Living Life Black is a virtual exhibition of established and emerging artists of color curated by Savona Bailey-McClain, Executive Director of the West Harlem Art Fund for the Columbia Model United Nations Conference and Exposition (CMUNCE), a premier crisis conference for high school students in the United States. This event will take place on Sunday, January 17, 2021. About the Curator Savona Bailey-McClain (b. 1961) is the Executive Director and Chief Curator of the West Harlem Art Fund, which has organized high-profile public arts exhibits throughout New York City for the past 20+ years, including Times Square, DUMBO, Soho, Governors Island and Harlem. Her public art installations encompass sculpture, drawings, performance, sound, and mixed media, and have been covered extensively by the New York Times, Art Daily, Artnet, Los Angeles Times and Huffington Post, among many others. She is host/ producer of “State of the Arts NYC,” a weekly radio program on iTunes, Radio Public, Youtube, Mixcloud and other audio platforms. She is also a member of ArtTable, NYC Dance in Sacred Places and the Governors Island Advisory Council. Statement by Savona Bailey-McClain
Our invitation to create an exhibition for this conference was based on the summer unrest that occurred during the COVID pandemic this year. Yet the struggle for racial equality in America with protests and marches, began long before even the Civil War. The racial crisis we are still experiencing in this country requires that we dispel false myths and generalizations about people of color. We urge conference participants who are hoping to solve world problems, to bridge real relationships with communities of color every day as fellow citizens and not as victims. We also ask that you don’t judge our gifts with the standards that we did not help shape. Our humanity is fueled with color and texture and style. In spite of life’s challenges —we still create! This exhibition is dedicated to fellow curators of color around the world who may not be as well known but make a difference— Nana Adusei-Poki, Amal Alhaag, Kisito Assangni, Barby Asante.
LIVING LIFE BLACK
2021 Virtual Exhibition - Designed and Curated by Savona Bailey-McClain Executive Director & Chief Curator, West Harlem Art Fund Artist Biographies Derrick Adams (b. 1970) is a Baltimore-born, Brooklyn, New York-based artist whose critically admired work spans painting, collage, sculpture, performance, video, and sound installations. His multidisciplinary practice engages the ways in which individuals’ ideals, aspirations, and personae become attached to specific objects, colors, textures, symbols, and ideologies. His work probes the influence of popular culture on the formation of self-image, and the relationship between man and monument as they coexist and embody one another. Adams is also deeply immersed in questions of how African American experiences intersect with art history, American iconography, and consumerism. Most notably in his Floater series, he portrays Black Americans at leisure, positing that respite itself is a political act when embraced by black communities. The radicality of this position has materialized in Adams’ work across his Deconstruction Worker, Figure in the Urban Landscape, and Beauty World series. Emma Amos (b. 1937 - d. 2020) was an artist whose practice includes painting, works on paper, weaving and experimental print-making. She was the youngest and only woman member of Spiral, the historic African American collective founded in 1963. She later became a member of the important feminist collective, Heresies, founded in the 1980s. Influenced by modern Western European art, Abstract Expressionism, the Civil Rights movement and feminist ideals, Amos explored the politics of culture and issues of racism, sexism and ethnocentrism through her paintings and works on paper. Her six-decade career considered color theory, texture and innovative printmaking techniques to engage the art historical canon and how women and Black bodies have been represented within it. Sanford Biggers (b. 1970) was raised in Los Angeles and currently lives and works in New York City. He was awarded the 2017 Rome Prize in Visual Arts. He has had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2018), the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2016), the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (2012) and the Brooklyn Museum (2011), among others. His work has been shown in several institutional group exhibitions including at the Menil Collection (2008) and the
Tate Modern (2007), and also recent exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017) and the Barnes Foundation (2017). Biggers’ work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Walker Center, Minneapolis; the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington D.C.; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; and the Legacy Museum, Montgomery, among others.
Kraig Blue was born in 1968 in The Bronx, New York, politicized in Washington, DC, and liberated in Los Angeles, CA. He is a multimedia sculptor using found materials as metaphors to explore complex socially constructed ideologies and paradigms; creating multilayered sculptural assemblages as altars to become vehicles for quiet contemplation and dialogue.
Chakaia Booker (born 1953 Newark, New Jersey) is an internationally renowned and widely collected American sculptor known for creating monumental, abstract works from recycled tires and stainless steel for both the gallery and outdoor public spaces. Booker’s works are contained in more than 40 public collections and have been exhibited across the US, in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Booker was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. Recent public installation highlights include Millennium Park, Chicago (2016-2018), Garment District Alliance Broadway Plazas, New York, NY (2014), and National Museum of Women in the Arts New York Avenue Sculpture Project, Washington DC (2012).
Bisa Butler (b. 1973) was born in Orange, NJ and raised in South Orange, the youngest of four siblings. Butler's artistic talent was first recognized at the age of four, when she won a blue ribbon in the Plainfield Sidewalk art competition. By age five, Butler was named the "artist of the month" at her nursery school. She currently resides in West Orange, New Jersey and
is a Newark Public School art teacher. A formally trained artist, Butler graduated Cum Laude from Howard University, with a Bachelor's in Fine Art degree. It was her education at Howard that Butler was able to refine her natural talents under the tutelage of such lecturers as Lois Mailou Jones, Elizabeth Catlett, and Ernie Barnes. While at Howard, Butler also studied the works of Romare Bearden, Faith Ringgold, and Henry O. Tanner. Jordan Casteel (b. 1989, Denver, CO) has rooted her practice in community engagement, painting from her own photographs of people she encounters. Posing her subjects within their natural environments, her nearly life-size portraits and cropped compositions chronicle personal observations of the human experience. Casteel received her BA from Agnes Scott College, Decatur, GA for Studio Art (2011) and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT (2014). Casteel's solo exhibition curated by Massimiliano Gioni, “Within Reach,” is currently on view at the New Museum, New York, presented in conjunction with a fully illustrated catalogue published by the New Museum. In 2019, Casteel held solo exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum, CO, and the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, CA. In recent years, she has participated in exhibitions at institutional venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2020); Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands (2020); Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (2019); Aïshti Foundation, Beirut (2019); Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA (2019); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2018); MoCA, Los Angeles, CA (2018); Harvey B. Gantt Center, Charlotte, NC (2017); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2017 and 2016); and MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2017). She is an Assistant Professor of Painting in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at Rutgers University - Newark. She lives and works in New York, NY. Colin Chase (b. 1954) is a sculptor who uses a variety of materials and devices. Ideas, forms, and textures are synergistically juxtaposed and nestled incongruent combinations that often challenge formal spatial logic, as well as quick intellectual responses. His work has been included in one-person and group exhibitions in several galleries including the University of the Arts, Philadelphia; Antenna Gallery in New Orleans; Smack Mellon Gallery, Jamaica Arts Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Neuberger Museum of Art, all in New York. He is a former resident of the Institute for Contemporary Art, PS1 Museum, and Longwood Studios. He received public commissions for the Queens Hospital Center and the Malcolm X Memorial. Chase is represented by June Kelly Gallery in NY.
Ed Clark was an American Color Field painter whose style was shaped by the years he spent in Paris in the early 1950s. As an African-American who had been raised in the segregated South, he found Paris tolerant, and the atmosphere encouraging. While there, he developed a sophisticated abstract style that was markedly influenced by the Tachist painter Nicolas de Stael. His early work is remembered for his "push-broom technique," which encouraged his full physical involvement in painting. He is also noted for the monumental scale of his work, and the fact that he is one of the first painters to have used shaped canvases. An often overlooked American artist, Beauford Delaney's artistic career straddled all of the most important art movements in the first half of the 20th century. He found himself among the heady intellectual and artistic milieu of the Harlem Renaissance as well as the modernist explorations of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz's circle, and he shared similar interests with burgeoning Abstract Expressionists. Delaney's output ranged from portraiture and city scenes to abstract compositions, but in all of his paintings he communicated the vitality and rhythms of his subjects. Perhaps overlooked because of his move to Paris at a moment when the American art scene was consolidating or perhaps because of his life-long struggles with mental illness, Delaney's artistic profile did not really register in the narratives of American modernism, but his reputation has become important to younger artists such as Chris Ofili and Glenn Ligon. Derek Fordjour was born in Memphis, Tennessee to parents of Ghanaian heritage. Derek Fordjour is an American interdisciplinary artist who works in video/film, sculpture and painting. Fordjour received an MFA from Hunter College, an Ed. M in Arts Education from Harvard University, and a B.A. degree from Morehouse College. His work has been exhibited at notable institutions nationally and internationally. He received commissions for public projects including a permanent installation for Metropolitan Transit Authority of New York City at 145th Street Subway Station and The Whitney Museum’s Billboard Project. He has been featured in several publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair and Forbes Magazine. Fordjour was recently appointed the Alex Katz Chair of Painting at The Cooper Union and serves as a Core Critic at Yale University School of
Art. His work also appears in several collections including The Studio Museum of Harlem, Brooklyn Museum, Perez Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum and LACMA. Born in 1945 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Barkley L. Hendricks attended Yale University, earning both Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Fine Art in 1972. Soon after he began teaching studio art at Connecticut College where he continued to teach until his retirement in 2010. During the mid-1960s, Hendricks experienced an important artistic realization that altered the direction of his life. While traveling in Europe in his twenties, Hendricks found himself at once awe-struck by the portraits by Old Master painters such as Remembrance and Velasquez he saw and simultaneously dismayed by these same museums’ collective failure to represent people and artists of color. This experience led Hendricks to his decision to create portraits of black subjects, many of whom he knew personally, and imbue them with the elevated dignity, vulnerability and immediacy they had long been denied. Coaxing his knowledge of art history with his direct engagement in black popular culture, Hendricks forged a distinct style, ambiguously positioned between the provocative playfulness of Pop Art, the critical gravitas of Conceptual art and the incandescent grandeur of Baroque-style portraiture. His formally sophisticated identitydriven representations have set a critical precedent for a younger generation of artists including Kehinde Wiley, Kerry James Marshall and many more.
Norman Lewis (b. 1909), a leading African-American painter, was an important member of the Abstract Expressionism movement, who also used representational strategies to focus on black urban life and his community's struggles. Lewis's work is characterized by the duality of abstraction and representation, using both geometric and natural forms, in the depiction of both the city and natural world, and expressing both righteous anger and joyous celebration. His paintings are singled out for their linear, calligraphic lines, along with his bright, expressive palette and atmospheric effects. Unlike other Abstract Expressionists, his technique and content never wholly gave over to the subjective. Often overlooked in art history studies, there has been a renaissance of interest in Lewis's oeuvre since the 1990s.
Nelson Makamo is a Johannesburg based artist. He was born in 1982, in a town called Modimolle, in South Africa's Limpopo province. Born with an astounding artistic aptitude he honed his craft at Artist Proof Studios in Johannesburg where he studied print making. Makamo has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in South Africa, France, Italy, America, Netherlands,The United Kingdom,Germany, Amsterdam and Scotland. Nelson's work is strongly influenced by the candid innocents of children. He is particularly drawn to children in rural South Africa, he believes that they embody the peace and harmony we all strive for in life, the search for eternal joy lies in the child within us all, we are just so consumed with worldly things that we forget the simplicity of life through a child's perspective. He evolved his scope of experience so did his medium of expression, namely charcoal, acrylic, water colors, mono-types, silk screen and oil paintings.
Delita Martin was born in Conroe, Texas in 1972. She is currently based in Huffman, Texas. Martin received her BFA in drawing from Texas Southern University and MFA in printmaking from Purdue University. Formally a member of the fine arts faculty at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Martin is currently working as a full-time artist in her studio. Martin’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. “Delita Martin: Calling Down the Spirits” held at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 2020 was Martin’s first solo museum exhibition. Her work toured the country (2016-17) in the Crystal Bridges Museum exhibition, “State of the Arts: Discovering American Art Now” that included 101 artists from across the United States. In 2015 she was featured in the International Review of African American Art as one of sixteen “African American Artists to Watch” who are gaining national and international recognition. Sungi Mlengeya (b. 1991) is a Tanzanian self-taught artist. She works primarily in the acrylic medium on canvas creating paintings that are free, minimalist and with a curious use of negative space. The works consist of dark figures in minimal shades of black and browns against perfectly white backgrounds with topics varying widely from self-discovery to empowerment, but common themes in her work are centered around women, specifically black women. She shades a light on their stories; their journeys, struggles, accomplishments and
relationships with their immediate societies, her stories included. Sungi’s work has been collected extensively and exhibited at Christie’s 1-54 Highlights 2020, 1-54 London 2020, Unit London’s The Medium is The Message curated by Azu Nwagbogu, 1-54 New York Online Edition 2020, Cape town Art fair 2020, Latitudes Art Fair 2019 and ‘Surfaces’ conceptual workshop and exhibition 2019 at Afriart Gallery Kampala. John W. Mosley (May 19, 1907 – October 1, 1969) was a self-taught photojournalist who extensively documented the everyday activities of the African-American community in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for more than 30 years, a period including both World War II and the civil rights movement. His work was published widely in newspapers and magazines including The Philadelphia Tribune, Pittsburgh Courier, and Jet magazine. Mosley has been called a "cultural warrior" for preserving a record of African-American life in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, one which combats "negative stereotypes and false interpretations of African-American history and culture". More than 300,000 of Mosley's photographs are included in the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University. Exhibitions of his work have been shown at the Philadelphia International Airport and the Woodmere Art Museum. Alice Neel (b. 1900) was one of the great American painters of the twentieth century. She was also a pioneer among women artists. A painter of people, landscape and still life, Neel was never fashionable or in step with avant-garde movements. Sympathetic to the expressionist spirit of northern Europe and Scandinavia and to the darker arts of Spanish painting, she painted in a style and with an approach distinctively her own. Neel was born near Philadelphia in 1900 and trained at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. She became a painter with a strong social conscience and equally strong left-wing beliefs. In the 1930s she lived in Greenwich Village, New York and enrolled as a member of the Works Progress Administration for which she painted urban scenes. Her portraits of the 1930s embraced left wing writers, artists and trade unionists. Neel left Greenwich Village for Spanish Harlem in 1938 to get away from the rarefied atmosphere of an art colony. There she painted the Puerto Rican community, casual
acquaintances, neighbors and people she encountered on the street. In the 1960s she moved to the Upper West Side and made a determined effort to reintegrate with the art world. This led to a series of dynamic portraits of artists, curators and gallery owners, among them Frank O'Hara, Andy Warhol and the young Robert Smithson. She also maintained her practice of painting political personalities, including black activists and supporters of the women's movement. Born in Paris from Cameroonian parents, Neals Niat at seven years old moved with his family. I spent 8 years of my life in Douala. Now, I’m studying Architecture. Black/African culture and especially Cameroonian culture have always been a big source of inspiration for me as well on the architectural, graphic, as visual level. My work is a way for me to communicate the memories of a dynamic and creative Africa, which for me, is the opposite of the one presented by the foreign media. But it's also a way for me to share the memories of my childhood in Cameroon. All my works are an integral part of: "the story between the lines" it is a continuous project, to which I add, remove, improve elements to enrich it, the idea being in several years to gather all the works composing the project to form one great work. Most of the times I work on Autocad, a design and architectural software but i can also work with a simple black pencil and a white sheet of paper.I like to create animations as well. Since my work is based on the story telling, I like working with different mediums to allow different approaches of my work. Luis A. Pagan is an abstract painter, born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico and raised in the South Bronx. During childhood, his interest in art began in the 1980s graffiti movement, and drawing Marvel superheroes. Luis didn’t think of becoming an artist until he met his college roommate who was studying art education at Pace University in 1991. Inspired by art, creativity, and the will to learn something new, Luis enrolled at FIT in 1995 to study fine arts. He graduated Cum Laude in 1997 with an AAS degree. He continued his art education at Purchase College studying art history and painting in 2003. He was placed on the Dean’s list twice and earned his BFA in 2005. Since graduation, Luis’s work has been on display at over 100 venues throughout NYC, Westchester County, Florida and Puerto Rico.
Gordon Parks (b. 1912) wrote about his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas, in his autobiographical novel and subsequent film, The Learning Tree, which was among the 25 films placed on the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1989. He went on to direct other films, to author several books, and to write original musical compositions, film scores, and a ballet. He established his reputation as a world-renowned photojournalist for Life Magazine, chronicling the Civil Rights movement for two decades. His work for Vogue magazine established him as a master of fashion photography. A major retrospective exhibit of Parks’s work, Half Past Autumn: The Art of Gordon Parks opened at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. in 1998 and toured the United States. HBO produced a documentary on Parks, also titled Half Past Autumn. As a filmmaker, he was the first African-American to direct a major Hollywood production with the poignant memoir of his youth The Learning Tree, filmed on location in Fort Scott. He also broke new ground with a hip black hero on the silver screen named Shaft. Parks received the National Medal of Arts in 1988 and has received over fifty honorary doctorates. His fifth autobiography and a new book of poetry were published in November of 2005. Mr. Parks died on March 7, 2006 and was laid to rest in Evergreen Cemetery in his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas on March 16, 2006. Amy Sherald (American b. Columbus, GA 1973) received her MFA in Painting from Maryland Institute College of Art (2004) and BA in Painting from Clark-Atlanta University (1997), and was a Spelman College International Artist-in-Residence in Portobelo, Panama (1997). In 2016, Sherald was the first woman to win the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition grand prize; an accompanying exhibition, The Outwin 2016, has been on tour since 2016 and opened at the Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MO in October 2017. Sherald has had solo shows at venues including Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago (2016); Reginald F. Lewis Museum, Baltimore (2013); and University of North Carolina, Sonja Haynes Stone Center, Chapel Hill (2011). In May 2018, she will present a solo exhibition at Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO. Group exhibitions include Southern Accent, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC (2016), travelled to Speed Museum of Art, Louisville, KY (2017); and Face to Face: Los Angeles Collects Portraiture, California African American
Museum, Los Angeles (2017). Residencies include Odd Nerdrum Private Study, Larvik, Norway (2005); Tong Xion Art Center, Beijing, China (2008); Creative Art Alliance, Baltimore (2016); and Joan Mitchell Foundation, New Orleans (2017). Public collections include Embassy of the United States, Dakar, Senegal; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; The Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; and Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC. Dianne Smith (born 1965) is an abstract painter, sculptor, and installation artist. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in New York City’s Soho and Chelsea art districts as well as, numerous galleries and institutions throughout the United States, and abroad. She is an arts educator in the field of Aesthetic Education at Lincoln Center Education, which is part of New York City’s Lincoln Center For the Performing Arts. Since the invitation to join the Institute almost a decade ago she has taught pre k-12 in public schools throughout the Tri-State area. Her work as an arts educator also extends to undergraduate and graduate courses in various colleges and universities in the New York City area. She has taught at Lehman College, Brooklyn College, Columbia University Teachers College, City College, and St. John’s University. Alma Thomas (1891–1978) was born in Columbus, Georgia, the oldest of four girls. In 1907, her family moved to Washington, D.C., seeking relief from the racial violence in the South. Though segregated, the nation’s capital still offered more opportunities for African Americans than most cities in those years. As a girl, Thomas dreamed of being an architect and building bridges, but there were few women architects a century ago. Instead, she attended Howard University, becoming its first fine arts graduate in 1924. In 1924, Thomas began a 35 year career teaching art at a D.C. junior high school. She was devoted to her students and organized art clubs, lectures, and student exhibitions for them. Teaching allowed her to support herself while pursuing her own painting part-time. Thomas’s early art was realistic, though her Howard professor James V. Herring and peer Loïs Mailou Jones challenged her to experiment with abstraction. When she retired from teaching and was able to concentrate on art full-time, Thomas finally developed her signature style.
She debuted her abstract work in an exhibition at Howard 1966, at the age of 75. Thomas’ abstractions have been compared with Byzantine mosaics, the Pointillist technique of Georges Seurat, and the paintings of the Washington Color School, yet her work is quite distinctive. Thomas became an important role model for women, African Americans, and older artists. She was the first African American woman to have a solo exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, and she exhibited her paintings at the White House three times. Nari Ward (b. 1963, St. Andrew, Jamaica; lives and works in New York) is known for his sculptural installations composed of discarded material found and collected in his neighborhood. He has repurposed objects such as baby strollers, shopping carts, bottles, doors, television sets, cash registers and shoelaces, among other materials. Ward recontextualizes these found objects in thought- provoking juxtapositions that create complex, metaphorical meanings to confront social and political issues surrounding race, poverty, and consumer culture. He intentionally leaves the meaning of his work open, allowing the viewer to provide his or her own interpretation. One of his most iconic works, Amazing Grace, was produced as part of his 1993 residency at The Studio Museum in Harlem in response to the AIDS crisis and drug epidemic of the early 1990s. For this large-scale installation, Ward gathered more than 365 discarded baby strollers —commonly used by the homeless population in Harlem to transport their belongings— which he bound with twisted fire hoses in an abandoned fire station in Harlem. Echoing through the space was an audio recording of gospel singer Mahalia Jackson’s Amazing Grace on repeat. The lyrics speak about redemption and change, generating optimism and a sense of hope. As with most of his work, this installation explored themes informed by the materials, community, and location in which Ward was working. The work has since been recreated at the New Museum Studio in 2019, the New Museum’s Studio 231 series in 2013, and in several locations across Europe. With each change of context, the significance of the work changes as each community associates differently with these found objects. Nari Ward received a BA from City University of New York, Hunter College in 1989, and an MFA from City University of New York, Brooklyn College in 1992. Solo exhibitions of his work have been organized at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX (2019); New Museum, New York (2019); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2017); Socrates Sculpture Park, New York (2017); The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (2016); Pérez Art Museum Miami (2015); Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2015); Louisiana State University Museum of Art, Baton Rouge, LA (2014); The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2011); Massachusetts
Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA (2011); Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2002); and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2001, 2000). Select group exhibitions featuring his work include Objects Like Us, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (forthcoming, 2018-2019); UPTOWN: nastywomen/ badhombres, El Museo del Barrio, New York (2017); Black: Color, Material, Concept, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2015); The Great Mother, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Palazzo Reale, Milan (2015); The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2015); NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, New Museum, New York (2013); Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Rotunda, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); the Whitney Biennial, New York (2006); Landings, Documenta XI, Kassel, Germany (2002); Passages: Contemporary Art in Transition, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Projects: How to Build and Maintain the Virgin Fertility of Our Soul, MoMA PS1, Long Island City; The Listening Sky, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Whitney Biennial, New York (1995); and Cardinal Points of the Arts, 45th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy. Ward’s work is in numerous international public and private collections, including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; the Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; GAM, Galleria Civica di arte, Torino, Italy; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Istanbul Modern, Istanbul, Turkey; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; National Gallery of Victoria, Southbank, Australia; the New York Public Library, New York, NY; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Ward has received numerous honors and distinctions including the Fellowship Award, The United States Artists, Chicago (2020); Vilcek Prize in Fine Arts, Vilcek Foundation, New York (2017); the Joyce Award, The Joyce Foundation, Chicago (2015), the Rome Prize, American Academy of Rome (2012), and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1998), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1996); and the National Endowment for the Arts (1994). Ward has also received commissions from the United Nations and the World Health Organization. As an artist, Jack H. White (b. July 6, 1940) was an abstract artistic innovator. His career spans over forty years. Although he was widely exhibited as a sculptor, his experimentation in plaster, paint and the traditional medium of fresco has also afforded him the signature label of painter. His themes were concerned with are universal: spirit, energy, matter, physics, and sacred geometry. His
work has been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Modern Art, NYC. The Snug Harbor Museum, The Everson Museum of art, and The San Francisco Museum of Art. He was born in New York City and died in Harlem, New York in 2017. Born in Bessemer, Alabama in 1939, Jack Whitten is celebrated for his innovative processes of applying paint to the surface of his canvases and transfiguring their material terrains. Although Whitten initially aligned with the New York circle of abstract expressionists active in the 1960s, his work gradually distanced from the movement’s aesthetic philosophy and formal concerns, focusing more intensely on the experimental aspects of process and technique that came to define his practice. The subtle visual tempos and formal techniques embedded in Whitten’s work speak to the varied contexts of his early life. After a brief period studying medicine at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in the late 1950s, Whitten pivoted his attentions to art, first attending the Southern University in Baton Rouge before moving to New York and enrolling at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1960, where he earned his BFA degree. In the 1970s, Whitten’s experiments with the materiality of paint reached a climax – removing a thick slab of acrylic paint from its support, Whitten realized that the medium could be coaxed into the form of an independent object. Whitten used this mode of experimentation to challenge pre-existing notions of dimensionality in painting, repeatedly layering slices of acrylic ribbon in uneven fields of wet paint to mimic the application of mosaic tessarae to wet masonry. Over the course of a six decade career, Whitten’s work bridged rhythms of gestural abstraction and process art, arriving at a nuanced language of painting, which hovers between mechanical automation and intensely personal expression. Kehinde Wiley (American, b.1977) is a painter best known for his naturalistic portraits of African American men in heroic poses. Born in Los Angeles, CA, he earned his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from the Yale University School of Art. Wiley’s early work consists of Photo-Realistic paintings of men, whom he had met on the streets in Harlem, set against a floral background. In all of his work, Wiley combines a wide range of references from classical painting and pop culture. He developed an early interest in portraiture and frescos, particularly the work of Venetian painters such as Titian and Giambattista Tiepolo, and draws inspiration from French Rococo painting, Islamic architecture, African textile design, contemporary fashion,
and urban hip hop. His painting Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps (2005), for example, imitates the well-known portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte by Jacques-Louis David. Wiley substitutes the figure of Napoleon with an anonymous African American model and sets him against a Rococo style background. Over the course of his career, the size of Wiley’s canvases have expanded, and he began depicting his subjects, young black models or music icons, in heroic defeat as well as triumph. In 2007, Wiley began his ongoing series titled The World Stage with portraits of black men that imitated Maoist propaganda posters. He has continued to travel through Africa, Brazil, India, and Sri Lanka, and paint portraits that incorporate the cultural imagery associated with these places. Wiley’s work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. He lives and works in Beijing, Dakar, and New York.
Young Black Photographers Today Aboubacar Kante Nydia Blas Shoccara Marcus Montinique Monroe Shan Wallace OJ Slaughter Nora Williams Asa Kryst Eze Amos Marcus Smith Summer Noel Yohan Hameed Tariq Tarey JerSean Golatt Steph Bolton Bre’ann White Nneka Julia Kennedi Carter Zora J Murk Liz Johnson Artur Phumzile Khanyile Tokini Peterside Touria El Glaoui Helen Jennings Maheder Hailselassie Tadese Brian Otieno Nana Kofi Acquah