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Sky-rocketing gasoline prices accompanied by worries of war in Ukraine even as the planet attempts to turn the pandemic corner is more than enough to hold happiness hostage. However, Sonya Fe’s exhibition “Are You with Me?” at the Riverside Art Museum recaptures the...
Capturing human dignity through drawing requires commitment not only to clearly see but to deeply observe. Current works by Richard Wyatt Jr. at Steve Turner gallery encapsulates such an act. As a muralist in the tradition of such predecessors as Charles White, John...
Born in 1935 and raised by sharecroppers during an era when rural Alabama was segregated, Simmie Knox persevered by making history in 2004 as the first Black artist to have his work selected for the official Whitehouse portrait collection—his rendition of former...
The post-pandemic era can offer rewarding challenges, as I found out when engaging in my first Zoom interview. I spoke with painter and educator June Edmonds on the occasion of her current 40-year retrospective at the Laband Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, and a...
Installation—often understood as the act of locating, positioning and inserting—has, in Nari Ward’s exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch gallery in Los Angeles, intersected with the examination of founding American democratic principles. This combination of past works and...
The act of self-disclosure is an intentional revelation of one’s thoughts, emotions, and feelings to another individual; it is part confession and part declaration. The 11th Biennial Ontario Open Art Exhibition at the Ontario Museum of History and Art was an aesthetic...
Mari Evans’ poem, “I am a Black Woman” was resurrected through the “Passion Power Prayer” exhibition at Band of Vices, featuring abstract paintings by Lisa Diane Wedgeworth. With a singular vision her works extend an invitation, as in The Matrix (1999): to take the...
In Between the World and Me (2015), Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are.” This two-edged sword of truth was unapologetically visible in the "Kangs" exhibition at Band of Vices, which includes four...
A group exhibition at Heather James Palm Desert, "Material and Abstraction: Theaster Gates, Sam Gilliam, and Rodney McMillian," explores abstraction and non-representation, inviting the viewer to move beyond “either/or” assumptions about art-making, and to embrace...
If math is not your strongest suite, then Todd Gray’s art will shape-shift your perceptions of geometry. Currently on display at the Riverside Art Museum, “Pop! New Works by Todd Gray,” celebrate the cartoon imagery associated with the Pop Art Movement of the late...
Michael Massenburg’s paintings eddy about the boundaries of figuration and abstraction. The artist’s acrylic on paper and acrylic and collage on panel, earth-toned works, which seem to encircle first the one, and then, the other mode of painting, express an intuitive...
As noted in 1001 Things Everyone Should Know about African American History (1996) by Jeffrey Stewart, Althea Gibson received her first tennis racket in 1940, being barely a teenager. She was not only the first African American to win a women’s singles at Wimbledon;...
How do you disappear when you’re already invisible? The unnamed narrator/protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) would answer by instead choosing to reappear to awaken sleepwalkers from their racist straightjacket. Similarly, selected artists in the...
If the wallet of your heart is running low, then Gabby Rosenberg’s “Night Pockets” provides enough spare change for your paradigm to spend. Rosenberg’s exhibition at Steve Turner LA embodies the identity narrative seeping with the primal desire for interpersonal...
“What happens to a dream deferred?” This question asked by Langston Hughes in his poem Harlem sets the stage of Charles White’s development as an artist. In 1934, and again in 1935, the teen was awarded scholarships to study art. Each time White showed up in person to...
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