News

Combining richly colored textiles, found objects, beads, and more, multidisciplinary artist Suchitra Mattai (b. 1973, Georgetown, Guyana) explores themes of history, identity, and belonging. The forces that lead certain stories to be remembered, or forgotten, are central to her art. Drawing on her Indo-Caribbean roots, Mattai weaves together personal narratives, collective mythologies, and colonial history. Her two- and three-dimensional works offer a reimagined vision of the past that centers the perspectives of women and people of color, especially those from Southeast Asia.

The Center for Indigenous Studies at Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, New York) will organize a convening in Venice on the relationship of Indigenous North American art and cultures to global histories. Diverse speakers, including practitioners, academics, artists, and theorists, will address the interdisciplinary, transnational nature of Jeffrey Gibson's work in the U.S. Pavilion.

By Sara Roffino

For her current show, “Bíikkua (The Hide Scraper),” at Los Angeles’s Roberts Projects, Wendy Red Star stepped back from the humor that often carries through her work. Instead she dug into the Apsáalooke history of bishkisché, traditional leather pouches, to share a little-documented history of her people. Bishkisché were functional objects used to transport goods through the Great Plains. They were also creative expressions, meticulously designed and painted by Apsáalooke women and passed down through generations as keepsakes.

The exhibition Sleep! at the Kunsthal KAdE takes you on an exploration into the deep landscape of sleeping and dreams, through the eyes of some fifty visual artists and designers. Here, for a moment, another time reigns. The viewer experiences the four sleep stages from slumber and light rest,  deep sleep and (sleep) walking through the dream to the great hall where the bed is central. “Did you sleep well?” is a question that is often asked to each other. A basic question in which the response of the person questioned immediately provides insight into the alertness, mood and ability to put things into perspective of the person in question. Sleeping is, just like eating and drinking, a basic necessity of life. Magazines are full of tips & tricks for a good night's sleep every week: with the golden rule of rest, cleanliness and regularity recurring as an ideal form of sleep hygiene.

Interview by Eva Recinos

"I think being an artist is something you know that you are, and you might not recognize it for a long time because I think there are these preconceived ideas about what it is to be an artist and engaging in a professional practice. But the thing is, as we all know, it’s super complicated to be an artist. How do you have the time to make all the work? How do you fund the work? How do you grow your practice? These are all things that, when I was younger, seemed like a mystery. I think if you just trust in the art and the process, that is the only thing you can control. And the other things fall into place. I know that sounds maybe silly, but I do feel like whatever limited time you have, whatever resources you have—if you use that time to make, and to make your work better, and to develop new ideas and curiosities, that’s super important too."

By Stephanie Sporn

For centuries, painters have taken creative liberties when depicting their sitters’ attire, whether for sheer visual impact or to imbue their works with symbolic significance. This phenomenon, in which the artist doubles as stylist, has been the subject of recent solo shows, including exhibitions on Gilded Age master, John Singer Sargent, and purveyor of contemporary cool, Barkley L. Hendricks. Today, a new generation of sartorially savvy artists are leading the charge, capturing clothing to stunning effect – but rather than merely painting fashion, these women consider style as a means to convey notions of heritage, pride, and power.

Interview by Elisa Carollo

In “she walked in reverse and found their song" at ICA SF, Mattai examines the power of memory in the creation of personal stories.

Cultural artifacts are vessels of collective memories: symbolic elements that a community can identify with to find a sense of belonging and some of the most powerful statements on the status of a specific society. With a labor-intensive practice drawing from her Indo-Caribbean lineage, artist Suchitra Mattai creates works that evoke, preserve and translate traditions passed through generations, using the potentialities of materials to reactivate forgotten or erased histories and memories.

By Malcolm Gay

Jeffrey Gibson, the multidisciplinary artist who represented the United States at this year’s Venice Biennale, will create the next mural at Dewey Square, the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy announced Monday.

Gibson is scheduled to complete the mural, titled “your spirit whispering in my ear,” this September. The project is a collaboration with the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, where Gibson is slated to open an immersive installation in late 2024.

By Maria Vogel

In Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe's most recent body of work, figures engage in one of the most physically taxing activities available–boxing. For Quaicoe's birthplace of Accra, Ghana, the sport symbolizes much more than its renowned physicality; It’s a commonly walked upon path whose success can be the very thing that provides expulsion from the cycles of poverty present in Ghanian villages. Following his own trajectory that took him away from Accra, the artist now resides in Portland, Oregon, a place where his recommendations of favorite haunts take on a much more relaxed stance than his latest paintings.

Wendy Red Star is known for photographing herself within elaborately constructed scenes, engaging the viewer directly and foregrounding her presence within narratives of her own design. In Stirs Up the Dust, from a series of celestial couture garments titled Thunder Up Above, Red Star reimagines the regalia associated with powwow, a circular dance celebration found throughout Indigenous Plains cultures including Red Star’s Crow Nation, in futuristic terms.  

By Gabriella Nugent

The rise of figuration since the mid-2010s has been coterminous with the art world’s attempt to become more inclusive. Not only have there been increased demands for ‘women artists’ in the context of the #MeToo movement that began in 2017, but the global Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 galvanised the appeals for decolonisation – that is to say, the expansion of collections beyond white artists typically from Western Europe and North America. In this context, public and private institutions have depended on figurative art to demonstrate, in quite a literal way, that they are being more equitable. This trend has developed in parallel across institutions and the art market: since the mid-2000s, there has been a growth in sales of figurative painting, which subsequently has been bolstered by an institutional embrace.

Lenz Geerk, Beach Couple V is featured in the July issue of Harper's Magazine. Accompanying author Dan Piepenbring reviews of Rosalind Brown’s debut novel Practice (Farrar, Sraus and Giroux), Yoko Tawada’s novel Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel (New Directions), and Private Spaces in Public Places (John Hopkins University Press). 

Image featured: Lenz Geerk, Beach Couple V, 2021, acrylic on canvas. © Lenz Geerk, image courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California.

The exhibition Suchitra Mattai: Bodies and Souls explores migration, matriarchy, and materiality. Mattai uses found objects, such as vintage saris, to create colorful monumental installations. She wraps, braids, stitches, and weaves fabrics together as allegories for historical and personal narratives. For her first museum exhibition in Florida and the Southeast, Mattai will premier new installations in conversation with recent works, highlighting the artist’s ongoing investigations of the past and present.

Suchitra Mattai was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and immigrated to Canada as a young child. The history of her ancestors—brought from India to work as indentured laborers in Guyana—deeply influences her practice. Using techniques passed down through generations, she weaves materials marked by the past into a collective story of migration and gendered labor. In this exhibition Mattai turns inward, examining the power of memory in the creation of her own stories: sometimes factual, sometimes fantastical, with divergent pieces collapsing and combining into something new.

By Andy Battaglia

When Jeffrey Gibson first visited the Venice Biennale in anything like an official capacity, he was a fledgling artist just starting to make his way. It was 2007, and he had traveled to Italy at the invitation of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). But he had no artwork to show, nor any real role to play. He was simply there to see what he could see, like all the other hundreds of thousands of visitors to the art world’s biggest international event.

"Suburbia. Building the American Dream" draws us into the imaginary of the idyllic family home and shows how this lifestyle has been sold and promoted by fiction and the entertainment industry. The exhibition goes back to the origins of residential neighbourhoods in the early nineteenth century, explains how they developed massively in the 1950s, and reviews the economic, political and social context of their relentless expansion across the United States.

Roberts Projects is delighted to announce Kehinde Wiley: A Maze of Power at The Musée des Civilisations noires (Museum of Black Civilizations) in Dakar, Senegal. Initiated in 2012, the unprecedented series explores the staging of power through the lens of African heads of state. The portraits reflect the distinctive cultural elements of each state, thus highlighting the immense diversity of the African continent, and reveal the identity of an individual through the double prism of the artist and his model.

By Evan Nicole Brown

The American assemblage artist Betye Saar spent her childhood salvaging lost, discarded and forgotten things, like small glass beads, broken necklaces and scraps of colored paper left in trash bins or littering the ground where she walked. Born in 1926, she was raised during the Great Depression and so, Saar wrote to me recently, she was taught to “use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”

On the occasion of its tenth anniversary, ICA Miami presents “Toward the Celestial,” a selection of works from its permanent collection highlighting the museum’s programmatic development, as well as recent commissions and previously unshown works. The exhibition is organized thematically, and journeys from microscopic to macroscopic images in order to explore the dimension of time and orders of scale. The exhibition’s title alludes to Betye Saar’s Celestial Universe (1988) banner, which was featured in the artist’s 2021 survey and has been part of installations of the artist over multiple decades suggesting both imminent presence and the recording of time through alternative ideological structures.

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.

Interview by Phyllis Hollis

Nigerian artist living and working in Chicago. Examines themes of globalization, migration and cultural dislocation within the framework of a postcolonial world. MFA in Painting and drawing from School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023. Teaching Fellow at the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL. Recently named a 2024 Breakout Artist by NewCity Magazine.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.