ANA MENDIETA

Her video works ‘Creek (1974)’ and ‘Untitled: Silueta Series (1978)’ will be on view from the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection and courtesy of Galerie LeLong & Co. In the ‘Silueta series (1973–1980)’, Mendieta staged performances where she laid down in natural landscapes or covered her body in organic materials and then documented the resulting imprints or silhouettes. The impression into the earth, the outline of her body suggests its absence. She marks the land, leaves traces of her body, of its existence. In many of the ‘Siluetas’, there is water or fire, the primordial elements of destruction or creation. Her silhouette in the video featured has been drawn in gunpowder, it looks like earth until it ignites, and her silhouette comes alive in sputtering flames, scorching the earth and perhaps levitating the memory of her body beyond its horizontal plane.

In ‘Creek’ she floats Christ-like but face-down in moving stream. Her body is visible, no longer an allusion, an impression, but she has positioned herself almost between life and death, in ritual union with the moving water that carries her body,

Born in Cuba, Mendieta moved to Iowa at age 12 with her sister as part of a US government asylum program for adolescents after the Cuban revolution. Mendieta eventually enrolled at the University of Iowa and, upon completing her undergraduate degree, began her graduate studies in art. After training as a painter, Mendieta quickly grew dissatisfied with the medium and transitioned to the university’s new MFA in Intermedia program, where she began to develop her interdisciplinary work. Throughout her career, Mendieta’s explorations of representation were grounded in an intersectional conception of identity where race, gender, age, and class operated simultaneously. “As non-white women, our struggles are two-fold,” Mendieta wrote in a curatorial statement for an exhibition of women artists of color. “This exhibition points not necessarily to the injustice or incapacity of a society that has not been willing to include us, but more towards a personal will to continue being ‘other’".

 “My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that unite me to the Universe. It is a return to the maternal source.”

-Ana Mendieta

RADCLIFFE BAILEY

On view in the exhibition is ‘Monument to the Known (2021)’ which employs a black sand plaster head– a recurring motif in Bailey’s work. The head might be a stand-in for the artist and/or representative of the everyman through whom this history flows. The figurehead is adorned with glasses and a Union Civil War cap. The monument is made with charred wood beams which speak to previous destruction, of homes destroyed in flames, and a tabby concrete block, an early building material used in the coastal South produced largely by slave laborers who would have converted oyster shells into concrete. Enshrined in this concrete is one gorgeous solitary conch shell – the kind you might hold up to your ear to hear the whisper of the sea, a memory of the crashing tide which bore us across oceans to this place today.

Radcliffe Bailey (b. 1968, Bridgetown, NJ; lives and works in Atlanta, GA) is a painter, sculptor, and mixed media artist who utilizes the layering of imagery, culturally resonant materials, and text to explore themes of ancestry, race, migration and collective memory. His work often incorporates found materials and objects from his past into textured compositions, including traditional African sculpture, tintypes of his family members, ships, train tracks and Georgia red clay. The cultural significance and rhythmic properties of music are also important influences that can be seen throughout his oeuvre. An iconic work of Bailey’s, ‘Windward Coast–West Coast Slave Trade’, is composed of hundreds of discarded piano keys. This piece expresses his love of music, as well as the history, culture and spirituality contained in song. Here, the undulating keys are arranged to resemble the turbulent waters of Middle Passage. The waters of this work are physically embodied by music, an intangible entity carried over to new worlds and a trans-generational vestige of African heritages. Individual experience serves as a departure point in Bailey’s quest to excavate the collective consciousness of African diasporas and regional American identities. Found objects and imagery present seemingly bygone pasts as contemporary, neon Northern Stars that lead us through Bailey’s constellation of works on view, exploring and interweaving our shared histories. Often quilt-like in aesthetic, his practice creates links between diasporic histories and potential futures, investigating the evolution or stagnation of notions of identity.

GUADALUPE MARAVILLA

On view in the exhibition is a recent work ‘Mantaray Drawing (2022)’ which draws its title from the depiction on the righthand side of the artist dressed ashes ‘Ghetto Blaster’ character, sitting atop a Manta Ray. Before his family fled El Salvador, Maravilla nearly drowned in the Pacific Ocean but was saved by a Manta Ray. The work evokes this life-altering experience and the power, healing and revitalization associated with water. The drawing also features a retablo painting, depicting the artist in his hospital bed. The Spanish text along the bottom of the painting translates to: “I Guadalupe Maravilla dedicate this with all my heart in gratitude for this second opportunity that life has given me to continue forward on this path as an artist and healer”. The snakes in these drawings reference both the Caduceus staff of the Greek messenger god Hermes, and the Rod of Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine. Both ancient Greek symbols are now the dominant symbols for professional healthcare associations in the United States. —excerpt from text courtesy of PPOW gallery.

Guadalupe Maravilla creates intricately layered paintings, large-scale sculptures, and therapeutic performances that draw from his personal history and Central American ancestry. Often resembling mythic creatures or ornate reliquaries, Maravilla’s works examine issues of migration, disease, and generational trauma, while creating new rituals for care, healing, and regeneration. At age eight, Maravilla was part of the first wave of undocumented unaccompanied children to migrate from Central America to the United States. Today, the artist’s work is a means both to process that experience as well as to create healing spaces that address the harsh realities of migration and immigration. Maravilla juxtaposes indigenous and contemporary forms of knowledge, craft, and language in his work, drawing upon the rich cultural legacies of indigenous and immigrant peoples. A teacher and mutual-aid organizer, Maravilla works closely with undocumented and marginalized communities, distributing resources and hosting workshops that provide access to ancient modes of healing, such as herbal medicine, mycology, and sound baths.

CHASE HALL

‘The Great White Hanging (2020)’, on loan from the Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody, might be read as a reversal of power with the image of a Black fisherman and his catch of the day—a great white shark bound, tied, and strung up--- the rope eerily reminiscent of a noose.

Chase Hall’s paintings and sculptures respond to generational celebrations and traumas encoded throughout American history. Responding to a variety of social and visual systems, each of which intersects with complex trajectories of race, hybridity, economics, and personal agency, Hall generates images whose materiality is as crucial to their compositional makeup as their indelible approach to representation. A central body of paintings, made with drip-brew techniques derived from coffee beans and acrylic pigments on cotton supports, is notable for both its conceptual scope and its intimacy. The use of brewed coffee carries powerful symbolic weight since it evokes centuries-old geopolitical systems associated with the commodification of a plant native to Africa, but in Hall’s hands, it also becomes a means of achieving subtle visual textures, a range of brown skin tones, and a mark-making vocabulary precipitated on the closeness of touch. Above all, however, it is his improvisational willingness to immerse himself in the indefinable personal hieroglyphics of each picture that gives his work its resonance and impact.

NICOLE EISENMAN

Her drawing ‘Raising the Man Flag 1987 – 2002)’, on loan from the Collection of Beth DeWoody, is an iconic representation of her drawings from this period that took a fantasy community of Amazon women as a point of departure for a series of works that feature strong women capturing men, sometimes castrating them, aggressively inflicting violence and taking control. The work featured shows a group of these strong naked muscular women who have bound and tied a man who hangs from the end of large pole. The artist has been quoted as speaking about the way Michelangelo painted women by working from male models and then amplifying their feminine aspects—she has said they ‘they were as close as I could see in culture to trans-masculine bodies.’ These Amazonian women are painted with a musculature that seems to reference Michelangelo’s painting technique but amped up for the artists contemporary imagining. They exert their power, enacting a kind of revenge fantasy on the male figure who is strung up to be hung, while the composition quite clearly echoes the famous Marine Corps War Memorial that depicts the raising of the American Flag during the Battle of Iwo Jima in 2915.

One of the most important figurative painters working today, Nicole Eisenman explores the human condition in paintings, drawings, and mixed-media sculpture. Her works are full of tenderness and dark humor, often populated with emotionally resonant, cartoonish figures with outsized hands, a clear indicator of her work and her style. She paints herself, her family, friends, and characters in scenes that might be imagined but that have deep sense of art historical composition. Energetic, painterly flourishes and intense colors are key aspects of her paintings which focus on figures who lounge dreamily or move through space with calm and contemplative countenances. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Eisenman was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2015 and was included in both the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial in 2019. Eisenman’s paintings have been acquired for the public collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, among other institutions.

 BRUCE NAUMAN

‘Raw War’ (1971)’, ‘Study for Holograms A & E (1970)’ and ‘Infrared Outtakes (2006)’ are all on loan from the Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody. This selection of works exemplifies the artists experimentation with text and his use of the body and documenting of the body to create work with what he had on hand. Games or distortions of language and body are the medium and the viewer is given the opportunity to see the significance in the simple, yet powerful actions documented.

Bruce Nauman has been recognized since the early ‘70s as one of the most innovative and provocative of America’s contemporary artists. Confronted with the question “What to do?” in his studio soon after leaving school, Nauman had the simple but profound realization that “If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product.” Working in the diverse mediums of sculpture, video, film, printmaking, performance, and installation, Nauman concentrates less on the development of a characteristic style and more on the way in which a process or activity can transform or become a work of art. A survey of his diverse output demonstrates the alternately political, prosaic, spiritual, and crass methods by which Nauman examines life in all its gory details, mapping the human arc between life and death. The text from an early neon work proclaims: “The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.” Whether or not we—or even Nauman—agree with this statement, the underlying subtext of the piece emphasizes the way in which the audience, artist, and culture at large are involved in the resonance a work of art will ultimately have. Nauman lives in New Mexico.

WANGECHI MUTU

On view in the exhibition are three works from the Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody

‘Underground Hornship (2018); ‘Mwotaji (The Dreamer) (2016)’ and ‘Howl (2006)’. These works exemplify her artistic practice centered around issues of ritual, race, consumerism, and the politics of identity. East African mythology, Afro-surrealist elements of science fiction and fantasy, critiques of African and female stereotypes, and universal notions of power, race, and colonialism are all present in her work. Among Mutu’s best-known works are her magazine-based collages, begun in 2002 and continuing today, depicting grotesquely beautiful hybrids of female figures and animal parts with distorted lips, eyes, and heads, such as ‘Howl’ which appears to be a shrieking bird-like feminine fantasy gorgon creature—a site of both desire and disgust.

‘Underground Hornship’ approximates an antler shed, the patina black with the tips of the horns in bronze. And finally, ‘Mwotaji (The Dreamer)’, a bronze female head with knots in her hair, that that lies resting peacefully on a Carrera marble support, reclaims the appropriated African masks that influenced a generation of modernist sculptors (most notably perhaps in direct reference to Constantin Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse). There is something of violence inherent in this decapitation, the head without its rightful body; but the features are calm, restful – and most importantly dreaming of futures perhaps not yet imagined.

Wangechi Mutu is a contemporary Kenyan artist noted for her work which engages issues of gender, race, art history, and personal identity. Creating complex collages, sculptures, and performances that draw from the aesthetics of traditional African crafts, Mutu engages in her own form of storytelling; her works document the contemporary myth-making of endangered cultural heritage. The almost science fiction-like nature of her imagery has placed her work within the realm of Afrofuturism, and her practice is often discussed as providing an alternate course of history for people of African descent. Born in 1972 in Nairobi, Kenya, she received her BFA from Cooper Union in 1996, and subsequently her MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 2000. In 2019, her exhibition The New Ones, will free Us, was featured as the inaugural Facade Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It consisted of four bronze sculptures. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

EDGAR ARCENEAUX

‘Untitled (2007), on view from the Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody, is a charcoal drawing of a shark head that seems to come into frame from above. Splattered over with the red spray paint, the work is ominous and foreboding. It speaks of a violence that has just occurred or may be about to occur. Instead of emerging from the depths, the shark seems to descend towards us from above—a sign of a world reversed.

Edgar Arceneaux investigates historical patterns through drawings, installations, and multimedia events, such as the reenactment of Ben Vereen’s tragically misunderstood blackface performance at Ronald Reagan’s 1981 Inaugural Gala. In the artist’s work, linear logic is abandoned in favor of wordplay and visual associations, revealing how language, technology, and systems of ordering produce reality as much as describe them. Seemingly disparate elements—such as science fiction, civil rights era speeches, techno music, and the crumbling architecture of Detroit—find a new synchronicity in the artist’s hands, ultimately pointing to larger historical forces such as the rise of the surveillance state. Arceneaux’s installations have taken the form of labyrinths, libraries, multi-channel videos, and drawn landscapes that change over the course of an exhibition, only ever offering a partial view of the whole at any given moment. This fragmentation extends to the artist’s use of historical research in his work, such as FBI documents concerning civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., where redacted passages are presented on mirrors that reflect the viewer’s curious gaze.

NICOLETTE MISHKAN

In ‘Kindle’, one of these gorgeous water creatures disdainfully and sensually spits fire from her mouth. These figures seem to maintain a tension between desire and destruction, between sex and violence. While the mermaid may be a mythical figure, she has always been the vilified and idolized symbol of seduction who lures sailors to their watery grave but is rendered sexless in her fish/female hybridity. Mishkan’s work is also influenced by her Iranian heritage and given the current situation in Iran, we would be remiss not to read these feminine figures in response to the censorship and violence against women. Their sensual semi-nude bodies, bald or with hair covered by swimming cap, are safe to exist and thrive, wielding their own power in these imagined underwater realms.

Nicolette Mishkan (b. 1986, Los Angeles) graduated from Otis College of Art and Design in 2008. A first-generation Iranian American, she lives and works in Los Angeles. Nicolette Mishkan’s paintings are portals into a utopia where land or sea legs are not required to venture the totality of the globe, where men are nonexistent, where violence only exists in the pleasure of bondage or as a rite of spring. In her cosmology, the mermaid swims through the symbolic order, exploiting her duality to tickle, provoke, and entangle her established relationships with paternal consciousness.

ABRAHAM CRUZVILLEGAS

‘Esperanza’ (2003), on loan from the collection of Craig Robins pairs what appears to be two turtle shells one atop the other, pressed belly to belly, and suspended by a bouquet of galvanized steel rods. Like the detritus from a construction site, or ecological disaster, the work pairs industrial forms with natural ones, which are caught in a tense dance to form an amalgamated totem. 

Abraham Cruzvillegas’s artistic process is deeply influenced by his surroundings; rather than being defined by a particular medium, many of his projects are linked by the platform autoconstrucción: a concept that draws from the ingenious, precarious, and collaborative building tactics implemented by the people living in Colonia Ajusco, his childhood neighborhood in Mexico City. He appropriated this term in relation to his practice to describe an approach of inventive improvisation and instability which presents change as a permanent state arising from the chaotic and fragmentary nature of life. The evolving notion of autoconstrucción has in turn yielded different approaches such as autodestrucción and autoconfusión. These inquiries have led him to explore his own origins and to collaborate with family and friends in a very personal form of research that results in a constant process of learning: About materials, landscape, people, and himself.

FAWN ROGERS

Beginning with her two-channel video ‘The World is Your Oyster’, Rogers began her recent series of oyster paintings. On view in the exhibition are ‘Happy as a Clam’ and ‘The Most Beautiful Pearls Are Black’ both of which are representational yet surreally large portraits of oysters. They teeter between realism and abstraction depending on your point of view and distance. According to the artist, “the world is your oyster' which was often said to young people with life ahead of them, is in fact a ‘phrase of passionate violence directed toward the pursuit of one's own desire.” The oysters are both luxurious rarities that produce pearls, aphrodisiacs that encourage the erotic, and toxic mollusks that cleanse the sea of its pollutants. A portrait of these creatures encompasses life, sex, and death simultaneously. The cultivation and harvesting of oysters for pearls is violent and extractive while also being sensual and opulent—a concise symbol of the decadence and unsustainability of our current time.

Fawn Rogers (born in Portland, Oregon) is a Los Angeles-based contemporary artist. Through painting, photography, video, and sculptural installation, Rogers addresses the idea of power as the currency of nature and human interaction, while her aesthetic incorporates realism, conceptualism, and the synthesis of text and image. Concerned with systems of the natural world and social constructionism, her art accepts nature as a full range of existence, including violence, innocence, and invention.

ARMANI HOWARD

‘River Bed (2022)’, is a new painting created for this exhibition hat explores the relationship between the ancestral spirit realm and the sea; or perhaps more specifically water as spirit and life force. 

Armani Howard is an African American-Thai contemporary artist, working primarily in painting and drawing. His work explores themes of identity preservation, escapism, pop culture, self-discovery, mental health, and loss of innocence. The direction of reimagining his existence and experiences as a Black body into a visually sizeable body of work has become a form of contemporary folklore. Dream-like and at times bewildering, his work is expressive of narratives unbounded in time. He hopes this will help future bodies find their internal dialogue of identity and heritage while sustaining a self-supporting development. His work with its layered compositions of abstract figuration, loose gestural marks, and an evocative usage of color uphold the antecedents of the African American dialogue before him. At the same time, they allow the space to question American traditions.