Sneak preview of Boney Manilli, a new play by Edgar Arceneaux, staged in an outdoor BBQ Party!

Boney Manilli is a family sitcom dramedy staged in a house with a magical ceiling.

Boney Manilli will be presented as a work in progress, after a 2-week development residency at CAP UCLA. Hosted by Studio Edgar Arceneaux and Vielmetter Los Angeles, the show will stage at the gallery’s north parking lot and consist of an immersive experience for the audience, performed inside of a BBQ party catered by QD’s Double Barrel BBQ.

Supported by the Mike Kelley Foundation and presented in association with UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, this work in progress presentation takes place during Arceneaux’s solo exhibition “Skinning The Mirror”, shown at Vielmetter from January 29th until March 12th, 2022.

Arceneaux has generated an exclusive series of paintings dedicated specifically to fundraising for the development of Boney Manilli.

The duration of the performance is approximately 30 minutes. The BBQ party is 2 hours in duration. The performance will begin around 7:30pm, we invite you to arrive 30 minutes early to leave time to settle in and grab your food and drinks!

Performance and BBQ will be held outdoors, please arrive with proper attire for the weather.

Deborah Roberts and Genevieve Gaignard are featured in "Assembly: New Acquisitions by Contemporary Black Artists" at the Blanton Museum of Art on view through May 8, 2022.

"Assembly includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, textiles, and a monumental print, all produced between 1980 and 2019. Although diverse in style and subject matter, many of the works have ties to Southern history and reveal what scholar Saidiya Hartman refers to as “the long afterlife of slavery.” For example, the shared surname of two—unrelated—quiltmakers in the exhibition, Arie Pettway and Sally Mae Pettway Mixon, is that of the plantation owner their enslaved ancestors were forced to serve in Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Kevin Beasley’s resin sculpture incorporates raw cotton from his family’s farm in Virginia. Nari Ward’s immersive installation honors overlooked places, people, and traditions in Savannah, Georgia. Cauleen Smith made her recent neon work in memory of Sandra Bland, a Black woman who died in police custody after a routine traffic stop in Waller County, Texas.

The title of the presentation, Assembly, embraces the heterogeneity of work made by Black artists, refusing generalization, essentialization, and definitive interpretation. As theorized by the late British cultural critic Stuart Hall and expanded on by American philosopher Paul C. Taylor, with “assembly” comes the potential for disassembly and reassembly. In this gathering, we encounter acts of representation, resilience, reclamation, and resistance."

"The National Gallery of Art has acquired Sarah Cain’s Self-Portrait (2020), an exuberant, mixed-media abstract painting. The non-representational self-portrait is the first work by this original artist to enter the National Gallery’s collection.

Self-Portrait features a dynamic whorl of hard-edged colored bands creating curvilinear forms that alternate between foreground—for example, the large black band with drips that descend throughout the lower register—and background, as illustrated by the black translucent ground of smaller organic shapes. Cain incorporates an abstract vocabulary of form, color, and materials in this painting to create speculation about this painting’s meaning as a self-portrait. She sewed prismatic beads, given to her by her mother, into the center of the canvas as a kind of supportive, light-filled spine—an example of the personal symbolism in this work. Cain’s Self-Portrait painting brings the tradition of abstract painting into the present and continues a rich dialog with countless works in the National Gallery’s collection, including abstract works by artists Lynda Benglis, Ellsworth Kelly, Joan Mitchell, Amy Sillman, Joan Snyder, Frank Stella, and Richard Tuttle."

Curated by Sylvie Fortin, I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality invites visitors to consider how hospitality has simultaneously circumscribed what we think bodies are, what we imagine they can do, how we feel they relate, whom we believe they can encounter, and ultimately, how they engage with each other and in the world. The exhibition explores these questions in space by weaving together open-ended experiential connections between works in a range of media, from painting, sculpture, textile, installation and performance to lens- and time-based practices. These works explore several questions, including pregnancy and surrogacy; transplantation, implantation and transfusion; neural adaptation and the phantom limb; bacteria and the microbiome; viruses, parasites, symbionts and holobionts; stem cells; mechanical and chemical prosthetics; architectures and protocols of corporeal hospitality; dreams and dreamwork; and the “miraculous” work of relics, spirits and energies. In the process, the exhibition reveals a storied genealogy that points to the extractive intersection of race, gender, class, religion and value. I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality critically excavates this legacy and offers up an expanded theater of operations.

The exhibition includes works by Ingrid Bachmann, Crystal Z Campbell, Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Stephanie Dinkins, Celina Eceiza, Adham Faramawy, Mounir Fatmi, Flis Holland, Oliver Husain, Rodney McMillian, Bridget Moser, Pedro Neves Marques, Berenice Olmedo, Kerstin Schroedinger, Jenna Sutela, Ana Torfs, and Francis Upritchard.

December 9, 2021 - March 19, 2022
Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts

Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley are celebrated for video works featuring a distinctively graphic black-and-white palette and scripted narratives in rhyming verse full of punning wordplay by characters brought to life onscreen by Mary. Centered around two new film works—Blood Moon and I’m Jackson Pollock—the exhibition explores the mechanics of power and its fallibility, each film presented in an immersive world and experienced through a darkly funny lens. Co-curated by Alec Unkovic, Exhibitions Manager, and Karen Patterson, Curator and Director of Exhibitions.⁠

"The Shear segment of “Ways of Seeing” presented a hard act to follow. and in November the sculptor Arlene Shechet opted for an enchanting installation for “Take Two." She painted the lower half of the galleries’ walls with bands of pale brown and gray, hung the drawings at different heights and added benches of her own design whose alternately rounded and right-angled edges seemed to comment on the nature of line.

Shechet took care that her selections were linked, one piece to the next, by form or subject, creating an almost continuous chain."

By Roberta Smith - 20 January 2022

A distressed white princess in tattered clothing waves a red scarf in the air as she is abducted on the back of a white bull. The bull, she’ll soon learn, is Zeus in disguise. He is taking her to Crete, where he will rape and impregnate her, then make her his queen. This Greek myth about the defenseless Phoenician mortal Europa—after whom the continent was likely named—is dramatized in one of the most famous paintings of all time, Titian’s The Rape of Europa, commissioned by King Phillip II of Spain in the sixteenth century. Since 1896, it has been part of the collection of famed Boston socialite Isabella Stewart Gardner, whose museum currently displays all of Titian’s mythological poesie paintings, briefly reunited after four hundred years apart.

By Emily Watlington - December 22, 2021

"Self-taught with a background in industrial design, it’s obvious that McCloud is a restless experimenter. In “translated memories,” McCloud continues his practice of incorporating plastic merchandise bags to investigate connections between industrialization and the natural world. Delicate slivers of colored plastic making up pots, leaves, and petals are cut with a razor and applied with heat piece by piece — at the end of the painstaking process, the plastic looks as liquid as a brushstroke."

By Catherine Yang - 15 December 2022

"Spanning the course of Fishman’s career, from her years in the MFA program at the University of Illinois in the early 1960s through 2018, the more than one hundred works on display at the Krannert Art Museum are taken almost entirely from Fishman’s personal collection and most have never before been exhibited. Eschewing a linear, developmental structure, the show—which was organized by the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, Amy L. Powell, in close collaboration with the artist, who passed away just a month before its opening—is instead arranged according to Fishman’s formal grammar, with sections titled “Transfers,” “Grids,” “Curves,” “Flat Folds,” and “Expressions.” Within each, graphic and painterly gestures, chronologies, and materials collapse and intermingle. "

By Jessica Baran - 15 December 2021

"One might presume that a collection of Pope.L’s writing spanning the artist’s decades-long career would be, itself, a performance. My Kingdom for a Title enlivens the artist’s fascination with language as a core mode of inquiry. An artist known for his strenuous public crawls that often include pedestrian and volunteer participation in a mixture of rehearsed and spontaneous study, such as “The Great White Way” (2001-09) and most recently “Conquest” (2019), My Kingdom for a Title is equal parts a peek at the artist’s sketchbook and a career retrospective through Pope.L’s iterative textual analysis."

By Erica N. Cardwell - 10 December 2021

"O’Flaherty’s debut exhibition featured Kim Dingle’s “Psycho-Tods.” The opening of the show was a chaotic, vibrant mix of everyone in New York. The new, the old, the artists, the artist wannabes. The opening felt like vintage New York, before art was presumptuous. It just existed everywhere you turned. And we didn’t make a big fuss about it, we just existed in it."

"Hugo McCloud’s survey at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut reveals an artist who, even early in his career, can be best understood through his novel approach to materials. If you’ve only seen his art online, you’d be forgiven for thinking his images of workers are made with translucent watercolor or glossy acrylic. In fact, they’re meticulously rendered with single-use, semitransparent plastic bags, cut and layered over a white surface. Informed by an earlier career in industrial design, McCloud’s “paintings” in plastic—as well as his large-scale abstractions made with metal, tar, and other industrial materials—speak to a global system of labor, the everyday pursuit of beauty, and the resiliency of the human spirit."

By Will Fenstermaker - 2 December 2021

"Despite having painted self-portraits since childhood, Glynn, 29, abandoned the medium as a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, working instead in video and performance. Things changed after graduation. “I started transitioning, and it was very intuitive to pick up a brush,” she said. “When you grow up without a reflection, sometimes you just need to make your own.”

By Arthur Lubow - 30 November 2021

"Don’t miss out on this Los Angeles-based artist’s curious and sensitive work. The exhibition is curated by one of Dingle’s characters, Pudgey Pomona, a reference librarian who appears in a blue floral shirt against a lemon yellow background in a portrait at the entrance. The 1962 lime green jaguar parked outside the gallery is also Miss Pomona’s, we are told. Inside, you’ll find a delicate marble collection, a cookie cutter in the shape of Cagliari, Italy, a world atlas of animals, and so much more."

By Matt Stromberg and Elisa Wouk Almino - 30 November 2021

"Now, a career-spanning survey has opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, organized by Michael Darling, the MCA’s former chief curator, and Connie Butler, chief curator at the Hammer Museum, where it will travel in 2022. The largest-ever presentation of Bowers’s work, it offers perspective on a remarkable journey.

On a formal level, it presents her path from virtuoso, if spare, drawings in the 1990s to the present cornucopia of crafted objects and installations, textiles and neons, documentary videos, works on paper and cardboard, archival presentations and more.

But the deeper journey is a personal one: How a woman born in 1965, on the launchpad of Generation X, and raised in small-town Ohio, has navigated three decades of allyship — not without missteps — to become, arguably, America’s most important political artist."

By Siddhartha Mitter - 30 November 2021