THIS IS AMERICA
Whenever something terrible happens in the United States, many Americans like to say, “This is not who we are,” as if the terrible incidents are aberrations that do not define the country’s character. These protestations are wishful thinking. No one wants to believe they are connected to people capable of brutality, racism, callous indifference to suffering. But when mass shootings, racist attacks, and rampant discrimination are the rule rather than the exception, it is time to admit that maybe, just maybe, this is exactly who we are. Some of us have known this all along, and others are finally seeing that truth.
On January 6, 2021, a large group of angry men and women attended a rally where twice-impeached President Donald J. Trump inflamed the crowd with soaring, mendacious rhetoric about winning the election he lost by a significant margin. He continued to insist that he and his legal team, a band of utterly incompetent lawyers who mounted more than forty unsuccessful legal challenges of the election results, were still going to make a stand against the encroaching reality of a Biden presidency. Trump told his followers, “We will never give up. We will never concede.” He promised to “fight like hell.” And then he said, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering for some of them.” The former president, of course, did no such thing, but he gave his followers all the permission they needed to make their way to the Capitol. And over several hours, they committed an insurrection that we watched unfold on social media and cable news. Members of Congress fled to safety as the Capitol police were overrun. The Senate chamber was breached. It was surreal. It was terrifying. It was heartbreaking. I would have asked, “How did it come to this?” but I already knew the answer.
After it was all over and the rioters dispersed, information about the gravity of what took place emerged. There were men in combat gear with plastic handcuffs, who moved through the halls of Congress with military precision. Certain politicians, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Vice-President Mike Pence, were targeted for attacks because they dared to defy the former president or they dared to articulate a progressive vision for the United States or they dared to lead their caucus from their rightfully elected position. It was equally chilling that the insurrectionists did not bother to hide themselves. They did not wear masks. They shared their locations and what they were doing on social media. They took pictures and videos. It was fairly easy for law enforcement to find them even though it is not very likely that they will face appropriate consequences for their actions. This is America, where justice is elusive and far from blind.
My parents, who were with me during the storming of the Capitol, watched the news with incredulity. My father, in particular, was profoundly shaken. He kept saying, “I cannot believe this is happening in the United States.” He was shocked, and then he was angry. My parents are from Haiti. They have known political upheaval. They have lived under dictators. They know what it means to survive an authoritarian regime. They never expected to see such circumstances in a country that has always prided itself on democracy and freedom. And it was particularly galling given that Americans always look down on countries like Haiti when they experience political unrest, as if similar unrest could never happen in America, the beautiful. We know better, now that this is, indeed, America where democracy is ignored when it becomes inconvenient to political ambitions.
I was stunned by the events of January 6, and then I wasn’t. Violence was inevitable. It had been brewing throughout the Trump presidency and many of us were simply waiting to see what would happen. The signs had been there after Heather Heyer was murdered during a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. There were more signs in the ensuing years as white supremacists, emboldened by Trump, became more comfortable displaying their racial enmity. Trump forecasted his resistance to leaving office when he would not definitively assert that he would peacefully hand over power if he lost the 2020 election. In some ways, the insurrection was the least surprising thing to happen during Trump’s tenure.
The Constitution, the founding document of the United States, is held as sacrosanct. It is treated as unimpeachable. But it was a document created by white men, some of whom owned enslaved people, all of whom were complicit in the institution of slavery. They did not believe Black people deserved to be seen as anything more than 3/5 of a white person. They did not believe in codifying
the freedom of all people, including Black people, in their supposedly sacred document. The inevitability of the January 6 insurrection might go much further back than people want to admit—to the birth of a nation that was built on the backs of enslaved people. This is America— any country that rose out of such a moral disgrace was bound to end in ignominy.
American exceptionalism is the seductive myth that the United States is a chosen nation, a country superior to all others. But throughout this country’s history, we have seen overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I suppose, like many Americans, I used to believe in this exceptionalism. I am not sure why I was ever so naïve. Or, I was the child of immigrants, and I understood that my parents came to America so their children would have opportunities, better lives than we might have had in the country they left.
I have traveled throughout the world by the grace of my career. I have seen glimpses of what life is like in Australia and Sweden and Egypt and Norway and Italy and other places. I’ve been to Haiti, many times. I have been to Mexico. There are wonderful things about these places, just as there are many wonderful things about the country I call home. Every place I’ve ever been to also has its failings. What I haven’t seen, when traveling, is any evidence that the United States is as exceptional as it believes itself to be.
When I am abroad, people ask me so many questions about life in America but they aren’t the questions you might expect. Instead, they want to know if American police are as dangerous as they seem. They want to know if we really don’t have universal healthcare. They want to understand student loans. These are well-intended conversations but they always make me feel like I am an involuntary emissary from a deeply uncivilized place.
I feel like I need to say I love the United States, that I should say some positive things about the country but I don’t know how to, anymore. Yes, there are wonderful things about the United States. There are opportunities here that cannot be found anywhere else. There is a richness in the diversity of the American people. But there is also needless suffering that could be avoided if, once in a while, we would favor policies that would benefit the entire country and not just a privileged few. This is a country that worships at the altar of rugged individualism and the survival of the fittest but only a few are able to be the fittest. This is America—a country of stark contradictions—a country of immense wealth and unnecessary poverty. This is a land of possibility but there is an impassable border around that possibility for most people who are not heterosexual, middle-class, able-bodied white men.
Whatever faith I once had in the United States was shattered when Donald Trump was elected. It was unfathomable that he rose to the highest office with no qualifications, with no integrity, with no real aptitude for leadership. With each new policy he enacted that eroded rights and freedoms for anyone he held in contempt which was almost everyone, my faith shattered even more. For the first time in my life, I felt like I needed to apologize for the country. What else could I express but shame in a country that tried, several times, to institute a ban on Muslims entering the country? Or allowed migrant children to be held in cages, separated from their parents with no plan for reunion? Or did nothing as, for decades, police officers brutalized Black Americans during arrests, while they were walking down the street, while they were sleeping?
As the 2020 election season unfolded, and the candidates were winnowed, liberals understood that literally anyone would have been a better president than Trump. And we also understood how pathetic it was that this is what American politics had come to—trying to clear the lowest of bars. We had to compromise. We were told that it was best to rally behind the most electable candidate and, of course, the most electable candidate was a man who would be familiar, comfortable to the broadest swath of the electorate. It is strange that the most successful political candidates do not embody the values of a country that prides itself on bold, brash innovation. Joe Biden ended up winning the nomination. He is a centrist politician, an older white man who looks presidential and assumes the role with relative ease. He isn’t too radical for conservative voters and he is just liberal enough to moderately appease progressive voters. This is America—a country so exhausted by political turmoil that it elected a leader who offered the hope of respite after four years of wanton chaos.
The Biden presidency has been mostly unremarkable, with the exception of his vice-president Kamala Harris, the first Black woman, and first South Asian woman in that position. Harris’s election was an incredible achievement but it was also a frustrating reminder of how long it took for that glass ceiling to shatter and that the glass ceiling of the presidency still remains.
The Biden administration inherited a terrible mess. Trump largely ignored the pandemic. During the final days of his presidency, Congress spent more time politicking than trying to provide any kind of meaningful relief to people who were facing unemployment, eviction, and a number of other crises. Politicians are reluctant to cancel student loan debt that is an unreasonable burden for people who merely wanted a college education. They are reluctant to pass a $15 minimum wage, which is less than what the minimum wage should be for anyone to make a reasonable living. And a lot of their constituents agree. They begrudge basic initiatives to improve the quality of life for all Americans. They adhere to a scarcity doctrine. It is every person for themselves. That toxic attitude will be but part of our downfall.
As the pandemic raged on, financial stimulus was meager. As other countries gave their citizens monthly stipends until the crisis ended, the United States issued one $1200 check and one $600 check, and not to everyone. Masks became politicized and people actively resisted doing the one thing that would prevent the spread of the coronavirus. The selfishness, the cavalier disrespect, is staggering. For a time, there were supply chain issues for almost everything. Hospitals were overrun. Families were forced to say their goodbyes to loved ones via FaceTime. Dead bodies filled morgues. To call it a disaster would barely begin to address the state of affairs. This is America— the country was, finally, exceptional, in that we accounted for nearly a quarter of the world’s coronavirus infections while accounting for just more than four percent of the world’s population. This is America—more than 500,000 people have died.
There was no way Biden would be able to right a great many wrongs immediately. He was, in the earliest days of his presidency, exactly who we expected him to be—sober, diligent, cautious. He wore a mask in public. He received his vaccination in public. He mourned the hundreds of thousands of people lost to the coronavirus. These are the smallest of gestures, things that should be de rigueur for a leader but in the wake of Trump, they were significant. More relief, something of a return to normalcy. And sadly, it isn’t enough. It was never going to be enough, particularly for the most vulnerable Americans, the ones consistently forgotten, ignored, overlooked.
What I am trying to tell you is that America is a mess. This is a country on the precipice of change that some are resisting with all their might. It is too simplistic to suggest that we are experiencing the last gasp of white supremacy, though white supremacy is, certainly, a large factor. The demographics in the United States are shifting. By 2055, there will be no racial majority. The balance of power will, I hope, eventually shift too. That is a terrifying prospect for the people who have, historically, held all the power. They do not want to relinquish it. They do not want to subject themselves to the ways they have treated those over whom they wielded their power.
But there is also this—for every failure, there is a triumph in this country if you know where to look. As communities have struggled during the pandemic, they have also come together. Mutual aid organizations have done incredible work in cities all across the country. Politicians like Cori Bush, Lauren Underwood, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Deb Haaland, Rashida Tlaib, Sharice Davids, and others are a new generation of politicians who reflect the actual diversity of the people they represent. I wish there were more triumphs to hold onto but this, for America, is a time of reckoning with the mistakes and moral failings of the past so that the possibility of the future is open to as many people as possible. I don’t know that we need more glowing testimonials about America’s greatness and hope for our future. We need brutal honesty.
As a Black, queer woman, as a writer who engages with issues of race, gender, sexuality, and other forms of difference, I am often asked to respond to current events, particularly when they are tragic or horrifying or unjust. Like many Black writers, there is always a slew of inquiries in my inbox after yet another police shooting of an unarmed Black person or an act of domestic terrorism. There is a strange expectation that the only thing I am qualified to comment on is oppression. It has been hard to know what to write over the past four years. I certainly have opinions and observations to offer on the American political climate. But I also have creative inclinations that have little to do with the political climate. There are so many things I want to make, if only America would let me. I suspect most artists feel this way, trapped between an obligation to telling the truth, to bearing witness, and surrendering to the wilds of our imaginations. If only America would let them.
I am a realist, not an optimist. I don’t quite know what to make of America anymore. I really don’t. Or I don’t want to face, eyes wide open, what America has become and how elusive an equitable future for all Americans seems. But I still have words. I have my voice. If there is a creative mandate for anyone who means to make art, it is to reflect not only America as it was and as it is but to also reflect America as it could be.
This is America presents over thirty artists that live and work in the United States. Many of the artists in this exhibition were born there and have witnessed the country’s rapid evolution during the past few decades. Other artists were born outside the US and have emigrated from different parts of the world—the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, Asia. Together, this selection encompasses a cross-section of artists whose work reflects, for better or worse, their experiences in the US. Following 2020, a year that will be remembered in infamy given the global pandemic and social unrest, much of this art reflects the current state of precarity in which we all live. The works in the exhibition were made during the past year, from 2020 to 2021, and each reflects prescient issues affecting this country at present, including class, race, and gender inequity, as well as concomitant civil unrest.
Wealth Disparity
Income disparity in the US is at its highest since the gilded age. New York, the city that several artists in the show call home, has some of the wealthiest and poorest people living within its densely packed boroughs. On the Pacific coast, Los Angeles boasts affluence, celebrity, and idyllic weather, but it is also home to one of the largest populations of homeless people in the world. Skid Row is adjacent to blue-chip galleries, where collectors vie for million-dollar artworks.
Alfonso Gonzalez Jr’s poignant Homeless health care Los Angeles (2021), is a painting depicting the titular clinic with an overstuffed car and sofa outside, capturing the reality of many people trying to survive while living in their automobiles or, even worse, on the street. Philadelphia-born artist Timothy Curtis remarks on a different disparity related to health care—the relationship between opioid addiction and death or incarceration—in his work Aw Man, 2021. Structured in two parts, on the right side of the canvas, a prescription pill container spills pills marked POISON; a grid covers the opening of a container and two eyes peek out from its depths, suggesting an imprisoned person. The left side of the canvas features a tombstone with marks that overflow from its surface, a sad reminder of how many people are lost to overdoses. Curtis creates a visual commentary on how big pharma has vastly accelerated addiction, which, in turn, was criminalized; each of these industrial complexes—the pharmaceutical industry and the private prison system—have made billions for some while destroying the lives of too many Americans. These contrasts are what make this country so complex and legitimately difficult to encapsulate. For every great aspect about living in the US—the right to free speech, to practice free religion, sexual freedom, and same-sex marriage, as well as the incredible variations in landscape and topography—there are equally disturbing elements. Gun violence, racial inequity born out of slavery and incarceration, an addiction epidemic, and an almost moral disdain of poverty are some of the issues plaguing our nation.
Miami-based artist Fairley Aguilar’s Chain Gang, circa 1903 (2021) shows a group of four shackled men in prison striped outfits. The inspiration for this painting was a historical photograph of imprisoned men of color. One man leans on a large ax, symbolizing the free labor obtained through a draconian incarceration system after slavery was permitted. Aguilar, a Nicaraguan artist who lives in Miami, clearly understands that his fate could have been much different had he been born even one century earlier. With a similar ethos, LAbased Alex Becerra comments on the horrific realities of manual labor for many of his Latin community with an oil on linen painting, Chemical Cocktail (2021). In an artist’s statement, Becerra reminds viewers, “Chemical cocktails for the migrant worker while you slurp up a strawberry daiquiri on a rooftop and small talk with your associates.”1 He is referring to the use of highly toxic chemicals sprayed on the fields for
strawberry harvest while workers with little to no rights are exposed as they toil these crops for a pittance.
Jarrett Key’s oil painting on cement, A Good Laugh (2021), responds to the history of Black migration to the North that was so prevalent during the Jim Crow era. Rather than focusing on the exploitation of this population for labor and the injustices that they suffered, he shows two joyful Black men, reflecting the new opportunities found in cities like Chicago or New York. The lush pastoral scene and the protagonists’ smiles contrast with the cement to form a poignant commentary on a history of oppression. This is aligned with the ceramic works of Sharif Bey. His Was, Was Not, 2020 and Protest Shield: Zulu Knots (2021), which resemble the formal iconography of African tribal art but are very much rooted in the contemporary. Protest Shield borrows its form from Benin sculpture, with a head surrounded by a halo of tiny fists, a BLM reference to Black power and resistance. Bey’s shield is one of protection as well as power, suggesting the elision of meaning as works are understood across cultures and historical eras.
Tony Marsh, Louis Osmosis, and Christina Forrer contribute works that are more abstract in their messaging of disillusionment. Marsh’s group of ceramics sculptures, The Jester’s Pants (2020/2021), while appearing without narrative, alludes to the year 2020 and its mounting crises, from the pandemic and divisive politicians to civil protest against gender and police violence. The artist says, “I felt disgusted, everything around me felt like it was in a state of chaotic mess, like vomit and excess.”2 His ceramic forms with various colors of dripped glazes reflect the conditions of chaos and disorder. Christina Forrer, a native Swiss artist who calls the US home, shows Distant Affliction (2020) a woven work made of cotton, wool, and watercolor. While not referencing any conflict directly, the figures in the work have a folkloric appearance, seemingly conjured from dark fantasy. Forrer’s work may be read as symbolic of our current state of crisis and frustration. An anthropomorphic sculpture by Louis Osmosis is similarly obtuse. HK Space Museum (Berghain Mix) (2021) was inspired by the protests in Hong Kong as well as the legendary psychedelic techno club Berghain in Berlin. A central figure with a security mirror as a face is punctuated by small neon rods, recalling Renaissance imagery of Saint Sebastian. The neon sticks are reminiscent of shards of light in a nightclub and lasers used in the Hong Kong protests. The figure is symbolic of the dislocation and a fugue-like state that many people felt during the past year.
#BLM
While 2020 will be remembered for the COVID19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement became mainstream and formed a groundswell of support.3 This developed in response to shock and outrage over George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. While this kind of violence has been endemic in our country, today, cell phone videos provide evidence from an intimate distance. Peter Williams references Floyd’s murder directly in two paintings, Stand in Now or Later and Jesus Died For Somebodies Sins, But Not Mine, both 2020. The latter depicts Floyd’s ascension as a martyr saint with angels in the sky circling his halo. Williams based the painting on Medieval religious imagery paired with contemporary events.
Pat Phillips presents a work on paper that examines the correlation between no-knock warrants and violence against African Americans. Untitled I’m just a no-knock warrant (2020) shows the warrant as a personified pencil-drawn figure looking up at a person, whom the viewer sees only from the shin down. The blue trouser leg and black Nike Gore-Tex boot that dwarfs the warrant illustrate the disparity in power between the police, those who are supposed to protect and serve, and their victims, who are often innocent. Numbers on the Board (2020), by the young artist Jameson Green, is perhaps the most unflinching depiction of violence against African Americans in this exhibition. The painting reads formally like a deposition, with a person of color (only the dreadlocks reveal the race) seen under a bloodstained sheet surrounded by the small numbers used to indicate details in crime scene photographs. Green’s oil on panel could depict any of the hundreds of people of color brutalized by the police in America daily.
Further reverberations of this theme are spread throughout This is America in works that feature protest imagery. Cristina BanBan’s US Summer 2020 (2020) is a painting that represents protests related to BLM. The acrylic on canvas features a Herculean sea of bodies of varying colors, some holding megaphones and signs bearing the names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Elijah McClain, as well as the heartbreaking “I CAN’T BREATHE.” Other figures, mostly white, hold batons and wear police uniforms. The all-over composition suggests chaos, confusion, and movement.
Ilana Savdie’s Public Displays of Insinuation (2021) bridges references to resistance and invasion of all forms, from the structural and societal to the cellular. The central area of this painting appears to be an acrobatic human figure, with a hand gripping a pole that cuts across the foreground. The figure’s arm is the most referential element, while the torso and head areas are abstracted. As if flying through the air, several legs and feet can be seen in what may be read as a reference to group action and the dynamic public response to various injustices. Complementary colors are juxtaposed in the composition, with pink and blue hues hovering alongside a large swatch of textured green, an area where the artist used pigmented beeswax to create a rippling effect. Savdie’s painting embodies the feelings and moments of the past year in American history without referencing any specificity.
David Leggett, Raelis Vasquez, and Patrick Quarm each represent figures of color in their work. Leggett’s paintings use text and pop culture references. Night Studio (2020) features a KKK member, Mickey Mouse and Pluto riding a donkey, Fat Albert, and the text “STAY BLACK.” Leggett was intrigued with the controversy over the cancellation of Philip Guston’s retrospective and how the dialogue in the press and the art world didn’t involve Black voices. His painting memorializes this moment and encourages voices of color to speak out. Quarm’s three-dimensional painting Dream of Reason (2021) depicts a Black man asleep while sitting at a desk, his head resting on a pillow. Speech bubbles float upward from his head, the largest reading “GRIM!” While the text recalls Pop art, the artist based the composition on Goya’s iconic painting The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters 1797–1800. This contemporary iteration sums up the nightmare of policing for people of color in this country. Raelis Vasquez paints a seated young couple looking downwards to something outside the edge of the canvas, perhaps the viewer. Vasquez implicates all of us in the discussion of racial violence and inequity, casting a mirror image and asking what we will do to work towards a solution.
#MeToo
One of the most important developments of recent years was the #MeToo movement.4 As a woman who grew up in the 1970s and 80s, I’m no stranger to catcalls, lewd jokes about women, and unwanted advances. It is a welcome development that men can no longer trespass women’s bodies without legal and social repercussions. This is America includes several works that touch upon the theme of female experience and resistance. Zoë Buckman’s feather canyons (2021), and face to the bricks (2020), are hanging sculptures of boxing gloves made from vintage textiles, particularly those most typically associated with women, such as tea towels and tablecloths. They embody the rage that some women have sublimated and are now feeling freer to express. Kelly Reemtsen also conveys the precariousness of female experience without using bodily imagery in Look What You Made Me Do (2020).
Reemtsen is known for her uncompromising depictions of women in fancy dresses carrying household objects that suggest violence, such as axes and chainsaws. In this large oil on panel, the artist paints a white frock on a dress form, which can be read as a stand-in for a female subject. Blood spatter on the wall and floor suggest violence, but we never see the damage. Her tongue-in-cheek title suggests television shows such as Dexter, where violence is depicted and even glorified, as well as the music of Taylor Swift, a popular twenty-first-century feminist icon.
Using clay as a medium, Brie Ruais also comments on the female experience without creating an overtly figurative work. Her large ceramic sculpture Locating Obfuscating, 130 lbs (2021) is made with the precise amount of material as her body weight at the time of its creation, a silent commentary on the immense societal pressure on women to appear a certain way. Ruais kneads, pushes, and forces this material into a large circular form torn into pieces.
A large red X crosses its surface; this may be interpreted as a protective force applied to the female body and is an evocative statement on violence against women. Boot prints and scrapes from her knuckles are a testament to the corporal engagement with the medium.
Several artists in This is America use the female body, arguably the center of the #MeToo movement, to comment on the gendered experience of women as both subjects and creators of art. Shona McAndrew’s Katye (2021) is a painting that seeks to challenge what Laura Mulvey coined as “the male gaze.”5 Katye is not a typical idealized female as we have grown conditioned to seeing throughout centuries of art history. She has pink hair, purple lips, and is tattooed. She is also larger than most women painted by male artists, defiantly expressing an alternative form of beauty. Alina Perez also creates a female subject that resists stereotypes of female nudes. In Self Portrait as Nude with Mask (2021) the artist draws herself nude, sitting in a striped chair6 and wearing a mask. Her stance is louche and confident: one leg is bent upwards, her tattooed legs and arms are clothed only with a pair of socks and boots. A full-frontal nude set in an oval shape, it recalls miniature portraits but challenges any notions of propriety with a confrontational and powerfully sexual woman.
Gender Trouble
Maybe, maybe not (2020) by Sojourner Truth Parsons, shows two female bodies in profile surrounded by smaller images of figures. The central and largest figure is pregnant with swollen breasts, clutches a teddy bear, and wears a large pink bow in her hair. The reflecting figure is not with child. Created in her typical graphic style, with a predominance of pink and red, the painting captures the decision that most women make at some point in their lives, whether or not to bear children. This is an especially important decision for an artist, given the demands of motherhood and the lack of equitable support with domestic labor. While the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963, we know that at present women are still paid around seventy cents to the dollar of men. Having a child only exacerbates this issue with the lack of federally endorsed maternity and paternity care regulations.
Coady Brown’s painting Gentlemen’s Club (2020) shows a woman in a suit and tie, her head too small for the body, suggesting that she is shrinking. The cause of the discomfort remains out of the picture: a hand and a blue thong suggest an undressed stripper performing for her. This has the hallmarks of a typical Brown painting: the clashing patterns, the ambiguous expression, as well as the tightly framed composition of the figure. An intriguing statement on the female experience, the painting represents the objectifier looking more uncomfortable than the objectified. Again, a new riff on dismantling the male gaze. An equally ambitious and ambiguous work by Chloe Chiasson is titled Come and Take It (2021) depicting two figures which literally grow out of the canvas. Chiasson’s figures read as female and sit so close that their white shirts bleed into each other, suggesting intimacy. They sit on the back panel of a pickup truck in a surreal landscape punctuated by both American and confederate flags. The artist describes her work as a response to a polarized gender stratification, where her figures often embody “spaces that historically demand that I, and other queer people like me, specifically cannot and should not exist.”7
Genevieve Gaignard contributes a diptych mixed media work on panel titled White Fragility (2020). As a biracial artist, Gaignard is known for a practice that merges photography, installation, and mixed media work and explores the divide between races and gender in America. One panel of White Fragility features several debutantes, all Caucasian, wearing white gowns and surrounded by out-of-scale red roses. The other panel shows one white woman in profile, again surrounded by roses. A small BLACK LIVES MATTER pin on her sweater reveals the problem of white fragility:
after centuries of dominance, it isn’t easy to accede power and wealth. In the same vein, a white savior complex cannot solve these deep-seated issues in America. Where then lies the solution?
Fact and Myth
Mira Schor is an artist known for an abiding engagement in feminism and politics. Her three New York Times intervention pieces are part of a daily practice that expresses our collective frustration and anger with recent debates over truth in the media. Schor, known for her painting and critical theory, uses pages from the iconic newspaper (now hated by the right and some on the left as well) to comment upon their coverage of current events. Her New York Times Intervention, “NEW
In Conclusion
YORK TIMES IS THIS REALLY THE HEADLINE?”
August 28, 2020 (2020) comprises black and red text in all caps and white gesso areas where images are obfuscated. Schor replaces their headline “Trump Bolstered by Party He’s Transformed” with Trump “VIOLATES HATCH ACT” followed by a caustic denunciation of the President’s actions. Schor’s interventions suggest that no news source can be trusted wholly; we all must read across platforms and understand how truth can be twisted with language.
Mark Thomas Gibson’s ink on canvas You Can’t Kill Us All (The Battle of DC) (2020) depicts a scene from current events when Donald Trump used police, federal agents, and unknown security mercenaries to violently clear Lafayette Park in Washington DC for a photo opportunity. Gibson, whose work is inspired by the history of political cartoons, writs this incident large. Like a twentyfirst-century version of Picasso’s Guernica (1937) the scene is chaotic, with random limbs, a horse, and the now infamous upside-down Bible all on view. Gibson writes of the “ongoing American interest in myth-making, which has always justified cruelty in the name of the USA.”8 In contrast to Gibson’s canvas, Cosmo Whyte’s No Names in the Streets (2021) is a haunting work notable for its formal economy. A burning police car rendered in charcoal is surrounded by short textual references connected by red lines to the central scene. The absence of bodies is both sinister and peaceful, portraying the result of people coming together in an act of civil disobedience, albeit without depicting any violence against Black bodies. While the artist conceived this painting before the January 6 insurrection, the text references the security guard, Officer Eugene Goodman, who used his body as a decoy to insurrectionists away from Congress. In contrast, Charles Edward Williams presents a peaceful scene, although one just as disturbing. In his oil on mylar work
Untitled (2021) we see a Black man holding a flag standing next to another figure. Rendered mostly monochromatic, the protagonist’s face and hand are among the only areas in color. Both men appear sheepish, as if they have lost any hope in what the flag stands for.
Will Cotton’s exquisite oil on canvas Roping 2 (2021) features a cowboy throwing a lasso while riding a pink unicorn. Cotton comments on the opposing mythological status of both cowboys and unicorns, a metaphor for male/female dyad as well as immigrant/American identity. The sheer beauty and technical precision of this painting seduce the viewer into wholescale acceptance of these constructed myths, a welcome diversion from current events. Caleb Hahne depicts a similarly mythical scene: a Black man stands on top of a horse whose feet are immersed in water. Holding a glinting sword and confronting the viewer straight on, he is flanked by a dove that hovers beside him, a call for peace in a time of great division. In addition, Asif Hoque joins this discussion of the masculine and the mythological with his oil on linen work God of Love (2021). A winged nude man and winged beast stand on a plateau surrounded by an indeterminate landscape. Both figures appear fearless and masculine, ready for action. The human figure’s hybrid existence as a winged creature signals the artist’s personal history as a Bangladeshi immigrant to Florida. The heroic quality of these works indicates our desire for contemporary heroes. Who will be the Malcolm X or Dr. King of the 2020s?
What is the future of America? As a young country, we have a lot to learn from our colleagues abroad. Will there be a class or racial revolution? Will the country remain a superpower? There is much to be determined. It is not a stretch to believe that every artist in this exhibition has concerns over the future of the US. Some works in the exhibition are poignant in their envisioning of our future. For example, Cleon Peterson’s acrylic on canvas painting Suddenly Cruel (2021), rendered in a rarefied palette of red, black, and white, reflects the struggle between many Americans and corporate culture. Often referred to as “the man,” many of us are at the mercy of large multinational conglomerates who often pay low wages despite reaping huge profits. Hiejin Yoo’s Lucky Striker (2021) depicts an olivaceous landscape bisected by a road that doubles as a bowling lane. A large hand grips the setting sun, which doubles as a ball with the potential to knock out the ten pins. Yoo’s canvas reminds us that we are hurtling towards the sixth extinction, draining our precious resources, including and perhaps most importantly, human capital. In her work, we might consider the large hand as “the man,” with the bowling pins representing the people who do the heavy lifting to keep the country running.
Daniel Arsham’s Blue Calcite American Flag (Large) (2016) is a fitting conclusion to this essay. The wall-based work immediately signals a flag due to its shape and gentle folds that seem to furl in the wind. The outlines of the stars and stripes remain but are transformed into a monochrome, calcified object that appears to be a relic, typical of Arsham’s practice, sometimes referred to as fictional archaeology. A viewer can cast hundreds of years into the future and imagine stumbling upon this object, a remnant of a country founded on the principles of freedom, yet destroyed by greed and human nature, a federal Ozymandias. Arsham’s sculpture reads as a semaphore, cautioning Americans to abide by our founding dogma that all are created equal.
1 Artist’s statement, p18.
2 Artist’s statement, p56.
3 The Black Lives Matter movement was founded in 2013 by three women—Alicia Garza, Patrice Cullors, and Opal Tometi—in response to Trayvon Martin’s murder. See https://blacklivesmatter.com/herstory/ for more information about the organization’s history.
4 Born out of Ronan Farrow’s The New Yorker exposé of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s atrocious behavior, this movement gathered ferocity, becoming a global phenomenon. See https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/ from-aggressive-overtures-to-sexual-assault-harvey-weinsteins-accusers-tell-their-stories for the full article.
5 See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009 (1989). The article was originally published in Screen journal in the UK in 1974 and subsequently published in the first edition of this title in 1989.
6 The seated subject is reminiscent of Alice Neel’s Self-portrait at eighty, 1984, which is in the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian, Washington DC
7 Artist’s statement, p32.
8 Artist’s statement, p42.
Farley Aguilar [Nicaraguan, b. 1981]
Chain Gang, circa 1903, 2021
Oil, oil stick, pencil on linen
76½ × 65 in, 194.5 × 165 cm
This past year, the US’s deeply problematic history with race relations, especially its disturbing history with African Americans, has become painfully clear. The painting, Chain Gang, circa 1903, is based on a photograph that is over a century old and demonstrates how our carceral system has yet to progress in providing minorities an opportunity for upward mobility. Certain segments of our society profit very much from the carceral system; this includes immigrant detention centers and youth correctional facilities but does not reinvest in education or authentic forms of rehabilitation for those that are usually the poorest members of society. Until we confront the fact that inequality and racism are embedded into the foundation of the United States, nothing will be rectified. I want these painted figures to look through time to invoke the viewer to recognize their agency and, ultimately, remind them of the existence of the lives of the incarcerated then and now.
US Summer 2020, 2020
Acrylic on canvas
98 × 158 in, 249 × 401.5 cm
In 2020, the pandemic forced us to stop and see life from another perspective. Many of us were locked up at home, dealing with uncertainty and a lack of human contact. For some, this isolation was a struggle; for others, it was a moment of liberating pause, and surely, for many, a moment of reflection—we had time for it.
Coinciding with the warmer months and the loosening of restrictions, a series of events occurred that caused a social revolution in the streets. The murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Elijah McClain, in the hands of the police, detonated as a mass protest in many cities. In New York, people came out together to protest against racial discrimination, systematic oppression, and the abuse of people of color by the authorities in the United States.
I am a thirty-three-year-old female immigrant classified as an “alien of extraordinary ability,” which has allowed me to live and work in this country. While accepting my privilege and the need to do better to educate myself on the historical context of race, I realized that a way for me to support the movement was with a painting.
US Summer 2020 depicts the police’s brutal response to protesters who peacefully marched daily and for months in the streets of New York. This is my largest painting to date, as I wanted to paint figures that were close to life-size. The figures were painted through research and collected images, allowing me to create an accurate representation of the scene, uniforms, and clothing. With this painting, I am illustrating a certain moment in time, detailing the facial expressions, bodies, and atmosphere of the protests.
Alex Becerra [American, b. 1989]
Chemical Cocktail, 2021
Oil on linen
60 × 48 in, 152.5 × 122 cm
Injusticia En El Barrio, 2021
Oil on linen
60 × 48 in, 152.5 × 122 cm
Farm-to-table carries a very different meaning to my Latin brothers and sisters laboring in the fields. Hand-picked in extreme conditions for your convenient pleasure, $15.99 Avocado Toast craze in a fancy Beverly Hills brunch spot. Complaints that go ignored and you must get back to work to make your workload by sundown. Entire communities exposed to tear gas vapors as the strawberry fields are prepared for year-round harvest. A full cycle of leftover tear gas from WWII, injected into the brown earth to eradicate unwanted pests—once sprayed into the brown faces marching during the Chicano Moratorium in 1970 in East Los Angeles—now rebranded for the strawberry fields in Oxnard, California. Chemical cocktails for the migrant worker while you slurp up a strawberry daiquiri on a rooftop and small talk with your associates.
Protest Shield: Zulu Knots, 2021
Earthenware and mixed media
22 × 20 × 8 in, 56 × 51 × 20.5 cm
Was, Was Not, 2020
Earthenware and mixed media
24 × 6 × 6 in, 61 × 15 × 15 cm
Was, Was Not
Although Was, Was Not utilizes literal imagery, it symbolically speaks to conditions stemming from the African Diaspora in the United States that are not so pleasant. The vessel suggests a funerary urn. The knob on the lidded-vessel represents the self-inflicted ending of a life that never found its purpose and a potential that was never fully realized.
Protest Shield: Zulu Knots
While the imagery in Protest Shield: Zulu Knots might read as a mask, it is an object designed to empower and protect (as would a shield). It incorporates a mash-up of historical references and symbols. The large face is reminiscent of Benin sculpture, the nails suggest nkisi nkondi, and the patterning that frames that form is a traditional surface for decorative ceramics. Emanating from the halo-like band of color are fists— a more contemporary symbol for power, protest, and resistance—that speak to the spirit of our time.
Coady Brown [American, b. 1990]
Gentlemen’s Club, 2020
Oil on canvas
54 × 46 in, 137 × 117 cm
My work examines how groups, couples, and solitary figures explore self-presentation in both private and public life. Bodies inhabit tightly framed, intimate spaces in paintings that expose our vulnerabilities and the tenuous nature of our connections and relationships. Figures become reflections of their environments, mirroring these heightened, surreal, frenetic, sexy, and sorrowful states.
Patterns are painted in contrasting, high-chroma colors. Flowers, faces, and geometric shapes adorn jackets and T-shirts, allowing clothing to become an extension of the psyche. In their contrasting flatness and opticality, bodies are trapped in a world that is both familiar and strange. Figures tend to be androgynous, understanding gender fluidly and that femininity can be a site of both strength and extreme vulnerability. Caught in various states of harmony, anxiety, ecstasy, and anguish, figures navigate the world and uncertainty of the everyday, from intimate boundaries in bars and bedrooms to the unknown that awaits outside. It is a world fraught with the instability and paranoia of contemporary life.
feather canyons, 2021
Boxing gloves, vintage textiles and chain
16 × 26 × 21 in, 40.5 × 66 × 53.5 cm
face to the bricks, 2020
Boxing glove, vintage textiles and chain 16 × 11 × 8 in, 40.5 × 28 × 20.5 cm
Buckman’s new sculptural and textile works, recalling an intimacy with the body and a proximity to the domestic space, explore identity, trauma, and gendered violence. swallowed by banter comprises two delicate white handkerchiefs, embroidered with text and bearing faint stains of blood, a testament to their history. Urgent, capital letters, picked out with white thread, ask the question, “How many bodies have been swallowed by banter?”
These slight, domestic textiles, used to mop up spills, call out the violence of “locker room talk” with visceral insistence, whether in the home, or public spaces. Vintage handkerchiefs are also incorporated in face to the bricks, enveloping its symbolically masculine form with tender care. Hanging from a heavy, industrial chain, a boxing glove is decked with domestic checks and soft ruffles, a reflection of its dual function of harm and protection. Missing its other half, the lone glove appears uncertain, questioning preconceived notions of vulnerability and strength.
Chloe Chiasson [American, b. 1993]
Come and Take It, 2021
Oil, acrylic, resin, wood on canvas
93¼ × 96 × 5¼ in, 237 × 244 × 13.5 cm
My interest is in the space “in between”: in between worlds, in between genders. My position in between has me defined by, trapped in, resisting, and breaking free from the cultural construction of gender identity, expression, and sexuality. This “in between” existing only through the acknowledgment that you are either one, or the other. Inspired by the desire to rebel and confront this paradigm of sameness versus difference that has historically suppressed non-conforming identities and expressions, my work is a rejection of the mutual exclusiveness of many things: of femininity and masculinity, of sexuality and freedoms of expression, of being yourself, secular perhaps, open, in landscapes and spaces that historically demand that I, and other queer people like me, specifically cannot and should not exist. Androgynous forms and figures escaping the canvas are meant to suggest crossing boundaries or exceeding acceptable “extents” as they come into their own world. A world where mutability wouldn’t be necessary for survival. A world where freedom stretches to take on more meaning than can be held on a bumper sticker. Not a world of being wedged between social constructs, but of hopeful, fluid possibility.
Timothy Curtis [American, b. 1982]
“Aw Man, You wouldn’t believe me if I told you” (A short story based in Philadelphia), 2021
Oil, wax pastel, graphite and acrylic on canvas
72 × 96 in, 183 × 244 cm
If I Had Your Hand, I’d Cut Mine off, 2021
Oil, oil stick, wax pastel, graphite on canvas
72 × 72 in, 183 × 183 cm
Christina Forrer [Swiss, b. 1978]
Genevieve Gaignard [American, b. 1981]
White Fragility, 2020 Mixed media on panel
Each Panel 14 × 11 in, 35.5 × 28 cm
My work explores issues of race, class, and femininity using uncanny humor befitting of these concepts’ duality as both weighty markers of identity and unfixed values traded fluidly in popular culture. As a biracial woman in America, I investigate the aesthetic and cultural divide between black and white, a chasm as palpable as it is “invisible.” As an artist, I am interested in the varying incremental shades that exist between, and inadequately define, these markers, and my practice hinges on composites: of identities, experiences, appearances, and materials. My staged photographs present a spectrum of imagined and wholly recognizable “selves,” demonstrative of the kaleidoscopic means by which our outward existences are forged and fashioned, and pointing to the imperfect relationship between our inner worlds and public lives. My installations and mixed media works, composed of a myriad of materials and found objects dutifully collected from various sources, convey a similar multiplicity. Representing something more, and different, than the sum of their parts, these domestic tableaux are reconstructed and repurposed to meld the real and the imagined; they become a patchwork of cultural and political associations, often nostalgic, yet yearning for change.
You Can’t Kill Us All (The Battle of D.C.), 2020
Ink on canvas
69½ × 89½ in, 169 × 227.5 cm
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, political cartoons and caricatures informed the public of the divides and positions within a society, typically from the position of informed individuals. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, William Randolph Hearst used all aspects of the newspaper—including the comics section— to attack and out-sell his competitor Joseph Pulitzer. Yellow Journalism went beyond writing salacious stories and found its vulgar hand comfortably placed within comics and caricature. The mode of comics came into focus after the invention of lithography. This relatively quick and easy process allowed satirists to react and respond to a massive audience daily. This speed of reception and reaction made the experience of public reaction palpable to the point that people began to copy the artwork and derisive imagery. This would be the case of Honore Daumier in France. His image of King Louis-Philippe’s transformation from a pear to a grim pouting monarch employs a childlike naivety, while at the same time leveling the most powerful person in their world.
Fast forward to June 1, 2020: Ex-President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, used the power of his office to violently clear Lafayette Park in Washington DC. for nothing more than an ill-conceived photo opportunity. This moment was a particularly low point in an already dismal presidency, (more low points were on the horizon). The military action with unidentified mercenary enforcers, mixed in with police and other federal officials, was not new. What was new was the pointed use of cameras and the media to show that this action had become completely normalized. The three-minute photo-op at the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church just across from Lafayette Square, with upside-down Bible in tow, bolster’s the ongoing American interest in myth-making, which has always justified cruelty in the name of the USA. In time, that three-minute photo op will be used by those who wish to rewrite the narrative as an American Triumph. Perhaps unbelievable to some, but it is a very American angle if history has shown us anything.
Homeless health care Los Angeles, 2021 Oil, enamel on canvas
40 × 60 in, 101.5 × 152.5 cm
Alfonso Gonzalez Jr. is an artist whose work developed from close observation of his father’s skillful trade in commercial sign painting. He draws inspiration in the permanence of handpainted signage and the physical weathering remnants of Los Angeles to narrate his familial histories of labor and image-making.
Gonzalez’s paintings, while seemingly passive still-lifes, excavate the sedimented interactions that happen on everyday public surfaces. His multi-layered works function as contemporary palimpsests, surfaces in which the original facade has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain. Gonzalez’s works are not merely metaphors but objects that uphold the visual as a form of knowledge and language.
Jameson Green [American, b. 1992]
Instar, 2021
Oil, acrylic, flashe and wax on canvas
72 × 55 in, 183 × 139.5 cm
Painting for me is the choice to remember; remembering all the space in-between each moment, like the leaf falling from its branch. My work is an action to hold onto the parts of my history I find valuable. I paint the people closest to me and often myself as my way of holding onto those stories as the subject, viewer, or both.
For this painting, I dug through my family records uncovering the story of my ancestors, learning that their arrival was from Mexico, not Spain. Instar is the transition of my identity, like the caterpillar becoming a butterfly. Painting these lost moments, moments suppressed as a means of survival, is not just an act of remembrance but of reclamation. Standing atop a blue spirit horse, sword in hand, my teenage great-great-grandfather staring into the eyes of his viewers, fearless of his nature. This is the first step in telling all of the forgotten stories behind the first brushstroke.
Asif Hoque [Bangladeshi, b. 1991]
God of Love, 2021
Oil on linen
60 × 50 in, 152.5 × 127 cm
Asif Hoque, through autobiographical representations, addresses multicultural identity and vulnerability through painting. Habiting abstract worlds and impossible spaces, his figures are dancing, swaying, and embracing. As if guided by their movement, the lush greenscapes, with tangled vines and curving branches, caress the figures with a sense of intimate delicacy. His paintings express emotional intelligence and masculinity through elongated curves, soft gaze, and an unexpected tenderness. Vibrant yet gentle, Hoque’s paintings challenge our preconceptions of identity, gender, and body.
Jarrett Key [American, b. 1990]
A Good Laugh, 2021 Oil in Cement (Fresco)
53½ × 37½ in, 136 × 95.5 cm
I often ask myself, “I am free, ain’t I?” This quest for understanding freedom extends further than the current demands in the streets for justice and equality. As I examine the history of Black freedom in America, I often think of the migration of Black folks out of the rural South to escape the horrors of not only Jim Crow policies but also the legacy of agrarian labor associated with enslavement. Now in urban centers like Chicago or Detroit, Black folks found new lives and hope in landscapes defined by cement. As I made my own migration from rural Alabama to NYC, the histories and realities of dispossession and hyper surveillance from police defined my life. I became a perpetual worker, someone with no ability to rest with security, no ability to leave the city.
My current series of paintings, Leaving the City is a body of oil works in cement. Painted in wet cement like a fresco, the image depicts Black people (biological and chosen family) in lush, pastoral landscapes literally held within a substrate of cement and wire. The images of Black leisure and joy appear in defiance to the cement. Defining a new reality, these cement paintings suggest land stewardship, security, safety, and freedom.
We them boys, 2021
Acrylic, collage, felt, and spray paint on panel 24 × 18 in, 61 × 45.5 cm
Night Studio, 2020
Acrylic, collage, felt, and spray paint on panel 24 × 18 in, 61 × 45.5 cm
Night Studio takes its name from Musa Mayer’s memoir of her father, Philip Guston. The cancelation of Guston’s retrospective and the overall debate that followed influenced the painting. This conversation was around what should or should not be seen during the current racial uprising in America. I found this intriguing as very few people seemed to care for Black peoples’ perspective in the arts, and even with the cancelation of Guston’s show, Black people were still largely not in the conversation. Inserting Fat Albert with the Black power slogan to “Stay Black” beside a peaceloving hippie Klansman is my answer back to that conversation.
We Them Boys takes its name from Wiz Khalifa’s 2014 song “We Dem Boyz.” It is also a reference to Amazon’s TV show “The Boys.” You are the chosen ones that were handpicked is the overall theme. Young Black figurative artists have been making waves in the art market in recent years. What are the pitfalls, and is this just a fad? Are non-Black collectors interested in Black artists for their talent or a future investment?
Tony Marsh [American, b. 1954]
The Jester’s Pants, 2020/2021
Multiple fired clay, glaze
59 × 51½ × 27 in, 150 × 131 × 68.5 cm
The Jester’s Pants was started in May of 2020, during the early moments of the pandemic lockdown, and finished five months later as we all tried to make sense of yet a new trauma that was engulfing the world rapidly.
I lived through the decade of the 60s and never thought there could be an encore to the social upheaval we all experienced in America. The country was beset with the assignations of multiple beloved political figures, widespread violent civil rights issues, the unpopular Vietnam war, and all of the conflict that an intergenerational culture war offered.
2020 unto itself has eclipsed the trauma the 60s whole-cloth delivered in America. All at once, the perfect storm of cultural insults came home to roost, a chaotic, disruptive, and divisive group of politicians were in full bloom, economic inequity ravaged, racial injustice came to the fore in necessary ways it never had before, and climate change and a brand of extreme weather events have created a new terrifying norm.
As though all of that were not enough, the world was hit with plague and the American response felt unnecessarily foolish and exasperating.
I felt disgusted. Everything around me felt like it was in a state of chaotic mess, like vomit and excess. It was how I wanted to create, a mirror to the moment. I started The Jesters Pants as an absurd ironic, excessive, overly wrought collection of archetypal forms isolated on a dark, crowded tableau.
Shona McAndrew [French, b. 1990]
Katye, 2021
Acrylic on canvas
48 × 40 in, 122 × 101.5 cm
Now more than ever, women can question ideas about womanhood, existing under increasingly diverse, or nonexistent, notions of femininity. I begin my paintings with poses of women lifted from art historical references. I look for paintings of women from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made by men, which is not very hard to do. Throughout history, as men have almost exclusively been the only group allowed to create fine art, they have had complete control over the depictions of womanhood. Beautiful, thin, upper-class, elegant, paleskinned women are all delicately captured on canvas by men for men. This representation of women is what I’m working against. I want to make art by women for women.
I feel a responsibility as a woman and an artist to question and articulate the complex, unspoken truths that define many women’s day-to-day existence. With this specific painting, Katye perfectly represents an approach to self-expression untethered from the “male gaze.” Pink hair, purple lips, tattoos, and comfortable pose and clothing. This is how I see Katye, and more importantly, this is how Katye wants to be seen.
HK Space Museum (Berghain Mix), 2021
Reinforced paper-mache, acrylic rods, cardboard, polystyrene, security mirror, helmet, epoxy putty, steel, concrete 71 × 32 × 25 in, 180.5 × 81.5 × 63.5 cm
The recent protests in Hong Kong struck a particular nerve in me; the circumstances of this political unrest produced a visual syntax across the landscape grounded in non-linearity, devolvement, and a visceral strain of rupture. Spectacle became rigorously democratized as demonstrators engaged the cityscape as arena and stage, from which a flurry of bricks, umbrellas, and (perhaps most significantly) lasers arose.
I experienced an aesthetic déjà vu between these protests in HK and my experience at the nightclub Berghain; architectural space became abstracted to thick opacities of grays, wherefrom strobing vectors of light pierced through the fog and bodies libidinally flailed. These optical conditions and projective logics carry with them a certain volatility, enabling a mercurial type of subjectivity to emerge.
Amidst this topographical abstraction lies a positionality entrenched in a radical descent and withdrawal. I look to these modes of selfdiscontinuity as a collective disavowal of the dogma of voluntarism–anxiety and ambivalence are perverted to the points of subversion in these zones. Rather than travel actual distances, the anxious subject wanders, drifts, paces; amidst mirages of projected horizons and barren futures, the meander offers respite from enterprise and plausibility in non-linearity and disorientation.
Sojourner Truth Parsons [Canadian, b. 1984]
Maybe, maybe not, 2020
Acrylic on canvas
50 × 30 in, 127 × 76 cm
“In the theatrical spaces of the city, intimate strangers assemble, disassemble, and reassemble… And everything is more hypnotic when it’s pink.”
—Kim Anh Schreiber, 2020Sojourner Truth Parsons’s paintings have a powerful sense of intimacy, where viewers experience highly personal yet fictional slices of life. Like classical film noirs, her works combine dark surfaces, shadows, and fractured personas in a mix of illusion and desire. They incorporate psychic dramas where the drive for unity and completion is balanced by the pleasure and pain of a dynamic multiplicity. While the artist’s marks and brushstrokes highlight her painting process, her fields of color, repetitions, reflections, and figures’ minimal forms engender a visceral, emotional subjectivity. Parsons’s Maybe, maybe not, 2020 is like an animated film transformed into a painting, where sound and action are replaced by brushstrokes and a collage of recurring images. A multi-screen narrative about a decisive, personal moment becomes, within the field of the canvas, an abstracted mosaic of imagining.
Self Portrait as Nude with Mask, 2021 Charcoal and pastel on paper
77 × 63½ in, 195.5 × 161.5 cm
Framed dimensions: 81 × 67 in, 205.5 × 170 cm
Suddenly Cruel, 2021
Acrylic on canvas
60 × 60 in, 152.5 × 152.5 cm
America is the embodiment of utopian and dystopian fantasies, histories, and dreams. As Americans, we often feel both proud of our progress and cursed by our shortcomings. Rather than focusing on the fantasy of what America should be, in my work, I reflect on the America I’ve experienced. I’ve observed that virtue does not always prevail, and the unfortunate byproduct of our American “reality” is a culture obsessed with winners and losers. I’ve also experienced an America replete with human kindness, goodwill, and opportunity in pain. As an artist, I’ve lived two distinctively different lives. I’ve conformed to and broken society’s rules. I’ve been an outsider, invisible, voiceless, damaged, and stigmatized. I’ve also found a way to feel like I belong. It’s through the feeling of belonging that I’ve found renewal. I couldn’t have experienced any of this alone. My struggles have helped define my values and helped me, as an individual, earn my freedom and liberty. Today, I have the power to decide what cultural narratives bind me. We all start in one place and move to another. In my life, I’ve grown and encountered both tremendous pain and incredible beauty. I’ve learned that there are many Americas and that our strengths lie in our differences. America has deep-seated structural issues, yet it’s also a place where there is always an opportunity for personal accountability and change.
Untitled “I’m just a no-knock warrant”, 2020 Acrylic, pencil, airbrush, aerosol paint on paper 42 × 29½ in, 106.5 × 75 cm
Framed dimensions: 44 × 32¼, 112 × 82cm
Inspired by “I’m Just A Bill”, a song from the 1976 Schoolhouse Rock! cartoon segment, Untitled “I’m Just a no-knock warrant” examines the United States Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizures and the search warrants legally carried out by law enforcement in forty-seven states. While fundamentally, the idea of carrying out a no-knock search warrant seems reasonable, we have seen in many cases where an unbalanced burden is placed on the individual(s) being served the warrant. With an inability to respond accordingly, a person might find themselves acting in self-defense... assuming law enforcement are actual intruders. With many cases of warrants carried out on innocent individuals and the over-criminalization of citizens (over 40 % of warrants are carried out on African Americans), these “mistakes” can regularly result in mental trauma, physical harm, the arrest of an innocent person(s) or death, and are often justified for the officers, rather than protecting the victims they are sworn to protect.
Patrick Quarm [Ghanaian, b. 1988]
Dream of Reason, 2021
Mixed media, acrylic, oil on African print fabric
82 × 68 × 12 in, 208.5 × 172 .5 × 30.5 cm
Inspired by Goya’s The Sleep of Reason
Produces Monsters , my painting seeks to highlight the subconscious mind as a space where the fears and memories of history exist.
I think of history as a series of fluid events that intertwine with respect to time. Thus, the past is a remnant of the present, and the present is a progressive evolution of the past. With this work, I endeavor to understand what becomes of history when the consciousness of a generation becomes numb to memories of its past. Therefore, the only access point is within a dream state. The question then becomes: how does the hybrid individual moving through time access these memories and, how do these memories shape their present and future?
Characterized by two layers as a way of separating time, my paintings function as a form of cultural archeology, wherein I seek to excavate the layers of history that have been deposited over time. An attempt to uncover what has been hidden from the viewer or disguised in the passage of time. This is evident in the processes of layering, cutting, and erasure. Through these, I attain intricate inbetween spaces; this becomes a way to develop understanding from the exterior issues to deeper truths, which are hidden from the viewer. I create a systematic buildup of true or false cores within, in which the hybrid becomes its author: hence, this results in a painting characterized by a visual topography, commanding the experience and engagement of the viewer.
Look What You Made Me Do, 2020 Oil on panel
72 × 40 in, 183 × 101.5 cm
Look What You Made Me Do Installation, 2020 Felt, dress form, silk, push pins
79 × 60 × 33 in, 200.5 × 152.5 × 84 cm
Like many Americans, I have become increasingly disturbed over the years by a seeming collective numbness to gun violence and our nation’s political loyalty to laissez-faire gun restrictions despite ever-rising blood-shed. Why is America so insecure that it needs to carry weapons? Furthermore, there seems to be a uniquely American fascination with violent media and gun paraphernalia coupled with a general offense to regulation and explicit content. Why are American actions so often at odds with our perceived morals?
My own affinity for crime-drama television led me to observe an interesting parallel. When examining and collecting bloodstain evidence at the scene of a crime, a variety of observable physical properties can translate into tangible information for solving the crime. While well-defined splatters and the shape of their patterns reveal much about the type of trauma endured as well as the instrument that caused it, I was struck by one surprising detail. There is such a thing as too much blood. In Forensic Sciences guide to bloodstain pattern evidence, it is revealed how, “Large amounts of blood, such as if the person bled to death or was so severely injured that the resulting blood spatter was extensive, can often yield less information [...] Too much blood can disguise spatter or make stain patterns unrecognizable…”
Perhaps this is the predicament America finds itself in. Too much blood has been shed. The instruments responsible remain disguised, the people responsible for putting forth the policies to address the crime are numb, and the source of the problem remains obscured. Unsolved. We can see the blood, but we can’t make any inferences from it.
Locating and Obfuscating, 130lbs, 2021 Glazed stoneware, rocks, hardware
81 × 81 × 3 in, 205.5 × 205.5 × 7.5 cm
My ceramic sculptures are generated by a personal system of process-based performance. Always working with the equivalent of my body’s weight in clay, my integration of physicality and materiality allows me to explore themes of embodiment and the interconnectedness of the human and ecological worlds.
The performative score that I keep returning to is Spreading out from Center. I’ve been making this work since 2011. I always begin from a centralized position, on a mound of clay on the floor, and spread the clay outward while I rotate in a circle. The center of the work holds my body and what radiates outward is the extent of my reach. Within this process, I have found openings in limitations: I push and stretch the clay into explosive forms, passageways, portals, and wounds. The work is divided afterward, sometimes with a knife into a Jeffersonian grid, or by tearing it into centrifugal sections, or by letting the clay dry and separate on its own, like mud does in the desert. The circular works are expansive. The gesture radiates out from the center extending to the outside environment, simultaneously pointing outward and inward. This reflects the nature of human perception, and of western thought as centered on humans (of a certain kind). I am interested in complicating and exploring these variant ideas of centeredness.
I always come back to the idea that the individual’s experience of the world is centered in the body. In Locating and Obfuscating, 130lbs, the red glaze X poured over the surface identifies this center, marking it, locating it. Looking closely, one sees that it has also been tread on by boots, a further layer of marking, occupying, and wearing down. This work seems both identified for destruction, like a site to be mined, and impenetrable and protected, bearing a symbol for “keep out” or “stop.” The four rocks extending from the X gesture hold the center down, holding it together, tying it into the world of destruction and discovery.
Ilana Savdie [Colombian, b. 1986]
Public Displays of Insinuation, 2021 Oil, acrylic, and pigmented beeswax on canvas mounted on panel 48 × 38 in, 122 × 96.5 cm
“I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails.”
—Gloria AnzalduaWhen landscapes are owned and not quite by us, our history is inherited in our bones, our cartilage, our diabetes and heart disease, our coded language, our ritual retellings, our inherited dread. Community that finds citizenship in the margins is the invented landscape somewhere between us and them. Shifting identities are intact in their state of flux, forever in a state of becoming. I am interested in the carnage that happens in those liminal spaces where the folkloric and the biological can cohere to propel power for those of us deemed impure, inconvenient, and culturally complicated.
Painting serves as a reminder that I have a body, beyond the teeth that grind and fingertips that add to cart. I can pervert, rescale, reconfigure, and reroute the paths of power in figures that co-exist intimately on the canvas as contrasting textures, gestures, and colors. I see these gestures as organs, fractured bones, unbound parts that displace the equilibrium of power and dependence.
New York Times Intervention, “NEW YORK TIMES IS THIS REALLY THE HEADLINE?,”August 28, 2020, 2020
Ink and gesso on newspaper
22 × 10¾ in, 56 × 27.5 cm
Framed dimensions: 2513/16 × 14 5/8 in, 65.5 × 37 cm
New York Times Intervention, “Acting President Pelosi Passes Aid Bill,” March 14, 2020, 2020
Ink and gesso on newspaper
22 × 12 in, 56 × 30.5 cm
Framed dimensions: 2513/16 × 1513/16 in, 65.5 × 40 cm
My work has always been steeped in the political, the historical, the personal, and the material. Language has been a visual and conceptual element of my artwork since the 1970s, emerging first from a feminist experience, and always embedding the gap between visual and verbal language within each other’s materiality and meaning. I began my New York Times interventions the day after trump’s inauguration (I never capitalize his name or have never referred to him as President). These interventions were done sporadically, spurred by personal necessity to constantly critique and undermine the normalization of his regime through the language of the news coverage. I did these quickly, first thing in the morning, immediately sharing them on social media to assure people with similar responses that they were not alone.
Cosmo Whyte [Jamaican, b. 1982]
No Names in the Streets, 2021
Charcoal and mixed media on paper
72 × 61 in, 183 × 155 cm
My work employs drawing, sculpture, and photography to explore the intersections of race, nationalism, and displacement. From my material choices to my conceptual conceits, I frequently draw upon my Caribbean roots while also engaging with historical events and images to investigate the broad complexities of diasporic and migrant experiences. The resulting work feels simultaneously family and dislocating, as it reflects the multiplicity and fluidity of identity. Typically, my work braids together imagery from distinct political or celebratory gatherings such as Caribbean Carnival or Black Lives Matter protests as a way to reveal a common goal of holding space for community and self-determination in the face of present and historical Black oppression. The combination of sources creates atemporal layers of the personal and archival from which arise new narratives and mythologies.
Charles Edward Williams [American, b. 1984]
Infinity, 2021
Oil on mylar
36 × 44 in, 91.5 × 112 cm
Framed dimensions: 41½ × 49½ in, 105.5 × 125.5 cm
Side A (Officer) Side B (Young John Lewis), 2021
Oil on mylar
Two pieces, each
8¾ × 9 in, 22 × 23 cm
Framed dimensions, each: 22¼ × 22¼ in, 56.5 × 56.5 cm
As a visual artist, I am inspired by the relationship between human emotions and our natural environment. I often choose subject matter based on life experiences that have been humbling and sometimes traumatic. The psychological elements of my works are generated by personal and emotional responses to people, places, and things. Each piece serves to orchestrate various viewpoints into a shared message of our human connectedness and commonality, which will entice viewers to explore from unfamiliar perspectives.
Peter Williams [American, b. 1952]
Stand In Now Or Later, 2020 Oil and graphite on canvas
60 × 72 in, 152.5 × 183 cm
Jesus Died For Somebodies Sins, But Not Mine, 2020 Oil and graphite on canvas
60 × 72 in, 152.5 × 183 cm
Sporting a red cape and a golden halo, Stand in Now or Later depicts the transformation of George Floyd from victim and martyr to heavenly advocate of POC and protector against police brutality. The symbol or iconic motif that identifies St. George Floyd is the cell phone camera, which he wields in his hand and uses to document the crimes of the system against the poor and disenfranchised. Floyd joins a long line of heroes and icons that have played a central role in Peter Williams’ work over the years—from his earliest paintings depicting Buffalo Soldiers to “The N Word,” from Colin Kaepernick to Sandra Bland, from “The Queens” (Maxine Waters, Patricia Okoumou, and Harriet Tubman) to the “Fierce Fighters” (Pam Grier, Kathleen Cleaver, and Angela Davis).
Jesus Died For Somebodies Sins, But Not Mine depicts the accession of George Floyd into sainthood and all-around badass. Reminiscent of medieval paintings and illuminated manuscripts, the scene in this painting shows the central figure of Floyd ascending to heaven surrounded by Black and Brown angels. Below, the solar system, suggestive and playful, is populated with colorful planets and rare birds. Like many prominent saints, George Floyd can be recognized by his distinctive face; here, his large head and strong articulated features are framed within a glowing halo that doubles as a space helmet. The symbolism in this painting is further communicated through color. Gold articulates status and serenity. Yellow is enlightenment, remembrance, intellect, honor, and joy. Blue aligns with spirit and harmony. Red is passion, and black represents a union with ancestors and spiritual awareness.
Hiejin Yoo [German, b. 1987]
The Lucky Striker, 2021 Gouache and oil on canvas
35 × 38 in, 89 × 96.5 cm
My paintings are an intimate journal and meditations on self-discovery. They grow from journal entries and the world around me. I keep a brief diary of daily life, and it is the everyday, mundane things that inspire me most. Each painting contains things that remind me of my personal experience and has a story that I want to tell, so I zoom in to the focal point and crop the parts that I don’t need. The traces of my memories show that I have enjoyed a remarkable life. I strive to make each of my paintings a reflection of my perception of the moment. Since these ordinary moments have been so strongly etched on my consciousness, each moment of my life becomes an event and a personal history as soon as I express my daily life as a painting. The memories are telling me something about what I remember in my life when I work and interact with them.
Farley Aguilar
Chain Gang, circa 1903, 2021
Oil, oil stick, pencil on linen 76½ × 65 in 194.5 × 165 cm
Farley Aguilar [b. 1980, Nicaragua] lives and works in Miami, FL. Aguilar’s parents emigrated to the United States in the mid-1980s when he was a young child, fleeing the Contra War. Taking inspiration from historical photographs, he paints images that address power dynamics, group psychology, colorism, race, gender, child labor, incarceration, and war. By basing his compositions on fact, Aguilar bridges past, present, and future socio-political realities.
Using oil, oil sticks, and pencil to create unsettling compositions, Aguilar dredges the psychological depth of history with his placid pools of color that crash against jagged forms; figures spring from the scribbled noise of the ground, and faces are masks more expressive and shifting than flesh itself.
Through the lens of his paintings, Aguilar meditates on fundamental social balances: the shift between seeing and being seen, between agency and objectification, and, perhaps most importantly, the relationship between the individual and the crowd. Aguilar shows how, throughout history, the body is scapegoated as the flashpoint and symptom of social turmoil.
Daniel Arsham
Blue Calcite American Flag (Large), 2016
Blue calcite, aquaresin, hydrostone 46 × 78 × 3 in 116.8 × 198.1 × 7.6 cm
Daniel Arsham [b. 1980, Cleveland, OH] lives and works in New York, NY. Arsham was raised in Miami, where he attended the Design and Architecture High School. He was awarded a full scholarship to The Cooper Union in New York, where he received the Gelman Trust Fellowship Award in 2003. Upon graduation, Arsham toured worldwide with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as the company’s stage designer for over four years—an experience that informed his ongoing synergistic practice. In 2007, he founded the pioneering architecture firm Snarkitecture with partner Alex Mustonen. Collaboration continues to be a cornerstone of his practice—realizing high-profile projects with music producer Pharrell Williams and designer Hedi Slimane, as well as Dior, Porsche, and Rimowa. Arsham has participated in numerous major international exhibitions, including at the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, OH; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; the HOW Art
Museum, Shanghai; and the Moco Museum, Amsterdam. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.
Cristina BanBan
US Summer 2020 2020
Acrylic on canvas 98 × 158 in 249 × 401.5 cm
Cristina BanBan [b. 1987, Barcelona, Spain] lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her painting and drawing practice explore the form of the human body, pushing boundaries of proportions with the depiction of voluptuous feminine figures. Reminiscent of eighteenth century neoclassical paintings and influenced by anime, expressionist aesthetics, pop culture, and lived experience, BanBan’s works empower their feminine protagonists by making them feel monumental whether contained in a large canvas or a small work on paper. Harmoniously mixing the real and the imaginary, BanBan creates intimate everyday scenes that speak to the social expectations, norms, and societal values surrounding femininity and millennial life in the tech era. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona and is represented by the 1969 Gallery, New York, where she had solo exhibitions in 2019 and 2020. Other recent solo and two-person exhibitions include those at 68 Projects, Berlin (2019); the Dot Project, London (2018 and 2017); Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London (2018). Recent group exhibitions include Auguries of Innocence, Fredericks & Freiser, New York (2020); Extra, The Hole, New York (2019); Forms, Cob Gallery, London (2018); and Griffin Art Prize, Griffin Gallery, London (2017). Other exhibitions include those at Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles, Stems Gallery, Brussels, WOAW, Hong Kong, and albertz benda, New York (forthcoming). BanBan has also participated in art fairs, including Untitled Miami and Volta Basel, and her art is held in many private collections internationally. Her work has received critical acclaim from T-Spain, The New York Times Style Magazine Vogue Magazine (Spain, Germany), Elephant, and other publications.
Alex Becerra
Chemical Cocktail, 2021
Oil on linen
60 × 48 in 152.5 × 122 cm
Injusticia En El Barrio 2021
Oil on linen
60 × 48 in 152.5 × 122 cm
Alex Becerra [b. 1989, Piru, CA] lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Working in painting, drawing, and sculpture, he explores the way we view modernity, often chopped up into bits and sliced together. Referencing the history of Modern European painting, specifically German Neo-Expressionism, Becerra layers oil paint in thick, sweeping lines of impasto raised inches off the canvas. His thoughtful compositions reinterpret the classical tradition, from self-portraiture and the female nude to still life and genre scenes, through recurring context-specific objects like beer bottles and car rims. Seemingly quotidian, these symbols carry personal significance relating to his adolescence in Southern California and subsequent entrance into the international art world. In this way, Becerra’s work bears a distinct aesthetic and energetic vibrancy unique to the artist.
Sharif Bey
Protest Shield: Zulu Knots 2021
Earthenware and mixed media
22 × 20 × 8 in 56 × 51 × 20.5 cm
Was, Was Not 2020
Earthenware and mixed media
24 × 6 × 6 in 61 × 15 × 15 cm
Sharif Bey [b. 1974, Pittsburgh, PA] lives and works in Syracuse, NY. Bey completed a pottery apprenticeship in the 1990s. Shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, Bey studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia. Later, he earned his BFA from Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania, and his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Inspired by modernism, functional pottery, African art, and art of the African Diaspora, Bey’s works investigate the cultural and political significance of adornment and the symbolic and formal properties of archetypal motifs, while questioning how the meaning of icons transform across cultures and over time. His awards include: The New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Fellowship, and a Fulbright Scholarship. His work is featured in public collections, including: The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Carnegie Museum of Art, Columbus Museum of Art, and Everson Museum of Art.
Coady Brown
Gentlemen’s Club, 2020
Oil on canvas
54 × 46 in
137 × 117 cm
Coady Brown [b. 1990, Baltimore, MD] lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. She received her BFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University in 2012 and her MFA from Yale University in 2016. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally with 1969 Gallery, Stems Gallery, The Hole, Harper’s Books, Koenig & Clinton, and Richard Heller, among others, and most recently a solo show at Stems Gallery in spring 2021. She is the recipient of several fellowships and residencies including The Fine Arts Work Center, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Fountainhead, Vermont Studio Center, and the Yale/Norfolk School of Art. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Juxtapoz, and New American Painting
Zoë Buckman
face to the bricks, 2020
Boxing glove, vintage textiles and chain
16 × 11 × 8 in
40.5 × 28 × 20.5 cm
feather canyons 2021
Boxing gloves, vintage textiles and chain
16 × 26 × 21 in
40.5 × 66 × 53.5 cm
swallowed by banter 2020 Embroidery on vintage textiles
11½ × 15½ in 29 × 39.5 cm
Framed Dimensions:
16¾ × 20½ in 42.5 × 52 cm
Zoë Buckman [b. 1985, Hackney, East London, UK] lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Buckman studied at the International Center of Photography, New York. Her work has been included in shows at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) New York; Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA); Camden Arts Centre, London; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Children’s Museum of the Arts, NY; Indiana University, IN; Democratic National Convention, PA; National Center for Civil and Human Rights, GA; and the National Museum of AfricanAmerican History and Culture, Washington, DC. Upcoming exhibitions include the Virginia MOCA and MAD New York.
Collections include Baltimore Museum of Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA. She is represented by Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London.
Chloe Chiasson
Come and Take It, 2021
Oil, acrylic, resin, wood on canvas 93¼ × 96 × 5¼ in 237 × 244 × 13.5 cm
Chloe Chiasson [b. 1993, Port Neches, Texas] lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Chloe received her BS from the University of Texas at Austin and MFA from the New York Academy of Art (NYAA). While at the NYAA, she concentrated in painting and was awarded the Belle Artes Residency and the Chubb Post-Graduate Fellowship. Chiasson has exhibited internationally in London and Hong Kong (upcoming). A recently named finalist for The Bennett Prize, her work has been featured at Art Basel Miami Beach and in New American Paintings Artnet News, Juxtapoz Fine Art Connoisseur, and American Art Collector
Will Cotton Roping 2 2021
Oil on linen 28 × 37 in 71 × 94 cm
Will Cotton [b. 1956, Melrose, MA] lives and works in New York, NY. Cotton was raised in New Paltz, New York. He has a BFA from Cooper Union, and lives in New York City. His work often explores themes of desire, insatiability, and most recently the relationship between a cowboy and a pink unicorn.
His paintings are in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.; Seattle Art Museum, Washington; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; and Orlando Museum of Art, Florida, as well as many prominent private collections.
Cotton served as the artistic director of the California Gurls music video for pop singer Katy Perry. He is the subject of a monograph published by Rizzoli, USA.
Timothy Curtis
“Aw Man, You wouldn’t believe me if I told you” (A short story based in Philadelphia), 2021 Oil, wax pastel, graphite and acrylic on canvas 72 × 96 in 183 × 244 cm
Timothy Curtis [b. 1982, Philadelphia, PA] lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Since establishing a focused studio practice in 2015, Curtis realized his first solo exhibition in November 2017 at Kaikai Kiki’s Hidari Zingaro gallery in Tokyo, Japan, curated by Takashi Murakami. His work was debuted publicly in the US at the Brooklyn Museum as part of the group
exhibition Coney Island Is Still Dreamland (To a Seagull) by the artist Stephen Powers (2015–2016). Curtis had his first solo show in New York with albertz benda and was featured in the group exhibition The Pencil is a Key curated by Claire Gilman at the Drawing Center, New York in 2019. Recent shows include Timothy Curtis: Temporary Decisions at Arndt Art Agency, Berlin (2020).
Christina Forrer
Distant Affliction, 2020 Cotton, wool, and watercolor 102 × 60 in 259 × 152.5 cm
Christina Forrer [b. 1978, Zürich] lives and works in Los Angeles. Her weavings, paintings, and works on paper are at once fantastic and brutally honest, cartoonish, and harrowing. Her work is a searing exploration of conflict, which she perceives as being the very core of all relationships, human as well as throughout the natural world. Forrer’s visual language is rooted in the folkloric, yet the raw emotion and essential truths revealed are blatant and undeniable. Each work by the artist presents an Id-driven ecosystem, synthesizing need, hatred, fear, jealousy, and violence into a battle of bodies, instincts, and wills.
Selected solo exhibitions include Christina Forrer, Luhring Augustine, New York (2019); Grappling Hold Swiss Institute, New York (2017); Cat Lady, The Finley, Los Angeles (2016) and Christina Forrer, Grice Bench, Los Angeles (2014). Group exhibitions include Midtown Lever House, New York (2017); Unorthodox, The Jewish Museum, New York (2015); Some Masks, Grice Bench, Los Angeles (2015); Can’t Reach Me There, Midway Contemporary, Minneapolis (2015); and Made in L.A. 2020: A Version, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA (2020–2021). She is the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant (2014).
Genevieve Gaignard
White Fragility 2020
Mixed media on panel
Each Panel: 14 × 11 in 35.5 × 28 cm
Genevieve Gaignard [b. 1981, in Orange, MA] lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Gaignard’s work focuses on installation, sculpture, and photographic self-portraiture to explore race, femininity, and class. As a biracial woman in America, Gaignard investigates the aesthetic and cultural divide between black and white, a chasm as palpable as it is “invisible.”
She interrogates notions of “passing” by positioning her own female body as the chief site of exploration—challenging viewers to navigate the powers and anxieties of intersectional identity. Her work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, DC; Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, AR; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; California African American Museum, CA; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, MA; and Prospect.4, LA. Gaignard received her BFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA, and her MFA in Photography from Yale University, New Haven, CT.
Mark Thomas Gibson
You Can’t Kill Us All (The Battle of D.C.),2020 Ink on canvas 66½ × 89½ in 169 × 227.5 cm
Mark Thomas Gibson [b. 1980, Miami, FL] lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. In Gibson’s work, the revolution will not be televised; it will be cartooned, abstracted, and mediated through the lenses of Southern Gothic horror, Black Pulp, post-psychedelic graphics, and art history. Gibson’s political images combine escalation and despair as they subvert the fixed center of our shared narrative.
Gibson received a BFA from The Cooper Union and an MFA from Yale School of Art in 2013. He has had numerous solo shows, including Loyal Gallery, Stockholm, M+B, Los Angeles, and Fredericks & Freiser, New York. He co-curated the exhibition Black Pulp! with William Villalongo, which began at Yale University and traveled to four subsequent venues and was reviewed by the New York Times He self-published his artist’s book, Some Monsters Loom Large, with support from Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and later published his second artist’s book, Early Retirement with Edition Patrick Frey, Zürich, Switzerland. Gibson was included in the 2017 Frieze Magazine cover story on new painting.
Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.
Homeless health care Los Angeles 2021 Oil, enamel on canvas 40 × 60 in 101.5 × 152.5 cm
Alfonso Gonzalez [b. 1989, Los Angeles, CA] lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Gonzalez is a multidisciplinary artist raised in the San Gabriel Valley and East Los Angeles. He attended LA Trade Technical College for Sign
Graphics. Trained as a commercial painter for large-scale murals and advertisements, his current art practice reflects on his familial and personal history with sign painting, landscapes, working class labor, social environments, graffiti, punk DIY, and cultural production of images. Gonzalez’s work constantly negotiates between social realities, fictitious materials, ephemera, and photography to construct speculative narratives. Painting, sculpture, and photography are mediums that informed his earlier years and have shifted throughout his art practice. He has shown at Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA; Maki Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Gamma Galleria, Guadalajara Jalisco, Mexico; and Residency, Inglewood,CA. Gonzalez’ work has been featured by Artforum, Los Angeles Times, and Hypebeast
Jameson Green
Numbers on the Board, 2021 Oil on panel 60 × 48 in 152.5 × 122 cm
Jameson Green [b. 1992, New Haven, CT] lives and works in Bronx, NY.
Education
2019 MFA, Hunter College, NY 2014 BFA, School of Visual Arts, NY
Caleb Hahne
Instar 2021
Oil, acrylic, flashe and wax on canvas 72 × 55 in 183 × 139.5 cm
Caleb Hahne [b. 1993, Denver, CO] lives and works in Denver, Colorado. He received a BFA in Fine Arts from Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. He is represented by 1969 Gallery in New York, NY, with his debut solo exhibition planned for late 2021. Hahne’s work has been shown internationally, including in Denver, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Portland, Montreal, Berlin, and the United Kingdom. Recently he participated in Just As Am, Adventure Painting, and Tell Them About Me group exhibitions 1969 Gallery, as well as exhibitions at MCA Denver and the New Museum, NY in collaboration with Adidas. His residencies include The Cabin LA, ShowPen, RedLine Contemporary Art Center, and Adventure Painting. His work has been featured in Juxtapoz, Hi-Fructose and Booooooom.com Denver Westword named Hahne one of the 100 Colorado Creatives of 2014 and one of the Top Ten Artists to Watch in 2015. He is listed as one of the top ten contemporary artists under forty by Wide Walls
Asif Hoque
God of Love, 2021
Oil on linen
60 × 50 in 152.5 × 127 cm
Asif Hoque [b. 1991, Rome, Italy] lives and works in New York, NY. As a Bangladeshi immigrant raised between Rome and South Florida, Hoque’s paintings attempt to figuratively and stylistically combine aspects of multicultural identity. His early work highlights his fascination with classical fine arts, but with the progression of his skill and self-discovery, Hoque challenges his audience to explore aspects of self that are authentic. Hoque hopes to address the unique experience of living in the “in between.” He has been featured in Kajal Magazine, Juxtapoz, Artnet, and Artsy
Jarrett Key
A Good Laugh 2021
Oil in Cement (Fresco)
53½ × 37½ in 136 × 95.5 cm
Jarrett Key [b. 1990, Seale, AL] lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island. They received their MFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2020. Jarrett grew up in rural Alabama and pursued their fine art practice in New York City after graduating from Brown University in 2013. They are represented by 1969 Gallery in New York. They were one of Forbes 30 under 30 for Art and Style 2020. They have been featured in solo and group exhibitions, including 1969 Gallery, NXTHVN, Fierman Gallery, Steve Turner, La MaMa Galleria, The Columbus Museum, and The RISD Museum. Key’s work is in the collections of The LumpkinBoccuzzi Family Collection, the Columbus Museum, Brown University, RISD Special Collection, the Schomburg Center, the Museum of Modern Art Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Library, among other institutions.
David Leggett
Night studio, 2020 Acrylic, collage, felt, and spray paint on panel 24 × 18 in 61 × 45.5 cm
We them boys, 2021 Acrylic, collage, felt, and spray paint on panel 24 × 18 in 61 × 45.5 cm
David Leggett [b. 1980, Springfield, MA] lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He received his BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design (2003), and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2007). He also attended The Joan Mitchell Foundation
Artist-in-Residence program (2018). His work tackles many themes head on: hip-hop, art history, popular culture, sexuality, the racial divide, and the self are all reoccurring subjects. He takes many of his cues from standup comedians, which he listens to while in his studio. He ran a daily drawing blog Coco River Fudge Street that started in 2010 and ended in 2016. He has shown his work throughout the United States and internationally, including recent solo show at Steve Turner Contemporary Los Angeles (2020) and a group show at Zidoun-Bossuyt.
Tony Marsh
The Jester’s Pants, 2020/2021
Multiple fired clay, glaze 59 × 51½ × 27 in 150 × 131 × 68.5 cm
Tony Marsh [b. 1954, New York, NY] lives and works in Long Beach, CA. Marsh is a sculptor and ceramicist whose work uses the vessel form as a starting point for experiments with texture, color, and movement. Marsh’s ceramic forms emerge from his intensive decades-long study of material, ranging from the topographic and heavily textured surfaces of his Cauldrons and Crucibles series to the vibrant and lustrous glazes of his Spill and Catch works. Referring metaphorically to both geophysical and artistic forms of creation, Marsh’s vessels explore the highly transformational nature of these materials by posing an argument between gravity and the flow of molten materials through heating and cooling cycles. There is no note-taking in his process, making each work an irreplicable product of chance.
Marsh has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions since 1992, and his work has been shown at public institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri; Crocker Museum of Art, Sacramento, CA; and the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY. Marsh’s work is in a number of prestigious international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Art & Design, New York, NY; and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX, among others.
Shona McAndrew
Katye 2021
Acrylic on canvas 48 × 40 in 122 × 101.5 cm
Shona McAndrew [b. 1990, Paris, France] lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. She holds an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BA in Psychology and Painting from Brandeis University. She currently has a solo exhibition at AbromsEngel Institute for the Visual Arts at UAB, Birmingham, AL (2021).
Previous solo exhibitions include Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, PA (2020); CHART, New York, NY (2019); and Spring/ Break Art Show, New York, NY (2019). In May 2021, she will debut a new sculptural installation at Art Omi in Ghent, NY.
Louis Osmosis
HK Space Museum (Berghain Mix), 2021
Reinforced paper-mache, acrylic rods, cardboard, polystyrene, security mirror, helmet, epoxy putty, steel, concrete 71 × 32 × 25 in 180.5 × 81.5 × 63.5 cm
Louis Osmosis [b. 1996, Brooklyn, NY] lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Osmosis is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture, drawing, performance, and video. He received his BFA in 2018 from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Recent exhibitions include a two-person show, This is your captain speaking, with Thomas Blair at Gymnasium, New York (2020); a three-person show, Free Fall, at Shoot the Lobster, Los Angeles (2021); and a group exhibition, The Symbolists: Les Fleurs Du Mal, at Hesse Flatow, New York (2021).
Sojourner Truth Parsons
Maybe, maybe not 2020 Acrylic on canvas 50 × 30 in 127 × 76 cm
Sojourner Truth Parsons [b. 1984, Vancouver, BC, Canada] lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, NS, Canada. Solo exhibitions include Milk River, Various Small Fires, Seoul, South Korea; Sex and love with a psychologist Foxy Production, New York, NY (both 2020): Holding Your Dog At Night, Oakville Galleries, Oakville, ON, Canada (2007); and Crying in California Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2016). Group exhibitions include: l’Invitation au voyage, Esther Schipper, Berlin, Germany (2021); This Sacred Vessel (PT. 1), Arsenal Contemporary, New
York, NY; Staying alive, Lyles and King, New York, NY (both 2020); Red Hills of Lardossa, Downs & Ross, New York, NY; Sojourner Truth Parsons, Sean Steadman, Veronika Pausova 11R, New York, NY (both 2017); Am Silver, Foxy Production, New York, NY; and No Ordinary Love, Galerie Sultana, Paris, France (both 2016.)
Alina Perez
Self Portrait as Nude with Mask, 2021
Charcoal and pastel on paper
77 × 63½ in
195.5 × 161.5 cm
Framed dimensions: 81 × 67 in 205.5 × 170 cm
Alina Perez [b. 1995, Miami, FL] lives and works in New Haven, CT. Perez received her BFA in Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2017. She was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2017 and attended residencies at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, the Ox-Bow School of Art in Saugatuck, MI, and the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT. Her work was recently exhibited at Deli Gallery, New York; Arcadia Missa, London; Rachel Uffner, New York; and Company Gallery, New York. Perez received her MFA from Yale University in New Haven in 2021.
Cleon Peterson
Suddenly Cruel, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 60 × 60 in 152.5 × 152.5 cm
Cleon Peterson [b. 1973, Seattle WA] lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Peterson’s chaotic and violent paintings show clashing figures symbolizing a struggle between power and submission in the fluctuating architecture of contemporary society.
Pat Phillips
Untitled “I’m just a no-knock warrant”, 2020 Acrylic, pencil, airbrush, aerosol paint on paper 42 × 29½ in 106.5 × 75 cm
Framed Dimensions: 44 × 32¼ in 112 × 82 cm
Pat Phillips [b. 1987, Lakenheath, UK] lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. Settling in Louisiana as a child, Phillips’s work examines class, race, and social perceptions through his personal narratives and history. He has attended residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Fountainhead, and The Fine Arts Work Center. In 2017,
Phillips was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors grant. Some of his solo exhibitions include ROOTS, Antenna Gallery, New Orleans, LA; Told You Not to Bring That Ball, Masur Museum of Art, Monroe, LA; SubSuperior, Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, New York, NY; and Summer Madness, M+B Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Phillips also exhibited in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.
Patrick Quarm
Dream of Reason, 2021
Mixed media
Acrylic, oil on African print fabric
82 × 68 × 12 in 208.5 × 172.5 × 30.5 cm
Patrick Quarm [b. 1988, Sekondi, GH] lives and works in Takoradi, Ghana. Quarm graduated from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana (2012) with a BFA in painting and from Texas Tech University with a Masters of Fine Art degree (2018). Quarm paints portraits of young African individuals directly onto collaged and perforated African wax print fabric. His paintings weave and splice cultural signifiers from different eras and communities into multi-layered works that invite the viewer to explore them from different angles.
Quarm’s work has been showcased around the world at institutions including the Trout Museum of Art, Appleton, WI; K.N.U.S.T Museum Kumasi, Ghana; and the Caviel Museum of African American History, Lubbock, TX. He has participated in artist residency programs, including Artist in Residence, Red Bull House of Art, Detroit, MI. In September 2020, Quarm debuted his first solo exhibition in New York with albertz benda.
Kelly Reemtsen
Look What You Made Me Do 2020
Oil on panel 72 × 40 in 183 × 101.5 cm
Look What You Made Me Do Installation, 2020
Felt, dress form, silk, push pins 79 × 60 × 33 in 200.5 × 152.5 × 84 cm
Kelly Reemsten [b. 1967, Flint, Michigan] lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Reemtsen is best known for her bright and bold paintings of women carrying household tools such as chainsaws or axes. Her work often investigates the role of the modern woman, deconstructing societal perceptions of gender, power, and femininity. Reemtsen’s paintings are characterized by their thick impasto, stark white backgrounds, and anonymous figures.
She studied fashion design and painting at Central Michigan University and California State University Long Beach. Reemtsen has been involved with printmaking since the 1990s, studying etching and screenprinting in workshops and with educators across the United States. Kelly Reemtsen’s work has been exhibited widely in North America and is part of the Twentieth Century Fox and AT&T corporate collections.
Brie Ruais
Locating and Obfuscating, 130lbs
2021
Glazed stoneware, rocks, hardware 81 × 81 × 3 in 205.5 × 205.5 × 7.5 cm
Brie Ruais [b. 1982, Southern California] lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts in 2011. Ruais’s movement-based practice is legible through the scrapes, gouges, and gestures embedded in the surfaces and forms of the ceramic works. Each sculpture is made with the equivalent of her body weight in clay, resulting in human-scale works that forge an intimacy with the viewer’s body. Through her immersive engagement with clay, Ruais’s work generates a physical and sensorial experience that explores a new dialogue between the body and the earth. Her work has been exhibited at public institutions, including the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Katzen Center at American University, Washington, DC; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, PA; and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Her first institutional solo exhibition, Brie Ruais: Movement at the Edge of the Land, opened in June 2021 at The Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University in Houston, TX. Awards and residencies include The Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (2018), The Sharpe Walentas Studio Program (2018), the Dieu Donne Fellowship (2016), Montello Foundation Residency (2017), Socrates Sculpture Park Fellowship (2014), and The Shandaken Project Residency (2014), among others. Ruais’s work is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; the Pizzuti Collection, OH; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, PA; and the Burger Collection Hong Kong. She is featured in Vitamin C: New Perspectives in Contemporary Art, Clay and Ceramics, published by Phaidon (2017). In 2021, Brie Ruais will present her second solo exhibition at albertz benda, New York.
Ilana SavdiePublic Displays of Insinuation, 2021 Oil, acrylic, and pigmented beeswax on canvas mounted on panel
48 × 38 in
122 × 96.5 cm
Ilana Savdie [b. 1986, Barranquilla, Colombia] lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2018 and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. Savdie’s work deals with themes around invasion, control, defiance, and ways in which power is propelled and mediated through bodies as they attempt to locate home, history, and heritage.
Ilana had a solo show in 2021 at Deli Gallery (Brooklyn, NY) and has her first solo show on the West Coast coming up at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA in the fall of 2021. Most recently, she was included in the Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA booth at Frieze New York in 2021; Art Basel Miami 2020; and the Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco, CA booth at Frieze London 2020.
She has been involved in numerous group exhibitions, which include upcoming shows at Pippy Houldsworth, London, England; James Cohan, New York, NY; Kunstraum Potsdam, Berlin, Germany; and recent shows at Hesse Flatow, New York, NY; Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami, FL; Museum aan de Stroom and CASSTL gallery, Antwerp, Belgium; Golestani Gallery, Düsseldorf, Germany; and Jack Barett Gallery, New York, NY. In 2020, Ilana was awarded the TOY Foundation fellowship and the NXTHVN studio fellowship.
Mira Schor
New York Times Intervention, “Acting President Pelosi Passes Aid Bill,” March 14, 2020, 2020 Ink and gesso on newspaper 22 × 12 in 56 × 30.5 cm
Framed dimensions: 2513/16 × 1513/16 in 65.5 × 40 cm
New York Times Intervention, “NEW YORK TIMES IS THIS REALLY THE HEADLINE?,” August 28, 2020, 2020 Ink and gesso on newspaper 22 × 10¾ in 56 × 27.5 cm
Framed dimensions:
2513/16 × 14 5/8 in 65.5 × 37 cm
New York Times Intervention, “Oh Please,” November 18, 2020, 2020 Marker on newspaper
22 × 12 in
56 × 30.5 cm
Framed dimensions: 2513/16 × 1513/16 in 65.5 × 40 cm
Mira Schor [b. 1950, New York, NY] lives and works in New York, NY. Her work has been included in exhibitions at The Jewish Museum, New York; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; MoMA P.S.1, New York; Kunsthaus Graz, Austria; and Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, Germany. Schor is the recipient of many prestigious awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting, the Pollock-Krasner Grant, the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism, the Creative Capital / Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and the 2019 Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award for her work as a feminist painter, art historian, and critic. She is the author of A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life and Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture, and of the blog A Year of Positive Thinking. She was the co-founder and co-editor with fellow painter Susan Bee of the journal M/E/A/N/I/N/G. Schor’s work is in the permanent collections of Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis; The Marieluise Hessel Collection of Contemporary Art, Annandale-on- Hudson; and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. She is an Associate Teaching Professor in Fine Arts at Parsons The New School for Design. Schor is represented by Lyles & King, New York.
Raelis Vasquez
Untitled 2021 Acrylic, oil, and sand on canvas 48 × 48 in 122 × 122 cm
Raelis Vasquez [b.1995, Mao Valverde, Dominican Republic] lives and works between New York and New Jersey.
Cosmo Whyte
No Names in the Streets, 2021 Charcoal and mixed media on paper 72 × 61 in 183 × 155 cm
Cosmo Whyte [b. 1982, St. Andrew, Jamaica] lives and works in Atlanta, GA. Whyte received a BFA from Bennington College, a post-baccalaureate at Maryland Institute College of Art, and an MFA from the University of Michigan. Whyte has exhibited his work widely including, the 13th Havana Biennial, Cuba (2019), as well as the Atlanta Biennial (2016), and the Jamaica Biennial (2017). In 2019, he had a solo exhibition at MOCA Georgia, curated by Allison Glenn, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. He has also participated in exhibitions at
The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA (2019); The Drawing Center, New York, NY (2019); The Somerset House, London, UK (2019); Museum of Latin American Art, Los Angeles, CA (2017); Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA (2016); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (2016); and the National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica (2014).
His work is in the public collection of the High Museum, 21c Collection, Hallmark Art Collection, and Pérez Art Museum Miami.
Charles Edward Williams
Infinity, 2021
Oil on mylar
36 × 44 in 91.5 × 112 cm
Framed dimensions: 41½ × 49½ in 105.5 × 125.5 cm
Side A (Officer) Side B (Young John Lewis), 2021
Oil on mylar
Two pieces, each:
8¾ × 9 in 22 × 23 cm
Framed dimensions, each: 22¼ × 22¼ in 56.5 × 56.5 cm
Charles Edward Williams [b. 1984, Georgetown, SC] lives and works in Greensboro, North Carolina. Creating compelling imagery in oils, video/film, and sound installations, Williams’s work investigates current, historical-cultural events related to racism and suggestive stereotypes formed within individuals. His works define self–representation of human emotive responses that lie within cultural identity and reveal tension to expose the complexities within our sociopolitical environments. Through his visions, we are encouraged to engage in self-examination, to question false boundaries that separate us, and view the inner connectedness of our common existence.
Williams holds a BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta, GA and an MFA from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC. He has had solo exhibitions at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, MI and Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC, among others. Williams has exhibited in group exhibitions at institutions including the Weatherspoon Museum, Greensboro, NC and the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC
Permanent collections include the North Carolina Museum of Art, NC; the Gibbes Museum, SC; Knoxville Museum of Art, TN; Polk Museum of Art, FL; and the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, NJ. Williams also received the Riley Institute Diversity Leadership Award from the State of South Carolina to develop enriching art programs within local communities.
Peter WilliamsJesus Died For Somebodies Sins, But Not Mine, 2020
Oil and graphite on canvas
60 × 72 in
152.5 × 183 cm
Stand In Now Or Later, 2020 Oil and graphite on canvas
60 × 72 in
152.5 × 183 cm
Peter Williams [b. 1952, Nyack, NY] lives and works in Wilmington, DE. For more than forty-five years, Williams has chronicled current and historical events, interspersing pictorial narratives with personal anecdotes and fictional characters to create paintings about the diverse experiences of Black Americans. With boldness and humor, he tackles the darkest of subjects, including, but not limited to, police brutality, lynching, slavery, mass incarceration, and other realms of racial oppression. Williams uses cultural criticism to form new creation myths, retelling the history of America from fresh and cosmic perspectives.
Williams recently retired from his position as Senior Professor in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Delaware. Williams earned his MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and his BFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He is the recipient of the 2020 Artists’ Legacy Foundation Artist Award and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts.
Hiejin Yoo
The Lucky Striker, 2021 Gouache and oil on canvas
35 × 38 in 89 × 96.5 cm
Hiejin Yoo [b. 1987, Munster, Germany] lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Her work has been exhibited at Half Gallery, NY and LA; Paul Kasmin Gallery, NY; Blum and Poe, LA; Almine Rech, London, UK; Fredric Snitzer Gallery, FL; and Woaw Gallery, HK. Her work has recently been included in High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA, the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection (The Bunker) FLA, and Hort Family Collection, NY.
Yoo earned an MFA at the University of California Los Angeles (2018), a BA from Seoul Women’s University, and a Post Baccalaureate/BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
This catalog was published on the occasion of the exhibition THIS IS AMERICA at the Kunstraum Potsdam, August 7–September 5, 2021.
This publication was made possible with the generous support of the Burger Collection, Hong Kong.
We would like to thank artistic director Mike Gessner, Matthias Arndt, and Annalena Amthor for their contributions to this project.
Special thanks also to Kathy Battista and Roxane Gay for their essay contributions and all the participating artists, their representatives, studio teams, and gallerists.
Editors
Kate Moger
Thorsten Albertz
Concept
albertz benda
515 West 26th Street
New York, New York 10001
In collaboration with
A3 Arndt Art Agency
Fasanenstraße 28
10719 Berlin, Germany
Design Nate Baltikas
Texts
Kathy Battista
Roxane Gay
Copy Editing
Alicia Reuter
Image Editing
Hausstätter Herstellung, Berlin
Production Management
DISTANZ
Printing and Binding
optimal media GmbH, Röbel/Müritz
© 2021 the authors and artists; Kunstraum Potsdam, Potsdam; albertz benda, New York and DISTANZ Verlag GmbH, Berlin
Distribution
Edel Germany GmbH
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international-books@edel.com
ISBN 978-3-95476-420-4
Printed in Germany
Published by DISTANZ Verlag www.distanz.de