Black Artists and the March Into the Museum

Article: Black Artists and the March Into the Museum

(NY Times)

“There was a joke for a long time that if you went into a museum, you’d think America had only two black artists — Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden — and even then, you wouldn’t see very much,” said Lowery Stokes Sims, the first African-American curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and later the president of the Studio Museum in Harlem. “I think there is a sea change finally happening. It’s not happening everywhere, and there’s still a long way to go, but there’s momentum.”

The reasons go beyond the ebbing of overt racism. The shift is part of a broader revolution underway in museums and academia to move the canon past a narrow, Eurocentric, predominantly male version of Modernism, bringing in work from around the world and more work by women. But the change is also a result of sustained efforts over decades by black curators, artist-activists, colleges and collectors, who saw periods during the 1970s and the 1990s when heightened awareness of art by African-Americans failed to gain widespread traction.

Pedro Reyes: Turning Weapons Into Instruments | Pedro Reyes 'Disarm'

Video:  Turning Weapons Into Instruments | Pedro Reyes 'Disarm'

Mira Dancy: THE 2015 ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH GUIDE

Article:  The 2015 Art Basel Miami Beach Guide

(http://blog.mariabrito.com/)

Nautilus is the brand new Miami hotel by Sixty, and Artsy commissionedKatherine Bernhardt, Dan Colen, Mira Dancy, Eddie Peake and Chloe Wise to paint inside and around the hotel's pool. Also at Nautilus,  Paul Kasmin Shopwill partner with Maison de Mode for a pop-up presenting an interactive installation of Nir Hod’s “The Night You Left,” colored-mirror hand-painted unique pieces.

Cynthia Daignault: Cavalli, Lauren. “Critics’ Picks: Cynthia Daignault.” Artforum. 20 November 2015

Article: Cavalli, Lauren. “Critics’ Picks: Cynthia Daignault.” Artforum. 20 November 2015

(Artforum)

In 2014, Cynthia Daignault packed her bags, gassed up her car, and drove. For one year she 

traveled throughout the United States, stopping every twenty-five miles to paint the landscape. 

The result is “Light Atlas,” 2015, a series of more than three hundred modestly sized works, hung 

edge to edge in a tidy line in the main room of the gallery. The installation produces a crazy-quilt 

gradient field of blues, greens, and browns, culled from oceans, farmers’ fields, and arid deserts.

Daignault’s intimate approach undermines the macho grandiosity of American landscape 

painting. And a gooey optimism oozes out of these oils, as she manages to make America’s 

poisoned landscape of fracking sites or an image of an abandoned building with graffiti spelling 

out the word “safe” on its walls feel seductive.

In the adjacent gallery is Somewhere Someone Is Traveling Furiously Toward You, 2015: You 

are startled awake. Projected floor to ceiling, 160 black-and-white photographs appear in rapid 

succession on a twenty-minute loop from two analog projectors. The slideshows, with a score 

by William Morisey Slater, flash through Daignault’s and photographer Curran Hatleberg’s 

separate road trip photos simultaneously on opposite walls. The whirlwind pacing of the images—

and the kink in your neck from attempting to absorb all of them—imprints you with a stark portrait 

of this country. The projectors manage to be in sync only once, when two photos of paved paths 

stretching out infinitely into the horizon leave you to wonder: Is either direction safe?

Cynthia Daignault: Felsenthal, Julia. “On the Road with Cynthia Daignault at Lisa Cooley Gallery.” Vogue. 2 November 2015.

Article:  Felsenthal, Julia. “On the Road with Cynthia Daignault at Lisa Cooley Gallery.” Vogue. 2 November 2015.

(Vogue)

“There are so many cows in America!” the painter Cynthia Daignault declared on Saturday morning.

“That’s something you realize driving around. There are 100 million cows at any given time in this 

country. I Googled it, just out of curiosity.”

Daignault and I were speaking at the Lisa Cooley gallery on New York’s Lower East Side, where the 

artist’s latest show, “Light Atlas,” opened last night. But 30 hours before, she still had her work cut 

out for her. The small white box of the gallery’s main space was strewn with hundreds of Daignault’s 

8×10-inch landscape oil paintings (some depicting cows), part of a series of 360 that represent a 

slice-in-time portrait of America. That series also constituted a year of Daignault’s life: The artist 

spent six months alone in her Dodge Ram pickup, driving the 15,000-mile perimeter of the 

continental United States, sticking to back roads and small highways and pulling over every 25 miles 

to sketch and photograph the view out her passenger side window. Then she retreated to her L.A.  (more... Vogue 2 November 2015)

In the Studio: With Nike Shoes and Cigarettes, Katherine Bernhardt Codifies Our Contemporary Hieroglyphs

Article: In the Studio: With Nike Shoes and Cigarettes, Katherine Bernhardt Codifies Our Contemporary Hieroglyphs

(Artsy)

Despite her having just closed three concurrent solo shows at the New York and L.A. locales of Venus (formerly Venus Over Manhattan and Venus Over Los Angeles) and Carl Freedman, the long, narrow space is bursting at the seams with brightly colored, electric paintings of watermelons, sharks, and bananas. Some lay on the paint-splattered cement floor, drying; others are rolled in plastic or propped up on empty paint buckets against the walls. But to get to this painter’s haven, brimming with spray paint and gallon jugs of acrylic in infinite lush colors, you must pass through a lair of Moroccan rugs, piled high and tacked across the walls. It’s an ideal playground for Bernhardt’s four-year-old son Khalifa, who alternates climbing and lounging on the stacks and goes relatively unnoticed save for his scattered Mack Trucks and toy cars. But it also serves as a well of inspiration for Bernhardt’s surprisingly codified works and the flagship for her Berber rug importing business.

Genieve Figgis: Up and Coming: From Ireland’s Wicklow Mountains, Genieve Figgis Paints Dark Narratives of Previous Worlds

Article:  Up and Coming: From Ireland’s Wicklow Mountains, Genieve Figgis Paints Dark Narratives of Previous Worlds

(Artsy)

The paintings of Irish artist Genieve Figgis share a dark, strange allure with the landscape that surrounds her studio in County Wicklow, Ireland, a short drive from Dublin. Her work brings to my mind a poem by the great Irish writer Seamus Heaney—himself a long-term resident of the county—who in Exposure (1975) imagines himself as a 17th-century Irish soldier. Having “escaped from the massacre” of his forces by the English armies he now wanders through the woods, living wild. It is December in Wicklow, and amidst “the alders dripping,” he has left civilization behind and grown philosophical, “taking protective colouring/ from bole and bark, feeling/ every wind that blows.”

Kadar Brock: cast with flashback cast with flashback

Article: Kadar Brock: cast with flashback cast with flashback

(MutualArt)

Almine Rech Gallery, is pleased to present cast with flashback cast with flashback, an exhibition of new paintings by New York City-based artist Kadar Brock. Brock will display the latest works from three of his ongoing series of paintings. These bodies of works interrelate. The material produced through the scraping down of one painting generates the paint chips that produce another, the sanding down of which generates the dust that comprises yet another.

The title of the exhibition refers to a mechanic in the card-based fantasy game Magic: The Gathering, which Brock plays. The text “Cast with Flashback” appears when a player is able to reuse a spell that they had already used previously. By this special exception, something that should have been relegated to the past is made present and active again. This not only suggests Brock’s longstanding use of game-derived spell casting systems, both analogue and digital, as processes to organize and guide his activity on the canvas. But it also resonates with Brock’s references to a preexisting painting vocabulary derived from Modernism. These include: the color field, a process-based approach, a reflexivity of materials and content to the way the work was made, and to the material terms of painting itself. All of these Brock consciously derives from the toolbox of art history and replays in ways that, like these re-accessed spells, are drawn from the past, but are refigured as active agents in the present.

The doubling of the title refers to a glitch that exists only in the online version of the game, which displays the text twice when such a spell is cast. Brock likes the way that this suggests how digital space is one where things morph and multiply as they circulate through its networks, in certain cases allowing us to re-access old things in new ways. Brock demonstrates, through his work, that this includes Modernist ways of approaching the task of making a convincing picture. For, pointedly, Brock finds that the result of his manipulations are more affecting than the painting he starts with. This positions Brock astutely within a younger generation dealing with the changing status of painting as a medium. Brock, along with his peers, have seen that gesture no longer has to be figured only as empty. Instead, it has been reinvigorated by new kinds of gestures: such as swiping and tapping touchscreens. This in turn makes us newly aware of other ways of acting: including the workman-like gestures of sanding, casting, etc. that Brock uses in the studio.

In terms of the three series of paintings on view here, they all begin as conventional paintings that Brock produces with all the unselfconscious indulgences and freedoms of old, romantic ideas of direct, intuitive painting practices. These become available to him only because he knows that soon they will be erased by the activity of his sander. Out of these Brock produces his sanded paintings through a meticulous, labor-intensive process of first scraping, and then sanding down all his painted marks, achieving a subtle, worn gradient color field effect. Which Brock enhances by careful additions of numerous layers of industrial strength primer and spray paint. The scraping and sanding process, even as it erases Brock’s original marks, creates new ones, and retains the history of the process through the effervescent pinks and blues that remain. Other points of formal interest in these works are the holes and tears that Brock’s razor makes in the canvas.

These gestures in turn produce other series’ of works, those produced through the aggregation of the paint chips that fall off of the painting in the act of scraping. And another series produced by the turning of the accumulated dust of the sanding process into a monochrome slab. All this establishes a contained ecosystem of sorts in Brock’s studio. Nothing goes to waste, as the byproducts of every process are creatively redistributed into new works. Other series’ evolve organically as Brock finds new ways of making use of the side effects of his workman-like activities.

Brock’s goal is that the resulting paintings, in the juxtaposition of a reductive quality with quiet but evident aesthetic effects, will provide the viewer with a space of respite and contemplation.

Mira Dancy: PS1’S SPRAWLING ‘GREATER NEW YORK’ SHOW...

Article:  "PS1’S SPRAWLING ‘GREATER NEW YORK’ SHOW.."

(Artnews)

"Yes, painting is fairly well represented, and much of it is strong, from the hyper-real pop oddities of Greg Parma Smith to the flowing ladies of Mira Dancy (who has a joyous wall painting on the top floor) to roughly 35-to-40-year-old paintings by Robert Kushner to the fabric constructions of Eric Mack."

All the World’s a Gallery

Article:  "All the World’s a Gallery"

(TMagazine)

"No longer just for pop-music hopefuls, social media has become a way for big-name artists to prop up fresh talent.

 The internet has for years allowed aspiring stars a way to circumvent the industry machine in order to hit it big (cases in point: Justin Bieber, Kate Upton). Now, that phenomenon is spreading to the otherwise insular art world, as new talents who post their work on Twitter and Instagram are attracting the attention — and business — of successful artists with influential followings of their own. The Canadian artist BP Laval began putting up one erotic drawing a day on Twitter this past spring “to create a structure to work within”; one morning, he woke up to a message from Richard Prince asking if any were for sale. Since then, Prince has retweeted the illustrations to his nearly 12,000 followers and showcased Laval’s work at the New York Art Book Fair stand of his gallery and publishing imprint, Fulton Ryder. For the Irish painterGenieve Figgis, having Prince as a Twitter follower led to Fulton Ryder publishing her first book, “Making Love With the Devil,” and to representation with Half Gallery in New York. And Andrew Pope, a New York-based artist, found an advocate in Raymond Pettibon, who has sung Pope’s praises (and prompted numerous sales) to his audience of more than 13,000 fans. The two went on to collaborate on a limited-edition zine, “Inside Outside Baseball.” While social media can help bridge geographic distance, it also offers access to key players in a world notoriously difficult for outsiders to penetrate. “I’m a guy with a pen, paper and an iPhone,” Laval says. “This is a story of social media cutting across boundaries.”"