"The Storm King exhibition will feature bronze sculptures installed in the indoor and outdoor spaces of the centre that will aim to emphasise Mutu’s interest in the natural world, something that has “been present but not at the forefront of conversations around her work”, according to Nora Lawrence, the centre’s artistic director and chief curator.

“Mutu’s work is rooted in the idea of karmic power, or a future where humans have reconnected with the environment, where human and non-human elements merge and create a greater force because of their union,” Lawrence tells The Art Newspaper. “The landscape at Storm King is an ideal platform for understanding this facet of her work.”

The commission includes a monumental fountain spanning 15 ft. in length that will flank an area known as “museum hill”, a focal point of the sculpture park that offers panoramic views of the grounds and houses another iconic sculptural fountain, the work North South East West (1988/2009/2014-15) by Lynda Benglis. Mutu’s work will take the form of a water-filled canoe holding anthropomorphic female figures that are intertwined with tendrilous roots resembling mangroves."

By Gabriella Angeleti - 15 March 2022

"Ellen Berkenblit’s paintings are built from the lovely gaps within and between time, space, lips, metaphors, just as painting itself has been understood of late as a productively anachronistic medium. As Amy Sillman has written of Berkenblit, “Neither representations nor simulacra, these figures are displacements, emptied presences that allow something else to pour out: grief, ruins, memories, stories from old worlds…”1 And those old worlds have old words, the stuff of chivalric legends, old photographs, crushes, and Lynchian girl groups."

By William J. Simmons - May 2022

"It makes me uncomfortable when everything is totally out of control, but it also makes me uncomfortable when everything is completely in control. It’s the navigation between these poles that creates dynamism within my work. Certainly, there are strategies that I stick to when I’m painting. I like creating things that feel like a performance or an event on a stage."

By Pia Gottschaller - May 2022

"In Gut Feelings the artist takes a physiological approach to trauma and othering while drawing on her experiences of acclimating to life in Sweden as a refugee from Iraq during the Gulf War. Kahraman uses exposed, knotted intestines as a visual metaphor for trauma to explore the process of coping with the impacts of distressing events as she highlights the inalienable connection between mind and body. The show also considers links between neuroscience, the microbiome and how the body carries trauma through the artist’s work with bacteria."

By Salena Barry - May 2022

"One of the strangest and most compelling works in the show is a two-channel video by New York-based, Jamaican artist Dave McKenzie. Listed Under Accessories (2022) shows the artist entangled in an ambiguous but earnest struggle with curious objects. For several minutes, McKenzie performs a seemingly improvised choreography with a large sheet of glass. At first, he’s resting the rectangle on his foot and scooting around the room; later, he balances it on the back of his head and shoulders, flexing his neck to keep it level. The rigidity of the glass forces his Black body to adapt in order to handle the material safely. He’s going through something, and we feel it with him even if the parameters of his struggle are never fully explained."

By Peter Brock

"Nine of Roberts’ collage-and-pencil works on canvas at Art + Practice, plus nine from a suite of 27 Warhol-style silk-screen heads, elaborate the theme, introducing girls and kids in groups. (In a nice touch, the silk screens are hung low on the wall — kid-height.) Roberts places her figures off-center against blank white fields, her unerring design sense yielding the savvy effect of a fashion shoot. Given a larger absence of Black faces in commercial culture, these kids insert themselves — camera-ready."

By Christopher Knight - 11 May 2022

"As an installation, I’m is about empowerment. The works cry out: Look at me. I’m a person. I’m here. I’m important. In this exhibition, Roberts blends faces of children and grownups to suggest the trajectory toward adulthood and the fact that in today’s violent and racist world, they grow up too fast, if they get to grow up at all.'

By Jody Zellen - May 2022

"Just inside the entrance, the visitor is greeted by Bright Sun Cloud (2021) offset on a large floor plinth. Rising in piled chunks of wood and ceramic, these forms seem to spread out in a big yellow/green embrace. Revealing itself only after a 360° perusal, the forms are masked from one side to the next and shifts in color provide new readings from one view to the next. The soft surface is replete with both cracks and textures and the only element less heated in the ensemble is the steel plate below which strikes a more plaintive, almost whimsical note. Along with the scalar shifts, it’s impossible to survey the entirety of the work, making viewing a literal discovery."

By John David O'Brien - May 10, 2022

"We now have to defend our beauty and the way we dress. So I wanted to show the vulnerability of young children, especially boys, when that toxic masculinity appears, as early as the third grade. Most of the definitions that apply to Black boys and Black girls are very negative and not uplifting. And that’s why most of my images are floating. I’m lifting them up. I’m not grounding them—they’re moving. And that’s what I’m hoping that my art does.” - Deborah Roberts

By Emil Wilbekin - 29 April 2022

"Her bent toward nostalgic ephemera is coupled with an insatiable curiosity to mine personal and collective histories. Gaignard’s work rests uncomfortably at the intersections of portraiture, history and recent calls for justice. She masterfully employs found objects that signify. She appropriates misrepresentations—the commoditized stereotypes that historically have been used to humiliate Black people and presents them in active stances, ignited with a renewed agency."

By Angela N. Carroll - 22 April 2022

"Throughout her career, Genevieve Gaignard has sought to interrogate and protest the racial violence that plagues America through her art. In her current solo exhibition with Vielmetter Los Angeles (her second with the gallery), Gaignard harkens back throughout American history and the racial violence at the forefront, intertwined with analysis of and commentary on the American psyche in its inseparability from this violent trajectory. 

Strange Fruit, its title borrowed from the iconic Billie Holiday song, is a collection of pieces which agitate against the historical and modern-day lynching of Black Americans. An aggregate of provocative pieces, Strange Fruit aims to disrupt: to amplify alternative narratives of racial violence and white supremacy.

Flaunt spoke with Gaignard about the exhibition and her practice and intentionality behind the works therein."

By Madeleine Schulz