Postcard from New York - Part II

Postcard from New York - Part II

Derrick Adams, Firelei Báez, Abigail DeVille, Alexandria Smith, Paul Anthony Smith, William Villalongo

Curated by Larry Ossei Mensah and Serena Trizzino

6 June - 27 July 2018

Anna Marra Contemporanea is pleased to present the exhibition Postcard from New York – Part II, second installment of a series started in 2016, designed to showcase and celebrate the works of artists based in New York City.

Featuring paintings, works on paper and collages by Derrick Adams, Firelei Báez, Alexandria Smith and William Villalongo; Paul Anthony Smith’s picotages, and Abigail DeVille’s installation, which occupies the entire courtyard of the gallery, the artists selected for the exhibition represent the diversity of the African Diaspora in the Americas. Through the lens of their Afro-Latinx, Afro-Caribbean, and African-American roots, they all create work that embraces the nuance of what it means to be a Black person in New York City, The United States and around the globe in the present moment.

Known as a metropolis of immigrants and migrants, New York City is the U.S. municipality with the highest number of Black residents at over 2 million; approximately twenty-five percent of New York’s population is of African descent. Black people have undeniably shaped the fabric of American culture. However, despite their historical and cultural contributions, the global art world has only now started to turn its attention to artists of color, giving them much deserved attention and long overdue recognition.

The artists featured in Postcard from New York – Part II are all actively creating thought-provoking work that directly responds to the dramatically shifting social, cultural and political landscape. By way of their varied artistic practices, each artist selected shares a vision and sensibility that employ a dynamic approach to art making and underpin the diverse ways in which Afro-descended artists are challenging the status quo, living, working, and experiencing the world.

Postcard from New York – Part II grapples with the issues of representation, migration, diaspora, border, mobility, citizenship, and human rights as it related to individuals from the African Diaspora. By using visual art as a catalyst to advance this discourse, the exhibition will expose viewers in Rome to the various strategies employed by U.S.-based artists of color as they negotiate the complexities of politics, privilege, presence, race, class, and geography. While many of the issues and ideas addressed in the exhibition are on the minds of marginalized communities in the United States, these topics also have contemporary resonance in Italy. Postcard from New York - Part II aims to look past national and racial barriers to wrestle with the ways in which these issues can be engaged with by a global audience and how coalitions can be formed transnationally to foster systemic social and political change.

Go Figure

Seed

William Villalongo

From left: Nathaniel Mary Quinn, William Villalongo, Kehinde Wiley, Tala Madani

From Left: Nathanial Mary Quinn, William Villalongo

GO FIGURE

MAY 10 - AUG 12, 2018

Artists: Nicole Eisenman, Tala Madani, Joan Semmel, Allison Zuckerman, Deana Lawson, Omar Victor Diop, Derrick Adams, Nathanial Mary Quinn, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Kehinde Wiley and William Villalongo.

Curated by Greer Pagano

GO FIGURE takes on the human form in ways both inquisitively tender and provocatively direct. Works offer an array of perspectives about how we look at others, how we look at ourselves, how we take in and interpret bodily forms, and what we deduce from those encounters. At this particular moment, our bodies face an outlandish number of threats ranging from gun violence, to legislation against reproductive rights, to widespread sexual abuse. The works in this exhibition do not shy away from fundamental discussions pertinent to our culture wars, showing how figuration in painting, photography, and sculpture can address aging, sexuality, the inequities of the art historical canon, social media obsessions, and definitions of intimacy.

This intergenerational exhibition features surreal and sexy paintings of women by art world icons like Joan Semmel, mid-career masters like Nicole Eisenman, and newcomers like Allison Zuckerman. Kehinde Wiley makes a cameo with a monumental bronze bust, his first representing women. The sculpture Wiley says, “looks at the presence of black women, all of those women who raised me, the graceful women who’ve been in my life over the years, but also the ways in which black American women adorn themselves as both a type of communication act and of armor.” Photographers Deana Lawson and Omar Victor Diop carefully stage images, playing with our tendencies to create narratives from seemingly documentary photographs. Nathaniel Mary Quinn and Deborah Roberts, newcomers to the collection, create collages of magical human forms. We welcome back Derrick Adams with five new acquisitions, whose saturated colors and subject matter ranging from birthday parties to pool parties remind us of the joy of human connections and the necessity to celebrate love over hate. 

SOLO SHOW: Outside My Name or Through Other Eyes

William Villalongo: Outside My Name or Through Other Eyes

September 11 – October 13, 2017

Public talk: William Villalongo
September 11 from 4 – 5.30 pm – Art Building (room 109, VAIS)

Opening Reception
September 11 from 5.30 – 6.30 pm – Art Building, CAG

CAG will open the new school year with an exhibition by William Villalongo Outside My Name or Through Other Eyes. The curatorial theme is structured around a beautiful film by the artist that draw parallels and do clarify how in different ways both Picasso’s formalist Cubist approach and how Aaron Douglas’s, (a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance) very distinct illustrative style and political forcefulness are merged within Villalongo’s artwork.

“Between Pablo Picasso and Aaron Douglas is the story of American Modernisms and the essential and underrepresented African-American contribution to that history. For both artists African masks and sculpture were key to unlocking the metaphysics of space. In Douglas’ hands this bore out a new Afrocentric aesthetic proving consequential to how emancipated black folks would begin to imagine themselves.”

Outside My Name or Through Other Eyes, weaves the artist’s aesthetic and social interests together with aspects of Pablo Picasso and Aaron Douglas’s visual vocabulary. Villalongo’s paintings, collage works and prints draw upon the distinct illustrative style and political forcefulness employed by Douglas, a celebrated Harlem Renaissance artist. Also evident is the artist’s creative contextualization and reinterpretation of these Modernist Era Masters’ Formalist experiments, their love of African Art and use of black iconography. Villalongo’s art likewise references Picasso’s sexually charged Bather canvases and his once notorious painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, from 1907.

The curatorial centerpiece of Outside My Name or Through Other Eyes, is Villalongo’s stunning, wall-size projection of his 2012 film, Water Root. The film’s imagery that includes, masks, paintings, paintings being painted and frolicking Nymphs, binds the show’s selected artworks together. Included in the exhibition are a selection of books and periodicals illustrated by Douglas, providing art historical context to the scope of Black representation. By combining past and present work, Outside My Name or Through Other Eyes, projects a more
nuanced future.
* The Contemporary Art Galleries exhibition, Outside My Name or Through Other Eyes, is being presented in tandem with William Villalongo’s 2018 Artist Residency with Counterproof Press, our School of Fine Arts press.

SOLO SHOW: Keep on Pushing

26 October - 9 December 2017

Susan Inglett Gallery is pleased to present “Keep on Pushing,” an exhibition of new cut-paper work by gallery artist William Villalongo from 26 October through 9 December 2017. A reception for the artist will be held Thursday evening, 26 October from 6 to 8 PM.

Known for irreverent riffs on the art historical “muse,” William Villalongo has made episodic paintings and works on paper which underscore historical erasure and master narratives of desire. 

In his fifth solo exhibition at Susan Inglett Gallery, the artist turns his attention to the black male figure, while returning to his signature cut velvet paper works.

This new work suggests a re-imagining of the black male figure at a time when current events and statistics reflect a social reality of limited expectations, contingency, and disproportionate fear. Within the dark tones of these meditations on physiology, the artist uses metaphors of invisibility, nature, and reformation as necessary conditions of being. Much like fallen autumn leaves, Villalongo’s men navigate their world subject to an unpredictable wind - piling, spinning, and re-collecting. The work conjures spaces of sensuality, humor, and history. 

Titled after Curtis Mayfield’s 1970 “Keep on Pushing,” Villalongo’s recent body of work speaks to the inherent human spirit will to persevere and to find a way.

WILLIAM VILLALONGO was born in 1975 in Hollywood, FL. He received his B.F.A. from The Cooper Union School and his M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art at Temple University. Villalongo has exhibited extensively with recent appearances in “Woke!  William Villalongo and Mark Thomas Gibson” at the USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa and is the co-curator with Gibson of the highly acclaimed traveling exhibition “Black Pulp.”  Work has been in included in recent shows at the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, MOMA PS 1, the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Art, and the Studio Museum Harlem. Reviews have appeared in Artforum, ARTnews, The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail and The Village Voice among others.

The exhibition will be on view at the gallery located at 522 West 24 Street Tuesday to Saturday 10 AM to 6 PM. The Gallery will be closed for the Thanksgiving holiday 23 through 27 November 2017.  For additional information please contact Susan Inglett Gallery at 212/647- 9111, fax 212/647-9333 or info@inglettgallery.com

Near & Dear

September 15 – October 28

EFA Project Space, 323 W. 39th St., 2nd Floor

Opening reception: Friday, September 15, 6 – 8 PM

Artists: Jennifer Paige Cohen, Anoka Faruqee, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Sheila Pepe, Alison Saar, Rachel Stern, William Villalongo, Brian Zegeer

Curated by: Carrie Moyer

EFA Project Space presents Near & Dear, an intergenerational exhibition which explores amorous connections artists make with signifying materials and objects. This group of eight artists use objects to deliver embodied meaning, from the haptic to the optical to cerebral. All have an investment in a specific material culture and the product of their research takes the form of discrete artifacts.

The term “material culture” tells of the relationships between people and their things, irrespective of time and place. The range of culturally specific aesthetic vernaculars employed by each artist in the exhibition serves as a starting point for Near & Dear. For some, the connection is intuitive. Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, an artist who was an altar boy in the Catholic Church and a radical on the frontlines of the Gay Liberation Movement, treats his tin-foil chalices and reliquaries to gay porn stars with the same bedazzled tenderness.

For others, the vernacular is used to address to notions of taste, high vs low art, the domestic space vs the gallery or institution. Rachel Stern’s stand-alone installations re-envision the Renaissance “studiolo” as dandy’s lair filled with queer ruminations on life, death and decoration. For Sheila Pepe, crocheted textiles and brocade upholstery are combined to obliquely evoke the aspirational and assimilationist sensibilities of the Italian-American church and home. Painted on velvety black flocking, William Villalongo’s pictures of coquettish brown nymphs combine high and low, reimagining classical mythology in the form of the maligned (and beloved) "sofa-sized" oil painting.

Elsewhere in Near & Dear, ideas are transmitted directly to the viewer through the imagined provenance of readymade or the hidden histories behind familiar landmarks. Battered tin, weathered wood and tag-sale ephemera ground Alison Saar’s narratives in the rural past and Great Migration of African Americans. The panoramic structure of Brian Zegeer's The Golden Hour re-imagines a domestic interior as a place of slow, prolonged scrutiny, inspired by Persian miniature paintings and his Lebanese grandfather's wood-inlaid backgammon table.

Contemporary art may also claim its own unique material culture(s). The work of both Jennifer Paige Cohen and Anoka Faruqee incorporates some aspect of the “real world” to puncture the hermetic sign system and values of the art world. Cohen’s witty, table-top plaster pieces are double-sided. From one side the forms seem to be distant cousins of Brancusi; on their backside, Cohen has embedded ordinary sweaters, as if the model’s clothes peeled off in the casting of her limb. Faruqee infuses the tradition of self-referential painting with the kitschy-ness of opart, creating discursive objects which hide their intellectual chops behind a kind of giddy pleasure.

Filled with texture and innuendo, the work included in Near & Dear celebrates the recognition, delight, and sheer bewilderment artists discover by mining the familiar.

For press inquiries, please contact Meghana Karnik, EFA Project Space Program Manager at meghana@efanyc.org or 212-563-5855 x 229.

Black Pulp! & Woke Exhibitions a usfcam

BLACK PULP!

A century of visualizing Black experience

June 2–July 22, 2017 - USFCAM Lee & Victor Leavengood Gallery

Black Pulp! examines evolving perspectives of Black identity in American culture and history from 1912 to 2016 through rare historical printed media shown in dialogue with contemporary works of art. The exhibition highlights works by artists, graphic designers, writers, and publishers in formats ranging from little known comic books to covers for historic books and magazines, to etchings, digital prints, drawings, and media-based works by some of today’s leading artists. Historical printed media includes dust jackets by Aaron Douglas and Loïs Mailou Jones, offset lithographs by Charles White, rare Black comics Lobo #1 and All Negro Comics, periodicals Crisis, Fire!! and Opportunity, novels by Chester Himes, album covers by Sun Ra, Donna Summer and more! The exhibition is co-curated by New-York based artists William Villalongo and Mark Thomas Gibson and organized by International Print Center New York. 

CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS

POPE.L, KENNY RIVERO, ALEXANDRIA SMITH, FELANDUS THAMES, HANK WILLIS THOMAS, KARA WALKER , FRED WILSON, DERRICK ADAMS, LAYLAH ALI, FIRELEI BÁEZ, NAYLAND BLAKE, ROBERT COLESCOTT, RENEE COX, WILLIAM DOWNS, ELLEN GALLAGHER, TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK, LUCIA HIERRO, YASHUA KLOS, KERRY JAMES MARSHALL, WANGECHI MUTU,LAMAR PETERSON

WOKE!

June 2–July 22, 2017 - USFCAM West Gallery

Woke! brings together recent work by William Villalongo and Mark Thomas Gibson, artists and the curators of Black Pulp!. The term “woke” is contemporary American vernacular terminology for acute awareness, particularly in reference to the socio-political contexts we inhabit. Woke! presents works made over the past two years, a time when the influence of the hyper-visuality of police violence upon Black bodies and the cultural currents of the Black Lives Matter movement informed new narratives in their practice. They traverse the psychic and spiritual landscape of Black erasure through narrative-figural styles; often negotiating high and low forms of image making. Limited notions of the illustrative tradition’s ability to take on grand narrative or serious content is confronted, questioned and overturned by these works. Villalongo and Gibson address perennial change, biology, protest and revolution in highly contrasting ways, opening up pathways to engage the difficult realities of American history and culture. Woke! calls on the viewer to reorient themselves to current cultural inequities and their reverberations on how we imagine ourselves from the inside out. Woke! is organized by USF Contemporary Art Museum.

CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM | Institute for Research in Art

University of South Florida

4202 East Fowler Avenue, CAM101

Tampa, FL 33620-7360 USA

Hours: M–F 10am–5pm, Thurs. 10am–8pm, Sat. 1–4pm, Closed Sundays 

cam.usf.edu | 813-974-4133 | caminfo@admin.usf.edu | #usfcam