Spring Shows to See
New York, NY
“BLACK BACKSTAGE” -The Kitchen
Now-May 25 New York, NY-USA
Harmony Holiday’s project BLACK BACKSTAGE builds upon the artist’s latest book MAAFA (2022), a work that deals with the archetypes and sounds that form in and of the ruins after genocide and displacement. Inspired by the ways Black music is often born in these ruins and becomes their archive(s)—brought to the stage, the radio, and the album as necessity/commodity—the exhibition comprises a short film, prints of new writing, a sculptural, sound installation, occasional live performances, and a series of public conversations. Installed immersively, the various elements of the exhibition are parts of a whole and transform The Kitchen into a hybrid, liminal space that quotes the pared-down aesthetic of backstage spaces. The environment evokes the practical, immaterial aesthetic of a makeshift storefront church, revival meetings, faith healings, and other underground modes of instilling Black sacred and everyday rituals within the spectacle of performance. BLACK BACKSTAGE therein draws an intentional contradiction between the barren spaces that are left untended, and those that are cared for because they support the sale of Black spectacle. SITE
Turiya Adkins: “More Than A Notion” - Hannah Traore Gallery
April 5th – June 1st 2024,
Hannah Traore Gallery is delighted to present Turiya Adkins: More Than a Notion. This exhibition features the artist’s most recent works, which explore resistance through the legacy of Black athletes in track and field and the theme of supernatural flight in African folklore.
These two points of departure were inspired by James Meredith’s “March Against Fear,” the civil-rights activist’s landmark demonstration in 1966, during which he attempted to travel from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, to protest voter discrimination and racism in the South. When he was injured by a gunshot on the second day of the march, three civil rights organizations—the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Congress of Racial Equality, and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—pledged to continue on his path until he could rejoin them. Even as participants faced threats, arrest, and violence, they bravely persisted to support the Black Power movement, Civil Rights Act, and Voting Rights Act. Soaring from Meredith’s footsteps into imagined realms, Adkins’ works chart acts of Black transcendence—mapping abstract layers of personal, ancestral, historical, poetic, technological, literary, and psychic departure.
More Than a Notion is a phrase Adkins learned from her grandmother, a refrain which reminds her that within each person there are interwoven realities and mythologies. In her abstracted atmosphere, Adkins encourages these souls to ascend and roam freely. SITE
The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism - The MET
Now-till July 28th, New York, NY- USA
The groundbreaking exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism explores the comprehensive and far-reaching ways in which Black artists portrayed everyday modern life. Through some 160 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film, and ephemera, explore the new Black cities that took shape in the 1920s–40s in New York City’s Harlem and nationwide in the early decades of the Great Migration, when millions of African Americans began to move away from the segregated rural South. The first art museum survey of the subject in New York City since 1987, the exhibition establishes the Harlem Renaissance and its radically new development of the modern Black subject as central to the development of international modern art.
Featured artists include Charles Alston, Aaron Douglas, Meta Warrick Fuller, William H. Johnson, Archibald Motley, Winold Reiss, Augusta Savage, James Van Der Zee, and Laura Wheeler Waring. These artists are shown in direct juxtaposition with portrayals of international African diasporan subjects by European counterparts ranging from Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, and Pablo Picasso to Germaine Casse, Jacob Epstein, and Ronald Moody.
Also, check out the podcast presented alongside the exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, the podcast is hosted by writer and critic Jessica Lynne. The five part-series features a dynamic cast of speakers who reflect on the legacy and cultural impact of the Harlem Renaissance. SITE
MoMA “Good Night Good Morning” - MoMA
Now-July, New York, NY-USA
Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning presents drawings, photographs, notebooks, oral histories, film screenings, performances, and a selection of the artist’s installations. Jonas continues to produce her most urgent work through immersive multimedia installations that address climate change and kinship between species. “Despite my interest in history,” she has said, “my work always takes place in the present.” Also, explore the Joan Jonas Video Channel SITE
“Arthur Jafa: BLACK POWER TOOL AND DIE TRYNIG” - 52 Walker
April 05 – June 01, 2024, NYC
52 Walker is pleased to announce its eleventh exhibition, which will feature new work by Los Angeles–based artist Arthur Jafa (b. 1960). Lauded for his achievements as a filmmaker and cinematographer as well as a visual artist, Jafa has developed an incisive, chameleonic practice, through which he seeks to unravel the cultural significance and strictures ascribed in tandem upon Black existence in the Western world. Spanning the length of the gallery will be a site-specific installation—a plexiglass structure that Jafa refers to as a “picture unit”—whose interior will be covered from floor to ceiling in the artist’s characteristically potent imagery, drawing the viewer through its labyrinthine halls. Jafa has also created new paintings, sculptures, and a new film, all of which will be installed around the gallery, their forms and colors reflected onto the picture unit’s exterior in a charged and destabilizing kind of visual doubling. In BLACK POWER TOOL AND DIE TRYNIG, Jafa will invoke the body’s personal, political, and industrial guises in one fell swoop, deftly interweaving images and objects to create a forceful and maximal space that beckons toward engulfment and revelation alike. SITE
“The Garden of Forking Paths” - Deli Gallery + Calderón
Now-May 4th, New York, NY-USA
This group show at Deli gallery, in partnership with Calderón is an exploration of country life and the slowing down of time – an invitation into a world of fireflies fighting a moonlit breeze and the buzzing heat of a summer afternoon. The Garden of Forking Paths features 12 contemporary artists: Ana Villagomez, Danielle De Jesus, Tiffany Alfonseca, Massiel Mafes, Elsa Muñoz, Papo Colo, Jeffrey Meris, Armig Santos, Caleb Hahne Quintana, Cesar Lopez, Cristián Fernández Ocampo, and Raelis Vasquez. SITE
Baseera Khan: “Floral Fix”- Simone Subal Gallery
Apr 12 - May 18, 2024
Floral Fix marks Baseera Khan’s passionate return to painting, a medium that they are drawn to for its emotional and gestural immediacy, and capacities for embodiment. In these new paintings, Khan studies the flora of Kashmir, examining both their intrinsic medicinal qualities and exploitation in global markets. The oils and pigments of Kashmiri flowers are extracted for beauty serums, makeup, and scents in exclusive luxury goods—uses that now threaten the indigenous plants with extinction. In Floral Fix, Khan critiques Western mythologies of self-care, and compulsive beauty “fixes,” that are built through a systematic extraction of resources from the subcontinent. Their paintings engage the polarities of beauty, medicine, and violence, that are latent in the natural forms of orchids, lotuses, poppies, and saffron crocuses. To make their works, Khan submerges hand-crafted paper in water, which they then stack with alcohol-based inks, crude oil, and oil paint—materials that repel one another as they intermix. Possessing radiant hues of greens, pinks, and purples, Khan’s transfixing flowers appear both emergent and smothered, vitally blooming and bleeding in a chemical field. SITE
CYPHER - Fierman Gallery
March 30th - April 28th
FIERMAN is pleased to announce CYPHER, an exhibition curated by Anna Akpele and Brittany Adeline King. The exhibition, featuring fourteen cross-regional artists, Marco DaSilva • Nene Aïssatou Diallo • Victoria Dugger • Lloyd Foster • Kiara Gilbert • Nyla Paula Isaac • Nandi Loaf • Pastiche Lumumba • Codi Maddox • Yvonne McCoy • Ezekiel Robinson • Matthew Schrader • Ellex Swavoni delves into the realms of melody, symbiosis and various modes of communication indicative of our contemporary world.
At the heart of CYPHER, from its conception onward, lies an exploration of connection - connections between artists, ideas and audiences. Through a diverse array of works, the exhibition seeks to uncover the similarities and differences between artists hailing from the Northeast and Southeast United States, highlighting the unique perspectives that emerge from each region.
"Bringing together Northeast and Southeast-based artists allows us to investigate the distinctions and beliefs that shape each artist's work," explains co-curator Brittany Adeline King. "We're really interested in the specificities of individual beliefs coexisting within the broader framework of the exhibition." SITE
NorthEast- USA
Firelei Báez - ICA Boston
Apr 4 – Sep 2, 2024, Boston
This is the first North American survey dedicated to the richly layered work of Firelei Báez (b. 1981, Dominican Republic). One of the most exciting painters of her generation, Báez delves into the historical narratives of the Atlantic basin. Over the past fifteen years, she has made work that explores the multilayered legacy of colonial histories and the African diaspora in the Caribbean and beyond. She draws on the disciplines of anthropology, geography, folklore, fantasy, science fiction, and social history to unsettle categories of race, gender, and nationality in her paintings, drawings, and installations. Her exuberant paintings feature finely wrought, complex, and layered uses of pattern, decoration, and saturated color, often overlaid on maps made during colonial rule in the Americas. Báez’s investment in the medium of painting and its capacity for storytelling and mythmaking informs all her work, including her sculptural installations, which bring this quality into three dimensions. This exhibition will offer audiences a timely opportunity to gain a holistic understanding of Báez’s complex and profoundly moving body of work, cementing her as one of the most important artists of the early 21st century. The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue. SITE
Inaugural Group Exhibition - TALA Gallery
Opening April 12th, Chicago
Featuring artist: ANG ZIQI ZHANG, CHAVELI SIFRE, CORRINE SLADE, FARAH SALEM, JASMINE HUAIMIN YEH, ISRA RENE, KIAM MARCELO JUNIO, KUSHALA VORA, ROLAND KNOWLDEN, ROLAND SANTANA, NICOLE JI SOO KIM and PIERRE-ALEXANDRE SAVRIACOUTY
LA
Erotic Codex - Honor Fraser Gallery
APR 6 — JUN 8, 2024, LA
Honor Fraser is pleased to present Erotic Codex, a group exhibition that surveys the liberatory affordances of sex, and the erotic devices that artists use to harness power in an evolving digital landscape. Featuring fifteen artists who embrace the body as a site for rupture, rapture, and reconciliation, the exhibition asks how emerging technologies reconfigure cultural norms around sex, just as they shape the political impact of sexuality at home and in public. In turn, EroticCodex illuminates the entangled ways that we understand intimacy, artificiality, and our own bodies through the prolonged relationships we share with the technological objects at hand.
Cocurators Jamison Edgar and Alice Scope arouse influential essays by Audre Lorde, Legacy Russell, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha to examine the fantasies our erratic media ecosystems engender. Their exhibition is indebted to these three trailblazing scholars and the theories of power, glitch, and care that they forward. In turn, Erotic Codexchampions the nuanced ways that queer, femme, and disabled people claim agency, autonomy, and pleasure on their own terms. “The device,” seen as both a technological companion and a rhetorical instrument, is taken up to observe the divergent modalities of sex across fleshy-messy networks on– and offline.
Exhibiting artists: Panteha Abareshi, BORA, Lena Chen & Maggie Oates, Nat Decker, Ayanna Dozier, Mariana Portela Echeverri, Lolita Eno, Sarah Friend, Xia Han, Huntrezz Janos, Lucas LaRochelle, Matthew McGaughey, Sybil Montet, Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou, Miyö Van Stenis. SITE
The South
“I’ve been here before…” - Sibyl Gallery
Now- May 5th New Orlens, LA-USA
Sibyl is pleased to present I’ve been here before…, a group exhibition curated by multidisciplinary artist and scholar Shabez Jamal (b. 1992, St. Louis, MO). I’ve been here before… is a group exhibition that explores the recursive nature of photography through the lenses of ten emerging Black artists in the United States. The exhibition examines the relationship between the Black community and the photograph and how, through interactions with the medium, Black people have been able to create and recognize language and symbols that are vital to the continued formation of an ever-changing Black artistic canon. I’ve been here before… features work by John Alleyne, Justin Carney, Mark Anthony Brown Jr., Sean G. Clark, Jen Everett, Felicita “Felli” Maynard, Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, Lola Ayisha Ogbara, Kristina Kay Robinson, and Darryl DeAngelo Terrell. SITE
Luke Agada “Arms, Feet and Fitful Dreams” 2023, Oil on canvas, 72 x 96 inches (Diptych)
In The Know, Show at The Greeen Family Foundation Pop-up
APRIL 2nd - 30th, Dallas, TX
The Green Family Art Foundation is excited to present In The Know, Show, a pop-up exhibition located in the lobby of Atelier Apartments in the Arts District. The exhibition brings together a selection of rising artists that the foundation is excited to present to the Dallas community. The exhibition features the artists Lindsay Adams, Luke Agada, Richard Ayodeji Ikhide, Anna Calleja, Elizabeth Dimitroff, Annice Fell, Emily Ferguson, Caroline Jackson, Jin Jeong, Jacob Littlejohn, Sophia Loeb, Jemima Murphy, Sixten Sandra Österberg, Emma Prempeh, Sol Kordich, Su Su, Thom Trojanowski, Georg Wilson, José Delgado Zúñiga, and others. SITE
Amber D. Smith, March 27th