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Tag: Art
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GALLERY ROUNDS: Naotaka Hiro
The BoxTwo side-by-side paintings face the gallery’s front door, awaiting visitors like sentries. They have all the elements that characterize Naotaka Hiro’s “Armor” exhibition, namely colorful swatches and fervid mark-making that expands from a vertical center line. The frequently butterflied compositions as well as abstracted renderings of fingers clue viewers into Hiro’s anatomical inspiration and process.
In the main gallery, visitors are again met by two side-by-side paintings, these nearly floor-to-ceiling on raw, unstretched canvas. Two large circles are cut out of each one. The holes allowed Hiro to insert himself through the canvas, ball it around his upper body and over his head (imagine a canvas dumpling with human legs) and proceed to dye the piece from the inside. Then he came out of the cocoon and worked from what he’d blindly started.
Installation view, Naotaka Hiro “Armor” at The Box, 2021 The artist employed a similar process for the exhibition’s central body of work, six 8 x 7 feet freestanding paintings on plywood. Each piece began laid flat, with short legs attached like on a coffee table. Hiro slid under the “coffee table” and, lying on his back, painted the underside, loosely tracing himself. He often worked with both hands. Then he flipped the piece over and worked sitting and standing on top of it. He then repeated the process until all the binaries blurred. The six paintings are arranged in a horseshoe, with a bronze cast of the artist’s torso (primarily) positioned before them.
Installation view, Naotaka Hiro “Armor” at The Box, 2021 The gallery’s back wall dazzles with ten 58 x 42 inch paintings on wood, focused on parts of the body rather than the whole. One has hand-sized holes cut out, suggesting another blind painting technique. Around the corner, a second bronze torso—this one more skeletal—ushers visitors into a screening room with a video of the artist at work. Beside that is a room of the artist’s sketches.
Installation view, Naotaka Hiro “Armor” at The Box, 2021 “Armor” presents process-oriented work about the body inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic (Hiro contracted COVID early on) and concurrent American socio-political upheaval, including attacks against Asians. The work, however, stands on its own visually and will continue to do so beyond this historic period.
Naotaka Hiro: Armor
May 29-July 24, 2021
All images ourtesy of the artist and The Box LA. Photographs by Fredrik Nilsen Studio.
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Outsider Art Fair & Takashi Murakami
“Super-Rough” Group Show, New YorkOutsider art is on display in full force in SoHo with a special exhibition hosted by the Outsider Art Fair and curated by Takashi Murakami. Focusing solely on sculpture, the exhibition brings together works by nearly 60 Outsider artists, a term that generally refers to artists who are self-taught. The exhibition is titled Super-Rough, a play on the term “superflat” that was coined by Murakami and refers to a style characterized by flatness and inspired by Japanese consumer culture, including manga and anime. Refreshingly unfiltered, the works in the show offer an imaginative exploration of materials, colors, and forms.
Installation view with works by Ryuji Nomoto and Yasuhiro Hirata, Yukiko Koide Presents. Upon entering the expansive exhibition space, I was confronted by a monumental, raised platform rife with sculptures that were anything but flat. While a few larger installations and wall pieces hung along the sides of the room, the vast majority of the nearly 200 sculptures were on this center platform. Abandoning the traditional art fair arrangement in which works from different dealers are separated into distinct sections and booths, the sculptures were all displayed together, allowing for close comparison of each piece. Also a departure from the art fair model, the exhibition is on view for nearly three weeks, running through June 27th and allowing for more time to visit.
Installation view with detailed view of works by Ryuji Nomoto and Yasuhiro Hirata, Yukiko Koide Presents. In line with the title Super-Rough, there were many artists who explored the physical boundaries of their materials. Displayed next to each other, artists Ryuji Nomoto and Yasuhiro Hirata, both from Japanese gallery Yukiko Koide Presents, are two memorable examples. In Nomoto’s untitled sculptures, the artist created colorful mounds that at first appeared to be wild bundles of string, but were actually made of colored glue. Piled into amorphous shapes, the works looked like they were slowly moving, as if pushing off of their wooden bases. Installed next to these was a cityscape of colorful cylinders by Hirata. All titled Corn on the Cob (2005-2020), Hirata’s sculptures, which looked to me like perfectly crafted ceramic vases, were a range of sizes and covered in small dots. Upon closer inspection, I was surprised to see they were actually made of paper tubes painted with acrylic. Even more surprising were the dots across the surface, which were not dots at all, but rather steel nails that the artist hammered into the tube, seen more clearly when viewed from the open sides.
Installation view with Paul Amar, Galerie Pol Lemétais and Gil Batle, Ricco/Maresca Gallery. Further down the platform was an assortment of glittery, colorful figures by Paul Amar. Playful and highly detailed, the figures resembled small altars and were made entirely of seashells. Next to Amar’s sculptures were pieces by Gil Batle that defied materials even further. Though they appeared to be stone, they were actually carefully carved ostrich eggshells with details so minute that a magnifying glass was provided for a closer look. Pairing the two artists together, I was struck by how they masterfully manipulated the unexpected material in such different ways.
Overall, the sculptures in Super-Rough were interactive, imaginative and playful. Having just viewed an exhibition of highly academic, critically acclaimed drawings at a nearby gallery, I was amazed at what artistic production free from stylistic and academic pretense could look like. It was refreshing reminder of how genuinely surprising art can really be.
Outsider Art Fair “Super-Rough” Group Show
Guest curator: Takashi Murakami
150 Wooster Street, New York
June 9-27, 2021
All photos by Annabel Keenan.
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GALLERY ROUNDS: Rebecca Campbell
L.A. LouverThe radiant and complex paintings in Rebecca Campbell’s exhibition “Infinite Density, Infinite Light” draw from the past, yet are very much about the present. They explore the nature of family, the freedom of being a child and the fragile nature of memory. Using found images including family snapshots and Polaroids, Campbell transforms isolated moments into stories about the people in her life— be it her children or parents. Within each work, she uses different painting styles to create an evocative journey through her own history.
Although the exhibition is predominantly a show of paintings, Campbell also includes a sculptural installation in the center of the gallery that directs the interpretation of the works. Titled To the One I Love the Best (2017), this mixed-media piece consists of a collage of translucent silk banners suspended from copper piping. They contain enlarged reproductions of concert tickets, a Western Union Valentine’s Day Telegram, handwritten letters and other documents that span different periods in Campbell’s family’s life.
Rebecca Campbell, To the One I Love the Best, 2017, installed in Rebecca Campbell: Infinite Density, Infinite Light, L.A. Louver In her paintings, Campbell often juxtaposes realistically rendered areas with looser, more abstracted brush strokes and thicker applications of paint. These gestural markings create a dream-like sensation that suggests the passage of time as evidenced in Nature Boy (2021), a large painting of Campbell’s son in the woods. The boy wears a white T-shirt with red letters that spell the word LOVE and holds a single plant stem. Behind him is an inkling of a path that leads to a giant tree trunk painted abstractly with swirling strokes in a range of soft colors. Campbell’s mélange of styles enhance a narrative that weaves past and present, dream and reality. The setting is simultaneously peaceful and unsettling as the child’s expression is one of defiance and awe.
Most of the paintings in Infinite Density, Infinite Light challenge the idea that there is a straightforward narrative about family: children growing into adults, having children of their own and negotiating the wonders of life. While Campbell depicts her subjects with compassion, at times she places them in potentially ambiguous situations interrupting what is represented in the original photographs with an abstract overpainting that suggests a divergent trajectory. In this exhibition, Campbell invites viewers to bear witness to her personal journey, while simultaneously suggesting it could resonate universally.
Rebecca Campbell
Infinite Density, Infinite Light
L.A. Louver
May 24 – July 2, 2021
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GALLERY ROUNDS: Patrizio di Massimo
François Ghebaly GalleryLike Schrödinger’s cat, the figures populating the canvases of Italian painter Patrizio Di Massimo’s paintings exist in two potential states at once. In his newest exhibition, Close at Hand at François Ghebaly Gallery, time/space freezes in each of the five paintings on view, creating a pseudo quantum superposition. There is an antagonist and protagonist in each melodramatic mise-en-scène—the antagonist caught ‘red handed’—their deeds immortalized in paint. Unsettlingly it is up to the viewer to decide the final resolution of the narratives.
For one example, in the painting Mum’s Floral Robe (2020) two figures are suspended in a state of struggle at the pinnacle of action/reaction. A female figure leans over a sofa, grabbing the “mum” in the scene by the scruff of her robe. The antagonist female figure also has her hand suspended in the air, as the mother screws up her face in theatrical terror. When initially viewed, this appears as the millisecond before a violent act. Yet when scrutinized further, the faces seem comical and playful, as if they’re only play fighting.
Patrizio di Massimo, The Island, 2020. Two bathing-suit-clad figures inhabit The Island (2020). A man lays seemingly dead at the forefront of the painting, splayed on a rock face, his arms opened at awkward angles and red blood pooling underneath his head. A woman is perched unabashedly above the man on a cliff and facing the ocean—she removes an article of clothing while basking in the breeze and brilliant sun. The discontinuity between the figures make the viewer wonder how connected they are? Is this the moment immediately following a vicious murder, or is the woman basking in blissful ignorance?
Installation view, Patrizio Di Massimo, Close at Hand, 2021, François Ghebaly, Los Angeles As stated in the press release the series was “completed over the course of fluctuating waves of lockdown… [and] shows the unruly side of intimate vicinity, especially when imposed under duress.” Each paintings offers more questions than answers. As indicated by the name of the show, the hands of each character in the paintings offer an implied theatricality which suggests a mock-reality, humorously representative of one of the oddest years in recent memory.
Patrizio di Massimo: Close at Hand
May 22 — June 19, 2021
All photographs by Paul Salveson. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly Gallery.
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GALLERY ROUNDS: Emil Alzamora
Lowell Ryan ProjectsEmil Alzamora’s “Waymaker” is like journeying through a series of time warps. Cement, steel and wood figures loom in various states of decay like Greco-Roman relics in a museum. Yet a modern sensibility invites the sculptures into a surrealist dream conjuring a restrained body, mangled by metal. His sculptural figures are caught in a violent tempest of industrial materials that weave in and out of linear time.
Emil Alzamora, Wormhole at Cladh Hallan, 2021 Wormhole at Cladh Hallan (2021) gives us a clue as to how Alzamora considers the body’s narrative history. Cladh Hallan is reportedly the only place in Great Britain where prehistoric mummies have been excavated. By alluding to a wormhole, Alzamora plays with the limits of time. He casts a dramatic resurrection by reconstructing forms out of rubble. His inventions are kin to Mesopotamian lamassu, a divine hybrid of human and animal. In Alzamora’s case, he unites the materials most commonly used in construction to introduce the human/industrial hybrid. He leans into the construction process through additive and subtractive techniques to highlight the procedure of the build.
Emil Alzamora, Hone Redux, 2018 Surrealist psyche unshackled, Alzamora’s sculptures stand among the fluid and powerfully charged sculptures of Umberto Boccioni. In fact, his provocative and alluring forms far outweigh any conceptual fodder. A practicing sculptor since the late ‘90s, Alzamora is a master craftsman when it comes to design. From the aquiline arms of the figure in Star Suit (2018), to the pocketed seams along Hone Redux’s (2018) ribs, Alzamora captures the ambition and drama of Henry Moore’s work while maintaining sensitivity to subtle expression. The arched back and exaggerated neck of Waymaker (2021) imitates Persipine’s deserpate clamor for freedom in the Baroque marble sculpture The Rape of Proserpina. Likewise, Hone Redux bears striking resemblance to the ancient Crouching Aphrodite and Crouching Venus sculptures. No doubt Alzamora was stuck with inspiration from the ancient world and his industrial time warps tunnel us into a futuristic dystopia studded with impeccable design.
Emil Alzamora “Waymaker”
May 8 – June 19, 2021
All photographs courtesy of the artist and Lowell Ryan Projects.
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OUTSIDE LA: Derek Weisberg
From the outside, Trotter&Sholer’s current exhibition of works by Derek Weisberg might look like jarring Frankensteinian creations. With roughly hewn figural assemblages, mixed media collages, and fragmented bricolages of ceramic masks, the show reveals sensitive, personal histories upon closer inspection. “I’ve Done Too Much Slithering, I’m Now Claiming Skies” brings together a thoughtful, visually engaging selection of works that reveal the artist’s investigation of human experiences and self-preservation.
Made from found materials and reconstructed fragments of the artist’s previous creations, the works in the show are personal and carefully crafted. In Pre-emptive Nostalgia for the Possible but Doubtful (2016), the artist has patched together a figure made of plaster and ceramic. Embedded in the surface and visible beneath the exposed ribs is detritus from the artist’s studio, including a cigarette pack. In the figure’s hand is an empty iPhone box forever affixed to the body. Including objects associated with the artist’s studio and daily life, the sculpture reflects Weisberg’s own environment and offers a snapshot of his identity.
Derek Weisberg, Pre-emptive Nostalgia for the Possible but Doubtful, 2016, plaster, ceramic and studio detritus, photo courtesy Trotter&Sholer and Shark Senesac. The figure appears to have been both added to and subtracted from—reworked over time as the artist decided which fragments and materials should be chipped away and which should be preserved in the surface. This clear sense of the artist’s process suggests a catharsis and casting off of certain elements. The materials that remain and those that were removed contribute to the whole, just as the experiences in life—those that are ephemeral and those that remain with us—impact our entire persona. Moreover, much like the human condition, there is a sense of mutability, as if the imperfections retain the potential to change over time.
Derek Weisberg, “The Alchemy of Unexpected Meetings IV,” 2020, mixed media, ink, china marker, graphite and oil pastel on paper mounted over fabric, photo courtesy Trotter&Sholer and Shark Senesac. While Weisberg is known for his ceramic and sculptural works, the show also includes a series of new, mixed media collages. Made from found-imagery, repurposed materials, and the artist’s own drawings, the collages all take the form of abstracted faces. In The Alchemy of Unexpected Meetings IV (2020), Weisberg has combined clippings of colored paper and patterns with a partial drawing of a human face and eyes. The bottom half of the head reveals a found image of a bearded classical sculpture, a nod to the artist’s own sculptural practice within the centuries-long discipline.
Though exploring the fragility of human experiences and identity, the works in the show achieve a sense of well-wrought accomplishment. With elements of previous creations and imagery that explores the material culture of the artist’s own environment, Weisberg offers a dynamic, layered reflection of personal history and a sensitive exploration of the delicate fluidity of life.
Derek Weisberg, I’ve Done Too Much Slithering, I’m Now Claiming Skies
Trotter&Sholer, New York
April 29 – June 9, 2021
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OUTSIDE LA: Galleria Nazionale d’Arte, Rome
Group Exhibition “lo dico lo – I say I”The capacious white central gallery is filled with a medley of artworks that at first glance seem to have no apparent connection. Sculptures, photographs, paintings and ceramics are distributed evenly on the walls and floor. Eventually it becomes clear all of these works are made by women and that is when the exhibition title ‘Io Dico Io / I Say I” comes into focus. This celebratory exhibition at the National Art Gallery in Rome has delved into its collection in order to bring to the fore women artists. Each speaks with their own voice with their own poetics, thus the heterogeneity of works on display falls into place.
Installation view, Io dico Io – I say I, Galleria Nazionale. Carla Accardi, better known for abstract painting, has a work, “Origine” (1976-2007), where she uses sicofoil, a commercial plastic, which she first incorporated in her practice during the 1960s as the framing device for a number of small photographs of women in her family. This intimate mash up of formal moves she deploys in her paintings combined with personal images epitomizes the approach of many of the artists on view. It is at the antipodes of the heroic muscular male-dominated art modes most often represented in modern Italian art history.
Monica Bonvicini, Fleurs du Mal (pink), 2019 (detail). Courtesy of the Artist and Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milano © Monica Bonvicini and VG Bild-Kunst. Monica Bonvicini’s 2019 sculpture “Fleurs du Mal (pink)” displays pink hand-blown glass objects hanging from hooks on a steel structure reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp’s Bottle Rack (1914). Congruent with an earlier version of this sculpture where transparent hand-blown penises are draped over the hooks, the artist humorously takes an icon of a decidedly phallocentric art practice to task.
As the viewer makes their way through the extensive exhibit, enjoying each on their own terms even as they may discover the resonances that are established by proximity, one eventually winds their way upstairs where they encounter the extensive archive of Carla Lonzi. The activist critic was the first to organize and sort art made by women from the specifically personal point of view and in terms of self-portraiture that effectively point to how historical gender occlusions can in fact be addressed. Curators Cecilia Canziani, Lara Conte and Paola Ugolini, with poise and adroitness, bring deserved attention to these women artists that are finally being recognized as part of the historical canons.
curated by Cecilia Canziani, Lara Conte and Paola Ugolini
Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea
National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art
March 1, 2021 – June 6, 2021
All photos by Alessandro Garofalo.
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Gallery Rounds: Eric Nash
KP ProjectsEric Nash’s latest collection of charcoal drawings is along the same vein as some of his previous series, with new signs, buildings and pools explored in different angles. These renderings stem from thousands of source photos that he takes around Los Angeles at any and all hours of the day.
The title comes from the last line of David Lynch’s weather report sign-off for KCRW, “So, we’re going to continue on, and I wish no matter what the weather is, I wish for all of you blue skies and golden sunshine internally all along the way.”
Valley Night (2021) is a stunning example of the puzzling opacity of Nash’s black tones, especially in contrast with his elegant draftsmanship, painfully straight lines, total lack of smudge despite using a notoriously messy medium, and attention to detail that transform this mundane gas station into a glowing oasis in the abysmal night.
Eric Nash, Ambassador Dog & Cat Hospital, 2021 Like many of the other signs in this series, Ambassador Dog & Cat Hospital (2021) has been around since at least the 1930s and beyond. These signs embody a special timelessness. A shadow reigns from the front of the sign to the back and the rivets in each letter with their own tiny shadows breathe a sense of age and weather into the work. Similar to Lynch, Nash often takes commonplace signifiers and makes them pop through his signature “California Noir” style.
Although the signs, pools and freeways may seem quintessentially Los Angeles, they are only a version of it that is more refined and redacted. The absence of trash, graffiti and cars seem to omit the one thing that is the most quintessentially Los Angeles: the people who currently inhabit the city.
Eric Nash “All Along The Way”
at KP ProjectsOn View May 1 – May 31, 2021
Photos by Eric Nash.
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Remarks on Color: Parakeet Green
May’s HueMostly you hear him coming long before the bright and flowing flourish which is his body floats across the speedway. Being that he is a dandy from Kensington, he much prefers the moniker Budgie, to the more pedestrian Keet. An avid smoker of Players and Dunhill’s, Parakeet Green would never be seen puffing menthols or rolled tobacco, at least not in public.
There has been some debate as to the “provenance” of his color, some suggesting a more pearlescent green suffused with what could only be described as lemon zest, while others have identified a downy tangerine streak lurking just under the surface. Parakeet Green deigns to position himself on either side of the debate, preferring instead to remain discreetly and luminously fluid, a verifiable mélange of bursting color, proffering something for everyone who turns to gaze upon this Avian Extraordinaire.
Parakeet Green can often be found posing for photos with ardent admirers in and around St. James’s Park with its view of Buckingham Palace, alongside all manner of other feathered detractors including the hideous and ubiquitous pigeon with its ever-bobbing disco-ball head, the dunnock, a common accentor of low flying means and unremarkable breeding, and the fierce little coal tit, circling the highlands in masked abandon in response to the calls of the tawny owl.
Parakeet Green is secretly searching for a counterpart in high society, a budgerigar of impeccable breeding, mischievous and ever loquacious, a BIRD among birds, a partner in crime, a downy compatriot with whom to pass the time, and what a time it will be! Soaring over the headlands, wing to wing, to finally eschew the mandatory “tea sessions,” the endless chatter of gossip and mean-spirited gibes, countless visits to the Queen, sitting on her shoulder and forever trying hard not to poop!
Helen Frankenthaler, Leprechaun, 1991 
Emily Carr, Western Forest, 1931 
Elaine de Kooning, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 1963 
Tarsila do Amaral, Abaporu (the one who eats), 1928 
Henri Matisse, The Green Line, 1905
Vincent Van Gogh, Tree Roots, 1889 -
OUTSIDE LA: Rachel Rossin
Magenta Plains, New YorkWhile the intersection of art and technology may be new for some, artist Rachel Rossin has been a pioneer in the field for nearly her whole life, having taught herself programming at a young age. Her practice includes painting, sculpture and digital art, as well as hybrid combines that incorporate elements of different disciplines. In her latest exhibition, “Boohoo Stamina” at New York’s Magenta Plains, Rossin presents a new body of gestural paintings that explore loss and methods of self-repair.
Pushing the boundaries of traditional and digital art, these recent works seamlessly weave together elements of both the physical and virtual worlds. A clear marrying of the two; some of her paintings include embedded holograms. One such combine, Boo-hoo (brain) (2020), features a close-up of a pink face with bright blue tears pouring out of the eyes. Above the eyes is a hologram of a brain that rotates continuously. While the inclination might be to search for a projector or hidden screen, the holograms are installed in the works themselves.
Rachel Rossin,
“Boo-hoo (brain),” 2020The figure in Boo-hoo (brain) is one of many avatars from the digital realm depicted in both the painted and holographic elements. The pink figure is joined by others from Rossin’s digital library, including cats and harpies, perhaps avatars of the artist herself. The allusion to sadness in both the tears and the title of Boo-hoo (brain) set the tone for the exhibition.
Addressing the theme of self-repair, Rossin explores the tools we use to heal in both the physical and virtual worlds with images of crutches, braces and the staff of Hermes or Caduceus. In Tall Cat on Mend (2021), the artist has painted a cat that appears to be propped up on crutches. The cat, another avatar or a nod to the proliferation of internet cats, is ethereal with its soft, washy colors. Avatars are useful tools to act as proxies for our physical selves, an idea the artist has investigated previously in her practice. Related to the concept of a sentinel species, like the canary in the coal mine sent to detect danger, avatars and our internet-selves are vehicles through which we grow, heal and even test out different identities.
Rachel Rossin, Set Elements for a Tome To Me and Tall Cat on Mend (installation view), 2021 Next to the cat is another feline figure in Set Elements for a Tome To Me (2021). Whereas the tall cat’s crutches were painted, Rossin has attached an aluminum brace to the surface of this second painting, introducing another tool to patch the figure together. Slightly robotic, the brace hints at VR equipment and prosthetics, again marrying digital and physical methods of repair.
While the works themselves blur the boundaries of digital and physical, the exhibition as a whole takes this even further. From the flickering images and whirling hum of the holograms to the blue light in the den-like bottom floor of the gallery, there is no beginning or end to Rossin’s physical and digital worlds. Instead, she weaves the two together to the point where their defining characteristics no longer exist and the viewer finds themselves surrounded by avatars in a glowing, buzzing, hybrid space.
Rachel Rossin: “Boohoo Stamina”
Magenta Plains
New York, NY
Runs thru May 22 -
Arata Tat Tat
A Conversation with Michael ArataAlmost exactly 10 years ago, one of my favorite (and certainly most improbable) curatorial projects was unleashed upon the world: Renee Fox, who was overseeing the development of the Beacon Arts Building in Inglewood (at least its cultural aspect) invited me to do something for their Critics-as-Curators series. I’d been wanting to do something to demonstrate that a museum-scale and quality show could be realized without 1) spending millions of dollars 2) 5 years of planning, and 3) a massive top-heavy bureaucracy. (After which the fake-ass house-of-cards Art World would collapse under the weight of its hubris, ushering in a shining new era of anarcho-syndicalist communalism. Still waiting on that one!)
The Beacon — designed to be a complex of private artist studios — was almost empty at this stage, and Renee negotiated for me to use most of the entire 4-story warehouse space instead of just the dedicated exhibition area on the main floor. I specifically wanted to put together a one-person show, so I needed an artist who was enormously prolific, underexposed, and whose work I honestly admired. Thus was born ARATALAND! A Mid-Career Survey of Artworks by Michael Arata, a theme-park inspired installation exploring the artist’s sprawling, inventive, playful oeuvre. (The text from the rarely-seen ARATALAND! catalog essay — which has one of my favorite titles of all time RIP Ferlinhetti — + a link to purchase same on lulu are reprinted below.)
In the decade since, Arata’s kept up the pace, producing enough new work to fill another museum space. But until LACMA or MOCA screw their heads on right and choose to serve their actual local community, we’ll have to take things on the installment plan – currently, Arata has a solo show entitled FRANTIC up at LSH CoLab, artist Laura Howe’s gallery on Virgil a couple blocks east of LA city college. The show is up through May 8 and the gallery hours are 1 – 6 daily, appointments preferred. LSH CoLab, 778 N Virgil Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90029.
Argument, acrylic on canvas, 40×30 in., 2020 Our operative met with Michael Arata in his Malibu penthouse over adrenochrome cocktails to interrogate his praxis.
(DOUG HARVEY) LESS ART: I think your pictures are neat! Where do you get your ideas?
Michael Arata: Well let’s see, I did 12 pictures of the Mona Lisa with a narrative dialog from the model’s perspective. Since I had to deal with scheduling models for life drawing it was a natural segue to the notion. My Narrative includes her and her sisters substituting as models posing for Leonardo.
The titles of the pictures include some of their takes on how he regarded them and their attitude about working for him. Some pictures are simply personal and reflect a day or thought. The pictures with the titles become gossipy tidbits of entertainment for pleasure. After the basics – food, shelter, clothing – it’s all entertainment! I decided it took 12 sessions to make the Mona Lisa painting because donuts and bagels come in a dozen. 12 inches in your foot, 12 months in a year, 12 apostles, 12 animals in the Chinese calendar cycle, and so on.
Mona Lisa Tenth Sitting: Leo paints the accusatory finger-pointing shrub after Lisa and Leo have words, acrylic on canvas, 40×30 in., 2020 You need to publish a calendar! What are the other paintings, and how do they connect with Mona & Her Sister?
The other 12 or so pictures are variants on life basics — mythology and magic as stories or parables for teaching and entertainment. After the acquisition of basics — food, shelter, and clothing — entertainment, politics, religion, emotion, and drama take the stage. Maybe things get boring when you know all the answers and satisfy basic needs.
Pegasus, spraypaint and acrylic on canvas, 40×30 in., 2020 I don’t think Pegasus and Mona know each other, they’re from different times. Their connection is that they’re from history – but different times. Pegasus probably knew Icarus until he had a meltdown. Mona probably knew who modeled for the Venus who knew about the apple in the garden and Eve.
Venus with the Flighty Fruit, spraypaint and acrylic on canvas, 40×30 in., 2020 The myths/stories may have originally been meant as educational and equally entertaining. Many had been reevaluated and re-written a thousand years later, and I am engaging in rewriting and repurposing them another thousand years later. Changing the context to suit the need and time — reworked historical allegory/myth/religion collaged with LA local, national and global genre.
Michael Arata, Shout, acrylic on canvas, 40×30 in., 2020 They seem to share a common stylistic approach – fast, somewhat cartoonish sketches that are sometimes, but not always, fleshed out with more intricately painterly passages.
I am happy with the painting technique, using the simple drawn color outline. The imperfections of the line add a fresh, difficult-to-repeat quality that make it direct, immediate, and sure. I told the gallery to use the phrase “Sgraffito Tango“ in describing the line work for their press release. Filling them in with solid flat color works fine. Blended filled color sometimes works to create illusionistic form and depth, they make a nice contrast when combined.The backgrounds are treated like the fill parts, sometimes painted before and sometimes after or over the subject. In some pictures I started with a black background and used lighter colors for drawing figures and filling the shapes. The visual effect and process reminds me of “Elvis” paintings on black velvet from the 70’s, 80’s.
Frantic, acrylic on canvas, 40×30 in., 2020 What’s with those cakes?
The group also includes sculpture, 2 half-cakes, one yellow and one chocolate. I only like chocolate or vanilla cake and chocolate or vanilla frosting. No fruit- especially if it looks like jam or jelly. Although bananas seem to work with the yellow on white. Chocolate swirly is OK if it has the cream cheese filling like the stuff on carrot cake. I guess strawberries are tolerable.When I first painted the Half Cakes I did solely for the pleasing color and simple high contrast value, a visual choice. Then I recognized they were divided (by color), so politics of the day likely planted the thought. Come to think of it spice cake is good too.
Vanilla – Chocolate Cake, wood, styrofoam, nova paste, acrylic gel, and paint, 6.5 x18x9 in., 2019 And these other sculptural entities?
The other 3D works are “Dats” and “Cogs” — chimeras. The pack/pride Started in 2013. A nod to the divisive positions held socially then and now… which have only escalated. Have/have-nots and so on.Not to mention race and gender! What are the materials for these pieces?
The Dats and Cogs begin with wooden armatures, then they are fleshed out with carved Styrofoam. Shaped with masking tape, then coated several times with NovaFlex, Then a couple coats of NovaResin. Then I paint them with acrylic paint. The population is still fighting like cats and dogs. The pandemic didn’t help that at all.
Dats and Cogs, wood, styrofoam, nova paste, acrylic gel, and paint, 2013-2021 How has your personal pandemic been?
The pandemic has affected my practice by giving me more time to work, so not a deficit but a benefit.I like cake. Thank you for your service!
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Shoptalk
LA Museum Update, Digital Art Happenings, In Memory: Simone GadDigital Art Happening
In April there was a moment when Yours Truly realized we were finally, at long last, emerging from the pandemic that has shut us in for over a year. It was Saturday night, and we were lured downtown by “LUMINEX: Dialogues of Light,” a one-night art happening of digital art projected onto building walls in DTLA. During COVID-time I’ve driven through these streets on various missions, and they were so empty it was apocalyptic. But tonight, lower Broadway was percolating with barhoppers and diners and, as darkness fell, art fans and those who had been pent up too long.
Sarah Rara, Perfect Touch, 2021, photo by Scarlet Cheng We started our rounds a little before the 7:30 official time—first stop was Sarah Rara’s “Perfect Touch 2021.” In a parking lot at 11th and South Olive, there was towering projection equipment and a handful of people, including guards and tech who were running the show. It was dusk, and we were told there was another half of the piece on the “other” side of the building—that is on the other side of the block. By the time we returned to look at the first piece again, it was dark, and there was now a crowd enjoying the sight of gigantic hands playing cat’s cradle—the string burning with light—and a voice reading a poem so aptly addressed to this strange, strange year: “The year of distance, the year of loss, the lost year,” the woman intoned, “The year of acknowledging fragility, interconnectedness.”
I think we will soon be seeing more work about what we’ve been through. It’s been a traumatic time, our shared annus horribilis—and we need to work it out through art: all forms of art, including writing and performance. And it was not only disease that captured us, but also a megalomaniac in power and his minions, bent on destroying the fabric of our civil life.
That night in DTLA we saw mesmerizing op-arty work by Nancy Baker Cahill and cascading images by Carole Kim, and a couple others. By 9 PM there were throngs of people on the sidewalks moving from site to site—mostly young and mostly elated to be out and about. Around us, new buildings were sprouting on nearly every block, some finished, others almost finished. What’s so surprising is that many are residential, housing for the new DTLA Urbanites. For some, the evening had just begun.
Installation photograph, Yoshitomo Nara, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2020, art ©Yoshitomo Nara, photo ©Museum Associates/LACMA. LA Museums (Finally) Reopen!
Museums also began to announce their reopenings in April, hooray! LACMA had a long list of exhibitions scheduled to open last spring and summer but, alas, did not. The biggest and probably most popular is the Yoshitomo Nara retrospective—he of the big-eyed girls holding little knives. To this day I never know what to make of his work—which has strong cartoony kitsch elements that play on its own commercial success. Yes, he is one of the most successful Asian artists today—in 2019, his painting Knife Behind Back sold for $24.9 million at Sotheby’s. I did enjoy looking at Nara’s early work, as he searches for his central themes. There is a reconstructed studio filled with drawings and small collectibles, which we peer into through windows. Then, as his canvasses grow in size and his brush becomes more impressionistic—as he turns away from his roots in line and drawing—he starts to lose me.
The Getty Villa has just reopened, with the exhibition “Mesopotamia: Civilization Begins.” I found the smaller show down on the main level, “Assyria: Palace Art of Ancient Iraq,” far more memorable. The subject matter is more focused (bas-reliefs from Assyrian palaces of the 9th to 7th centuries BC) and the images are so vivid, even brutal, in their storytelling: men hunting lions, soldiers storming battlements, kings lording it over everyone. These are on loan from the British Museum.
Also open are the Hammer (“Made in LA”), the Huntington (“Made in LA’s” second venue), California African American Museum (Sula Bermúdez-Silverman and Nikita Gale), and Forest Lawn Museum at Forest Lawn Glendale. Yes, the cemetery has a museum, and it’s currently featuring a terrific survey of work from noted stained-glass maker Judson Studios, based in Highland Park.
Simone Gad, photo by Lynda Burdick. OBITUARY
Saved by Simone Gad (1947–2021)
Simone Gad understood the tenuousness of appearances, their material possession and assertion. Her work as an artist was a conscious, deliberated and obsessive retrace of those assertions, an insistence upon their value and significance long after the fade-to-black, whether material or psychological (or for that matter cinematic—Hollywood actor and performer that she remained to the end). Among contemporary LA artists, she was a poète maudite, her work poised on a razor’s edge between redemption and remembrance; and she embraced it in full, transmuting loss and desperation into affirmation, affection, joy, mercy and defiance.
—Ezrha Jean Black
Please visit www.artillerymag.com/saved-by-simone-gad-and-other-souvenirs/ for a full read on the remembrance of Simone Gad.
Comings and Goings
Frieze LA is cancelled, finally. It’s been reported that they had planned to have galleries showing art in various available spaces around town—Paramount Studios, its usual haunt, was already booked to the gills with productions trying to play catch-up after COVID delays. This meant lots of driving for Angelenos (who already drive too much). The wonky logistics of all this apparently collapsed a scheme which would have been pretty challenging, even in the best of times. They’ll be coming back in February 2022 though, in a tent next to the Beverly Hills Hilton.
It was just a matter of time before New York mega-gallerist David Zwirner realized he had to open an outpost in Los Angeles—and Artnet reports he’s found a space near Deitch Projects in the West Hollywood area. LA galleries are making a move too—lots of well-located retail space is open around the city (the unfortunate fallout of COVID and the crippled economy). Moran Moran is moving to Western and Melrose. Luis De Jesus is leaving Culver City for DTLA and Lowell Ryan is moving from West Adams to West Washington Boulevard, in a building with a roomy courtyard. It’s always good to have outdoor space in LA, and of course so very useful for receptions and gatherings.
MENTAL HEALTH
May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health is sponsoring a month-long series of free programs and events highlighting the healing powers of art and connection. In its fourth year, WE RISE includes Art Rise with 21 art projects, Community Pop-Ups with over 50 local activities, and a Digital Experience, which can be enjoyed the usual way—virtually.
At this point, I’m especially keen on the RL experiences. Grand Park in DTLA, for example, will be home to “Grand Park’s Celebration Spectrum“ by dublab, in collaboration with Tanya Aguiñiga and curator Mark “Frosty” McNeill. Art installations and programming will “create space for all the missed celebrations in Los Angeles during the last year,” says the press release. Check out the festivities at www.werise.la.
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The NFT Craze
Art BriefThe digital artist known as Beeple sold an NFT for $69 million in cyptocurrency at Christie’s auction in March, 2021. The media treated this grotesque sale as if it revolutionized the art world, but if we separate reality from the hysterical hype, it clearly has not. An NFT stands for a “non-fungible token”—probably the most ridiculous acronym ever invented by digital geeks. An NFT is nothing more than a token on a shared digital ledger in the never-ending continuum known as blockchain. I’m not an expert on blockchain; however, suffice it to say, the owner of an NFT can signify his ownership by obtaining a token, or time-stamp in a digital ledger that constitutes a blockchain.
It’s important not to confuse ownership of an NFT with ownership of a copyright which is governed by copyright law. Common law copyright automatically attaches upon the artist’s creation of the work and statutory copyright is established by a filing with the US Copyright Office. The vast majority of the time when an artwork is sold the artist retains the copyright. The artist may also license the copyright if, for example, he or she wishes to merchandise an artwork’s image.
An owner of an NFT does not own the digital artwork or the copyright that attaches to it (ownership is retained by the digital artist). The buyer simply owns the NFT of the first edition of the digital file, but nothing else. Is NFT a con? I leave it to those who have read about the 17th-century Tulip bulb craze in the Netherlands to decide.
Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) had a successful career as a graphic designer of video games when he decided he would create a new digital image every day for 5,000 days. The digital file which set the record at Christie’s for a NFT contained all of those images and was titled Everydays: The First 5,000 Days. I’m not going to quibble about whether digital art itself is “art.” As far as I’m concerned, it is. The problem is that the NFT of a digital file is a digital ledger entry which does not constitute an artwork.
Over the last few years NFTs have become things of value and can be bought or sold online. In fact, prior to the auction of The First 5,000 Days, Beeple sold numerous NFTs of still digital images he created, as the market for NFTs got red hot. Many of the images making up the The First 5,000 Days and other Beeple digital works are freely available to view online (featured here).
A few weeks before The First 5,000 Days was sold, an NFT of Nyan Cat, a ubiquitous meme of a flying cat with a pop-tart body, was sold by its creator for the equivalent of $580,000 in cryptocurrency. Recently, there has been a frenzy for NFTs of short clips of NBA stars making spectacular dunks or blocks. A digital token of LeBron James blocking a shot went for $100,000 in January. A company called NBA Top Shot has made a market in NFT sports clips achieving $43 million in sales in January, 2021, according to The New York Times.
Stills from Kate Moss’s NFTs. Anything digital can be an NFT. The Times reports that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet for the equivalent of over $2 million in crypto. The insanity reached new heights in April as Vogue reported that super-model Kate Moss said she was selling NFTs labeled “Kate Sleeping” and “Kate Walking”—the proceeds, she says, will be donated to charity.
The art world has already heard from the most mercenary of artists—Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami declared they would be selling numerous NFTs of images of their works. Many other artists are sure to follow their example.
Christie’s, deeply in on the NFT Beeple hype, clearly wants to establish a category of NFT auctions capitalizing on the craze. Christie’s proudly announced that the sale of The First 5,000 Days would be made in crypto—specifically in Ethereum—the second largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin, both of which have hit recent market highs. This was the first auction where Christie’s accepted crypto for payment, including the buyer’s premium.
The buyer of The First 5,000 Days, billionaire Vignesh Sundaresan, who calls himself Metakovan (described by the media as a cryptocurrency “whale”), is the founder of Metapurse, an equity fund for cryptocurrency. Paying in crypto for his auction purchase helped bring legitimacy to Ethereum and other such currencies.
Metakovan (does anyone use their real name in this “brave new world?”) plans to build a digital museum to display his collection of NFTs. He has also established a “public art project” known as B.20 (it contains certain Beeple NFTs Metakovan purchased in December, 2020 for $2.2 million) The Times reported that Metakovan has been selling millions of fractional shares (“tradeable virtual tokens”) in B.20—so he’s no fool.
Neither is Beeple. Shortly after the sale to Metakovan, it was reported that Beeple converted all of his Ethereum into millions in good old US greenbacks, as the saying goes: “Trust your mother but cut the cards.”
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Moving Forward with Women’s Center for Creative Work
GRACE AND GRITTo incarnate is to become embodied in form, and form follows function. From the outset of the year 2020, leadership at the Women’s Center for Creative Work began the task of expanding its physical form because they had had the good fortune of having outgrown their existing space. Born out of a series of successful “site-specific feminist dinner parties” in the Los Angeles area, the wishes of the regular attendees of those dinners, and a $10,000 grant from SPArt, the WCCW put down roots in the Frogtown/Elysian Valley area in 2015 as a nonprofit. The function of this form: to foster an intentional, accessible community as publicly as possible. It’s fair to say that co-founders Kate Johnston, Sarah Williams and Katie Bachler (who is no longer with the organization) were extremely successful in doing so.
WCCW Family Dinner, July 2017, courtesy WCCW photo archive. One facet of this accessibility has manifested as a PDF you can download for free from the WCCW website called “A Feminist Organization’s Handbook.” The 75-page image–filled tome is a love letter to the work that they put into building their business: essays, flow charts, photos and documented processes available free and on demand for anyone in the world to download and peruse. By the act of compiling this handbook and giving the world a clear view into their mindsets as they began such a massive undertaking, they have made high-level business planning more accessible. Anyone with the will and courage can use their experiences outlined in the handbook as helpful guidelines to lay their own feminist business foundation without spending hundreds of dollars on coaches and consultants.
With this intentionality applied to their core values, WCCW’s audience and community growth was inevitable. Those core values are radically intersectional and inclusive, with the safety of women of color, trans women and disabled women given the highest priority. When put into practice, these values dictated the programming they hosted in the space: workshops, book clubs, performances and more. It’s part of what motivated the center’s new Communications & Marketing Director, Kamala Puligandla, to move to Los Angeles from the Bay Area three years ago. “I would come down to LA to visit and go to all the workshops at the Women’s Center,” she says in a video chat. “There’s this beautiful way where things collide at the Women’s Center and I’ve always been really invested in that.”
The new Highland Park space, 2021, courtesy WCCW photo archive. There’s so much more that can be said about the WCCW’s role in their community: partnerships with the local elementary school, partnerships with neighboring businesses, contributions to the local neighborhood council, the launch of their in-house publishing platform “Co-Conspirator Press.” Yet it was the uncertainties that came with the pandemic, coupled with leadership’s commitment to intentionality, that led co-founder Johnston to make the decision to reverse all plans of adding to their space, and move out of their beloved home of five years. (The very week they were to sign a new agreement with their landlord to expand into the warehouse next door, the state government began the mandated lockdown.) Consequently, the WCCW downsized: the staff packed up and moved out of their multi-room warehouse space in Frogtown and into a much smaller studio in Highland Park. Yet the ramifications of letting go of the former site have been startlingly positive. Resources that once went into maintaining physical space for a limited number of present bodies have been redirected to creating print and digital space that accommodates hundreds of eyeballs, remotely.
SALIMA Issue 1 cover, 2021. Thus, the Women’s Center for Creative Work has reincarnated: embodiment through online events has expanded its audience globally, and embodiment through SALIMA, a new print magazine just launched this year, keeps the community engaged in a material way. “It’s been a huge learning curve, but it’s been really fun and amazing,” Williams tells me. “There’s so many exciting people and voices and artists involved in all of these different ways. It feels like the [physical] space in a magazine, to me.” This is essentially a win-win for the Center and for people who—because of chronic illness, physical challenges or their location—were not always able to take advantage of the in-person programming available. This incarnation of the WCCW is the most accessible the organization has ever been.
Williams and her colleagues are working on making some of these programmatic changes permanent while tweaking others. The membership subscription they offer— which makes up 15% of their pre-pandemic income—is being restructured to reflect the changes the organization had to make last year. Responding positively to something as momentous and unexpected as a global pandemic while still serving a mission of creating, maintaining and sharing accessible feminist space takes both grace and grit, which the leadership and staff of the Women’s Center have ably demonstrated.
Editor’s Note: After publication of the article, the Women’s Center for Creative Work has since changed their name to Feminist Center for Creative Work
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Decoder
Owning ArtSince the theme for this issue is “Private Property,” I assume someone besides me will be tackling non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and their sudden rise to collectibility—I’ll leave that to someone who can talk about them in some sort of intelligent, technical way and instead just talk about what NFTs are like.
Depending how you look at it, they either smoothly continue (or emphasize the absurdity) of a practice that has been normal for half a century: buying entirely conceptual art—in particular, buying works of conceptual art that could be reproduced by any reasonably functional adult being paid minimum wage.
I once heard a story on NPR about a middle-class collector who’d acquired an early Sol LeWitt for a few hundred dollars. The stunned host responded by saying he would kill (or was it die?) for that opportunity, which immediately begs the question: Why? Unless the plan is to sell it (in which case, why not just kill or die for the money it would bring instead?), you can have all there is to an early LeWitt wall drawing by googling “Sol LeWitt wall drawing,” picking your favorite set of 55-word instructions and pressing “print.” What did the host want exactly? Whatever it is, approximately the same thing is in an NFT.
Now, one aspect of this kind of acquisition is it can claim to be a species of philanthropy: you’re not only supporting the artist to the tune of X dollars, you are, for the sake of their future, supporting the idea that they should be getting X dollars every time they do what they’re doing. On the flipside there is some form of bragging right—just as the Carnegies and the Mellons can say “As in Carnegie Mellon?” you can say you’re the one who bought the thing, and there are allegedly circles where this improves the quality of the parties you get invited to.
These ways of owning have their uses, but not for me.
My favorite piece of mine that I still have around the house is a mug. I didn’t make the mug—I didn’t even design it. It took very little thinking, really, in the ordinary sense, to get this mug to be. Some friends in the art business called me up and wanted a picture to use for their kid’s bar mitzvah, and they were very precise: We want blue and green and balloons; there has to be a breakdancer and everyone has to be cheering them on, in a video arcade. Since I liked them and their kid and I was not a smouldering psychopathic egotist from the 1960s, I passed up the opportunity to send back a long and scathing letter saying that this bar mitzvah frippery was beneath me—a true artist—and they should’ve known it, and that I was therefore severing all commercial ties. I drew it, liked drawing it, and promptly forgot I drew it. A month later I got a package with a mug with the bar mitzvah picture on it.
A week or two after I put it on the shelf, a strange thing happened. I was drinking (as I so often do when in possession of a mug) and I looked down and realized this was a great mug. Really first-rate. Some excellent curatorial choices had been made: The outside, where my picture was printed, was white, like the paper, but the inside was that wonderful glossy dark blue you sometimes get in the tiles around the edge of swimming pools. It worked very well with all that blue and green I’d magic-markered on there. And the little figures standing on video game cabinets, forever at their party, and all so small and irregular (almost unreadable in industrial design terms—if you had proper Mickeys and Minnies on a mug, they’d be at least twice the size, parading properly around the cup). It was a nice, weird fun thing to drink from and I drank and I washed it, and forgot I had it, and a few days later remembered all over again.
Since then I’ve gone through dozens of cycles of not remembering the mug and then being ambushed by its existence all over again “Oh yeah, the bar mitzvah—look at all those happy little guys.” That, as far as I’m concerned, is how owning art should work.
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Provenance: Senga Nengudi’s Public Rituals
Ceremony for Freeway Fets (1978)What makes some spaces private and others public, if not rituals? In Los Angeles, a complex series of rituals reify our belief in private property. Property deeds, for instance, give physical form to a political notion; signing a deed a symbolic ritual that shapes spatial realities and delivers economic consequences. This is a ritual of exclusion, an agreement that this parcel of land is private and not public; it is mine and not yours.
Senga Nengudi, Ceremony for Freeway Fets, 1978. Chromogenic development print; series of 11, each: 12 × 18 in. © Senga Nengudi. Photo: Roderick ‘Quaku’ Young The pandemic greatly altered our daily rituals, sequestering homeowners to their private spaces, while those without a deed are left to live “private” lives in “public” spaces. Throughout modern history, few factors have had a greater impact on shaping urban landscapes than contagion. In 15th-century Italy, an epidemic led to the construction of leper islands; in newly industrialized 18th-century London, the outbreak of cholera resulted in modern sewage infrastructure. These upheavals remind us that urban spaces reflect rituals that are neither determined nor static. These spaces are daily experiments in collective living and continuously reconfigured by competing visions for the future, which contour the conditions and needs of the present.
In her 1979 documentary Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes, Barbara McCullough interviews fellow LA artists of the 1970s Black Art movement (known as LA Rebellion) on the meaning of ritual in their work and practice. In the film, sculpture and performance artist Seng Nengudi describes her public performance work Ceremony for Freeway Fets (1978) as a ritual that used public space as its medium.
Senga Nengudi, Ceremony for Freeway Fets, 1978. Chromogenic development print; series of 11, each: 12 × 18 in. © Senga Nengudi. Photo: Roderick ‘Quaku’ Young In the performance, Nengudi gathered several artists from the Studio Z Collective (1974–1980s) together under a freeway on Pico Boulevard. The participants carried instruments and small talismans and tokens, while adorned in head wraps, sheet scraps and other garments constructed by Nengudi from the nylon mesh of women’s tights. During the performance, artists David Hammons and Maren Hassinger danced and dueled to free-form jazz, acting out the tensions between “feminine” and “masculine” societal poles. Nengudi—draped in a large sheet—presided over them to perform an impassioned and improvised ritual of healing between them.
In a 2018 interview with Frieze magazine, Nengudi reflected on the performance’s freeway underpass locale, where “the energy of humans” was “already infused” by the unhoused people who had made it their home. A steep ledge beneath the freeway created a raised plateau where they had built encampments and left behind remnants of daily life. According to the artist, it was here, in a shadowy recess above LA’s privatized public space that people felt “protected,” and subsisted in an “almost ancient way of survival” akin to “Native American cliff dwellings.” Her performance sought to make these invisible rituals visible.
Senga Nengudi, Ceremony for Freeway Fets, 1978. Chromogenic development print; series of 11, each: 12 × 18 in. © Senga Nengudi. Photo: Roderick ‘Quaku’ Young Nengudi was exploring ritual as a means of transforming the mundane materials, bodily habits and forgotten land of everyday life into something sacred. Ritual can create a moment to acknowledge change and turmoil—but harness it towards collective healing, rather than strife. Today, when collective grieving, healing and recognition feel imperative and yet unattainable, Sengudi’s work reminds us to question the rituals that dictate urban space. Mass upheaval can open space to create new rituals, to choose how we change, and decide what is to remain sacred.
