This week at Daily Serving we’re remembering the life and work of photographer Malick Sidibé (1935–2016), whose studio portraiture and candid images of nightlife in Mali during the 1960s and ’70s recorded a powerful time for the recently liberated country. As author Lia Wilson comments in her 2014 review, Sidibé’s photographs “chronicle a flourishing of human hope, ambition, and newfound opportunity” while remaining timeless. This article[…..]
“It’s not a key,” Enrique Martínez Celaya warns of the text Empires: The Writing, which accompanies his first solo exhibition at Jack Shainman, now on view at the gallery’s two venues in Chelsea under the titles Empires: Land and Empires: Sea.[1] I meet Celaya in early September, when we walk through the shows on the eve of the artist’s departure for his home in Los Angeles. Empires[…..]
Hayv Kahraman’s current solo exhibition at Jack Shainman is captivating. A suite of large paintings, produced in 2014 and 2015, shows women in patterned garments interacting within simple architectural forms; Arabic script annotates the figures. The gallery text explains that the works depict “memories from Kahraman’s childhood in Baghdad and as a refugee in Sweden.” The women are suggestive, and refer to other artworks as diverse as Persian miniatures, ukiyo-e[…..]
In Made by Whites for Whites, Nick Cave’s new show at Jack Shainman Gallery, the artist continues to exhibit works characteristic of his making process, in which the reclamation of found objects functions as a catalyst. “It’s always the object that provides me the impulse,” he said in a recent talk at the gallery. “It’s always one thing that sort of sets it up. It[…..]
The photographs of Malick Sidibé remind us how the political content of an image can shift and evolve under the unpredictable influences of time and the arrival of new contexts. Currently on view at Jack Shainman Gallery, Sidibé’s work is a mix of black-and-white portraits and candid shots of local people from his native Bamako, Mali. The artist first began his work in photography by[…..]
The preserved crocodile carcass, pinned against a ratty tarp to form the centerpiece of a work called On Your Way Up, is as good a place as any to begin a review of Radcliffe Bailey’s exhibition Maroons at Jack Shainman gallery. Though purportedly on the ascent, this climber has clearly seen better days; its exposed finger bones, protruding between disintegrated flesh, seem unlikely to carry[…..]
#race #class #access #commerce #representation #empowerment #codeswitching As the values of the contemporary art elite veer ever farther toward commerce, art with a social justice conscience is rallying in New York—arguably the center of the global art market. This summer, three prominent artists known for their political consciences have been drawing attention for thoughtful, research-heavy projects. In Chelsea, Hank Willis Thomas and the team of William Powhida and Jade Townsend have[…..]
