Article: 10 Exceptional Millennial Artists to Watch in 2016
Jordan Casteel (b1989)
The young artist is known for depicting black male subjects at ease in domestic scenes, and her style is reminiscent of the work of Alice Neel, Martin Wong, and Nicole Eisenman. Her residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem culminated in a highly-anticipated show this summer. We can’t wait to see what she does next.
Article: Artist Vincent Valdez Paints The Ku Klux Klan In "The City"
Inside, the art space is taken over by one colossal black and white painting — 43 feet long — broken up into six panels. It’s titled “The City.” It features 14 hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan caught in a candid moment on a bluff overlooking a city at night.
“I felt that it was important that the viewer, when they first confront the piece, might even make the assumption that it is based on a historical photograph. That this is 1869 or 1920, but when they start looking at the details of the piece they’ll find traces of contemporary life like the iPhone, the baby Nikes, class rings, the cell phone towers and the modern day 21st century Chevrolet truck.”
Valdez started this painting last October. And after working on it seven days a week for 11 months, he says he’s glad it’s finally finished. But, he has been thinking about painting this image for years.
Valdez says viewers make the mistake in assuming it’s a reaction to the current political climate.
“People jump to the conclusion that this is Donald Trump’s fault – Oh, this is Trump all day right? This is about Trump. Well, I ask the viewer to step back for a moment. You don’t have to look very far and you really don’t have to look too deep to realize that this was here – this was present – long before any politician,” Valdez says.
That’s not to say there isn’t a connection to today’s politics. There is a rise in white nationalism in American and in Europe. And according to the Southern Poverty Law Center there is a surge in the growth of white supremacist groups — especially the Ku Klux Klan.
“It’s strangely coincidental, fascinating. It strikes me as being a little bit surreal. I’m not sure what to make of it exactly. I guess all I can say about it is the timing couldn’t be more urgent,” he says. (more at TPR.org)
Article: "Titus Kaphar's broken home"
When artist Titus Kaphar started building his farmhouse five years ago, memories of the past conspired to drive him insane.
Painful remembrances were the genesis of "The Vesper Project," an ambitious new installation of paintings and keepsakes on view this week at the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami. The centerpiece of the exhibit looms tall inside the gallery, and could not be more out of place in Coral Gables: Kaphar's 19th century-style Connecticut farmhouse, a ramshackle box filled with splintered wood, old photographs and uprooted floorboards. The interior is wallpapered in yellowed newspaper clippings and framed portraits of the home's inhabitants: a mixed-race, multigenerational family called the Vespers.
Everything about the "The Vesper Project," Kaphar says, is built on an elaborate fiction. The farmhouse is neither from the 19th century nor from Connecticut, and the Vespers never existed. But this hardly stopped Kaphar from concocting back stories for the Vespers, characters whose histories called out to him like vengeful ghosts. He swears he heard the Vespers' voices five years earlier while painting a portrait of his aunt, a strong figure from his childhood in Michigan. Kaphar, 40, says the memory of his aunt was actually false, and that she wasn't the guardian he fondly remembered.
"Between this memory lapse and the voices, I felt like I was going insane," Kaphar says. "I was troubled by the characters speaking to me, but what terrified me more was the idea that memory is unreliable, where people are sure they are remembering something a certain way, but turns out to be untrue."
Article: For Pedro Reyes, Politics and Sculpture Go Hand in Han
After studying architecture at Mexico City’s Universidad Iberoamericana, Pedro Reyes found his calling as a sculptor instead. He uses his art, typically large works sometimes incorporating elements of theater, to call attention to political issues. To protest against his country’s gun culture, for example, he melted down pistols to make shovels to plant trees. But his early interest in architecture reveals itself as well. He launched Pirámide Flotante from a beach in Puerto Rico, and he and his wife, fashion designer Carla Fernández, built Pirámide del Futuro right in their family home. He works in materials including marble and volcanic stone, which he shapes with the assistance of professional masons. The results, straddling the divide between abstraction and representation, force us to see the familiar in new ways, just as the artist asks us to reexamine our preconceived politics.
Represented by Lisson Gallery, Reyes has gained wide recognition. A solo show opens at Dallas Contemporary in September. Then, for a commission from New York’s Creative Time that coincides with Halloween, he will create a haunted house presenting doomsday scenarios related to climate change and other ills. He will also be teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this fall. In fact, he and Fernández will be co-instructors, offering a class intended to “reimagine the ethos of the Defense Sector and challenge the pervasive contemporary outlook of techno-optimism,” according to the course description. He will focus on performance art, she on costume design. The semester will culminate with their students staging “an Opera for the end of Times.”
Article: CREATIVE TIME TO HOST PEDRO REYES’S ‘DOOMOCRACY,’ A HOUSE OF HORRORS AT THE BROOKLYN ARMY TERMINAL
For its fall exhibition, Creative Time has given Pedro Reyes free reign over the Brooklyn Army Terminal to create a work he’s called Doomocracy. From the sound of it, the installation is going to be pretty legitimately horrifying. Timed to be up around the time of both Halloween and the presidential election, Reyes has called the work a “political house of horrors” and promises a mysterious labyrinth filled with fun stuff such as “apocalyptic torments, from climate change to pandemic gun violence to GMOs.” Not many other specifics are revealed.
“Pedro is a master of creating socially and politically engaged installations,” Katie Hollander, Creative Time’s executive director, said in a press release. “When he proposed the idea for a satirical political haunted house, we knew it was a timely, relevant, and necessary project—and represented our commitment to art that engages with and shapes the public dialogue.”
The exhibition runs from October 7 to November 6, which is a few days before the election. It’s free and open to the public, but in order to see it, you need to reserve a ticket and get assigned a timed entry. You can snag an early ticket by supporting the work’s Kickstarter campaign, and if you want to see this thing, you should probably do that sooner rather than later: the Creative Time show from this spring, Duke Riley’s Fly By Night, had a waiting list of 40,000 people.
Article: THE VESPER PROJECT Opens at the Lowe
Rarely has art that explores notions of race been more relevant. The Vesper Project is a compelling and timely exhibition by New York artist Titus Kaphar, whose unforgettable installation does just that. It features ghostly architecture and hauntingly beautifuly paintings that question the meaning of "race." It opens at the Lowe on September 8 and runs through December 23, 2016.
The Vesper Project is the culmination of Titus Kaphar's intensive engagement with the fictional history of the Vespers, a 19th-century New England family who were able to "pass" as Caucasian despite the fact that their mixed racial heritage made them black in the eyes of the law. The resulting project, which includes The Remains of an abandoned Connecticut home into which the artist has incorporated his own work, interrogates notions of race, identity, memory, and social constructs. Through slashing, silhouetting, and whitewashing, Kaphar creates a complex map that compresses time and elides personal histories. The artist's most ambitious installation to date, The Vesper Project obliterates the distance between viewer and work, and is as immersive as it is experiential. (more at BroadwayWorld.com)
Spanning forty artworks, Omul Negru is an anthropological occurrence, one comprised of both cultural enactment and ritual embodiment, invoked to explore the varied notions of the Boogeyman. It is a celebration of civilization’s most important character, a figure that has transcended in the 21st Century into a monster of ever-expanding applications. This spectrum of visual culture’s darkest corner is traced through artists, martyrs, serial killers, madmen, and monsters; to explore the many faces as well as the facelessness of the Boogeyman. It traverses the origins, stereotypologies and embodiments of the Boogeyman through contemporary, historical, and archetypal lenses - staging an ominous atmosphere of summoning and possession.
Artists: Daniel Albrigo, Will Boone, Mike Bouchet, BREYER P-ORRIDGE, Gunter Brus, Brian Butler, Church of Euthanasia, John Duncan, Damien Echols, Brock Enright, Bob Flanagan, John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein, Adrian Ghenie, Douglas Gordon, John Houck, Jim Jones, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Ted Kaczynski, Daniel Keller, Mike Kelley, Marco Lavagetto, Lazaros, Lionel Maunz, Asger Kali Mason Ravnkilde Moulton, Alban Muja, Ciprian Muresan, Steven Parrino, Hamid Piccardo, Ana Prvacki, Jon Rafman, Sheree Rose, Sterling Ruby, Benja Sachau, Max Hooper Schneider, Richard Serra, Robert Therrien, Ecaterina Vrana, and Zhou Yilun.
A full-color catalogue with texts by Aaron Moulton, Alissa Bennett, an interview with Dr. Philip Zimbardo, an anthology of evil words and images, and installation views will be published for this occasion. Opening, accompanied by a book-signing, will be held on August 6, 2016 from 6pm to 9pm.
Article: PREVIEW: Pedro Reyes in Season 8 of ART21 "Art in the Twenty-First Century" (2016)
In this preview from the "Mexico City" episode of Season 8 of "Art in the Twenty-First Century," artist Pedro Reyes organizes a workshop where participants create musical instruments from firearms. "Doing these workshops is an attempt to transform not only the material metal, but also to try to create a psychological transformation," says the artist. "And, hopefully, a social transformation."
Season 8 of Art in the Twenty-First Century premieres Friday, September 16, 2016 at 9:00 p.m. ET on PBS. Mexico City airs Friday, September 16th at 10:00 p.m.
Article: 16 Artists to Watch in 2016
I first saw Dancy’s work in 2013 at Kansas Gallery in New York City. Having graduated from Columbia’s MFA program in 2009, Dancy is a solid member of the new generation of figurative painters, many of whom are quickly gaining attention. She focuses on the female body with a vengeance. It is almost as if she is trying to wrest it from the hands of the mostly male cast of artists who have laid claim to it over the years. In the past few years her compositional sense has gotten ever more sophisticated. I am excited to see how she grows.
Article: 16 Artists to Watch in 2016
Smith is yet another strong painter to emerge from Columbia’s MFA program. My first contact with the work came at Laurel Gitlen’s space in the Lower East Side this past September. It was a fun exhibition to walk into. Smith’s paintings draw from the graphic clarity of Pop-art and digital space to critique sexual politics, gender and identity. They are, however, never preachy or cloying. Like other artists on this list, Smith’s paintings are simply weird in the best, indescribable way.
