Tenses: Artists in Residence 2015–16 by The Studio Museum in Harlem

T E N S E S : A RT I S T S I N R E S I D E N C E 2 015 / 6 Amanda Hunt, Assistant Curator New York City is changing at an astounding pace. Issues surrounding gentrification and income inequality are at the forefront of local and national political discussions in this pivotal election year. Capitalism is a driving force in many facets of American society—it informs ideas around success, political influence and desirability—so it becomes especially poignant in a place with as much history and cultural value as Harlem. Harlem has been referred to as a “black mecca” since the 1920s, both by its occupants and in the popular imagination. Artists are great critics of their surroundings and of culture, and often they reflect back to us its various impacts. This year’s residency and its culminating effort, Tenses, is no exception. Tenses is meant to refer to temporality, as well as an expansiveness of language and creative expression: past, present, future. Each of this year’s artists in residence explores, in some way, the idea of impermanence or the movement of the body in space— in the studio or the city at large. Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s installation contains pictures within pictures; it is a composite made up of parts and layers of images that are themselves fractured and

complex. EJ Hill’s A Monumental Offering of Potential Energy (2016) is a demonstration of the strength and resilience of a highly visible, politicized, black, queer body, one that thrives against all odds. Jordan Casteel’s substantial paintings are both compassionate portraits and urgent documentation of the black vendors who occupy 125th Street on a daily basis. Many past artists in residence refer to the distinct energy of the studios that face 125th Street. This street has often informed the work produced in these spaces, or provided the subject. The facade of the Museum building is one large, porous membrane. On some days, from the studios, it is as if the windows and walls have melted away, and the spaces hang over the street as our David Hammons flag does every day. This promenade is one of the most humming, alive pedestrian spaces in all of America. You cannot quiet the noise. You cannot stop the life below. Drumbeats, drum lines, politicians, protesters, Prince mourners, vendors, kite fliers—this is the(ir) place. The Studio Museum in Harlem, like the city it occupies, is about to enter a new phase in its history as it approaches its fiftieth anniversary. I cannot help but carry this into my thinking around this exhibition, its related parts and the residents themselves. Harlem is evolving, as is the Museum, as are they.

A Monumental Offering of Potential Energy Ⅱ Call and Response Ⅲ CharlesⅠ Glass Man MichaelⅠ FloraⅢ JamesⅠ JaredⅠ Kevin the Kiteman Ⅰ Laying on HandsⅢ Red Material (After Amy Sillman) Ⅲ Stanley Ⅰ StanzaⅢ Untitled (Landscape) Ⅲ Untitled (Office) Ⅲ

9 17 7 4 23 5 6 3 21 19 2 13 18 20

Dispatches from the Time That RemainsⅢ Informal EconomiesⅠ LifeworksⅡ

18 3 10

TENSES

Jordan CasteelⅠ EJ HillⅡ Jibade-Khalil HuffmanⅢ

Stanley, 2016. Photo: Adam Reich

JORDAN CAS TEEL : INFORMAL ECONOMIES Sarah Lewis Jordan Casteel’s paintings are as much figurative portraits as they are composites of an often-invisible network of exchange. She locates some of her sitters from the vantage point of her window at The Studio Museum in Harlem while gazing down at pedestrians. A vendor whom she has painted often waves to her when he catches her eye. From her perch, she might spot someone and run downstairs in the hope that he’s still there, and will agree to be photographed for a portrait. She takes hundreds of photographs; she prints five or six. After finishing each oil painting, which invariably starts with rendering the head and hands, she can’t bear to let the source photographs go. As a result, Casteel’s studio walls are filled with photographs, set out as if a constellation. It is fitting, as her portraits are not only translations of experiences with her subjects, but also documents of rarely glimpsed informal networks of

exchange that Casteel has adroitly identified and set before our eyes. Much as Mark Bradford’s (b.1961) early paintings engaged with the informal economies of Los Angeles through abstraction and the language of cartography, Casteel deals figuratively with the fragile economies mapped by figures in Harlem. Bradford’s early work deals with informal mercantile economies, communities that cannot be represented spatially but exist around formal networks, as Michael Laguerre described in The Informal City. 1 Bradford engaged with the communities of Latino day laborers, referred to colloquially in

Kevin the Kiteman, 2016. Photo: Adam Reich

JORDAN CAS TEEL

Los Moscos (2003), a painting in which cubic and rectangular accents of yellow, red, pink and blue pierce the black paper to create a metaphor for the increased visibility of the group referenced in title. What Bradford has done through abstraction—using strips of multihued paper in a radial arrangement that seem to refract through the darkness as if to convey how much these communities do, in fact, permeate urban space—Casteel begins to pioneer with figuration. Her use of color transforms her portraits of black men, ages 18 to 80, into compositions of figurative stanchions, important nodes of an informal economy. Casteel’s figures go by names such as “Kevin the Kite Man,” who rides his bike with kites flying behind him as he sells, from his backpack, cups with red, blue and green lights. There is also a glass vendor who tirelessly sets up his table of assorted glass objects each day, rain or shine, and a sitter who sells an assortment of furs packed in storage containers, no matter the weather. Absent from Casteel’s compositions are any logos or brands that could shift the focus away from the human lives centralized in the pictorial frame. What

is left is a searing view of precariousness and reliance, fortitude and determination. While Casteel’s paintings call to mind various influences—the vibrant colors of William H. Johnson (1901–1970), the fragmented compositions of Romare Bearden (1911–1988), the psychological portraiture of Alice Neel (1900– 1984)—these artistic antecedents do not dwarf her innovation, the use of color as a registration system of tone and compositional importance. Her use of tone, contrast and color blocking direct our focus to what is most salient about each sitter—a topography of significance. In Glass Man Michael (2016), for example, Casteel renders her subject with rose and gold hues that rhyme with his glassware on the tarp-covered table, as if to convey both place and

Glass Man Michael, 2016. Photo: Adam Reich

the sitter’s state, which contains, it seemed to Casteel, a certain luminosity, a kind of levity and grace. In James (2015), Casteel creates a near-monument out of a figure who has been selling music—CDs mainly—so consistently that he is as much a feature of the landscape as the buildings themselves, by spatially locking the backdrop to the figure with mahoganies and reddish browns. Casteel’s compositions deftly turn street scenes into subjective landscapes. In Stanley (2016), Casteel has grayed out the face of her sitter, associating him with the newspaper-print sign taped to the window above his head in the barbershop, a sign that captivated her when they met. Part of the text reads, “Stop Police Terror” and “Rise Up October,” the latter the name of an organization focused on police violence. Above it is a grid of images, loosely rendered portraits. It is a tonal move, exemplary of Casteel’s color strategy, to deftly move us from internal worlds— hers, from that moment of connection with her sitters—to the external

realities that comprise the backdrop of Casteel’s recent body of work. In her earlier practice, Casteel often painted black men in interior spaces—sitting, crouching, often compositionally confined—this started for her directly following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting of Trayvon Martin. As incidents of social injustice have become hyper-visible, centralizing the lives of black men in this country, Casteel’s work has focused on how her subjects navigate their terrain.

James, 2016. Photo: Adam Reich

JORDAN CAS TEEL

“How many times I could have passed these men outnumbered the times I connected with them,” she recalls. She wants each compositional encounter to be intentional. “The only thing I ask is that my sitters look at me,” she says of her process. Yet the result is more than an

Jared, 2016. Photo: Adam Reich

exchange between individuals. Each composition is a rare portrait of an exchange between a sitter and his self-fashioned world. 1 Michel S. Laguerre, The Informal City (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).

Charles, 2016. Photo: Adam Reich

JORDAN CAS TEEL

JORDAN CASTEEL (b. 1989) E D U C AT I O N 2014 MFA, Yale University, New Haven, CT 2011 BA, Agnes Scott College, Decatur, GA 2010 Merit Stipend Recipient, Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia, Cortona, Italy SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2015 Brothers, Sargent’s Daughters, New York, NY 2014 Visible Man, Sargent’s Daughters, New York, NY GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2016 Imitation of Life, HOME, Manchester, UK; Learning to See Color, University of Denver School of Art, Vicki Myhren Gallery, Denver, CO 2015 Thats On Me, Paris Blues, Harlem, NY; Color II: Identity and Society, Kenyon College, Gund Gallery, Gambier, OH; Slo Jamz, Jessie Edelman Studio, Brooklyn, NY 2014 Sargent’s Daughters, Sargent’s Daughters, New York, NY; MFA Thesis Exhibition, Yale School of Art, Green Gallery, New Haven, CT; The Gaze, The Study, Aisling Gallery, New Haven, CT; 13 Artists, Yale School of Art, 24/6.106.353.v.1, Alternative Space, New Haven, CT; Face Up, 32 Temple Court, New Haven, CT 2013 For ED: Splendor in the Grass with Olympic Lad and Lass, Yale School of Art, Green Gallery, New Haven, CT; Second-Year Graduate Student Exhibition, Yale School of Art, Green Gallery, New Haven, CT

2012 First-Year Graduate Student Exhibition, Yale School of Art, Green Gallery, New Haven, CT; Celebrating the Culture of African-American Art, A Brookfield Invitational Exhibition at the Republic Plaza, Denver, CO 2011 Yasan: 100 Year of Womyn’s Struggle Ceremony and Sword, Sellars Project Space, Denver, CO; CIAO: I Direttori, Terminus 100, Atlanta, GA; Collage Arts Colloquium, Dalton Art Gallery, Atlanta, GA AWA R D S 2014 Admissions Crew Co-Chief, Yale School of Art Class Representative, Yale School of Art 2013 Gloucester Painting Prize Recipient, Yale School of Art 2011 Dalton Art Gallery Award, Decatur, GA RESIDENCIES 2016 Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Brooklyn, NY 2015 Artist in Residence, YADDO, Saratoga Springs, NY 2015 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), Governor’s Island, NY; New American Paintings, Northeast Issue #116

A Monumental Offering of Potential Energy (study), 2016. Photo: Adam Reich

E J HILL

E J HILL : LIFE WORKS Danielle Jackson I am not making the work, I am living it.1 —EJ Hill A man wearing a white collared shirt, a tie, black pants and loafers wanders in silence around the New Wight Gallery at the Broad Art Center in Los Angeles. His gait is steady as he gravitates toward the corners of the eleven-thousandsquare-foot space. At 6:30 pm a cluster of people begins to follow him. Word has spread that the wanderer, EJ Hill, is going to perform an action. Leading the audience into an empty gallery, he stares into the crowd. After clearing his throat, he delivers a prolonged squawking scream with a force that is palpable. He alternates between clockwise and counterclockwise motions as he looks out at the crowd with his hands folded in front of him. Then he delivers a series of guttural screams. He inhales and exhales each time, releasing the screams while bending his knees and clenching his fists. Suddenly he falls to his knees and continues to bellow from all fours. Some audience members begin to cry and pull out tissues to dry their eyes. After six minutes, Hill quietly rises and walks toward the exit.

Performed on the occasion of his University of California, Los Angeles master’s thesis exhibition in 2013, Hill’s haunting performance was the culmination of a thirty-oneday continuous action (or inaction, depending on one’s point of view) entitled Tell, which existed at the edge of public visibility. His summary of the story consists of two sentences: “From April 1 to May 2, 2013, I did not speak or use my voice for any reason. I successfully maintained a month-long vow of silence.” Prior to the climactic action held in the gallery, there had been no singular audience. No one was privy to the rules that governed

A Monumental Offering of Potential Energy, 2016 (detail). Photo: Liz Gwinn

his day-to-day routine, and few were given a window into his thoughts. By day eight of the vow, Hill declared in a private letter to the curator Tempestt Hazel that he was not making work, but living it.2 In so doing he proclaimed Tell a lifework, one that functioned outside of the gallery system—until the aforementioned evening. Tell is a lifework in the sense that it has been shaped by lived duration and choreographies; specifically it is an action that communicates through noncommunication.3 It is reminiscent of the “One Year Performances” of Tehching Hsieh (b. 1950), an artist perhaps best known for his Rope Piece (1983–84) collaboration with Linda Montano (b. 1942) in which the two artists were tied together at the waist with an eight-foot rope for one year.4 The scholar Adrian Heathfield has discussed Hsieh’s lifeworks as excluding the responses of live audiences and turning instead toward “the practice of living, its existential dilemmas, and ethical considerations.”5 Hill is likewise invested in lived practice, de-privileges the art object and frequently tests corporeal limits, but unlike Hsieh, he does, at critical

junctures, embrace the responses of live audiences. Hill’s lifeworks also distinguish themselves through their investigations of the politics of black and queer bodies. Specifically, Hill uses his own body as a site for the presentation and representation of traumas. He stores sociopolitical experiences, particularly those that affect “othered” bodies (such as police brutality, homophobia and racism) in his own body, and then projects these to an audience. His work creates an empathetic energy. There is a call-and-response mechanism inherent in the structure, which relies on vulnerability. Consider, for instance, The Fence Mechanisms (2014), which took place at Commonwealth & Council in Los Angeles and explored the familiar childhood pastime of jumping rope. Hill tied one end of a jump rope to a chain-link fence in the gallery.

The Fence Mechanisms (performance still), 2014. Photo: Craig Kirk *

E J HILL

EJ Hill A Monumental Offering of Potential Energy (in progress), 2016 Eight wood panel frames, installation, performance 492 × 108 × 85 in.

Jibade-Khalil Huffman Call and Response, 2016 Screenprint on linen 27 × 36 in.

Jordan Casteel Glass Man Michael, 2016 Oil on canvas 56 × 72 in.

A Monumental Offering of Potential Energy (in progress), 2016

Jibade-Khalil Huffman Flora, 2016 Archival inkjet print 20 × 30 in.

Jordan Casteel Charles, 2016 Oil on canvas 78 × 60 in.

Jordan Casteel James, 2015 Oil on canvas 72 × 56 in.

Jordan Casteel Jared, 2016 Oil on canvas 72 × 54 in.

Jibade-Khalil Huffman Red Material (After Amy Sillman), 2016 Archival inkjet print 30 × 45 in.

Jibade-Khalil Huffman Untitled (Office), 2016 Archival inkjet print 28 × 42 in.

Jordan Casteel Kevin the Kiteman, 2016 Oil on canvas 78 × 78 in.

Jordan Casteel Stanley, 2016 Oil on canvas 78 × 60 in.

Jibade-Khalil Huffman Laying on Hands, 2016 Inkjet print on canvas 30 × 23 in.

Jibade-Khalil Huffman Stanza (video still), 2016 Multi-channel video, color, sound (TRT variable), found windshields, found license plate, air freshener

Jibade-Khalil Huffman Untitled (Landscape), 2016 Archival inkjet print 30 × 26 1/4 in. All works courtesy the artist unless otherwise noted.

WORKS IN THE E XHIBITION

He took hold of the loose end and jumped repeatedly for approximately two hours before collapsing. As he fell to the ground in exhaustion, the audience came to his aid, as if sensing that the gesture of jumping rope was serving as a metaphor for coping with trauma, triumph, love and loss. The same empathetic energy was present during the culminating action of Tell, when audience members literally cried as he wailed—a gesture that I myself repeated as I watched the six-minute video documentation. Existing as he does in a black, male, queer body, Hill is acutely aware of how certain bodies are privileged over other bodies. His performative actions point to the subjugated body’s potential for endurance, and his engagement with live audiences points to the various ways we experience transcendence when given the opportunity to feel together. Hill’s practice exists within a wider lineage of performative histories that investigate the aesthetics of risk, human relations, interruptions of space, and duration. His work is as emotionally extreme as Chris Burden’s (1946–2015) Shoot (1971), in which a friend shot Burden in his left arm. Hill’s work is as poetic (though not quite as dangerous) as Marina Abramovic´’sć (b. 1946) and Ulay’s (b. 1943) Rest Energy (1980), in which the two artists

held a bow and arrow taut, with the arrow pointed at Abramovićc’s heart and the weight of their leaning bodies putting tension on the bowstring. And it is as spiritually resonant as Terry Fox’s (1943–2008) Levitation (1970), where Fox placed an eleven-and-a-half-foot mound of dirt on the ground and lay atop it for six continuous hours, attempting to levitate.6 Throughout his artistic career, Hill has shown a commitment to the language of the body. He stood for six continuous hours for Inaction (2011), painted gallery walls with his saliva and blood in Drawn (2011) and boxed with David Bell while hooded in O Captor, My Captor! (2014). During his 2015–16 residency at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Hill has taken an interest in roller

O Captor, My Captor! (performance still), 2014. Photo: Jen Diskin **

coasters. Pen-and-ink sketches of their undulating, intersecting forms line his studio walls, and wooden pieces meant to represent their skeletal structures stand nearby. One might ask, “Why the roller coaster?” It is a youthful obsession, of course, but one with telling correspondences to adult real life. For example, the gesture of raising one’s arms for a sudden drop on a ride is reminiscent of the “hands up, don’t shoot” position. As we begin to recognize the complexities that the artist has already noted, flashes of the human condition emerge, with all of its joys and sorrows. I view Hill’s work as fundamentally about the intricacies of existence. His lifeworks are about bodies, and how we inherit social circumstances and are marked by them. Walking into the Studio Museum gallery, visitors may not see a human body, but in A Monumental Offering of Potential Energy (2016), the body is everywhere implied. Comprised of vertical posts and horizontal beams at varying heights, the installation is a wooden roller coaster, with the track’s serpentine pathway and steep slopes rendered in pink LED lights. Here, Hill’s investigation into human relations, lived practice and duration merges with metaphor. Consider the roller coaster as a vessel for bodies to experience affect. The force of the ride pushes and pulls at us physically, igniting fear, anxiety and

exhilaration—all feelings that we experience in life. In this way, the piece is an extension of Hill’s performative works, even if his body is absent. The phrase “potential energy” in the title is key. It, along with the roller coaster’s movement, suggests a progressive buildup, then release—also strategies deployed in the performances, as in Tell, when Hill emitted his screams after his month-long vow of silence. The artist’s symbolic yet immersive environment gives the visitor an opportunity to contemplate social circumstances as well as emotions. And in that sense, this lifework is about healing. 1 EJ Hill, “Record of Creative Work” (master’s thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 2013), 3. 2 Ibid., 50. 3 Adrian Heathfield, Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 16. 4 Hsieh produced five separate yearlong performances between 1978 and 1986. 5 Ibid., 17. 6 Four hours into the Levitation performance Fox felt as though he had left his body. He could no longer feel his chest expanding and contracting. At the sixhour mark, an audience

was allowed into the room. They said that a spirit lingered afterward, and people likewise reported feeling a spirit lingering in New Wight Gallery after Hill’s action. * The Fence Mechanisms, 2014. Chain link fencing, concrete, beaded jump rope, durational performance, Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles. Photo: Craig Kirk ** O Captor, My Captor!, 2014. Performance collaboration with David Bell, 01:30:00, Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn. Photo: Jen Diskin

l),

E J HILL

EJ HILL (b. 1985)

2010 X-TREME Studio, A+D Gallery, Chicago, IL

E D U C AT I O N

2009 Before Cake, After Dinner: Big Space, Columbia College, Chicago, IL; Global Print, Hokin Gallery, Chicago, IL

2013 MFA, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 2011 BFA, Columbia College, Chicago, IL SOLO AND T WO-PERSON EXHIBITIONS 2014 The Fence Mechanisms, Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles, CA 2013 Dear John, Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles, CA 2012 Slow Dance, Matt Austin and EJ Hill, RAID Projects, Los Angeles, CA 2011 There is no I in It, Karen Bovinich and EJ Hill, The Hills Esthetic Center, Chicago, IL GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2014 Racial Imaginary, Nichols Gallery, Pitzer College, Claremont, CA; Have At It, Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Postcards From Familiar Places and Other Uncommon Sites, ArtStreet, University of Dayton, OH 2013 MFA Thesis Exhibition, New Wight Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles, CA; Internal Visualizer, Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn, NY 2012 A Romantic Measure, Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; The Tipping Point of Me and We, Little Black Pearl, Chicago, IL 2011 dream, in, the, act, Kunz, Vis, Projects, Chicago, IL; Overkill, The Mission Projects, Chicago, IL

2008 Millifest, Quincy Wong Center, Chicago, IL PERFORMANCES 2014 O Captor, My Captor!, Collaboration with David Bell, Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn, NY; Signaling Through the Flames, LA><ART, Art Los Angeles Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA 2012 Untitled, Collaboration with Collin Pressler as part of Industry of the Ordinary’s Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL; Help Is on the Way (for Mark Aguhar, Trayvon Martin, and the Rest of Us), Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles, CA 2011 The Mountain Was a Gift, Yes. Oui. Si., Boston, MA, and Hewn Oaks Arts Education Center, Lovell, ME; Corpo/Ilicito: The Post-Human Society 6.9, Collaboration with Guillermo Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra, SOMArts, San Francisco, CA 2010 Crawl for Your Life, Muskets and Memories Civil War Era Reenactment, Boscobel, WI 2009 Unstable, Collaboration with Alexa Loftus, Chicago, IL; This Is an Imaginary Border, Chicago, IL; Re: Growing, A+D Gallery, Chicago, IL

Call and Response, 2016

JIBADE-KHALIL HUFFMAN

generation ahead of us both, whose work we respect, Khalil and I, black poets in America, working alongside one another, sometimes knowingly, seeing each other out the side of an Simone White eye, working out a workable relationship with what Nathaniel Mackey calls “... each existent demands “the previous,” which is all that condiits proper possibility, it demands tions the present of our own making. that it become possible.” I hear myself say (now I am remem— Giorgio Agamben, bering saying) something like, “Poetry The Time That Remains1 is a time-based art,” and this is the first time I say this thing aloud and the With Khalil, by chance, at Bard first time I say it to myself, though it College, because we run in parallel seems so obvious, and it is because circles, which mixes a metaphor, of being with Khalil, with him before and makes no spatial or temporal sense. He’s sitting right in front of me. me, present, working the same room that I am working, working the same I’ve just heard him reading poems, boundary of invitation and exclusion, making a gesture of appreciation for our shared poetic lineage. We’re here working the impossible rejoinder of art to institutional space, to literary to pay tribute. We’re together in the poetry circle where we’ve both been before (trained/being trained/ training endlessly repeating). For a long time we were together and did not know it. We were circling in circles that did not meet until they did. I am at a podium, Khalil is sitting in front of me. I’m thinking about his work at the intersection of poetry and the visual and talking extemporaneously about the influence of a poet a JIBADE-KHALIL HUFFMAN: D I S PAT C H E S F R O M T H E T I M E T H AT R E M A I N S

Untitled (Landscape), 2016

history, and I begin to understand this crucial thing about our work: Visions are precarious. They come and go in fractions of seconds and are radically contingent upon respective time-space positions. Poetry is a time-based art in that it foregrounds the effort of—strains to achieve—the visionary as against the representational; poetry becomes what representation is not. Khalil’s work is fractured by the effort of this becoming. It exists in the space of the difference between the categorical and the uncategorizable. Later, I ask Khalil to write to me about his work, as a poet writes to another poet: I ask him to help me to describe his work in terms of visions/in visionary language. (This isn’t a way of boasting; it’s about refusing the naturalization of the peculiar.) Extemporaneous: This does not mean outside of time, it means outside preparation or prediction; it means working inside the seconds we are given in the time that remains to see what is happening, to say what is happening.

Dispatch 1 I want to make a show about process that foregrounds the very act of going through the process of making the thing or focuses on one or a few aspects and nothing more, or the subject is somehow truly secondary to the materials and how they are

Red Material (After Amy Sillman), 2016

JIBADE-KHALIL HUFFMAN

applied to the surface. In this imaginary show you could have a list, á la the performance score. Or you could show all the sketches and applications of paint on different substrates. —J-KH 2 “... one or a few aspects and nothing more ...” Khalil, I suspect that you are concealing or refusing what can only be called the “whole” work or a total vision of the work or the works you are making. There is a kind of stinginess or guardedness in that as an impulse (impulse being invisible). Being, then, in the grip of your refusal as viewer ... Then there is the lush or lascivious materiality of Flora (2016) or Net (2016). You can’t help it. The view is of the pleasure you take in passing your eye over an object, the pleasure of processing what Sylvia Plath calls “the light of the mind” (“cold and planetary”),3 the odd-light that grows Wallace Stevens’s “palm” of cognitive imagining4; this sight propels us into the apprehension of time, which is thinking. Yes? All we know of being here on this Earth is instantaneous arrest of the bombardment of our consciousness with

all this flora, so much junk from the dollar store. The stills stop time. You are powerless over “the spell over spells,” which is what Adorno said about beauty.5 The video work: capitulation, submission. They are so pretty. The stills: You are wrestling power away from the spell in order to do what? In order to feel what in the textures for which you demand our attention?

Untitled (Office), 2016

Dispatch 2 The anger or my anger cuts both ways, no doubt, from the more obvious situations like losing one’s seat at 7 am—saved in the universal way by placing your belongings on the seat—to a white person on a bus who think she deserves that seat and you do not, but also at the art world’s failure to get behind or show up for anything that doesn’t confirm what we already know about certain histories or facts and/or notions about identity. But I think I can go there or I want to go there this time. And I suppose that really means harnessing this anger or at least placing it deliberately within the process of going there, foregrounding that rage and then making a work about what that rage looks like, not the thing that caused the rage, but the rage itself. —J-KH 6

already knows about you: You are _____, you are black, you cannot control yourself, you are going to tell the origin story, the story of the redemptive power of truthtelling that is the only true story. The thing about revelation is you have to tell someone, which is intimacy, which is the secret haven of nonnarrative and privacy that makes life bearable. Making art the way you do, which has always seemed to me a holistic brain practice, involves spreading the self out, sometimes very thin, in order to have thought that is real, to give actual thinking the space to take place, which means making an intellectual/physical environment that is free of all naysayers, in your mind.

K: The thing about revelation, telling the truth/ confessing, especially to exactly the thing everyone Laying on Hands, 2016

JIBADE-KHALIL HUFFMAN

Dispatch 3 Instead of making another narrative-based work with a female protagonist that is really just a stand-in for me, I’ve decided to continue shooting a studio-based video that is more in line with the wall works. There is on the one hand my usual tendencies (photographic-like attention to detail in terms of framing and lighting or not lighting videos, lyrical narrative with female protagonist that is really me, single- or multichannel execution, sculptural elements that supplement and undermine what is happening in the videos). Going against this or on the other side of this is a more experimental impulse. —J-KH 7 What runs continuously through Khalil’s video, sculpture, photography and painting is his sense or sensibility of touch and sight as infinitely magical. We watch him expose whatever can be achieved through manipulation of every material at his disposal as it is pressed through the alembic of his hand and eye. We process, too, the stops of starts of his achievement. Khalil’s work is specific to his presence with you in this moment in time. Conversational, argumentative, at the mercy of its passions—it is so human in all its

technological sophistication and important for its representation of a stage of our evolution. In Khalil’s new work, we are in experimental time, and his choices and materials reflect the trembling of certainties. In Laying on Hands (2016), pale-skinned female figures appear gingerly to raise or lower a bedspread under which it is possible to perceive the outline of a figure. Is this a shroud? Is this a resurrection? But the figurative hand, laying on, invokes any and all acts of making—and healing. The hand shakes before the cut, before paint is touched to surface, before the shutter opens and closes again in a time so small we cannot exactly think it. 1 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005) 2 Jibade-Khalil Huffman, in conversation with the author, May 1, 2016. 3 Sylvia Plath,“The Moon and the Yew Tree,” The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (New York: Harper Perrenial, 1981), 172. 4 Wallace Stevens, “Of Mere Being,” Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, eds. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), 476.

5 Agamben, 35. 6 Jibade-Khalil Huffman, in conversation with the author, May 2, 2016. 7 Jibade-Khalil Huffman, in conversation with the author, May 5, 2016.

Flora 3, 2016

Flora, 2016

JIBADE-KHALIL HUFFMAN

JIBADE-KHALIL HUFFMAN (b. 1981) E D U C AT I O N 2013 MFA, Roski School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 2005 MFA, Graduate Program in Literary Arts, Brown University, Providence, RI 2003 BA, Bard College, Annandale-onHudson, NY SOLO AND T WO-PERSON EXHIBITIONS 2016 Verse Chorus Verse, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA; What Can I Say About That Suit (That Hasn’t Already Been Said About Afghanistan, LA><ART, Los Angeles, CA 2015 Come and Go: Jibade Khalil Huffman, MANTRA (commissioned by A.L. Steiner), Blum and Poe, Los Angeles, CA; Anthony Pearson and JibadeKhalil Huffman: Third Person, Marianne Boesky East, New York, NY; We Don’t Believe You, You Need More People, Marianne Boesky East, New York, NY 2013 The Four People You Meet At Every Drug Deal, Samuel Freeman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Niagara, USC Roski Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2012 We Don’t Believe You, You Need More People (with Martine Syms), Public Fiction, Los Angeles, CA 2011 Teen Wolf/Teen Wolf Too, Mt. Tremper Arts, Mt. Tremper, NY

2010 Monster Island Czar, MoMA PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, NY 2008 Xaviera Simmons and JibadeKhalil Huffman: Oscillations (For A Minute There I Lost Myself), Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY 2003 You Just Have To Go Down a Flight of Stairs, Woods Gallery, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

AWA R D S 2014 Emerging Artist Fellowship, California Community Foundation 2010 Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant 2004 Grolier Poetry Prize 2001 Photography Advisory Board Scholarship at Bard College

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

RESIDENCIES

2015 Pictures of the Moon With Teeth, TBA:15, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR Altarations: Built, Blended, Processed, Ritter Art Gallery, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL

2011 Artist in Residence, Workspace, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York, NY

2014 Made in L.A. 2014, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, Step and Repeat, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Rockaway!, MoMA PS1/ Rockaway Surf Club, New York, NY 2013 The Reanimation Library, Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles, CA The Stand In, Public Fiction, Los Angeles, CA 2012 New Wight Biennial 2012, UCLA New Wight Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2011 Pixelating: Black in New Dimensions, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, Brooklyn, NY; Le Mots et Les Choses (Words and Things): An Evening With Future Plan and Program, Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA; The Collector’s Guide to New Art Photography Vol. 2, Chelsea Art Museum, New York, NY 2007 Game Bird Sampler, White Box Annex, New York, NY

2009 Jerome Foundation Fellowship/ Residency, Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Red Wing, MN 2008 Residency, Ucross Foundation for the Arts, Clearmont, WY 2007 Residency, Millay Colony for the Arts, Austerlitz, NY

This publication was organized on the occasion of the exhibition Tenses: Artists in Residence 2015–16 at The Studio Museum in Harlem, July 13–October 30, 2016. Artist-in-Residence is supported by The Robert Lehman Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, and by endowments established by the Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Trust and Andrea Frank Foundation. Tenses was organized by Amanda Hunt, Assistant Curator. This publication was produced by Hallie Ringle, Assistant Curator and Doris Zhao, Curatorial Assistant, with Amanda Hunt. All images courtesy the artist unless otherwise noted. © 2016 The Studio Museum in Harlem

Studio views Photos: Adam Reich

Sarah Lewis is an author, curator and professor at Harvard University. Before joining the faculty, she held curatorial positions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Modern, London and wrote The Rise, The Los Angeles Times best-seller that has been translated into 6 languages and has been made required reading at universities. Lewis serves on the advisory council of the International Review of African-American Art and the board of the Andy Warhol Foundation of the Visual Arts, Creative Time. She received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard, an M.Phil from Oxford, and her Ph.D. from Yale. Simone White is a poet and critic. Her most recent collection of poems is Of Being Dispersed. She is Program Director at The Poetry Project and lives in Brooklyn.

Danielle Jackson is the 2015–16 Friends of Education Twelve Month Intern, Department of Media and Performance Art, The Museum of Modern Art. Artists' portrait by King Texas Designed by Common Name Printing by Cosmos Communications The Studio Museum in Harlem 144 W 125th Street New York, NY 10027 studiomuseum.org