Todd Gray’s solo exhibition Rome Work is reviewed by Jody Zellen in Visual Art Source!

“The current exhibition featuring Los Angeles-based photographer Todd Gray is comprised of work made during a 2022-23 residency at the American Academy in Rome. Rome Work features images of iconic architecture, statues and churches in Rome combined with images from previous bodies of work, some shot in Ghana, others a selection of self-portraits, many of which depict the artist’s head covered with swaths of white shaving cream. Gray is a master of juxtaposition and has devised a way to creatively layer his images, encasing each element in its own (glassless), often oval frame so the finished works have dimensionality.

In his Rome series, Gray beautifully brings together photographs of the Eternal City that speak to darker times, wealth and poverty, construction and destruction. While Rome is a city full of ruins, Gray injects new life into his depictions. His images are an attempt to weave a path through different periods in history as a way to suggest that the evils of the past connect to the present. His evocative and thoughtful juxtapositions combine art, architecture with personal imagery to create new Black narratives that expose and explore legacies of colonialism in Africa and beyond.”

By Jody Zellen – 20 December 2023

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Kambui Olujimi’s exhibition All I Got To Give at Vielmetter Los Angeles is reviewed in Hyperallergic by Gregory Volk.

“These marathons have long been a potent theme for Kambui Olujimi, whose eclectic work spans sculpture, installation, performance, painting, and other mediums. The eight engrossing paintings (all watercolor, ink, and graphite on paper) and two ceramic sculptures (all works 2023) in his memorably titled exhibition All I Got to Give — his first with Susanne Vielmetter gallery — turn dancing couples, admission tickets, trophies, and, more implicitly, audiences into complex, extremely pertinent meditations on endurance, fragility, care, resistance, transcendence, and — importantly — race.”

By Gregory Volk – 18 December 2023

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Deborah Roberts’s work is featured in the NY Times article “Piecing Together a Black Identity, and a Whole Black World” by Margaret Renkl on the exhibition Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary Collage currently on view at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville through December 31st. The exhibition also features the work of Genevieve Gaignard, Wangechi Mutu and Mickalene Thomas.

“In her depictions of Black children, for example, the Austin-based artist Deborah Roberts has made use of not just magazine and internet images of Black children but also the eyes of James Baldwin and the fist of Muhammad Ali. In such works, Ms. Roberts is commenting on more than just the “otherness” she discusses in an artist’s statement on her website. She is commenting on more, even, than the failure of the white world to recognize Black beauty and the damage that this failure does to children.”

By Margaret Renkl – 11 December 2023

April Bey is featured in María Elena Ortiz’s highlights from Art Basel Miami Beach for The Art Newspaper.

April Bey is “really interested in the beauty” of the Black figure, “but also traditions of Black culture”, Ortiz says. “Here, she has featured Royal Crown, a product that some Black women use in their hair—and, of course, the title speaks of colonialization”.

By María Elena Ortiz – 08 December 2023

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We are thrilled to present Jared McGriff’s work in our booth at Art Basel Miami Beach. McGriff is featured in the NY Times spotlight on the Miami art scene by Brett Sokol.

“His Instagram handle, @watercolorbrother, perfectly captures the engrossing fugue state his paintings can inspire — ethereal scenes of Black life suck the viewer in, only to reveal deeper layers and troubling narratives. Yet his brushwork remained largely hidden from public view, until 2017 when he finally “pulled the plug” on his old life and moved to Miami.”

Visit us at Booth A16 to see McGriff’s newest work.

By Brett Sokol – 06 Decemeber 2023

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Pope.L interviewed about his recent South London Gallery exhibition, Hospital, featured in The Art Newspaper!

“Pope.L may not call himself one of the most influential performance artists working in the US today, but he has been known to pass out business cards declaring he is “the friendliest Black artist in America”. Known for his provocative and often absurdist works that deal with race, economic systems and language, the Chicago-based artist and educator works across multiple disciplines, from installations and film to painting and writing.”

When asked: “What can absurdity offer as a tool of resistance and liberation? Are not recent political figures (both in the US and the UK) also often branded as absurd, and how might absurdity now be a facet of fascism rather than liberation?”

Pope.L answers saying “The final word of James Joyces’s Ulysses is “yes”. The last words of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is “They do not move”.”

By Margaret Carrigan – 23 November 2023

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Kambui Olujimi interviewed in Black Art and Design by Christopher Okereke-Cox.

The New York based artist talks about his latest exhibition All I Got to Give, at Vielmetter Los Angeles, which takes us on a journey through the enduring spirit of historic dance marathons.

“This exhibition marks Olujimi’s first solo venture in Los Angeles and is the culmination of a decade-long exploration in which the artist immersed himself in the history and cultural impact of the 1920s and ’30s dance marathons. These marathons, emerging during the Great Depression, transcended entertainment to become intense endurance contests where participants, driven by desperation and the lure of prize money in economically hard times, danced for hours, days, or even months on end.

In All I Got to Give, Kambui transcends the boundaries of time and space, creating a mythic realm where the past and present converge. Through his art, he invites viewers to contemplate the complexities of human interactions, the strength found in community, and the enduring power of the human spirit in the face of adversity. This exhibition is not just a display of Olujimi’s artistic prowess but a testament to his profound ability to connect historical events with contemporary themes, making him a significant voice in today’s art world.”

By Christopher Okereke-Cox – 28 November 2023

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Paul Mpagi Sepuya interviewed in Document Journal by Ryan McNamara.

“In the studio photographs that Sepuya has been producing over the past few years, which nod to the format’s rich history, the artist appears alongside friends and lovers whose relationships to him and to the camera never seemed fixed. They’re performing together on a stage of his own making, but one whose improvisatory conditions he doesn’t fully control. That stage has grown more inviting with the addition of black velvet drapes, oversized pillows, an armchair, and other props which may recall the studio of Carl van Vechten, who photographed the artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance nearly a century ago. The mirror is still a frequent presence, as if to suggest that what we’re seeing isn’t intended for an outsider’s gaze.”

Text by Evan Moffitt. Interview by Ryan McNamara – 01 November 2023

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Deborah Roberts’ SITE Santa Fe exhibition Come walk in my shoes reviewed in Hyperallergic by Eric Joyce.

“Roberts centers the beauty and vulnerability of Black children, which is often seized from them at a young age via systemic violence in the United States.

Roberts’s sculpture “trumpet of consciousness” (2019) is an assemblage composed of a wooden box, a metal car jack, and a stack of books. The work, whose title refers to a speech given by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, engages with the history of violence against Black boys by invoking the story of George Stinney, a 14-year-old boy who was wrongfully accused and convicted of murdering two White girls in South Carolina in 1944. Stinney was subsequently sentenced to death by electrocution after a three-day trial. Due to his small frame, the boy’s body did not fit the scale of the electric chair, forcing him to sit on a stack of books. The sculpture itself is situated in the far corner of the gallery, slightly isolated from the figural depictions of the children. The books, four copies of Black Boy by Richard Wright, are squished and seemingly exploding from their spines from the pressure of the car jack. While the two-dimensional works in the show are more nuanced and subtle in their message, “trumpet of consciousness” explicitly confronts the assumed criminality of Black children through structural racism.”

By Eric Joyce – 23 October 2023

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Deborah Roberts’ Come walk in my shoes at SITE Santa Fe reviewed in Culture Type.

“The figurative works by Deborah Roberts focus on Black youth. Roberts assembles the collage works with found images – an eclectic mix of facial features, limbs, and colorful and patterned clothing – finishing the compositions with painted details. The complex, dynamic portraits speak to the individuality of her subjects and ask viewers to consider the societal assumptions thrust upon them. 

Originally, the Austin, Texas-based artist focused exclusively on girls. In recent years, she began portraying boys, too, further exploring preconceived notions around race, gender, beauty, masculinity, and vulnerability when it comes to Black children, and the tenuous innocence all too many of them experience.”

By Victoria L. Valentine – 16 October 2023

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Nicole Eisenman’s What Happened exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery featured in The Art Newspaper.

“Eisenman used humour in a very raucous way at the beginning to make new kinds of representations of lesbian life,” Godfrey says. “They weren’t that common in contemporary art.” Later works, like Morning Studio (2016), show domestic scenes. “You can see her engagement with lesbian life in New York with queer couples throughout the exhibition, in different, simple ways—like how she might present a pair of people relaxing, how she presents romance,” Godfrey says.”

By Catherine Hickley – 10 October 2023

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Featuring Megan Fox Kelly, Founder of Megan Fox Kelly Art Advisory; Susanne Vielmetter, Owner and Director of Vielmetter Los Angeles; and Alain Servais, Collector and Founder of Servais Family Collection—moderated by Eileen Kinsella, Senior Market Editor of Artnet News.

Tectonic shifts are being felt across the art market. From the expansion of digital mediums and the movement towards ultra-contemporary art, to new generations of buyers and the ascent of mega-galleries, the arts landscape is undoubtedly undergoing rapid and monumental change. This panel will discuss the future of the art market in broad strokes, considering key forces behind these major movements.

Click link below to listen on Spotify

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Nicole Eisenman’s current exhibitions featured in The Guardian.

“We’re at Nottingham Contemporary, where Eisenman is co-curating a group show. Just opened, it’s called Ridykeulous: Ridykes’ Cavern of Fine Inverted Wines and Deviant Videos – and it’s as much of a blast as its name suggests. But I’ve come to interview the artist about something even more monumental: her career retrospective at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, which is opening this week.

What Happened covers a momentous 30 years, going from jokey lesbian subversions of cartoons (in one, Wilma and Betty from The Flintstones get it on) to self-portraits, political paintings and public statues. So impressive is her output that, eight years ago, the French-born American was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant” for restoring “cultural significance to the representation of the human form”.”

By Claire Armistead – 09 October 2023

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“I’ve seen many artists whose artistic ventures employ beauty to entice the viewer. Genevieve Gaignard’s work is probably my favorite. A delightful multimedia artist who creates photographs, installations, collages, and other mediums, her artwork tells the story of America’s history of color blindness, and its eager violence upon Black people, women, and everything in between. Pretty pinks and bushy hairdos, florals, and red-lined lips cleverly conspire together, deconstructing the intricacies of race and cultural identity.”

Interview by Shaquille Heath / Portrait by Charlsie Gorski, Juxtapoz – Fall 2023

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Nicole Eisenman featured on the cover of October’s Frieze magazine along with a feature article “Nicole Eisenman’s Literary Inclinations,” written by Isabel Waidner.

“Paintings like Beer Garden with A.K. (2009) are populated by New York-based queer and trans contemporaries and friends, in this instance gathered around the artist A.K. Burns. It makes sense that Eisenman’s engagement with literature should not be limited to canonical works but should include, if not centre, contemporary literary communities and live literary production. ‘Eisenman loves literature and writers,’ Myles noted in frieze in relation to the painting Weeks on the Train (2015), in which the writer Laurie Weeks, laptop on lap, is reading and taking up space while travelling.”

By Isabel Waidner – 04 October 2023

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Wangechi Mutu’s solo exhibition Intertwined at the New Museum is reviewed in Artforum by Darla Migan.

“Mutu has embraced the spiritual necessity of splitting her studio practice, like a serpent’s tongue, between New York and Nairobi, Kenya, learning from nature, myriad cultures, and her Pan-Africanist roots. The artist, who also studied anthropology, recognizes and claims the similarities happening between various folk-tale traditions—from Kikuyu lore to the Brothers Grimm and the stories of Br’er Rabbit that move between African-descended peoples of the Caribbean and the American South—and is deeply sensitive to the ways that beliefs about ourselves, our neighbors, and our species underlie all the actions that go into the creation of our world.”

By Darla Migan – October 2023

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Karl Haendel’s “Hand Holding Scribble,” is Artillery Magazine’s “Picture of the Week”!

“And then I was suddenly confronted by “Hand Holding Scribble” in Karl Haendel’s Daily Act of Sustained Empathy, his show of large scale drawings in pencil and ink on paper that opened Saturday afternoon at Vielmetter Los Angeles, and it was as if a mystery of the universe was unfolding before me.

A Karl Haendel Scribble has its own wave or fluid dynamic, geometry, maybe even logic; and this one was of a complexity that took it onto a different plane (okay I’m not talking about the paper), a different sphere or domain, even a different universe.  The universe.”

By Ezrha Jean Black – 30 September 2023

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The monumental immersive painting, titled This is the thing they call life, wraps around sections of the building’s exterior from ground level to its 70-foot-tall central silos and through its interior spaces. A natural extension of Cain’s established practice, which questions the seriousness of art, This is the thing they call life includes both her bold geometrics and fluidly painted marks throughout.

“It was a really great, fluid process,” Cain said, after seeing a shift in the logistics of her practice during the work. “To let go of control and have help was pretty mind-blowing,” she said, adding, “I learned a lot and it was really a dream project.”

The efforts of a team of artists from the community, who will continue to maintain the work, helped bring this yearlong project together.

The public is welcome to visit Cain’s work on the OBM campus at 250 North Hartford Avenue.

By Francesca Aton – 28 September 2023

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Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade’s “interstellar chamber opera” Star Choir will be presented by acclaimed experimental opera company The Industry inside Mt. Wilson’s largest observatory on Sept. 30 and Oct. 1. The opera features six singers and six instrumentalists (horn, harp, synthesizer, cello, contrabass, and percussion). Gaines, the Industry’s co-artistic director, composed the music for Star Choir and Segade wrote the libretto.

“Audiences will embark on a cosmic mission, as a starship crew seeks refuge on the hostile Planet 85K: Aurora. Once there, the colonists encounter intelligent life imperceptible to their all-too-human awareness. As the planet defends itself from their invasive presence, the humans evolve to become a part of the Holobiont, a queerly multi-species organism that covers this world. STAR CHOIR offers a meditation on the challenges and pleasures of mutual coexistence, reimagining humanity as a porous category that must transform to survive.

STAR CHOIR features an ensemble of eight singers, with performances by company members Kelci Hahn, Sarah Beaty, and Jon Lee Keenan. The Industry’s Music Director, Marc Lowenstein, leads an orchestra of six musicians, featuring board and company member Lucy Yates. Choreographer Milka Djordjevich joins the creative team as movement director and the sci-fi video elements are designed by Daniel Leyva.

Through fantasy and critique, STAR CHOIR asks urgent questions facing humanity amid our era’s confluence of natural and political crises, evoking scenes of disaster migration, fugitivity, and colonization as they are entwined with our difficult histories and our best visions of a potential future.”

Gaines and Segade are members of My Barbarian, along with Jade Gordon.

By Catherine Womack – 01 September 2023

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Genevieve Gaignard is featured on the cover of the third issue of Space on Space magazine along with a feature article “Genevieve Gaignard’s Ecosystem of Collecting” by Emily Logan.

On the cover is a new collage by Gaignard “My Funny Valentine | The Magician,” which will be featured in the upcoming group exhibition “Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage” at the Frist Museum opening next month.

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Nicole Eisenman’s solo exhibition “What Happened” at the Museum Brandhorst, Munich is reviewed in ArtReview by Christian Egger! The exhibition is on view in Munich through September 10, 2023 and subsequently travels to the Whitechapel Gallery, London opening October 11, 2023 through January 14, 2024.

Eisenman’s work is currently on view at the gallery in our group exhibition “Perpetual Portrait”  through August 18, 2023.

“What Happened at Museum Brandhorst, Munich, begins with Heading Down River on the USS J-Bone of an Ass (2017). This painting, of a mandible like vessel sailing dangerously close to sending its all-male crew over a waterfall, is an appropriately scabrous starting-point for this show, with its roughly 100 works drawn from three decades of the American artist’s predominantly painterly practice and embedded social commentary. (That said, Eisenman’s latter-day recognition as a significant sculptor is attested to by the presence of Procession, 2019, a multifigure sculpture staging an ambiguous parade or protest, originally shown at that year’s controversy-shadowed Whitney Biennial and, in the present context, a kind of mysterious backdrop.) The paintings, shown across multiple rooms, are loosely organized into categories: ‘Heads’, ‘Being an Artist’, ‘Coping’, ‘Against the Grain’, ‘Protest & Procession’, ‘In Search of Fun and Danger’ and ‘Screens, Sex & Solitude’. This last focuses on Eisenman’s ongoing, decade-long pictorial engagement with present-day communication gadgets: projectors, laptops, drones, iPhones, etc. That viewers are going to photograph the work, and publish it on social media, seems factored into the artist’s reflexive thinking.”

By Christian Egger – 31 July 2023

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Karla Klarin’s exhibition “Big Pink” is reviewed in Artillery by Jody Zellen!

“The works that comprise “Big Pink” explore Klarin’s memories of a pink-hued house that belonged to her neighbor Natalie. In the series’ earliest paintings, Klarin combines architectural precision with broad, washy brushstrokes to depict a typical Los Angeles tract home; a one-story house with an attached garage and low-pitched roof. Klarin’s illustrations appear as arrays of rectangular, textured shapes filled with swirling lines. The house’s particular pink color works as a point of departure for Klarin’s subsequent paintings.

In her later paintings, Klarin delights in abstraction—allowing the planes of architecture to morph into a more expansive landscape of interlocking triangles and trapezoids in shades of gray against a light pink sky. While she creates both small and large paintings, it is the larger works (more than 90 inches across) like Big Pink LA 1 (2017), Big Pink LA 2 (2016), and Big Pink LA 4 (2021) that evoke the sprawl that characterizes the terrain of Los Angeles.”

By Jody Zellen – 21 June 2023

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“Breasts become weapons in less literal ways in other works. The woman in “Boob Gold,” an oil painting on wood from 2018, stares defiantly back at us as she tugs open her dress to expose a coin slot, the kind you might find on a donation box, at the center of her chest. The work addresses what Kahraman sees as the exploitative dimensions of humanitarian aid. “Your body becomes a spectacle,” she says. “But on the other side, she’s exuding this power.” Sexual objectification may be an unavoidable condition of being a woman, especially one seen as exotic by the West, but Kahraman suggests it comes with its own forms of strength.”

By Zoe Lescaze – 16 May 2023

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“Drawing on Grimm fairy tales, Haitian Vodou and Catholic ritual practices, and the objectification of women’s bodies in media, each piece and collection of works tells a story. The large scale of many of her mature collages lends itself to a closer reading of all its many aspects.”

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“The characters in the Mutu cinematic universe are a sexually assertive, menacing and athletic bunch. They leap, twist and spring, often backwards and in heels, like Ginger Rogers. The retrospective is titled Intertwined and, sure enough, her figures are constantly putting down roots or bursting free of them, moulting and germinating in a frenzy of tangled growth.”

By Ariella Budick – 15 March 2023

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“Paul Mpagi Sepuya crafts pictures that feel as intimate and warm as they do formal and intellectual. His photos do what art does best: Offer an immediate jolt of both recognition and disorientation, and point toward a singular perspective — a voice, a vision. I’m tempted to say they are arresting images, or captivating, but then the involuntary connotations of those adjectives don’t seem to fit; better to say that Sepuya creates images that hold you. Images that give pause and invite reflection — not so much like looking in a mirror but very much like catching someone else, someone you care for, gazing into the mirror.”

By Justin Torres – 15 March 2023

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“Like Braithwaite, Sepuya, Gaignard, and McMillian work against photography’s extractive legacy, in which white men used their cameras to further harmful stereotypes, expand their colonial prospects, and otherwise reinforce systems of power. Instead­­, they sustain photography’s parallel legacy as a mechanism of collective agency and liberation.”

By Erin O’Leary – March 2023

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“Hybrid creatures populate both the artist’s extravagant collages and startling sculptures, variously merging human and animal (or plant), alien and earthling, and female and male into assertive female-leaning beings. An interest in fusing opposites is suggested in the show’s title, “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined,” taken from a 2003 watercolor collage of two dance club habitués — young, scantily clad women with the heads of wild African dogs on the second floor.”

By Roberta Smith – March 2023

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“This humorously paired presentation includes glazed ceramic sculptures by Arlene Shechet and graphite figurative drawings by Nicola Tyson. Shechet’s gravity-defying sculptures seem to contort, tilt, bend and melt. They appear to be set in motion even while static. Her work embraces the duality of clay which is malleable yet holds still, and fragile yet strong, conveying the humor and pathos of bodily existence. Tyson describes her work as “psycho-figuration” because her misshapen figures have unexpected proportions. These amusingly freakish, androgynous figures are beyond gender identification, yet they have an obstinate individuality even without detailed faces.”

By Lita Barrie – February 2023

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““It’s Time” is an exhibition of works by Kwesi Botchway, Genevieve Gaignard, Rodney McMillan, Wangechi Mutu, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya in conversation with works by legendary New York-based photographer Kwame Brathwaite. Anchored by Brathwaite’s influential images, the exhibition creates a cross-generational dialogue that posits an exploration of the photographer’s influence and the continuing investigation of portraiture and representation of the Black body by artists today.”

By Mousse Magazine Staff – 18 February 2023

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“Kirk is specifically taken with the story of Minerva—goddess of wisdom—and her pet owl, who symbolizes knowledge acquired through trial and error; cultivating wisdom through the process of making mistakes. His neon orange sunsets and sci-fi skyscraper vistas, painted with Gorilla Glue and spray paint, function as markers of time, change, and spirituality.”

By Jennifer Piejko – 17 February 2023

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"In another dynamic paired presentation, Vielmetter’s booth mixes large-scale pencil drawings of surreal people, animals, and plants by British-born painter Nicola Tyson with abstract, mixed-media sculptures by American artist Arlene Shechet."

By Paul Laster – 17 February 2023

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“As part of the Frieze Projects programme at Frieze Los Angeles, Ochoa is resurrecting the CLASS: C van, exhibiting ‘Las Tortillas’, a series of bronze tortilla sculptures that pay homage to both the food and his family’s history as tortilla purveyors. In parallel, working in partnership with the fair, Revolution Carts – maker of the first hot food vending cart approved by the LA County Department of Health – and local street vendor advocacy groups, Ochoa will design the graphics for a custom ‘street legal’ food vending cart, which will be unveiled and donated to a local vendor at the fair. As well as directly benefitting this community, the gesture is intended to raise awareness of the history, contributions and ongoing ‘hustle’ of Los Angeles’ street vendors, whose economic and cultural impact on the city is, Ochoa says, unrecognized and undervalued.”

By Patricia Escarcega – 15 February 2023

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“Now, for the first time since 2005, Ochoa is opening the doors of his storied and rather rusty van to the public again, parking it on the tarmac of the Santa Monica airport for the run of Frieze Los Angeles there (Feb. 16-19). Its engine is shot, so this time the van, known as “Class: C” (after the standard type of driver’s license needed to operate it), will be towed into place.”

By Jori Finkel – 13 February 2023

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“From the couture-inflected to the conceptual, minimal and visceral, the portraiture-centered group show, It’s Time, features six artists offering urgently needed updates to our culture’s definition of beauty. Next door, painter Forrest Kirk’s landscape-shredding solo exhibition, The Owl of Minerva Flies at Dusk, upends pastoral quietude with disruptive materiality and a suspicious attitude toward perfection. Each of these artists in their own way takes aim at the persistently unwise restrictions imposed by conventional cultural paradigms — and they offer some compelling alternatives.”

By Shana Nys Dambrot – 10 February 2023

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“Based in Austin, Roberts creates powerful collages of mostly Black adolescents. Splicing elements from varying sources – Michelle Obama’s hands, the eyes of James Baldwin – she uses heavily textured collages to explore “the multiplicity” of Blackness. “Do not think of people of colour as this monolithic idea,” she says, “but as individuals.”

By Katy Hessel – 06 February 2023

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“The New Museum exhibition will be the first time the whole building is turned over to a single artist. It will trace the continuity of Mutu’s thinking over the past 25 years as well as the profound impact her part-time move back to Kenya has had on her practice, especially her shift from the complex and lush collaged-based works on paper that brought her fame in the 2000s to a more recent focus on large-scale sculpture, installation, film and performance.”

By Aruna D’Souza – 08 February 2023

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“In 2012 I started working in ceramics (again.) By again I mean I did it in high school and before that, like many did, as a child at a local community center. First I made porcelain animal figures and then started throwing on the wheel. The pieces pictured here were made during the pandemic, between 2020 and 2022. They were shown in the solo exhibition Forest for the Trees (2022 at Vielmetter Los Angeles), installed with stumps and rocks and paintings. I thought it would be nice to show them “up close” since you can’t touch the art in an art show and pick them up.”

By Stanya Kahn – February 2023

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“Themes of representation also appear in a gorgeous show, “It’s Time,” at Vielmetter Los Angeles where the work of artists Kwesi Botchway, Genevieve Gaignard, Rodney McMillian, Wangechi Mutu, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya are in conversation with the portraiture of Kwame Brathwaite, who is widely known for his photographic documentation of the Black is Beautiful movement of the 1960s and ’70s. The exhibition title, “It’s Time,” is a nod to the 1962 jazz album by Max Roach featuring Abbey Lincoln. It not only refers to the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements of the period, but also suggests that now is still “the time” to prioritize the movement and efforts towards true liberation and representation for all.”

By Dominique Clayton – February 2023

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"There are historical moments that transform the industry standard, and sometimes they have deep, traceable roots. An opportunity to understand this process is provided by an exhibition of artist Nicole Eisenman’s work opening in March at Munich’s Museum Brandhorst. Curated by Monika Bayer-Wermuth and Mark Godfrey, the show, especially its revisitation of startlingly explicit lesbian works from the 1990s, will allow viewers to enjoy Eisenman’s beautiful, widely appreciated, and highly valued artworks. The fifty-seven-year-old, French-born, New York–raised painter, sculptor, and creator of wild, passionate murals and drawings has taken a bad-boy, oppositional, and sometimes dramatically risky path to becoming one of the world’s most successful living artists. Somehow, the seas parted and—at times in spite of herself—Eisenman has thrived, has been approved of, and is now in some ways iconic. Beyond the quality of her work, how did it happen that exclusionary criteria that kept a range of lesbian imagery out of the mainstream were lifted?"

By Sarah Schulman- February 2023

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“I am grateful for the opportunity to show work I care about, to make new things and to show work at the fair for out-of-town visitors who may have missed my recent show (which was unlike anything I’ve made before). Ruinart describes a commitment to sustainability and understanding of biodiversity which seems crucial, [and] mandatory if we’re to survive,” Kahn tells Wallpaper*.

By Harriet Lloyd Smith – 27 January 2023

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“Across Gaignard’s works are themes of beauty. Without looking closely, you could become swept up in her delightful pastel palette, romantic floral motifs, and swanky style. But the artist uses this to elicit dialogue around the intricacies of race and cultural identity. Likely best known for her self-portraits, Gaignard makes installations and mixed-media collage, creating her own visual language that illuminates racial injustice. She unabashedly centers Blackness and cleverly entices us to consider the most unsettling parts of American culture and anti-Blackness. Look What We’ve Become takes the object of a vintage hand mirror, used to beautify and adorn, and asks us to take this quiet moment to really look at ourselves. Who is impacted by an intrusive gaze? Who has the freedom to look away?”

By Shaquille Heath – 19 January 2023

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"In the opening essay of filmmaker Nora Ephron’s 2006 book I Feel Bad About My Neck, and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman, she reflects on the experience of getting older in her signature, cleverly confessional style: “That’s another thing about being a certain age that I’ve noticed: I try as much as possible not to look in the mirror. If I pass a mirror, I avert my eyes. If I must look into it, I begin by squinting, so that if anything really bad is looking back at me, I am already halfway to closing my eyes to ward off the sight.” Few would disagree that Ephron, as a perfector of the rom-com and the personal essay, is as sharp-eyed an observer of women’s experiences as they come. But rarely has her name been invoked in relation to feminist art of the 1980s, with its emphasis on deconstructing “woman as image.” Nevertheless, as I was walking through Mary Kelly’s show at Vielmetter—an installation of her work Interim, Part I: Corpus, 1984–85—the comedienne, to my own surprise, immediately came to mind."

By Ashton Cooper – January 2023

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