ARTE: also lives at ARTE:ZINE tumblr, different content/same contemporary view so check it out and subscribe!
Wednesday, May 22, 2013 at 5:00AM Alitash Kebede is this phenomenal art dealer that celebrates 30 years of being in the business this year! Her specialty deals with artists like Romare Bearden and Richard Hunt. Last year she produced a documentary on Hunt, a great sculptor; the famous film maker and prominent art world figure Charlie Ahern directed it.
Photo by Loretta Averoff
Monday, May 20, 2013 at 5:00AM Theaster Gates opened his solo show this weekend in Chicago at MCA, if your there check it out. More about the show and photos from MCA's website.
13th Ballad, an installation by Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates, is an extension of the artist’s12 Ballads for Huguenot House, which was coproduced by the MCA and exhibited at Documenta 13, the 2012 iteration of the international art exhibition that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany.
Gates, whose practice includes performance, installation, and urban interventions, created 12 Ballads for Huguenot House as part of his ongoing efforts to rejuvenate—both socially and architecturally—his South Chicago neighborhood, a campaign that began in 2006 when he refurbished an abandoned building on South Dorchester Avenue as his studio and home. This effort was later expanded to include abandoned houses nearby, which the artist and a team of local laborers also renovated, reinventing them as alternative cultural spaces while also repurposing their materials to make both functional and purely aesthetic objects. For 12 Ballads, much of the raw building material from the house at 6901 S. Dorchester Ave. was transported to Germany and used in the partial restoration of the dilapidated historic building in Kassel called the Huguenot House—where the carpenters and students who were involved in this effort lived as part of the project—symbolically mending one neglected cultural history with another. Ultimately, 12 Ballads resulted in a poetic exchange of material and music. Before the sister house in Chicago was carefully disassembled, Gates and his collaborators from the musical ensemble Black Monks of Mississippi—an improvisational group that combines black spiritual music with the blues and Eastern chanting traditions—recorded a series of twelve songs and performances in the South Side home, which was later screened in Kassel and accompanied there by another set of live performances by the Monks.
For 13th Ballad, Gates creates a new large-scale installation in the MCA’s Marjorie Blum Kovler Atrium that comprises art objects and materials from the Huguenot House, as well as a set of repurposed pews from the University of Chicago’s Bond Chapel. The pews, having been removed recently in order to offer Muslim students a place to pray, are a symbolic gesture of religious tolerance. Gates thought broadly about spaces of worship while researching the religious persecution of the Huguenots, members of the Protestant Reformed Church of France, who were forced to flee discrimination by the Catholic Church and relocate in Protestant nations such as Prussia (modern-day Germany) between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The installation features a monumental sculpture that showcases the everyday objects left behind by the artists and workers in the Huguenot House. This anchoring work, in combination with the carved wooden pews, creates an ecclesiastical ambiance within the museum, alluding to how art museums, not unlike churches, are sites of pilgrimage and contemplation. Providing context for the project, the MCA Screen presentation in the Turner Family Gallery on the fourth floor reprises key aspects of12 Ballads, including video footage from Kassel and the original Dorchester project as well as functional objects Gates and his team created for Documenta.
This exhibition is co-organized by Michael Darling, James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator, and Kristin Korolowicz, Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow.
Sunday, May 19, 2013 at 5:00AM Fashion illustrator icon Antonio Lopez.
There is a great book that recently came out about his work and his life, "Antonio: Fashion, Art, Sex & Disco" by Roger and Mauricio Padilha.
Saturday, May 18, 2013 at 5:00AM Street artist JR's "Inside Out: A People's Art Project" comes on HBO Monday night at 9pm
Inside Out, JR, Street Art Permalink Friday, May 17, 2013 at 5:00AM John Beadle has a fantastic solo exhibition on view now in Nassau at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas.
Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 5:00AM Mary Boone the NY contemporary gallerist and art dealer is chic for a number of reasons. New York Magazine once said in the early eighties when she burst right into the center of the art world that she was the "New Queen of the Gallery Scene" I love her because she sold great art, repped great artists and looked great while doing both.
Wednesday, May 15, 2013 at 5:00AM Alitash Kebede (gallerist and art dealer) sent us information about this. She has been assisting with organizing this event with the work she does with the Mazisi Kuene Foundation.
Friday, May 10, 2013 at 5:00AM LOVE the GIOGO Girls latest video! We had a blast last night with the ladies celebrating there 2 years of GET-IN'S
Wednesday, April 24, 2013 at 5:00AM Numa will be apart of ARTVOICES MAGAZINE 5th annual group exhibition for emerging contemporary artists! It opens this weekend.
Numa Perrier Permalink Sunday, April 21, 2013 at 5:00AM Regarding space, time and performative acts:
The Sonder exhibition represents the synthesis of my pursuits to work more sculpturally and engage time and space in the work. I have embraced the idea of making these text portraits as performative acts. The process of writing a text in repetition over time is a metaphor for the ways that we accumulate information. A pivotal moment that prompted a deeper examination of this idea was during the process of creating my first large-scale drawing installation in 2011. After rendering the portrait with a hand-written text, I destroyed the drawing at the close of the exhibition in front of an audience. This experienced directed me toward making another large scale work that physically engaged an audience in the making/completion of a drawing.
Sonder became a work that not only engaged the audience, but transitioned people into being participants that become a part of the work. The large installation is composed of three layers of translucent textiles, suspended from the ceiling, several feet apart from one another. The transparency of the material allows the viewer to see through parts of the first panel, into the second, while the distance between them allows the viewer to traverse inside the installation. The installation is in a constant state of flux as people move about the space and in between the panels. It is also designed to iterate the very definition of the word sonderand its emphasis on noticing strangers.
***this blog was taken from kenturah's micro-site for sonder...moments of sonder
Saturday, April 20, 2013 at 5:00AM Regarding binary code:
Working with the written language, I’ve become increasingly engaged with the history of writing. Understanding that the advent of written information arrived as the capacity of the human memory deteriorated situates my portraits as a kind of record.
Over a year ago I began thinking about the binary number system and how I might make a drawing using a code. I had an interest in deconstructing text into the most reduced expression as possible. As the idea for Sonder developed into a multi-layered artwork it became important to explore the possibility of working with different kinds of information across the three panels. As a result, the second panel of the installation is composed by converting the definition of the word sonder into binary code and stamping that onto the textile. The tapestry of binary number elicits a reading that is not comprehended in a literal sense; rather, it presents itself as a coded matrix that references the evolution of an ancient mathematical concept into its modern application in computer technology.
***this blog was taken from kenturah's micro-site for sonder...moments of sonder
Friday, April 19, 2013 at 5:00AM Regarding the QR code:
After deciding to draw the second panel with binary code, I knew that a third panel should be an extension of the first two panels that pushed the content of the work into another form to convey information. After converting the original text of the first panel to binary code on the second panel, it made sense to complete the piece by making a final conversion for a third panel. I chose to use a Quick Response code, a matrix barcode, because it technologically relies on the binary system to pass information through cyberspace. QR codes can be scanned by someone’s mobile devices and them to a website. So, I set up a website whose purpose would be to show documentation about the creation of the Sonder exhibit. I then generated a QR code for the URL of the website and ordered a rubber stamp customized with the code. As a result I was able to draw the last panel with a stamp that engages technology in a self-reflexive look at the content of the work, by linking the viewer to this microsite with ongoing documentation about the project (momentsofsonder.tumblr.com).
***this blog was taken from kenturah's micro-site for sonder...moments of sonder
Friday, April 5, 2013 at 5:00AM Edgar is doing a screening this weekend at The Silent Movie Theatre in LA
Friday, March 22, 2013 at 5:00AM A giant in the world of literature and humanity. Chinua Achebe achieved icon status as a writer for penning many best sellers depicting life and truths about his home country Nigeria. Two of my favorites and cannon classics Things Fall Apart and No Longer At Ease are still in my top 10 favorite reads of all time. He was a prolific man and may be rest in peace.
Chinua Achebe: November 30, 1960 Ogidi, Nigeria - March 21, 2013 Boston, USA
Read Things Fall Apart on Google Books
Thursday, March 21, 2013 at 5:00AM TOTALLY LOVE EVERYTHING SANTI! #GIRLS #GIRLS #GIRLS
Wednesday, March 20, 2013 at 5:00AM |
Project Bronzeville is an exhibition of art work by Kathie Foley-Meyer inspired by Bronzeville, a period in LA history when African Americans moved into the neighborhood known as Little Tokyo. Please visit their site to see the list of events happening over the next few months including this performance by gallery favorite Miguel Atwood Fergueson. |
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You can purchase tickets to this show by going to their fundraising page this jazz performance is not to be missed! Visit the Project Bronzeville Facebook page to stay in the know. |
Tuesday, March 19, 2013 at 5:00AM I had the pleasure of being apart of this amazing new web series created by Julianne Waters and Tomas Whitmore. I love those 2 creatives deeply, they are always cooking up something in their studio. Here is the trailer...more to come!
Sunday, March 10, 2013 at 6:00AM Thursday evening we opened Kenturah Davis solo exhibit, Sonder. The opening was alot of fun escpically since a week before the opening the artist was still feverishly finishing the art works. The photos below taken by photographer Xavier Fumat shows a behind the scene glimpse into a private invite only studio visit we did with art collectors and museum curators in LA. During these visits Michelle Joan Papillion walked the guest through Kenturah's work, they were also able to observe her process and watch her create. For photos from the opening click HERE
MJP
THE TIME LAPSE VIDEO OF KENTURAH WORKING IN THE GALLERY CREATING ALL OF THE WORKS
