Articles
Amplifier of Black Art Nothing Random with Chance the Rapper's Course
“We outside!” Chance the Rapper exclaims into his microphone. The sky is near black at maybe seven minutes after 8 p.m. in Downtown Los Angeles. Third weeknight of October. Chance had been and would be again, soon, rhyming his way through a song. The Chicago MC had been in the midst of vocalizing about his heart and his God and the shifting tides of life. Chano—as more ardent fans might call him—stood on top of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s roof while he did his thing. It’s our inside-out pandemic-era update on “in the house.” We Outside. And when Chance proclaimed this, approval shouts swept through MOCA’s disproportionately Windy...
From Lagos with Love The Far-Reaching Vision of Adenrele Sonariwo
The sun is rising over my home in Northeast Los Angeles as I call gallerist and curator Adenrele Sonariwo on Zoom. She answers me from her office in the bustling West African city of Lagos, Nigeria, where her day is already in full swing, crescendoing toward the familiar buzz of a workday afternoon. Dressed in a classic black blouse, she fills the frame of my screen with a steady and warm presence, inviting an immediate sense of oneness to our interaction. This unlikely meeting across continents and time zones seems to reflect something uniquely true about African diasporic kinship; we are worlds apart and yet, powerfully united by the...
Reframing A Ritual Allana Clarke Wrestles New Meaning into Hair Bonding Glue
I’m often asked which artist or artists interest me the most, or some variation of the question. For the last year-and-a-half since I saw her work in “Un/Common Proximity,” a group show at James Cohan in New York, my response has been Allana Clarke. Before this show, the Trinidadian-American artist had already made a name for herself with videos, performance, photography and text-based works that explore aspects of embodied Blackness and abstraction. In “Un/Common Proximity,” Clarke exhibited work from her residency with NXTHVN, the Connecticut-based fellowship. Along with her cohort, Clarke considered the idea of proximity, geographic and...
Re-Imagining an Impossible Future Marshall Brown Finds Beauty in Dystopia
One half of Chicago’s famous corn cob buildings, formally known as Marina City, floats above a winding road in a mountain pass. It pierces a white void, which highlights the building’s delicate edges, the bite marks in its ocular facade. Below, light streams through an open pit, illuminating a subterranean realm. There are thin, precise incisions along the collage, which are then mended with irregular strips of blue painter’s tape. The Round Tower (2021) is one of Marshall Brown’s many paper monsters in his solo exhibition “Marshall Brown: The Architecture of Collage” at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Collage is inherently about creating...
Publication in the Age of Negation, Part IX In the Region of Pure Art
Jim Brooklinen’s rapturous response to reading my novel in its entirety had exceeded my wildest hopes. Not only had the veteran New York literary man hailed it as “the finest new work of sustained prose I’ve read in a very long time,” and expressed a genuine desire to attach himself to its inception, he had also confidently stated that it would have received an equally fervent endorsement from his close friend, the late Barney Rosset, founder of Grove Press. Jim had assured me that he would be sending my manuscript out to his contacts in “the more enlightened and discriminating echelons of the publishing world,” and that he would be getting...
