Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Recalibrating Awareness in Rebecca Campbell Infinite Density, Infinite Light

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At LA Louver (through 2 July 2021)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

How does an artist adequately describe in paint the concept of love? One could say that even the idea of attempting to capture this ineffable human attribute seems schmaltzy and somehow embarrassing, yet most of us have at some point or other lived and died by the sword of passion- jilted, exalted, or both simultaneously. Each person’s personal history is also the history of humanity in that within each life’s unique and spectacular set of personal associations, images, affinities and biases, there also exists a common thread of communion, of universal likeness and of love. We all want it. We all have lost it. We all somehow find it again, and if we don’t, our lives speak endlessly to the pain of this loss. [Read more…]

Aidan Salakhova’s The Dust Became The Breath

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at Gazelli Art House, London (through 6 June 2021)
Reviewed by Niccy Hallifax

Walking into a London gallery again after a year of restrictions and lock-downs was strange but uplifting for the soul. More uplifting still was seeing an artist I have long admired, ever since I saw her work at the Saatchi gallery many years before. The Dust Became The Breath, at Gazelli Art House, is a solo exhibition for Aidan Salakhova, the prominent Azeri artist. [Read more…]

Ferrari Sheppard: Positions of Power

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At UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles (through 15 May 2021)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

The history of portrait painting is long and star-studded from the stunningly humanist portraits of Alice Neel to the politically charged monolithic works of Kehinde Wiley; artists have, for centuries, endeavored to capture the essence of their times and the people who mattered through the lens of figuration. Ferrari Sheppard, like so many artists before him, has created a visual mapping of his life that includes not only friends and family but also artists like Tupac Shakur, Jimi Hendrix and other artists in the Black community whose works have affected him. These paintings suggest less a topography of place and time and more a personal lexicon of strength, love and friendship in the face of injustice. [Read more…]

Simphiwe Ndzube’s Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon

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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…]

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

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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…]

In Conversation: Andrej Dubravsky and Sam Trioli

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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 honest. I just keep working all year long on various subjects in parallel, no matter if there’s any show coming up next month or in the next six months. Sometime before the works had to be shipped to New York City, I lined up many paintings outside in my garden and I picked from all of these paintings and sort of curated them in a way that would make a sense. This show makes it my first solo show in New York City.  [Read more…]

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

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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 lost, least of all the lessons and losses of her own life, in particular the chasm of her exile from Iran. [Read more…]

Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle

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at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC (ended 1 November 2020)
Reviewed by Sanford Schwartz

Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle
an exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art,
November 20, 2020–February 7, 2021;
the Seattle Art Museum,
February 25–May 23, 2021;
and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.,
June 26–September 19, 2021.
Catalog of the exhibition edited
by Elizabeth Hutton Turner and Austen Barron Bailly.
Peabody Essex Museum/University of Washington Press,
188 pp., $45.00
NYRB

As we were waiting on line at the Metropolitan Museum to get into the exhibition Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle, I told my friend that one reason why Lawrence, though long an esteemed name in American art, has a rather modest presence in our museums may derive from his not having made oil paintings. In a long career that stretched from the late 1930s, when he was barely in his twenties, through the late 1990s—he died in 2000, at eighty-two—he primarily used gouache (which is sometimes referred to as poster paint) or tempera. [Read more…]

Lettering The Yet Known: The Arcane Calligraphs of David D. Oquendo

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by Lisa Zeiger

“I dream of a new alphabet.”  — Marcel Broodthaers, 1974

When considering the merit of a work of art, should the biography of its maker matter? Should we train the tentacles of personality upon the armature of art? When I first saw images of David D. Oquendo’s calligraphic paintings on Instagram (@monkpuppy) I had no ideas about the age, identity or ethnicity of their maker. The paintings were all sign rather than signature, solemn instances of regal yet anonymous beauty, not unlike that of many hieroglyphic writings made in ancient Egypt. Such was the imposing presence of these unfamiliar letters that, while I wondered if they conveyed a meaning, I didn’t care. As I would later learn, a friend of Oquendo’s told him, “You have not created a language, but language.” [Read more…]

Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art

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at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC (through 31 January 2021)
Reviewed by Anna Shapiro
NYRB

The Whitney’s show, Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, is a study in revisionism, recasting the standard story so that those formerly disregarded and excluded from the canon of modern American art are instead given a place in it. Exhibitions in recent years have been doing that rewriting in accord with values newly freed from stigma, discovering or rediscovering artists who are female or non-European-American, or who simply didn’t fit the strictures of formalist Modernism. The artists in this show, however, were truly avant-garde in their social values, championing the underdogs of history when it was deeply unfashionable to do so. [Read more…]

Salman Toor’s How Will I Know and Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art

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at Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC: Salmon Toor: How Will I Know (through 4 April 2021) and Vida Americana: Mexican Artists Remake American Art, 1925-1945 (through 31 January 2021)
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

In two rooms on the ground floor of the Whitney Museum, a scattering of miniature brown men frolic around the walls, choreographed by Pakistani artist Salman Toor. Some dance, some light a cigarette, others whisper. Many do nothing but offer themselves to our gaze or that of their cellphone. Salman Toor, who admits to admiring Watteau and Gainsborough, has adorned his tableaux with a whole festival of baroque imagery: undulant mustaches and hair styles, collars that almost look like lace, a loose neckerchief, a large hat largely out of place. [Read more…]

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

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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

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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…]

Lockdown Be Damned! Raffaello 1520–1483: An Exhibition in Rome

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at the Scuderie del Quirinale
Reviewed by Ingrid D. Rowland

Raffaello 1520–1483
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Marzia Faietti and Matteo Lafranconi, with Francesco P. Di Teodoro and Vincenzo Farinella Skira
543 pp., €46.00 (paper) (in Italian; an English translation will be published in October 2020)
The New York Review of Books

Like the artist himself, the long-anticipated Raphael exhibition that opened in Rome on March 5, 2020, was struck down by infectious disease. Raphael succumbed to a sudden fever on April 6, 1520, his thirty-seventh birthday. The exhibition that marked the five hundredth anniversary of his death lasted only four days. On March 9, the Italian government issued a decree prohibiting “every form of gathering in public places” to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, and every public institution in Italy shut its doors. Raphael’s birthday came and went with his legacy under lockdown. [Read more…]

Palo Alto Sees the Thelonious Monk Quartet at its “Final Creative High”

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Reviewed by Marty Sartini Garner

Palo Alto
on Impulse!
Pitchfork

Thelonious Monk once said: “Weird means something you never heard before. It’s weird until people get around to it. Then it ceases to be weird.” By the time Monk and his quartet strode into the auditorium at Palo Alto High School on October 27, 1968, people hadn’t just gotten around to his oblong, minimalist take on jazz—they’d left it behind. After decades of toiling in New York’s clubs to little outside recognition, Monk had briefly tasted superstardom, culminating in a 1964 Time magazine cover. Less than half a decade later, he’d slipped to No. 6 on DownBeat’s International Critics Poll ranking jazz’s best pianists, and writers routinely dismissed his playing as stale and uninspired. Still, he was Thelonious Sphere Monk: If he was no longer weird, and no longer a superstar, he was still a legend. A legend who couldn’t afford to miss a $500 payday at a high school. [Read more…]

Music for a Revolution: A Word with Jazz Great Archie Shepp

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Interview by Accra Shepp
NYRB

My father, the saxophonist Archie Shepp, has recorded more than 110 albums since 1962, performed all over the world, and received numerous honors, including the 2016 Jazz Master’s Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. In the 1960s, he helped define “free jazz,” a new idiom in which the details of melody, harmony, and rhythm are all improvised to create a grand conversation: voices rise and fall, sometimes echoing one another, sometimes dissonant and discordant. In the 1970s and 1980s he wove the blues into his music, extending our understanding of this tradition. His cultural influence reaches far beyond the realm of jazz, touching artists as diverse as Ntozake Shange and Chuck D. [Read more…]

An Interview with Erin Currier: Artist, Writer & Activist

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by Lisette García and Barrett Martin

excerpted from Ponderosas: Conversations with Extraordinary, Ordinary Women 
by Lisette García, Ph. D
available November 20th
Sunyata Books

“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And then you have to do it all the time.”
–Angela Davis

Barrett: I first met Erin Currier and her late partner, Anthony Hassett, in 1996 when I was visiting mutual friends in Taos, New Mexico. A group of us went on a hike together, in the magnificent Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the high desert of northern New Mexico. We all had much in common—a great love for music, art, and an obscure martial art that we were studying with the same master in Taos. Even though we were all relatively young, we seemed to understand each other in a much deeper way than most new friends. [Read more…]

Stories of Creation, Stories For Our Time in Toyin Ojih Odutola’s A Countervailing Theory

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at The Barbican, London (through 24 Jan 2021)
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones

Despite what intuition tells us, history is constantly changing. The revision of the past happens all around us and at all times, sometimes perniciously and sometimes for enlightened reasons. For her first exhibition in the UK, Toyin Ojih Odutola has done a brave and remarkable thing. She has created an entire origin-myth that not only revisits ancient African history but invents it. Through 40 new works specially commissioned for the Curve Gallery at London’s Barbican Centre, Ojih Odutola has hand-drawn a fictional prehistoric civilisation dominated by female rulers and served by males labourers. [Read more…]