We Go as They: Artists in Residence 2016–17

WE GO AS THEY

We Go as They brings together the work of Autumn Knight, Julia Phillips, and Andy Robert, the 2016–17 artists in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem. In many ways, each resident artist engages understandings of liminal space—in concept or form—and stages his or her practice firmly between defined modes of working.

Stemming from this ambiguity, the title of the exhibition, We Go as They, reflects Knight's, Phillips's, and Robert’s deep investigations of the undefined.

Knight, for example, explores the flexible boundaries of identity and psyche through her serial performance piece Sanity TV (2017). Knight stages a fictional talk show and conducts interviews during the course of the performance to create an atmosphere that oscillates between tense and absurd, leaving audience members second-guessing their responses to both the artist and fellow viewers. Each of Knight’s prompts takes on multiple meanings, creating a duality in participants’ conscious. Promoting neither sanity nor insanity, she complicates our understanding of language and pushes the boundaries of mental health, humor, and performance.

Phillips’s enigmatic ceramic sculp­ tures invite both associations with tools and with the body, yet their true functions remain uncertain. Viewers are invited to imagine potential purposes. The surface of each work is packed with tension— Phillips experiments with the malleability of clay to form metal-like rods, belts, and machines. Even the glazes she uses emulate their perceived industrial material sources, though their extreme fragility renders them useless as utilitarian objects.

Opposite: AUTUMN KNIGHT’s studio, 2017

ANDY ROBERT Nocturne 125 in Gold and Silver, crossroad between Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X Boulevard (2nd Take), 2017

While Phillips engaged in this form of making—seemingly functional tools about the body—during the residency her sculpture has further addressed specific historical figures, such as Saartjie Baartman and Josephine Baker.

In his poignant series of nocturne paintings of Harlem, Robert formally engages the histories of painting, from French Social Realism to the Harlem Renaissance to conceptual abstraction. Rearticulating these styles into a new, radical pictorial language, Robert works in the space between the abstract and the figurative.

They are generally understood as separate styles, but Robert posits them as existing in a continuous dialogue and, in turn, draws together seemingly opposed methods of painting to explore an undefined space between the two. His contemplative nightscapes capture the ambiguous future of Harlem, a place in constant transition as gentrification threatens businesses, 1

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WE GO AS THEY

homes, and people who have lived here for generations.

As an exhibition title, We Go as They implies a group, a communal sense of being or witnessing that anchors each resident’s practice. Knight quite literally uses community in her work—audiences who, during her performances, collectively share psychological and emotional experiences. In one video work, Meesh (2017), Knight slowly climbs a staircase and examines the access to spaces, both physical and social, political, economic, and intellectual privileges. The video is partly inspired by the administration of Barack and Michelle Obama, whose ascension to the presidency symbolically and tangibly proved that access to power and space was possible for African-American men and women. At the same time, Knight critiques the treatment of the Obamas by members of the press and opposing political party during their time as President and First Lady.

In her sculptures, Phillips engages black feminist thought and feminist art history. Each work in the exhibition serves as metaphor for social hierarchies and power dynamics. Exoticizer, Worn Out (Josephine Baker’s Belt) (2017), composed of a banana skirt fashioned into a belt, makes reference to Josephine Baker. A dancer, entertainer, and political activist whose banana-skirt performance was popular during the 1920s and 1930s, Baker was often fetishized in the overwhelmingly

Eurocentric spaces where she performed.

Like Exoticizer, Phillips’s other works, including Extruder and Fixator (both 2017), follow the artist’s function-like naming convention, which emphasizes perceived uses and metaphorical content.

Thinking of the community around the residency, Robert’s nightscapes are each a mediation on the nighttime rituals that take place in Harlem, acts that, however small, determine the future of the neighborhood. Paintings such as Check II Check (2017) reference local residents’ financial preparations for the upcoming day. In others, such as Platinum Blonde SaVonne (2017), Robert articulates the future of the place through a specific subject—one who, through Robert’s references to artists such as Barkley L. Hendricks and Jacob Lawrence, embodies the past and future of Harlem. In each, Robert speaks to an indeterminate black future in the neighborhood.

In a more tangible sense, We Go as They defines Knight, Phillips, and Robert’s close conversation with each other as they negotiated the physical and psychological boundaries that come with working in close proximity. Their practices, though different in form, are united by an investment in exploring space, identity, and power. The exhibition title also suggests the cohort the three artists have formed, bound by their experience in the residency, as well as the community of artists, curators, and Museum staff that surround and nurture the program.

—Hallie Ringle, Assistant Curator

JULIA PHILLIPS Fixator (#1), 2017 Courtesy the artist and Campoli Presti (London/Paris)

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AUTUMN

KNIGHT

by Rashida Bumbray

Autumn Knight is the first black woman performance artist to participate in The Studio Museum in Harlem’s artist residency in its near fifty-year history.1 While black artists have long been the drivers of the avant-garde, black performance art maintains a radical posture within contemporary art. Specifically, Knight has arrived at a moment when black women’s cultural production is finally being acknowledged for its foundational contributions to society. From the earlier radical performance practices of artists such as Maren Hassinger, Barbara McCullough, and Blondell Cummings, to the contemporary work of Simone Leigh and Okwui Okpokwasili (Knight’s critical dialogues partner), and even Ava DuVernay in the mainstream, black women artists are central to the critical conversations shaping the current cultural landscape.

Knight is a performance artist’s performance artist. Unlike in the work of others who have, by tradition, created objects for the market, objects, videos, and ephemera are not emphasized for Knight. She is committed to the medium of live performance.

And in this work of centering a live process and negotiating meaning between and across subjects in real time, she refuses the “act with a final goal,”2 and hence requires our full presence as she unravels, unseats, and shifts the ground of the moment.

Throughout her residency, Knight has been focused on an investigation of black interiority—an exploration of emotion, sadness, intimacy, and depression.

Sanity TV, 2017 Photo by Scott Rudd

AUTUMN KNIGHT’s studio, 2017

Sanity TV (2017), Knight’s ongoing live work, takes the structure of a talk show that invites the participation of the “audience” as guests driving a plot. Knight determines the tone and structure, and those in attendance determine the content. She calls herself the host. Think Oprah, Iyanla Vanzant, Miranda July. I would call her a conductor. Think Butch Morris, Sun Ra, DJ Screw, Erykah Badu.

Knight is fundamentally a student of theater. Drawing concepts from Augusto Boal, Paulo Freire, Bertolt Brecht, and Ngugı wa Thiong’o, she uses the experimental space of her practice to engage black people in a conversation—a process of play and discovery as a methodology for self-understanding. She conducts an open, unresolved process that is both responsive and improvisational, dependent on the energy of the audience.

A foundational grounding for Knight has been her work with homeless people dealing with schizophrenia, whom she describes “as real people dealing with real human problems.”3 Her technique of 5

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spending days in conversation with people with severe mental illness means “falling into their world.”4 This falling has become a metaphor for Knight’s own approach to performance—guiding the audience into a space of freedom, an opening to the absurd. This absurdity is a central point of departure for her practice, an acknowledgment of the psychological violence enacted by white supremacy. Not unlike the “psychosomatic disorders” that Franz Fanon identified as consequences of the colonial context, Knight wants to unmask our suppressed responses to the contemporary trauma of racial and spatial violence: police murders, displacement, gentrification, and social forgetting.5 Creating a space that draws from theater, improvisation, therapy, and grouprelation work, Knight sets the conditions Sanity TV, 2017 Photos by Scott Rudd

for her performances to devolve. She persuades us, through her posturing and the sing-song quality of her voice, to go on a ride toward the peculiar. Within this uneasy space, there is a tangible and intense care for our collective emotional well-being.

She sweeps across people’s feet with a broom. Some folks, people not raised in the Global South, even let her do it.6 She also sweeps the floors of the performance space. While she’s not looking to air our dirty laundry, she is intending to gather all the dirt as a reminder of just how much of it there is. When someone asked her if she is a witch, she replied, “maybe I am.” Kamau Brathwaite has described Magical Realism as the forms we have developed in the New World “as an alternative to insanity.”7 In a recent incarnation of Sanity TV at Studio Museum, Knight invited a young 6

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man from the audience up, as a guest.

She asked him, “Who are you?” The young man, looking down at the ground, answered in a way that suggested that he was unsure of himself. Knight used the opportunity to emphasize the importance of the moment. She told him to stop, as she brought out the broom to sweep the ground around him, and asked him to start again.

She requires her guests to “take seriously the opportunity to ‘say anything.’” Because as Knight says, “We get so few of them.

We do not get to have emotion and affect, because the conditions that we are living under are so problematic, we are all trying to find our own normalcy within it, and we need spaces that acknowledge the insanity of it all.”8 As the current political reality becomes increasingly hostile for black lives, Knight’s charge to create moments of freedom—however temporarily—align to our own desperation for moments of levity, escape, and nurturing. Her work in performance mirrors Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’s description of the space of nineteenth century Weeksville, “a bastion of the idea of freedom in a land fundamentally unfree.” 9

3 Autumn Knight in discussion with the author, August 2017.

4 Ibid.

5 Frantz Fanon became a spokesman for third-world peoples of all nations by describing in sensitive, clinically astute terms the psychology of racism and its untoward effects upon oppressor and oppressed.

6 Superstition posits that sweeping one’s feet is a bad omen. If a person sweeps across your feet with the broom you must spit on it—or you will end up to jail, or never get married. Interpretations vary.

7 Kamau Brathwaite is a Barbadian poet and theorist. He has developed an intensive body of work on Magical Realism—a movement that he expands beyond Latin American literature to include many genres and forms created by people of African descent in the New World.

8 Autumn Knight, Sanity TV, (August 4, 2017; New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem.), performance.

9 Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, “Freed But Not Free,” Creative Time Reports, September 17, 2014, http://creativetimereports.org/2014/09/17 /sharifa-rhodes-pitts-freed-but-not-free-black -radical-brooklyn/

NOTES 1 Performance artists who have been artists in residence at the Studio Museum include Dave McKenzie, Clifford Owens, and EJ Hill.

2 Jones, Amelia and Andrew Stephenson.

Performing the Body, Performing the Text, Introduction, p.1, 199

SANITY TV PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE

September 17, 2017 3 pm November 12, 2017 3 pm

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December 10, 2017 3 pm January 7, 2018 3 pm

AUTUMN

AUTUMN KNIGHT’s studio, 2017

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KNIGHT

2015 Keep Some Sunshine on Your Face, She Works Flexible, Houston Latencies, Project Row Houses + Diverseworks, Houston 2014 Underground, Afronaut(a) Film Series, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, Pittsburgh

State of the Art, Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, AK Yates vs. Wheatley, BOX 13 ArtSpace, Houston Galveston Artist in Residence Exhibition, Galveston Artist Residency Gallery, Galveston, TX

Lone Star Explosion, Houston International Performance Biennale, Houston Antena, Blaffer Museum, Houston Ghost of Rauschenberg, Galveston Artists Residency, Galveston, TX 2013 I AM HIM, Community Artists’ Collective, Houston do it: houston, Alabama Song Art Space, Houston Coming Through the Gap in the Mountain on an Elephant, University Museum Texas Southern University, Houston 2012–13 Project Row Houses Round 37, Project Row Houses, Houston

Born 1980 in Houston, TX

EDUCATION

2010 MA, Drama Therapy, New York University, New York 2003 BA, Theatre Arts/Speech Communications, Dillard University, New Orleans 2002 Certificate, Arts Management & Marketing, University of London, London SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2017 Autumn Knight: In Rehearsal, Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, IL 2015 She Think She Kawaii, Artpace, San Antonio, TX Latencies, Skowhegan Project Space, New York Latencies, New Museum, New York 2014 GYN, Fresh Arts, Houston WALL, Galveston Artist Residency, Galveston, TX 2012–13 Futz: A Research Method, Project Row Houses, Houston SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS/ PERFORMANCE

RESIDENCIES AND AWARDS

2018 Declaration, Institute for Contemporary Art, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA 2017 I’ve Only Known My Own, Optica Centre for Contemporary Art, Montreal Collaboration Extravaganza Featuring Autumn Knight & John Pluecker & Et Cetera Gallery, The Poetry Project, New York Say Her Name, Art League Houston, Houston 2016 The La-a Consortium, New Cities Future Ruins, Dallas Chale Wote Festival, Accra, Ghana I’ve Only Known My Own, Flex Space Houston 2015–16 I sland Time, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Houston

2016 Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME 2015–16 Dance Source Houston, Houston 2015 Yamaguchi Institute of Contemporary Art, Yamaguchi, Japan

Artpace, San Antonio, TX

Artadia Award 2014 The Idea Fund Grant, Texas

Millay Colony for the Arts, Austerlitz, NY

In-Situ-In-Place, Pendle, United Kingdom 2013–14 Galveston Artist Residency, Galveston, TX 2012 Taller Portobelo Norte, Panama City, Panama

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JULIA

PHILLIPS

by Daniella Rose King

Julia Phillips notes that her sculpture-based practice has undergone a transformation— from “tools” to “apparatuses” to “scenes.”

The narrative thrust of these “scenes,” her latest group of sculptures produced while in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem, moves the audience through distinct theaters of reflection, pleasure, submission, pain, and domination, and back again. The work is a complex negotiation of space (domestic, public, and intimate), boundaries (psychological, material, and bodily), and transgression of both of these categories. It is a site where language and meaning are manipulated, informed by black feminist thought and theory, as well as feminist art history and artistic practices, and indebted to critiques of the intersection of race, gender, colonialism, and psychoanalysis.

Driven by an autobiographical reg­ister, her ceramic, steel, and concrete sculptures portray imagined bodies in moments of exchange, loosely characterized by a passive recipient and an active agent. This binary of giver and receiver, active and passive, is particularly informed by her reading of “penetration” as an abstract concept, marked by biological determinism and tied to feminist discourse.1 Penetration is interpreted by the artist as a psychological and biological position that has shaped, and continues to permeate, our understanding of heteronormative gender positions and identities (penetrator=male, penetrated= female). The persistent logic of the binary reveals itself and is reaffirmed even in the Operator (with Blinder, Muter, Penetrator, Aborter), 2017

material and technical aspects of the work; it is not rare to find fixings and parts technically described as male/female.2 The penetrator/penetrated dichotomy further leans on an understanding of power relations that underlaid the antebellum era. How have certain legacies of slavery, subjugation, and sexual violence informed ideology, society, our understanding of the psyche, the economy, and histories of art and ideas? Ariane Cruz coins the term “racial sexual alterity” to describe a “perceived entangled racial and sexual otherness that characterizes the lived experience of Blackwomanhood . . . [that] expresses the importance of both race and sexuality as complex social constructions that are imposed on the Black female body.”3 This call for an intersectional approach to (black female) sexuality was made by artist Lorraine O’Grady in her seminal essay “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity.” In her opening paragraphs, she writes, “A kaleidoscope of not-white females, Asian, Native American, Latina, and African, have played distinct parts in the West’s theater of sexual hierarchy. But it is the African female who, by virtue of color and feature and extreme metaphors of enslavement, is at the outermost reaches of ‘otherness.’”4 Phillips’s object-based study of seemingly contained and intimate power dynamics acts as a viewfinder for locating the multivalent roots of this pervasive phenomenon.

It is through four works that act as “scenes” or microcosms—in concert with a 11

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number of wall-hanging “tools” and works on paper—that Phillips makes manifest these preoccupations, titled Operator, Fixator, Exoticizer, and Extruder. As with many of Phillips’s sculptures, these titles guide the viewer and hint at the intended use of the apparatuses, as well as the exchange or extraction of power they involve. Verbs become nouns, as her subjects become objects—transformations that can, and do, oscillate in the work.

Operator (with Blinder, Muter, Penetrator, Aborter) (2017) is a mise-en-scène that unfolds on what appears to be a clinician’s trolley. Constructed of brushed steel, with two pairs of glossy white ceramic handles on each side molded by the artist’s hands, the trolley displays a disconcerting array of objects. Are these a doctor’s tools (one, titled Aborter, suggests this)? Or weapons of torture (Muter, Penetrator, and Blinder seem to allude to this purpose)? Or perhaps they belong not to a single person, but to a number of agents with conflicting intentions. The objects form a narrative of seemingly contradictory readings: sexual violence, medical procedures, objectification and subjection, pain and pleasure, sensory deprivation, domination and submission—all means of exerting control and power over a body. Whether these objects were born of personal experience is of less significance than the structural and systemic realities of exploitation and objectification from which they take their cues. They are hybridized forms that amalgamate histories of medieval, antebellum, and very modern devices for control and submission, while borrowing from a surrealist repertoire. Aborter, a rudimentary

egg-shaped tool in two halves, one with a saw-toothed edge, seems destined to inflict pain through an almost unspeakable extraction; Blinder is a ceramic eye mask with its two holes blown through, with torn edges evocative of a forced entry; Muter is a ceramic lower-face mask that appears to fit over the end of the nose while covering the mouth area to prevent speech; Penetrator consists of a foot-long poker, again made in ceramic, that has pierced through a cast of the artist’s closed lips.

The powerful, visceral nature of these four objects ties them intimately to the body, and therein lies much of their representational and symbolic power. It is hard not to look at these pieces and imagine their effects on one’s own body, and the resulting discomfort, pain, or obliteration.

Fixator #2 (2017) suggests a discomfiting, contorted meeting of two bodies.

Four key elements of the sculpture allude to this, from the bottom to the top of the human-scaled structure: two pairs of glossy footprints on the tiled floor, one pair of hand grips, a cast of the front of a crotch, and a chin rest. This combination of components calls to mind a convoluted exercise machine, or slightly ridiculous sex toy, in which the persons using it are both reduced to their sexual organs and positioned front to back, with no means of eye contact, recognition, or contact besides a direct, forceful imposition of the penetrator onto the penetrated. Not to mention the acrobatic proclivities assumed in at least one of the users. This fixation on particular organs works with the title, and could be extended to readings of the hypersexualization of our culture in general, as well as the primacy of 12

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not only the male gaze, but also the phallus itself in contemporary pornography.

A banana-yellow glazed ceramic beltcum-holster is laid upon a hip-height metal pedestal bearing the name Exoticizer, Worn Out (Josephine Baker’s Belt) (2017), in reference to the complex and pioneering transatlantic entertainer, activist, and French resistance agent, and one of her most famous performances and enduring images—dancing in a skirt fringed with bananas. The belt is made up of holster-like receptors that look to be able to hold the stem of a banana, itself a powerful symbol of the phallus, or perhaps a more protective object—a bullet. Baker stands as not just a symbol of colonial desire and racist stereotyping, but as a slippery figure: entertainment icon and international superstar, intellectual, government agent, exuberant exhibitionist, and civil rights activist. Phillips’s presentation of a fictional girdle for Baker, placed almost clinically on a plinth evocative of industrial surfaces is at odds with the folly and ecstatic character of Baker’s performances and self-presentation. Yet the artist seems to

Exoticizer, (Josephine Baker’s Belt), 2017 Courtesy the artist and Campoli Presti (London/New York)

foreground those complexities of her subject, at once exoticized and self-exoticizing, while conjuring a fantastical apparatus that Baker could utilize for a performance and a military operation in turn. (Legend has it that she smuggled photos for Allied forces in her underwear during World War II.) As the title suggests, the belt is “worn out,” and displays signs of physical overuse and subsequent fragility. This is a sentiment that the prolific performer Baker may have appreciated, and that resonates with the historicized, overdetermined tropes, symbols, and images of the (desired) black female body. The title is further ambiguous about the nature of the belt. Without a wearer, how does it function, and whom does it exoticize? Could it be repurposed?

It also complicates the aspect of agency, a key factor in understanding Baker’s work as an exercise in self-exoticization.

The final work in Phillips’s presentation, Extruder (2017), could be described as an architecture of exploitation, a closed loop that contains traces of violence, sexual desire, and humiliation. Working with concrete for the first time, in combination with premade metal piping, the artist has given the work a distinctly industrial feeling. Yet handmade ceramic fixtures and tools—including a mask with a gaping, gagging mouth, a rustic auger with an almost decorative handle and traces of an indiscernible liquid, and an ambiguous orifice—introduce a human scale and tactility, and further heighten the tension of the installation. As with Phillips’s “scenes,” the viewer is invited to encounter the work like the scene of a crime, and piece together events from recognizable tropes such as 13

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to communicate this, Phillips engenders a new ground from which to imagine alterity in relation to power. Complicating the immutability at the core of the male/female, penetrator/penetrated binary, with imagined bodies that corrupt or exist outside of that dichotomy, the artist performs a “retrieval of the mutilated female [and othered] bodies.”6

body parts, via casts of mouths, hands, and abdomens, and any other visual information we can grasp. Extruder, like Fixator #2 is suggestive of a compromised body, made vulnerable by the contorted position it is forced into.

Phillips’s sculpture embraces the messy, fleshy, contradictory realities of intimate relations and the social, imaginary, and physical institutions that they impact and conspire with. There is an urgency to the work that seeks to identify, reveal, and undermine the power dynamics that she observes, and to suggest new means of locating agency and pleasure. The haptic tendencies of the work—from their human scale, to the utilization of glazes to invoke bodily textures, surfaces, and interiors— coalesce as an “abstract convergence of touch, feeling, and relation . . . attempting to translate a thought about feeling in advance of and in the midst of feeling.”5 In many ways her work is a critical excavation of histories of power dynamics through the lens of specific acts of physical exchange.

By narrowing her field of investigation to the unequal transactions between certain bodies, and creating a visual vocabulary

JULIA PHILLIPS’s studio, 2017

NOTES 1 Julia Phillips, “NLS In: Autumn Knight, Jessica Bell brown, Joiri Minaya, Julia Phillips, Oneika Russell,” streamed lived on December 11, 2016, accessed July 28, 2017, www.youtube.com /watch?v=IDdzHTulVVg&feature=youtu.be&t=346 2 Ibid.

3 Ariane Cruz, “Beyond Black and Blue: BDSM, Internet Pornography, and Black Female Sexuality,” Feminist Studies, 41 (2015): 411.

4 Lorraine O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” in New Feminist Criticism: Art/Identity/Action, eds. Joanna Frueh, Cassandra L. Langer, and Arlene Raven (New York: HarperCollins Icon Editions, 1994), 153.

5 Rizvana Bradley, “Introduction: other sensualities,” Women & Performance. a journal of feminist theory, 24 (2014): 130.

6 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17 (1987): 68.

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Born 1985 in Hamburg, Germany

EDUCATION

2016 Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York 2015 MFA, Columbia University, School of the Arts, New York 2012 Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (University of Fine Arts of Hamburg) SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2016 Impenetrable Entry, Campoli Presti, London 2013 Several Reasons to Migrate, Hinterconti, Hamburg SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2017 Dreamers Awake, White Cube Bermondsey, London That I am reading backwards and into for a purpose, to go on:, The Kitchen, New York 2016 Whitney Independent Study Program Studio Exhibition, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York In Place Of, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York 2015 A Constellation, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York Floating Point, Judith Charles Gallery, New York

MFA Thesis Exhibition, Fisher Landau Center for Art, New York New Work New York, biennial survey of work by New York City MFA students and recent graduates, 695 Grand Street, Brooklyn The Feminist Sex Shoppe, On The Ground Floor, Los Angeles 2014 Temporary Autonomous Zone 3, with ƒƒ, Teatr Studio, Warsaw MFA First Year Show, Wallach Gallery, Columbia University, New York Read Your Call, Galerie Diane Kruse, Hamburg

Expanded V, 2016

Networking Tips for Shy People, 200 Livingston Street, Brooklyn Erogenous Zone, Galerie im Körnerpark, Berlin 2012 Index 12, Kunsthaus, Hamburg Summer Intensive Show, LeRoy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University, New York Benefit Auction, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg Thesis Show One.Equal, University of Fine Arts, Hamburg 2011 Index 11, Kunsthaus, Hamburg DASO PK, Westwerk, Hamburg What the Fox, Goldsmiths, University of London, London February 4th, Forum Factory, Berlin 2010 Zu den Dingen und zurück, Collection Lenikus, Vienna RESIDENCIES AND AWARDS

2016 Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME 2015 Arts @ Renaissance Residency, Brooklyn

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ANDY

ROBERT

by Ian Alteveer

Color studies painted on sheets of canvas and paper line the walls of Andy Robert’s workspace at The Studio Museum in Harlem in a grid that travels wall to wall, floor to ceiling. Each page is labeled with the poetic names of every pigment, all spelled out by hand, a practice that grew more rigorous while he was in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture.

Robert uses these keys to build his layered pictures, and finds among the many strokes of paint that line the walls each finish, tone, and technique he wants to place on his meticulous surfaces. In his painting Check II Check, which takes as its subject a streetscape not far from the Museum, the facades of a check casher and a deli on Malcom X just north of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard seem to dissolve in shimmering layers of metallic, iridescent, and pearlescent paint in lavender, black, creamy yellow, hot pink, and silver. Across areas of both heavy impasto and thinly applied glaze, the scene becomes a meditation on nighttime peregrinations through a shifting neighborhood—a moody and tantalizing nocturne.

Exploring the streets around the Studio Museum is an important aspect of Robert’s practice. Less a flâneur—that embodiment of the (white and male) privileged and dispassionate regard—Robert thinks instead of the Situationist dérive in his drifting passages through the city. Author Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, in her masterful work about her own geographic and literary rambles through Harlem, finds the ultimate signifier Check II Check, 2017

Platinum Blonde SaVonne, 2017

for the neighborhood in a famous line from Ralph Ellison’s 1948 essay about the place: “One ‘is’ literally, but one is nowhere; one wanders dazed in a ghetto maze, a ‘displaced person’ of American democracy.”1 Earlier in his essay, Ellison writes, “Harlem is a ruin—many of its ordinary aspects . . . are indistinguishable from the distorted images that appear in dreams and, like muggers haunting a lonely hall, quiver in the waking mind with hidden and threatening significance.”2 In Robert’s pictures, that ruinous cityscape is pictured through paint that actually seems to crumble. Passages of coarse, sandy-textured pigment, as well as dried chunks of impasto, are clustered on his surfaces.

While New York is not a new city for the artist, his experience of Harlem during 17

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his residency at Studio Museum has been a fresh one. Through each locale in which he has lived, Robert feels the pulse of its specificity. Robert was born in Haiti and immigrated to Brooklyn, specifically the predominately Caribbean neighborhood of East Flatbush and Ditmas Park, with his family in the early 1990s. After attending high school on Long Island, he went to the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore for his undergraduate degree, followed by California Institute of the Arts for graduate school. “I didn’t go to CalArts to paint,” Robert said recently, but the mentorship and conceptual rigor of teachers there such as Thomas Lawson, Charles Gaines, and Sam Durant clearly bear some effect on his practice.3 His travels in the summer of 2010 to Rwanda for two residency programs on human rights and post-genocide studies were also formative.

ANDY ROBERT’s studio, 2017

In each locale Robert inhabits as an artist, he finds subjects not only in the cityscape around him, but also among those who also call it home. His recent portrait Platinum Blonde SaVonne takes as its subject an employee at the Museum named SaVonne Anderson—a stylish, urbane woman whose platinum bleached hair caught his eye. Robert has long admired the tonal portraits of Beauford Delaney, the expatriate artist who spent formative years of his career in Harlem, starting in 1929.

Thinking in particular of his 1968 portrait of Ella Fitzgerald at Savannah College of Art and Design Museum, in which the singer’s famous visage hovers in a field of glowing, golden-hued layers of brushstrokes, Robert began painting his own versions of the picture. He began a tonal portrait of Anderson that aims to capture her worldly energy with similarly yellow 18

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tones. For Delaney, after his move to Paris in the 1950s, his use of yellow involved an aspect of exorcism—that particular hue symbolized for him the power of inspiration, illumination, and healing. James Harlem Sings the Blues, 2017

Baldwin, a fellow expatriate, begins his introduction to Delaney’s work for a 1964 exhibition by describing their walks around New York when they first met. “Perhaps I am so struck by the light in Beauford’s 19

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work because he comes from darkness.”

He continues, “But the darkness of Beauford’s beginnings . . . was a blackblue midnight indeed, opaque and full of sorrow. And I do not know . . . what kind of strength it was that enabled him to make so dogged and splendid a journey.”4 That shimmering layers of paint can be sources of transformation and repair, and that colors can take on meanings beyond mere representation, are also important aspects of Robert’s own pictures.

In another recent, tonally resplendent work, Harlem Sings the Blues (2017), Robert painted a parrot against a leafy backdrop. On a deep, slate-blue metallic ground, layers of purple, green, and silver create a thick, impastoed surface in which the bird seems to blend into its verdant backdrop. With nuanced references to music and color, Robert made this picture another nocturne (“nocturne” as a term began in the musical world before being used to describe James McNeill Whistler’s moody evening views of the 1870s). As Robert said recently about his own nighttime views, they are “paintings that have a certain light, focused on the night.” Robert, however, doesn’t think of his nocturnal views as dark, sinister, or foreboding, but rather as about what is to come when the next day breaks. For him they are about the “thinking or reflection that happens at the end of the day when you are thinking of tomorrow; so the end of day not as an ending but the beginning of the next.”5 But who can participate in a dérive?

When artist Renée Green was asked to submit a text on the Situationists for a

German anthology in the early 2000s, she imagined a black, female participant in the field, in part inspired by her reading of Angela Y. Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (1999).

For Green, it is the blues singer who, for her, might best embody the complexities of a dérive undertaken from a position that is different than that of the white, straight, male Situationist. These “various versions of so-called female transgressive behavior which involved play and pleasure with the attention to the various shades of the everyday” are exactly what blueswomen might accomplish.6 To think of women such as these singing for glistening, glittering nighttime Harlem—part ruinous, part romantic, rich in history—is also to experience Andy Robert’s painting in all of its many-layered magic.

NOTES 1 Ralph Ellison, “Harlem Is Nowhere,” Harper’s, August 1964, accessed August 2, 2017, harpers .org/archive/2014/08/harlem-is-nowhere-2/; quoted in Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), 117.

2 Ibid.

3 Andy Robert, in conversation with the author, August 2, 2017.

4 James Baldwin, “Beauford Delaney” (1964), reprinted in Afro-American Writing: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry, eds. Richard A. Long and Eugenia W. Collier (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1990), 539.

5 Andy Robert, in conversation with the author, August 2, 2017.

6 Renée Green, “Situationist Text” (2001), in Other Planes of There: Selected Writings (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014), 102.

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ROBERT

Bienal de las Fronteras, Instituto Tamaulipeco para la Cultura y las Artes, Tamaulipas, Mexico

Whitney Independent Study Program Studio Exhibition, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York 2014 LATimes Festival of Books, University of Southern California, Los Angeles 2013 Black Box, Lacen Project, Los Angeles

Murmurial, Curtat Tunnel, Lausanne, Switzerland

4 Fragments, The Bindery Projects, Minneapolis

Thrice the Bed, Lacen Project: Inaugural Opening, Los Angeles 2012 The Subterraneans, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA

Ex Libris, Sabina Lee Gallery, Los Angeles

To the Lighthouse, JB Jurve, Los Angeles 2011 Do We Surf The Wake?, Concord Artspace, Los Angeles

So, Sangfroid, Pieter, Los Angeles

Open Ending, Farley Building, Los Angeles

Intimacies, MFA Graduate Exhibition, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA

Born 1984 in Les Cayes, Haiti

EDUCATION

2014 Whitney Independent Study Program, New York 2011 MFA, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA 2008 BFA, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2015 Heavy Rain and Lightning, Full Haus, Los Angeles Blind Contour, Papillon Gallery, Los Angeles 2011 Andy Robert’s Thesis Show: “I Witness Murambi,” L-Shape Gallery at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA 2010 Notes from Rwanda: Drawings, Interdisciplinary Genocide Studies, Kigali, Rwanda

Dear Darlin’, L-Shape Gallery at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2016 S/Election: Democracy, Citizenship, Freedom, Barnsdall Art Park, LA Municipal Gallery, Los Angeles

Open Air Prisons, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles

A Change of Heart, Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles

Aunt Nancy, Night Gallery, Los Angeles 2015 A Constellation, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York

Sound Like, Herron School of Art and Design Gallery, Indianapolis, IN

Voleur (thief)– Jamilah Sabur & Andy Robert, performance in conjunction with Sound Like, Dimensions Variable, Miami

RESIDENCIES AND AWARDS

2016 Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME 2015–16 Black Artist Retreat, Chicago 2014 An Itinerant Seminar, Beta-Local, San Juan, Puerto Rico 2013 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant Award Parkfield Ranch Art Residency, Parkfield, CA

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EXHIBITION CHECKLIST

AUTUMN KNIGHT

JULIA PHILLIPS

ANDY ROBERT

Meesh, 2017 Single-channel video TRT 00:08:00

Exoticizer, Worn Out (Josephine Baker’s Belt), 2017 Ceramics, brass hardware, metal pedestal 39 × 18 × 18 in.

Courtesy the artist and Campoli Presti (London/Paris)

Call to Mecca, 2017 Oil on linen 88 × 120 in.

Courtesy the artist and Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles

Roaches Aren’t the Easiest Creatures to Milk, 2017 Single-channel video TRT 00:05:00 Sanity Television episodes 1–4, 2017 Performance TRT 01:30:00 The History of Mystery, 2017 Single-channel video TRT 00:07:00

Extruder, 2017 Ceramics, metal pipe structure, concrete tiles 34 × 51 × 68 in.

Expanded V, 2016 Relief ink on paper 38 × 25 in.

Monoprint 2 of 3 Expanded VI, 2016 Relief ink on paper 29 × 22 in.

Monoprint 2 of 3 Fixator (#2), 2017 Ceramics, metal structure, tiles 70 × 25 × 31 in.

Operator (with Blinder, Muter, Penetrator, Aborter), 2017 Ceramics, metal wheel table 41 × 45 × 18 in.

Check II Check, 2017 Oil on canvas 71 × 59 ½ in.

Courtesy the artist and Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles Greyhound to Harlem, 2017 Oil on canvas 72 ½ × 120 in.

Courtesy the artist and Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles Harlem Sings the Blues, 2017 Oil on canvas 48 × 36 in.

Courtesy the artist and Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles Nocturne 125 in Gold and Silver, crossroad between Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X Boulevard (2nd Take), 2017 Oil on canvas 59 × 69 in.

Courtesy the artist and Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles Platinum Blonde SaVonne, 2017 Oil on canvas 40 × 40 in.

Courtesy the artist and Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles

All works courtesy the artist unless otherwise noted

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ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE 2016–17

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This publication was organized on the occasion of the exhibition We Go as They: Artists in Residence 2016–17 at The Studio Museum in Harlem, September 14, 2017–January 7, 2018.

The Studio Museum in Harlem 144 W. 125th Street New York, NY 10027 studiomuseum.org © 2017 The Studio Museum in Harlem The Artist-in-Residence program is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; the Jerome Foundation; Kiki Smith; RBC Foundation—USA; the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; and by endowments established by the Andrea Frank Fund; the Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Trust, and Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

We Go as They was organized

by Hallie Ringle, Assistant Curator.

This publication was produced

by Doris Zhao, Curatorial Assistant, with Hallie Ringle.

Designed by Miko McGinty Inc. Copyedited by Samir S. Patel Artists’ portrait by Texas Isaiah Photos by Adam Reich unless otherwise noted All images courtesy the artist unless otherwise noted Printing by Cosmos Communications

Opposite: Studio views

Ian Alteveer is Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. At The Met he organized three recent Roof Garden Commissions for Pierre Huyghe (2015), Dan Graham with Günter Vogt (2014), and Imran Qureshi (2013). His recent exhibition projects have also included retrospectives for Kerry James Marshall (2016) and Marisa Merz (2017), as well as for David Hockney, forthcoming this autumn. He has an undergraduate degree from Stanford University and completed his qualifying exams for a PhD at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 2006.

Rashida Bumbray is a curator and choreographer.

She is senior program manager for the Arts Exchange, the Open Society Foundations’ global arts for social justice initiative.

Bumbray was guest curator at Creative Time for the public art exhibition Funk, God, Jazz and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn (2014). From 2006 to 2011, Bumbray served as Associate Curator at The Kitchen, where she organized solo exhibitions

by Leslie Hewitt, Simone Leigh, Adam Pendleton, and Mai Thu Perret as well as performances by Derrick Adams, Sanford Biggers, Kalup Linzy, Marc Cary, Kyle Abraham, and Camille A. Brown among others. Bumbray began her career as Curatorial Assistant at The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Her performance work has been presented by Harlem Stage, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Museum, Project Row Houses, SummerStage, Tate Modern, and The Whitney Museum of American Art. Daniella Rose King is a writer, a curator, and the 2017 Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania.