[B.A.R.]
BLACK ARTISTS RETREAT AUGUST 21 - 23, 2014
Hosted by Theaster Gates, Carrie Mae Weems, Sarah Workneh & Eliza Myrie Thursday, AUGUST 21 6918 S. Dorchester Ave 6.30 pm Welcome! ROLE Call Screening w/ Arthur Jafa: Dreams are Colder Than Death
10 pm Shuttles to Hotel Felix and Public Hotel begin
Friday, AUGUST 22 7200 S. Kimbark Ave 9.30 am Light breakfast
10 am MODE OF ADDRESS: intersections of queerness and feminism in black art noon Lunch/Break/Group Photo
1.30 pm The Past Is Present: Black Artists and the Issue of Abstraction
5 pm Shuttles to Retreat, Valerie Carberry/Richard Gray Gallery HTMAH, Arts Incubator Gallery
6.30 pm Currency Exchange Cafe, 305 E Garfield Blvd
8 pm Toast & Dinner REVELRY!
9 pm Shuttles to Hotel Felix and Public Hotel begin
1 am Good Night Saturday, AUGUST 23 6918 S Dorchester Ave
Welcome! 10.30 am Light breakfast and office hours ROLE Call Screening w/ Arthur Jafa: Dreams are Colder Than Death Inside-out/Outside-in: Black Cultural Producers, Privilege, and Margins Is Your House In Order? B.A.R. edition The Black Lunchtable Presents Mass Observation: Historical Enactments Story of Belgian Copal: the role of Belgian Congo Copal in the History of mid-20th century Painting Gallery Presence…Why, When, Which, and How? Thinking about Criticism
1 pm Walk to 7200 S. Kimbark Ave
1.30 pm DECOMPRESS
4 pm fin! Inside-out/Outside-in: Black Cultural Producers, Privilege, and Margins Misa Dayson
Black artists and cultural producers in the 21st century find ourselves in a unique and paradoxical situation: We inhabit a privileged position in society, while continuing to face systemic marginalization and racism in our elite spaces. While we recognize and experience continued practices of marginalization in spaces of cultural production, are we simultaneously aware of how we are also implicated in marginalizing practices? This panel attempts to serve as a laboratory for putting theory into practice with regards to living a materially sustainable and equitable creative life.
Heavily informed by conversations with, and/or work produced by Sonia Elizabeth Barrett, Roderick Ferguson, Jodi Melamed, and James Baldwin, to name a few, during this session we first investigate the question of whose interests are served when, in the words of Barrett, “ we create art in a way that sustains others...but not ourselves”?1 By focusing disproportionately on issues of representation in the art world, are we unwittingly disconnecting from, and dismantling the WORKSHOPS momentum of, those working to change the socio-economic issues that inevitably inform our work? We will use this time to discuss and workshop ways in which we can connect our artistic practices to social justice issues in ways that allow for a transformative envisioning of living in a more socially equitable world.
1 Sonia Elizabeth Barrett,“Creating Space for Evolution,” in The Little Book of Big Visions: How to be an Artist and Revolutionize the World. Pp. 143. Berlin: Edition Assemblage
Is Your House In Order? B.A.R. edition Pamela Council So many people die without having a plan in writing for how their material and intellectual possessions will be cared for. This is especially troubling for cultural producers. Inspired by the Reebok x Basquiat collection, Michael Jackson’s posthumous album, and James Brown’s ongoing final show, Is Your House In Order? welcomes you to stop by and start the difficult conversation about how your possessions and work will live on beyond your time here on Earth. Have you started to think about a plan? Worksheets will be provided. The Past Is Present: Black Artists and the Issue of Abstraction Dawoud Bey
The historical erasure and mischaracterization of the works of black artists choosing to work within the construct of formalist and abstract paradigms has had many recent and early iterations. Numerous exhibitions over the years have sought to serve as a corrective to this disappearing of black artists from these discourses, including April Kingsley’s seminal ‘Afro- American Abstraction’ at PS 1 in 1981 to the recent exhibition ‘Outside the Lines,’ curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston in 2014. And still the tepid critical response and lack of substantive discourse continues, though its existence is periodically “heralded,” as in a recent ARTnews article “The Changing Complex Profile of Black Abstract Painters (ARTnews June 2014). This roundtable panel brings together artists of varying generations to examine the varied histories and genealogies at the root of their diverse practices, and the responses to these practices. They will be joined by art historians and curators for a conversation on the histories, methods, and critical reception of black artists working within this area and other less clearly racialized modalities, while contemplating the histories—past, present and future—of abstraction as a broad heuristic frame. Or as Maren Hassinger recently asked me, “Not all of my work is abstract, but much of it is not about being black, which I guess is a form of abstraction?”
Roundtable Participants Dawoud Bey, Chair/Organizer
Facilitators/Readers Huey Copeland Adrienne Edwards
Panelists Torkwase Dyson Jennie C. Jones Maren Hassinger Richard Hunt Tameka Norris William Villalongo MODE OF ADDRESS: intersections of queerness and feminism in black art Aay Preston-Myint The goal of Mode of Address is to destabilize, expand, and reimagine representations and performances of blackness in art through the lens of queer theory/experience and feminism. Through this panel, we will build energy and open lines of communication in order to interrogate the self and the community as gendered subjects, racial subjects and, sexualized subjects with greater sensitivity and criticality. Building off of last year’s gathering, we will continue to construct black art as an intersectional cultural form as opposed to monolithic one. The panel will consist of an introductory conversation between the artists to be followed by a short question period and smaller breakout groups.
Facilitators/Readers Aay Preston-Myint
Panelists Rashayla Marie Brown Darrell Jones
WORKSHOPS Ayanah Moor Amina Ross
Story of Belgian Copal: the role of Belgian Congo Copal in the History of mid-20th Century Painting Vincent Johnson
From 1942 to 1970, the Permanent Pigments company in Cincinnati commercially produced Frederic Taubes copal painting medium, which this artist and inventor thought replicated the remarkable media employed by the Flemish masters. During the first half of the 20th century and beyond, “The highest grade for paint and varnish manufacture was Congo copal.” From the onset of colonial control, copal was mined at a spectacular level along with other natural resources of the Congo. Belgian Congo copal resin found markets and application not only in Western art suppliers, but in vast international commercial enterprises such as varnish, protective coatings and commercial house paint. Story of Belgian Copal provides the details. The Black Lunchtable Presents Mass Observation: Historical Enactments Heather Hart and Jina Valentine Heather Hart and Jina Valentine’s performance-based project The Black Lunch Table has taken many forms since its inauguration at Skowhegan in 2005. For [B.A.R.], our collective history writing event will take place around a metaphorical lunch table. We seek to democratize the (re) writing of history by animating discourse among the people who lived it, in an effort to record a comprehensive and idiomatic (art)historical account. It is our aim that our collective effort will enrich the historical and art historical record (on Wikipedia and other online archives) with oral histories, testimonials, and first hand accounts of artworks experienced, artists encountered, and exhibitions viewed.
Four Keynote dialogues will punctuate this event: 10:30 – Dawoud Bey and Sonia Davis 11:15 – Lisa Dent and Hank Willis Thomas 12:00 – Carrie Mae Weems and Latoya Ruby Frazier 12.45 – Huey Copeland and William Villalongo. Additional, curated dialogues will take place during these times; all are invited to contribute to these critical discussions.
Our wikipedia editing station will be open throughout the weekend of [B.A.R.] Everyone is invited to update or add pages for other [B.A.R.] attendees!
Gallery Presence…Why, When, Which, and How? Kambui Olujimi As the alchemy of courting and negotiating a gallery presence is a well- kept secret and no one route is ever taken, the various journeys are rarely discussed. Gallery Presence... will explore four main topics of the artist/ gallery relationship through the individual experiences of four panelists.
1 – Why: What can a gallery offer beyond revenue? 2 – When: What are the factors that informs one’s decision to enter or avoid gallery markets? 3 – Which: What concerns and considerations influence the creation of a “good fit” between artist and gallery? 4 – How: How are galleries introduced to new artists? What are some of the points of evaluation both for the gallery and the artist? Dawoud Bey is an artist and professor of art and Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago. His works have been exhibited internationally, and are included in the collections of institutions throughout the United States and Europe including the Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art (NY), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guggenheim Museum, The Addison Gallery of American Art, the National Portrait Gallery (London) and others. His essays on contemporary art and its place within institutional and social practice have appeared in various catalogues and publications including Third Text, High Times Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967-1975 as well as online at Artnet.com. His seminal essay ‘David Hammons: In the Spirit of Minkisi’ (Third Text, 1993) was the first to place this artist’s work within the framework of West African cosmological practice, moving beyond the Duchampian references through which this artist’s work had been viewed. His essay “The Ironies of Diversity or the Disappearing Black Artists” (Artnet, 2004) examines the issue of the limited space accorded black artists working within the space of abstraction in the larger art world. Bey received his MFA from Yale University School of Art.
Rashayla Marie Brown is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and writer. Her practice spans across image-making, performance, research, and community building, often infusing cultural studies with personal agency, subjectivity, and spirituality. Her journey as a professional artist began as a radio DJ researching black British music in London, England and as the founder of the family-owned graphic design company Selah Vibe, Inc. in Atlanta, Georgia. Brown holds a BA in Sociology and African-American Studies from Yale University, advised by Paul Gilroy, and a BFA in Photography and Video from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), advised by Barbara DeGenevieve. She has been awarded numerous fellowships and grants, including the Anna Louise Raymond Fellowship, Chicago Artist Coalition’s BOLT Residency, the Propeller Fund, and the Yale Mellon Research Grant. She currently serves as the Director of Student Affairs for Diversity and Inclusion at SAIC, fostering subversive narratives and access within and outside institutions.
Mike Cloud is a painter living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He earned his M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art and his B.F.A. from the University of Illinois-Chicago. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at P.S.1, NY; the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY;Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum, Slovak Republic; Good Children Gallery, LA; Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY; Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, NB; White Columns, NY; Max Protetch, NY; Apexart, NYC. He has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Art Review and featured in the publication Painting Abstraction by Bob Nickas, published by Phaidon Press. Cloud is currently an assistant professor at Brooklyn College/CUNY in New York.
Huey Copeland is Associate Professor of Art History at Northwestern University with affiliations in the
BIOS Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. His work focuses on modern and contemporary art with emphases on the articulation of blackness in the Western visual field and the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality within global aesthetic practice. A regular contributor to Artforum, Copeland has also published in Art Journal, Callaloo, Camera Obscura, Nka, Parkett, Qui Parle, Representations, and Small Axe as well as in numerous exhibition catalogues and edited volumes including Black Is, Black Ain’t. His first book, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America, was published in 2013 by the University of Chicago Press. Pamela Council was born in 1986 in Southampton, New York. She received a B.A. from Williams College in 2007 and an M.F.A. from Columbia University in 2014. She works primarily in sculpture, performance, and textiles. Pamela is a recovering sneakerhead with charismatic leadership on her mind. Interests in exuberant personal style, legacy-building, icons and branding, and culturally specific materials are evident in her work, which has been featured in exhibitions at the Williams College Museum of Art, Southampton Historical Museum, The Wassaic Project, Kianga Ellis Projects, and the Soap Factory in Minneapolis. Pamela Council lives and works in New York City.
Misa Dayson is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a documentary filmmaker. She explores how art spaces and visual culture in Berlin are used to foster discussions about contemporary racial, cultural, and national identity formations in Germany and Europe. Her work further focuses on the relationship between space, place, race, and memory, which she discusses in, “Imagine Us There: Visions of Radical Art.People.Spaces” in the Witnessed anthology, The Little Book of Big Visions: How to be an Artist and Revolutionize the World (Edition Assemblage). Misa received her B.A. in African American and Film Studies from Wesleyan University, her M.A. in Anthropology from UCLA, and is the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation German Chancellor Fellowship, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and the German Academic Exchange Service German Studies Research Grant.
Torkwase Dyson merges ideas such as site and built environments, nature and culture under the rubric of ecology. Torkwase Dyson received her MFA from Yale University. Her work has been exhibited at Franconia Sculpture Park, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran College of Art and Design, the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. Dyson has been awarded the Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists, Spelman College Art Fellowship, Brooklyn Arts Council grant, Yale University Barry Cohen Scholarship, the Yale University Paul Harper Residency at Vermont Studio Center Prize, Culture Push Fellowship for Utopian Practices, FSP/Jerome Fellowship and Yaddo. Dyson’s work has also been supported by the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, The Laundromat Project, the Green Festival of New York, Obsidian Arts and Public funds of the City of Minneapolis, Mural Arts Program of Philadelphia, The Kitchen and Dorchester Projects, in Chicago Il.
Adrienne Edwards, Associate Curator at Performa, is a curator, scholar, and writer with a focus on artists of the African diaspora and the Global South, and a PhD candidate in performance studies at New York University, where she is a Corrigan Doctoral Fellow. Edwards’s research interpolates visual and time-based art, experimental dance, critical race theory, feminist theory, and post-structuralist philosophy. She has curated and co-organized numerous performance art projects, including Rashid Johnson’s first live work, Dutchman, A Performa Commission, Dave McKenzie’s All the King’s horses...none of his men; Clifford Owens’s Five Days Worth; Fluxus founding member Benjamin Patterson’s first retrospective concert Action as Composition; and Pope.L’s Cage Unrequited; among others. Edwards is a contributor to numerous exhibition catalogues and art publications—including Artforum, Adam Pendleton for Pace Gallery, as well as for the Museum of Modern Art, Clifford Owens: Anthology for MoMA/PS1, Performa 11 for Performa, Fore for the Studio Museum in Harlem, Wangechi Mutu for the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, and Wangechi Mutu: Nguva and Nyoka for Victoria Miro Gallery —and is performance reviews editor for the journal of feminist theory Women & Performance. Heather Hart Based in Brooklyn, NY, Heather Hart was an artist in residence at LMCC Workspace, Skowhegan, RBPW, Santa Fe Art Institute, Fine Arts Work Center and at the Whitney ISP. She received grants from Joan Mitchell Foundation, Harvestworks, Jerome Foundation and a fellowship from NYFA. Her work has been included in a variety of publications and exhibited worldwide including at Socrates Sculpture Park, Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park, Studio Museum in Harlem, Art in General, Rush Arts Gallery, No Longer Empty, Museum of Arts and Craft in Itami, Portland Art Center and the Brooklyn Museum. She studied at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Princeton University in New Jersey and received her MFA from Mason Gross School of the arts at Rutgers University.
Maren Hassinger works in a variety of media including sculpture, installation, performance, and video. Coming to the visual arts via dance, her practice is steeped in bodily knowledge of how physical presences inhabit a three-dimensional space. She continues to create sculptures, installations, videos, performances and public artworks that deal with our changing relationship to nature, consumerism, and equality. Hassinger has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad. She is the recipient of many awards and honors including grants from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Gottlieb Foundation, Anonymous was a Woman and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for the Arts. Since 1997 she has been the Director of Rinehart School of Graduate Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Hassinger received her BA from Bennington College (1969) and her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles (1973). Her seminal performance work can currently be seen in Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at the Walker Art Center. She continues to create sculptures, installations, videos and films, performances and public artworks that deal with our changing relationship to nature, consumerism and equality.
Richard Hunt is an internationally renowned sculptor. As a high school student he began to develop his skills at the Junior School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Hunt continued in the schools college as a scholarship student graduating with a BAE degree in 1957. Influenced by many of the new tendencies in styes, materials, and techniques present in mid century modernism particularly surrealism and abstract expressionism Hunt moved beyond modeling to experiment with the direct metal medium and the implications of the marriage of material and space. This experimentation garnered critically positive response from the art community, such that Hunt was exhibited at the Art Institutes Artist of Chicago and Vicinity Shows and the American Shows, from which Dorothy Miller, one of the jurors at one of the America shows, purchased a piece for the Museum of Modern Arts collection. He was the youngest artist to exhibit at the 1962 Seattle Worlds Fair, a major international survey exhibition of modern art. Hunt has become one of the most prolific public sculptors completing over 150 commissions since 1968. Approaches to his public work are as varied as the places, the times, and the contexts that bring them into being, allowing the sculptor in various ways to comment on aesthetic, spiritual, historical, political and social concerns.
BIOS Arthur Jafa uses film to investigate issues surrounding black cultural politics and black cultural nationalism. He is interested in ways in which black film can be used to investigate what he calls “Black Artificial Intelligence,” and to reflect black ways of life in the diaspora. Jafa has also developed an idea that he calls “Black visual intonation,” in which irregular camera rates and frame replication is used to create filmic movement which approximates black vocal intonation. Jafa’s cinematography work includes a collaboration with Julie Dash on Daughters of the Dust, a portrayal of a little-known Gullah subculture on a barrier island off the coast of South Carolina, which received the Sundance Film Festival Award in 1991. He also worked with Spike Lee on Crooklyn and with Manthia Diawara on Rouch in Reverse. His writings include the essay 69, published in Black Popular Culture (1992). Vincent Johnson received his MFA in Fine Art Painting from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California 1997 and his BFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1986. He is a 2005 Creative Capital Grantee, and was selected for the New Museum of Contemporary Arts Aldrich Art Award in 2007 and for the Art Matters grant in 2008, and in 2009 for the Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship, Los Angeles. In 2010 he was named a United States Artists project artist. His work has been reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, Art in America and Art Slant, and in over fifty different publications in total. His works were shown in the inaugural Pulse Fair Los Angeles. He has shown recently at Soho House (curated by ForYourArt, Los Angeles) and at Palihouse (curated by Los Angeles Nomadic Division), West Hollywood, and most recently at Another Year in LA gallery, West Hollywood. Johnson’s work has appeared in numerous venues, including The Studio Museum in Harlem (Freestyle (2001, The Philosophy of Time Travel, 2007, and The Bearden Project, 20112012); PS1 Museum, New York; the SK Stiftung, Cologne; Santa Monica Museum of Art, LAXART; Las Cienegas Projects, Los Angeles; Boston University Art Museum; Kellogg Museum, Cal Poly Pomona; Adamski gallery of Contemporary Art, Aachen; Lemonsky Projects, Miami. Johnson’s work has been published in a dozen exhibition catalogs. . He is currently working on a series of self published photography books that will focus on the U.S. cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Cleveland, Ohio, Miami, Florida and New Orleans. Johnson is also creating abstract paintings for his Cosmos Suite and for The October Paintings, that explores the practice of painting with the knowledge of historical painting practices. He is using the techniques of representation to create remarkable works of abstract art. At Beacon Arts Center, Los Angeles, he recently exhibited an entire suite of grayscale paintings. His work was exhibited in the inaugural Open Project exhibition at the Palace of the Inquisition, Evora, Portugal, July - October, 2013. Vincent Johnson lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He is a work member of THE WINTER OFFICE, Copenhagen. THE WINTER OFFICE upholds a creative strategy concerned with defining an intersection between art, architecture and design.
Darrell Jones has performed in the United States and abroad with a variety of choreographers and companies such as Bebe Miller, Urban Bush Women, Ronald K. Brown, Min Tanaka and Ralph Lemon. Along with performing Darrell continues to choreograph and teach. He has collaborated with other choreographers (Paige Cunningham, Lisa Gonzales, Damon Green, Angie Hauser, JSun Howard, Kirstie Simpson, Jeremy Wade), writers (Cheryl Boyce-Taylor), musicians (Jessie Mano, Brian Schuler, Justin Mitchell) and designers (Mawish Syed) in dance films, documentations and interactive multimedia installations. In addition to his collaborative work he continues to work in solo forms and has choreographed for professional and student ensembles (The Seldoms, University of Colorado, University of Illinois). Darrell has received choreographic fellowships from MANCC, CDF (Chicago Dancemakers Forum) and is a two time Bessie award recipient for his collabrative work with Bebe Miller Company and his most recent research in (e)feminized ritual performance. Darrell has also taught workshops and master classes in dance technique and improvisational processes throughout the United States and in other countries such as South Africa, UK, and South Korea. Darrell is presently a tenured faculty member at at The Dance Center of Columbia College in Chicago where he teaches classes in dance technique, performance and improvisational practices. is an artist, printmaker, and educator based in Chicago, IL. My practice currently and educator based in Chicago, IL. currently My practice printmaker, is an artist, creates audio collages, paintings, sculptures, and works on paper that explore the the that explore on paper and works sculptures, collages, paintings, audio creates received her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Los Angeles Angeles Los of California, at the University degree her undergraduate received is Associate Professor in Printmedia at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. of the Art at the School Institute of Chicago. in Printmedia Professor is Associate Atlantic Center for the Arts, (New Smyrna Beach, FL). Moor holds a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth Commonwealth Virginia from Arts, for the holds a BFA Atlantic Center Smyrna Beach, FL). Moor (New of Art. School Tyler from and MFA University Ayanah Moor Ayanah has been featured work and video. Moor’s tools include, printmedia, performance, drawing creative Her Art? and What is Contemporary and Blackness, She has held Visuality Performance, Vision: in Troubling Proyecto (Philadelphia, PA); Workshop, GA); Brandywine (Atlanta, University, State at Georgia residencies (Johnson, Studio Center, Vermont Zealand); Studio (New Auckland Print Argentina); (Buenos Aires, ‘ace NY); and Lake, (Blue Mountain (Rosendale, NY); Center, Blue Mountain Workshop, Studio VT); Women’s the Studio Museum in Harlem, the 2013 Joan Mitchell Award, the William H. Johnson Prize in 2008 and the and the in 2008 H. Johnson Prize William the Joan Mitchell Award, the 2013 in Harlem, the Studio Museum Higher Resonance, was solo exhibition, in 2014. Her Florida Residency in Captiva, Foundation Rauschenberg in 2013. DC Garden, in Washington and Sculpture at The Hirshhorn Museum presented Jennie C. Jones Jennie music, particularly avant-garde and black modernist abstraction between junctures conceptual formal and her Masters she received of the Arts School where Mason Gross Rutgersjazz. Jones attended University, a of the Art to that she attended The School receiving Institute of Chicago, in 1996. Prior Art degree of Fine Jones participated 20 years in Freestyle in 1991. Exhibiting for over with Fellowship, Art, Bachelors of Fine from Prize Wein Alexander Joyce of a 2012 She is the recipient in 2001. in Harlem at the Studio Museum Gallery, New York (2012. Her work is currently in Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary in Contemporary Black Performance in Radical Presence: is currently work (2012. Her York New Gallery, Orleans. New 3 in Prospect at length film/installation feature debute a new will In October Norris Art. Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art currently at the Walker Art Center. Through her work in in her work Through Art Center. at the Walker Art currently in Contemporary Black Performance Presence: in cultural critiques the invisibility of blackness Norris and installation performance, photography, video, and idioms. By inserting herself–a black expression of black cultural forms built upon the appropriation of the black body a critique about the presence the dialogue about painting she all but forces woman–into University attended Yale Norris UCLA in 2010, Tameka from her BA in the history receiving of painting. After (2009) and the and Sculpture of Painting School She has participated in the Skowhegan for her MFA. Third Streaming include Gifted and Talented, exhibitions Artist group (2012). Her Hermitage Retreat Tameka Norris Tameka of Art can be seen in Radical School work in 2012. Her University Yale from with an MFA graduating before employs visual and collaborative strategies to investigate memory, memorial, self-reflection and self-projection and self-projection memorial, self-reflection memory, investigate to strategies visual and collaborative employs in interdisciplinary work media, I am a In addition to my own of queer community and history. within the context an artist partnership artwork, that prints and distributes affordable contemporary Coast, I serve founder of No of queer artists party the work in for Chances Dances, that supports and showcases as a DJ and organizer and Dust. of an online and print journal called Monsters Chicago, and am editor-in-chief Aay Preston-Myint Aay BIOS Kambui Olujimi was bord and raised in Bedford Stuyvesant Brooklyn, Kambui Olujimi received his BFA from Parsons School of Design, NY and MFA from Columbia University, NY. He has had solo exhibitions at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, MA; apexart, NY; and Art in General, NY. His works have premiered nationally at The Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY and the Museum of Modern Art, NY. Internationally he has exhibited at The Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok, Thailand; Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland and Para Site, Hong Kong. Olujimi has been awarded fellowships from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, apexart, The Fine Art Work Center in Provincetown, MA and A Blade of Grass among others. Numerous periodicals, newspapers and journals have written about his work including The New Yorker, Art Forum, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times and Modern Painters.
Amina Ross is a visual artist, writer and community organizer; and as a queer woman of color she lives as a marker of otherness and difference. She is committed to creating spaces that foster thinking, conversation, growth and love. Her ambitions manifest themselves in the founding of the 3rd Language queer art collective; which uses curation, publication and community outreach as vehicles for challenging discourse.
Jina Valentine is based in North Carolina, where she is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at UNC Chapel Hill. She has exhibited at venues including The Drawing Center, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the CUE Foundation, the Elizabeth Foundation, the DiRosa Preserve, Southern Exposure, Marlborough Gallery. She has participated in residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Women’s Studio Workshop, Sculpture Space, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Santa Fe Art Institute, and the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. She has received numerous awards for her work including a Joan Mitchell MFA Grant, and a San Francisco Arts Commission Fellowship. Jina received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and her MFA from Stanford University.
William Villalongo received a BFA in 1999 from Cooper Union and an MFA in painting in 2001 from Tyler School of Art. Mr. Villalongo’s work was first introduced to the public through his residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2004 and PS1Contemporary Art Center’s Greater NY 2005 exhibition. His work has also been exhibited in the Studio Museum In Harlem’s 2005 “Frequency” exhibition and El Museo del Barrio’s fifth biennial: The (S) Files in 2007. He is a recipient of both the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptor’s Grant. In 2012 he received a The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) annual Artist Fellowship in Painting. His work is included in several notable collections including the Studio Museum In Harlem, El Museo Del Barrio and Princeton University Art Museum. His work has been reviewed in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, The New Yorker and the New York Times. Mr. Villalongo was appointed lecturer in painting/printmaking at Yale in 2010. [B.A.R.] ORGANIZERS Theaster Gates, Carrie Mae Weems, Sarah Workneh & Eliza Myrie [B.A.R.] [B.A.R.] READERS Torkwase Dyson, Bridget R. Cooks, Roger Cummings, Lorraine O’Grady, Adrienne Edwards, Mitchell Squire, Wayne Hodge, Michelle Papillion, Kimberly Drew, Steffani Jemison, Daniel Giles, Huey Copeland, Nate Young
[B.A.R.] THANKS Ford Foundation, Warhol Foundation, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Guggenheim Museum, Paul & De Gray, Lisa Yun Lee, Anita & Marty Nesbitt, Denise Gardner, Richard Wright & Valerie Carberry, Eric McKissack, Darrel and Nickol Hackett, Otherwise Inc.,Tony Lewis, Jeffreen Hayes and The Rebuild Foundation, Nick Jirasek, Tess Kisner, Currency Exchange Cafe, Theaster Gates Studios, UChicago APL and Arts Incubator The Ironies of Diversity, or the Disappearing Black Artist Dawoud Bey
In spite of what seems to be an acceptance of diversity as a cultural and social fact of life, both in and outside of the art world, black artists are, for the most part, still largely consigned to a narrow conceptual space in which to operate. This is particularly true if they have any hopes that their work will become a part of the larger critical discourse. This narrow space of expectation is one which both precludes and discourages them
William T. Williams from focusing on the vast range of art history and practice as the Trane 1969 source of their work, and instead encourages an ongoing, never- ending reexamination of an all too familiar racial terrain, confined largely to the black stereotype and an endless inspection of the forever beleaguered racialized self. I believe that this boxing in of art-making aspirations is as reinforced in academia as it is within the art world itself. The history of art practice within the last two decades warrants a critical reading if we are to begin to unravel, contest and ultimately change this condition. It is not my purpose here to assert anew the primacy of a high modernist paradigm. Rather Al Loving Home #47 my intention is to foreground what was lost when critical and 2003 institutional attention became disproportionately lopsided in favor of a limited set of art-making strategies, and a group of artists subsequently disappeared, or were subsequently shielded from public view. In light of several recent revisionist looks back at the 1980s, it might be instructive to examine this era as it relates to the presence of African American artists, since -- with the exception of perhaps Jean-Michel Basquiat -- they have been largely rendered invisible in these histories. In the early 1980s, the African American painter William T. Williams, a maker of densely layered abstract paintings -- who Melvin Edwards Resolved early in his career had been a practitioner of hard-edge geometric 1986 painting -- was the first black artist to be included in the H.W. Janson text, The History of Art. This book, which had been the standard academic art history text for several decades, had indeed been exceedingly slow to acknowledge the role of black artists in the making of that history. So, Williams’ inclusion was seen as something of a breakthrough at the time. Excluded for so long, Williams now found himself placed squarely within the history of art. But things were changing. No sooner had Williams found himself included in Charles Burwell Untitled the Janson text than that text itself -- along with much of what ca. 2000 had been considered the canon -- began to be questioned by revisionist art historians. Just as quickly as he had found himself acknowledged, William T. Williams was again relegated to the shadows as this more oppositional and less canonical sense of art history began to exert itself. He became the proverbial baby who got tossed out with the bath water, trapped in the revolving door of art history and deposited squarely on the sidewalk without ever having really gotten a look around at the exalted -- and now devalued -- company he had kept.
Howardena Pindell In addition to Williams, a host of black artists continued to Free White and 21 1980 remain largely unknown. This in spite of the fact that they show in major museums throughout the world, including the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, and have works housed in museum collections too numerous to mention here. There were several Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships between them. And more importantly they remained active. The law of averages being what it is, such a performance is usually enough to ensure an artist at least an occasional a high-profile exhibition, which then hopefully receives a certain amount of critical attention, which then keeps the artist and his or her work present in the current discourse. Certainly, this absence cannot be chalked up to age and fashion alone, since any number of white artists of a similar position remain very visible on the art-world radar, in spite of the vast Howardena Pindell range of formal and conceptual strategies that they deploy in their Untitled 1974 various works and the shifting critical climate that surrounds Sragow Gallery them. Their works may be variously successful and out of step with whatever the prevailing orthodoxy might be, but nonetheless a space for them at the discursive and critical table is always found, and indeed they never seem to go out of fashion. Sadly, the same cannot be said for Ed Clarke, a pioneering painter of gestural abstractions; Jack Whitten, whose paintings have The Ironies of Diversity, or the Disappearing Black Artist also been an ongoing investigation into process and material; Mel Edwards, a sculptor whose “Lynch Fragments” works fuse the tradition of welded sculpture with deep social and political content; and Al Loving, Terry Adkins, Tyrone Mitchell, Stanley Whitney, the late Alma Thomas, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Charles Burwell and other African American artists who still fail to receive Jerald Ieans their due. Untitled 2001-02 And while Howardena Pindell may have gained notoriety for her seminal video, Free White and 21, and her art-world activism that helped pull the sheets off of the institutional racism of the art world, she is familiar to only a few for her earlier work, which made her one of the breakthrough black conceptual and formalist artists of the 1970s and early ‘80s. It is instructive then to look at the various texts that began to both shape and document art production in the 1980s. For while Janson and its ilk had established a canon that was exclusive in the extreme, the new texts, by selectively filling in the racist and sexist art historical gaps, began to inscribe yet another orthodoxy. Most of the work that began to come to the fore proposed a view Louis Cameron Disappearing Color Glue Stic of art and art production as a largely -- if not solely -- social 2003 construct and practice, and thus began to favor those artists who were engaged in the debate around issues of representation. The field of semiotics became a critical point of departure in art discourse. For artists of color the prevailing discourse came to center almost solely around issues of race and representation. And while these new texts did indeed do much to foreground new and previously excluded voices, I also believe they were terribly disruptive and had a deleterious effect, since they completely eliminated or ignored whole categories of art production that were still taking place among black art practitioners. It seemed that in order to create an unbroken linear progression towards the moment of multicultural postmodernity, any artists whose works that did not fit this unbroken revisionist trajectory were conveniently eliminated. Consequently, as the multicultural movement in the art world Julie Mehretu continued, black artists ironically found an increasingly narrow Empirical Construction (Detail) space to work in if they wanted to engage in a critical dialogue or 2003 simply remain visible. The move towards pluralism, contrary to what it implies, ironically only allowed for a certain kind of black art practitioner. The closing off of these spaces of expressive and conceptual possibilities has had dire consequences not only for the careers of black artists, but for black art students as well, who then find themselves faced with a set of diminished strategies and references in terms of how black artists are represented within art history. And while one would be foolish to argue against the power that emerges in some of these young and not so young artists work, one can only lament the sense of truncated possibility that
Frank Bowling work represents in light of the limitless possibilities that actually Spreadout Ron Kitaj do exist. The effective erasure of alternate black esthetic role 1984-6 models and strategies has thus led to a very shallow pool from which a narrow set of ideas are dredged. In spite of this, younger artists such as Jerald Ieans, whose large paintings are filled with undulating biomorphic forms; Louis Cameron, whose brightly colored floor-based works both reference and subvert the Minimalist tradition of Carl Andre and others; and Julie Mehretu, whose large, densely layered “mappings” are just as rooted in a formal tradition of mark-making as they are in the discourse around globalism, have continued to edge onto the map in what is hopefully not only a “post-black” moment, as curator Thelma Golden has described it, but a post- theory one as well; a moment when orthodoxies -- both left and right -- are finally exploded. Such recent exhibitions of black abstract artists such as “African American Abstraction” at George N’Namdi Gallery in Detroit, “No Greater Love” at Jack Tilton Gallery in New York, and “Quiet As It’s Kept,” curated by David Hammons at Galerie Christine Konig in Vienna provide a much-needed affirmation that alternate Glen Ligon Untitled (I am an art-making strategies for black artists do and have long existed invisible man) 1992 outside of the dictates of race and representation theory, and are again being recognized. Likewise the appearance of the Black British abstract painter Frank Bowling in the most recent edition of the Venice Biennale, in the “Fault Lines” exhibition curated by Gilane Tawadros of London’s Institute for International Visual Art (inIVA), provides a much-needed sense of historical continuity and context. For the most part -- with a few notable exceptions -- the critical Ellen Gallagher Bling Bling response to these efforts remains muted at best. It’s anyone’s 2001 call as to why this remains so. No doubt everything from market forces and changing fashion along with a healthy dose of good old American racism come into play here, along with a younger generation of art historians and curators whose collective memories and formal training allows them to feel comfortable consigning anything produced before the 1980s to the torpid dustbin of retrograde modernism. The Ironies of Diversity, or the Disappearing Black Artist Factor in the quality issue -- as in, “They haven’t succeeded because they’re not good or original enough” -- and you’ve got a real pot boiler of a debate over why black visual artists are not accorded the same creative levity as black musicians. We don’t, after all, expect Sade to be Cassandra Wilson, or presume that Black Eyed Peas operates out of a more legitimate musical construct than Roy Hargrove. What makes this schism easier to perpetuate, perhaps, has to Dawoud Bey do with the failure of certain artists to acknowledge their own Alex 1995 roots in modernist practice. Glenn Ligon, for example, prior to the textual works that established his reputation, was a maker of abstract paintings. That these paintings have never been shown diminishes a crucial historical continuity, a fact that is belied by the densely layered surface of many of Ligon’s paintings, which provide evidence, in fact, of a pleasurable material engagement. For all of this, the art world’s table still doesn’t appear to be large enough to seat those black artists whose works function within a paradigm of a high-modernism that doesn’t obviously foreground race. Apparently such an investment in the high-modernist paradigm is acceptable for black artists only if there is also the attendant dissonance of race, as it is in the racially caustic but formally rigorous work of Ellen Gallagher, whose production has often been compared in its cool understated formalism to Agnes Martin. Where then are the structures to support true diversity; a diversity that encompasses a complex conceptual vision of black humanity and art practice that takes up the challenge of mirroring early 21st century American hybridity in all of its multifarious glory? For black artists and black art students I suspect that we are going to have to create these structures ourselves, since the art world seems to have little need, tolerance, or understanding for those who continue to work outside of the narrow confines of the art world’s intellectual and conceptual coon show. It’s anyone’s guess then as to what it will take to lift this collective blindfold off of so many eyes and to recognize a history that while largely ignored is indeed is still very much in the making.