8-PAGE PHOTO EDITORIAL SPREAD S

Amoako Boafo

Curated by Benjamin Kwaku Boateng London

Looking Through Two Fingers, 2018, Oil on paper Krystal 1, 2018, Oil on paper

Representing individuals from the surrounding countries of his native Ghana, Boafo attributes to his portraits a natural grace, poise and elegance. Artists who are able to achieve this palpable sense of tenderness within the scope of their working process are few and far between, yet Boafo does exactly this, communicating both warmth and vulnerability in his intimate portrayals of what he terms the “Black Diaspora’. As with other contemporary portrait artists, including Alice Neel, Jordan Casteel and Noah Davis, Boafo attempts to create a new vernacular, reframing his own experience and that of his subjects to include a more variegated understanding of the Black Experience. Considering the socio-political landscape of the past two years, coupled with how racism is alive and well in the world, adds yet another level of complexity and relevance to Boafo’s project. Giving credence to this is the idea of a diaspora, of being uprooted and displaced again and again not within the context of a life “well lived,” but in the context of abuse, bigotry and racism, is the sad engine that drives these enigmatic paintings. Boafo seeks less to diagnose a problem and more to initiate a human connection, whereby, we as viewers might arrive at our own perceptions, coming to these images with fresh eyes. The way he paints his figures also suggests this widening diaspora of change, understanding and resolution. Whereas, the bodies of these men and women are obviously discernible as literal figures occupying space and time, the looseness of Boafo’s painting style suggests a transition, or one might even go so far as to say, a transgression, juxtaposing the tension within the paint itself against the precise and evenly rendered line work that creates the totality of each image.

William Villalongo William Villalongo

Navigates the politics of historical erasure directing his work towards are assessment of western, american and african art histories. Working out of the notion of blackness as a verb; He reframes familiar images, events, and themes in our cultural landscape. He explores dualities such as male-female, visibility/invisibility, humanity/nature incorporating appropriations from ancient myth to contemporary politics. This vast time frame narrates a conversation between images by which current existential concerns of representation are made more visible.Villalongo’s figures are held somewhere between magic and the factualness of being in a body, desire and discord. The surface and materiality of the work breaks between flatness and dimensionality, making the presence of the object an important measure for understanding it. Seeing and recognition become critical metaphors for the artist in framing his subjects.

27 HOUR CARGO PIECE 2017 acrylic, paper collage and velvet flocking on wood panel 46 x 60 x 1.5 in.

Simone Fattal

Was born in Damascus and grew up in Lebanon. She first studied philosophy at the Ecole des Lettres of Beirut and then at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1969 she returned to Beirut and started painting. She participated in numerous shows during the ten years when life in Lebanon was still possible. In 1980, fleeing the Civil War, she settled in California and founded the Post-Apollo Press, a publishing house dedicated to innovative and experimental literary work. In 1988, she returned to artistic practice by doing ceramic sculptures after enrolling at the Art Institute of San Francisco. Since 2006, she has produced works in Hans Spinner’s prestigious workshop in Grasse, France. In 2013, she released a movie, Autoportrait, which has been shown worldwide in many film festivals. She currently has a show at Moma PS1 on till September 2019.

The Migrant Family, Refugees by the hearth, 2004, Bronze, 28.5 x 29.5 x 25 cm / 11 2/8 x 11 5/8 x 9 7/8 inches

Variation en noir et blanc, l’etat du ciel 2013 acrylic on canvas 100 x 100 x 2 cm / 39 3/8 x 39 3/8 x 6/8 inches

Paul Anthony Smith

Untitled, 2018, unique picotage on inkjet print mounted on museum board, 40 7/8 x 30 7/8 x 1 3/4 inches (framed).

(b. Jamaica, 1988) creates paintings and unique picotages on pigment prints that explore the artist’s autobiography, as well as issues of identity within the African diaspora. Referencing both W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness and Franz Fanon’s theory of diasporic cultural confusions caused by colonialism, Smith alludes to African rituals, tribal masks and scarification to obscure and alter his subjects’ faces and skin. Through Smith’s process of picotage, rendered with the use of a ceramic tool to pick away at surfaces of photographic prints, he achieves rich textures that appear almost iridescent. With this method, Smith questions the potential of a photograph to retain and tell the truth of one’s past. Smith’s work has been acquired by numerous public collections, including the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas, Austin, and has been featured in numerous museum exhibitions, including a solo show at the Atlanta Contemporary, a two person show at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, and group shows at the New Museum, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; the Seattle Art Museum; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; among others.

Fear on the Hill, 2018, Picotage on inkjet print with spray paint and oil stick on museum board, 40 × 30 in 101.6 × 76.2 cm

Paul Anthony Smith

Fear on the Hill, 2018, Picotage on inkjet print with spray paint and oil stick on museum board, 40 × 30 in 101.6 × 76.2 cm Adjacent to the Evening Sun’, 2018-2019, unique picotage on inkjet print, mounted on museum board, 60 x 40 inches (print)

D’Angelo Lovell Williams

I’ll Be Up There In A Minute 2018 pigment print

In his self-portraits, Williams creates painterly tableaux characterized by meticulous attention to texture, pattern, color, and composition. In one image the artist’s figure appears from the neck down. His body is shrouded in a shirt and a cape that is worn like a skirt. He is nearly indiscernible from the black fabric background that fills the frame. Williams’ veined hand pulls up the cape to reveal his bare legs, spread slightly, his fingers resting gently between them. In another, the artist and a man embrace, kissing through the fabric of black do-rags that, worn backwards, completely veil their faces. The scenes are achingly intimate, pulsing with an energy and power generated by interweaving the sensuous and the political – the beauty of each picture complicated by a radical gesture. Williams’ unblinking gaze through the lens is reflected back at the viewer as it lingers on the contours of his own body, amplifying the sensations of desire and longing that activate the space between portrait and viewer. His performances for the camera assert visibility and vulnerability, insisting on an alternative pictorial and societal narrative in which Blackness and queerness are dominant, authorial voices. D’Angelo Lovell Williams (b. 1992) earned his BFA from Memphis College of Art in 2015 and is currently an MFA candidate at Syracuse University. Recent solo presentations include an exhibition at Spark Contemporary Art Space, Syracuse (2016) and Beauty Kings (2015), SALTQuarters Gallery, Syracuse. His work was also on view in Gendered, The Mint Museum, Charlotte (2017) and Queering Space, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (2016). Williams lives and works in Syracuse, New York.

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Love Train 2018 pigment print

Faith Ringgold

Buba Died, 1977, Mixed media on wood and fabric, 11 x 9 1/2 x 7 in. Coming to Jones Road Part II 2010: We Here Aunt Emmy Got Us Now, Paintings, Acrylic on canvas. 68 x 63 in. (172.7 x 160 cm.)

Faith Ringgold was born Faith Willi Jones in 1930 in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan. Her mother, a fashion designer and seamstress, encouraged Faith’s creative pursuits from a young age. Ringgold earned a bachelor’s degree from City College of the City University of New York in 1955. She then taught art in New York City public schools and worked on a master’s degree at City College, which she completed in 1959. Ringgold’s oil paintings and posters begun in the mid-to-late 1960s carried strong political messages in support of the civil-rights movement. She demonstrated against the exclusion of black and female artists by New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in 1968–70. She was arrested for desecrating the American flag in 1970 as a participant in The People’s Flag Show, held at the Judson Memorial Church in New York. Ringgold cofounded Where We At, a group for African-American female artists, in 1971. In 1970 Ringgold began teaching college courses. In 1973 she quit teaching in New York City public schools to devote more time to her art. In the early 1970s she abandoned traditional painting. Instead, Ringgold began making unstretched acrylic paintings on canvas with lush fabric borders like those of Tibetan thangkas. She worked with her mother, Willi Posey, to fashion elaborate hooded masks of fabric, beads, and raffia, which were inspired by African tribal costume. She also began making fabric “dolls” and larger stuffed figures, many of which resembled real individuals. Ringgold used some of these works in Performance pieces—the earliest of which, Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro, was first performed in 1976 by students using her masks, life-size figures, and thangkas, along with voice, music, and dance. In 1976 and 1977 she traveled to West Africa. Ringgold expanded the format of her thangka paintings to quilt size. Her mother pieced and quilted the first of these new works, Echoes of Harlem (1980), before dying in 1981. It was in 1983 that Ringgold began to combine image and handwritten text in her painted “story quilts,” which convey imaginative, open-ended narratives; in the first one, Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima? (1983), the familiar advertising character is turned into a savvy businesswoman. Ringgold’s use of craft techniques ignored the traditional distinction between fine art and craft, while demonstrating the importance of family, roots, and artistic collaboration. From 1984 to 2002, Ringgold was a professor at the University of California, San Diego. She adapted the story quilt Tar Beach (from the Woman on a Bridge series of 1988) for an eponymous children’s book published in 1991. Its critical and popular success led to her development of several other titles for children. For adults, she wrote her memoirs, published in 1995. Ringgold’s first solo gallery shows were held in 1967 and 1970 at the cooperative Spectrum Gallery, New York. Retrospectives of her work have been organized by Rutgers University, New Brunswick (1973), the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (1984), and the Fine Arts Museum of Long Island, Hempstead (1990). Ringgold’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions devoted to political art, women’s art, contemporary quilts, and African-American art, as well as in the Whitney Biennial (1985). Her achievements as an artist, teacher, and activist have been recognized with numerous honors, including National Endowment for the Arts awards in sculpture (1978) and painting (1989), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1987), and sixteen honorary doctorate.