News

Interview by Ben Davis

Gibson is one of the most visible artists currently working, and with his Cherokee and Choctaw heritage, he is also the first Native American to represent the U.S. in Venice. Representing your country at the Biennale is among the highest honors that any artist might receive, and also among the most fraught. Even from this show’s title, which is “The Space in Which to Place Me,” you can tell that Gibson is pondering what national representation means.

Kehinde Wiley: Omaha debuts  September 10, 2024 with new portraits by Kehinde Wiley inspired by paintings from the Joslyn Art Museum’s collection of European art. In the fall of 2023, the artist spent two days in Omaha conducting “street casting,” a practice he developed early in his career that entails working with local residents to identify sitters for his paintings. For the The Joslyn exhibition, Wiley is focusing primarily on first and second-generation South Sudanese immigrants who live in Omaha, the largest such population outside of the Republic of South Sudan. The artist invited members of this community to attend photo shoots, where he carefully posed them based on figural paintings from the Museum’s collection. 

By Sarah Moroz

The behemoth that is the Biennale d’Arte di Venezia has commenced its 60th edition, with its annual themed title—“Foreigners Everywhere”—drawn from a series of works made by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill’s Paris/Palermo collective, Claire Fontaine. The expression also references an anti-racism and anti-xenophobia collective from Turin circa the early 2000s: Stranieri Ovunque.

By Jori Finkel

To enter Kehinde Wiley’s show An Archaeology of Silence is to step into darkness, where only the art itself seems to emit light. The space feels somewhere between a crypt and a cathedral, featuring paintings and bronze sculptures of reclining Black bodies, spread out in repose or entombed like corpses, that appear to glow from within.

The show, now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, culminates with a monumental sculpture of a fallen man on horseback, draped over the horse as if he had just been shot, his Nikes dangling below the saddle. Made in the year after George Floyd was killed by the police in Minneapolis, this monument—and more broadly, the show as a whole—confronts the “legacy and scope of anti-Black violence,” according to Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation.

The United States Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia presents a multidisciplinary exhibition by Jeffrey Gibson, an artist recognized for a hybrid visual language that employs abundant color, complex pattern, and text to articulate the confluence of American, Indigenous, and Queer histories and imagine new futures. Gibson’s exhibition for the U.S. Pavilion, the space in which to place me, engages concepts that have shaped the artist’s practice over his 20-year career. Bringing together sculpture, multimedia paintings, paintings on paper, and video, the exhibition explores the dimensions of collective and individual identity and the forces that shape its perception across time. 

By Jillian Steinhauer

People in Venice might hear the jingle dress dancers before they see them. On April 18, some 26 intertribal Native American dancers and singers from Oklahoma and Colorado will make their way through the winding streets and canals of the Italian city. Wearing brightly colored shawls, beaded yokes and dresses decorated with the metal cones that give the dance its distinctive cshh cshh rattling sound, they’ll make their way to the Giardini, one of the primary sites of the Venice Biennale. There, they’ll climb atop and surround a large red sculpture composed of pedestals of different heights and perform.

The jingle dress dance, which originated with the Ojibwe people of North America in the early 20th century, typically takes place at powwows. In Venice, it will inaugurate the exhibition in the United States Pavilion on April 20. Titled the space in which to place me, the show is a mini-survey of the rapturous art of the queer Choctaw and Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson. 

Review by Kriston Capps

From Grandma Moses to Rashid Johnson, “Revolutions” spans a ludicrous range of painters. Right from the start, the show dials up the contrasts: The first works to greet viewers are a stately 1884 portrait by society painter John Singer Sargent hanging next to an electric 2020 portrait by Ghanaian star Amoako Boafo. 

Roughly speaking, these works could serve as chronological capstones for the Hirshhorn’s collection. But there’s something else to this pairing: It’s an unlikely diptych that tees up the push-and-pull between figuration and abstraction that defines the collection — and the century.

Interviewed by Guy Trebay

"The main challenge, I guess, to being an artist is how to make a living. But being a creative person means you have to find ways to do this. I studied design at U.C.L.A., and after I graduated, I made greeting cards, I made jewelry, I got into printmaking and then sold my prints. I taught art classes in colleges all over the states. My creativity kept evolving with my needs as I got married and bought a house, had my daughters and put them through college. Through it all, I loved making art. It kept me going."

By Melissa Smith

It’s almost time for the art-world Olympics, as the Venice Biennale is often described. In a historic first, artist Jeffrey Gibson, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, will represent the United States this year. Commissioned by the Portland Art Museum in Oregon in collaboration with SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico, Gibson is working with curators Abigail Winograd and Kathleen Ash-Milby to organize an exhibition that brings together an oeuvre so far-reaching it defies easy categorization.

In the 20th century, textiles have often been considered lesser—as applied art, women’s work, or domestic craft. Woven Histories challenges the hierarchies that often separate textiles from fine arts. Putting into dialogue some 160 works by more than 50 creators from across generations and continents, the exhibition explores the contributions of weaving and related techniques to abstraction, modernism’s preeminent art form.  

We are nomads, we are dreamers is a solo exhibition of newly commissioned works by Suchitra Mattai, celebrating the migratory oceanic journeys of past, present, and future diasporic communities. Inspired by the Park’s position along the East River, which flows into the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, Mattai’s installation features a series of monumental, soft sculptures made from vintage saris. Activated by monthly dance performances, this exhibition pays homage to the artist’s Indo-Caribbean ancestors and the stories of many Queens residents.

In his first solo exhibition at a UK museum, American artist Jeffrey Gibson (b.1972) will create a new site-specific installation for the Sainsbury Centre. The first Indigenous artist to represent the USA at this year’s Venice Biennale, Gibson is a painter and sculptor whose work is held in many major American collections. Incorporating murals, paintings, textiles and historical objects, Gibson’s work also weaves together text drawn lyrics, poetry and his own writing, complete with references to abstraction, fashion and popular culture.

Jeffery Gibson is included in Unravel: the Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at Barbican, London. The exhibition sets out to ask why textiles are a particularly resonant medium to address ideas of gender and sexuality, the movement and displacement of people, and histories of extraction and violence, as well as understanding the world through connecting with ancestral practices and communing with nature. 

Gordon Parks. Jean-Michel Basquiat. Lorna Simpson. Kehinde Wiley. Nina Chanel Abney. These names loom large in the past and present of art—as do many others in the collection of musical and cultural icons Swizz Beatz (Kasseem Dean) and Alicia Keys. Expansive in their collecting habits, the Deans, both born and raised in New York, champion a philosophy of “artists supporting artists.” The first major exhibition of the Dean Collection, Giants showcases a focused selection from the couple’s world-class holdings. The Brooklyn Museum’s presentation spotlights works by Black diasporic artists, part of our ongoing efforts to expand the art-historical narrative.

By Stephanie Seidel

Celestial bodies, constellations and zodiac signs feature prominently in the work of American artist Betye Saar. Through ritual acts, she assembles syncretic spaces that incorporate spiritual, autobiographical and politically charged elements foraged from flea markets and the annals of history. 

By Maximilíano Durón

Suchitra Mattai is among the 15 Anonymous Was A Woman 2023 winners. Anonymous Was A Woman is a grant-making nonprofit that has awarded over $7 million to women-identifying artists since 1996. The list of nearly 300 past recipients is a who’s who of today’s leading artists, many of whom received the award at critical points in their careers.

Roberts Projects is thrilled to announce representation of Mia Middleton, whose pictorial works explore interiority, memory and evocation. Middleton’s intimate paintings capture a tension and threshold between conscious and subconscious, desire and aversion, reality and fantasy. This announcement follows the gallery’s first exhibition of Middleton’s work – Love Story – this past April. 

Middleton is a semiotician in a profoundly visual sense. Often working in a sequence of poetic vignettes, Middleton’s uncanny ability to delve into the transience of existence invites viewers to contemplate the interplay between interiority and exteriority, corporeality and the world beyond. The artist’s skillful manipulation of composition, color and subject matter produces striking freeze-frames that compels viewers to cross the threshold into a profound psychological exploration.

By Hilton Als

Betye Saar’s studio and house, where she has lived for more than sixty years—she is now ninety-seven—are dedicated to history, especially American history as it relates to Black women. In her work, that history is often told through pop-culture artifacts, which, in Saar’s hands, take on a witty poetic resonance—an aura—that they wouldn’t otherwise have. Her layered assemblages, which sometimes resemble the interior of a hope chest, are also filled with inquiry: into the nature of mythology, and specifically how and why we mythologize the Black woman.

Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence showcases Kehinde Wiley’s new, monumental body of work created against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the global rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. The exhibition premiered earlier this year at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the MFAH is the first stop on the tour. Expanding upon his “Down” series from 2008, the American artist (born 1977) meditates on the deaths of young Black people slain around the world. The works in An Archaeology of Silence stand as elegies and monuments, underscoring the fraught terms in which Black people are rendered visible, especially at the hands of systemic violence.

Renowned American artist Betye Saar’s large-scale work “Drifting Toward Twilight”—recently commissioned by The Huntington—is a site-specific installation that features a 17-foot-long vintage wooden canoe and found objects, including birdcages, antlers, and natural materials harvested by Saar from The Huntington’s grounds. The commission is personal for Saar, who has fond memories of visiting The Huntington as a child and of the trees and landscape in her north Pasadena neighborhood.