Do The Right Thing

BY BABS RAPPLEYE

Dear Babs, My friend recently inherited some African and Native American masks from her uncle and is concerned with talk in the news about demands for museums to return items to their indigenous owners/countries of origin. She doesn’t think the masks are looted and loves them, but doesn’t want to keep them if they are essential to another culture. What should she/we do?

—Anxious Artifacts in Akron

Dear Anxious, If only everyone approached inherited artifacts with the same concerns as your friend. Hopefully, the masks are just tourist souvenirs or artworks made by modern or contemporary artisans. But there’s a chance they could mean the world to another group of people who want and deserve them back.

If what you might call a “mask” is made by the Hopi tribe, and in reality is the embodiment of a specific Kachina spirit, then taking an actual Kachina ceremonial artifact from the tribe and displaying it outside its intended context is akin to physically kidnapping a close friend. Your friend does not and should not own a ceremonial Hopi Kachina mask or anything like it.

To avoid this scenario, you should start by determining the history of each mask, where it came from, who made it and its cultural significance. The National Museum of the American Indian can provide an excellent introduction to the many mask-making traditions of Native American tribes. While the Met and the British Museum’s websites have plenty of examples of masks from the continent of Africa, keep in mind they have built their collections from thousands of stolen artifacts long due for repatriation. In fact, if any of “your” masks look like “their” masks, you too might own something you shouldn’t.

At the same time, you need to research the provenance of each mask and gather all evidence of how it came into your friend’s possession through her uncle. But remember, just because something was acquired “legally” back in the day, doesn’t mean you have the right to own it now. A good rule of thumb is that if one of the masks looks older than your friend’s uncle before he passed, you’re obliged to uncover its history and get advice from indigenous experts on its need for repatriation. In this case, you should consider contacting organizations like the Association on American Indian Affairs or Open Restitution Africa. Sending them an email is easy. Ultimately, if the masks are indeed of significant cultural importance and should be returned, your friend should celebrate the opportunity to do the right thing and send them home.

Mia Middleton Roberts Projects

By Eve Wood

History tells us that the highly refined, discreet object imbued with emotional resonance is an artistic choice largely made during a bygone era when the likes of such artists as Johannes Vermeer stood before a blank canvas, choosing to illuminate the specificity of the living world—whether it be a pearl earring or a kitchen maid making bread pudding by an open window. Mia Middleton’s first solo exhibition at Roberts Projects, “Love Story,” reads like a primer for the quietly majestic instances in life that so often pass us by without our noticing, harkening back to a time when life was considerably less frenzied and probably more fulfilling.

As the title of the show suggests, each of the small paintings in this exhibition contains its own unique love story—a visual paean to the ordinary objects that populate our all-too-busy lives, and often define us whether we like it or not. These works are small worlds within worlds, luminous moments of heightened and electrifying sensibility wherein the outer world seems to fall away, displaced by the singularity of each highly stylized, perfected moment. Drawing inspiration from the physical body, Middleton specifically explores the boundaries between the emotional and mystical realms that exist beyond our sensory perception, and the ways we navigate these often-murky intersections.

Many of the works in the show feel familiar and appear reminiscent of certain surreal artists such as Man Ray, Salvador Dalí and René Magritte. Works like the hauntingly graceful Blind (2023) remind us of Magritte’s seminal 1928 painting The Lovers, in which a man and woman kiss, their faces completely covered with a white sheet. In Middleton’s image, the young woman’s head appears to be wrapped in velvet, her blouse echoing the folds of the fabric pulled across her face, adding a lusciousness and vitality to the hidden mystery. These small yet powerful, nuanced gestures are what make these paintings so mesmerizing. All her images possess a strange distance that is at once dissociative and intimate, as if these objects were suffused in darkness or painted in a dimly lit room. As viewers, we want to look more closely, and, once we do, we too become fixed in a state of transcendence— balanced between ideals and absolutes, tenderness and chilly admonition—yet we keep looking just the same.

Penda Diakité UTA Artist Space

By Shana Nys Dambrot

In Malian-American artist Penda Diakité’s transformational paintings and collages, every element is much more than what it seems. From her impossibly detail-rich photocollage to her unique technique of hand-engraving surfaces—and the historical cosmology of her subject matter—Diakité’s vision is one of (re)discovery, delight and surprise. Her exhibition is simultaneously an intensely personal narrative of her own identity and of a broader cultural excavation, in which the truth behind that which has passed into legend is recentered.

“Mansa Musso (She is King)” is a revelatory pageant of the female figures who, though their names were often lost to patriarchal history, played central roles in what would become modern West Africa—specifically the Mali Empire. Though the love of mixing bright colors and intricate patterns is a hallmark of Malian visual culture, the figures and objects in Diakité’s compositions are more than the effect of their palette since they were organized from sourced photographs. Painstakingly built from gathered pieces of the world—humans, animals, botanicals, foods, crafts, adornments—Diakité’s work reflects how mythologies, folklores and histories are themselves constructed.

In hefty canvases displaying elaborate hand-cut collages of ambitious scale and unending detail, bodies (regal women of color dancing, praying, riding wild beasts) are created from images of limbs, especially hands; animals (lions, snakes, birds, buffalo, fish, camels) are formed from other species; and plants (flowers, trees, blossoms) are built out of humans and vivid creatures alike. For example, the roaring lion of Sogolon (2023) has a face made out of an upside-down blue parrot, a mane and tail from feathers and flowers, sharp claws from avian talons and a rider with a posture of motion and determination from the braceleted arms of countless others. In her specific approach to collage, Diakité uses the technique itself to create both illusion and story. Her deployment of source imagery blends line, shape, color, pattern and texture to brilliantly realize her clear and detailed figures. At the same time, those choices are not only optical—they encourage discovery and empathetic understanding in the viewer through specific poetic associations.

In the ebullient Shea Musso and Musso Koro Ba (2023), two female figures engage over ceremonial water vessels to enact what reads like a cleansing ritual. In MeeAn and the Serpent (2023), the snake that encircles her expresses not as a threat but as a living garland of thousands of flowers, embodying an ideal of beauty and power. Throughout the exhibition, the works are exceptionally prismatic and figuratively clear, but approached a few steps closer, each image reveals its universe of secrets embedded by the intensive labor and devotion of Diakité’s process. The effect is not only like magic: It contains a powerful demonstration of the interconnectedness of all things and highlights the infusion of meaningful symbolism into the blessed panoply of the world around us—and the women who have always looked after it.

Blair Saxon-Hill SHRINE

By Ezrha Jean Black

A viewer unfamiliar with Blair Saxon-Hill’s previous work might be inclined toward certain assumptions about the foundations and precedents for her style and approach to her subjects—figurative, abstracted or quasi-symbolic—or even what her subjects might actually be. There’s a certain kind of figurative art we’ve been seeing quite a lot of in recent years that “checks a number of boxes”: the quasisurreal, faux-naïve, sometimes slightly pictogrammatic, the “outsider”- or New Image–influenced. Some of it’s good, some quite good, and most of it pretty “meh.” At best, the general reaction elicited is something along the lines of: “Great. Why?”

Conceivably, there will be viewers inclined to take a similar view of Saxon-Hill’s new work, which, though not entirely discontinuous from work she has recently shown, seems a significant departure from the boldly gestural, animated and performative assemblage work she exhibited at JOAN in 2017—work that referenced both body and body politic under assault. That gallery felt compelled to underscore that this show represented a “major pivot in her artistic practice,” in that the works were entirely oil paintings on canvas. But there may be more continuity than first meets the eye. In one sense, what might have been collage, whether patterned fabrics or other natural or synthetic elements, has simply been distilled into pigment—a style and technique that goes back to Matisse and the Cubists (and still earlier). But Saxon-Hill’s imperative here is not simply to tease or invert it—no tongue-in-cheek trompe l’oeil or faux bois for her.

She titles her subjects “Spirits, Queens, Dogs and Flowers,” and she messes with all of them, from The Casual Dog Walker (all works 2023) to the Spring Queen to the Quiet Peacock (each of which could have easily been, in actual flesh, Arbus subjects). She roughs up the elements, but more importantly she emphasizes their irregular, discarded or remaindered eccentricity. The couch melts away beneath the “dog-walker.” The Spring Queen’s Siberian Husky eyes pop against watermelon wallpaper. Wallpapered peacock tail feathers upstage her Peacock. Everywhere, Saxon-Hill’s impulse is to reduce or strip away. The brushstroke itself becomes form, armature or the figure in its entirety. Consider the brushstroke(s) that make the Peacock’s coiffure, or the oversized gestural white brushstroke that curlicues over the reddened dome of the Spring Queen.

Pattern and textural references notwithstanding, this is not simply paint mimicking collage. Patterns are shuffled and knocked offkilter—iris petals torn into blue cranes or just splotches; fleurs-delys melting into starbursts (In the Stars—with an ambiguously inset picture/window). Broken stripes read (from some distance) as columns of print awaiting their Editor’s scrutiny. The painting is itself a kind of performance and not without urgency. Contradicting its implied romantic premise, The Proposal distills urgency in every aspect—graphically, chromatically and compositionally.

For all their playfulness and chromatic virtuosity, Saxon-Hill’s works embrace the ceremony of her subjects—celebratory, mournful or simply aspirational. (However parodied, the portrait is itself a ceremony of vanity.) The flowers of This Year’s Garden (and the other “flowers” on view here) may be dying; but any promise otherwise is just another three-card monte. In the meantime, we’re encouraged to embrace our spirit animal (or queen)—which Saxon-Hill reminds us is more than likely a dog.

Bryan Ida Billis Williams Gallery

By David S. Rubin

Bryan Ida’s recent paintings of nature and its animal inhabitants examine the perilous plight of both in the face of increasing threats to the planet. With forests continuing to be torn down by industrial enterprises and climates becoming increasingly erratic, the natural order of the material world is in serious jeopardy—as is the existence of many of the creatures who live among trees and in oceans. To represent this reality, Ida developed a process whereby he splices together two discordant views of nature. He begins by painting one composition, then divides it into linear sections using tape and superimposes different painted imagery over it. Finally, he peels off the tape to expose conflicting fragments of two nature scenes.

Nature’s Way (2020), an early work in his series, focuses entirely on trees and foliage, illustrating emerging tensions by contrasting the terse yellow-green palette of a dense bamboo forest and the harsh acidic oranges of horizontal bands of leaves that simulate Venetian blinds. In 2021, Ida began incorporating endangered species into the scenarios; for example, he juxtaposed animals trapped in a field of darkness with scenes of their natural habitat. In Orangutan (2021), the tropical rainforest ape stares straight at the viewer, flanked at left by trees with the sky seen from below and at right by treetops viewed from above. With dark vertical lines closing in from both directions, it seems as if the animal stands at the precipice between the physical and the spiritual, the temporal and the timeless.

In late 2021, Ida damaged a nerve in his right arm, which caused the right-handed artist to cease painting for several months. Resilient as ever, he eventually turned to making smaller, less detailed paintings, using his left hand. Remarkably, we would never know this if Ida had not disclosed it—the works in his “Faded Light” series are meticulous in execution, not to mention poignant in tone. In each of these predominantly monochromatic paintings, a sole animal from the endangered species list searches for a way out of a dark atmospheric field painted in shades of blue, green, red or gray. Subtle gradations move incrementally from a bleak darkness to a hopeful light, or vice versa.

Red Panda and Snow Leopard (both 2022) are particularly endearing, the subjects peering out at us from the lower regions of their depicted spaces as if pleading for help, with the crisp tactility of their coats compelling us to pet them. By contrast, the protagonists of Siamese Crocodile (2022) and Asian Elephant (2023) confidently approach the viewer, the former displaying fierce anger, and the latter appearing strong and triumphant. Such an air of determination to survive is also seen in Monarch Butterfly (2022) and Palos Verdes Blue (2023), in which the delicate insects appear to have no hesitancy about spreading their wings and flying toward the light. Through the cautious optimism expressed in these paintings, Ida reminds us of the efficacy of willpower, and that we should not give up hope for the future of our planet.

Paul Paiement

Tufenkian Fine Arts

By Emma Christ

Painting is, quite possibly, my least favorite visual medium. I’m not being disdainful, far from it—it’s simply that I gravitate toward mediums that are more immersive. That said, I was curious to see Paul Paiement’s recent exhibition, “Nexus,” as he created many of these paintings during a 2022 residency in the unincorporated community of Neskowin, Oregon. I was drawn to it because most of my childhood summers were spent in the little town of Otis, a mere nine miles down the 101; it is a landscape I’m wholly intertwined with. So, despite my lack of zeal for the medium, I went to Paiement’s show to see if he too found himself enchanted with the land.

Entering the gallery, I quickly realized that although Paiement created many of his landscape series in Neskowin, not every painting depicts that locality. Some of the works are references to views he’s seen elsewhere, such as the sunlit woods of Custer, South Dakota, and the yellowed range of Dixon, Montana. The works are exquisitely detailed—Mannerist in style—rendered in richly vibrant colors. Paiement’s process is a nuanced take on plein-air; he layers cut plexiglass atop his landscapes in patterns akin to modernist architecture. The works are positioned as a seamless blend of the man-made and the natural, a subversion of the trope that man is destroying nature. While the idea is laudable, the paintings didn’t read as a positive reconciliation, but rather as a collision.

This conflict is exemplified by the piece Chamberlain, South Dakota (2016). Paiement’s intricate landscape features an open field with a path running through it, flanked on the left by a grassy knoll, and on the right by an endless expanse of field. Splicing the painting horizontally is a sheet of plexiglass cut like a blueprint for a contemporary cabin. The overlay mirrors the landscape beneath it; the slope of the hill becomes the slant of a roof, the rolling fields become floor levels. The effect is not the subtle melding of organic and artificial— it’s jarring. The building Paiement depicts is a sleek and seemingly high-end cabin that appears to smother the landscape. The paint and plexiglass act in sharp contrast to one another, making it impossible to view the overlay as anything but an unwanted intrusion on the bucolic scene.

Although the show fell short of fully visualizing the reconcilia- tion it aspired to, there were a couple of paintings that were more successful: those of Neskowin. Salmon River Marsh 2, Oregon (2022) portrays the salt marshes found by a turnoff from Highway 101. In the foreground is a single arching tree, and in the background the hills of Cascade Head. This too features an overlay shaped like a cabin, but unlike Paiement’s other pieces, it is made from painted plywood so that the landscape flows smoothly— hardly a man-made encroachment at all. Moreover, these Neskowin works come closest to capturing the harmony Paiement envisioned, and, while I’m certainly partial to the scenes, they made me realize I may have been overlooking some of the possibilities of painting. Maybe it’s not my least favorite medium after all.

Dawoud Bey Sean Kelly

By Jody Zellen

Throughout his long and distinguished career, Dawoud Bey has used his camera to document his surroundings, looking closely at people as well as the places they live. Interested in the natural, social and political landscape, Bey has made multiple series that trace a lineage from past to present. This exhibition provides a chronology via selected images from 1976–2019, beginning with the series “Harlem, U.S.A.” (black-and-white photographs Bey shot in between 1975 and 1979) and concluding with the 2019 series, “In This Here Place,” which features eerie and haunting large-scale black-and-white images taken on plantations in Louisiana. Aiming to preserve African-American history and culture through photography, Bey also captures specific moments in time as a celebration of life. Shot on the streets of Harlem with a 35mm camera when Bey was 22 years old, the 10 images from “Harlem, U.S.A.” portray groups and individuals going about their lives: Some are aware of Bey’s presence, while others are not. The viewer’s eye dances across the composition of Four Children at

Lenox Avenue (1977), which depicts four formally dressed schoolchildren caught in mid-action as they pause on the sidewalk.

Shot on the fly, these photographs successfully capture the daily goings-on of the neighborhood, whereas his street portraits, shot 10 years later, convey more confidence, seemingly the result of more direct interactions with his subjects. With the later series, Bey’s aim was to create a studio in the streets, which allowed him to forge a relationship with his subjects (even if it was only for the duration of the shot). For example, Buck (1989) presents a young boy wearing a Batman T-shirt posed against a brick wall, his stance aggressive, self-assured and vulnerable.

Bey returned to the streets of Harlem in 2014 to create “Harlem Redux,” a series that documents the beginnings of gentrification and economic changes in the neighborhood. Harlem has become a different place, and through his photographs, Bey tracks these shifts. In Patisserie (2014), a white man using his laptop is juxtaposed with a Black woman working behind the counter of an upscale bakery. Young Man, West 127th Street (2015) documents a construction zone where a figure wearing a hoodie stands before a prominent No Entry sign. Clothes and Bag for Sale (2016) shows clothing hanging on a chain-link fence, laying on the sidewalk atop blue tarps that obstruct the view of a vacant lot. The absent people, represented by the hats, jackets and shoes, allude to ongoing displacement.

The timeline ends with examples from two recent series: “In This Here Place,” composed of photographs of plantations, and “Night Coming Tenderly, Black,” which features dark, unspectacular landscapes shot at night. According to Bey, the works “imagine the flight of slaves along the underground railroad racing toward freedom,” evoking the history of injustices toward the African-American community. Without being overly didactic, Bey poetically invites audiences to contemplate the past and its relationship to the present moment.