Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Braithwaite

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at the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles (through September 1)
Reviewed by Nancy K. Turner

If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can transform one million realities
–Maya Angelou

Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Braithwaite, is an intimate in scale, personal in scope, potent exhibit. It documents through photographs, ephemera, and fashion, Kwame Braithwaite, his wife Sikolo, his brother Elombe Brath and their circle of musician and artist friends as they built a movement based on the philosophy of cultural empowerment, dignity and affirmation originally espoused by Marcus Garvey. [Read more…]

Awakening the Spirit in Motion: Christina Quarles

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But I Woke Jus’ Tha Same, at Regen Projects, Los Angeles (through May 9)
Reviewed by Genie Davis

Christina Quarles’ dazzling But I Woke Jus’ Tha Same transports viewers into a lush and seductive world, a world that takes viewers on a brilliantly motion filled ride with contorted figures that veer between narrative and abstract. We struggle to understand the image, yet we intuitively know the seemingly impossible, terrible and wonderful positions relationships thrust us into. [Read more…]

Alice Neel: Freedom

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at David Zwirner, NYC (through April 13)
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

In a sense, Alice Neel’s portraits are always naked, at least psychologically; Neel brilliantly stripped her subjects down to their bare essence. As Joseph Solman, a fellow artist and old friend from her Socialist Realist days, once put it, “She turned a person inside out. If she did a portrait of you, you wouldn’t recognize yourself, what she would do with you. She would almost disembowel you, so I was afraid to pose for her. I never did pose for her.” Or as another old friend, artist Benny Andrews said, “I always said she was looking at you like an X-ray…” [Read more…]

Van Gogh and Britain

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at Tate Britain, London (through 11 August)
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones

Judging from the crowds and the advanced ticket sales, the magnetism of Vincent Van Gogh shows no sign of diminishing. It’s hardly a surprise. We come to empathise with the optimism of a man whose dreams of an art colony in the south would come to nothing. We respond to him because he kept on painting, his canvases getting brighter and brighter as his days got darker. [Read more…]

Kim Dingle: I Will Be Your Server (The Lost Supper Paintings)

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at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects (through May 4)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie 

Priss has captivated the artworld with her mischievous antics since she first appeared in Kim Dingle’s artwork thirty years ago, dressed in her Sunday Best and ready for battle. Dingle’s imaginary character split and replicated, like a Tribble on StarTrek, into a bi-racial pair, Fatty and Fudge, and then into a wild pack, the “Priss Girls.” These ornery tots run amok: causing mayhem, having fights, raging temper tantrums, and destroying things. Priss and her gang of rambunctious pre-pubescent girls inhabit a world with no adults, no men, and no rules.  [Read more…]

Hew Locke: Here’s the Thing

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at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham UK (through 2 June)
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones

Hew Locke makes art to discover things. This is the sense you get. It explains why there is so much texture and variety throughout his work. For the viewer, being with an artist who seems to be in the act of turning over a dozen stones at once, it is a rewarding experience.

Open-eyed, critical but not dogmatic, Locke comes across as an artist who is happy to reveal his anxieties. Much of his work is a personal response to the history of European colonialism and especially to Guyana, a country with a long history of colonial subjugation. First from Dutch imperialism and then under the British Empire in the late 18th century, Guyana finally gained its independence in 1966. [Read more…]

Andy Warhol: By Hand

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at The New York Academy of Art
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

We are so accustomed to seeing Warhol as a seminal game changer that it’s easy to forget that like most artists, he started out in a much more conventional vein, as evidenced by his junvenilia and other early works on display at the Whitney’s wonderful major Warhol survey. The New York Academy of Art’s recent exhibit, Andy Warhol: By Hand, running somewhat concurrently with the Whitney retrospective, offered a rare opportunity to sample Warhol’s seductive skills as a draughtsman and illustrator—apart from such well-known commercial work as his I. Miller shoe ads and album covers. [Read more…]

Annie Leibovitz, The Early Years: 1970-1983

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Archive Project No. 1
at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (through April 14)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
           –-Lyrics: Stephen Sills/Buffalo Springfield
              “For What It’s Worth”

Annie Leibovitz has combed through her enormous archive of negatives to personally curate and print these 4,000 (yes, that’s right) mostly black and white photographs for this poignant and profound exhibition at Hauser & Wirth. The exhibition chronicles the turbulent late sixties, the “me decade” of the seventies and the beginning of the prosperous early eighties. Printed in various sizes with some as small as 3”x5” straight from a contact sheet to later work that is printed much larger with an irregular black border (that echoed both Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon, two photographers that she admired), they are push pinned to a hemp wall in a precise grid in a sometimes curiously casual looking installation meant to evoke a kind of walk-in scrap book. These pictures are truly an amazing visual history of the way we were, while clearly indicating where we were headed. [Read more…]

Shining Light On Luchita Hurtado’s Dark Years

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at Hauser & Wirth, 69th Street, NYC (through April 9)
Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell

Hauser & Wirth’s exhibit, Dark Years, features three gallery floors of work from painter Luchita Hurtado. Venezuelan-born and Los Angeles-based, Hurtado is 98 years old and beyond deserving of the show and recognition. This is a real celebration story of a life-long artist finally getting her due, with many solo shows in the works for the coming years, including her upcoming exhibit at the Serpentine Gallery in London. [Read more…]

The Variant Hands Of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye And Wilmer Wilson IV

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Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, In Lieu of A Louder Love 
at Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC
&
Wilmer Wilson IV, Slim…you don’t got the juice
at Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC (through March 16)

Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye follows in the steps of late 19th century European masters, and makes no mystery about it. They favored the wet-on-wet application of paint, more poetically known as Alla Prima, that demands quick work in one sitting, or one day. When Dutch painters first invented it in the 1600s, the impossibility to render small, time consuming details such as luxurious fabrics and jewels, veered the focus to the sitter’s interior life. Instead of stressing status (rich, powerful, respectable), the protestant artists questioned what it means to be a human being. Manet reintroduced it to his followers in the late 19th century by using the technique to great effect. His work is also instantly recognizable for its deep, unctuous blacks. [Read more…]

Norman Rockwell v. The State Of Public Art

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Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt, & The Four Freedoms
A traveling exhibition, with Reimagining the Four Freedoms
currently at The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum, Washington, DC (through April 29)
Reviewed by Kevin Baker
Courtesy of Harper’s Magazine

The fight over which of our public monuments should remain where they are is as complicated as the American past they commemorate. For all the fighting over who and what we should not honor from our past, there is one vital element that has been missing from the argument: that is, what we should honor and aspire to now. [Read more…]

Tracey Emin: A Fortnight of Tears

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at White Cube Bermondsey, London (through 7 April)
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones

Some artists use their art to put up a facade for the world; others seek to bear themselves whole. The art of Tracey Emin – who has a remarkable exhibition of new work at the White Cube Bermondsey, London – undoubtedly falls into the latter category. The title, A Fortnight of Tears, has apparently been rolling around in the artist’s head for fifteen years, distilled by the recent death of her mother, but first kindled by a relationship breakup in her thirties when, she explains, “I was crying for the loss of my future. Then when my mum died, I was crying for my past.” [Read more…]

Paa Joe: Gates of No Return

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at the American Folk Art Museum, NYC
Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell

Joseph Tetteh Ashong, known as Paa Joe, is a wood carver famous for his figurative “fantasy coffins” hand-carved in Accra, Ghana. In the 1950s, these coffins, also known in Ghana as abeduu adekai, translated to mean “receptacles of proverbs,” became popular. Kane Kwei first popularized these coffins and Paa Joe apprenticed under Kwei, his mother’s cousin. As some of the first and most famous coffin makers, they are known for making famous these coffins for Ga funerals in southern Ghana. The reference to proverbs makes sense, as artists would visually translate an important proverb or aspect of the dead’s life into a carved physical vessel that carries them into a symbolic journey to the afterlife. [Read more…]

Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving

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at the Brooklyn Museum (through May 12)
Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell

At the start of the month, the Brooklyn Museum opened the exhibit Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving. It is a massive show, packed with rooms of ephemera, clothing, artifacts, and of course art, based upon both last year’s Frida Kahlo: Making Herself Up at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the original exhibit curated by Circe Henestrosa at the Frida Kahlo Museum in 2012.

Aptly titled, the exhibit is deceiving in its appearance and scope. All three of the past exhibits advertise that they showcase Kahlo’s famed clothing and personal possessions that had been locked away behind closed doors for fifty years, following her death in 1954 until 2004. All boast of being firsts as well: the first exhibit to showcase the clothing (Frida Kahlo Museum), the first exhibit outside of Mexico to do so (Victoria and Albert), or the first to do so in the U.S. (Brooklyn Museum). However, this show is about so much more than Kahlo’s clothing or appearance… [Read more…]

Suzanne Jackson: holding on to a sound

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at O-Town House, Los Angeles (through March 23)
Reviewed by Genie Davis

There are so many different elements that make Suzanne Jackson’s exhibition, holding on to a sound, aptly named. Regardless of the medium, her work has a kind of musical component to it, a lyricism that seems to radiate from the wall where they are hung, like a kind of cosmic tuning fork was at work. They are also hauntingly lovely images, and if you study them long enough, they evoke ideas of memory and mortality. There is a soft of netherworld quality to these works, vividly alive, yet floating in an ether between a dream-like state and waking, and between this world and the next. [Read more…]

Jeff Koons At The Ashmolean

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Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford UK (through 9 Jun 2019)
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones

To say that a work of art holds up a mirror to the world is to recognise an attempt by the artist at portraying the truth. “See what the world really looks like” is the message. Art like this – that seeks to show us the reality of things – does so by parodying, exposing, lampooning and taunting. It invites you to peer into the fracture it has opened up, and when you do so, it’s like standing beside the artist and peering in together. With Jeff Koons it’s always a bit trickier. You sense that he too is holding up a mirror, but what kind of fracture is he asking you to peer into? One that, when the light reaches the depths, you see Koons’ own smile gleaming back at you? [Read more…]

James Siena: Painting

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at Pace Gallery, NYC (through February 9)
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

James Siena has had what might be called a linear career. Whether painted, drawn or sculpted, his work is purely line-based. Yet his art always avoids the shortest distance between two points; i.e. the simple straight line. Instead he has continued to evolve work based on what he calls “a visual algorithm,” creating recursive labyrinthine canvases; intense but relatively small-scale repetitive patterns painted in enamel on aluminum. [Read more…]

Joan Semmel: A Necessary Elaboration

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at Alexander Gray Associates, NYC (through February 16)
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

Joan Semmel is the master of the anti-Selfie. For decades she has turned the camera on herself, using candid photographs as references for her large-scale nudes, which are both sumptuous and unsettlingly intimate. For an age obsessed with instant, miniature self-branding imagery, pervasively produced by iPhones and through Instagram, her large, flawed, vulnerable figures open a nearly forgotten door onto the pure pleasure of painted flesh. [Read more…]

Ed Moses: Through the Looking Glass

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at William Turner Gallery, Santa Monica (through March 30)
Reviewed by Genie Davis

To say that the opening of Ed Moses Through the Looking Glass, was crowded with fans and art lovers is an understatement. Moses is an LA icon of art, and the collection of his recent works on display here underscore the reasons for that honorific. That he continues to draw and fascinate viewers is unsurprising; his works are a magnet, deeply attractive, alive and engaging. [Read more…]

Paige Jiyoung Moon’s Days of Our Lives

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at Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell

Paige Jiyoung Moon’s solo exhibit, Days of Our Lives, at Steve Turner, Los Angeles, is utterly immersive and compelling. Through minute details both in size (with most paintings averaging just 12 inches in size) and in presenting the everyday, Moon highlights the mundane aspects of life, elevating the ephemeral and making the fleeting more permanent and profound.   [Read more…]