Pace Gallery is pleased to present Blackness in Abstraction, an exhibition curated by Adrienne Edwards tracing the persistent presence of the color black in art, with a particular emphasis on monochromes, from the 1940s to today. Featuring works by an international and intergenerational group of artists, the exhibition explores blackness as a highly evocative and animating force in various approaches to abstract art.--Pace website.
An artistic discussion on the critical potential of African American expressive culture In a major reassessment of African American culture, Phillip Brian Harper intervenes in the ongoing debate about the “proper” depiction of black people. He advocates for African American aesthetic abstractionism—a representational mode whereby an artwork, rather than striving for realist verisimilitude, vigorously asserts its essentially artificial character. Maintaining that realist representation reaffirms the very social facts that it might have been understood to challenge, Harper contends that abstractionism shows up the actual constructedness of those facts, thereby subjecting them to critical scrutiny and making them amenable to transformation. Arguing against the need for “positive” representations, Abstractionist Aesthetics displaces realism as the primary mode of African American representational aesthetics, re-centers literature as a principal site of African American cultural politics, and elevates experimental prose within the domain of African American literature. Drawing on examples across a variety of artistic production, including the visual work of Fred Wilson and Kara Walker, the music of Billie Holiday and Cecil Taylor, and the prose and verse writings of Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and John Keene, this book poses urgent questions about how racial blackness is made to assume certain social meanings. In the process, African American aesthetics are upended, rendering abstractionism as the most powerful modality for Black representation.
The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art is widely recognized as one of the most significant collections of modern and contemporary work by artists of the African diaspora and from the continent of Africa itself. 'Four Generations: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art' draws upon the collection's unparalleled holdings to explore the critical contributions made by black artists to the evolution of visual art in the 20th and 21st centuries.0This revised and expanded edition updates 'Four Generations' with several new texts and nearly 100 images of works that have been added to the collection since the initial publication of this influential and widely praised book. Lavishly illustrated and featuring important contributions by leading art historians, critics, and curators, Four Generations gives an essential overview of some of the most notable artists and movements of the past century, with an emphasis on black artists and their approaches to abstraction in its various forms.0Filled with countless insights and visual treasures, 'Four Generations' is a journey through the momentous legacy of postwar art of the African diaspora.
A 2008 cover of The New Yorker featured a much-discussed Black Power parody of Michelle and Barack Obama. The image put a spotlight on how easy it is to flatten the Black Power movement as we imagine new types of blackness. Margo Natalie Crawford argues that we have misread the Black Arts Movement's call for blackness. We have failed to see the movement's anticipation of the "new black" and "post-black." Black Post-Blackness compares the black avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement with the most innovative spins of twenty-first century black aesthetics. Crawford zooms in on the 1970s second wave of the Black Arts Movement and shows the connections between this final wave of the Black Arts movement and the early years of twenty-first century black aesthetics. She uncovers the circle of black post-blackness that pivots on the power of anticipation, abstraction, mixed media, the global South, satire, public interiority, and the fantastic.
Selections of writing by the influential art critic and curator Kellie Jones reveal her role in bringing attention to the work of African American, African, Latin American, and women artists.
In this book, art historian Darby English explores the year 1971, when two exhibitions opened that brought modernist painting and sculpture into the burning heart of United States cultural politics: Contemporary Black Artists in America, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The DeLuxe Show, a racially integrated abstract art exhibition presented in a renovated movie theater in a Houston ghetto. 1971: A Year in the Life of Color looks at many black artists’ desire to gain freedom from overt racial representation, as well as their efforts—and those of their advocates—to further that aim through public exhibition. Amid calls to define a “black aesthetic,” these experiments with modernist art prioritized cultural interaction and instability. Contemporary Black Artists in America highlighted abstraction as a stance against normative approaches, while The DeLuxe Show positioned abstraction in a center of urban blight. The importance of these experiments, English argues, came partly from color’s special status as a cultural symbol and partly from investigations of color already under way in late modern art and criticism. With their supporters, black modernists—among them Peter Bradley, Frederick Eversley, Alvin Loving, Raymond Saunders, and Alma Thomas—rose above the demand to represent or be represented, compromising nothing in their appeals for interracial collaboration and, above all, responding with optimism rather than cynicism to the surrounding culture’s preoccupation with color.
Here, for the first time, is a collection of the artist Clare Rojas' abstract paintings, completed between 2012 and 2015. Known for her association with a generation of San Francisco artists that became internationally prominent through the exhibition "Beautiful Losers," much of Rojas' earlier work drew from various Russian and Eastern European folkloric subjects. While the figures have been removed from this newer body of work, it is not hard to see their lasting impact on Rojas' practice; these paintings are equally evocative of folk art, sign painting and the formalist reductions of artists like Alexander Calder, Matisse or Ellsworth Kelly. Accompanying these works is an essay by the curator and writer Jens Hoffmann.Clare Rojas (b. 1976) lives and works in San Francisco. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Everyone Has Those Spaces at Kavi Gupta, Chicago; Carved, Cast, Crumpled: Sculpture All Ways at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago; Caerulea at Paule Anglim in San Francisco, Clare Rojas at Vladmir Restoin Roitfeld in New York; Clare Rojas at Galleri Nicolai Wallner in Copenhagen, and Pith at Prism in Los Angeles. Solo museum shows include the Museum of Craft and Folk Art, San Francisco; Riverside Art Museum, CA; The Rose Art Museum, Boston; Museo De Arte Comtemporaneo De Castilla y Leon; Museum Het Domein, Sittard; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita; Knoxville Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
In this stimulating, thought-provoking guide, a noted sculptor and teacher demonstrates how to discover a rich new design source in the abstractions inherent in natural forms. Through systematic study of such properties as line, form, shape, mass, pattern, light and dark, space, proportion, scale, perspective, and color as they appear in nature, students can learn to utilize the infinite variety and diversity of those elements as a wellspring of creative abstraction. The author invites students to learn the necessary techniques through a series of projects devoted to exploring and drawing plants, animals, birds, landscapes, seascapes, skies, and more. Lines of growth and structure, water and liquid forms, weather and atmospheric patterns, luminosity in plants and animals, earth colors and lightning are among the sources of abstraction available to the artist who is aware of them. This book will train you to see and use these elements and many more. An intriguing blend of art, psychology, and the natural sciences, Abstraction in Art and Nature is profusely illustrated with over 370 photographs, scientific illustrations, diagrams, and reproductions of works by the great masters. It not only offers a mind-stretching new way of learning and teaching basic design, but deepens our awareness of the natural environment. In short, Mr. Hale's book is an indispensable guide that artists, teachers, and students will want to have close at hand for instruction, inspiration, and practical guidance.
Magnetic fields, an introduction / Erin Dziedzic and Melissa Messina -- Black, woman, abstract artist / Lowery Stokes Sims -- Conversations. Lauren Haynes on Mavis Pusey -- Sandra Jackson-Dumont on Maren Hassinger -- Melissa Messina on Chakaia Booker -- Kathryn Wat on Lilian Thomas Burwell -- Alice Thorson on Sylvia Snowden -- Kindred : materializing representation in the abstract / Valerie Cassel Oliver -- Conversations. Erin Dziedzic on Nannette Carter -- Nanette Carter on Evangeline "EJ" Montgomery -- Allison Glenn on Candida Alvarez -- Michelle Perron on Gilda Snowden -- Gia M. Hamilton on Deborah Dancy -- For women of color who have considered art in which abstraction is enough / Lilly Wei
