Okay, so we let the cat out of the bag a few weeks back when we told you that Charles Huntley Nelson was one of the artists chosen by Project Row Houses for Round 25 of its commissioned artists program. But we've since held our tongue about the other artists invited to participate in the Houston-based project. Now PRH has announced its full list of participating artists.
A centerpiece of the current round will be the work of British artist Ingrid Pollard who has coordinated the work of four distinct artists working in various media. The work, called "Tradewinds--Landfall," commemorates the 200th anniversary of Britain's abolition of the slave trade by act of parliament (1807). The work considers Atlantic slave trade routes and is meant to resonate with the identity of Houston as a port city. The artists whose work together will form the "Tradewinds" project are
Artists participating in PRH projects install work in the project's historic Third Ward row houses, which have been converted into art and social spaces. Each artist works with about 500 square feet of space. Round 25 at PRH opens 21 October.
In celebration of the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s upcoming photography exhibition, Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990–2005, the museum has called on long-time Brooklyn photographer Delphine Fawundu-Buford to teach a series of master classes on photography. Delphine has been exhibited twice at the Brooklyn Museum: in 2000’s controversial exhibition Committed to the Image and in 2004’s Working in Brooklyn. Her other photography credits include Vibe’s Unbelievable: The Life, The Death and Afterlife of the Notorious B.I.G., Essence, Rolling Stone, and exhibitions at the International Center of Photography.
The photography course, starting in November, will be conducted on location at the museum as well as the BAC Gallery and powerHouse Gallery and will include topics such as printing, lighting, and composition. Delphine’s latest exhibitions include 3rd Wave, curated by Phillip Harvey at the BAC Gallery, and No Sleep Till Brooklyn at the powerHouse Gallery. Both exhibitions open on 11 October. Annie Leibovitz opens 20 October.
When it comes to art from the African continent and images of the Continent, the current zeitgeist in the west is to finally question what is meant by ideas such as "authentic" and "real." Of course we had ICP's pivotal Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography curated by the most recent super-curator, Okwui Enwezor in New York. And we remember Looking Both Ways last seen in Lisbon in 2005, not to mention Charlayne Hunter-Gault's recent book New News Out of Africa: Uncovering Africa's Renaissance, and the sprawling Africa Remix exhibition, last seen in Tokyo, all questioning what we think we know about Africa.
Two recent exhibitions come at this same theme from opposite directions. Seeing Africa at Tate Britain explores "Africaniste" paintings and sculptures, which is to say the works of European artists who visited the Continent between 1880 and 1960 and subsequently interpreted, misinterpreted, and reinterpreted what they saw there. The show is designed to spark questions about how the west's inherited notions of Africa arose and about the particular power of the colonial gaze. The show runs through 29 October.
Across the pond, the University of Houston's Blaffer Gallery has mounted A Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad, in which eleven African artists who work outside of Africa meditate on notions of identity as a constantly shifting set of metaphors by which they construct new histories of "multiplicity and hybridity." The artists all work abroad, but maintain ties to Algeria, Benin, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Tunisia. A Fiction of Authenticity was organized by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and runs until 11 November.
We knew that Boondocks cartoonist Aaron McGruder was taking a planned, 6-month leave-of-absence from the daily strip beginning last March. But we didn't know he would go all Dave Chappelle on us and disappear from sight altogether. Universal Press Syndicate has officially announced that they have no idea when McGruder will return to write the popular comic strip, if ever, and have not been successful in getting McGruder to name even a provisional date.
The first strips would have been due by mid-September to make the newspapers' October deadlines, but the strips were a no-show at that time. Universal nevertheless held out hope for McGruder's return at least up until last week, given the cartoonist's reputation for performing well under intense deadline pressure. The clock, however, seems to have run out as Universal president Lee Salem announced that newspaper editors should throw in the towel, stop calling him, and officially consider Boondocks dead on arrival. Newspapers may continue to run reruns of the strip for free until the last Saturday in November. Salem issued a very carefully-worded statement in which he called McGruder a "brilliant cartoonist" and stated that the current flap does not spell the end of their relationship with McGruder. We have no idea if McGruder agrees with that or not.
Boondocks launched in 1999 in 160 newspapers and has since courted controversy both in print and on television. The strip's syndication had grown to over 300 newspapers, though only about one-third of those outlets continued to carry reruns during the hiatus.
None of this affects the Boondocks cartoon on The Cartoon Network, which has just picked up the show for a new season, upping its order from 15 to 25 episodes. And we presume McGruder is returning their calls.
We haven't been able to take our eyes off Brazilian film since Hector Babenco's Carandiru in 2003. Aw hell, for all that, let's take it back to 1981's brilliant masterpiece Pixote.
U.S. fans of Brazilian ways of seeing will be happy to know that City of Men, a television series from the makers of the much-lauded film City of God will be released on DVD in the U.S. today (26 September), according to Brazzil Magazine. This release follows the DVD release of Lower City two weeks ago. Lower City stars Alice Braga and was produced by the team behind The Motorcycle Diaries.
City of Men stars Douglas Silva and Darlan Cunha as two 13-year-old kids living in the treacherous, drug-lord ruled "favelas" of Rio de Janeiro. The series moves back and forth between comic views of the boys' normal adolescent adventures and the often gritty reality of living in a city of extreme violence, drugs, and death. The entire DVD set comprises 4 seasons of the show, including over 9 and a half hours of content. We're working on our Portuguese lessons now so we'll be ready when our copy arrives. So far we're pretty good at saying, "The pencil is on the table."
We never knew until we snagged the press release from White Walls Gallery in San Francisco, California, that Brett Cook-Dizney was actually born Brett Cook, and that the "Dizney" was in fact an adopted pseudonym used during his days of tagging as a teenage graf writer in San Diego where he executed a number of murals attacking social topics like homelessness and racism. We're assuming that the statute of limitations has run out on any arrest warrants.
White Walls is hosting a solo exhibition of the artist whom we also remember as a graduate of the Studio Museum's highly-regarded residency program. The show, entitled "Reflections," includes two of the monumental, shrine-like, kaleidoscopic self-portraits for which Brett is best known. The show also includes work from the "Models of Accountability" series. Ok, so the title might sound like homework, but the work itself consists of portraits and texts of social transformers (Mohandas Gandhi, Arundhati Roy) painted on mirrors.
Honestly, we had wondered where Brett went, as we seemed to be hearing his name less often than we used to. We're glad to hear he has been continuing his practice of socially engaged art in the U.S., Brazil, Barbados, and Mexico, and continues to work as an active teacher and lecturer.
On September 22, 1906, Atlanta exploded into racial violence fueled by a cocktail of sensationalized rhetoric from politicians and unsubstantiated news stories about a black crime wave. The riot ended three days later with at least 25 blacks and 2 whites dead.
Atlanta's Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery is marking the 100th anniversary of the riot with its group exhibition What Color the Dawn: Breaking Silence on the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot. Curated by Kevin Sipp of the Hammonds House with Louise Shaw, formerly of Atlanta Contemporary Art Center and now with the CDC's art programs. What Color the Dawn includes the work of 8 regional artists, including High Museum curator Michael Harris. The show also includes a mix of mixed-media works, installation, and video that reflects on the riot both in direct, historical terms and in oblique, poetic ways. A listening station of oral histories by first- and second-generation witnesses is included, as well as an entire room installation by Hermina Glass Avery.
The show was organized by The Coalition to Remember the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot in collaboration with the gallery, and we note that the Coalition lists a number of related events, including poetry readings, walking tours, and a discussion of Rebecca Burns' Rage in the Gate City. The show closes on 30 September.
We first caught wind of Kimberly Glennon when some photographs of her striking costume and makeup work for the Classical Theatre of Harlem's production of Macbeth showed up in our inbox. The self-trained costume designer has had steady work with the CTH as well as with the Women's Shakespeare Company, The American Place Theatre, St. Bart's Players, and others. It turns out she built the 40 some odd costumes for Macbeth by hand, sewing through the night in her New York City apartment.
CTH's kickoff production to the 2006-2007 season is King Lear, which opens 29 September starring André De Shields with artistic director Alfred Preisser. Kimberly told us that the entire show will be costumed with an "Ancient Persia and Abyssinia" theme, which fits with her practice of working with the director to imagine new worlds that are "inspired by" the style of a certain period without slavishly following it detail for detail. When we spoke to her, she had just completed the first fitting of the 30 or so costumes for the show.
An English major from Case University with a background in theater performance, Kimberly is a self-taught costumer who learned on the job. (We have mad respect for that around here.) She says that her academic background allows her to approach costume design somewhat differently as she reads scripts with the eye of an English major trained to interpret texts. Among other awards, Kimberly won the OBIE Award for her costuming of "The Blacks" for CTH in 2003.
The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute of Williamstown, Massachusetts has announced its eleven Clark Fellows for the 2006-2007 academic year, and we're seeing two notable recipients for the spring: The Studio Museum in Harlem's Lowery Sims and the University of Chicago's Darby English.
Darby English teaches postwar American art and visual and cultural studies as assistant professor of art history at the University of Chicago. While at the Clark, he will conduct a "historiographic study of post-black art, focusing on the peculiar convergence of racialism and formalism" in this aesthetic movement.
Lowery Sims, meanwhile, who recently went from being the Director of the Studio Museum to being its Adjunct Curator of the Permanent Collection--a role created specifically for her--will take up residence in Williamstown to examine "the phenomena of appropriation and parody in the work of African-American artists, with particular attention to the contextualization of these works within contemporary criticism." Yeah, we want that gig.
The Clark Institute awards fellowships to national and international scholars, critics, and museum professionals who work to understand the visual arts and their role in culture. According to the Clark, the program encourages a commitment to "research in the theory, history, and interpretation of works from all periods and genres."
We told you about L.A. artist Rodney McMillian's Minneapolis appearance at the Walker Art Center a few weeks back. Now the artist is back home at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects with his new solo show "Odes," which opened on 9 September.
Get this: The main piece in the exhibition is a large painting of the sky, which will be sold by the square foot and which will be priced based on the income level of the prospective buyer. We love the democratic impulse. We're not sure exactly how they will be verifying income, but we suggest going to the show armed with at least 3 years' worth of tax returns. The painting will be cut apart and shipped at the end of the show.
The exhibition will be rounded out with "18 post-minimalist" objects (boxes made from cardboard with duct tape), a video of Lyndon B. Johnson's "Great Society" speech, with which McMillian seems especially taken these days, and a pair of Jesus images rendered on blankets.
This is McMillian's second solo show at Vielmetter, and it runs through 14 October.
We've decided Joost O. Bosland is our new best friend for sending us information from the Michael Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town. (Actually, we just sorta like saying "Joost.") Anyway, we've heard that Berni Searle will be presenting her third solo exhibition in the gallery starting on 21 September.
In this outing, Searle will be featuring "Night Fall," a three-channel video installation along with a series of related prints. Shot mainly at dusk and dawn, Searle's video is meant to elicit a mood of dreamlike languor as she stands upon and falls down a giant mound of crushed grape skins, creating a reddish purple backdrop that we think simultaneously signifies fruition, decadence, exhaustion, and decay.
Searle was trained as a sculptor and has become over the last decade one of South Africa's most visible artists, both in South Africa and abroad, often dealing with South Africa's history of racial encounter and its legacies of confrontation, amalgamation, and classification. We note that she has paid particular attention to South Africa's peculiar (and now officially defunct) classification of "coloured," meaning of mixed race.
Among other honors, Searle's 2005 Vapour was selected for the Arsenale exhibition Always a Little Further at the 51st Venice Biennale. The show runs through 20 October.
Remember how back before we launched, we said that we couldn't do this whole Code Z thing without you? Well we're coming to call now that we've worked out some kinks and gotten our engines humming. We're actively seeking interns and volunteers, both onsite and online.
We're quickly developing new features, new programs, and new content and can use all the help we can get. Plus, we're still a small enough organization (miniscule actually) that interns and volunteers would have major say in areas like publicity, outreach, programming, design, and editorial. Get in on the ground floor and help us shape the future of Code Z!
Visit the get involved page for more details.
We at Code Z had always planned to have a community network system in which artists can create a MySpace-style profile with their art, writings, and other information to share with other artists. Um... yeah, we're getting to that. In the meantime, London's supercollector Charles Saatchi has already created something similar via the Saatchi Gallery with the Your Gallery web site.
Thousands of artists have seemingly taken the gallery up on the offer and have uploaded their images and C.V.'s to the site. Now, because too much is never enough for Charles Saatchi, he has teamed up with the Guardian newspaper to select 10 artists from Your Gallery to appear in a group show at the Guardian's exhibition space in October. We're noting that the painting-heavy shortlist of 30 artists includes Ronald Hall, whom we remember from his group show at SAM a couple of years back. Hall's painting is called "The Forgotten," and Hall says about his work: "My work is a celebration of African-American culture and history. I attempt to demonstrate through my art my interpretation of historical relations in the context of race and identity in America."
The final 10 artists will be determined by a web poll at the Guardian's website. Don't act surprised. We live in a post-Pop Idol/American Idol world, and nothing means anything unless its voted on by a nation full of casual observers with no particular expertise in what they're voting on. We say have fun. Voting closes September 18th.
So DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid aka this dude we know named Paul sent us a package containing his new CD "In Fine Style," a two-disk Jamaican music extravaganza from Trojan Records. And we'll let you know what we think when we're finished listening to it. In the meantime we can't take our eyes off the other item in the package.
Call us "on the late train," but we didn't realize what we were missing not having grabbed a copy of his book "Rhythm Science," published by The MIT Press some two years ago. The book is a visual explosion of images, essays, illustrations, and logos--a sampled, remix manifesto for the hip-hop graphic eye set, covering Paul's usual canon of obsessions: philosophy, technology, beats, and all forms of Black science. We're told the 128-page book, published as part of the Mediawork Pamphlet Series, has been one of MIT's top sellers since its release. We'll be carrying this one around with us at all times for a while
It's hard to pinpoint what we find most compelling about Guerilla Cafe in Berkeley, California: it might be the artistically served waffles, pastries, and sandwiches. Or it might be the urban, funky-chic vibe making copious use of browns, olives, turquoises, and oranges to lend it the--in their words--"70s retro atmosphere." Or it could be that the cafe also serves up a line of t-shirts, track jackets, wrist bands, and messenger bags all emblazoned with their gorilla/guerilla logo. Generally, we think it's the fact that Andrea Ali, Keba Konte, and Rachel Konte have created a spot that's as much about the art and design as about the cafe proper. We go in for that kind of thing.
All three founders are artists in their own right: Andrea is a ceramacist, Keba is a photographer and mixed-media artist, and Rachel is a graphic designer, which clearly informs the cafe's art-saturated vibe. We dig the fact, for example, that when you place your order, instead of getting a number you get a portrait of one of the cafe's heroes, including Bruce Lee, John Coltrane, Muhammad Ali, Bob Marley, Assata Shakur, and Nina Simone among others.
Guerilla Cafe took over Smokey Joe's Cafe, a vegetarian landmark in Berkeley since 1973, and transformed it with a 360-degree remodel completed last May. (We're told that "Smoky Joe" Ned Getline went on to a happy retirement.) The new spot rotates art exhibits approximately every six weeks and is currently showing the mixed media assemblages of Githinji Wa Mbire.
It hasn't escaped our notice that it can get a little... bachelor pad-ish around here. (After all, did you see where the "dat ass" thread in the forums started to go? Yeesh!) Some of the sisters might want to take a break by clicking onto ymib.com, a site that coincidentally launched about a week before our little rag over on this side of the 'net. ymib is the brainchild of editor-in-chief Ericka Taylor along with executive editor Sety Bes, and stands for "you make it beautiful." They've been up and running as a multi-topic webzine since August 1st, and first caught our eye with their interview of Portland artist Damali Ayo.
Ericka tells us the site is devoted to the "woman of culture," a coinage she adopted to emphasize how women of color are often the most attuned to culture and the ways in which it moves through families and communities. The "you" in ymib of course refers to the readers and hits on Ericka's idea that women take charge of their own creative energies by focusing on 3 main areas: inspiration, health and holistics, and everyday creativity. All of ymib's features are designed to create a community in which women can not only explore these areas, but trade knowledge with other women who vibe the same way.
In addition to its strictly online features, ymib has its eye on promoting offline activities such as a book club and lesson plans for stay-at-home mothers. We hear they even have their eye on a print version. We know what it takes to run a website and judging by what Ericka and company have put together can only say: hats off.
As if we as a people don't watch enough television, Nielsen Media Research reports that black US "TV households" grew at a rate of 1.3% from 2005 to 2006. This was faster than the overall US rate of increase (1.1%), but much slower than the rapid 3.6% at which Latino and Asian households gained televisions over the same period. We got nothing against television; we say it's what you watch that matters, not where you watch it.
via Mediaweek.com
Go ahead. Click on the thumbnails. And make sure someone happens to be walking by when you do it. It'll make you look cool.
Vonetta Jenkins is a body artist. She decorates bodies, faces, and hair--costumes mostly made of paint--and lately has been putting it all on display in a series of stage productions that she describes as "interactive, collaborative musicals" at Fitzgerald's in downtown Houston. Fitzgerald's is a rough-around-the-edges former punk palace that's still got an edge and is still a staple of the Houston music scene. So I imagine Vonetta's racy works fit right in.
Vonetta told me she originally imagined these productions would take place in sterile, white-walled galleries. She's a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and she very much considers the performances art pieces. But instead the works have ended up on the seamier side of town, mixing with the hoi poloi of Houston's various night time party scenes. This, she confesses, gives them an energy and a spontaneity that they never could have had anywhere else.
Her most recent show, Kitty Kat in Paris, is a follow up to the original Kitty Kat show and features our heroine leaving the jungle for the City of Lights. Vonetta cites the work of Toulouse-Lautrec and the film Moulin Rouge as heavy influences in her vision of decadence and sensual overdrive. Kitty Kat in Paris goes on stage this Sunday evening, September 10.
Joost O. Bosland of the Michael Stevenson gallery recently chastised us for our recent run of U.S.-focused arts coverage. (This, right after the In the Lab founder let us have it for getting the description of his site slightly amiss.) So while we're nursing our wounds, check out Johannesburg, South Africa's Nicholas Hlobo, whose first solo exhibition at Micahel Stevenson is full of grand gesture installations that evoke idiosyncratic personal histories and unnamable inner conflicts and resolutions.
The show is titled Izele, which means "someone or something has given birth." But, according to the Michael Stevenson website, Hlobo insists on a double entendre in which it can also mean an adding to or a filling up. Hlobo plays with concepts of birth, conception, and sex throughout the show. Specifically, Hlobo deals with the question of how sexual minorities engage with the larger society. Says Hlobo, "Gay men have always reserved some space for fun and celebration of who they are. However, to some this doesn't come easy--the performance becomes a weapon through which they fight the heavy baggage that comes with being gay." Hlobo completes his performative installations through the use of evocative materials such as rubber, silicon, soap, and ribbon in order to engage ideas of "comfort, shelter, protection, beauty, cleanliness, sacred space, pleasure and fantasy."
We knew we liked this cat when he said this, according to Artthrob: "The lack of arts writers, particularly black arts writers, is compounded by the minimal media attention allocated to the arts, as well as the lack of institutions offering specific courses for writing or curating." He's talking about South Africa, but sounds to us like the U.S., Canada, most of West Africa, and several other countries we're familiar with.
Hlobo was born in Cape Town in 1975 and has been seen in group exhibitions throughout South Africa, Europe and the U.S. He is the winner of the Tollman Award for Visual Art 2006. The show ends 16 September.
Most guitar players we know treat their instruments like sacred objects, or better yet like delicate lovers. That's why we noticed the guitar of pILLOW tHEORY front man Kelsey Warren, whose instrument doubles as a personal scrapbook put on stage for public consumption. We'd call this low-fi multimedia.
Kelsey gave us a pretty decent view of the goods, and we notice among other things an image from Madonna's Sex and something called "Carpe Dyke!" We can't begin to speculate what that means. The alt-rock band's next show is on 16 September at the Freedom Festival at the Hook in Brooklyn.
We're noticing family resemblances among a variety of artists working in the mold of the bizarre, the alien, and the misshapen. Take the collage work of our good friend Wangechi Mutu or Kojo Griffin's recent painting work. Add to this list Philadelphia ceramics artist and sculptor Syd Carpenter who brings a swath of this prickly strangeness into the third dimension. Carpenter is one of 19 artists in Shades of Clay: A Multi-Cultural Look at Contemporary Clay currently at Ursinus College in the Philadelphia area. Curated by local sculptor Paul A. Wandless, the exhibition is designed to demonstrate "how multi-cultural and multi-ethnic clay sculpture is today." Though we're pretty sure clay has always been multi-ethnic, we're glad to see that fact acknowledged in this 55-piece exhibit, which includes artists of African-American, Afro-Cuban, Thai, Chinese, Latino, and Native American descent.
Carpenter's work combines and recombines shapes--tails, finlike apparatuses, coils, balls, wheels, and nests--in a kind of intuitive and personal grammar of forms that hints at biomorphic collisions and abortive chemical-industrial experiments. The show has received a mixed review from the Philadelphia Inquirer, though Carpenter's entry, "Internal Noise" was described as "simple and wacky yet authoritative" and "the best item in the exhibit." Carpenter is currently associate professor of studio art at Swarthmore College. The show runs through September 24.
We'd like to say congratulations to In the Lab who prevailed against all other contenders to emerge as the winner of the Best Video Blog in the Black Weblog Awards competition. Code Z sponsored the prize in that category, so it now seems that we gotta get up off our hinies and produce the goods. The In the Lab guys get to choose between a copy of Conoa EasyFX (a set of plugins for Adobe After Effects or Final Cut Pro) or a copy of Ulead VideoStudio 10 Plus.
Now we've seen these guys' site, and frankly we're not sure what they're going to do with our prize. After all, they do music, not video per se. The video on the site only acts as a documentation of the folks making their music. Hmmmm.... we didn't see that coming. We're thinking they may hold a contest themselves and re-gift the software to someone else. Or they may use it to prop up the broken leg of a table. Whatever. We love those guys.
San Francisco area artist and designer Marissa Arterberry got tired of people constantly asking when she was finally going to design apparel for men to complement her line of jewelry and apparel for women. Marissa answered with Black Royalty, her recent line of t-shirts specifically geared toward the men among us. Pairing up with Codi Smith of Bluelady Graphic Design, she has so far released the James Brown version of the shirt and plans to follow up with Marvin Gaye and--watch out--Nina Simone.
Marissa's even wagering that the brothers are secure enough to don a Diana Ross version of the shirt, which she will soon be releasing in a limited edition. We admire the audacity.
Black Royalty is available on the web only and will be in Bay Area stores soon.
