News

T-1000 opens at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles and is named in reference to the Terminator 2: Judgement Day villain—an artificially intelligent shapeshifter that utilizes different metals to take human form and wreak havoc. With materials like rubber, steel, and paint, Sylvester’s new body of work examines the impact of living in an intelligence-driven state and the harm that these forms of oppression have on our current and future lives. You need not fear a moment when cyborgs project themselves from the future when we have our own very real horrors unfolding right before our eyes. 

Interview by Camille Okhio

"Painting is what I knew and understood first. I always thought I would move to New York and be an artist. Painting completed that picture for me. The other ones I became interested in later. Through movement, I wanted to communicate being free in your body. I want to show many bodies of color, in joy and movement, without self-consciousness. When you are a queer person of color, there are so many codes you grow up thinking you’re responsible for. Performance has given me the entitlement to put those down and listen to my body and what it wants."

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.

REDCAT, the CalArts School of Art, and IndigenousArts@CalArts are pleased to welcome the editors, book designer, and artist contributors of the landmark anthology, An Indigenous Present, for an evening of conversation and celebration. Our Own Work, Our Own Audiences celebrates the release of An Indigenous Present (published by BIG NDN Press/DelMonico Books) which surveys an intergenerational field of Indigenous North American contemporary artists, musicians, filmmakers, choreographers, architects, writers, photographers, and designers whose work upends the conventions of the mainstream art world and non-Native publics by making work that embodies Indigenous ways of being and knowing.

Black Rock Senegal announces they are now accepting applications for the next cycle of the multidisciplinary artist-in-residency program located in Dakar, Senegal. Named for the volcanic rocks that blanket its shoreline, Black Rock is a multidisciplinary artist-in-residence program founded by renowned artist Kehinde Wiley in 2019. The residency brings together international artists to live and work in Dakar, Senegal for 1–3 month stays.

Roberts Projects is honored to announce representation of Suchitra Mattai. This announcement follows the gallery’s first exhibition of Mattai’s work – In the absence of power. In the presence of love. – this past July.  

The Guyana-born artist explores how memory, myth, and oral traditions can be used to unravel colonial and patriarchal narratives. Drawing from European tapestry traditions, Indian miniature painting, and other craft-based traditions like embroidery and weaving, she imagines a “future space” where new mythologies are formed to celebrate and monumentalize the experiences and labor of brown women. 

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.

A short documentary—produced by The Huntington and directed by Kyle Provencio Reingold, program director of Ghetto Film School LA—is presented within the exhibition, Betye Saar: Drifting Toward Twilight, at The Huntington. The film features footage of the work in progress in Saar’s studio, documenting her process of selecting natural materials in partnership with The Huntington’s Botanical curators.

“Paraventi: Folding Screens from the 17th to 21st Centuries” is an extensive exhibition curated by Nicholas Cullinan that investigates the histories and semantics of folding screens by tracing trajectories of cross-pollination between East and West, processes of hybridization between different art forms and functions, collaborative relationships between designers and artists, and the emergence of newly created works.

Amoako Boafo: Soul of Black Folks is the debut museum solo exhibition tour for Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo (born 1984). One of the most acclaimed artists of his generation, Boafo’s works focus the viewers’ gaze on his subjects’ presence through his portraits representing Black life.

Accra! The Rise of a Global Art Community showcases the work of 18 artists who have deep connections to Accra, Ghana and their impact on global art discourse. Portraits, abstraction, textiles, works on papers and sculpture explore cultural identities, political histories, mythology, trauma and healing.

The show takes pains to get its arms around the region’s multifarious history, opening with Suchitra Mattai’s An Ocean Cradle, 2022, a broad tapestry woven of fragments of silky Indian saris. A conceptual seascape, it nods to South Asian heritage on various islands and in Guyana, where indentured Indian labor was imported to replace enslaved people when the practice was abolished in British Caribbean colonies in the 1830s.

In Queer Nature, New York based artist Jeffrey Gibson celebrates the beauty of plants and fungi with House of Spirits, an installation fusing vibrant colour and pattern. This large-scale, suspended artwork is intricately crafted to form a collage of printed fabrics, incorporating botanical illustrations alongside language and patterns informed by Gibson’s own perspectives on queerness, and the endless diversity of plants and nature.

The exhibition Cowboy will bring together loans and new commissions from 27 artists representing a wide range of perspectives including Asian American artists, Latinx artists, and Native artists. The exhibition aims to shift the narrative of this figure’s cultural power and significance to be both historically accurate and creatively imaginative. 

Kehinde Wiley unveils an exclusive series of portraits of African heads of state. A project exploring the staging of power, on which the artist has been working confidentially since 2012. It was as a result of the election of Barack Obama in 2008 that Kehinde Wiley began to ponder the question of presidential leadership. In 2012, the American artist, whose work reinterprets representations of power and prestige in the history of portrait painting, imagined an original series dedicated to African heads of state.

Featuring Jeffrey Gibson, Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction foregrounds a robust if over-looked strand in art history’s modernist narratives by tracing how, when, and why abstract art intersected with woven textiles (and such pre-loom technologies as basketry, knotting, and netting) over the past century.

U.S. Pavilion Presented by Portland Art Museum and SITE Santa Fe; Co-Commissioned by Kathleen Ash-Milby, Louis Grachos and Abigail Winograd

Roberts Projects congratulates Jeffrey Gibson who will represent the United States at the 2024 Venice Biennale. The Portland Art Museum in Oregon and SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, announced today that Jeffrey Gibson will represent the United States at La Biennale di Venezia, the 60th International Art Exhibition.

This summer, the Ashmolean launches its contemporary exhibition series Ashmolean NOW. The museum’s Gallery 8 will become a laboratory for contemporary artists who have been invited to create new work inspired by the Ashmolean’s historical collections.