mequitta ahuja

Protege of Kerry James Marshall, artist Mequitta Ahuja is making a name for herself. Already having solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Saatchi Gallery is ensuring that Ahuja is getting the much needed recognition that she deserves. This posts is for those of you that support the natural hair movement! You can check out more of her work at her upcoming exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem on July 15th.

 Afrogalaxy.

Dream Region

detroitwhat.

Despite the grim reports on the decline of Detroit's economy, there are a select few young, upwardly mobile burgeoning professionals who seek to reshape the public's perspective of this troubled city, highlighting contemporary cultural production as a glimmering speck of hope for what was once America's economic Mecca. No matter how pessimistic the outlook may be, art production will never cease. If you're in the Motor City anytime before July 25th, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) is featuring the first solo exhibition of artist/photographer Latoya Ruby Frazier. Frazier chronicles 10 years of photographs exploring her own family, and "the psychological and biological lineage that unites her grandmother, mother and herself, revealing at the same time the unavoidable issues of race, class, conflict and substance abuse that surround them." (MOCAD) Go see Mother May I  at the MOCAD today!

Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit
4454 Woodward Ave
Detroit, Michigan 48201

For more information on what's going on in the Detroit restaurant, art, and music scene, follow my dear friend and Detroit native Cambrey Thomas' awesome blog, Detroit Girls About Town.

piquant picasso.

Gagosian Gallery in London is celebrating the particular work of the late Pablo Picasso during his artistic production within the south of France. If you're in London this summer, I highly recommend that you check it out!

white walls

Rachel Mason: I Rule with A Broken Heart opens tomorrow @ Andrew Rafacz Gallery in Chicago.

This excerpt was taken from a press release on behalf of the gallery:

"Since 2004, Mason has been sculpting political figures and imagining herself as one of them. The project has extended to live performances, video, albums, and writing. The body of figures began as a project called The Ambassadors, as Mason sculpted herself as an imagined ambassador to wars in her lifetime. For this exhibition, we present a literal timeline of Mason's life as a fictional ambassador to conflicts, in figurines set on a shelf that wraps around the perimeter of the gallery. Mason is interested in using her own personal experiences to address the public experience of these historical, and very real, human beings. Reading a passage in a Shambala Buddhist text led her to think of the leaders as being heartbroken, and her own interpretation is deeply empathetic, attempting to imagine what it might be like to be Saddam Hussein, Jimmy Carter, or Deng Xiaopeng."

Mason will be present to talk about her first solo exhibition in Chicago as well as the release of her new book, I Rule with a Broken Heart and she will be giving a performance on Saturday, February 7th. Click here to view the entire press release.

In addition to Mason's exhibition, A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund opens today at the Spertus Museum.

The works of artists such as Hale Woodruff, Elizabeth Catlett, and Aaron Douglass will be displayed. Here is an excerpt from the description of the exhibition:

"A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund is the first exhibition to explore the legacy of the Julius Rosenwald Fund created by the Chicago businessman and philanthropist to foster black leadership through the arts, literature, and scholarship. From 1928 to 1948, the Fund awarded stipends to hundreds of prominent and emerging African Americans artists, writers, and scholars across such disciplines as history, sociology, literature, and the visual and performing arts. A Force for Change will present the artistic and scholarly products of Julius Rosenwald’s support, and will include more than sixty paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by twenty-two Rosenwald fellows, as well as a selection of documentary and archival materials."

On Sunday, February 8th, renowned art historian Richard J. Powell (Duke) will be giving a lecture pertaining to African American art and collecting. The exhibition will be on display until August 2009.

the dream: revisited

American photographer Gordon Parks (1912-2006) framed some of the most prolific moments in our country's history. Today's post is a tribute to him, as he is one of many Americans who could not witness yesterday's momentous occasion. Parks' powerful rendition of American Gothic (Ella Watson, 1942) is a befitting photograph because it serves as necessary reminder to keep the past within the present. Parks' work keeps alive the legacy of hundreds of thousands of African-Americans who struggled in hopes that one day we could be one nation, under God, indivisible...with liberty and justice for all. Though we are not there yet, the legacies of our forebearers encourage and motivate us to progress forward, one step at a time. You can check out more of Parks' works in Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art in Evanston, Il in April 2009.

Image: Gordon Parks, American Gothic, photograph, 1942.

WHITE WALLS

This week I will make my way to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago to see PROTECT PROTECT, text and installation artist Jenny Holzer's new exhibition....and I will be bringing you Visualité's first exhibition review from our White Walls series. Updates forthcoming!

celebrité

Andy Warhol. Elizabeth Peyton. Prow. Even Kehinde Wiley. What exactly is the connection between art, celebrity, and popular culture? How exactly do icons of popular culture become visual tools for contemporary artists? What I find even more interesting is that the process of capturing celebrity through photography and painting often reproduces imagery of pop culture icons while inadvertently making artists themselves apart of celebrity circles. The paparazzi aren't the only forces feeding into the mass public obsession with the stars...

You can check out Elizabeth Peyton's retrospective Live Forever at the New Museum in New York City, as well as Andy Warhol's Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.

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.

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.

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.