Headlines: Recent Drawings By Derek Boshier @ Night Gallery In Los Angeles

Derek Boshier’s practice has taken many forms over the years: he has produced films, paintings, sculptures, album covers as well as theatrical sets, but drawing has remained central the entire time. Magazines and newspaper clippings are the primary source for his “Headline” drawings and the immediacy of the medium has allowed him to react to current events in real time. While the drawings exhibited here are all recent, they are the culmination of decades of dedication to drawing and conviction to understanding the world at large through lines on paper.

Headlines is on view through March 13 by appointment and online viewing room @ Night Gallery 2276 E 16th Street

Christine Wang & Luke Murphy Present Screen Time @ Night Gallery In Los Angeles

Screen Time is an exhibition of new work by Luke Murphy and Christine Wang. Both artists address the screen as a digital intermediary for experience. Though its trajectory began long ago, the screen's total encroachment upon daily life reached new heights in 2020, becoming the primary tool of community engagement, creative exploration, and consumer activity in response to long-term shelter-in-place restrictions. Murphy and Wang consider the omnipresence of the screen without dogma, addressing its cultural and perceptual implications with a sense of humor and an appreciation of unexpected beauty.

In equal parts euphoric, critical, escapist, hilarious, and mournful, their work presents a kaleidoscopic approach to a moment of cultural inundation and mass uncertainty, finding value in the sheer play of perception and the long standing role of art to illuminate through confusion.

Screen Time is on view through March 13 by appointment and online viewing room @ Night Gallery 2276 E 16th Street

Jeffrey Gibson's It Can Be Said of Them @ Roberts Projects In Los Angeles

Jeffrey Gibson’s solo exhibition, It Can Be Said of Them, features new work exploring themes of identity–as it relates to diversity and inclusivity–to uplift the unique experiences, struggles and personal victories shaping the current fight for LGBTQIA visibility. It Can Be Said of Them takes its title from a print produced by Sister Corita Kent in 1969. Kent’s print was part of her “Heroes and Sheroes” series, undertaken after she formally left the church as a serving nun, and depicts images of Jesus, Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy. The men are surrounded by a quote by author E.B. White that reads, “It can be said of him, as of few men in like position, that he did not fear the weather and did not turn his sails, but instead, challenged the wind itself to improve its direction and to cause it to blow more softly and more kindly over the world and its people.”[1] A strong supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, Kent viewed these four figures, among many others, as modern day martyrs, especially during a time of aggressive political and social unrest.

It is in these works and others on view, that Gibson expands on how gender, as identity, is a liminal space; one that occupies and explores the in-between, the threshold, the reconfigured and the temporal. As a transitory space or state, it is characterized by ambiguity, hybridity and fluidity, with the great potential for subversion and radical transformation. Writing about anti-structure, cultural anthropologist Victor Turner argues that this liminal state is “a conceptual space where the ordinary world falls away, and the hierarchies of everyday life are no longer applicable.”[2] It is in this sublimation of surrender where joy can be found; where one re-articulates a new identity beyond the restricted spheres tied to tradition, geography, or social construct, and lives openly after abandoning the constraints of the everyday. Gibson’s most recent work is a reaffirmation of this profound and total freedom.

It Can Be Said of Them is on view through February 27 @ Roberts Projects 5801 Washington Boulevard Culver City. photographs courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California

California African American Museum Hosts Virtual Screening of Body and Soul

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Oscar Devereaux Micheaux, a pioneer of African American cinema, produced more than forty films during the dawn of the 20th century, including Body and Soul (1925). The silent film features the acclaimed stage actor and activist Paul Robeson, who performs as both a mystifying preacher and doting inventor, capturing the seduction of faith and the complicated power structures that can surround it. This new digital restoration, which is included in the Pioneers of African American Cinema collection, has been produced by the artist Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, who also contributed a new score for the 2015 re-release. The online screening of Body and Soul is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Enunciated Life, which utilizes Black spiritual beliefs as a point of departure for considering modes of surrender and includes work by Steffani Jemison, a contemporary artist whose practice is in dialogue with Micheaux’s films.

CAAM will host the screening Thursday, February 25 5:00 - 6:30 p.m. RSVP for screening instructions.

Friday Playlist: Space Is The Place

Film still, Barbarella, 1968

Film still, Barbarella, 1968

A trip though the cosmos, one cloud, one star, one planet at a time. A collection of soul ballads, sonic love letters, and eccentric oddities.

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Something Vexes Thee? New Paintings By Jessie Makinson @ François Ghebaly Gallery In Los Angeles

 
 

The title of the exhibition, Something Vexes Thee? is a rhetorical question, at once sarcastic and decorous. It’s what’s up with you? wrapped ironically in genteel robes. It is also what the witch asks of The Sheriff of Nottingham after his plans have been foiled once again by the trickster Robin Hood in the 1991 film adaptation of the English legend. Jessie Makinson’s painting of the same name is a decentered diptych crawling with potentially vexing vignettes. A couple of fighting dogs have upset a basket of peaches, a parlour game in a backroom equivocially suggests sensuous and sinister play, various limbs jut in and out of frames and doorways, suggesting narrow escapes. Along the right foreground, where painters traditionally place a repoussoir to gently guide the viewer’s eye back into the composition, the eyes of a steely, nymph-ish character gaze back at you over a crooked arm, annoyed, perhaps, at the intrusion. Makinson reimagines the hierarchical grid of the painting into a complex and generous container for many stories at once.

In her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” Ursula Le Guin explains how the vessel, as opposed to the weapon, is the earliest and most significant “cultural device.” What has been gained, she asks, by characterizing history as a spear, an arrow, a sword piercing lines of victims and losers that span the centuries? What if we see the human story as a container, a sack, a vessel allowing for the jumbled freeplay of many narratives at once? Jessie Makinson takes this as an invitation to muss up the fixities that haunt historical painting. Instead of villains, heroes, or even genres, she offers story—not as an escape from reality, but as a tool for imagining a new one.

Something Vexes Thee? is on view through February 27 @ François Ghebaly Gallery 2245 E Washington Blvd.,
Los Angeles

magic passed life Features Work By Mike Linskie & Lucia Love @ darkZone In New Jersey

This place changes a little each time I come back to it. Even through a mask, the dust can find a way to settle into the back of your nostrils. The light has shifted, and the air has a frenetic energy in it. There’s a leak in the crawlspace in the far back corner, which has collected in a pool and traveled down the gentle slope of the retaining wall all the way to the opposite corner. The space seems to be salivating, maybe in expectation of my arrival, or maybe in the anticipation of being one step closer to an impending finality. Or is it bleeding? What will it’s scabs look like? This peculiar codependence has done damage to us both. Visit by visit, wounds are inflicted, moved passed, and brushed over. How will we heal together?

magic passed life was on view February 1 @ darkZone in New Jersey

Bojan Sarcevic: L'Extime @ Galerie Frank Elbaz In Paris

Bojan Sarcevic’s ensembles explore the technoid fascination of our society today while offering unsettling relics of a future in which bodies and machines commune with an intimacy so odd that it becomes an extimacy.

Each marble block is scored with geometric cuts and hosts a functioning industrial freezer inserted into or placed atop of it. Like alien sarcophagi, the marble blocks in a deeply veined blue, green, or rose tone seem to engulf the machines. Three slightly larger-than-life muscular figures surround and engage with the marble sculptures. Their distinct postures and carved stone heads create an eerie unison. Contrasting with their seemingly unbridled masculinity, the figures are draped in delicate silk blouses cut in characteristically 1980’s silhouettes, while shibari rope bondage dresses their hips and feet.

The title of the exhibition, L’Extime (extimacy), sets a stage. The term denotes how even our most intimate feelings can be strange and foreign to us.

L’Extime is on view through February 27 @ galerie frank elbaz, Paris 66 Rue de Turenne

Haim Steinbach: 1991 – 1993 @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

For more than four decades, Haim Steinbach has explored the psychological, aesthetic, and cultural aspects of collecting and arranging found objects. In selecting items that range from the obscure to the ordinary, the private to the ethnographic, Steinbach emphasizes notions of circulation and human connection.

The exhibition highlights a concentrated three-year period in the artist’s career and draws upon memory, offering a recontextualization of his own historic practice and an occasion for reflection. Comprising a seminal large-scale “display” and objects from the same time period, the exhibition is populated by individuals who are both named and unnamed, touching upon family gatherings and traditions, intimacy, and the personifying power objects can hold.

Haim Steinbach: 1991-1993 is on view through February 27 @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery 521 W 21st St, New York

KW Institute For Contemporary Art Celebrates It's 30th Anniversary With Year-long Program Of Exhibitions

Founded on July 1, 1991 by Klaus Biesenbach, Alexandra Binswanger, Philipp von Doering, Clemens Homburger, and Alfonso Rutigliano, KUNST-WERKE BERLIN e. V. put down roots in a derelict former margarine factory located on Auguststraße 69 in the Berlin-Mitte district. After organizing the pivotal innovative exhibition project 37 Räume in 1992, artistic director Klaus Biesenbach continued to present ground-breaking exhibitions that won the institution critical acclaim, both nationally and internationally, and in 1996 he initiated the now widely renowned Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art.

In its thirty years, KW has considerably shaped the development of contemporary art by critically examining current tendencies and discourses within society. To mark its 30th anniversary, KUNST-WERKE BERLIN e. V. is is hosting a year-long program of exhibitions featuring artists Renée Green, Leonilson, Michael Stevenson, and Amelie von Wulffen; group exhibitions co-curated by artists Iman Issa and Ghislaine Leung; and a new performance piece by Michele Rizzo.

This series of new commissions, featuring Susan Philipsz’s acoustic work in KW’s courtyard in homage of political activist Rosa Luxemburg on the anniversary of her execution, was created during Philipsz’s residency at KW in 2002; the re-installation of Katharina Sieverding’s monumental print Deutschland wird deutscher (1993) is to be displayed in the entranceway of KW as well as on billboards across Berlin in April-May; and artist Sissel Tolaas will create a limited edition of soap carefully composed from particles she collected at the KW building, a former margarine factory.

Complementing this program, a major two-part art auction, organized in collaboration with renowned Berlin-based fine art auction house Grisebach, will take place in June and December 2021, featuring works by over 60 artists who have significantly contributed to KW’s legacy. The annual program’s key event will be a weekend-long celebration on July 2 – 4, 2021, featuring an extensive program of events, performances, and the launch of the first publication retracing KW’s history.

KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s full 30-year anniversary program can be found here.

Appalachian Spring: Rare Performance of Martha Graham's Iconic Masterwork Available Via Planet Classroom

Premiering in 1944 with an original score by Aaron Copland, set design by Isamu Noguchi, and costuming by Martha Graham.

Cast and Credits
DIRECTOR: Peter Glushanok
PRODUCER: Nathan Kroll
EDITOR: Eleanor Hamerow
CAST: Martha Graham as The Bride, Stuart Hodes as The Husbandman, Bertram Ross as The Preacher, Matt Turney as The Pioneering Woman, and Miriam Cole, Helen McGehee, Ethel Winter, and Yuriko as The Followers.

Autre Exclusive Premiere: Cat Power "From Fur City" An Elegy To Benjamin Smoke

Autre presents an exclusive premiere of a never-before-seen live video of Cat Power (Chan Marshall) performing "From Fur City" at Tonic in NYC in 2003, a powerful elegy to radical and legendary musician and songwriter, Benjamin Smoke who died on January 29, 1999. The song "From Fur City" has never been on a proper studio album. Filmed by Scott Crary (Kill Your Idols, 2004).

Couture From Home: An Inside Look At The Making Of Alexander McQueen's Pre-SS21 Collection

AMQ Team - NA_PHOTO-2020-05-15-11-56-08.jpg

As all offices, ateliers and factories were closed over lockdown, the Alexander McQueen design team were sent stock fabric to their homes, which was over-printed, over-dyed and renewed.

This collection harks back to the early days of McQueen and a free, make-do-and-mend spirit. Garments – from signature sharply cut masculine-inspired tailoring to prom dresses - were cut by hand at kitchen tables, fabric was dip-dyed in gardens. A mid-twentieth century silhouette – sweetheart necklines, soft shoulders and overblown skirts – is complimented by a hyper-feminine colour palette in shades of pink, from albion to fuchsia rose, and red, punctuated by classic black. Asymmetric hand-draped silks and exploded bows nod to the haute couture tradition finishing an audaciously romantic look.

Look 26
A dress with off-the-shoulder drape and a tiered skirt in washed silk organza dip-dyed albion pink and black.

look 27
A double-layered tuxedo jacket in black wool silk with a wrapped bow peplum in albion pink micro-faille and cigarette trousers in black wool silk with a black satin tuxedo stripe.

 
 

look 28 
An oyster ruffle dress with a high neck and scalloped back in washed organza dip-dyed albion  pink and black.

 
 

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An asymmetric, floor-length dress with an exploded skirt volume in washed calico silk organza with sketchbook hand embroidery over a skeletal corset in nude silk tulle. The embroidery was inspired by drawings in the notebooks of the Alexander McQueen design studio teams.

Friday Playlist: Hipgnosis

Enrique Metinides, A Woman Grieves over Her Dead Boyfriend, Stabbed in Chapultepec Park While Resisting Robbers, Mexico City, 1985

Enrique Metinides, A Woman Grieves over Her Dead Boyfriend, Stabbed in Chapultepec Park While Resisting Robbers, Mexico City, 1985

A warm dive into a hipgnotic bath of repetitive grooves, atmospheric tracks and metallic vibrations. Back seat, leather upholstery, dark rooms, flashing lights. A meditation on forgetting who you are on a Saturday night. The dream of vanishing.

Listen on Spotify: A warm dive into a hipgnotic bath of repetitive grooves, atmospheric tracks and metallic vibrations. Back seat, leather upholstery, dark rooms, flashing lights. A meditation on forgetting who you are on a Saturday night. The dream of vanishing.

Watch S.R. Studio's Debut "Apparitions" For Paris Haute Couture Week

California Couture. A collection created in America, reflecting America. Shot in Los Angeles on January 19, 2021, the last day of the Trump presidency. 

The Puritan and Pilgrims, traveling to America in the 17th century, viewed the United States as a “Redeemer Nation” — a belief in the country’s divinely ordained redemptive role in the world. It is a narrative being profoundly questioned today, inseparable from the enduring inequalities and ongoing threat of violence framed as patriotism.  

Responding to the history of the United States — imagined and real — Sterling Ruby explores the intersection of fashion, art, craft and culture for this first haute couture collection created at the invitation of the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, Paris. Silhouettes, shapes, garment archetypes reference American heritage: Puritan collars, styles of dress inextricable from colonialism, neocolonialism, and religious persecution. These contrast with the uniforms of modern America: references to skate wear, workwear, business wear. 

creative direction and editing by Ruby

Watch Part 2 of The Broad Museum's Time Decorated: The Musical Influences of Jean-Michel Basquiat Featuring James Spooner

“Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time” Jean-Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988). The Broad announces Time Decorated: The Musical Influences of Jean-Michel Basquiat, a three-part video series dedicated to the famed New York City artist. The video series includes three segments, Jazz and Bebop, Punk and No Wave, and 2 Bebop to Hip-Hop via Basquiat, where musicians, creatives and scholars discuss the impact of each music genre on Basquiat’s now iconic style. All three segments were filmed at The Broad, in newly installed Basquiat galleries displaying the museum’s uniquely deep representation of the artist’s work. The "Punk and No Wave" segment, hosted by James Spooner, co-founder of Afro-Punk and who ran an underground club on Canal Street in the early ‘90’s, features tunes by James Chance and The Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Basquiat’s band Gray, Liquid Liquid, DNA, and Mars. Click here to read a conversation between Spooner and The Broad’s director of audience engagement, Ed Patuto.

Time and Intent: A Solo Exhibition By Alex Heilbron @ Meliksetian Briggs In Los Angeles

The five paintings featured in Alex Heilbron’s Time and Intent are part of a larger body of work she began prior to, and completed after, the onset of the pandemic. The various patterning techniques that guide this work facilitate distillation of concepts like adolescence, decay and movement into notions of temporality. Not unlike the specular aspect of a graph, these paintings find a balance in transition between dualisms: order and chaos, active and passive, before and after.

Time and Intent is on view through March 27 @ Meliksetian | Briggs 313 N Fairfax Avenue

Danny Fox's The Sweet and Burning Hills @ Alexander Berggruen In New York

Danny Fox’s new paintings at Alexander Berggruen capture the conflicting spirit of the Hollywood Hills through boldly-rendered expressive portraiture, mystical elements, and allusions to smoke and fire. Fox blends domestic imagery with influences from his natural surroundings to create eerily striking articulations of the human psyche. In the show’s namesake 2019 painting The Sweet and Burning Hills, a figure lets a mask hang below her chin to reveal her face, seemingly indifferent to the fire-teeming background. The ghost-like transparent outline of her body suggests her transience within the burning environment, or perhaps she exists as a distant memory. As the figure is impermanent and atemporal, so too is the landscape immortalized in painting while burning to ash. photographs by Dario Lasagni

The Sweet and Burning Hills is on view by appointment through February 26 @ Alexander Berggruen 1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3

Steven Harwick's SKiNFLiCK Solo Show @ URSA NYC

i’M DiRTY LiKE iCE CREAM MELTED iN BEDSHEETS AND FRESH MUD SQUiSHED OUT OF CROCS HOLES. YOU ARE HiGH OCTANE TUBE SOCKS iN PiSS STAiNED BRiEFS. GiVE ME YOUR GOLD TEETH, i’LL KEEP THEM iN EVERY POCKET. i’M CUM RiCH LiKE A MATCHSTiCK ANARCHY SYMBOL ABOUT TO GET LiT.

SKiNFLiCK is on view virtually and for in-person appointments @ URSA NYC

7 Never-Before-Seen Works By Rosie Lee Tompkins @ Anthony Meier Fine Arts In San Francisco

American artist, Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936–2006) is considered one of the greatest quiltmakers of all time and one of the century’s greatest artists. The seven artworks on view at Anthony Meier Fine Arts date from 1974 to 2006, the year of the artist’s death. This significant exhibition coincides with a major retrospective of her work at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and includes a newly commissioned essay by Lawrence Rinder, the longtime champion of Tompkins and former Director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

Rosie Lee Tompkins is the pseudonym of quilter Effie Mae Howard, who carefully guarded her privacy after her rise to national prominence in the late 1990s. Born on September 6, 1936 to a sharecropping family in southeastern Arkansas, she learned quilting from her mother as a child but did not begin to practice the craft seriously until the 1980s, when she was living in the Bay Area city of Richmond. Tompkins was a devout member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, and credited God with her uncanny sense of color. Many of her quilts were made with family members or friends in mind, and can be seen as prayers on their behalf, including her sons.

Few of Tompkins’ quilts conform to the traditional scale of a bed covering, a byproduct of the conceptual logic inherent in each piece. Her quilts are characterized by the variation in scale of the triangles and squares used in her patterns, creating “asymmetrical forms that pull, crumble, and bend,” says Rinder. Tompkins “transformed everything she touched with her improvisatory piecing and unerring sense of color, composition and scale,” notes critic Roberta Smith. “In the still-unfolding field of African-American quilt-making, she has no equal.”

Rosie Lee Tompkins is on view through February 19 @ Anthony Meier Fine Arts 1969 California Street, San Francisco