News

By Alisha Wexler

“It feels almost like being reunited with an old friend,” says Wendy Red Star as she reflects on the bittersweet emotion of discovering locked-away aspects of her Crow heritage across digital collections, auctions, eBay, and museum archives. “It’s thrilling but there are moments of deep sadness.” Now her findings have made their way to Roberts Projects, on view from July 13 until August 24.  

By Kate Mothes

Situated along the East River in Long Island City, New York, a new outdoor public installation by Suchitra Mattai invites visitors to consider how history, heritage, and cultures connect across land, oceans, and time. We are nomads, we are dreamers at Socrates Sculpture Park comprises six monumental forms evocative of continents or ancient monuments, cloaked in woven vintage saris. Reflecting themes of femininity and fertility, a series of seven sack-like sculptures are suspended from branches in a nearby grove of trees.

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.  

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.

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.

“We are all the living ends of very, very long threads,” Jeffrey Gibson says. Here, the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States in Venice reflects on identity, cosmology, and his breakthrough Indigenizing and queering Western forms.

From natural wonders to the open road, the landscape has long been a muse in American art. (Un)Settled questions the shaping of national identity through objects from the colonial era to present. The variety of media and makers helps to redefine whose view is considered and expands on landscape’s relevance and resonance in art. 

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.