more to come in 2009

visualité will return in 2009! happy holidays...and have a happy new year! meanwhile, check out pink bow by world renowned artist Jeff Koons.

scene of the day

Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool. Lupe, K. West, and Ebony Magazine...please take notes. You can check out Birth of the Cool at the Studio Museum in Harlem until March 2009.

scene of the day

I always wanted to learn how to create trees in a landscape painting with a single brushstroke like Bob Ross on public television classic "The Joy of Painting"...

block out with your c**k out

Polaroids: Mapplethorpe is coming to the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, and for the first time, in a long time, I’ve never been so excited about the line-up of exhibitions coming to campus. Perhaps because Robert Mapplethorpe represents a sore spot in American art history. An avant-garde photographer and grade-A badass, Mapplethorpe’s confrontational and abrasive artistic reputation is complicated with Polaroids in that the display of rudimentary, cheaply produced images reveal the artist’s process of aestheticizing bodies in the likeness of classical Renaissance drawings and artistic explorations of the human figure. Mapplethorpe’s photos will be shown in tandem with From Michelangelo to Annibale Carracci: A Century of Italian Drawings from the Prado, not to “legitimate” the curatorial claims of Polaroids but to provide patrons with multiple examples of a trajectory of discovering the body through sexuality, love, and emotional fervor. You can check out both exhibitions in January 2009.

scene of the day

interjection

Mimicry is perhaps one of the most powerful visual tools in postmodern art. Ghada Amer's mixed media works are marvelous in that they combine repetitive patterns of nude female bodies stitched onto large-scale canvases in familiar painterly orientation.

The New Albers (2002) is no different, in that it interjects a domestic, hyper-sexual visual language into a discourse of art that was largely male dominated. The New Albers serves not only as a reference to Joseph Alber's 1955 piece Homage to the Square, Amer's work conflates pornagraphy, art, and tropes of domesticity, all in a dizzing and confrontational abstract formation. You can check out more of Amer's work in London at the Gagosian Gallery.

scene of the day

You can check out artist Mark Bradford's Practice along with other works at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Hard Targets—Masculinity and Sport until January 19, 2009.

gender is burning

When Isis, the diva from America's Next Top Model made history as the first transgendered person to compete on the show, the airwaves went crazy. In fact, the producers created so much hype around Isis's gender that it inevitably overshadowed her performance on the show. But this was not the first time that the blurring of gender lines seemingly occurred in the mainstream. I think back to the overwhelming popularity of the 1990 documentary, Paris is Burning, in which characters like Venus Xtravaganza and Willi Ninja were born. Or even Marc Jacobs' controversial ad campaign which employed androgynous male model Cole Mohr to showcase a few dresses within his Spring 08 collection for Marc by Marc Jacobs. In 2003, Jean Paul Gaultier favorite Omahyra Mota even appeared in Jay-Z's video for Change Clothes. Whether in hip-hop, fashion, or mainstream popular culture...could the lines be blurring/burning before our eyes?

scene of the day

Performance artist Kalup Linzy's hilarious yet thought-provoking rendition of All My Children

nationalisme reinvented

Inside what used to be the Miami-Dade County Drug Enforcement Agency warehouse, is a little-known gem- the Rubell Family Collection. Don and Merell Rubell, one of few black couples who have been collecting work for decades, have organized a landmark exhibition of contemporary art, entitled 30 Americans.

An interesting divergence from the Hewitt Collection exhibited at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, 30 Americans is reflective of an exciting moment occuring in contemporary art history, especially for an aspiring art historian like me. The premise of the show is quite simple. 31 artists. 31 differing artistic approaches to dealing with, or not dealing racial identity. All Americans...sort of.

If it sounds vaguely familiar to Thelma Golden and Christine Y. Kim's 2001 exhibition Freestyle, where a group of the most promising black artists were shown under the cleverly-coined but much contended, and even ambivalent term "post-black", well...it is, but it ain't. In fact, the curators considered Freestyle, along with other important contemporary exhibitions like Black Is, Black Ain't and Frequency.

The premise is loosely similar, but the artists, are quite different in that they represent an even newer group of cultural producers whose work is being made, hung, and discussed, simultaneously. Having trecked all the way to Brooklyn to Kehinde Wiley Studio and to SMH to see World Stage Africa, and having written about Wiley's work, in addition to Iona Rozeal Brown and Chicago's own Rashid Johnson, 30 Americans excites me because it calls for black visibility, or even, a form of visuality, bathed in red, white, and blue.

In other words, the show demands for the work to be considered as an American narrative of art history. With heavyhitters like Wiley, Rozeal Brown, Wangechi Mutu, Mark Bradford, William Pope L., and David Hammons, among many others, let me be clear in saying that 30 Americans in no way escapes the capitalizing academizing high-brow low-brow machine. Bank of America, Puma, and even Don and Mera Rubell themselves made sure of that. But I have to admit, I am now reconsidering my spring break plans for Paris, to make an unconventional art road trip to the M.I.A.