Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Relic as Horrific Remembrance in the Monument to Joe Louis

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by Max King Cap

“My father was a little headstrong, my mother was a little armstrong. The Headstrongs married the Armstrongs, and that’s why darkies were born.” — Rufus T. Firefly, Duck Soup, 1933

He had done it before. One can readily find the photographs of his handiwork; two human torsos, headless, the legs amputated just below the knee. Young and fit but unidentifiable, their fingertips rasped smooth. When first put on display, tens of thousands saw this pair of dismembered bodies and admiringly walked right by them. [Read more…]

Another Week in the Death of America

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Samantha Fields, American Dreaming
at LSH CoLab, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Eve Wood

The first verse of the Mamas and the Papas seminal 1960’s anthem California Dreamin’ begins with “all the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey,” at once establishing an atmosphere devoid of color, hope and youthful abandon, and certainly not a description one would associate with the sunny, carefree lifestyle that has become emblematic of the quintessential California experience. Ultimately the song is a lament, a yearning to return to a brighter, more hopeful landscape, if only in the songwriter’s mind. Samantha Fields solo exhibition, American Dreaming, could be said to expand on this longing, albeit taking a darker more ominous approach. [Read more…]

A Gathering Of Ruins, And Simmering Consciousness, In Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus

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in Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London
by Zadie Smith

Kara Walker: Hyundai Commission
edited by Clara Kim
Tate Publishing, 144pp., $24.95
New York Review of Books

Two women are bound at the waist, tied to each other. One is a slim, white woman, in antebellum underskirt and corset. A Scarlett O’Hara type. She is having the air squeezed out of her by a larger, bare-breasted black woman, who wears a kerchief around her head. To an American audience, I imagine, this black woman could easily read as “Mammy.” To a viewer from the wider diaspora—to a black Briton, say—she is perhaps less likely to invoke the stereotypical placidity of “Mammy,” hewing closer to the fury of her mythological opposite, the legendary Nanny of the Maroons: escaped slave, leader of peoples. Her hand is held up forcefully, indicating the direction in which she is determined to go, but the rope between her and the white woman is pulled taut: both struggle under its constriction. And in this drama of opposing forces, through this brutal dialectic, aspects of each woman’s anatomy are grotesquely eroticized by her adversary: buttocks for the black woman, breasts for her white counterpart. Which raises the question: Who tied this constricting rope? A third party? And, if the struggle continues, will the white woman eventually be extinguished? Will the black woman be free? That is, if the white woman is on the verge of extinguishment at all. Maybe she’s on the verge of something else entirely: definition. That’s why we cinch waists, isn’t it? To achieve definition? [Read more…]

Transformative Expressions From The Ever-Transforming Jack Oliver

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Jack Oliver
@jackoliverx

Today, Jack Oliver is a Care Worker. During the current global pandemic, he offers his precious time to the elderly and those in need of assistance. But prior to the current health crisis, Jack Oliver invested over a decade of his life and passion to the Artistry of Make-up. His transformative, creative expression transgresses many fields of industry; art, drag, beauty, fashion and theatrical fantasy. “My work” he tells us, “ranges from rather simple constructs to more mind provoking images. I enjoy creating self-image as a way of expressing emotions of the Self. I previously titled a lot of my work SELFart.” [Read more…]

Romare Bearden And The Collapsing Of Worlds Into Fabulant Forms

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Reviewed by Sarah Elizabeth Lewis
.
The Romare Bearden Reader
edited by Robert G. O’Meally
Duke University Press, 413 pp., $29.95 (paper)
New York Review of Books

Every year, Congressman John Lewis has made a pilgrimage to honor the anniversary of the campaign to march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol in Montgomery. The journey began on Sunday, March 7, 1965, when Lewis, then twenty-five years old and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was severely beaten and nearly killed by state troopers as he led six hundred peaceful protesters in a march that started at a church in Selma and was forcibly intercepted by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named after the Confederate general and grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

[Read more…]

John Bradford: By Land And By Sea

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at Anna Zorina Gallery, NYC (through 25 April — view this exhibition online at annazorinagallery.com)
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

“For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”
— Herman Melville, from Moby Dick

The latest John Bradford exhibit at Zorina Gallery shows works in a style, history painting, that’s been out of favor with the art establishment for many decades. All the paintings’ subjects come from the 19th century or before, and relate to momentous events relating to the USA and the Americas: arrival of the Mayflower, of Columbus, Washington’s revolution, Lincoln’s wars. Bradford’s technique, thick impasto, has also fallen out of favor and is found more often in street market art: think Paris-view at sunset.  What is a blueblood painter, if ever there was one — he is a descendant of William Bradford, the English Puritan separatist who escaped persecution from King James I on the Mayflower and became the longstanding Governor of the Plymouth Colony, known thereafter as the Pilgrim Fathers — doing producing low art? [Read more…]

Moving Room To Room, Tentacle By Tentacle: Michael McCall’s Long Strange Trip

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By Peter Frank
Forward to:
Captain Squid & The Tentacle Room:
Adventures in Life, Love & Art
by Michael McCall
Fabrik Press, 260 pp., $35.00

Michael McCall came of age at a time when it was cool to live your art. That time may be coming back (no little thanks to McCall’s example, I’ll wager), but between coming of age and compiling this account, McCall’s lifestyle came to be regarded as more vagabond than renegade, more hippie than hip, more irresponsible than irreverent. Plenty of wannabe art-lifers gave the art-life a bad name. McCall – always an art maker, not just a goof, and always answering to aesthetic and ethical standards – wasn’t one of them, and he was brave enough to stick to his guns, keep on living his life as if it were an artwork, and keep on being committed to that life/art.  [Read more…]

Gerhard Richter’s Solemn Yet Miraculous Retrospective, Painting After All

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at Met Breuer, NYC (through 5 July 2020)
Reviewed by Peter Schjeldahl
The New Yorker

“Birkenau.” The dread name—of the main death facilities at Auschwitz—entitles four large abstract paintings and four full-sized digital reproductions of them in the last gallery of Painting After All, a peculiarly solemn Gerhard Richter retrospective at the Met Breuer. The works are based on four clandestine photographs that were smuggled out of the concentration camp in 1944. Two, taken from the shadowed exit of a gas chamber, show naked corpses strewn on the ground and smoke rising from bodies afire in a trench beyond them. Men in uniform stand at ease—two appear to chat—amid the shambles. Richter first saw the images in the fifties. He encountered them again in 2008 and kept the worst of them hanging in his studio in Cologne. In 2014, he projected them onto canvas and traced them. As he worked, they became illegible. The finished paintings exemplify Richter’s frequent style of densely layered, dragged pigments. They are unusually harsh in aspect, with clashing red and green, sickly whites, and grim blacks. But you’d hardly guess, by looking, their awful inspiration. [Read more…]

The Beguiling Desolations Of Trisha Donnelly

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at Matthew Marks Gallery, NYC
by Brian Block

In this era of pervasive promotional storytelling, Trisha Donnelly consistently chooses to go the other way and expunge. Her works carry no titles, her exhibitions no names, and her press releases only a few facts. This calculated act of liberalizing the viewing field works to intensify the abstracting power of the white cube toward the discrete objects and artist’s interventions on view. Indeed, what remains most compelling about Donnelly’s practice is her expert crafting of distinctive analogue mise en scène that finely reframes the show’s perceptual field. Far more gripping than any particular artwork of hers, it is this clandestine manipulation of the gallery space itself — as if it were a fabric in her medium — that she wields to captivating and occasionally frustrating effect. [Read more…]

In This Moment Of Collective Anxiety, New Images of Man Ponders The Human Condition, And Further Disquiets The Sense

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at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Genie Davis

Curated by Alison M. Gingeras, the expansive exhibition New Images of Man is a both a revisiting of and expansion on a 1959 exhibition of the same name at MoMA in New York City. A tribute and comment on the human condition, the original exhibition, curated by Peter Selz, focused on new figurative work following WWII. As such, it included a wide range of artists, from de Kooning to Giacometti, working in both sculptural forms and painted images. The Blum & Poe iteration offers its own view of figurative human depiction in a vast variety of genres, from pigment prints to acrylic and oil-on-canvas, fabric, paper-mache and other mixed media, as well as sculptural figures in bronze, plaster, and even created from a mixture of fabric and human hair. [Read more…]

Dust My Broom: Southern Vernacular From The Permanent Collection

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at California African American Museum, Los Angeles (through 15 March)
Reviewed by Seren Sensei

Folk art and folk artists tend to be an underserved discipline in the contemporary American art world. We gravitate towards fine artists with prestigious arts degrees over the more commonplace culture of folk art, and when we do discuss the importance of art born out of folk tradition, as in most artistic disciplines, we tend to highlight white artists. From the music of Bob Dylan to the exultation of Grandma Moses, when we talk about folk art as something born out of Americana or something inherently American, we very rarely talk about Black artists. Yet folk art is historically important as an archive of culture encapsulated within creative expression, and creation by Black American artists is nestled at the center of Americana. [Read more…]

Tales Of The Unconfined: Alison Saar’s Defiant Women Warriors

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Syncopation, at L.A Louver, Los Angeles (through 29 February)
Chaos in the Kitchen, at Frieze Los Angeles
Reviewed by Lita Barrie

Alison Saar’s work combines the raw power of tribal art with the postmodern sophistication of complex cultural subtexts. Her work is made in a near devotional way, which infuses a rare emotional intensity into her new narratives on upturning gender and racial hierarchies. Few artists can use visual materials as skillfully to create such powerful political statements. Fewer still can combine aesthetic technique and conceptual acuity in artwork that is so heartfelt it resonates with the viewer viscerally, a sensation akin to listening to a Nina Simone song. This is a rare feat only an exceptional artist can accomplish, which makes her concurrent exhibitions, Syncopation, at L.A Louver, and Chaos in the Kitchen, at Frieze Los Angeles, stand out even amidst the art fair frenzy. [Read more…]

The Shaman’s Bride Lifts Her Veil In Lezley Saar’s A Conjuring of Conjurors

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at Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles (through 22 February)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

 

Born under a bad sign

Been down since I began to crawl

If it wasn’t for bad luck

You know, I wouldn’t have no luck at all


In the magical exhibition, A Conjuring of Conjurors, artist Lezley Saar herself becomes the master shaman as she explores the role of mysticism, spiritualism and religious rituals in the human quest for safety, survival and certainty. Known for her earlier works that examine those who dwell in the interstices of identity, Saar here creates fantastically invented narratives of soothsayers and seers who use amulets, bones and tinctures to fix what is broken, find what is lost, or cure all manner of maladies.  [Read more…]

The Swirling Claustrophobias Of Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet

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at Met Fifth Avenue, NYC
Reviewed by Lisa Zeiger

“…the deepest and earliest secret of all: that just as we watch other life, other life watches us.”
—Toni Morrison, “Memory, Creation, and Fiction”

The superlative Félix Vallotton exhibition recently at the Metropolitan Museum, titled Painter of Disquiet, was an enthralling view of the tension between Vallotton’s early anarchist political engagement and the abiding, rather staid (though always darkling) character of his oeuvre over his 44-year career. [Read more…]

Triangulations Of The Black Cat: Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe Black Like Me

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at Roberts Projects, Los Angeles (through March 7)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Ghanian artist Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe’s gorgeously rendered oil paintings, on view at Roberts Projects, are stunning both in terms of their visual content and the literal application of the paint. One can make obvious allusions to artists like Kehinde Wiley or Wangechi Mutu, but these would only represent fleeting similarities as Quaicoe’s vision is very much his own. These paintings could be described as straightforward portraits, yet that would not account for their profound luminescence and the verifiable presence of Quaicoe in seemingly every brushstroke. [Read more…]

In Quiet Chorus: Mary Frank’s ¿Or Was It Like This? and Charles Burchfield’s Solitude

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co-exhibiting at DC Moore Gallery, NYC (through February 8)
Reviewed by John Haber

Mary Frank is not just a visionary. Neither was Charles Burchfield, back when Modernism was just bringing art back to earth. Yet showing them together brings alive their most unearthly twentieth-century visions. Frank has always had an eye on planet earth. She studied with Max Beckmann, the artist who refused to look away from Germany in the 1930s, even after Beckmann’s exile in America. And then she studied life drawing in New York with Hans Hoffman, the teacher of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. She has stood out among artists less than half her age in a 2009 group show of Natural Histories. She returns now to painting after a decade of photography with an eye to nature – her surroundings at home in the Catskills. That return, though, marks even her most naturalistic subjects as not altogether of this world. [Read more…]

Zilia Sánchez’s Sinuous, Overtly Sensual Forms

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at Galerie Lelong & Co (ended) and El Museo Del Barrio, NYC (through March 22)
Reviewed by Pheobe Hoban

Cuban-born Zilia Sánchez, 93, has always been ahead of the curve, even if she has remained for the most part unknown outside her adopted country, Puerto Rico. Her elegant, shaped canvases, many of them takeoffs on the female form, hold their own with the best of Minimalism, as does the work of that other long-forgotten and now much-acclaimed Cuban-born artist, Carmen Herrera. But unlike Herrera’s hard-edged geometric Minimalism, Sánchez creates overtly sensual sculptural paintings, with undulating curves and rounded protuberances that resemble breasts and genitalia, while simultaneously evoking spare, pneumatic topographies. [Read more…]

A Man’s History As Passing Shadow In John Sonsini’s Cowboy Stories & New Paintings

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at Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles (through February 22)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

The iconic and often brutal mythology that informs images of the American West is unreliable at best, specifically as it relates to the larger-than-life stereotype of the cowboy. Forged in the fires of patriarchy, the familiarity of the gritty, rugged lone cowboy making his way on horseback across the prairie, persists to this day. He exemplifies the myth that has become synonymous with our image of American culture, yet this image is simplistic and problematic in that it privileges one culture over another and leaves no room for shared human experience. [Read more…]