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Art in America
Joyce J. Scott’s Beaded Sculptures Confront Racist Tropes
In the 1970s, when the artist Joyce J. Scott was starting out, she crafted one-of-a-kind garments—glamorous and earthy looks made of materials including fur, snakeskin, and safety pins. She also plied her wild style in works of jewelry and sculpture that took on abstract and figurative forms, many of them ornamented by her signature beadwork. Her “Mammy/Nanny” sculpture series from the 1980s and ’90s includes Mammie Wada (1981), a doll-size figure of a Black woman seemingly bound, and made from an otherworldly assemblage of materials including crab claws, brass buttons, and synthetic hair. Many works play on racist tropes: Man...
Why Carla Accardi Abandoned Abstraction for Activism—and Then Came Back
In the early 1970s, Carla Accardi began to doubt the scrawling, colorful abstractions for which she had become known. Wanting to impact the world in more tangible ways, she cofounded Rivolta Femminile (Women’s Revolt), a Rome-based feminist group whose formative publishing house served as a model for how women might obtain both editorial and economic independence from men. While focused on the group, Accardi scaled back her artistic output. The few paintings she produced between 1970 and 1973 dispensed with the vibrating hues that had characterized her canvases, subbing in a simpler contrast: black and white.Jay Lynn Gomez's Tableaux About Transitioning Show Life Under...
Venice Biennale Artist Jeffrey Gibson on Painting and Paying Tribute to Indigenous Cultural Legacies
Jeffrey Gibson—who was profiled for the Summer 2024 “Icons” issue of Art in America and whose work features on the issue’s cover—is a painter, sculptor, video artist, and proponent of various forms of craft and performance that pay tribute to his Native American heritage. A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, Gibson was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and grew up in Germany, New Jersey, South Korea, and Maryland. This year, he is representing the United States in the Venice Biennale—the first time a Native American artist has done so with a solo show...
Tomashi Jackson Probes American Democracy in Her Multilayered Work
Tomashi Jackson’s midcareer survey “Across the Universe” at the ICA Philadelphia probes the histories of culturally resonant people and places as they relate to sociopolitical issues surrounding matters of race and the state of democracy in the United States. Jackson’s multilayered surfaces feature materials like quarry marble dust and Colorado sand, as well as screen prints from film stills and photographs, which highlight notable historical moments. Her work—Here at the Western World (Professor Windham’s Early 1970’s Classroom & the 1972 Second Baptist Church Choir), 2023, pictured above—is one such piece that will be on view in the exhibition through June 2.Artist...
Jay Lynn Gomez’s Tableaux About Transitioning Show Life Under Construction
A version of this essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.In Prismatic Paintings, David Huffman Pays Homage to Black Panther Protests of His Youth Who is Jay Lynn Gomez? That question animates the artist’s current exhibition at P.P.O.W in New York, and the answer is a bit complicated, ever evolving. Titled “Under Construction” and on view through June 15, the show poignantly and earnestly depicts Gomez’s gender transition—a process encumbered by the fact that Gomez had already achieved some art-world acclaim using her...
In Radiant Paintings and Beaded Extravaganzas, Jeffrey Gibson Remixes Native American Histories
When Jeffrey Gibson first visited the Venice Biennale in anything like an official capacity, he was a fledgling artist just starting to make his way. It was 2007, and he had traveled to Italy at the invitation of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). But he had no artwork to show, nor any real role to play. He was simply there to see what he could see, like all the other hundreds of thousands of visitors to the art world’s biggest international event.Art in America’s Summer “Icons” Issue Features Jeffrey Gibson, A Crash Course in Impressionism, and More A...
Art in America’s Summer “Icons” Issue Features Jeffrey Gibson, A Crash Course in Impressionism, and More
Early in this issue’s profile of Jeffrey Gibson by Art in America executive editor Andy Battaglia, the artist remembers being in Venice in 2007 to see the work of fellow Native American artist Edgar Heap of Birds, who had a project organized by curator Kathleen Ash-Milby on view there. The exhibition was a collateral event around the Venice Biennale, and it was unusual then for the work of a Native artist to show on such a global scale. Recalling a conversation with Ash-Milby at the time, Gibson said, “I think we both kind of felt like, Is this the beginning...
Jeffrey Gibson Details His Painting on Art in America’s Latest Cover
Jeffrey Gibson, whose beaded painting Born to Be Alive (2023) appears on the cover of Art in America’s Summer 2024 “Icons” issue, is the subject of a profile in the magazine. From his studio in Hudson, New York, Gibson told A.i.A. the backstory of the cover image, a detail of a larger work shown here in full.Joan Semmel Details Her Painting on A.i.A.’s Latest Cover As told to A.i.A. I was listening to music hunting for words to use in my work and came across this disco song, “Born to Be Alive,” by Patrick Hernandez from 1978. As a mix of different kinds of...
In Prismatic Paintings, David Huffman Pays Homage to Black Panther Protests of His Youth
A version of this essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.How Ione Saldanha Flattened Space, Stretched It Out, Then Flattened It All Over Again Anyone who has been affected by the protests roiling college campuses in recent weeks—which is to say everyone, given the range of emotions they elicit and their magnitude in terms of reverberation and reach—would be advised to visit David Huffman’s current show at Casey Kaplan gallery in New York. A short walk away from the Fashion Institute of Technology,...
Hayv Kahraman Paints Resistance Against the Classification of Migrants and Refugees
Hayv Kahraman is an Iraqi–born refugee who escaped with her family and became a Swedish citizen. Informed by her experience with migration and assimilation, her solo exhibition “Look Me in the Eyes”—on view at ICA San Francisco through May 19—explores the connection between botanical classification and human subjugation.Multidisciplinary Creator Miranda July Shares Her Top Five Recent Obsessions In her work—including the painting Loves Me, Loves Me Not (2023), pictured above—Kahraman draws on a personal interest in binomial nomenclature, a naming system for living species started by Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in the 18th century, and its relation to refugees and migrants. How did...
How Ione Saldanha Flattened Space, Stretched It Out, Then Flattened It All Over Again
A version of this essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday. One of the most memorable sections of this year’s Venice Biennale is a vast room hung floor to ceiling with abstract works, many of them by dead artists. The star of this room—the pieces I can’t stop thinking about—appear not on the overcrowded walls, but in the space’s center, suspended from the ceiling.That series, titled “Bambus,” is by Ione Saldanha (1919–2001). The late Brazilian artist painted the works on pieces of bamboo that she’d let dry...
Legacy Russell’s ‘Black Meme’ Critiques Representations of Black Culture—But Doesn’t Chart a Way Forward
Who gets to profit from the TikTok-famous Renegade Dance? Or the viral catchphrase “on fleek”? When memes are by their very nature hyper-transmitted and endlessly remixed, is there any opportunity to “own” one’s innovations in the online cultural field? The problem of how to compensate digital labor and goods has animated scholars and popular thinkers for more than two decades now. Meanwhile, questions of appropriation as they relate to Black creators and subjects have been part of this discourse for nearly as long—time enough that a reviewer of Lauren Michele Jackson’s 2019 book White Negroes, about Black virality and appropriation,...
A Riotous, Edgy Alternative Fair About 1970s Art Returns to New York
For the second year in a row, far from Frieze New York in Hudson Yards, the SoHo art dealer Eric Firestone is hosting 18 New York galleries, all of whom are celebrating the 1970s.At Frieze New York, Young Galleries Reveal Untold Narratives and Spotlight Overlooked Talents The fair is situated on the upper floors of Firestone’s gallery on Great Jones Street, where painter Jean-Michel Basquiat and jazz musician Charles Mingus once lived. (Basquiat’s former home now houses Angelina Jolie’s clothing store Atelier Jolie.) Up the broad, creaky wooden stairs, on the third and fourth floors, Firestone assembled some of the buzziest galleries in...
How Arlene Shechet Makes Her Recalcitrant Materials Come Alive
This spring, Storm King Art Center is getting a serious makeover. Since its founding in 1960, the 500-acre sculpture park in the Hudson Valley has been gradually populated by world-class works: the modernist abstractions of David Smith and Mark di Suvero; Louise Nevelson’s glowering black cabinetry; towering monoliths by Ursula von Rydingsvard; and, most recently, Martin Puryear’s Lookout, an elegant viewing chamber in vaulted brick. The collection is all the more impressive for its beautiful setting, a landscape that has inspired artists for two centuries and counting.Dozens Arrested at Pro-Palestine Encampment at Art Institute of Chicago There has, however, been one...
In Collection Hangs, Major Museums Remix the Classics
Until it reopened in a $230 million new building this past June, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum was an anomaly among United States institutions: it held a world-class collection of modern and postwar art with nowhere to properly exhibit the bulk of it at once. Now, a 50,000-square-foot space allows masterpieces like Picasso’s 1906 La Toilette to return to view, along with showstoppers from the likes of Chaim Soutine, Andy Warhol, and a whole lot more.Frank Stella, Trailblazing Artist Who Pushed Abstraction to Its Limits, Dies at 87 The way these pieces are displayed, however, changed vastly. The history of modernism...
Are We Supposed to Believe Maurizio Cattelan Is Sincere Now?
Maurizio Cattelan is usually “dismissed as a prankster,” per the press release for his new show at Gagosian in New York. That’s because he duct-taped a banana to a wall and sold it for $120,000, made a sculpture of an asteroid hitting the pope, and—for his last New York show, a 2011 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum—dangled his art from the rotunda’s ceiling, making it hard to get a good look and leaving viewers wanting more.The same press release insists that he is in fact “a deeply political artist,” and the evidence is supposed to be the new work in...
Esther Mahlangu’s South African Retrospective Asks: Whose Abstractions Count as “Modern”?
In 1989 Esther Mahlangu (b. 1935) participated in “Magiciens de la terre” at the Pompidou Center in Paris. One of the first exhibitions to mingle artists from across the globe, it remains influential—largely for the troubling issues it raised. One critic, Rasheed Araeen, pointed out the “biases of the way in which the organizers of the exhibition selected artists—searching for the ‘authentic,’ bypassing anything truly modern in Third World cultures.”Paul McCartney's Rarely Seen Photography Gets a Big Museum Show in New York Decades later, critics and curators are still grappling with the politics of inserting artists from the Global South into...
In the Early 20th Century, Jean Cocteau’s Queer Art Was Notably Cocksure
This essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.Cultural Institutions Throughout Northern Italy, South Korea Temporarily Close as Coronavirus Cases Continue to Rise The French polymath Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) was never content to work in one mode—and was ostracized for it. His retrospective at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice is titled “The Juggler’s Revenge”: it makes a case for this versatility, showing a cohesive spirit across works in film, sculpture, collage, drawing, literature, and jewelry. No bother, Cocteau was unperturbed, impressively juggling this...
Learning from Lagos: Lessons from the Megalopolis’s Growing Art Scene
When the Lagos Biennial debuted in 2017 at a railway terminal, there was a sense that the event was remarkable for the way it captured the do-for-self disposition of Nigerian artists, who’d been starved for years of institutional support. Directed by the artist Folakunle Oshun, the mood of that edition was makeshift—with scant concern for charting easy paths to navigate a weed-strewn place, or for presenting artworks with any kind of pristine veneer.Potential Legal Heir Emerges to Claim Long-lost Klimt Portrait Auctioned in Vienna Oshun’s choice of an unconventional locale as an art venue was memorable—a gesture that seemed to me...
Hard Truths: Can a Closing Gallery Get a Little Respect from the Press?
With a world in crisis and an art market spinning out of control, ace art-world consultants Chen & Lampert deliver hard truths in response to questions sent by Art in America readers from far and wide.John Cage's Frequently Misunderstood 4'33" Remains a Masterpiece It was with a heavy heart that I closed my gallery last fall. Proud of all that the gallery had accomplished over the years, I noted some highlights in a closure announcement that I sent to our mailing list. I was flooded with warm responses, yet it saddened me that no art press reported on our departure. Our shows might not always...
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