Making Mammy: A Caricature of Black Womanhood, 1840–1940 @ CAAM In Los Angeles

One of the most pervasive stereotypes constructed during the post-Civil War era, and arguably the most enduring image from the days of Jim Crow, the mammy was a staple caricature in the romanticization of the Antebellum South. Popularized into the twentieth century by characters such as “Mammy” in MGM’s hit film Gone with the Wind (1939), this archetype of black domestic servitude was often depicted as good-natured, overweight, and loud. Presenting an ahistorical view of black womanhood within southern plantation hierarchies, the mammy not only embellished the realities of black life in the American South, but it also denied African American women their femininity, beauty, and strength.

Making Mammy: A Caricature of Black Womanhood, 1840–1940 explores how the mammy figure was produced in an effort to temper the atrocities of enslavement and serve southern interests domestically, economically, and politically. Bringing together films, photographs, and artifacts, it examines the legacy of the institutionalized stereotype, considering a century of complex manufacturing of black femininity, power dynamics, and mass-media messaging that still affects black women’s body image, lack of agency, and sense of self. Making Mammy uncovers the nuances behind this figure and illuminates the vestiges of America’s role in enslavement through the mammy’s appearance in literature and cinema. Making Mammy: A Caricature of Black Womanhood, 1840–1940 is on view through March 1, 2020 at CAAM 600 State Drive, Exposition Park, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of CAAM

The Medea Insurrection: Radical Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain @ Wende Museum in Los Angeles

Working under the radar of the authorities that defined acceptable art, radical women artists in the former Eastern Bloc challenged both socialist and bourgeois ideals and power, as well as a male-dominated canon. Their work was innovative, and the sheer act of making it was a risk. Yet even today, little is known about these courageous and critical artists.

The Medea Insurrection introduces viewers to multifaceted, multifarious work by artists including sculptor and textile artist Magdalena Abakanowicz (Poland); photographers Sibylle Bergemann (East Germany), Evelyn Richter (East Germany), Zofia Rydet (Poland), and Gundula Schulze-Eldowy (East Germany); mixed-media artists Orshi Drozdik (Hungary) and Anna Daučíková (Czechoslovakia); painter and graphic artist Angela Hampel (East Germany); sound and performance artist Katalin Ladik (Hungary); conceptual artist Natalia LL (Poland); and painter and graphic artist Karla Woisnitza (East Germany).

The Medea Insurrection is on view through April 5, 2020 at the Wende Museum 10808 Culver Boulevard. photographs by Dany Naierman courtesy of the museum.

The Intimacy Of No Wrong Holes "Thirty Years of Nayland Blake" @ Institute Of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

From pop culture to corporal humor, Nayland Blake’s exhibition No Wrong Holes, currently on display at LA’s Institute of Contemporary Art, plays with intimacy from every angle. Pieces like Starting Over (2000), which features Blake in a 147 lb bunny suit tap dancing to Michael Jackson, put Blake's body and its capacities on display to consider cultural belonging. Engaging with their own White passing, Blake interrogates how the bonds of culture are both formed and broken along the fault line of cultural expectation.

Blake’s consistent use of kitsch icons like Bugs Bunny asks what kind of intimacy pop culture gives us; How do recognizable figures stand in as avatars for human expression and escapism? Blake also evokes pop culture to interrogate cultural bias, pointing to the racial and homophobic stereotypes that Br’er Rabbit—originally an African folk tale—and Bugs Bunny are imbued with. 

In a number of pieces, Blake cultivates historical closeness. Through works like Magic (1990) and Joe Dallesandro as Augustin (1994), Blake serves as a kind of queer biographer, archiving the contributions of overlooked queer icons such as Wayland Flowers, Hans Bellmer, and Ethyl Eichelberger. Blake's 30-year engagement with the HIV/AIDS crisis speaks to the closeness that tragedy brings. 

The exhibition ends with a focus on Blake's current community-based practice. This work is aptly paired with Bay Area artist Sadie Barnette’s iridescent and arresting installation piece The New Eagle Creek Saloon, a replica of the first black-owned queer bar in San Francisco, founded by her father.

No Wrong Holes "Thirty Years of Nayland Blake" will be on view at ICA LA until January 26, 2020. text by Rosa Boshier, photographs by Oliver Kupper

Al Freeman's Cubicle @ 56 Henry NY

Cubicle, an exhibition of new work by Al Freeman, presented at 56 Henry NY. On view in the gallery is a series of wall-hung soft sculptures that represent objects associated with the material culture of corporate offices. Chosen in part for the ubiquity of their presence, the sculptures variously depict a standing water cooler, a yellow internal mail envelope, and a desktop computer monitor, among other objects. Made of stitched pleather forms loosely stuffed with polyester fill, the works enlarge the scale of their referents, replacing rigid structures with sagging forms.

The sculptures also consider the office as a site where oppression, repetition, bad taste, and humor coalesce. A miniature basketball hoop attached to a garbage can suggests an aging fraternity brother advertising his glory days to the chagrin of his coworkers. A computer monitor features the recognizable layout of the Pornhub website, and the shattered screen of a rose gold iPhone supports four lines of cocaine, suggesting the presence of illicit activities in a shared public space. Highlighting the continuities between fraternity culture and corporate politics, the exhibition mines the genre of office pranks—not dissimilar from fraternity hazing rituals—and features one of these practical jokes, which can be viewed upon request.

Cubicles is on view through Dec 22, 2019 at 56 Henry 56 Henry St. NY. photographs courtesy of 56 Henry

Rodney McMillian Brown: Videos From The Black Show @ The Underground Museum In Los Angeles

Three years ago, Rodney McMillian presented The Black Show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Using a collection of large-scale paintings, sculptures and videos he formed a vision of the United States scarred by its long history of racialized oppression. Many of the videos were created in South Carolina, where McMillian was born. Others were filmed around Dockery Farms, an infamous plantation in Mississippi where some claim the Delta Blues was birthed.

McMillian transformed these places, along with moonlit fields and buzzing swamps, into stages for the performances you have just witnessed. The performances use song lyrics, political sermons and children’s stories deeply rooted in our American vernacular. His characters wear costumes like armor that serve as warning signs of—and protection from—a lush Southern landscape turned hostile by propaganda and laws. Taken together, McMillian’s videos create a mythic universe that mirrors our own, full of abundant brown earth and other suns in its skies, where we might plant the seeds of a more accurate story.

Videos From The Black Show are on view through February 16, 2020 at the Underground Museum 3508 W. Washington Blvd. photographs courtesy of the Underground Museum

Dust My Broom: Southern Vernacular from the Permanent Collection @ CAAM In Los Angeles

Featuring the largest selection of works by Southern vernacular artists ever displayed at the California African American Museum, Dust My Broom: Southern Vernacular from the Permanent Collection examines the remarkable reach and legacy of arts traditions from the American South. The region’s vernacular manifests itself in assemblages and quilts, as well as sculptures, paintings, and drawings, executed from found or repurposed objects by largely self-taught artists who spent their careers excluded by the mainstream art world. Reflecting themes associated with spirituality, social justice, folklore, and daily life among common folk, works by artists such as Sam Doyle, “Missionary” Mary Proctor, and Purvis Young mirror the ingenuity, creativity, and deep sense of community among African Americans.

The exhibition showcases numerous recent acquisitions and places them in the context of other works from the permanent collection—specifically, alongside those connected to the California assemblage movement, including by Noah Purifoy and John Outterbridge, Los Angeles artists who were born in the South. In this regard, Dust My Broom explores the affirmation, continuity, and innovation of African American southern vernacular aesthetics brought into the West through several waves of migration. Complemented by additional loans from local collections, these compelling works illustrate the breadth of approaches practiced by artists from the South, as well as by contemporary artists, including Dominique Moody, John T. Riddle Jr., and Betye and Alison Saar, who absorbed southern influences through personal experience, family ties, and their peers. Dust My Broom is on view through February 16 at 600 State Drive, Exposition Park, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of CAAM

Ibrahim Mahama: Living Grains @ Fondazione Giuliani In Rome

Embedded within the specific cultural and socio-political history of Ghana, the work of Ibrahim Mahama addresses issues of globalisation, labour, the exchange of materials and community building, ultimately bringing to the fore a more universal social condition. Mahama is perhaps most well known for his wrapping of architectural structures with jute sacks. Originally made in Southeast Asia and imported to Ghana to transport cocoa beans, these sacks eventually become multi-functional objects reused both by local goods sellers, and for various needs in the home. Both material and commodity trajectory – with its textured skin that retains the imprint of its own history – exemplify the crux of Mahama’s practice: the investigation of the memories and decay of history, cultural fragments, the discarding and future transformation of objects gathered from the urban environment. Through his examination of the history of these objects, Mahama underlies how their evolution over time denotes the developments and changes in contemporary society. Living Grains is on view through December 21 at Fondazione Giuliani Via Gustavo Bianchi, 1, 00153 Roma. photographs courtesy of Fondazione Giuliani

Catalina Ouyang: Marrow @ Make Room In Los Angeles

Ouyang’s oeuvre is situated in a framework of revisionist storytelling that resists essentialist metrics for navigating social space. In marrow, Ouyang builds on previous works to elaborate themes that confront language, space, and the power relations embedded within them.

Leaning on cross-cultural myths about stone and stoning—including the Gorgons, Biblical punishment, the Waiting Stone, and Ahalya—Ouyang develops a visual landscape of characters that instigate unfamiliarity and uncertainty. Ouyang carves stone as a way to feel into mythologies in which bodies are cursed or frightened into petrification, calling up questions of agency, resistance, and loss. Ouyang repeatedly returns her inquiry to the question of language and its departure from a body transformed. marrow is on view through November 30 at Make Room 1035 N Broadway, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Sadie Barnette: The New Eagle Creek Saloon @ ICA In Los Angeles

For her first solo museum presentation in Los Angeles, Oakland-based artist Sadie Barnette (b. 1984) will reimagine the Eagle Creek Saloon, the first black-owned gay bar in San Francisco, established by the artist’s father Rodney Barnette, founder of the Compton, CA chapter of the Black Panther Party. From 1990–93 Barnette’s father operated the bar and offered a safe space for the multiracial LGBTQ community who were marginalized at other social spaces throughout the city at that time.

Barnette engages the aesthetics of Minimalism and Conceptualism through an idiosyncratic use of text, decoration, photographs, and found objects that approach the speculative and otherworldly. Barnette’s recent drawings, sculptures, and installations have incorporated the 500-page FBI surveillance file kept on her father and references to West Coast funk and hip-hop culture to consider the historical and present-day dynamics of race, gender, and politics in the United States. Using materials such as spray paint, crystals, and glitter, she transforms the bureaucratic remnants from a dark chapter in American history into vibrant celebrations of personal, familial, and cultural histories and visual acts of resistance. The New Eagle Creek Saloon is a glittering bar installation that exists somewhere between a monument and an altar, at once archiving the past and providing space for potential actions. During the run of the exhibition at ICA LA, the installation will be activated by performances, talks, and other social events. The New Eagle Creek Saloon is on view through January 26, 2020 at ICA LA 1717 E. 7th Street, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Cross Colours: Black Fashion in the 20th Century @ CAAM In Los Angeles

In 1990, on the first season of the hit primetime television show The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, lead actor Will Smith wore a series of boldly hued and geometric looks designed by a young Los Angeles–based urban apparel line named Cross Colours. African American-owned, founded by Carl Jones and T.J. Walker, the brand quickly skyrocketed, securing a plethora of orders across the country and breaking color barriers in the field of men’s apparel. The commercial success of Cross Colours, which Jones and Walker created for black youth with the premise of producing “Clothing Without Prejudice,” had a significant influence on the mainstream fashion industry, inspiring it to take notice of the emerging importance of urban streetwear.

Working in the golden age of Hip Hop in the late 1980s and 1990s, Jones and Walker incorporated bright colors and graphic designs that reflected not just trends in fashion, but also a cultural embrace of Afrocentrism in response to unjust Reagan-era policies, rising poverty, police brutality, and substandard educational opportunities. They appealed unapologetically to a black aesthetic, while strategically using product placement, social justice messaging, and community outreach to address these pressing issues. Thirty years later, Cross Colours continues to engage in the socio-political moment and counter negative portrayals of black youth. The first exhibition to examine this groundbreaking brand, Cross Colours: Black Fashion in the 20th Century showcases vintage textiles, media footage, and rare ephemera that illuminate how Cross Colours has permeated popular culture and how fashion can be used to tell history anew. Cross Colours: Black Fashion in the 20th Century is on view through March 1, 2020 at The California African American Museum 600 State Drive, Exposition Park, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of CAAM

Anja Salonen: The Key Of Chiron @ Five Car Garage In Santa Monica

In 1977, a small planetoid named 2060 Chiron was discovered in our outer Solar System. Although a photographic record of it reaching back to the 1890s has been assembled, no one had noted it before that day at an observatory in Pasadena. In Greek mythology, the centaur Chiron embodies Jung’s ‘wounded healer’ archetype. After facing early life abandonment, Chiron is fatefully pierced by his own poison arrow, incurring an unhealable wound that he carries with him for the rest of his life. This injury propels Chiron to a resurrection and transcendence of the physical experience, leading to a lifelong journey to discover and share the healing qualities inherent in nature. The Key Of Chiron is on view at Five Car Garage Open every Saturday 12-4pm and by appointment. painting stills were shot by Don Lewis and the install pics by Matthew Farrar.

Tanya Brodsky: Tongue Tied @ Ochi Projects In Los Angeles

Kaiser Permanente sends me generic nature stock photos, accompanied by recommendations for something called “forest bathing.” In a blur of communication and advertising, image and text are flattened, co-opted, coded, re-coded, and ultimately digested, leaving behind traces of mutated half-meanings. The eye’s focus oscillates between looking through, and looking at: a scattering of sight and attention, a breaking apart of the singular. When I saw an ad stating that the Behr Paint color of the year is a green hue called Back to Nature, all I could think was, damn the 90’s really are back. Sometimes, I want to yell emojis across the room. Bears do supposedly still shit in the woods, though. Tongue Tied is on view through November 9 at Ochi Projects 3301 W Washington Blvd Los Angeles. Images by Josh Schaedel courtesy of Ochi Projects

Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet The Sun Again @ The Broad

Originated by The Broad, Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again is the largest exhibition to date of internationally acclaimed artist Shirin Neshat’s approximately 30-year career. Taking its title from a poem by Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, the exhibition (which presents approximately 230 photographs and eight video works) offers a rare glimpse into the evolution of Neshat’s artistic journey as she explores topics of exile, displacement, and identity with beauty, dynamic formal invention, and poetic grace.

Beginning with her early photograph series, Women of Allah, the exhibition also features iconic video works such as Rapture, Turbulent, and Passage, monumental photography installations including The Book of Kings and The Home of My Eyes, and Land of Dreams, a new, ambitious work encompassing a body of photographs and two immersive videos that will make its global debut in the exhibition. I Will Greet the Sun Again is on view through February 16, 2020 at The Broad Installation Images by Joshua White, courtesy of The Broad

Theodore Boyer: Star Maps @ Show Gallery In Los Angeles

As a California native, adopted at birth, the artist began his wanderlust at a young age, traveling extensively throughout the world seeking the truth to humanity’s origins. Theodore’s artistic practice is a response to acquired knowledge, and his applications are often learned through personal experiences. Color and form are paramount in the vocabulary of his work, combining dyed textile, scenic paint, oil paint, dirt, gravel and grout to convey the constant balance between nature and humanity. 

For the artist: “My research and artistic lineage is one blossom in a garden of artists, philosophers and mystics who through their own journey have all come to the same conclusion: we, every living organism, come from the stars.” Star Maps is on view at Show Gallery 1515 N Gardner St, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Wangari Mathenge: Aura of Quiet @ Roberts Projects In Los Angeles

In this current body of work, Wangari Mathenge, draws her inspiration from “The Danger of a Single Story,” a 2009 Ted Talk delivered by the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In this vein, Mathenge takes as her subject complex human beings and situations, focusing her attention on those liminal moments that are rarely distinguished or registered but are essential to the narration of an unabridged existence. Aura of Quiet is on view through November 16 at Roberts Projects 5801 Washington Blvd, Culver City. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Micro Era: Media Art from China @ Kulturforum In Berlin

From documentary film images, and the adapted use of classical film language to the aesthetics of Japanese Anime, the works of Micro Era focus on and explore the relationships between mind, body and technology – with installations and single-channel videos ranging from the 1980s to the present. Historically, within the Euro-American context, video art is often regarded as a democratising art form – through the rapid circulation of information and global events by fast-access technologies. Cao Fei, Fang Di, Lu Yang, and Zhang Peili scrutinise the seductive thesis of this democratisation by reflecting in their visual language the mass production of goods as well as how images and virtual subjectivities are produced and consumed, and how we understand our world through imaging technology. At the same time, in the cross-generational exhibition with documentary, narrative and installation references and the expansion into virtual space, the central directions in the development of media art in China are presented. Micro Era is on view through January 26 2020 at Kulturforum Stauffenbergstraße 41 10785 Berlin. photographs courtesy of the Staatliche Museum

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge On Her First Ever West Coast Exhibition

Tom of Finland Foundation and Lethal Amounts present iconic artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge exhibition PANDROGENY I & II. Opening tonight and running until November 24th 2019 at Tom of Finland Foundation and Lethal Amounts Gallery. This marks the first time that the legendary artist’s work has been on view on the West Coast. Below is a sneak peek from a very special interview we did of Genesis Breyer P’Orridge with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist for our next print issue. Click here for tickets to the exhibitions.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST The exhibition in Los Angeles will be called Pandrogyny 1 and 2?

P-ORRIDGE For two locations. One at Tom of Finland, in his house... they keep it as it was when he lived there. When you do an exhibition, what you put there goes amongst all his things, so that one is mainly sculptures. There was a mini retrospective in Holland this year, then it went to Berlin, and now Tom of Finland. It has things like ‘Tongue Kiss,’ which is two wolf heads, and the tongues have been replaced with knife blades. The one above is turning slowly and once every turn the two ends of the knives click. Another one is Bubblegum Machine, and it represents the womb. It has ice cubes and scorpions. It’s the myth of biological replication.

OBRIST Living scorpions?

P-ORRIDGE No unfortunately. It would be nice but no one would let me do that, but real scorpions that have been dried. So it’s things like that, they’re all created out of things that have been around me in my living space, that’s how I always work. Things that are already here that have been drawn to me in some way and then they become something.

OBRIST: What’s your relationship with L.A.?

GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE I never had one really. I would never live there. To me it has a strange atmosphere. It’s like it has a big cave underneath, with a dark energy in it that you can fall into by mistake. It doesn’t suit me at all.

Jim Shaw: Strange Beautiful @ Praz-Delavallade In Paris

Uncle Sam, sickened by Gremlins from the Kremin. Checkers, Richard Nixon’s dog. Brett Kavanaugh, a judge accused of rape, appointed to the Supreme Court by Donald Trump. Mark Zuckerberg, one of the new masters of the world. Jim Shaw’s recent paintings are swarming with grotesque and nefarious figures evoking contemporary American history. Yet, even if these works drip with a sharp satirical intent, we are not dealing with a form of political art, for instance, AgitProp – the creation of an ideological community around a form or an idea. Jim Shaw’s historical models are more distinctively anachronistic, closer to History Painting as it was practiced at the end of the nineteenth century. History Painting brought together discursive tools stemming from a critical rationalist tradition, alongside allegorical images. Another reference of Shaw’s, older still, is Hieronymus Bosch’s hermetic and nightmarish visions, the intent of which remains, even today, half a millennium after their creation, the subject of the most contradictory interpretations. Strange Beautiful is on view through November 2 at Praz-Delavallade 5 rue des Haudriettes, Paris. photographs courtesy of the gallery

"Back Side / Fashion from Behind", An Off-Site Exhibition @ Musée Bourdelle In Paris

In a society that is obsessed with people’s faces, "Back Side / Fashion from Behind" is an original and unexpected theme. By addressing our body’s relationship to clothing from a social and psychological point of view, the exhibition questions the perception we have of our own and other people’s backs.

The exhibition spreads across the Great Hall of Plasters, the contemporary Portzamparc extension and Antoine Bourdelle’s studio. The models on display establish a dialogue between fashion and sculpture, a dialogue with the works of this great master of the turn of the 20th century. "Back Side – Fashion from Behind" gives us a new take on the works of Bourdelle: we look with new eyes at the powerful, muscular backs and the slender outlines of his sculptures. "Back Side / Fashion from Behind"  is on view through November 15 at Musée Bourdelle 18, rue Antoine-Bourdelle, Paris 15e. photographs courtesy of Palais Galliera

Jasmine Nyende: Crested Crane @ AA|LA Gallery In Los Angeles

Through conversation, meditation, and rediscovery of “lost pasts,” Jasmine Nyende uses art to explore and mediate her mother’s southern American roots and her father’s Ugandan genealogy. Incorporating paintings, fiber arts, performance, poetry, meditation, spoken word, and embroidered ready-to-wear clothes, Nyende manifests an alluring confluence of body, identity, and ancestry.

Crested Crane materializes through Nyende’s use of fibers and manifests a particular mending of personal identity that echoes throughout the body of work. For Nyende, art is a way to speak to ancestors while asserting her own individuality. Specifically, the crocheted and knitted works relate to the American history of Black female labor in the fiber arts. The web of soft textiles act as connective tissue, binding the vibrant images and colorways into a complex yet comprehensive family narrative that would otherwise be inaccessible. Crested Crane is on view through December 14 at AA|LA 7313 melrose avenue, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery