the 72-year-old artist said of his new acclaim. Read the rest.
About the exhibition Clay captures the mark of the human hand unlike any other medium. While it is almost obvious to consider it balm for our techno-centric world, its superpowers are undeniable: what other material, in its earthiness/tactility/associations, reminds us that we have hands/mouths/feet and connects us with past/present/future in a single work. This selection of works captures the direct marks of NIAD artists living and working in our local creative community. These sculptural objects represent a dip into the continuum of conversations humans have with clay — via functional pottery, ritual artifacts, portraiture, craftivism, the blob — the ongoing Read More …
About the exhibition This group is a visual catalogue that spans a broad range of forms and ideas. Each work is paired with a letter from the English alphabet. Having sifted through the 5,000 or so pieces in NIAD’s collection, my personal selections seemed somewhat arbitrary. I have affinities for certain colors, ways of making a mark, and attitudes in a piece. After going through everything, I had a list of 77 that I wanted to include. I thought an additional method was needed to organize these things, so I used the English alphabet. Beginning with A, I chose a Read More …
About the exhibition “Having looked through the amazing works in the NIAD web store, I started to feel like an archaeologist excavating treasures. It brought to mind Queen Puabi’s Royal Tomb, a discovery that yielded incredible finds from the ancient Sumerian city of Ur. I thought it would be fun to present works that have the appearance of having been dug up from an ancient tomb, a queen’s tomb! Behold her magnificent grave goods!” View it here.
Jason has only recently begun creating at NIAD Art Center. // Jason’s available work // recent exhibition history Collective Memory: NIAD // organized by Hannah P. Mode NIAD Art Center February 2019
Joseph has only recently begun creating at NIAD Art Center. recent exhibition history Collective Memory: NIAD // organized by Hannah P. Mode NIAD Art Center February 2019
The 2019 edition of the Whitney Biennial, on view May 17 through September 22, was curated by Whitney Museum Associate Curator Jane Panetta and Assistant Curator Rujeko Hockley. Each has experience curating painting into group exhibitions, which means we should see some work on canvas (or related material). Hockley came to the Whitney in 2017 from the Brooklyn Museum, and she has co-curated “Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined” and “An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940–2017.” Panetta, who has worked at at the Whitney since 2010, helped organize “America Is Hard to See,” “Fast Forward: Painting from the 1980s,” and a solo for Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Read More …
“I had specific, personal reasons for closing my gallery, but I also saw ominous, unavoidable changes in the art market which are analogous to changes in the broader economy. First, abundance plagues our industry. In January 2016, I was discussing the over-saturation of artists with some clients. Forty minutes later, one checked her phone and realized she’d gotten no less than ten sales offers during the time we’d been talking. One PDF every four minutes. In January. The globalization of the art world means that galleries have contact information for the same set of collectors, who are then deluged with Read More …
About the exhibition, Julia writes, “One of my favorite things about working with artists is seeing all of the reference images, notebooks, and sketches that inform the finished artworks. Each of them has taught me a bit more about the artist and his or her philosophy. For example, Squeak Carnwath wrote a poem that appears on a few paintings in the 1990s, and it shows up in her sketchbook pages too. It reads: if we don’t give the poets time, leisure to speak our empty ears our vacant eyes our clean hands and finger tips will not be capable of Read More …
“Pele de Lappe was a teenager when she painted “The Eyes Have It,” a surreal depiction of a woman artist being hung at the hands of a male art critic. The painting is dated circa 1931, around the time she would have befriended Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera during their visit to de Lappe’s native San Francisco. It’s possible that the painting is an outcome of one of Kahlo’s impromptu drawing circles, to which de Lappe was invited. Dreamlike, macabre imagery like the one in the painting was not de Lappe’s signature style, but the artwork contains the seed of Read More …
Ides, an ancient calendrical measurement used by the Romans to compute time according to the lunar cycle, referred to the first full moon of a given ‘month’. In the earliest examples of the Roman calendar, the Ides of March marked the first full moon of the new year. The occasion was celebrated with the Festival of Anna Perenna, goddess of the ring or circle, thus alluding to annual revolution, as the Latin reading of her name ‘per annum’ or ‘for each year’ suggests. In its contemporary context, the Ides of March has become more directly associated with ominous connotations of Read More …
In Disparate Minds: “This year begins with stunning solo exhibitions featuring two of this movement’s greatest contemporary artists – Helen Raeat The Good Luck Gallery in Los Angeles and Marlon Mullen at JTT in New York. No longer emerging, these are Rae and Mullen’s fourth and third major solo exhibitions respectively; both exhibitions feature new bodies of work offering distinctive approaches to the re-imagining of found imagery through abstraction…. Read the rest.
“I find inspiration in the space between simplicity and complexity, which NIAD artists often teeter. For cats & dogs, I’ve selected a group of 13 works that feel like investigations, confrontations, or observations having to do with popular imagery (i.e. animals (cats, dogs, birds), other people, furniture, etc.). The presented subjects become of equal interest to the audience, as the artists’ hyper-focuses become one with our own. Appearingly naïve forms become enthralling windows into the minds of these exceedingly talented artists with disabilities.” View the exhibition.
While amassing his own collection, the music producer became a crucial connector, and an important advocate for artists of color. Read the article here.
The nightingale which from the top of it’s branch, looks down into the river thinks it’s fallen in. It’s perched at the top of an oak-tree, and yet is scared its going to drown. -Cyrano De Bergerac Tree-shadows in river mists Die like smoke. High in the air on real branches Doves Lament. Traveller, how often has this faded land Watched you fade, How poignant your abandoned hopes High in tress! -Paul Verlaine View the exhibition.
“The Picassos and van Goghs will still be there, but the 40,000 square feet of additional space will allow MoMA to focus new attention on works by women, Latinos, Asians, African-Americans and other overlooked artists like Shigeru Onishi, a Japanese experimental photographer, or Hervé Télémaque, a Haitian-born painter who is now 81. With the doors closed from June 15 to Oct. 21, the museum will give up summer tourism revenue in the interest of creating a new MoMA that will abandon the discipline-based display system it has used for eight decades. Three floors of exhibition space will retain a spine Read More …
“After the celebratory title image on Dorrie Reid’s gorgeous quilt, the exhibition begins with the image of a great turtle shell–protecting and enclosing the soft, vulnerable (unseen) animal body inside. Jeremy Burleson’s fantastical turtle is a grid erupting with flame. The rest of the images in the exhibition break through the rigidity of the grid/shell and allow us to see the intimacy of the soft, squishy pliable body hidden within. Moving through the exhibition, geometry becomes organic as life courses through these objects. We see animals literal and figurative, always emphasizing physicality, gravity, and embodiment until the show itself dissolves away in the sticky Read More …
Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday Today’s show: “Marlon Mullen: 2017 – 2018” is on view at JTT in New York through Sunday, February 17. The solo exhibition is Berkeley, California–based artist’s third with the gallery. View it here.
…(D)igital technology didn’t really take off until the fountain pen had already begin its decline, and the ballpoint its rise. The ballpoint became popular at roughly the same time as mainframe computers. Articles about the decline of handwriting date back toat least the 1960s—long after the typewriter, but a full decade before the rise of the home computer. Read the rest.
“It was a true joy exploring all the art here at NIAD. I tried to select works that reverberated with color, whose lines and shapes transported me; pieces I kept thinking about, wanting to look at closer, to absorb their fullness.” View the exhibition.