Spelman College Museum of Fine Art’s current exhibition, Africa Forecast: Fashioning Contemporary Life, presents a small but dynamic assemblage of twenty designers and artists who blur the line between fine art and fashion from across the globe. Co-curated by Spelman Museum’s own Dr. Andrea Barnwell Brownlee and Dr. Erika Dalya Massaquoi to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the institution, this exhibition embodies the curatorial commitments that have guided the museum since its beginning: namely, the promotion and support of art by women of the African diaspora. By complicating and expanding the often-unheard narratives of this international community of artists, Africa Forecast communicates the historical and political potency of self-fashioning through and beyond the frame of the garment. Met by mannequins as well as video, photography, painting, and sculpture, viewers encounter a constellation of rich and diverse material practices that push beyond a mere display of aesthetic achievement. In foregrounding fashion as a tool of individual expression and visibility, Africa Forecast confronts a range of institutional biases regarding the display of fashion in a museum setting and encourages a rethinking of the objectification and self-presentation of Black women.

Fabiola Jean-Louis. Amina, 2016; archival pigment print; 29 x 28.5 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Alan Avery Art Company, Atlanta, GA.

The recent financial and critical success of fashion exhibitions in world-class museums—such as Alexander McQueen’s retrospective Savage Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2011 and The Glamour of Italian Fashion: 1945–2014 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2014—has changed the conversation in regards to the role of clothing and textiles as objects of social and cultural significance, negating the institutional biases that pitch fashion as a commercially driven (and thus, lesser) genre of making. Africa Forecast continues these museological debates, but draws the conversation away from questions of high versus low in order to point to the power and historical resonance of clothing and craft. Thus, many of the artists in the exhibition deliberately blur the line between fashion and the fine arts to highlight such implications.

Through her sumptuous images of Black women costumed in beautifully crafted and delicate paper garments, the Haitian-born, Brooklyn-based artist, designer, and photographer Fabiola Jean-Louis invites viewers to rethink the production of an image and acknowledge the ways in which European power has shaped narratives of beauty and Black history. In Amina (2016), Jean-Louis intervenes in the privileged, gendered conditions of European portraits by photographing her subject adorned, resplendent, and confident in the clothes of her oppressor—puncturing the ideological art history of the objectified woman. With a stage-like setting and highly produced effects, a bejeweled recess sits in the center of this meticulously crafted gown, revealing the limp form of an anonymous Black body hung from the thin branches of a tree. The colorful three-dimensionality of the vignette oscillates uncomfortably between whimsical illusion and disturbing reality—a wound hidden in plain sight, and thus a possible response to the current and historical effects of state-sanctioned violence against Black bodies.

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Help Desk is where I answer your queries about making, exhibiting, finding, marketing, buying, selling–or any other activity related to contemporary art. Submit your questions anonymously here. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving.

This question follows your recent Help Desk article “Underrepresentation.” I appreciated that answer so much, since I know many artists who feel the same. I got stuck on this simple sentence, though: “Start by identifying at least one other gallery in your city that you’d rather work with, and invite the director(s) for a visit.” Any word of advice on the best way to go about this? Of course, go to the openings, show face, etc.—but time and time again I hear what a faux pas it is for an artist to contact a gallery directly. If you are an artist who didn’t go to grad school in the city you live in, and/or is not a mover and shaker by nature, therefore not likely to quickly make friends with people who are “in the know” and can introduce you, what is the best method of approaching a gallery for a studio visit?

Louise Bourgeois in her studio.

Let’s start with a tiny shift in perspective: Unless you plan to work with some kind of faceless consortium of finance bros who have LLC’d together to open an art space, you’re not asking a gallery for a studio visit, you’re asking a person—in other words, you’re looking for a human being with whom to build a long-term, mutually beneficial professional relationship. This change to your outlook is important, because a person (aka the gallerist) has preferences and needs just like you, and you want to make sure you’re a good match for each other. The best place to start is with research: Does your work fit the program? This is perhaps the most important part of your behind-the-scenes work, because a dealer who sells plein air paintings is never going to be interested in conceptual video. Also, what are the gallerist’s priorities? A dealer who spends the entire year at art fairs may not be keen to work with an artist who only makes large-scale installations. Take the time to study the galleries’ programs.

It’s true that an introduction is still the best way in, but even this strategy has potential pitfalls. One Los Angeles dealer read your question and said, “Personal introductions do go a long way. I recommend taking a solid look at your social network to determine if anyone can introduce you to someone at the gallery (even if not the director) to utilize that connection to reach the powers that be.” However, another gallerist from the same city tempers this advice: “I hate it when artists show up at the gallery and say something like, ‘Dealer X sent me, thought you might like my work’ or ‘Artist Y sent me, said you might…’ Dealers and artists should share websites with gallerists rather than ever send an artist over to a gallery—that’s the worst, or at least it’s not good…” So even if you score an introduction, don’t put the dealer on the spot by requesting a studio visit in person; ask your connection to send an email with the pertinent information.

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Today, from our new friends at Arts.Black, we bring you an interview with Detroit-based metalsmith artist Tiff Massey by Taylor Renee Aldridge. They discussed “socio-politics in Detroit, ’80s bling, and Massey’s rigorous art practice.”  Massey speaks of symbolism and color in her work, explaining “I keep going back and forth to the use of the mirror, the cameo, this oval shape [points to massive rings on her fingers], and these distortions within the reflections which are ongoing themes with how the audience is included in the work. There’s this distortion of history, distortions of Blackness.” This article was originally published on May 19, 2016.

Tiff Massey. Facet, 2013. Courtesy of the Library Street Collective.

Tiff Massey, a Detroit-based metalsmith artist, has been a pioneering figure in Detroit’s contemporary arts community in recent years. Massey, one of the few, if not only Black female metalsmith artists in the city, was awarded the Kresge Visual Artist Fellowship in 2015. In the same year, she garnered the support of the Knight Foundation to implement a one-month residency program for national and international metalsmith artists, and is now gathering matching funds to make this a reality in the city. A Cranbrook Academy Alum, and Detroiter, born and bred, she is known for creating metal work—hand, and neck jewelry—reminiscent of the large gold jewelry hip hop artists used to wear in the 1980’s. She also creates large-scale public installations, that you can find throughout the city.

My first interaction with Massey was not necessarily a warm one. Similar to the hard dark exterior metal pieces she creates, Massey is stoic and hardly affable unless she considers you a close acquaintance. She and I met shortly after I moved back to Detroit in 2014. I came back aware of all of the disparities and appropriating happening in the city, but unable to speak first hand to the things that had happened while I was away for several years. Massey, along with other artists who have stayed in Detroit, have watched people come and go over the past several years to use the “new Detroit” brand to their benefit, much to the exclusion of the greater Detroit (arts) community.

Read the full article here.

Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information. In this Shotgun Review, Colony Little reviews Hammer Projects: Simone Leigh in Los Angeles.

Simone Leigh. Althea, 2016; terra-cotta, india ink, porcelain, cobalt, epoxy. Courtesy of the Artist and Hammer Museum. Photo: Brian Forrest.

Simone Leigh uses sculpture to tell stories that transcend time and space. In her first solo West Coast exhibition at the Hammer Museum, Leigh draws on Africa’s colonial past while remaining rooted in the present, incorporating political resistance and performance to craft a decidedly modern aesthetic.

The exhibition features five onyx-colored sculptural busts adorned with raffia skirts, beads and headdresses made from small porcelain roses in shades of indigo, gray, white, and gilded 14-karat gold. Distinct facial expressions and gestures distinguish each bust from the others. None of the sculptures, however, have eyes. If eyes are the windows to the soul, their absence creates a façade; their obfuscation may be a protective emotional shield. One sculpture stands apart from the rest. A black hole in the center of the bust surrounded by black flowers in india ink replaces the details of her face. With her identity unknown, the piece becomes a mirror for the viewer to project their own narrative onto the work. When looking at her, I couldn’t help but think of Nina Simone’s powerfully emotive song “Four Women.” The song invites us into the lives of her subjects, engaging us in simple, vivid stories of pain, history, and perception. Viewing Simone Leigh’s work through this lyrical storytelling lens, I saw these sculptures as an abstract adaptation of the song. The artist extends the narrative by including the faceless woman whose story is unknown.

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In light of Monday’s women-led strike in Poland, in which thousands of people in over sixty cities gathered to protest the government’s proposal to completely ban abortion, If You Don’t Know Me By Now, You Will Never Never Never Know Me at Fundacja Arton seems exceptionally prescient. The exhibition brings together seven works of film or video made by women between the years of 1973 and 1982, presenting a small but influential selection of startlingly direct explorations of femininity and culture.

Letítia Parente. Task 1, 1982; video, color, sound; 1:56.

Of all the works in the show, American audiences will be most familiar with Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), in which the artist dons an apron and demonstrates the uses of an abecedarium of kitchen implements: bowl, chopper, dish, eggbeater. This is a straight-faced inventory; Rosler simply announces the name of each tool and then pantomimes its use. But unlike a cheerful Julia Child–style exposition, the violence in Rosler’s gestures exposes the resentment behind the toil of household drudgery. When she announces ice pick, she stabs it dramatically into a chopping block like a modern-day Clytemnestra.

In a similarly domestic vein, Letítia Parente’s Task 1 (1982) shows a woman in light-colored clothes lying face-down on an ironing board; a woman in a black dress proceeds to iron her body. As the second woman moves the hot tool over the first’s back and legs, she uses her free hand to smooth the folds of cloth, communicating care for the woman underneath the fabric while firmly auditing her appearance. The double-edged message will not be mysterious to any contemporary user of the internet, where “fitspo” memes, slut-shaming tweets, and gender-policing Facebook posts show that women continue to be harsh judges of each other’s appearance and status, often under the guise of “just wanting to help.”

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Today from our archives we bring you a review of Sharon Lockhart’s most recent solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: “The beauty of Lunch Break is that its attenuated moments make it difficult to lock onto a single interpretation,” wrote author Rob Marks. This evening Lockhart is presenting a lecture at California College of the Arts in San Francisco as part of the Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program, a collaboration with Pier 24 Photography and SFMOMA. This article was originally published on December 5, 2011.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art defies the normal boundary between landing and gallery at the entrance to the fourth-floor space that houses Sharon Lockhart’s Lunch Break, 2008. Photo: Saul Rosenfield, ©2011, with permission of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The stairway to the fourth floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art leads me directly toward a long, narrow, darkened space, at the end of which is the image of another, much longer passageway. In that image, a concrete floor below and light fixtures above trace a trajectory toward infinity punctuated by pipes, wires, hoses, storage boxes, tools, and lockers. The scene is not monochrome—red, blue, yellow, orange, and green are common—nor is it dark, but the fluorescent lights, the faded floor, the absent windows, and the constrained path—no more than five feet wide—suggest that this is a place to travel through, not a place in which to settle.

This sensation is amplified by the fact that the image, I slowly realize, is moving. Inch-by-inch down the corridor, the slow-motion journey of what turns out to be Sharon Lockhart’s film, Lunch Break (2008), might be confused with a series of stills. Lockhart, who says she is interested in “duration,” describes her method of filmmaking as “photographic.”[1] Despite appearances, the film is not typical slow-motion; Lockhart has digitally inserted eight repetitions of each frame, ballooning a 10-minute, 1,200-foot traverse into an 80-minute encounter. It is a film engaged in repeating moments, in suspending, not slowing, time. It asks me, in effect, to witness the moment once, and then again, and then again. It proposes that I might answer the question, “What do you see?” only by pondering yet another, “Do you see what you see?”

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In George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), a character posits that the zombies are flocking to the mall because of “[s]ome kind of instinct. Memory. It’s what they used to do. This is an important place in their lives.” As Romero’s zombies siege the mall, the filmmaker critiques consumerism and how it has penetrated the human condition. The mall acts as a refuge, housing a bounty of merchandise that could sustain the protagonists into the apocalypse, but also becomes a site of horror. Without the gore of flesh-eating zombies, Sophia Al-Maria: Black Friday at the Whitney Museum of America Art presents an equally ominous vision of malls in the Gulf region. Qatar, where the artist was partially raised, has been negotiating its nomadic and Bedouin heritage, being a former British colony, and becoming an oil-rich independent country engaged with Western brands and consumer culture. Al-Maria provocatively probes the simulation and disorientation involved in place—electronic or physical—as it relates to conspicuous consumption and her investigation of “Gulf Futurism.”

Sophia Al-Maria. Black Friday, 2016, and The Litany, 2016; installation view, Sophia Al-Maria: Black Friday (July 26-October 31, 2016), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Collection of the Artist. Courtesy of Anna Lena Films, Paris and the Third Line, Dubai. Photo: Ron Amstutz.

Al-Maria exhibits two works, Black Friday (2016) and The Litany (2016), that hold together as a single piece through their proximity and related content. The artist presents Black Friday as a narrow but epically tall floor-to-ceiling video projection. In contrast, The Litany occupies the adjacent ground with a jumble of flashing smartphones and flatscreen monitors strewn about a low pile of sand—a reference to the Gulf desert and landscape in general. While the physicality of the work plays with verticality and horizontality—thus portrait and landscape—Al-Maria’s video Black Friday interrupts this clarity with whirling and askew camera angles. Despite occupying only a narrow portion of the gallery’s walls and floor, the thundering soundtrack of horns, synthetic sounds, and bits of voiced narrative reverberates and activates the entire gallery, even extending into the lobby. As Al-Maria plays with spatial relationships, viewers navigate their orientation to image, object, and sound, both establishing and confusing landscape and place.

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