Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

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artist

Portals for Memory, and Wonder, in the Work of Reggie Burrows Hodges

at Karma Gallery, NYC
Reviewed by Hilton Als
NYRB

Reggie Burrows Hodges begins by painting a raw canvas black. Then he paints his figures and their atmosphere on top of that. His hand is everywhere in his work, in control but not controlling. Shall we call Hodges’s work controlled bleeding? While Color Field painters such as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and the like managed their paint by splashing color here and there, their project was different from Hodges’s in a number of ways, including their use of color. While today we look on those distinguished Color Field paintings for the joy they express about physicality, the irrepressible eye, and a relative lack of fear when it comes to the decorative, there are, in these artists’ wonderfully gestural work, some shortcomings. Such as their use, or lack of use, of the color black, a hue that is of the utmost importance to Hodges, who has said: “I start with a black ground [as a way] of dealing with blackness’s totality. I’m painting an environment in which the figures emerge from negative space….If you see my paintings in person, you’ll look at the depth.” [Read More…]

thought

Being Apart: A Memoir of 2020

by Mark Goodman

For us the new year began far from home at the southern tip of Africa. Apartheid — “apartness” — was a euphemism for racial brutality, and the necessary condition for its enactment: the dehumanizing ghettoization that precedes violence. 2020 would be a year of reckoning for my country’s racial division and a year when being-apart became a universal condition. The disorienting isolation of quarantine spread with its own kind of virulence, eroding intimacy and fraying bonds. [Read More…]

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artist

Simphiwe Ndzube’s Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon

at Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (through 20 March 2021)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a Cheshire cat.
–Julian Huxley

I will eat the last signs of my weakness
Remove the scars of old childhood wars
and dare to enter the forest whistling
like a snake that had fed the chameleon
–“Solstice,” Audre Lorde

Simphiwe Ndzube’s engaging exhibit, entitled Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon at Nicodim Gallery, is a visual and aural treat composed of paintings, sculptures and two installations, all bathed in a soundscape created by the artist in collaboration with Thabo K. Makgolo and Zambini Makwetha. A master storyteller, Nzdube creates an existential, otherworldly space where the ordinary becomes extraordinary. The work defies easy explanations, as mystery is piled on top of enigma. Each painting or sculpture shares a homemade, do-it-yourself aesthetic, with all seams made visible, as though haphazardly sewn, stitched, stapled, glued and pinned together in a hurry. All collaged elements are intentionally separate and noticeable, like a homey piecework crazy quilt. Ndzube juggles fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, with a skill and dexterity of a trained magician while employing inventive improvisation like a superb jazz musician. [Read More…]

books

Radical Black Dignity and the Shared Revolutionary Paths of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

Reviewed by Brandon M. Terry

The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.
by Peniel E. Joseph
Basic Books, 384 pp., $18.99
NYRB

Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X met only once, at the US Capitol during the Senate debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That chance encounter was immortalized in a photograph that shows the two men shaking hands and smiling but reveals little trace of the public feud that has linked them in our historical imagination. Their conflict has cast arguably the longest shadow over African-American politics and the struggle for racial justice of any contretemps since the one between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington at the turn of the twentieth century. [Read More…]

books

It Floods the Womb Until One Drowns

Reviewed Brandon M. Terry

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
by Les Payne and Tamara Payne
Liveright, 612 pp., $27.52
NYRB

At the end of his remarkable, improbable life, Malcolm X was on the cusp of a reinvention that might have been even more significant than his conversion in prison from criminal predation to religious piety. Although he rose to prominence preaching the bleak, racialist metaphysics of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam (NOI), which depicted whites as “devils by nature,” in March 1964 Malcolm defected from the Nation and converted to Sunni Islam. Charging Muhammad with the sexual exploitation of his teenage secretaries, and the NOI with corruption, criminality, and idolatry, Malcolm pushed a dangerous feud toward its deadly conclusion. [Read More…]

The Line –>

In Conversation: Andrej Dubravsky and Sam Trioli

Andrej Dubravsky, Aggressive Slav + Friendly Slav, at LAUNCH F18, NYC by Sam Trioli Andrej Dubravsky speaks to Sam Trioli about his new paintings for his current dual exhibition at LAUNCH F18, Aggressive Slav and  Friendly Slav. Created from his countryside home in rural Slovakia, Andrej shares the effects on his work and life with returning to nature. SAM TRIOLI: This exhibition highlights a new series of paintings for you. How did the Aggressive Slav/Friendly Slav series first begin? ANDREJ DUBRAVSKY: I don't even know if it’s a particular “series” with an exact start and end, to be … [Read More...]

For Our Dyings: Shirin Neshat’s Land of Dreams and The Colony

by Lisa Zeiger “All I can see is the frame.” --Robert Mitchum in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past The art of Shirin Neshat is the pure, clear pool at the heart of a Persian garden. On its surface play fountains of poetry and music, films and visions. In its depths reside all the sequestered emotion, alluring ritual, and ambivalent traditions of the artist’s native Iran. Long gone from another country, Neshat exalts its beauty in the photographs, video installations and feature films she has been making since the early 1990s. To paraphrase Henry James, she is someone on whom nothing is … [Read More...]

The Line

Photography as Bildungsroman: On Jason Eskenazi’s Wonderland, Black Garden and Departure Lounge

by Allyn Gaestel

I lent Jason Eskenazi’s photo books to a friend of mine to look at after dinner. I had been carrying them in my suitcase for eight months. It was the night before a residency where I planned to finally cohere the fragments of this essay into a text. In the morning my friend told me the books were intense to look at right before bed. She quoted the introductory poem to Departure Lounge:

If you cannot bear your grief
And you dare not dare to die
Then make of grief a song
And bear it high.

[Read More…]

Envisioning a Gilded Vengence in Mark Steven Greenfield’s Black Madonna

at William Turner Gallery, Los Angeles (through 28 November)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie

Mark Steven Greenfield’s powerful exhibition of Black Madonna paintings, currently on view at William Turner Gallery, is perfectly timed to coincide with the election of the first woman of color, Kamala Harris, to be our next Vice President; while the exhibition notably follows on the years-long Black Lives Matter protests that in all likelihood lifted Ms. Harris to the second highest office of the land.

As an African American artist who emerged out of the Black Power movement in the late 1960s, Greenfield has had a long arc of making art of consequence, art with something to say, art with teeth. In his latest exhibition, Black Madonna, Greenfield takes dead aim at centuries of racial supremacy by inverting the very narrative of white dominion: exalting Blackness while simultaneously setting aflame, quite literally, the relentless tide of teeming inhumanity that seeks in all-too-horrific ways to subjugate and enslave. [Read More…]

From Trauma to Transcendence in The Naked Mind

at Track 16, Los Angeles (through December 12)
Reviewed by Genie Davis 

Curated by Georganne Deen, the group show at Track 16 Gallery is perhaps the ultimate exhibition for pandemic times. Titled The Naked Mind, the show features the art of eleven artists including Deen, Liz Young, Eve Wood, Cathy Ward, Samantha Harrison, Christine Wertheim, Laurie Steelink, Rhonda Saboff / Parker Pine, and Lara Allen. The exhibition focuses on the uncovering and understanding of trauma on the human mind. Running through December 12 and available for both virtual viewing on the gallery website and in-person at the Bendix Building, the show also serves as a dazzling tour de force for the artists.

[Read More…]

Excellence and Thrilling Abundance in LA Louver’s 45 at 45

at LA Louver, Los Angeles (through 16 January 2021)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

45 at 45, currently on view at LA Louver in Venice, is an exhibition of epic proportions, not only because of the sheer number of artists included but also because it signifies and celebrates four-and-a-half decades of LA Louver’s luminous and expansive vision. Big group shows can be difficult to navigate, especially if they constitute more of a retrospective-like approach; yet when done right, the plethora of works included create what feels like a variety of intimate conversations. Such is the case here where artworks by represented gallery artists like Matt Wedel and Rebecca Campbell create insightful and sometimes deeply moving interchanges with works by artists the gallery does not necessarily represent but have shown in the past. The breadth of this exhibition is truly impressive, as is the range of work represented, some of which are representational and some of which are not. Either way, the thru line here appears, simply, to be excellence.  [Read More…]

Stalking Memory to Spy Out One’s Self in Patrick Modiano’s Invisible Ink

Reviewed by John Biscello

Invisible Ink
by Patrick Modiano
Yale University Press, 176 pp., $24.00

If there is a suitcase, forged documentation, café-life and tons of mileage accumulated tramping the streets of Paris, it’s a pretty safe guess that you are inside a Patrick Modiano novel. The French writer, whose Nobel Prize in 2014 launched him into a new stratosphere of exposure, acclaim and readership (with many of his works now having been translated into English), has been haunting a familiar path, a twilit phantom territory all his own, for the past fifty-plus years. [Read More…]