A virtual bulletin board gathering cultural happenings that may be of interest to our readers.
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE AND TRANSATLANTIC MODERNISM
February 25–July 28, 2024
The Met Fifth Avenue
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028
In February 2024, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present the groundbreaking exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism. Through some 160 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film, and ephemera, it will explore the comprehensive and far-reaching ways in which Black artists portrayed everyday modern life in 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 will establish the Harlem Renaissance and its radically new development of the modern Black subject as central to the development of international modern art.
The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism is curated by Denise Murrell, who curated the Wallach Art Gallery's 2018 exhibition Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today.
SHEHER, PRAKRITI, DEVI
January 19, 2024–June 1, 2024
Ishara Art Foundation
A3, Alserkal Avenue, Street 17,
Al Quoz 1, Dubai, UAE
Sheher, Prakriti, Devi marks artist and photographer Gauri Gill’s first extensive curation in an art context. Ruminating on the interwoven relationship between dynamic cities, the natural environment and the inseparable sacred, the show presents twelve artists and collectives working across diverse contexts of urban, rural, domestic, communitarian, public and non-material spaces. The title, Sheher, Prakriti, Devi comes from the Hindustani terms for ‘city,' ‘nature’ and ‘deity.’ It includes works by Chamba Rumal, Chiara Camoni, Gauri Gill, Ladhki Devi, Mariam Suhail, Meera Mukherjee, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Rashmi Kaleka, Shefalee Jain, Sukanya Ghosh, Vinnie Gill and Yoshiko Crow.
Sheher, Prakriti, Devi is curated by Gauri Gill, in dialogue with Sabih Ahmed.
Gauri Gill’s art is the subject of an upcoming exhibition at the Wallach, Looking for Ourselves: Gauri Gill’s The Americans, 2000–2007, on view March 23–April 7, 2024.
BEAU MCCALL: BUTTONS ON!
March 30, 2024–February 2, 2025
Fuller Craft Museum
455 Oak Street
Brockton, MA 02301
Buttons On! marks the first-ever retrospective for creative artist Beau McCall. Proclaimed by American Craft magazine as “The Button Man,” McCall creates wearable and visual art by hand-sewing clothing buttons onto mostly upcycled fabrics, materials, and objects. Buttons On! showcases pieces from McCall’s nearly forty-year career, the debut of several new works, and select archival material. Organized into several themes, the exhibition explores McCall’s mastery of the button and commentary on topics such as pop culture and social justice.
Buttons On! is guest curated by Souleo, who curated the Uptown 2023 Triennial at the Wallach. Artwork by Beau McCall was included in Uptown 2023.
UNRAVEL: THE POWER AND POLITICS OF TEXTILES IN ART
February 13–May 26, 2024
Barbican Centre
Silk Street, London
EC2Y 8DS
Angela Su will take part in a group exhibition entitled "Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art" at Barbican Art Gallery, London, on view from February 13 to May 26, 2024. The exhibition will then travel to Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, on view from September 14, 2024 to January 5, 2025.
In this major group exhibition, 50 international, intergenerational artists use textiles to communicate vital ideas about power, resistance and survival. From intimate hand-crafted pieces to monumental sculptural installations, these works offer narratives of violence, imperialism and exclusion alongside stories of resilience, love and hope. The exhibition will present a few works from Angela Su’s Sewing Together My Split Mind (2019-2021) series.
Angela Su: Melencolia was on view at the Wallach Art Gallery February 2 - March 10, 2024.
TRACES OF ECSTASY
February 16–June 9, 2024
The Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University
601 W Broad St
Richmond, VA 23220
Traces of Ecstasy is an adaptation of a pavilion and exhibition project premiering at the Lagos Biennial in February 2024. Guided by the theme of refuge, the Lagos Biennial will be held in Tafawa Balewa Square—a site in central Lagos, named after Nigeria’s first prime minister, that hosted the country’s independence ceremonies in 1960. Traces of Ecstasy critically responds to the charged historical residues of this space, taking its constitutive role in postcolonial nation-building as a point of departure.
This second, reimagined iteration of Traces of Ecstasy at the ICA continues the Lagos pavilion’s aims to unsettle the colonial capitalist power structures that maintain and reproduce the ideological legitimacy of the nation-state in post/neocolonial Africa and the wider world. Providing a space for critique, repair, and “freedom-dreaming,” it features artists from the African continent and its diasporas including Nolan Oswald Dennis, Evan Ifekoya, Raymond Pinto, Temitayo Shonibare, and Adeju Thompson. The exhibition expands on the scale and breadth of each artist’s contribution to the Lagos pavilion, presenting works that span sculpture, installation, video, sound, drawing, textile, performance, and digital art, in addition to a reading room and a symposium.
The ICA’s exhibition is curated by Guest Curator KJ Abudu, who curated Living with Ghosts in spring 2022 at the Wallach as part of Columbia's MODA program.
JEFFREY GIBSON TO REPRESENT UNITED STATES AT 60TH VENICE BIENNALE IN 2024
Portland Art Museum in Oregon and SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, announced that Jeffrey Gibson will represent the United States at La Biennale di Venezia, the 60th International Art Exhibition. Celebrated for an artistic practice that combines American, Indigenous, and Queer histories with influences from music and pop culture, Gibson creates a dynamic visual language that reflects the inherent diversity and hybridity of American culture. Using abundant color, complex pattern, and text, he invites deep reflection on identity, inspires empathy, and advocates for a widening of access to democracy and freedom for all. On view April 20 through November 24, 2024 in Venice, Italy, the Biennale provides international audiences with the first major opportunity to experience Gibson’s work outside of the United States.
Gibson’s 2020 painting I’ve Got You Under My Skin is on view at the Wallach now through September 17, 2023 as part of the Uptown Triennial 2023.