Artillery Magazine

Tag: Art

  • Leila Weefur’s Hymns for Other Voices Uncomfortable Questions

    Leila Weefur’s Hymns for Other Voices
    Uncomfortable Questions

    Explorations of gender identity are central to the work of Oakland-based artist and curator Leila Weefur, how they felt that their identity was suppressed by belonging to the Christian Church is at the crux of their latest project, “Prey†Play.” Presented in two separate and complementary incarnations, both in San Francisco, one is at Minnesota Street Project, as part of their California Black Voices Project, the other at Telematic Media Arts. Many such twinnings and juxtapositions are found in Weefur’s work, who laughs and acknowledges, “Yes, I’m pretty interested in duality.”

    We meet at Minnesota Street Project on one of the artist’s rare days away from their teaching responsibilities—this fall Weefur is a lecturer at both Stanford and UC Berkeley. Their own academic background includes an undergraduate degree in journalism from Howard University, followed by a degree in film from Cal State LA. Weefur then spent several years in the film industry in LA, working on music videos, independent films and reality shows.

    It was during this time working in the film industry that Weefur decided to shift to fine art. In the 2010s, it was before the advent of the “movement around contemporary Black cinema” and their interests in any event lay outside the “formulaic structure” often found in Hollywood. Seeking out a liberal arts college, Weefur returned to the Bay Area, to Mills College, where their interests in cross-disciplinary exploration were satisfied by studies in the book arts, creative writing and music departments. The latter is where they met composers Josh Casey and Yari Bundy, who form the duo KYN, with whom Weefur has continued to collaborate on the immersive soundtracks for numerous projects, up to and including “Prey†Play.”

    Between Beauty and Horror, 2019, video still, courtesy of the artist.

    Weefur’s current work builds on earlier film installations such as Blackberry Pastorale Symphony #1 (2017), Noise and Thirst (2018), and Between Beauty and Horror (2019). The first references the phrase, “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,” a reference to the idea that darker-skinned Black women were somehow perceived as more voluptuous, sexier, in the context of “colorism”—racism against darker-skinned Blacks. Weefur, who never connected with the idea of the femme Black body, creates potent images of men and women interacting with, crushing and consuming, blackberries. Noise and Thirst evolved in response to the artist being accused of stealing from a market in San Francisco by a woman who described Weefur to the police as a “Black man.” It functions as “an experimental sound collage expressing the cadences of Black masculinity.”Between Beauty and Horror “teases out the uncomfortable dynamics and violence that are present in racism” and, as the artist describes it, “performative Blackness.”

    Between Beauty and Horror, 2019, video still, courtesy of the artist.

    Drawing on their personal experience of the constraints and rigidity implicit in Black Christian churches, Weefur paints a picture that is nuanced and bittersweet, with the pageantry and allure of the church, it’s promise of salvation and the love of God, contrasted with the subtle and not-so-subtle ways religion has worked to control those under its sway. At Minnesota Street Project Prey†Play: A Gospel is set in a darkened space defined by three imposing arches. The video is set in Havenscourt Community Church in Oakland, where the artist was baptized, with red-upholstered pews and stained-glass windows. We hear a childlike voice speaking. “Stand up. Bow your head. Bring the palms of your hands together. Close your eyes. Talk to God.” As the narrator speaks, the actors perform symbolic gestures. Weefur intends the nonbinary characters to act as a point of entry for many different people—a spectrum of LGBTQ and BIPOC, as well as many others.

    PLAY†PREY: A Performance, 2021, image courtesy of the artist and Minnesota Street Project Foundation, photo: Jenna Garrett.

    The narrator continues, “Dear God, can you see me?… I come in afraid to show myself.” At a young age, perhaps 10, Weefur first became aware of gender discomfort, “I knew I was never going to give birth to a child,” and their parents eventually relented and allowed them to wear pants—rather than a dress—to church; they left the church after baptism at age 15. The narrator speaks, “Power is only power if everyone wants it, and no one has it. I used the only power I had, the power to remove myself from view.”

    The actors hide within the pews, then reveal themselves, playing hide-and-seek, then peek-a-boo. These gentle games act as a metaphor for early experiences. The atmosphere darkens as a stern voice intones lines from the Black writer and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones, his “sermons” on themes common in Black preaching, and an image of his poem “The Judgment Day” appears on the screen. We see images of fire, candles burning, a charred sprig of blackberries. This leads us into the work at Telematic Media Arts, Prey†Play: The Old Testament, where Weefur fills the screen with an image of a burning Bible.

    PLAY†PREY: Old Testament, 2021,  video still, image courtesy of the artist and Minnesota Street Project Foundation.

    Telematic, a much more compact space, sandwiches the viewer between the imagery as a burning book sizzles and snaps, gray flakes of ash curling up and blowing off: Turning, one is startled to catch their own reflection immersed in the video—this side actually a reflection. Weefur likes to catch one off guard, “seeing themselves implicated in the work structurally and conceptually.” Wax candles in the form of crosses lie heaped in a corner, the contribution of collaborator Sandy Williams IV. There are 506 of these, equal to the number of times the word “fire” appears in the King James Version of the Bible. A performance event was also held by Weefur in the nearby St. Joseph’s Art Society, with five other queer and trans writers invited to share “prayers” to be performed with ritual within the highly charged environment of this former Catholic church.

    Winding down our conversation at Minnesota St. Project, Weefur reflects for a moment, then speaks, “ …it’s like a child wanting to run around on a field of grass, but there are sanctions that tell you you can only run so far. Like Jim Crow laws, it tells you there’s only one place you can go. That certain places aren’t for you.” Addressing issues very much of this moment, Weefur’s fascinating work raises uncomfortable questions of how we see ourselves, and each other, on a very fundamental and intimate level.

  • It’s a Vincent Van A Gogh-Gogh! Review of the Van Gogh Immersive Experience

    It’s a Vincent Van A Gogh-Gogh!
    Review of the Van Gogh Immersive Experience

    Doubtless you’ve seen the billboards: the Immersive Van Gogh exhibit has shown in cities across North America, and now it’s Los Angeles’ turn. It’s Time To Gogh! commands the sign, and I oblige, stepping into the old Amoeba building on Sunset Boulevard, which will serve as the event space for the duration of its local run.

    I pass through security and walk into the dark hallway that begins the “immersive experience.” Overhead, a voice actor murmurs lines from Vincent Van Gogh’s letters. This hallway opens onto a tunnel of empty gilt frames that ends at the main foyer, which has a mural of the Hollywood sign painted in the manner of Van Gogh. The voice actor is replaced by classical strings covers of Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games.” FIND BEAUTY EVERYWHERE is scrawled on one of the promotional leaflets.

    The foyer serves as another hallway, and I follow the crowd to the projection rooms. With the lights on, it would be like standing inside an enormous blank cube. Now, however, the darkness is broken by projections of Van Gogh’s paintings. Heavy bass electronica thrums through the air, while farmland and flowers flow across the walls as if they painted themselves. The animated autonomy of Van Gogh’s works seems strangely fitting.

    The first time I remember seeing a Van Gogh, I was an elementary school tot. My teacher wheeled out the projector and cast Starry Night onto the wall. I can still feel the nubby carpet under my hands when I remember this, how it is like the texture of the paint. It seems strange that a painter who found God in the world would have his work transformed once again into that least material of mediums—into light.

    It’s impossible to know the first time most people saw his vision of the night sky over Saint Remy, though almost certainly it wasn’t the painting in New York City, hanging on MoMA’s 5th floor. Most likely it was a replication of the image on a poster, a phone case, fridge magnets, backpack or bed sheets, and now this “immersive experience.” Van Gogh reportedly painted many of his works through windows; the replications are now like thousands of miniature windows on his actual paintings, wherever they may really be housed.

    I notice a sign near the bathroom advertising an app that allows you to write a letter to Van Gogh and receive one in return, inspired by his lifelong conversation with his brother Theo. “Hi Vincent,” I type, “How’s the asylum?” The loading wheel spins, and a moment later the bot replies, “My painting goes well, despite my worsening circumstances…”

    The sense of the prophetic is too strong about his life to have any other relation to it. Each brush stroke brings him a step closer to his death, to the 7mm revolver in the wheatfield. I watch Bedroom at Arles dissolve into another wheatfield painting; Edith Piaf’s “Je Ne Regrette Rien” thunders through the speakers. He suffered exactly as he needed to so that we can experience his life after death, his pervasiveness in pop culture, his penetration into the deepest, oldest corridors of memory. A painted bird drifts against blue walls that were once the painted sky of Arles. Across the world, his work and his words continue to swirl forward in countless repetitions like snow blowing through an open door.

    Still, it’s nice to sit in the middle of the floor, as you’re encouraged to, and just look around. The room is filled with families, couples and young children with benches for people who might not have the flexibility to stand up and sit down again. “Irises” floods the wall, and the blue light of the painting washes upon the veined hands of an older woman, sitting quietly, holding her walker. Thankfully, the entire thing is rather hard to take a photo of—the projections are too large to capture anyway and the projections are a little grainy. Instead we sit and look. The whole video lasts about an hour and is on a continuous loop, but you can stay as long as you want.

    It is no small irony that we can’t avoid the figure of Van Gogh as the archetypal impoverished artist. The lines of the Bedroom at Arles start to take shape: the bed frame emerges out of thin air along with the chair and the boots, then color splashes into it, and the famous painting looms on all sides; and his legacy seems suddenly, painfully inescapable.

  • The Truth Is Out There, Somewhere Decoder

    The Truth Is Out There, Somewhere
    Decoder

    Who doesn’t like a bit of mystery? But where are they keeping it these days?

    There are certainly unknowns—when will this pandemic really end? Did they really do that? But mystery is not the same as a mystery. True crime, for example, isn’t mysterious. In the end either one kind of crime was committed or another was. If the killer is eventually revealed, it’s extremely satisfying… and far less mysterious. A true mystery feels mysterious every time you see it.

    True mystery gathers around something unknowable but compelling: fields of humanoid fossils in the Rift Valley, incunabula deep in the Bodleian or Vatican libraries, the heart of the sun.

    Any art old enough to also be an artifact can feel mysterious just by dint of having been made by long-vanished minds we’ll never have a chance to know—but newer art summoning mystery is a neat trick. Francis Bacon did it, after so many surrealists failed, perhaps because his distortions seemed so necessarily to connect to pain (so less playful), Lee Bontecou did it (she made the biotechnohorrorvoid as abstraction before Alien made it literal), Mark Tobey was mysterious on a good day. But, aside from a few aggressive antifashionables like Jeronimo Elespe and Danny McCaw, “summoning mystery” tends not to be on the contemporary artist’s list of ambitions. Why?

    For one thing, we live in an age of explication. Seconds after hearing about a thing for the first time, we are googling up a gloss on it. The truth is out there, or at least several plausibly mundane competing theories. We use explication in so many ways: explication-as-advertising (for the explicator or the explicated), explication-as-entertainment (What happened at Chernobyl? Who is this Tiger King?), explication-as-critique (or, more commonly, backdoor insult).

    For another thing, it’s really hard to be both mysterious and funny—and since at least Warhol, it’s been hard to accuse anyone of genius unless they have “wit.” Giving up on wit looks like giving up on self-awareness, and in an age of social media that’s the only defense most of us have.

    Illustration by Zak Smith

    Science and the fictions science engenders seem less mysterious every day: our current style of public speculation tends to be less in the direction of what? and why? and more in the direction of how soon will we solve it? and how horrible will we be about it when we do? Science seems increasingly about us. About what kind of bad will we be with our new machines and new genes? Nothing could be less mysterious.

    Is our music mysterious? Hip hop is the least mysterious form: the thrill has always been in how blatant it is. The orchestration and collage required of electronic music, on the other hand, can be mysterious, but it always seems to need help: a dancehall, a drug, a movie—it needs to be part of a larger dream.

    Dreams will never go anywhere: that’s a good sign, for mystery. But are we putting any stock in dreams these days?

    Religion is dream-adjacent, but lately we understand religion primarily as a social divider or a form of self-help—which makes it eager to explicate itself. Faith behaves now as if its survival depends on being de-mystified. Artists in Western Europe stopped asking Why the Crucifixion? and Why the Resurrection? in the middle of the last century and the rest of the world is far too practical to spend any time wrestling with such things. Maybe in Latin America? But there the low-hanging peach flesh of infinitely discussable topics like gender, sexuality and colonialism are always close at hand. Issues are not mysteries—issues are vital, urgent, they have right and wrong answers, they can get you killed. It’s not safe to get caught messing with the ineffable when there are issues afoot.

    This points to the absence of the most mysterious thing: god. Which I’m fine with, really, but you can see why people try to find substitutes in star charts or tarot cards: there is a dark and luxurious sense of privacy, intimacy and infinity that takes over when you become convinced that something really depends on how you handle being alone in a room with a metaphor.

    To be pressed to puzzle out the truth from inert and inarticulate matter in a way no expert or psychiatrist could know better than you—that’s tremendously exciting. I would like more artists to try it.

  • ASK BABS BABY STEPS, BACK TO NORMALCY

    ASK BABS
    BABY STEPS, BACK TO NORMALCY

    Dear Babs, Back in the pre-Covid days, I didn’t mind going to art openings and events; they weren’t my favorite thing, but I knew it was essential to show up and meet people. Now, after a year of not going out, I find these activities next to impossible to endure. I’m vaccinated, booster-ed, and wear a mask, so I’m not afraid of getting Covid. It’s just that I have this new anxiety I didn’t have before. I find myself unable to socialize; I feel paralyzed and just not myself. What do I do?

    —Awkward in Altadena

    Dear Awkward, At least you kinda liked going to openings in the “before times.” Most artists I know were happy to have a reprieve from obligated social functions during months of lockdown. But the fact is we all need to start showing up for each other—if only to rebuild social bonds and communities damaged by the pandemic. That doesn’t mean it will be easy. After adapting to our isolation, getting out into the world feels like a shock.

    You should know you’re not alone in your newfound anxiety. The American Psychological Association published a report in March of this year stating that nearly half of all Americans they surveyed felt “uneasy about adjusting to in-person interaction.” So know that everyone else feels weird too.

    Remember to take your time. You don’t have to be the same social butterfly you were before COVID. Socializing is a skill, and you must practice it just like anything else. Set a goal of going to one art event a month. If you feel overwhelmed with anxiety during the small talk that plagues all social functions, just come out and say how you’re feeling. Trust me; many people will be happy you did and will welcome the opportunity to talk about their own awkward social re-emergence.

    After a few months, you’ll get more comfortable. Before you know it, your calendar will be so filled with openings and parties and fairs and other social functions you’ll be wishing for another lockdown.

  • COMICS A Bunch of Sour Grapes

    COMICS
    A Bunch of Sour Grapes

  • Remarks on Color: Recalcitrant Red January's Hue

    Remarks on Color: Recalcitrant Red
    January’s Hue

    Recalcitrant Red has gone on strike once and for all, having shirked his usual duties which include the setting of campfires, blood drives, Naugahyde sex parties, riots and any activity where the devil is set to make an appearance. Recalcitrant Red has turned his back on the industry of violence, even going so far as to boycott action films where his presence is the most necessary ingredient in a culture hell bent on destruction.

    Now when you go to see Keanu Reeves’ latest foray into head splitting, blistering revenge, the requisite river of blood does not flow. Instead, the studios have had to make due with Burnt Orange, which is more reminiscent of Thanksgiving supper than John Wick! Recalcitrant Red’s refusal to participate has not only affected the film industry, but also greeting card businesses across the greater United States where young men can no longer descend on bended knee, extending red roses, to beg their lover’s hand in marriage. Somehow Peonies just don’t cut it! The tried and true red and green Christmas sweater has also suffered, as pink, a last-minute substitute on mittens and sweaters can be seen all across America as Recalcitrant Red continues to test the limits of his absence like a libertine come home from the war

    Recalcitrant Red once famously exclaimed “You can’t give the finger to the blind,” and with that comment was banned irrevocably from The National Federation of the Sightless for all eternity. Recalcitrant had to draw the line somewhere and did make the occasional appearance at several high-end fashion shows in and around Milan, where he could be seen showboating on a pair of gleaming vinyl chaps, replete with two perfectly formed half-moon butt cheeks. Of course, other colors fiercely criticized his complete lack of personal responsibility not to mention his abysmal taste, but rarely does Recalcitrant Red take stock, flanked by his constant cohort, the Devil, and opting instead for the most garish, high profile exit he can muster.

  • OUTSIDE LA: Jasper Johns Philadelphia Museum of Art

    OUTSIDE LA: Jasper Johns
    Philadelphia Museum of Art

     

    As the room unfolds before a viewer’s eyes there is a veritable procession of numbers going from one to nine through all the gyrations of being outlined, filled in or partially obscured. It is as though the sequence of this set of well-known forms is taken through every possible permutation. That is followed by a similar parade of images in which the letters of the alphabet are taken through their combinations including forays into brightly colored versions. The negative space surrounding the letter predominates in some while the letterforms emerge in others. Then comes a series of objects which are so prosaic and commonplace to be taken entirely for granted. There are American flags, maps, the reverse side of stretched canvases and pens and pencils. They are reincarnated multiple times as image and as object and every time their obdurate everyday origins seem to be contradicted by the painstaking construction the artist has put into visualizing them.

     

    ​Jasper Johns, Fool’s House, 1961–62 (Private collection) © Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

     

    Jasper Johns has a long history of confounding any critical reads of this work. His silence and repetition have led others to write extraordinarily long essays on what the artist intended. All the while it’s hard to discern how important these elucidations are to the artist. The exhibition “Mind/Mirror”—part one of a two-part exhibition divided between Philadelphia and New York—crisscrosses through the artist’s work and traces the chronology from its origins in what was then known as pop art to the most recent figurative elaborations. As with any artist’s long career, there are artworks that stand out for their amazing qualities and works that simply signal that the artist has continued working albeit with less successful outcomes.

     

    Jasper Johns, 5 Postcards, 2011. (Philadelphia Museum of Art: Promised gift of Keith L. and Katherine Sachs) © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

     

    Johns knowingly entices the viewer into a world not only of things that are recognizable in terms of their relationship to the outside world but recognizable within his overall output. His play with space and form and color has got a kind of predictability that is often unsettling in its obviousness. Whether or not the artist intended for this to be the result of the reflections of mind in the mirror, the viewer is taken on a whimsical and rather significant journey.

     

    Jasper Johns: Mind / Mirror

    Philadelphia Museum of Art

    Through February 13, 2022

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Jeffrey Deitch Group Show Curated by Kehinde Wiley

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Jeffrey Deitch
    Group Show Curated by Kehinde Wiley

    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 President Bill Clinton and First Lady, Hillary Clinton. Moonwalking forward, Kehinde Wiley—standing on the shoulders of Knox and other portraiture giants as Charles White, Laura Wheeler Waring and Nelson Stevens—made history in being selected as the first African American to paint an official US presidential portrait for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, former President Barak Obama in 2018. Of current interest at Jeffrey Deitch gallery in Los Angeles is “Self-Addressed,” an exhibition curated by Wiley consisting of self-portraits by 44 contemporary African artists from the multidisciplinary artist-residence program, Black Rock Senegal, that he founded in 2019.

    The infamous white gaze is interrogated, and African aesthetic individuality is unplugged as many of these images unapologetically stare right back at cha seeking neither acceptance nor approval for their intrinsic worth as human beings. Using such materials as acrylic, oil, pastel, charcoal and photography, these works reinforce that creative African expression is multilingual.

    Lindokuhle Khumalo, Smile is Luxury, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Josh White.

    Using acrylic on canvas, Lindokuhle Khumalo captures 21st-century self-perception with Smile is Luxury (2021). Gracing a Kool-Aid purple background is a young man taking a selfie, grinning while holding an iPhone. Facing viewers with a million-dollar smile, wearing a tangerine beanie and lime green T-shirt is enough to make anyone say cheese. In fact, Khumalo is courageous at painting two of the most challenging aspects of portraiture—teeth and hands. He refuses the escape clause of the serious look, or hands in pocket. Although many of the paintings do not reflect proficiency with rendering hands, the act of these artists taking the risk to intentionally reveal perceptions of themselves makes “Self-Addressed” worth seeing. It also leaves one hoping that Wiley will refine his curatorial vision with a reboot, sequel or a trilogy of exhibitions that push even further self-portrait boundaries.

     

    Self-Addressed
    Curated by Kehinde Wiley
    Jeffrey Deitch
    November 6 – December 23, 2021

  • Remarks on Color: Cringing Cucumber December's Hue

    Remarks on Color: Cringing Cucumber
    December’s Hue

    Cucumber is so much more than a tea-time British delicacy, served on white bread with loads of butter, yet Americans cringe at the thought! Cringing Cucumber, as she is known in the States, decided to open a specialty shop in the heart of Manhattan, serving all manner of crustless delights, aka sandwiches, including fig and pepper, baked wasp with Madagascar honey, watercress and mustard, sardines on toast, and her personal favorite, singed caterpillar butts on sourdough. Needless to say, the café, which was called The Last Great Cucumber Lodge, did not catch on immediately.

    Fellow restaurateurs including The Lavender Mustache and The Turquoise Amoeba suggested altering the menu to include more traditional fare like ham on rye, or the tried and true turkey club, but the recalcitrant cucumber would not budge. Instead, she dug her heels in, determined to win over The Big Apple with the succulent taste of squid toes on pumpernickel. Manhattanites were not amused and even went so far as to protest, marching around in front of the great establishment carrying signs with sentiments like “Grasshopper legs are bollocks!” and “If I wanted a crustless delight, my husband will do just fine!”

    Poor Cringing Cucumber redoubled her efforts in the hope of winning over the humorless Americans. She concocted new, ever more adventurous delights that included boar’s whiskers dipped in camembert and peanut butter, an all-American favorite; cream of ant on braised celery stalks, and boar’s ball biscuits with hemp seeds, lightly dusted with cinnamon and sage. Again, the response was a collective gasp, so Cringing Cucumber had no choice but to take early retirement back in Sussex where she spent the remaining years of her life delightfully churning butter in the nude with other likeminded women, and you can bet she most definitely lived happily ever after.

  • Bennett Roberts It’s About Time

    Bennett Roberts
    It’s About Time

    Back in 2006, I approached Bennett Roberts at his gallery on Wilshire Boulevard with a bit of chagrin. The LA art dealer had always been nothing but nice, helpful and accommodating to me as a person and as an arts writer. So my heart was heavy when I had to break it to him—before he could read it in the latest edition of Artillery—that we had panned his Kehinde Wiley show.

    Roberts, unflinching, seemed to be suppressing a grin. Was it because a review in Artillery had no significance to him, or was it his absolute confidence that Wiley was already untouchable? I chose to believe the latter. He graciously invited me in to linger at the show and told me not to hesitate to raise any questions. That made quite an impression on me as a journalist; I really respected his very adult manner.

    Fifteen years later, a lone Kehinde Wiley painting hangs on an empty white gallery wall, surrounded by brown-paper–wrapped canvases awaiting installation at Roberts Projects. I assumed the unopened art was Wiley’s; Roberts informed me otherwise, stating it was Amoako Boafo’s next show—the Wiley was there for a client-viewing later in the day.

    The irony did not escape me as we sat down in the main gallery for the second meeting of our interview. The first time was at the Los Feliz home that Roberts shares with his wife and business partner, Julie Roberts. That was nearly a year ago (that pesky pandemic kept delaying things), and it was now September, the start of the new fall art season. Julie, a full and equal partner in the gallery, was in New York at The Armory Show while hubby stayed behind to attend to their upcoming exhibition—there’s a long waiting list for Boafo’s work—“hundreds.” The African artist who has been showing with Roberts Projects since 2018 is super-hot right now; Roberts could not afford to be away that opening weekend.

    Business is going well for the gallery. Many of its artists are in high demand, and artists that have stuck by Roberts over the years are now getting their due—current art star Betye Saar for one. Roberts is in high spirits and ready to begin the interview before I even get the recorder going. He kicks off by singing high praises for LA’s current recognition as an important art center—finally. “It’s always been a great center for artists.”He pauses before acknowledging—for galleries and collectors—“not always so great.”

    In the past, Los Angeles was notorious for its inferior collector-base compared to New York. Roberts recounts the LA collectors of only a few decades ago; “If they’re going to spend 30 to 50 thousand dollars or a million dollars, they’re going to buy from New York. It gave them more confidence.” That is no longer the case.

    Roberts emerged in the LA art scene amidst the ’80s art-world explosion, after returning home from college in Santa Barbara. He grew up in Brentwood, a wealthy neighborhood on LA’s west side, with a producer-writer father in the film and television industry. Roberts attended Windward, “a well-known private school,” he points out, where his best friend was Richard Heller—of the Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica. In the summer of 1986, Roberts and Heller picked up where they left off and started a gallery in Heller’s father’s garage. They called it Richard/Bennett Gallery.

    Within a year, they were confident enough to move into a “real” space on La Cienega Boulevard near some of LA’s hottest galleries, like Rosamund Felsen, who was debuting the likes of Mike Kelley and Lari Pittman. Richard/Bennett proved to be no slouch either: they were the first to show Raymond Pettibon, and were responsible for introducing his work to Chief Curator Paul Schimmel—who in turn put Pettibon in the famed 1992 Geffen/MOCA show, “Helter Skelter.” Running the gallery was a struggle, Roberts admits, but somehow just when they didn’t think they could cover their rent, a miracle sale would happen, or a collector would buy a few Pettibons for $250 apiece to help them out. With measured success over five years, Roberts and Heller parted ways, both continuing their own successful careers as art dealers.

    Kehinde Wiley, Yachinboaz Ben Yisrael II, 2021, oil on linen, 106.5 x 74.25 x 4.25 in. framed; courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California, photo by Joshua White

    RETAIN & MAINTAIN

    According to Roberts, a central challenge in running a successful gallery is retaining your artists. Yes, Pettibon eventually moved on; his career skyrocketed after “Helter Skelter” and today he is represented by Regen Projects in LA and David Zwirner in New York—there’s always a bigger gallery, a better offer. Roberts concedes there’s a long list of artists who got snatched up after he invested in them. But that’s typical and expected. “It’s unavoidable,” he maintains.

    Take Roberts Projects’ biggest artist, Kehinde Wiley—it is by no means the only gallery representing him. Things have changed drastically since the 1980s era, when galleries had exclusive partnerships with their artists. Roberts says he prefers the new system—a more polyamorous relationship, if you will. He concurs, “I like Kehinde showing with someone different in London, someone different in New York. I make less money and get less pieces, but those people have different collectors, different curators that are interested in that program. Artists are seen differently, depending on the program they are in.” Roberts thinks that artists showing with other galleries is not necessarily a bad thing. Another newer trend is for a gallery to have multiple spaces. Galleries don’t often want to surrender their artists to another gallery and take lower percentages (like Roberts did with Wiley). He notes, “It may actually be cheaper in the long run to have another space in New York to show that artist rather than giving the artist to another gallery.”

    Roberts emphatically stresses that it’s all about retaining the talent you’ve developed. “The longer you retain it, it is perceived as important…,” he interrupts himself, “I use ‘perceive’ because everything is about time. Everything in the art world is about time. Everyone thinks it’s about popularity, success, money; it isn’t. It’s about how much time you can keep that person in play.”

    Roberts believes that for an artist to have historical staying power, a cultural discussion needs to revolve around that artist and their work. Until that dialogue expands outside the art world it remains “an inside discussion.” In other words, that work will not make a wider impact, nor make it into the history books.

    Kehinde Wiley’s oeuvre has crossed over to become part of a cultural discussion. Two factors play a part: his commissioned presidential portrait of President Obama and, most recently, his version of the famous Blue Boy portrait hanging at The Huntington (The Blue Boy is on loan to London’s National Gallery). Roberts Projects had a huge part in making that transaction happen. Those projects propelled Wiley into a wider cultural sphere, surpassing just the art world. Most likely, he will go down in history.

    Amoako Boafo, Monstera Leaf Sleeves, 2021; oil and paper transfer on canvas, 77 x 76.5 in.; courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California.

    BLACK ARTISTS MATTER

    The Black Lives Matter movement filtered into the art world quickly; in fact, most would say much earlier than the mainstream cultural embrace. Today, if your gallery doesn’t represent Black and POC artists, or include much diversity, you might as well be showing cave paintings. Roberts had been representing Black artists long before most galleries caught up to speed. His gallery didn’t seem to get much credit for it, but he wasn’t looking for it either. The artist roster has always been inclusive, starting with Kehinde Wiley in 2002, Noah Davis in 2006, Betye Saar in 2010 and recent additions of African artists Boafo, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe and Wangari Mathenge.

    The Black artist movement is thriving right now and Roberts Projects is right on target. Alongside Wiley, Noah Davis was a big hit for them. Davis, too, is engaged in that bigger historical discussion, as co-founder of The Underground Museum, an institution created to show museum-quality work in a Latino and Black LA neighborhood that was underserved in art exposure. Davis died of cancer in 2015, at the tragically early age of 32, but had left the Roberts & Tilton gallery in 2012 (Roberts’ former gallery with partners Julie, and Jack Tilton, who passed in 2017). All ties between Davis and Roberts & Tilton were severed by then, and David Zwirner obtained Davis’ estate in 2020. (Zwirner needs to hurry and check all those boxes).

    Roberts isn’t upset about that, but more dismayed about the erasure of Roberts’ involvement in developing Davis from the beginning. “I helped sell pieces to fund The Underground Museum.” Roberts pauses with quiet exasperation. Zwirner produced a huge monograph on Davis with nary a mention of Roberts. “It was unbelievable to me how the art world loves to rewrite history and make it seem like only the winners write it. Not the ones that are up-and-coming, or the also-rans.” Roberts was key in putting Davis on the map circa 2007. Roberts & Tilton were participatining in an art fair when Don and Mera Rubell (serious art collectors and clients) stopped by their booth and inquired about a painting. Roberts recalls Mera demanding: Who is this great artist on the wall? “I said, ‘It’s a brand-new discovery of mine. I think it’s terrific, I think you should get something.’ They said, ‘You know what? We’re doing [a show called] ‘30 Americans.’ And he will be the final and youngest artist we include in the show.’ And I said, ‘Thank you very much.’”(Let that go down in history—you read it here first!)

    Betye Saar, The Destiny of Latitude & Longitude, 2010, mixed media assemblage, 54 x 43 x 20.5 in., Baltimore Museum of Art; purchase with exchange funds from the Pearlstone Family Fund and partial gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California

    ONE PERCENTERS

    Let’s face it, the art world is a rich man’s game now, and with the world’s wealth concentrated among the one percent, it’s a small playing field. “It is the game you play after all the other games you’ve played,” Roberts explains, “It is the final frontier.” He goes on, “It is the place that once you’ve made whatever fortune you’ve made and you have what everyone else has… you can differentiate yourself from all the other billionaires by collecting things that are not only great but are truly something that will enhance how you see your own position in things.” Pausing, Roberts surmises, “It’s a game of fortune.”

    One-percenters have needs too. “When you’re that big, the richest people want to buy from you, because they feel secure buying from you,” Roberts says. That’s why mega-galleries like Gagosian can and do exist. At last count Gagosian had 16 galleries worldwide. In today’s global market, having art galleries around the world seems more shrewd than extravagant. Another factor, Roberts explains, “All of those businesses have a very, very vibrant secondary market—that’s truly where all the money is.” At that level, the competition is with the auction houses; they don’t care about other galleries at that point. Roberts acknowledges he’s not in that league—and is relieved not to be.

    Roberts refers to what’s happening right now in the art world as a “sea change.” His and Julie’s gallery is rolling with the new system, and in fact thriving. “I don’t think that I even sell things anymore—I think people buy things from me,” Roberts says reflectively. “Zero pressure. I want the experience to be as clean and as enjoyable as possible.”

    I’ve watched Roberts’ gallery remain fresh, relevant, edgy—top-notch for over 30 years. With Betye Saar’s soaring career, the recent Wiley accomplishments, and rising star Amoako Boafo on board, it is undeniably riding the wave.

    Unsurprisingly, Roberts announced at the end of our interview that they will be moving from their space to La Brea Avenue. The new gallery will be three times larger than their Culver City venue. And no, Roberts Projects will not be adding another gallery; they just need a bigger space for displaying larger works and a nice showing room for their clients—where they can have an enjoyable experience considering the lone Kehinde Wiley spotlighted on the wall.

  • Things Art Should Be Doing Decoder

    Things Art Should Be Doing
    Decoder

    Maggie West took over a large, dark space somewhere north of Frogtown last week and filled it with massive images of flowers, pulsating time-lapse photographed in UV light. The colors have weird harmonies: bad-acid Disney-villain purples and magentas, alien and dreamy but it is all more precise than any dream should be. In a word: it works, this immersive video installation.

    No part of it is an accident. “Eternal Garden” is not the kind of art where you lay out the canvas and make a move, then make another based on what you now see, then improvise the next and then the next. Maggie had to sit in her studio with plants, lights and cameras and know that eventually the pictures she was making would be on this particular screen in this specific big black room—it doesn’t work any other way: the piece relies on its precision—and seeing that precision at scale—for its effect. That’s what makes it more than decorative. The art would not only not work without the large and expensive machinery provided by the large company that owns it and the space, it could not even have been thought up without it: the piece is not itself otherwise. Before making the piece, Maggie made a deal. She told the company she would make an installation and it would show off the quality of the technology. She’s good at this sort of thing—and not ashamed.

    Simultaneously, on the other end of the country, the Instituto de Subcultura in San Juan, Puerto Rico is presenting “No Moral or Legal Authority,” woodcuts from John Mejias’ Puerto Rican War book. It is everything “Eternal Garden” is not: direct, low-tech, blatantly political, black and white, small. And wholly independently produced: the project began during the Obama administration, with no publisher, no gallery and no plan. Pieces of wood were going to get cut, over a span of years, into an intricate, jostling, chaotic and mutli-patterned re-telling of the story of an obscure conflict that even the visitors in San Juan weren’t taught about in school. And if nobody cared at the end? Oh well, John has been self-publishing for years. It turns out this time that they do care—post-colonial problems are on even collectors’ minds these days. But that is an accident. This piece didn’t expect the audience it got.

    John Mejias, “No Moral or Legal Authority” woodcut

    Both of these very different works deserve to exist and do things art should be doing: it is good to be reminded of the strangeness behind the beautiful growing world all around us, and it is good to find out about a real-but-failed revolution in our country from someone with noir-caper storytelling instincts and an eye for the off-beat—but they also both involve their artists in different gambles.

    It is a gamble for John to sit down and make art unsure if anyone cares, and it is a gamble for Maggie to decide to make art that won’t exist unless you first make someone care. The first gamble is earnest, unassuming, self-sufficient, it doesn’t care what you think; the second gamble is clever, charming, sociable, shrewd—it will be loved or it will not exist. Neither artist is rich, and neither was sure that any of this would be worth it.

    They are different in other ways: John’s piece is a book: something that sits quietly in private spaces and only is fully what it is meant to be when you pick it up in a quiet moment and decide, on a random day, to meet it more than halfway. Maggie’s piece makes a party: one night only, you could go see it without seeing all the people who want to see it, silhouetted also. You have to get into a car and out again, and then decide how long to linger, drinking, in the dark to make your trip worthwhile.

    This art and these artists both knock on our door, but they’re applying for different jobs—they are different, but not competing. Everyone needs the truth, well told, and everyone loves dazzle with something worth dwelling on at the center.

    There’s a lie in the middle of how we’re taught about art—that this or that captures the spirit of the age, and that the last thing is the throwback and the next thing is progress. Are we, any of us, a homogeny? We are not. Does any one of us need only one thing? No. Does art have something better to do than give us—humans—the various things we need? It doesn’t.

    There’s a fear of scarcity somewhere at the bottom somewhere—that more of this means less of that. In reality, we all need everything.

  • COMICS Future Features for Creative Creatures

    COMICS
    Future Features for Creative Creatures

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Tiffany Alfonseca The Mistake Room, Los Angeles

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Tiffany Alfonseca
    The Mistake Room, Los Angeles

    The two dozen or so paintings Bronx-based artist Tiffany Alfonseca made during a summer residency at the Mistake Room not only represent a kind of reimagined family photo album, but are intentionally rendered with fidelity to those source materials and their awkward vernacular, vintage aesthetic. Further, the works are installed in a unified field of walls painted a pale pink — the same hue that forms the foundational layer for the skin tones in all the portraits. Several threads converge across the suite of carefully rendered, large-scale images, but the mindful rendering of variations in skin tone as a metric for family resemblances and a more insidious intra-community colorism, along with the tumultuous blending of Black and Brown in her own Afro-Latinx family space, is one of the central ones. Like many of the choices Alfonseca makes, the presence of an invisible but universal underlying foundation to her nuanced palette has power in both the formal and narrative dimensions of the work.

    Tiffany Alfonseca, Por Alexandra, 2021, Acrylic, color pencil, charcoal on canvas, 72 x 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist and The Mistake Room, Los Angeles. Photo Credit: Ian Byers-Gamber.

    Another example of this is the matrilineal armature of the intersecting storylines — women are at the center of the birthdays, weddings, vacations, chores, candid and quiet moments and formal occasions captured first on cameras, and now in generously evocative paint and pencil. The stilted headshots and defiant children, the richly textured and colorful patterns of clothes from eras and occasions, the pristine upholstery, the glittering bangles, the haircuts and party dresses, the vibrancy of color at every turn, the taut smile held for just a smidge too long — all taken together the whole “album” imparts a sense of a family that is, like everyone’s, both absolutely ordinary and utterly remarkable.

    Tiffany Alfonseca, Alfonseca Rondon, 2021, Acrylic, color pencil, glitter on canvas, 72 x 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist and The Mistake Room, Los Angeles. Photo Credit: Ian Byers-Gamber.

    But Alfonseca takes all of this one step further still in her vivid and deliberative studio practice, as she makes the most effective and winsome gestures in the many opportunities to create not only exuberant color fields and patterns, but also a surprising and strategic impasto in hair and sometimes fabric and even concrete. In works like the fantastical “Dahianni” and surrealist “Por Alexandra” as well as the pageantry of a nearly Op-Art, Pattern & Decoration visual workout in “Alfonseca-Rondon,” this alleviates the flatness of the photographic spaces and re-grounds the works in an embodied presence that transcends the informational archive. In this way, Alfonseca does more than chronicle and remember, she creates new things that come directly from her own energy and hands, and she thereby informs her history with the fresh living presence of herself within it.

     

    Tiffany Alfonseca: De las manos que nos crearon

    The Mistake Room, Los Angeles

    September 25 – December 18

  • GALLERY ROUNDS: Louise Nevelson Kayne Griffin

    GALLERY ROUNDS: Louise Nevelson
    Kayne Griffin

    Fragments of paper, cardboard, wire and foil have all been carefully orchestrated into a space that seems to float seamlessly and coalesce into a compelling quasi-geometric composition in “Collages 1957–1982” by Louise Nevelson. On closer inspection, it becomes clear how much the detritus that was collected from the artist’s environment was carefully smoothed, flattened, cut, torn and arranged—as though it was the most precious material in the world. The clear yet complex set of correlated relationships between the smaller forms and the larger bounding areas radiate a sense of harmony that belies the humble nature of the raw material being deployed. Predominantly monochromatic with some high contrast between white-and-black masses, there are occasional eruptions of color: a bright orange here or a light blue there, but there’s a sense throughout that these compositions are meant to be very even tempered.

    While Nevelson’s sculptural works comprise large arrays of decontextualized objects and parts of objects arranged in patterns that are then evenly coded in one color, these smaller studies demonstrate how the artist works her aesthetic prowess on a less massive scale. There is still the kind of somberness to these collages but it is scaled differently so the concern that is worked out on each individual element, be it a fragment from a cigarette pack or part of a wooden crate, is highlighted.

    Louise Nevelson, Untitled, 1957 © 2021 Estate of Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

    In Untitled (1957) flanking either side of the central corrugated cardboard panel on which wood panels are wired are smaller scraps of flat cardboard on which rough geometric shapes have been created through spray painting, leaving the forms as negative space defined by the surrounding black paint. Above the central panel the artist has positioned several semi-circular arches that appear almost crown-like. There are tears and regular cuts of these different parts throughout, but it all looks to have been shaped by pushing a determined composition.

    The pleasure evinced in viewing these works is determined by both the quiet and controlled orchestration of space and also by entering a very subtle yet decisive imaginative dimension in which the viewer is invited into a space without it ever having to add up to anything other than its exploration.

     

    Louise Nevelson: Collages 1957 – 1982

    Kayne Griffin

    Through Oct. 30

  • Hugo Hopping and The Winter Office Nature As Infrastructure

    Hugo Hopping and The Winter Office
    Nature As Infrastructure

    I became aware of LA artist Hugo Hopping in 2009, when his conceptual work appeared in the exhibition “Post American L.A.,” curated by Pilar Tompkins Rivas for the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica. Since then his trajectory has taken him to base his practice between Los Angeles and Copenhagen, where he co-founded The Winter Office (TWO) with Johanna Ferrer Guldager. TWO is an experimental and professional group of artists, curators, architects, designers and social scientists, who are exploring artistic and design interventions looking to uncover emerging solutions for a sustainable urban and natural infrastructure.

    TWO’s theoretical and creative approach to architecture, urban planning and art is deeply enmeshed in the climate challenges of a warming world. Through a process of collaborative experimentation, TWO explores problem-solving through idea-sharing and research workshops, including rising housing inequality, economic displacement, houselessness and environmental disaster. Hopping, with members of TWO, were back at 18th Street in 2019 for a residency. They developed a study of the cultural landscape of the surrounding urbanity and communities, including climate gentrification. TWO also presented at the Armory Center in Pasadena, with “Non-Perfect Dwelling,” a visual environment where urgent approaches to dwelling and cohabitation could be imagined and planned.

    Rewildering Holographic Weeds, TWO, 2020
    Cover for the new publication, Nature As Infrastructure

    After quarantine in Copenhagen, Hugo Hopping is back in LA, doing advance work for TWO’s project, Nature As Infrastructure. Last year it was road-tested at the European Biennial Manifesta 13 in Marseilles, France. Their project is researching how to re-establish new connections to nature, rethinking a renewal of society, and inspiring the design of future public spaces by asking how to reintroduce nature into cities. Following a methodology they describe as the “creative practice of spatial justice,” TWO navigates from discourses of power and human survival to conversations of collaboration and thriving.

    TWO’s and Hopping’s practical-theoretical research is being conducted in Frogtown’s Elysian Valley and will be a continuation of the forthcoming Nature As Infrastructure publication. It documents and describes their work on designing forests as a program element leading to the establishment of natural infrastructure. Hopping says, “Frogtown is a very special area walled by the 5 Freeway and the LA River, near urban parks and a sizable number of trees. However little or no sound walls or the use of trees to absorb the plastic and CO2 pollution is in place. The lines in the diagrams for the project suggest the interplay between full-grown tree canopies and shared cultivation models mixing public and private land to build a powerful natural infrastructure. Our study aims to understand this area in full in order to generate a near-future proposal that can involve public and private participation to help implement most of our suggestions.”

    This second diagram image relates directly to what TWO plans to further theorize for Elysian Valley and that they hope citizens can buy into in practice and for full implementation.

    Perhaps a precursor to TWO’s work is articulated in Suzi Gablik’s thesis, The Re-Enchantment of Art (1991). It promoted reconstructive art practices with a basis in real-world solutions. TWO’s work also brings to mind recent LA participatory environmental projects that were artist-centric. Mel Chin’s The TIE that BINDS: MIRROR of the FUTURE, a water conservation art project, was part of Los Angeles’ 2016 Public Art Biennial. Chin’s project began at the Bowtie, a parched stretch of land adjacent to the LA River in Atwater Village, where eight sample gardens were created. The project envisioned drought-resistant gardens planted throughout LA, reflecting a climate-appropriate collective-future landscape. Another inspirational project was by artist Lauren Bon. Her Not A Cornfield was a 2005 art project that transformed a 32-acre industrial brownfield into a cornfield for one agricultural cycle. It was a wonderful breath of optimism and boosted public awareness that this area could be more than another industrial site, expediting the process of turning the site into a State Historic Park.

    Nature As Infrastructure, along with the launch of TWO’s publication about the project, discusses the importance of generating higher standards of spatial justice through the design of urban forests, along with new roles of citizen participation. LA as a laboratory for environmentally based social practice art is unique because the city embodies many of the climate change and climate justice extremes and challenges we face. Artists and thinkers like Hopping and TWO, who address these issues proactively, are on the leading edge of an evolving, collective 21st-century art and social science practice.

    An advance look at TWO’s forthcoming publication can be seen at https://rssprss.net/product/nature-as-infrastructure-two/

  • Zaria Forman: Fear and Awe Showcasing Beauty and Fragility

    Zaria Forman: Fear and Awe
    Showcasing Beauty and Fragility

     

     

    Climate change is a crisis that we must all recognize and work together to mitigate. For artists engaging with climate content, their activism manifests in many different ways. Some choose to showcase the devastating evidence of global warming, while others highlight the beauty of the natural world. Part of the latter group, Brooklyn-based Zaria Forman has been engaging with the issue of climate change through her large-scale drawings depicting some of the most beautiful and powerful aspects of the environment, including towering glaciers, crashing waves and melting icebergs. Impeccable to the point of appearing photorealistic, her works are at once serene and turbulent. Using soft pastel applied directly to the paper with her fingers and palms, Forman captures moments that reveal the tenuous balance between nature’s grandeur and fragility, and serve as reminders of what we all stand to lose.

     

    Forman began drawing the natural world at a young age, but it wasn’t until she experienced the impact of climate change firsthand that she grasped the severity of the crisis. In 2007, she took her first trip to Greenland and learned how changes to the ice fjords were challenging the lifestyles of Inuit locals. From then on, her work undertook a larger mission of addressing climate change. In the years since, Forman has traveled around the world to remote locations, even joining several of NASA’s Operation IceBridge airborne missions, for which she flew over Antarctica, Greenland and Arctic Canada, mapping changes in the ice.

     

    Zaria Forman, Wilhemina Bay No.2, Antarctica, November 23, 2018, 58 3/4 x 74 1/8 inches, soft pastel on paper, 2019

     

    It’s on these trips, as well as her own expeditions and partnerships with organizations like National Geographic, that Forman gathers source materials. Traveling to locations that most people never have the chance to see, Forman takes thousands of photographs, which she uses along with memories of how she felt on-site to convey the same sense of awe to the viewer.

     

    This sense of awe is perhaps best seen in her drawings of ice, the bird’s-eye-view works done on her trips with NASA, as well as those featuring close-ups of melting, weeping surfaces. In one powerful work titled Wilhelmina Bay No.2, Antarctica (2019), the artist has drawn an aerial view of a pristine, white iceberg partially submerged in deep blue water. Off to the side are fragments of ice, so faint they appear to be on the brink of melting away. The juxtaposition between the dense, solid iceberg with the tenuous fragments is a vivid reminder of the vulnerability of the natural world.

     

    In other works, Forman showcases the immense scale of nature. In Cierva Cove, Antarctica No.2 (2017), Forman depicted a monumental cliff of craggy ice. The drawing is equally monumental, measuring 70 by 105 inches. The size of the drawing and the foreboding position of the ice, towering over and jutting down towards the viewer, create an impression of incredible strength. Forman has carefully drawn the edges of the ice to convey movement, as if the wind is whipping off of the surface.

     

    Zaria Forman, Charcot Fjord, Greenland 66°21’7.21″N 36°59’10.49″W , April 22, 2017, 90 x 60 inches, soft pastel on paper, 2018

     

    What comes through in Forman’s art is a sense of magnitude: that of nature’s beauty, and of nature itself. Underscoring her work is the magnitude of the climate crisis. For many artists and activists, this magnitude—this weight—is an anxiety-inducing burden. Forman’s approach to the subject is refreshing and offers a necessary break from the more fearful representations of climate change, which are equally important but often daunting. This is not to say that her art is cheerful, but rather her approach is sensitive and nostalgic, offering snapshots of the natural world at a particular, often fleeting, moment.

     

    This balance between fear and awe was the subject of a recent group show at Mana Contemporary in New Jersey that featured Forman alongside artists James Prosek, Catherine Chalmers, Jeff Frost and Ted Kim. Pairing powerful representations of the devastating impact of the climate crisis with poignant yet beautiful images of nature, “Implied Scale: Confronting the Enormity of Climate Change,” was a compelling call to action. Included in the show was Forman’s Charcot Fjord, Greenland 66°21’7.21N 36°59’10.49W, April 22, 2017 (2018), a drawing that the artist completed as part of her work with NASA. Showing an aerial view of bright ice fragments floating in vast, deep blue water, the work is at once dramatic and beautiful. Toward the bottom of the drawing, a large iceberg with water pooling on its surface slowly melts as smaller pieces dissolve nearby, presenting a poetic harbinger of the iceberg’s fate. Though serene and simple, the scene captures the enormity of the phenomenon slowly unfolding below.

     

    Installation view of Implied Scale at Mana Contemporary. Photo: John Berens. Courtesy of Mana Contemporary.

     

    In addition to her activism as an artist, Forman also curated two exhibitions of climate-related art for National Geographic Lindblad Expeditions. Her first show, “Change,” launched in March of 2020 on National Geographic Endurance; her second exhibition, “res.o.lu.tion”, will be installed in October aboard the polar expedition ship National Geographic Resolution. The artists in the exhibitions will join Curate Change, a network Forman founded for artists engaging with nature and the climate crisis as “a place for discourse and collaboration, where new projects, perspectives and solutions are born.” She is also a member of Artists Commit, a group that shares resources on how to make artists’ practices more sustainable and hold their galleries accountable to do the same.

     

    Forman’s next trip will take her to Iceland, a place she’s visited before, but has not had the chance to draw since 2004. In many ways, reflecting on this last point may be superfluous. The changes to the natural world have accelerated in recent years, and the Iceland she saw in 2004 looked different from the Iceland of today. Even places Forman visited just a few years ago, especially those where climate change has taken the greatest toll, no longer look the same. This sad truth is at the heart of the artist’s practice. The beauty of nature, as immense as it is, is fragile and ephemeral. We are continually approaching the point of irreparable damage, and we are all responsible for our collective future.