1 – Black Refractions Highlights From The Studio Museum In Harlem, 2019

An authoritative guide to one of the world’s most important collections of African-American art, with works by artists from Romare Bearden to Kehinde Wiley. The artists featured in Black Refractions, including Kerry James Marshall, Faith Ringgold, Nari Ward, Norman Lewis, Wangechi Mutu, and Lorna Simpson, are drawn from the renowned collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Through exhibitions, public programs, artist residencies, and bold acquisitions, this pioneering institution has served as a nexus for artists of African descent locally, nationally, and internationally since its founding in 1968. Rather than aim to construct a single history of “black art,” Black Refractions emphasizes a plurality of narratives and approaches, traced through 125 works in all media from the 1930s to the present.

An essay by Connie Choi and entries by Eliza A. Butler, Akili Tommasino, Taylor Aldridge, Larry Ossei Mensah, Daniela Fifi, and other luminaries contextualize the works and provide detailed commentary. A dialogue between Thelma Golden, Connie Choi, and Kellie Jones draws out themes and challenges in collecting and exhibiting modern and contemporary art by artists of African descent. More than a document of a particular institution’s trailblazing path, or catalytic role in the development of American appreciation for art of the African diaspora, this volume is a compendium of a vital art tradition. Definitely an excellent book to read or reread during this period of Covid-19.

2 – Zanele Muholi, Somnyama Ngonyama

Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness includes 100 self-portraits created by one of the most powerful visual activists of our time. In each of the images, Muholi drafts material props from her immediate environment in an effort to reflect her journey, explore her own image and possibilities as a black woman in today’s global society, and – most important – to speak emphatically in response to contemporary and historical racisms. As she states, ‘I am producing this photographic document to encourage people to be brave enough to occupy spaces, brave enough to create without fear of being vilified … To teach people about our history, to re-think what history is all about, to re-claim it for ourselves, to encourage people to use artistic tools such as cameras as weapons to fight back’.

More than 20 curators, poets and authors offer written contributions that draw out the layers of meaning and possible readings to accompany select images. They include Renée Mussai, Unoma Azuah, Milisuthando Bongela, Ama Josephine Budge, Cheryl Clarke, Fariba Derakhshani, Andiswa Dlamini, Christine Eyene, Tamar Garb, Thelma Golden, Sophie Hackett, M Neelika Jayawardane, Peace Kiguwa, Mapula Lehong, Sindiwe Magona, Napo ‘Popo’ Masheane, Hlonipha Mokoena, Jackie Mondi, Pumelela ‘Push’ Nqelenga, Oluremi C Onabanjo, Ruti Talmor, Christie van Zyl, Carla Williams and Deborah Willis. Powerfully arresting, this collection is as much a manifesto of resistance as it is an autobiographical, artistic statement. Definitely an excellent book to read or reread during this period of Covid-19.

3 – Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful

In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, Kwame Brathwaite used his photography to popularize the political slogan “Black Is Beautiful.” This monograph―the first ever dedicated to Brathwaite’s remarkable career―tells the story of a key, but under-recognized, figure of the second Harlem Renaissance.

Inspired by the writings of activist and black nationalist Marcus Garvey, Brathwaite, along with his older brother, Elombe Brath, founded the African Jazz Arts Society and Studios (AJASS) and the Grandassa Models (1962). AJASS was a collective of artists, playwrights, designers, and dancers; Grandassa Models was a modeling agency for black women, founded to challenge white beauty standards.

From stunning studio portraits of the Grandassa Models to behind-the-scenes images of Harlem’s artistic community, including Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, and Miles Davis, this book offers a long-overdue exploration of Brathwaite’s life and work. Probably a beautiful art book to read or reread during this Covid-19 period and beyond.

4 – Making Africa by the late Okwui Enwezor

“The future belongs to Africa, because it seems to have happened everywhere else already”—Okwui Enwezor

“Making Africa” takes a fresh look at African design. For the first time, we have a book that focuses on creative accomplishments on the continent, without being obsessed with the usual tropes of recycling, humanitarian design or traditional crafts. Instead, “Making Africa” shows a new generation of designers who use their work as a tool for economic, political and social change and therefore also to create a new future for the continent. Their creative output defies all definitions of genres – crossing over classical fields such as furniture design, product design and typography to encompass digital media, art, photography, architecture and film.

A large section of the catalogue is dedicated to documenting work by over 120 protagonists of Africa’s new creative epoch – including Cyrus Kabiru, Cheick Diallo, Mário Macilau, Francis Kéré, David Adjaye, Kunlé Adeyemi, Bodys Isek Kingelez, Robin Rhode, Alaforu Sikoki, Selly Raby Kan and many more. The historical and theoretical background is explored in essays and discussions with Okwui Enwezor, Koyo Kouoh, Edgar Pieterse and Amelie Klein, among others. These are complemented by statements from around 70 other experts from Africa, who met at interviews and think tanks in cities such as Cape Town, Johannesburg, Lagos, Dakar, Nairobi and Cairo.

This is a book about the future of Africa and about a new, more open way of understanding design – which means it is also a book about what design can achieve in the 21st century.

5 –  The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion by Antwaun Sargent

In The New Black Vanguard: The featuring of the Black figure and Black runway and cover models in the media and art has been one marker of increasingly inclusive fashion and art communities. More critically, however, the contemporary visual vocabulary around beauty and the body has been reinfused with new vitality and substance thanks to an increase in powerful images authored by an international community of Black photographers. In a richly illustrated essay, Sargent opens up the conversation around the role of the Black body in the marketplace; the cross-pollination between art, fashion, and culture in constructing an image; and the institutional barriers that have historically been an impediment to Black photographers participating more fully in the fashion (and art) industries. 

Fifteen artist portfolios feature the brightest contemporary fashion photographers, including Tyler Mitchell, the first Black photographer hired to shoot a cover story for American Vogue; Campbell Addy, founder of the Nii Agency and journal; and Nadine Ijewere, whose early series title, The Misrepresentation of Representation, says it all. Alongside a series of conversations between generations, their images and stories chart the history of inclusion, and exclusion, in the creation of the commercial Black image, while simultaneously proposing a brilliantly reenvisioned future. Photographs by Campbell Addy, Arielle Bobb-Willis, Micaiah Carter, Awol Erizku, Nadine Ijewere, Quil Lemons, Namsa Leuba, Renell Medrano, Tyler Mitchell, Jamal Nxedlana, Daniel Obasi, Ruth Ossai, Adrienne Raquel, Dana Scruggs, and Stephen Tayo and including conversations with Shaniqwa Jarvis, Mickalene Thomas, and Deborah Willis are featured. Definitely an excellent book to read or reread during this period of Covid-19.

6 – A new republic by Kehinde Wiley

Filled with reproductions of Kehinde Wiley’s bold, colorful, and monumental work, this book encompasses the artist’s various series of paintings as well as his sculptural work which boldly explore ideas about race, power, and tradition. Celebrated for his classically styled paintings that depict African American men in heroic poses, Kehinde Wiley is among the expanding ranks of prominent black artists such as Sanford Biggers, Yinka Shonibare, Mickalene Thomas, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye who are reworking art history and questioning its depictions of people of color.

Co-published with the Brooklyn Museum of Art for the major touring retrospective, this volume surveys Kehinde Wiley’s career from 2001 to the present. It includes early portraits of the men Wiley observed on Harlem’s streets, and which laid the foundation for his acclaimed reworkings of Old Master paintings by Titian, van Dyke, Manet, and others, in which he replaces historical subjects with young African American men in contemporary attire: puffy jackets, sneakers, hoodies, and baseball caps.

Also included is a generous selection from Wiley’s ongoing World Stage project; several of his enormous Down paintings; striking male portrait busts in bronze; and examples from the artist’s new series of stained glass windows. Accompanying the illustrations are essays that introduce readers to the arc of Wiley’s career, its critical reception, and ongoing evolution. Definitely an excellent book to read or reread during this period of Covid-19.

7 – Contemporary African Art since 1980 by the late Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu

Contemporary African Art Since 1980 is the first major survey of the work of contemporary African artists from diverse situations, locations, and generations who work either in or outside of Africa, but whose practices engage and occupy the social and cultural complexities of the continent since the past 30 years. Its frame of analysis is absorbed with historical transitions: from the end of the postcolonial utopias of the sixties during the 1980s to the geopolitical, economic, technological, and cultural shifts incited by globalization. This book is both narrower in focus in the periods it reflects on, and specific in the ground it covers. It begins by addressing the tumultuous landscape of contemporary Africa, examining landmarks and narratives, exploring divergent systems of representation, and interrogating the ways artists have responded to change and have incorporated new aesthetic principles and artistic concepts, images and imaginaries to deal with such changes.

Organized in chronological order, the book covers all major artistic mediums: painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, installation, drawing, collage. It also covers aesthetic forms and genres, from conceptual to formalist, abstract to figurative practices. Moving between discursive and theoretical registers, the principal questions the book analyzes are: what and when is contemporary African art? Who might be included in the framing of such a conceptual identity? It also addresses the question of globalization and contemporary African art.

The book thus provides an occasion to examine through close reading and visual analysis how artistic concerns produce major themes. The main claim of this book is that contemporary African art can be best understood by examining the tension between the period of great political changes of the era of decolonization that enabled new and exciting imaginations of the future to be formulated, and the slow, skeptical, and social decline marked by the era of neo-liberalism and Structural Adjustment programs of the 1980s. These issues are addressed in chapters covering the themes of “Politics, Culture, Critique,” “Memory and Archive,” “Abstraction, Figuration and Subjectivity,” and “The Body, Gender and Sexuality.” Definitely an excellent art book to read or reread during this period of Covid-19.

8 – African Textiles Today

African Textiles Today illustrates how African history is read, told, and recorded in cloth. All artifacts or works of art hold within them stories that range far beyond the time of their creation or the lifetime of their creator, and African textiles are patterned with these hidden histories. In Africa, cloth may be used to memorialize or commemorate something – an event, a person, a political cause – which in other parts of the world might be written down in detail or recorded by a plaque or monument. History in Africa can be read, told, and recorded in cloth.

Making and trading numerous types of cloth have been vital elements in African life and culture for at least two millennia, linking different parts of the continent with each other and the rest of the world. Africa’s long engagement with the peoples of the Mediterranean and the islands of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans provides a story of change and continuity. African Textiles Today shows how ideas, techniques, materials, and markets have adapted and flourished, and how the dynamic traditions in African textiles have provided inspiration for the continent’s foremost contemporary artists and photographers. With a concluding chapter discussing the impact of African designs across the world, the book offers a fascinating insight into the living history of Africa. It is definitely a good art book to read or reread during this period of Covid-19.

9 – Mickalene Thomas I Can ́t See You Without Me 

Presenting paintings of some of the artist’s key models and muses, I Can’t See You Without Me illuminates the work of Brooklyn painter Mickalene Thomas (born 1971). Culling from art history and popular culture, Thomas creates scintillating portraits that deconstruct the highly charged connections between sitter, artist and viewer.

Whether depicted as classically composed 19th-century odalisques, Afro-adorned vixens of blaxploitation films or as a powerful maternal figure yearning for social mobility, the recurring models in Thomas’ compositions (almost exclusively women of color) convey a spirit of strength and self-confidence. Across this archetypal array, it is both their contradictions and kinships that make the black female body such fertile terrain for the artist’s ongoing investigations. By casting herself, her late mother and other formidable women in her life as models, muses and collaborators, Thomas particularizes her distinctive oeuvre of portraiture. Focused yet expansive, the catalog both reasserts and further contextualizes issues of identity, sexuality and agency in Thomas’ work that have only become more nuanced and palpable over time. Probably an excellent art book to read or reread during this Covid-19 period and beyond.

10 –  Recent Histories : Contemporary African Photography and Video Art from the Walther Collection 

Recent Histories: Contemporary African Photography and Video Art from The Walther Collection is an art book that unites the perspectives of 14 contemporary artists of African descent, who investigate social identity, questions of belonging, and an array of sociopolitical concerns—including migration, lineage, the legacies of colonialism and Calvinism, and local custom—as well as personal experiences in Africa and the African diaspora.

By highlighting specific creative approaches and studying the sites and collective platforms that enable these practices, this book examines the critical mass that has gathered across generations of African image-makers and lens-based artists. In accentuating different perspectives within this generation and considering the infrastructures that often link them, Recent Histories provides a point of entry to engage critically with current practices, and opens up considerations about how to conceptualize the frameworks of contemporary African photography and video art. Probably one of the best art book to read or reread during this Covid-19 period.

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An abstract woman painted in black sits on top of a red goat. She wears a delicate lace top while on her head are stitched together leather straps that hang down like hair. The work, entitled The Journey (2020) by DRC-born Cape Town-based artist Patrick Bongoy, becomes more interesting when we see that she is depicted with the same hooves as the goat. It was displayed on the wall of Ebony/Curated, a gallery with branches in Franschhoek and Cape Town, during the eighth edition of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair. The work, made with hessian, acrylic and rubber inner tubes, portrays the artist’s signature whimsical world that explores themes of migration, alienation and loss of one’s homeland. Also a fashion designer, Bongoy’s work speaks directly to today’s global state of environmental crisis. “My work speaks in response to the global reality of literal and figurative environmental pollution,” he says. Hard to miss after his startling sculpture of a figure at this year’s inaugural Stellenbosch Triennale of a man made in disused rubber hunched over as if trying to free himself from the confines of a pieces of fabric. The piece, which sold in the range of $6,000 and $10,000, was indicative of a strong presence of socio-political work at the fair, challenging present and past ideas of identity and historical narratives as the African continent jets into a new future.

The eighth edition of Investec Cape Town Art Fair returned to its home at the Cape Town International Convention Centre, with a new mission to endow the fair with a stronger African focus. “This is an international art fair where we bring in galleries from Europe and the US but we tried this year to focus more on galleries from the African continent,” said fair director Laura Vicenti. 

Out of the fair’s 107 exhibitors this year, 49 galleries were from the African continent and 58 were international, underlining a greater emphasis on the local. In previous years European blue-chip galleries such as Perrotin and Galerie Templon participated. Such names were replaced this year with new galleries from North Africa and the Middle East, including Lawrie Shabibi from Dubai, Galerie Veronique Rieffel from Ivory Coast and Tunisian Yosr Ben Ammar Gallery and AGORGI, among others. In addition, leading museums and institutions from around the world were present, including A4 Arts Foundation, ANO Institute of Contemporary Arts, FOLIO by Alserkal Arts Foundation, Fondazione Merz, Friends der Pinakothek der Moderne, Iziko South African National Gallery, the Centre Pompidou, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, The Norval Foundation, Palais de Lomé, Skissernas Museum – Museum of Artistic Process and Public Art, Tate Modern African Acquisitions Committee, WEDGE Curatorial Projects, Yerevan Biennial Art Foundation and Zeitz MOCAA.

Yet the challenging socio-economic landscape did provide cause for concern for many participants as well as the fair’s management. How does one host a contemporary art fair in a country where the local currency continues to plunge? 

“The economic landscape of South Africa is challenging,” said Vicenti. “Local collectors are very supportive but it is true that they are facing an economic crisis in South Africa so I tried to balance the situation by having international collectors from all over the world. The number of international collectors increased this year. In comparison to last year there is no comparison. But I am trying hard to have more collectors from Africa.” 

Local dealers were divided, however, on whether the buying power was coming from South Africa or abroad. “Of course we are happy when people from elsewhere come to South Africa to buy art—but the most exciting thing about this year’s Cape Town Art Fair was that the vast majority of our sales were to South Africans,” said Joost Bosland, a director at Stevenson. “It is amazing to see local support for our artists grow year on year.”

South African powerhouse galleries Stevenson, Blank Projects, SMAC Gallery and Goodman Gallery all reported swift sales on the first day of the fair. At the booth of Stevenson was an all-star group showing of emerging and established artists from the continent, including Meleko Mokgosi, Robin Rhode, Zanele Muholi, Neo Matloga and Paulo Nazareth and Simphiwe Ndzube. The gallery reported swift sales in the range of $2,000 and $75,000 and the works, like that of Bongoy’s, once again married the otherworldly and magical realm of dreams with the references to the often harsh reality of the present. 

Several of the fair’s biggest sales took place at Goodman Gallery’s booth, which confirmed approximately 25 sales in total on the opening day ranging from $2,000 to $500,000. The booth showed a line-up of some of their biggest names, including Ghada Amer, Yinka Shonibare…“We had a great diversity in terms of the spend and also the collectors that acquired the works,” said the gallery’s Anthony Dawson. “This is thanks hugely to Fiera Milano, the organizers of the fair who have cultivated a great program and collector base that is not only diversifying audiences to contemporary African art but bringing new brand new collectors into the country.”

“Cape Town is a stronghold for a lot of German citizens who have holiday homes here and they often come to the fair,” continued Dawson. “In addition, through the Italian organizers many Italian collectors were also in attendance but there seems to be strong focus of people from Western Europe coming more and more to Cape Town. We also had collectors from Angola and Nigeria as well. Overall, I’d say the majority of collectors were European.”

Taking place concurrently were two auctions for contemporary and modern art in Cape Town: The Aspire x Piasa Auction, which took place on 14 February and Strauss & Co’s Contemporary Art sale, which took place the day after. The former told of the first time a South African auction house had teamed up with a European equivalent to host a sale of African art on the continent. “Both auction houses made a big effort to bring French collectors to Cape Town which also added to a new audience in the city at the fair,” added Dawson. “With Piasa’s francophone influence we also so collectors arrive from West Africa that the South African audience has never been exposed to.”

The fair was also the place to forge long-term business relationships. First-time participant Galerie Veronique Rieffel from Cote d’Ivoire who showed a series of haunting works by Swiss-French photographer Manuel Braun of an Ivorian dancer in Egypt said she sold works largely to European collectors passing through Cape Town in the range of €3,500 and €6,000. “I forged excellent relationship with local collectors which deserve to be deepened,” said Rieffel. “I have formed a very beautiful partnership with a gallery in Cape Town, South gallery, and we have agreed to continue to show Braun’s work with them in situ.”

The recent edition of Investec Cape Town Art Fair testifies that a buoyant market for African contemporary art in South Africa can be achieved even during the most economically challenging of times—but through a concerted effort of local and international collectors, galleries and artists. 

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A woman who tries with all her might to maneuver a huge polyhedron–taken from Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514)—with the help of a slingshot; a girl wearing a hijab who jumps rope within a compositional homage to Keith Haring; a couple who fights under a white tree of life on a burnt wall and then reconciles: For the exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, the South African artist Robin Rhode (b. 1976) literally ventures into new territory, namely into the historic city of Jericho in the middle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict region. In March 2019, new works for his exhibition in Wolfsburg were created on old walls from the time of the Ottoman Empire which subtly address the history of Jericho, the three world religions practiced there, and the Middle East conflict.

In doing so, Robin Rhode remains true to the distinguishing feature of his multimedia oeuvre: the tension-filled combination of line, body and wall as image carrier. Step by step, he develops and animates the line through performative interaction with the body until it defines an abstract form or object. His trademark is a wall that stands in a socially disadvantaged district of Johannesburg, which he has used over the past eight years.

Born in Cape Town in 1976 and raised in Johannesburg, he first studied art at the Technikon Witwatersrand, now the University of Johannesburg, followed by a postgraduate program at the South Africa School of Film,
Television and Dramatic Arts in 2000. For him, the retrospective gaze is a result of his biography, since he has lived in Berlin since 2002.

Despite the spatial distance, the history of and current situation in South Africa continue to play a decisive role. For him, as well as for the poet and anti-apartheid activist Don Mattera (b.1935), from whose autobiography the exhibition title was appropriated, memory is a metaphorical weapon that helps him deal with his own hybrid identity. Robin Rhode’s works on view in the exhibition thus deal not only with obvious themes such as sports, music, design, geometry, color theory, and religion, but also with socio-political aspects, such as the history of the “Coloured communities” in South Africa, with which Robin Rhode is particularly preoccupied, not least of all because of his own family history. His visual language and content are a conceptual balancing act between South African history, culture, and mentality, as well as the signs and codes of these, and the visual vocabulary of European-American modernism.

The influence of urban music, film, popular sports, youth culture, and the local tradition of storytelling have all influenced the development of Robin Rhode’s initially typical Street Art aesthetic. Step by step, he photographically documents the development of narratives on his stone canvas, which in turn carries its own history.

Since 2002, Robin Rhode has lived in Berlin. In contrast to the colorful wall works that have been created in South Africa to date, in Germany he explores black and white approaches to drawing. Here, he draws not only with soap, charcoal, chalk, and paint, but everyday objects themselves, such as chairs, bicycles, and beds, become performative drawing instruments. The expressive drawings that he spontaneously develops during his energetic performances stand in contrast to the perfected illusionism and the intended lightness of his elaborate wall works. Robin Rhode reduces complex, at times socially critical or analytical content to a few visual signs or, as he puts it, simplifies chaos with the means of art.

After the exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2007, the presentation at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg is the first solo exhibition in Germany since twelve years. With more than 800 square meters of digital animations, photographic series, drawings, and sculptural elements, as well as performances, it offers a broad overview of Robin Rhode’s oeuvre, including new work groups, on which he is currently working. The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalog in German and English, including a preface by Andreas Beitin, an extensive interview with Robin Rhode and an introduction by Uta Ruhkamp.

Robin Rhode ” Memory is the weapon”

September 29, 2019 – February 9, 2020

Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Hollerplatz 1
38440 Wolfsburg
Germany

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Robin Rhode ” Memory is the weapon”

September 29, 2019 – February 9, 2020

Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Hollerplatz 1
38440 Wolfsburg
Germany

The post Robin Rhode’s solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum appeared first on Artskop.