Then and Now, AA Abstract Art

              The long anticipated exhibition Solidary and Solitary at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art allows visitors to catch a glimpse of the Joyner/Giuffrida Collection of African American abstract art with its display of approximately sixty paintings and sculptures representing fourteen artists, through January 2018. Four Generations: The Joyner Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art is the title of the catalog published in conjunction with the show scheduled to travel to seven additional venues following its New Orleans debuts.

                 A Private Stranger Thinking about His Needs, 2016, a soaring sculpture from Mark Bradford suspended from the Stephen Goldring Hall's third floor, provides a spectacular introduction to the exhibition. While still looking up, the visitor catches a sight of the yellow neon work from Tavares Strachan, I Belong Here, 2012, and on the way to the library walks by Drape Work, 1970, a major piece from Sam Gilliam. The Mississippi native's work occupies a prominent spot at the exhibition's entrance located on the museum's fourth floor. A sensuous folded canvas from his color field period in the seventies, along a short biography, is followed by nine works spanning  more than forty years of the artist's career, illustrating his search for shapes, colors, media, to build his compositions. The next featured artist, Norman Lewis was the only African American artist to join the first generation of Abstract Expressionists. Each selected work provides a clue about the artist's maturation, starting with Conversation (Two Abstract Heads), 1945, which exemplifies the juncture in the artist's career. During that decade, Lewis moved on from figurative and social realist themes to abstract in his quest of purely aesthetic goals. The juxtaposition of two bright yellow paintings, projecting the same aura of warmth and lightness, Easter Rehearsal, 1959, and Afternoon, 1969, provides a great example of the abstraction's process. A total of eight pieces sums up the artist's legacy. Following these "solo" shows, the exhibition takes a faster pace, featuring two artists in each gallery like a "duet" as described in the complementary pamphlet, with Melvin Edwards and Leonardo Drew sharing a space. The former is represented by five wall sculptures from his famous series Lynch Fragments started in 1965 in response to racial violence and two rocking sculptures for A Conversation with Norman Lewis, 1979. The latter's wall compositions contribute to the conversation about African American history and broadens it, reflecting on our society. Edwards's message is quite blunt while Drew's leaves us ponder and dream. Kevin Beasley and Shinique Smith have been selected for the next duet. Both use found fabrics as a media. Here ends the similarity. Beasley builds colorful sculptures, Smith, cosmic landscapes. Charles Gaines's works are spread on the four walls of a small gallery taken over by Numbers and Trees, Central Park Series I, Tree #9, 2016. The colorful tree on a black and white photographic background is drawn through the juxtaposition of  red, yellow, green, blue squares on a grid, giant pixels arranged with a compulsive precision to reach perfection. The minimalist pieces from Jennie C. Jones made with piano keys or painted on acoustic absorber panels are mixed with two neon wall sculptures from Glenn Ligon and Stranger #68, 2012, made with oil stick and coal dust on canvas. The last room is filled with the larger than life portraits from Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, charged with a symbolic overtone. The show spills in the hallway with Untitled (America America), 2015, a black neon work from Ligon. Facing down, belly and wires exposed, it looks like a broken object with its flickering lights. Three sculptures from Serge Alain Nitegeka, made with crate material (about refugees), and painted in red (blood) and black (skin color) are randomly scattered, falling short of their intended message. A side gallery offers a unique experience with the display of works from Marc Bradford and Jack Whitten energizing the space.

The show about four generations of African American abstract artists starts on a high note featuring works from two major artists. As it progresses, it looses its thread due to weak links between artists' practices for its duets and the inclusion of Yiadom-Boakye's figurative portraits. The setting which is not by chronological order would benefit from more didactic wall texts about the artists and their works, directed at a lay audience. The key to an exhibition is usually found in its title. The association of the words Solidary and Solitary epitomizes the quandary African American artists were faced with when embracing abstract, as exemplified by Norman Lewis. Other artists of the collection should have been included or mentioned. We miss Alma Thomas, Edward Clark, Richard Mayhew, Julie Mehretu, William T. Williams, ..., even just one work from each!
The exhibition helps us understand the contribution of African American artists to American art as they paved the way to new generations and hopefully will promote the inclusion of their works in the museums.

photographs by the author:
Leonardo Drew "Number 185", 2016
Charles Gaines "Numbers and Trees, Central Park Series I, Tree #9", 2016
Mark Bradford "No Time to Expand the Sea", 2014

Basquiat Belongs

With its catchy title, the exhibition Basquiat and the Bayou at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, part of Prospect.3: Notes for Now, is an attempt to relate Jean-Michel Basquiat's legacy to the culture of the Crescent City and the South in general. Nine paintings have been selected for the show which starts with a biography of the artist set along the hall leading to a vast room filled with the works.

Facing the entrance, Zydeco, 1984, a dark green triptych, color of "haricots" (beans), catches the visitor's attention with its reference to the music from Louisiana. The camera on the right panel focuses on the accordionist, the central figure. The left panel, harder to decipher, includes a black refrigerator, four black skulls topped by two iconic crowns and two seated black silhouettes. The painting is surrounded by Natchez, 1985, on the right, an aggregation of Xeroxed pieces on plywood mounted on a wood door, covered by texts and drawings treating a variety of subjects and, on the left, by CPRKR, 1982, dedicated to Charlie Parker. Facing these, two works appear loosely related to the theme of the exhibition: Embittered,1986, a complex juxtaposition of cartoonish figures including African inspired drawings and Back of the Neck, 1983, a painting inspired by Gray's Anatomy. Procession, 1986, appears racially charged with its simple sinister cortege led by a figure wearing bright clothes and carrying a white skull, followed by four black silhouettes. Another prominent piece Exu, 1988, is a mythical painting radiating energy, a late work possibly made after Basquiat's visit to New Orleans. Two paintings, King Zulu, 1986 and Untitled (Cadmium), 1984, are similar compositions treating unrelated subjects. The first refers to New Orleans and the musician Louis Armstrong, the later has a religious overtone featuring a black torso and a sacred heart.
The physical relationship between the bayou (South) and Basquiat is tenuous at best and consists of one visit to New Orleans during Jazz Fest in April 1988, shortly before his death. Basquiat himself claimed his New York City roots which are not incompatible with his preoccupations with the South, racial bias, his Haitian and Puerto Rican origins, and his musical choices, as described by Robert G. O'Meally in his essay published in the exhibition's catalogue. So it is not surprising to find themes related to the South in his works long before his trip to New Orleans like in Undiscovered genius of the Mississippi Delta, 1983, or Jim Crow, 1986, among others, important works selected for the great retrospective which took place at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2010 for his fiftieth birthday. Furthermore, some of Basquiat's late paintings appear to be an attempt to reconnect with his preferred themes following his collaboration with Andy Warhol.
It is not surprising that the exhibition's intent feels somewhat contrived, twisting Basquiat's vernacular to make it fit into a Southern experience. Cataloged as a neo-expressionist artist, ultimately, Basquiat is recognized as Basquiat and like Gauguin, found at the New Orleans Museum of Art during the Triennale, it is fitting that he should be part of Prospect.3 because, referring to Tavares Strachan slogan floating on the Mississippi, he "belongs".

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photographs by the author:

"Untitled (cadmium)", 1984

" Exu", 1988

" Zydeco", 1984

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.