About the exhibition “All of these works strike me in their immediacy of line and gesture as well as their economy of information. Boiling down the visual information into just the necessary elements. Form and line are king.” View the exhibition.
Artist Christine Wong Yap interviewed people (including some of our artists) throughout the Bay Area about their ideas of connection and belonging. And a terrific book is the result. Find out more here.
“Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said last week that she would be taking down two oil paintings by Emil Nolde, an Expressionist whose work she greatly admires, from the walls of her office. Her decision, widely discussed in German media, was interpreted as a symbolic gesture: a belated official rejection of an artist who yearned for Adolf Hitler’s approval and thought that banishing Jews from the country was a good idea. One of the works, “Breakers,” from 1936, shows crashing dark green waves against a fiery evening sky; the other, from 1915, depicts a flower garden. The decision to remove Read More …
About the Exhibition The paintings, ceramics, and works on paper in this exhibition contain references to language through the inclusion of lists, taxonomies, and data visualization, or simply letterforms. Lists become poems in the work of Sara Malpass, whose circular ceramic tile features the words None, Loyal, and Glory, floating around an evocative grouping of text that includes Vision Blink. In an artist book by Malpass, the serendipitous pairing of words creates phrases like “matchy small,” “sand-house going,” and “please what.” With some pieces, text becomes abstract mark-making, as in the works on paper by Donald Walker and Luis Estrada. For others, text is a Read More …
For the past 150-some years, while the Confederate battle flag has monopolized attention with its corrosive symbolism and inflammatory bluster, a different, largely unknown Confederate flag — the Confederate Flag of Truce, which the South used in the process of surrendering to the North — has been quietly waiting for its moment in the spotlight. That moment is now. Hoping to start a new conversation around the Civil War artifact, textile and social practice artist Sonya Clark has conceived a massive version of the Flag of Truce, measuring 15 by 30 feet — 10 times the size of the original Read More …
“The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has announced the 2019 recipients of its biannual SECA Art Award. Conferred this year on three Bay Area artists, the award has been the region’s most visible recognition program for contemporary artists since its inception in 1967. The winners were chosen from among 16 finalists announced in December. They are Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Sahar Khoury and Marlon Mullen. Each artist will have a dedicated gallery in a three-person exhibition to be held at SFMOMA in November…. Read the entire article.
About the Exhibition These artists get to the essence of what makes ceramics so wonderful- its imposed and inherent meaning, its ability to playfully perform mass, structure, architecture, figuration, and gooey, chunky painterliness. All of these works have qualities I strive for myself as an artist coming back to clay after 30 years away from it. View it here.
Seriously. They are doing an amazing job of covering and exploring America’s progressive art studios and the artists that are engaged in them. And they have a newsletter to which you may subscribe! Disparate Minds.
“The best-selling author and decluttering maven will guide curatorial staff in determining which of the museum’s roughly 1.5 million undisplayed objects should be deaccessioned based on whether or not they “spark joy.” In a statement, the museum’s CEO Daniel H. Weiss said, “Marie’s hire ensures that the Met will continue to lead the way on museum practices that sound truly innovative until you think about them.” Among the items feared to be in danger of sale are the Met’s Egyptian funerary objects, Christian crucifixion imagery, and practically every artwork by a Russian or German….” Read the rest here. (Btw Happy Read More …
About the Exhibition My waking life and dream-scape have been filled with all things book for the past few months gearing up for CODEX VII, the expansive international book fair that takes place every other February right here in Richmond. So, I was thrilled to find a small selection of one-of-a-kind artist books (my favorite!) by NIAD artists to showcase here. Enjoy & pick up a good book! View the exhibition.
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.
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.