Best Wishes 2021

Should mending the sky be our New Year's resolution? The title of the exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art Mending the Sky is timely and poetic. The allegory alludes to an ancient Chinese tale in which the goddess creator of mankind repairs a rip on the sky to stop calamities. Like all fables, it is simple but profound, timeless and universal. Eleven artists participate to the show which combines paintings, fiber art, videos, installations, sculptures and a musical performance.

Although the installation from Beili Liu is most enticing, for my second visit I saw the show in reverse, walking toward a huge tableau from Firelei Báez I had almost missed the first time. Superimposed on an architectural drawing, a strange creature takes over the foreground, arched backward between two tracks from the Illinois Central Railroad. The curves of the body and the headdress made of luxurious palms and tropical flowers contrast with the blend colors and sober lines of the blueprint. A mass of water on the left side (Bonnet Carré  Spillway) spills over the track and fills the vanishing point. The ciguapa, a Dominican mythological figure, seems to push against the flood with her feet. Allegory of nature versus human, the picture also alludes to the Great Migration facilitated by the construction of the railroad. Is the ciguapa also protecting the souls of the enslaved persons buried in the two cemeteries submerged under the spillway? Not only the composition is filled with a rich narrative fed by history, it also relates to the present as a reminder of nature's wrath. 

In the next two weaved pieces, water is looked at as a benevolent element sustaining communities, a sort of gold for the poor. Encontro das Aguas (Meeting of Waters), 2016-2018, from Clarissa Tossin, refers to mighty rivers: Nile, Amazon, Yangtze, Mississippi, evoked by a long blue ribbon meandering on a chevron patterned background, widening at the bottom for the delta. Satellite photographs of the rivers are printed on vinyl, providing the material to weave for this work, a reflection on rivers' local and global impact. On the wall, If you feed a river, 2019, from Diedrick Brackens has biblical undertones, depicting fishes swimming in a stream which connects two half bodies, one appears female on the right, the other male on the left. Adam and Eve? A symbolic scene about water, source of life. In the same room, Burnout in Shredded Heaven, 2018-2019, a "Munchean" closed composition from Heidi Hahn depicts the emotionally charged interaction between two women. Across the room, in A Sense of Memory, 2015, made in wood, metal and glass, Ana Hernandez looks at patterns found on wood and the brain convolutions, to find connections between "rhythms of nature and our thoughts, memories and dreams".

The three channel video installation from Thao Nguyen Phan provides a fifteen minutes interlude. It brings us to a faraway land (Vietnam) in a remote time. Between reality depicted by gruesome films and photographs from the famine (1940-1949), and folktales illustrated by hand-drawn animations, we are told about a story of starvation, resilience and hope. Lost in the dark between the five screens of Un chemin escarpé/ A steep path, 2018, from Jamilah Sabur, I stayed confused by the images of this ambitious work which "draws upon metaphysics, geology, and familial ties to reframe the landscape and history of the Caribbean".   

In the next gallery, at floor level, the convoluted roots of a tree pop out of the wall anchored on a metal support. Strength and fragility, Lore, 2017, from Lorna Williams is about us and where we come from. The third video Braidrage, 2017, from Baseera Khan should be a performance which had to be curtailed during the pandemic. If it looses some of its spontaneity, its physicality still transpires as we watch the artist climb a rock-wall. Grasping casts of her own body, loosing her grip, grunting at times, her slow ascend culminates with the view of a thick braid of human hair falling from the ceiling to the floor. Beyond the hairpieces' trade, the artist denounces the exploitation of women in the third world to feed our consumerism. 

Walking through Beili Liu's After All / Mending The Sky is a great way to start or finish the visit, or both. The light blue clouds weighted by thousands of needles gently swayed by the air flow, gleaming under the skylights, is a poetic interpretation of a Chinese tale about repairing a broken world. 

Natural calamities, human disasters are worldwide and it is fitting that the selected participants come from a cosmopolitan background, yet one can regret that  male artists are underrepresented, perpetuating the idea of females in charge of comforting, mending, healing.

Time to pick up a needle.  

photographs by the author

Beili Liu "After All / Mending The Sky", 2018-ongoing

Lorna Williams "Lore", 2017

Firelei Báez "the trace, whether we are attending to it or not (a space for each other's breathing)", 2019

Waiting for Prospect.3, four artists

Firelei Báez

Firelei Báez was born in 1980 in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, to Dominican and Haitian parents. She immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. Báez received a B.F.A. from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, NY, in 2004, attended the Skowhegan School Of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME, in 2008 and graduated from Hunter College, NY, with a M.F.A. in 2010. She has held residencies at The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace, The Lower East Side Print Shop and The Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace and presently lives and works in New York, NY.

Artist's Statement:

"My artwork consists of paintings, drawings and prints that regard my physical self, my personal history, and Caribbean folklore. Caribbean folklore allows for malleability in the creation of the self, but I find my status as an Afro-Latina in the United States static and limiting in comparison. In response, I try to disrupt the current system of social categorization through the creation of characters that refuse definition. As more people become multiracial, skin tone is no longer a sufficient signifier. Growing media presence and more commonplace interactions via technology in our daily lives reduce each individual to a small part of a larger demographic. I use symbolically loaded scenarios to metaphorically illustrate the multiplicities and hypocrisies that make up the current discussion about race and class within popular culture."

Ebony C Patterson

Ebony G. Patterson is a Jamaican artist born in Kingston in 1981. She has taught at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, the Sam Fox College of Design & Visual at Washington University in St. Louis. She has taught at the University of Virginia and is currently an Assistant Professor in Painting at the University of Kentucky. She lives and works in Lexington, KY and Kingston, Jamaica.
Her work includes paintings, drawings, collages and recently she added photography, installation and performance. The female body as an object is the subject of her early works with her "Venus", a search for "beauty through the use of the grotesque but visceral, confrontational and deconstructed."
One of Patterson's most recognized body of work, is a series entitled "Gangstas for Life," which explores conceptions of masculinity within  dancehall culture and subjects related to this, like homosexuality within a predominantly homophobic culture, race, stereotypes and beauty.
 She has shown her artwork in numerous solo and private exhibitions, such as Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art, Brooklyn Museum, (2007). National Biennial, National Gallery of Jamaica,(2006,2008,2010),Ghetto Biennale , Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Rockstone and Bootheel, Real Artways, (2010) Wrestling With the Image, Museum of the Americas,(2011)

link to National Gallery of Jamaica blog


Tavares Strachan


Tavares Henderson Strachan (born in Nassau in 1979) is a contemporary, conceptual artist whose multi-media installations investigate science, technology, mythology, history, and exploration. He lives and works in New York City and Nassau, Bahamas.
Initially a painter, Strachan earned his Associate of Fine Arts degree from the College of the Bahamas in 1999. In 2000, he moved to the US to enroll in the glass department at the Rhode Island School of Design and completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2003. Strachan went on to earn his Master of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture from Yale University in 2006. In 2006, Strachan joigned the international art scene with his piece titled "The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want" which involved a 4.5 ton block of ice from the Alaskan Artic displayed in a solar-powered freezer in the courtyard of his childhood elementary school. The work was later exhibited at Miami Art Basel and the Brooklyn Museum.
Strachan developed further the themes of exploration, displacement and the idea of pushing the body’s physical extremes, with a four-year, multimedia body of work "Orthostatic Tolerance" which documented Strachan’s experience in cosmonaut training at the Yuri Gagarin Training Center in Star City, Russia and experiments in space travel conducted in Nassau under the Bahamas Air and Space Exploration Center (BASEC), the artist’s version of NASA for his native country, with photography, video, drawing, sculpture and installation.
Last year a 20,000-square-foot overview of Strachan’s work from 2003–2011, subtitled Seen/Unseen,was presented at an undisclosed New York City location and was closed to the public. Tavares Strachan: seen/unseen is fully documented with a forthcoming catalogue, designed by Stefan Sagmeister. Strachan’s solo exhibitions include Orthostatic Tolerance: It Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea if I Never Went Home Again, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (2010); Orthostatic Tolerance: Launching from an Infinite Distance, Grand Arts, Kansas City, MO (2010); Tavares Strachan: Orthostatic Tolerance, the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2009); Where We Are is Always Miles Away, The Luggage Store, San Francisco, CA (2006); and The Difference Between What We Have and What We Want, Albury Sayle Primary School, Nassau, The Bahamas (2006).
In 2013, Tavares Strachan represented The Bahamas in the country’s first national pavilion at the 55th International Venice Biennale.

link to Artsy
link to Prospect.3


Antonio Vega Macotela

Antonio Vega Macoleta was born in Mexico-city, Mexico, in 1980. He attended the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, Mexico City, Mexico and obtained his BA in 2005. In 2011 he was accepted for a residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
The conceptual artist worked several years with the inmates of a prison in Mexico City and set up a "time exchange project" which resulted in a Series of works called Divisa , 2006-1010, a reflection on the concept of time. He also produced series like The Ungovernables for the Second New York Triennial, at the New Museum in 2012,
He participated in several group exhibitions, the latest at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Summer 2014.