EXPO CHICAGO

EXPO Kicks off EXHIBITION Weekend with In-Person and Virtual Programming

Thu, 24 Sep 2020 12:00:00 -0500

EXPO Kicks off EXHIBITION Weekend with In-Person and Virtual Programming
By Pearl Fontaine

EXPO CHICAGO is hosting a special EXHIBITION Weekend, featuring arts programming and exhibitions September 25-27. Conceived to provide a global platform for the city’s top galleries, creatives, and institutions, the event will include a lineup of virtual events accessible through an online viewing room (made possible by Hook) and live, socially-distanced shows and events.

“Given EXPO CHICAGO’s commitment to our community, there was no hesitation to make our first predominantly virtual initiative in support of Chicago—celebrating the breadth and scope of the city’s vibrant creative community while providing an access point for international audiences to connect with local artists, gallerists, and collectors,” said Tony Karman, President and Director of EXPO CHICAGO.

Nearly 20 venues are holding safely distanced in-person events by appointment, including Rhona Hoffman Gallery showing Spencer Finch, Amoako Boafo’s exhibition at Mariane Ibrahim, “Nine Lives” at Renaissance Society, Driehaus Museum’s “A Tale of Today,” and Monique Meloche Gallery’s Jake Troyli show.

Virtually, EXHIBITION Weekend participants will have access to an online platform where they can navigate the weekend’s happenings at their own pace. In addition to digital exhibitions, programming includes artist-led studio tours; a premiere of Angel Bat Dawid’s commission for The Art Institute of Chicago, “Peace: A Suite for Skylanding, A Mended Petal Odyssey;” and the opening celebration of Nate Young and Mika Horibuchi at Driehaus Museum. VIP attendees will have additional access to art advisor tours, institution walk-throughs led by curators, and collectors’ visits—including that of Jack and Sandy Guthman.

The weekend series kicked off Thursday, September 24 with a conversation co-hosted by Artsy, featuring artists Nick Cave and Bob Faust, with Quintin Williams of the Heartland Alliance for Human Needs & Human Rights and Illinois Humanities’ Gabrielle Lyon. Introduced by Agnes Gund, founder of Art for Justice, they discussed Cave and Faust’s limited-edition print sale, which will donate proceeds to Art for Justice, the Facility Foundation, and EXPO CHICAGO’s Curatorial Initiatives.

Editors’ Picks: 16 Events for Your Art Calendar This Week, From a Virtual EXPO Chicago to a Live Performance at the Met

Mon, 21 Sep 2020 12:00:00 -0500

Editors’ Picks: 16 Events for Your Art Calendar This Week, From a Virtual EXPO Chicago to a Live Performance at the Met
By Artnet News

Each week, we search New York City for the most exciting and thought-provoking shows, screenings, and events. In light of the global health crisis, we are currently highlighting events and digitally, as well as in-person exhibitions open in the New York area. See our picks from around the world below. (Times are all EST unless otherwise noted.)

Monday, September 21

1. “Art in a Time of Crisis: Excavating the Past, Confronting the Present, Imagining the Future” hosted by Cooper Union and Public Art Fund, New York

This past spring, the Public Art Fund commissioned 50 New York-based artists to create new work in response to these unprecedented times, resulting in a wide-ranging exhibition titled “Art on the Grid.” This accompanying talk features artists Firelei Báez and D’Angelo Lovell Williams in conversation with the fund’s director and chief curator Nicholas Baume. The artists will reflect on their individual themes and working methods to explore how they mine different histories and styles of representation to generate dialogues that both acknowledge and aim to transcend the limits of our dysfunctional present.

Price: Free with RSVP
Time: 5 p.m.–6 p.m.

—Eileen Kinsella

2. “Planned Parenthood of Greater New York’s Choice Works 2020” at Sotheby’s New York

Heavy-hitting feminist artists including Marilyn Minter, Barbara Kruger, and Laurie Simmons join forces with pro-choice allies such as Jeff Koons, Ed Ruscha, Sam Gilliam, and Jasper Johns for this Planned Parenthood of Greater New York auction chaired by Cecily Brown, Amy Cappellazzo, Lisa Dennison, and Amy Sherald. The fundraising effort also extends to the “Contemporary Curated” sale on October 2, where Judy Chicago’s Birth Trinity Quilt (1983), originally donated by the artist to Planned Parenthood of Rocky Mountains in 1991, is expected to bring in as much as $350,000. Tickets to this week’s virtual party previewing the sale, which features a DJ set by Questlove, include a limited-edition Cindy Sherman and Narciso Rodriguez t-shirt.

Location: Sotheby’s New York, 1334 York Avenue, New York
Price: Tickets to virtual event from $100
Time: Virtual launch event, 7 p.m.; by appointment in person or any time online

—Sarah Cascone

Tuesday, September 22

3. “Diana Al-Hadid Studio Visit” with the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery

As part of New York University Abu Dhabi’s “TRACE: Archives and Reunions” series, the executive director and chief curator of the university’s Abu Dhabi art gallery, Maya Allison, will look back at Brooklyn-based artist Diana Al-Hadid’s past show, “Phantom Limb,” which debuted at the gallery in 2016. The live-streamed studio visit coincides with the digital publication of the exhibition archive.

Price: Free
Time: 10:30 a.m.

—Caroline Goldstein

4. “Gedi Sibony With Yasi Alipour” at the Brooklyn Rail

Gedi Sibony will chat with writer and artist Yasi Alipouror as part of the Brooklyn Rail’s lunchtime conversation series “The New Social Environment.” The talk comes just ahead of the artist’s new solo show, “Gedi Sibony: The Terrace Theater,” on view September 24 through October 31 at Greene Naftali Gallery. Using repurposed walls, shelves, and other scraps from his studio, Sibony has created new sculptures as well as wall works with a specially conceived architecture.

Price: Free
Time: 1 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Wednesday, September 23

5. “Xaviera Simmons in Conversation with Sally Tallant and John Hatfield” at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York

In conjunction with her exhibition “Xaviera Simmons: Posture” at the Institute of Fine Arts, the artist will be joining Sally Tallant, president of the Queens Museum, and John Hatfield, director of Queens’s Socrates Sculpture Park, for a live-streamed conversation about how whiteness functions within museums and how art institutions can dismantle these systems while advocating for wealth redistribution and reparations for Black Americans. The panelists will also address the benefits and challenges of stewarding art institutions located in Queens, one of the world’s most ethnically diverse communities.

Price: Free with RSVP
Time: 6 p.m.

— Katie White

Wednesday, September 23 and Wednesday, September 30

6. “Lee Mingwei: OUR LABYRINTH” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Met is hosting its first live performance in more than six months with a site-specific staging of Lee Mingwei’s durational performance OUR LABYRINTH. The Taiwanese-American artist has enlisted dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones to retool the piece for an online audience, to be streamed on YouTube from three different galleries for three successive Wednesdays (this week is the second), when the museum is closed. A different dancer appears each time, using a stylized broom to sweep a pile of rice through a labyrinthine path.

Price: Free
Time: 12 p.m.–4:30 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Thursday, September 24

7. “Women, Race, Representation: Artists of Conscience” at the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

The Phillips is commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment with a Zoom panel discussion under the banner “Artists of Conscience.” The talk coincides with a digital exhibition featuring female artists from the permanent collection, including multiple recipients of the Anonymous Was a Woman Award.

Price: Free with registration
Time: 5:30 p.m.–7 p.m.

—Caroline Goldstein

Thursday, September 24–Sunday, November 15

8. “Akeem Smith: No Gyal Can Test” at Red Bull Arts, New York

Akeem Smith’s first major solo exhibition draws from a vast, highly personal archive of videos and photos tracking the evolution of Kingston, Jamaica’s inimitable dancehall scene from the early 1980s through the dawn of the 21st century. More than a straightforward celebration or documentation of a local cultural force that has since gone worldwide—if you’ve ever nodded your head (or more) to Sean Paul’s titanic 2002 single “Get Busy,” you’ve felt dancehall’s impact on the mainstream—Smith’s works also unearth the subculture’s many intricacies, the colonial tensions embedded in its spread, and the often unforgiving effects of time on places and people alike.

Location: Red Bull Arts, 220 West 18th Street, New York
Price: Free
Time: 1 p.m.–8 p.m. daily; reserve your time slot here (appointments recommended, but not required)

—Tim Schneider

Thursday, September 24–December

9. “Drawing 2020” at Gladstone Gallery, New York

As we enter week three of this most bizarre fall gallery-going season, we’re starting to see the different directions the big shops are taking with regard to how to fill the walls in a socially distanced world. For Gladstone Gallery, the answer is drawings—lots of drawings, brand new ones, by more than 100 artists, in an ambitious attempt to get the final word on the concept of the handmade work on paper. It’s a sequel of sorts to a similar show Barbara Gladstone staged in 2000, when she attempted to take the temperature of the new millennium by asking a large chunk of the then-vanguard for fresh drawings. Two decades later, we again find ourselves in interesting times—”this important moment in history,” says the press release—and here we have a new batch of wildly dissimilar voices with sketches that address said times. The stuffed bill of fare includes Alvaro Barrington, Kye Christensen-Knowles, Gladys Nilsson, Damián Ortega, Pope.L, and Peter Saul.

Location: Gladstone Gallery, 530 West 21st Street
Price: Free
Time: 10 a.m.–6 p.m. daily; reserve your time slot here (appointments recommended, but not required)

—Nate Freeman

Friday, September 25

10. “Photographer Kiki Williams on Artistic Healing” with Salon 21, New York

Polaroid photographer Kiki Williams is joining Salon 21 founder Alex Bass for an Instagram Live conversation about the therapeutic benefits of art practices. In conjunction with the talk, Salon 21 will be selling t-shirts to benefit mental health initiatives that are based in artistic creation, including Combat Paper, which transforms military uniforms into paper for art projects. Williams will be raffling one of her original polaroids to those who purchase shirts.

Price: Free
Time: 12 p.m.

— Katie White

Friday, September 25–Sunday, September 27

11. “Exhibition Weekend” at EXPO CHICAGO

Another major art fair goes virtual for 2020, with EXPO CHICAGO offering a full slate of virtual studio visits, exhibition and gallery tours, and discussions in addition to online viewing rooms with works for sale. Programming highlights include a conversation with Nick Cave, introduced by Agnes Gund, and the Richard H. Driehaus Museum’s “A Tale of Today: Nate Young and Mika Horibuchi,” in which the two contemporary artists discuss how they went about creating site-specific work for the historic house museum.

Price: Free
Time: Opening 11 a.m.

—Tanner West

Saturday, September 26

12. Champagne Reception and Press Preview at Aicon Gallery, New York

In honor of artist Natvar Bhavsar’s second solo exhibition, Sublime Light: On the Cusp of the 1980s, Aicon Gallery is hosting a champagne reception and press preview for their patrons. Bhavsar draws his influence from colorful memories of a childhood spent in India and New York in the 1970s. This show highlights 13 of his large paintings from the decade.

Location: Aicon Gallery, 35 Great Jones Street, New York
Price: Free with RSVP
Time: 4 p.m.–8 p.m. (only two parties allowed inside at a time)

—Neha Jambhekar

Through Saturday, October 10

13. “I Heard a Wild Flower” at Carvalho Park, Brooklyn

Head over to Carvalho Park in Brooklyn to check out Brian Rattiner and Keiko Narahashi’s two-person show, “I Heard a Wild Flower.” Rattiner’s large pastel paintings, imbued with a sense of serenity found during time spent in Greece and upstate New York, stand in stark contrast with Narahashi’s sculptures, which are reminiscent of Japanese minimalism. The dreamy paintings and the minimalist sculptures create a duality “in which the intangible sensations of one’s complex experiences of nature materialize,” according to the gallery’s statement.

Location: Carvalho Park, 112 Waterbury Street, Brooklyn
Price: Free
Time: Thursday, Friday, Saturday 12 p.m.–6 p.m.

—Neha Jambhekar

Through Sunday, October 6

14. “Children in the Wood: A Trip to the Madhouse” at Ivy Brown Gallery, New York

Elizabeth Jordan’s current solo show at Ivy Brown calls to mind the dark side of the original, unsanitized version of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, with eerie sculptures of animals formed from materials including wood, chicken wire, burlap, and plaster transforming the gallery into a haunted yet dreamlike forest. Among the artist’s self-proclaimed interests? “Photographing dead things, newspaper clippings, fairy tales; horror films from the fifties and sixties; ghost stories; animals, birds and insects behaving like people; fables; store mannequins.”

Location: Ivy Brown Gallery, 675 Hudson Street, New York
Price: Free
Time: By appointment

—Sarah Cascone

Through Saturday, October 31

15. “Aubrey Levinthal: Vacancy” at Monya Rowe Gallery, New York

In this solo show at Monya Rowe, Aubrey Levinthal presents tender moments of everyday life. In quiet scenes offering both thoughtful portraits and carefully considered still lifes, the artist hints at the emotional burdens and invisible anxiety that we all carry just below the surface—if you look close enough.

Location: Monya Rowe Gallery, 224 West 30th Street, #1005, New York
Price: Free
Time: Tuesday–Saturday, 12 p.m.–6 p.m.

—Nan Stewert

Through Sunday, November 1

16. “Kevin Claiborne: Black Enough” at Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York

Curator and critic Antwaun Sargent has written the essay for Kevin Claiborne’s first New York show, which features a mix of sculpture and photography that considers Black identity and oppression in the year 2020. Clairborne, who has captured some of the most striking images of this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, transforms police barricades into sculptures such as a cross recalling the iconography of the crucifixion and poses though-provoking questions, like “where is Black enough,” in bold text overlaid atop black and white photographs of the Joshua Tree desert.

Location: Thierry Goldberg Gallery, 109 Norfolk Street, New York
Price: Free
Time: Wednesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

EXPO CHICAGO Debuts EXHIBITION Weekend, ‘Alternate Assembly 2020,’ As Virtual Fall Events

Wed, 09 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0500

EXPO CHICAGO Debuts EXHIBITION Weekend, ‘Alternate Assembly 2020,’ As Virtual Fall Events
By Chadd Scott

Having announced in May that it would be postponing the in-person EXPO CHICAGO contemporary art fair originally scheduled for later this month to April of 2021, event organizers announced a new series of programs which will fill those dates and continue shining a light on the city’s visual arts community.

“We wanted to make it Chicago specific, very much in keeping with our mission to be supportive of Chicago galleries, institutions, artists, etcetera,” Tony Karman, President | Director of EXPO CHICAGO, told Forbes.com. “The good news is, it allows us to focus global attention on what's happening in our great city over these three days and also provide a nice opportunity for us to test a new a new online viewing room.”

EXHIBITION Weekend (September 25-27) will showcase Chicago-based exhibits, curatorial projects and artist programs through a series of virtual studio visits, exhibition and gallery tours, and discussions, as well as a custom online viewing and sales platform accessible worldwide.

That platform has been developed by Hook, an online venue which brings together seasoned art collectors and established galleries to create a marketplace for viewing, buying, selling and learning about art. Hook allows for a seamless transition to live communication between galleries and collectors through a video chat service that is integrated into the experience.

For 2020, it’s as close as widely available technology can come to recreating the in-person art fair or gallery experience virtually.

“It's not a perfect way to connect to a collector if you're a dealer because there's nothing that replaces the in-person experience, but it's a step that everyone needed to take and here we are,” Karman said. “The art world can never go backwards, we both as fairs–and I know a gallery would say the same–need to embrace digital in ways that make it easier to connect all of the patrons to the galleries as well as a broader global audience.”

Hook provides galleries the opportunity to upload enormous amounts of information to dedicated artist web pages including not just works for sale, but ephemera and video, to help customers become more educated about the artist. It also provides for real-time interaction between online patrons and gallerists.

“It will allow the dealer to go ahead and refer immediately to that material so a collector that's inquiring can engage in a conversation similar to the way they engage in the conversation at an art fair or within a gallery and I think that brings the digital to the real in a very important way,” Karman said.

The weekend will commence with a conversation featuring artist Nick Cave, introduced by philanthropist and Art for Justice founder Agnes Gund, discussing the re-release of Cave's limited-edition print for sale in support of Art for Justice on September 24.

Art for Justice Fund is a five-year initiative created by Gund in partnership with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and the Ford Foundation. The Fund invests in artists and advocates dedicated to ending mass incarceration and the racial bias that fuels it. To date, Art for Justice has invested over $75 million across almost 150 grants.

Chicago audiences will have select opportunities to view exhibitions in-person (by appointment) aligning with EXHIBITION Weekend. Participating institutions include the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, DePaul Art Museum, Monique Meloche Gallery and many others.

Karman recognizes in his audience a growing desire to again see art unmoderated by a screen.

“There’s still, rightfully so, strong concern for large scale gathering, but that doesn't tamper the yearning for an in-person experience…I think people want to get back and do what humans do, interact with live cultural experiences,” Karman said.

EXPO CHICAGO additionally announced another fall program, Alternate Assembly 2020: Environmental Impact in the Era of Pandemic (October 15-18). The purpose of this new event is to engage the fair’s local and global audience through film screenings and live-streamed panel discussions featuring leading curators, artists and scholars worldwide. Continuing EXPO CHICAGO's commitment to providing a public forum for critical dialogue, Alternate Assembly 2020 will address the ways in which contemporary art can contribute to rethinking our environment within the era of pandemic.

Consider it all “making the best of a bad situation.”

“I don't think there's anyone in the art world that would say that digital will ever fully replace an in-person experience,” Karman said. “There's a magic that can happen when you've gone into an exhibition in a gallery or you are at an art fair where there's loads of information that's coming from many different areas, running into individuals that you didn't know were there, hearing conversations, dinners afterwards, etcetera, all of that magic that takes place in person, I don't think is replicatable yet on a digital platform because that kind of interaction is what fuels not just a transaction, but also fuels information and creates so many different ways that an experience can expand.”

As for the main event in April of 2021? Will EXPO CHICAGO need to postpone again?

“The best thing we can do is do what we did, even before we postponed the September fair to April, is to continue to monitor and be in communication with the exhibitors and be in communication with all those individuals that are helping to communicate a ‘go,’ ‘no go’ for us,” Karman said. “We would be foolish to say we're 100% for sure that were happening in April, it's going to take time, but we also have to be careful about being responsible to the exhibitors and the dealers because there is a certain amount of time that they need to prepare and we need to prepare.”

Amanda Williams’ latest multi-platform project ‘What Black Is This, You Say?’ examines Blackness in its multitude of variations

Thu, 13 Aug 2020 02:00:00 -0500

Amanda Williams’ latest multi-platform project ‘What Black Is This, You Say?’ examines Blackness in its multitude of variations
By Darcel Rockett

Blackout Tuesday, June 2, was over two months ago — the collective response, an action to racism and police brutality following the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor. Artist Amanda Williams — known for her “Color(ed) Theory” project wherein she painted condemned South Side houses in colors like Harold’s Chicken Shack red, Newport 100s teal, and Crown Royal bag purple to acknowledge the racially tinted architectonic blight of Black communities — got swept up in the moment, the day when millions of social media users posted a black square, alongside the hashtag #Blackouttuesday to show solidarity with the #Blacklivesmatter pairs.

According to a post on Williams’ Instagram page, she hates stuff like that — stuff being the overwhelming “sense of urgency” people have to have (a resolute answer or a finite way) that they can understand very complex things that have been going on a long time.

“In this instance it’s racism,” Williams said. “As an American society, we generally want to have an answer and feel better about it, whatever it is. Social media then exacerbates that. It’s 140 characters, if you have a Twitter account, and you got to respond to some comment that was made or not made on someone’s life we don’t’ even know.”

The Bronzeville resident’s response? Continuing her artistic practice of color theory, but this time, the focus color is black. It’s a series called “What Black is this, you say?” The premise: Various photos of black items posted on her Instagram account that are accompanied by text/caption that describes the hue at which you are looking. The words can be funny, or right on the nose.

“My beginning of the series was actually a little bit of a pushback both of the need for people to think there has to be an immediate answer, usually not a well thought out answer, and simultaneously that Blackness is monolithic,” Williams said. “So, all Black people need to get on board with subscribing to a certain way of expressing Blackness, or frustrations with injustice. And there’s less and less tolerance for more than one way to do that.”

Williams pondered how to bring that kind of nuance to the public and Black people — that sometimes you don’t want to embrace some identities or want to reject other identities that are part of Black history and ethos? How do you do all that in art while having the ability to poke at and use the instantaneousness of Instagram or a social media platform?

So far, Williams has posted over 80 nuanced looks of Blackness on her Instagram page. Some captions reflect a kinship among strangers through a shared experience like going to Evergreen Plaza in your youth or everybody’s grandmother having an Andriana Fur, another culturally collective/connected moment. According to Williams, in her using terms like “you, I, and we” brings it back to viewers having to confront whether that image represents you or not — that it is Black, but it not be “your Black.”

Other projects have come from Williams’ ongoing work on Blackness. EXPO CHICAGO extended an invitation for her and Erick Williams, chef/owner of Virtue restaurant to co-host a July 16th virtual dinner party, a first for the international exposition of contemporary and modern art called “Dine&.” The program pairs culinary experiences with conversations led by figures in Chicago’s artistic, cultural and business communities. According to Stephanie Cristello,artistic director of EXPO CHICAGO, Williams and Williams (no relation) conceived a four-course menu for participants to enjoy in their homes (with heating and plating instructions).

“There was black rice, black-eyed peas, blackened kale, purple carrots, beets, blackened salmon – all of these things that really play on that idea of Amanda’s work,” she said. “Even though everyone was joining virtually, they were able to taste and smell the exact same thing. It really was this sensorial experience for all of the participants. Amanda and Erick talked about issues of race embedded in Devil’s Food Cake vs. Angel Food Cake and Amanda was able to take that idea and talk about her use of language and the “What Black is this, you say?” series. It was a very different way of having this conversation about the everyday labels, things and tastes that we experience through art.”

Proceeds benefited Enrich Chicago, a nonprofit organization working to address systemic racism in the arts.

“What I love about Amanda’s work and what she’s getting at is one of the terrible byproducts of racism,” said Nina Sánchez, Enrich Chicago’s director. “There’s a dehumanization and there’s a flattening of our identity…there is no one type of Black experience, no culture, no people is a monolith. Part of what racism does is it dehumanizes and makes us be lumped together in ways that are not productive, in ways that are limiting. I would check Amanda’s Instagram on the regular. My colleague and I would read each other the caption for the day and chat about it over Zoom. That’s where I think the genius of Amanda’s work is, because how many dialogues and open forums can you have, right?”

Williams is still growing her Black multi-platform conceptual project. She’s transitioning some of her Instagram series photographs to paintings for an upcoming gallery exhibit. And Williams’ collaboration with EXPO and Open Editions yielded a set of six dinner napkins in different shades of black and textures. The collectibles were paired with an artist-designed swatch card, which features the fabrics in a conventional grid, paired with captions used in the original series. The product’s first run sold out since its launch July 16 (another is available for pre-order); the funds also given to Enrich Chicago, Williams’ choice.

“The moment of the universe, needing to talk about a difficult conversation, and my ongoing work where I’m always trying to find ways to insert difficult conversations into new spaces just aligned,” Williams said. “This is one of those moments where you seem like a genius because the work that you’ve been doing meets the moment. But artists are always working ... I’m always doing (work) around color having a dual meaning – it’s a chromatic material, a medium, but it’s also a racial signifier. Much of my work is grappling with that duality, how to bring to light that duality and the unique voice that people of color, especially in Chicago, have in expressing that duality in the way we move through the spaces of the city.”

EXPO CHICAGO launches Dine& Virtual Salon series pairing multidisciplinary artists in conversation

Wed, 22 Jul 2020 12:00:00 -0500

EXPO CHICAGO launches Dine& Virtual Salon series pairing multidisciplinary artists in conversation
By Jose Villareal

CHICAGO, IL.- On Thursday, July 16, EXPO CHICAGO, The International Exposition of Contemporary and Modern Art, launched its new virtual salon series, Dine&, with an artist conversation and dinner featuring artist Amanda Williams and 2020 James Beard nominee Erick Williams (no relation). A new initiative from EXPO CHICAGO, Dine& pairs bespoke culinary experiences with conversations led by prominent figures from Chicago’s artistic and cultural communities. For the first event in the series, Virtual Virtue: What Black is This, You Say?, Erick Williams of Virtue restaurant designed a four-course dinner menu inspired by the many hues of black envisioned by the artist Amanda Williams in her recent digital series What black is this, you say?.

Over the course of the meal guests experienced a dynamic discussion between the artist and chef on Amanda’s digital series that originated as her response to the Instagram ‘black out’ on June 2, 2020, when black squares publicly swept the platform in an effort to show solidarity with the #blacklivesmatter movement. Meals were delivered to guests' homes, with an optional wine pairing featuring wines from Black-owned wineries McBride Sisters and Maison Noir Wines. The event brought together collectors, philanthropists, and cultural leaders from Chicago and around the country to experience a dialogue between chef and artist. EXPO CHICAGO has donated event proceeds to Enrich Chicago, a nonprofit organization working to address systemic racism in the arts, and honoraria for both participating artists.

“Throughout this incredibly challenging time, I have thought deeply about the role EXPO CHICAGO can play as a connector—between multidisciplinary creators, between artists and arts patrons, and between arts patrons and organizations that are making real change,” said President | Director of EXPO CHICAGO Tony Karman. “In creating Dine& , the exposition seeks to connect our community in new and innovative ways, fostering important conversations and continuing our year-round support of the Chicago arts community. We are honored to work alongside and collaborate with both Amanda Williams and Chef Erick Williams, whose artistic contributions to this event will have a tangible impact on the extraordinary work of Enrich Chicago.”

Director of Enrich Chicago Nina D. Sánchez stated, “The funds EXPO CHICAGO helped raise tonight will further our mission to fund equity research, develop the next generation of aspiring anti-racist arts administrators, and sponsor anti-racism workshops with leading national training organizations for arts leaders throughout Chicago. It is heartening to see our city’s art fair provide thoughtful support of Black artists and Black-owned businesses, and recognize the work we do at Enrich—we hope this series can serve as a model for influential organizations nationwide.”

Guests in attendance received one of 32 signed limited-edition artist proofs, an adaptation of Amanda Williams’ series What black is this, you say? in embroidered silk dupioni paired with a work on paper. Produced by EXPO CHICAGO and Open Editions, the work adopts the form of a dinner napkin and conventional swatch card used by fabric manufacturers, acting as a vehicle for messages written by the artist in response to the visual culture of protest.

EXPO CHICAGO has also partnered with Williams and Open Editions to produce a collectible and functional edition of What black is this, you say?. Based on her Instagram series, the artist’s interpretation of distinct hues of black will be presented as embroidered fabrics in a set of six dinner napkins. Each napkin in the set is sewn from a different type of fabric to portray a range of shade and texture. This edition includes an artist-designed swatch card, which features the fabrics in a conventional grid, paired with captions used in the original series. The open edition of What black is this, you say? is available for $85 and can be purchased online here. Proceeds from the sale of the edition will benefit Enrich Chicago to support anti-racism learning workshops, capacity-building training and leadership development for the Rising Arts Leaders of Color program.

Chef Erick Williams heads virtual dinner-arts series Thursday to benefit anti-racism efforts

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 12:00:00 -0500

Chef Erick Williams heads virtual dinner-arts series Thursday to benefit anti-racism efforts
By Phil Vettel

Chef Erick Williams will join Chicago artist Amanda Williams (no relation) in a virtual dinner-and-conversation event from 6:30-8 p.m. Thursday.

Created by Expo Chicago, the international exposition of contemporary and modern art, the program, titled “Dine&,” seeks to pair culinary experiences with conversations led by figures in Chicago’s artistic, cultural and business communities. Thursday’s event, “Virtual Virtue: What Black is this, You Say?” is intended to be the first of many.

Erick Williams, chef/owner of Virtue restaurant, will create a four-course dinner inspired by Amanda Williams’ work; each dish will feature colors matching those of Amanda Williams’ most recent series. The food itself will reflect heirloom Southern recipes; dishes include watermelon and balsamic cubes, kale salad with blueberries and Midnight Moon cheese, and choice of blackened salmon or braised short ribs.

Meals can be picked up or delivered; there is an optional wine pairing ($65) featuring wines from Black-owned wineries McBride Sisters and Maison Noir Wines. Event sponsor Hennessy Cognac will provide Hennessy X.O Cognac to pair with a silky chocolate ganache with toasted marshmallow, created by Virtue pastry chef Becky Pendola.

Over the course of the meal, there will be a discussion between artist and chef on Amanda Williams’ most recent projects. The latest, What Black is this you say? is a digital series that originated as her response to the Instagram “black out” on June 2. Dinner guests will receive one of the 32 artist proofs from the What Black is this you say? series, a black napkin embroidered with silver thread and accompanied by a hand-painted swatch card. Each limited-edition piece will be signed and numbered by the artist.

The event will take place via Zoom. Tickets are $750; proceeds will benefit Enrich Chicago, a nonprofit organization working to address systemic racism in the arts. Find more information and order tickets here.

EXPO CHICAGO will also collaborate with Open-Editions to create a set of six dinner napkins that adapt Amanda Williams’ work. The set will be available for purchase through Open-Editions beginning Thursday.

If Museums in the US Want to Be More Inclusive, They First Have to Recognize—and Unlearn—Old Habits and Biases

Thu, 25 Jun 2020 12:00:00 -0500

If Museums in the US Want to Be More Inclusive, They First Have to Recognize—and Unlearn—Old Habits and Biases
By Renaud Proch

Developing new kinds of cultural institutions also means developing new vocabularies.

On March 23, critic and curator Maurice Berger died of complications related to the coronavirus. The following week was an opportunity to re-read his 1990 essay, “Are Art Museums Racist?”

At the time, less than three weeks into New York City’s stay-at-home order, we at Independent Curators International (ICI) were seeking a global understanding of the impact of the pandemic by reaching out to recent and current collaborators from all 50 US states, Washington, DC, Puerto Rico, and 70 countries around the world. From the 1,500 curators and artists we contacted, we compiled scores of impressions coalescing around a small number of consistent concerns.

We learned, for example, that many independent curators saw a number of core issues increasingly shaping their thinking and practice—issues which, far from being new, became louder and more urgent amid the pandemic. They included labor conditions, migration, xenophobia, and racism.

Change begins with awareness of the problem, they say. But Berger found that museums were broadly unable to meaningfully present works by African American artists 30 years ago. And just five years ago, a Mellon Foundation study of the US museum field found that only 16 percent of specialized and leadership positions (such as curators, conservators, educators, and directors) were held by people of color.

Awareness of systemic over-representation of whiteness in US cultural institutions—that is to say, awareness of systemic racism—has grown since the Mellon report, and a number of subsequent studies have shed even more light on the problem. Among them, the CreateNYC Culture Plan, issued by New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs in 2017, offered a damning verdict on one corner of the cultural field: “The whitest job in arts and culture? Curator.”

With a new awareness of the issue, focused on the curatorial field and backed by metrics, many arts organizations across the country took steps to address a “diversity problem” in their midst. Their efforts were backed by the leadership (and power of the purse) of several large foundations, such as Mellon and the Ford foundations, and by local governmental bodies, including New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs.

Across the field, an emphasis took hold on the need to diversify staff and boards, so that they may be more representative of their communities, or the country’s demographics. At several museums, priorities in hiring changed in order to diversify the curatorial ranks. Other institutions sought to address an educational system that has kept people of color out of the academic training pipeline for curators, and to invest in the future through scholarships and fellowship opportunities that will in time diversify applicants pools.

These have been important steps in the right direction. But is it enough?

This is a question that has occupied us at ICI for most of the last decade, and the question of over-representation in the field has been core to our programs. Our approaches have evolved over time, and are now increasingly driven by the perspectives of curators within our own networks: out of the 136 US-based professionals who participated in ICI’s Curatorial Intensive (our professional development program for emerging curators) since 2010, less than 40 percent identify as white. But how could the diversity of our network be reconciled with the realities of a field that remained overwhelmingly white? What were the obstacles to change?

There are many models of social change, and one that I find particularly useful comes from 12-step recovery programs, the Three A’s: Awareness, Acceptance, and Action. What is particularly useful about this three-part method is the suggestion that for change to be meaningful, we cannot simply rush to action to remedy a problem we have been made aware of. We need to accept our own relationship to the problem.

Let’s begin with curatorial work, which is profoundly discriminatory by nature. Curators decide whether to include or exclude artists and artworks from exhibitions and publications, and from art history and collective memory. It’s worth considering and accepting this part of the role.

In doing so, we understand that the power to make these decisions is bestowed upon curators by their peers, whose respect they earn. Following this logic, we begin to see a feudal system, where curators are recognized as the guardians of the archive, the scribes of art history’s first draft, the arbiters of taste, only as long as their work validates the field that empowered them. And in the US, the field that empowers curators for as long as they validate it—the world behind the gatekeepers—is dominated by Euro-American art history and ideology. It is a world buoyed by 20th-century nationalist pride; centered on museums rooted in the 19th century and the colonial era; that claims a genealogy going back to the white marbles of Ancient Greece, almost halfway across the world.

The curatorial rank and file should reflect the country we live in, and so should the field that validates them. Beyond reviewing hiring policies, institutions must decide whether they are ready to make space for another narrative, and to value and fully empower different forms of knowledge. Are they ready to shift their relationships to the white art history embodied in their collections by ceding its assumed dominance?

Are institutions ready to shift their high-entrance-fee admissions policies that disproportionately exclude people of color? Indeed, as museums are considering a near-future with limited attendance due to COVID-19, and a resulting decrease in admission income, will they take up the opportunity to reinvent themselves as truly inclusive civic institutions with free admission? At ICI, we have learned from the experience of colleagues in art spaces that adopted a free admission policy, as they described an immediate shift in their audience becoming not only larger, but also more diverse. And a larger more diverse audience in turn came to expect more diverse and representative exhibitions and programs, prompting a reshaping of the curatorial role and who could fill it.

Working internationally, we have also learned to use important tools to better shift our own organization. We learned to rethink our knowledge structures: once we discarded the notion of a curatorial curriculum or an art-historical canon—exclusionary by definition and almost always strengthening the dominance of Euro-American art history—collaboration and horizontal models of knowledge-sharing became our working modes.

We also learned that some of our vocabulary is exclusionary. One of the most potent changes we’ve made was to the working definitions we use. The word “curator” is exclusionary. Redefine it. We adopted a definition of curators as “arts community leaders and organizers,” a term we came to understand with Miranda Lash, curator of contemporary art at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. The term “contemporary art” is exclusionary too. Redefine it. This was an approach we owe to Shuddhabrata Sengupta of Raqs Media Collective, who suggested that in considering art, we take the largest, most encompassing possible definition.

What we learned from our colleagues around the world and around the country, often outside of the main art centers, we applied to our day-to-day work. Institutions can do the same. One change to the system may not be enough; but coupled with other adjustments across the institutional structure, it can have an exponential impact. With awareness and acceptance, institutions will have a chance not only to diversify their staffs, but also their power structures, their work, their audience, and ultimately their civic mandate.

This has been a guiding principle of ICI’s Curatorial Forum, organized with EXPO Chicago every September since 2016, which convenes 40 US curators to generate conversations about the civic responsibilities of museums, topics of accessibility, regionalism, and race and representation. This fall, we will organize a version of the Forum that will build upon past sessions focused on racial equity and how museums can reach a level of awareness and acceptance from within the institution, together with all their stakeholders.

The task of institutional change isn’t small. However, not far from the museum’s doors, independent curators of diverse ethnic, racial, and socio-economic backgrounds have already been rethinking their relationships to the dominant arts and culture field, its preferred language, canon, and the ideology it promotes. They have developed ways to serve artists first, operate independently of the market, and represent a multiplicity of voices and practices that complicate, rather than consolidate prevailing versions of art history. They are creating more than exhibitions—they are shaping different realities through research, publishing, and organizing.

Many people in this new generation of independent curators have found opportunities to present their work in supportive regional and culturally specific museums, while others have created their own digital and physical spaces and founded and/or led art initiatives and small organizations. In taking charge of creating new models for smaller institutions, they have helped define a more inclusive context for art production and presentation, and a more direct relationship to artists than many of the larger institutions and museums, which are slower to adopt change. While these initiatives are not meant to replace the museum, they contribute to shifting the expectations that the curatorial field and art audiences alike will have of their larger cultural institutions.

It is our hope that, in addition to structural change in arts and cultural institutions, this time will prompt the country’s philanthropic field to more fully support independent curatorial voices through direct research, exhibitions and project grants, and to drastically increase the funding of curator-led arts initiatives and small organizations that have shown to be more resilient, responsive, and committed to racial equity through the crisis.

At this time of national crisis, when so many institutions are closed to the public and struggling to articulate their support of people of color, our belief in the need to empower and sustain an already diverse and dynamic independent curatorial field is only heightened.

Renaud Proch is the executive and artistic director of Independent Curators International.

EXPO CHICAGO Moving From Traditional September Dates To April 2021

Tue, 12 May 2020 12:50:00 -0500

EXPO CHICAGO Moving From Traditional September Dates To April 2021
By Chadd Scott

EXPO CHICAGO will bypass its traditional September event dates and instead present its ninth edition April 8–11, 2021 at Navy Pier.

When did it become obvious to organizers that its originally scheduled September 24-27 dates were not feasible?

“It was really two-and-a-half weeks ago, in council with all the stakeholders–exhibitors, collectors, civic leaders, cultural leaders, our partners–there was still hope, but it was real clear that everyone recognized that there was no way we could present a fair in September with the health and wellness of our patrons and exhibitors in mind and make it successful,” President and Director of EXPO CHICAGO Tony Karman told Forbes.com on May 12, the day the decision was announced.

The decision to delay the event was unanimous.

“I don’t think anyone was bullheaded enough to say, ‘don’t listen, stay the course, we want to be there with you;’ I didn’t have to fight a wave of potential discontent about the decision ever,” Karman said. “Everyone wants to hope that we can get back to some normalcy yesterday, but outside of that hope, no one said to me, ‘this is not a good decision if you have to do this.’”

An international exposition of contemporary and modern art, EXPO CHICAGO hosted more than 135 leading exhibitors from around the world at Navy Pier’s Festival Hall in 2019.

EXPO CHICAGO presents a diverse schedule of programming including conversations with leading artists, curators and designers, on-site installations highlighting large-scale sculpture, film and site-specific work, major public art initiatives including work installed throughout Chicago Park District locations, and a curated selection of international artists with work displayed throughout the city’s digital billboard network.

Expo Chicago was postponed until April 2021 due to COVID-19.

Tue, 12 May 2020 12:27:00 -0500

Expo Chicago was postponed until April 2021 due to COVID-19.
By Justin Kamp

The ninth edition of Expo Chicago has been postponed until April 2021. The annual art fair, which was originally scheduled to take place in September at Chicago’s Navy Pier, will instead be held from April 8th to 11th next year.

Last month, the fair introduced accommodations for exhibitors including non-binding deposits, reduced booth fees and flexible payment schedules. It also announced it would donate a portion of its proceeds to the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) and the New Art Dealers Association (NADA). These accommodations will still apply for participants in the spring 2021 edition of the fair, and will coincide with expanded programming and initiatives. NADA canceled the second edition of its Expo Chicago satellite fair, NADA Chicago, last month.

Tony Karman, director of Expo Chicago, said in a statement:

Moving our dates will enable our exhibitors and partners in Chicago to focus on reopening their galleries, launching their upcoming exhibitions, and begin the process of rebuilding so that together we can prepare for this important convening moment for the global art community in Chicago next April.

The announcement marks the latest postponement of major fall art fairs and exhibitions due to COVID-19. The 13 edition of the Gwangju Biennale, scheduled to take place from September 4th to November 29th, was pushed back to 2021. Art Basel’s marquee expo in Switzerland, meanwhile, is still scheduled to take place from September 15th to 20th after being pushed back from its original June timeframe.

After Initially Hoping to Stick to Its September Opening, EXPO Chicago Has Been Postponed Until April 2021

Tue, 12 May 2020 12:00:00 -0500

After Initially Hoping to Stick to Its September Opening, EXPO Chicago Has Been Postponed Until April 2021
By Sarah Cascone

Organizers of NADA Chicago, an EXPO satellite, pulled the plug on their event last month.

Another domino has fallen in the art industry’s international fair schedule, as the ninth edition of EXPO Chicago has been postponed from September 2020 to April 2021.

“The decision to move the date was the result of a collaborative decision-making process with the galleries to give them the time they need to focus on reopening their spaces and exhibitions,” fair director Tony Karman told Artnet News in an email.

Organizers of the fair, which was originally set to take place from September 24–27 with 125 exhibitors, determined that it would still be too early in the recovery period to hold the event, which attracts close to 40,000 visitors each year. The new dates are April 8–11, 2021.

The 2020 edition of NADA Chicago, EXPO’s one-year-old satellite, was canceled last month.

EXPO was slated to be part of a busy fall, especially after a slew of international events originally scheduled for the spring and summer were postponed or cancelled. Currently on the docket for the season are Art Basel (scheduled for September 17–20), the Dallas Art Fair (October 1–4), as well as regularly scheduled events including Frieze London (October 8–11) and FIAC in Paris (October 22–25).

But social-distancing measures make it nearly impossible to hold major gatherings. EXPO’s postponement follows similar announcements from organizers of South Korea’s Gwangju Biennale, which has been delayed from September to February, and France’s Biennale de Lyon, which has been moved from 2021 to 2022.

Karman remains confident that the fair will still attract high-end dealers, even as some may be looking to refocus how and where they spend their money.

“Fairs of our scale and character, that are based in cities that have robust and longstanding gallery, collector, and institutional resources, will have an advantage in terms of providing the kind of important art experiences patrons and collectors will look for moving forward,” he said.

“While we recognize the increased importance of virtual experiences and will be incorporating a digital platform into our program, we believe that there is no replacement for experiencing art in person.”

EXPO’s organizers have not yet decided if they will seek to return the event to its regular September dates following the April 2021 edition. But a portion of the event’s 2021 proceeds will be donated to the Art Dealers Association of America and the New Art Dealers Association.

Another coronavirus change: Expo Chicago art fair moves to next spring

Tue, 12 May 2020 08:00:00 -0500

Another coronavirus change: Expo Chicago art fair moves to next spring
By Steve Johnson

Claiming a new date on the American visual arts calendar, Expo Chicago, the big fall art fair on Navy Pier, is being postponed until next spring, the organization announced Tuesday.

The announcement of April 8-11, 2021, as the event’s next dates reflects an increasing understanding that the traditional late September long weekend was not going to fall early enough in the expected coronavirus recovery cycle, said Expo Chicago President and Director Tony Karman.

A month ago, Karman still hoped that the 8-year-old event, which brings together galleries, collectors, curators and other art lovers, could take place on the planned September 24-27, 2020, dates.

“We just needed to make this decision and make this decision now," Karman said before Tuesday’s announcement, "to ensure the health and safety and well being of our patrons.”

The decision follows the announcement last week of Illinois’s and then Chicago’s incremental plans toward re-opening businesses and public spaces. Both sets of guidelines involve crossing a variety of public-health hurdles before, in the final phases, large public gatherings might occur again, and both pledge to follow the science and the data over those hurdles.

Experts doubt the city or state will be ready by fall to host crowds as large as those of — full name — Expo Chicago, The International Exposition of Contemporary & Modern Art, which Karman said has drawn nearly 40,000 people over the four days.

“It was obvious that the risk to so many wasn’t worth taking,” he said. “After all, we’re only as good as the exhibitors that were looking to do the fair, and it would have been hard for them.”

One of the more than 125 galleries that exhibit at Expo Chicago is the city’s Corbett vs. Dempsey, and like its Chicago peers it has been closed in order to help slow the virus’s spread.

Co-founder John Corbett said he fully supports the Expo Chicago decision to claim new time in the spring rather than just make a shorter-term postponement.

“To have someone think long game like this is really, really helpful," he said. "It helps us to know that that’s out there, but it also helps us to know that it’s a time where we can imagine there’ll be a lot less uncertainty than there would be, for instance, in September, October, November.”

Corbett, who sits on the fair’s selection committee, added, “You want it to be something where you can go into it really feeling gung ho about getting people out to see the work.”

Monique Meloche, an Expo exhibitor and founder of the gallery that bears her name in the West Town neighborhood, also backed the move.

“It’s the absolute right decision,” she said. “I know they were very hopeful of being the first (art) fair to reopen during this thing, but it’s just become apparent the timing is not going to be right.”

One potential challenge with the change, she said, is that Chicago’s September weather is pretty reliably good, while April, the new Expo date, and May, the traditional date for Chicago art fairs before Expo began in 2012, “is always iffy,” she said. “Fingers crossed on the climate.”

On the other hand, countered Corbett, April might well be the time when art fair aficionados are feeling ready to get together in large numbers again.

With other fairs making postponements by steps rather than leaps, “the way things are rolling out, it may put Chicago in a position to be one of, if not the most, important fairs in that period in the United States,” Corbett said.

Karman said it remains to be seen whether Expo Chicago would remain on the spring calendar or seek to return to September for future editions.

Expo Chicago Postpones September Fair to 2021 Over Coronavirus Concerns

Tue, 12 May 2020 08:00:00 -0500

Expo Chicago Postpones September Fair to 2021 Over Coronavirus Concerns
By Tessa Solomon

As the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases climbs worldwide and projections remain bleak, art fairs taking place in the fall may soon have to make another tough call: cancel, pivot to online, or postpone. Expo Chicago, the annual art fair that was scheduled to open at the end of September, has chosen the latter option, saying that it has pushed its upcoming edition to April 2021.

Citing both the health risks a large gathering pose, and the financial turmoil currently roiling the art industry, Expo Chicago director Tony Karman told ARTnews, “It became very clear to us that we would not be able to produce a fair that would be successful for exhibitors, and the decision allows exhibitors the time to reopen their own galleries, to take advantage of adjusting their exhibitions.”

The postponement marks the first of any art fair scheduled for this fall, including a number of fairs that rescheduled their spring/summer dates for this fall. Chief among them is Art Basel, the world’s largest art fair, which is set to run September 17–20, the week before Expo Chicago was to open. And in the past several days, two of the world’s largest art biennials, the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea and the Biennale de Lyon in France said they too would postpone their upcoming exhibitions until February 2021 and September 2022, respectively. Among their chief concerns were the production of new work and possible international travel restrictions.

Last month, Karman sent a letter to exhibitors detailing several accommodations the fair planned to make, including non-binding deposits, a reduction in booth fees, and flexible payment schedules. Additionally, the letter stated that a portion of the fair’s proceeds will be donated to its member organizations, the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) and the New Art Dealers Association (NADA). These changes will instead be offered to galleries who choose to participate in the 2021 edition, which will run at Chicago’s Navy Pier from April 8–11.

“If you’re going to use the word partner then you need to make those adjustments—collaboration goes both ways,” Karman said. “The dealers have responded favorably and most importantly they know we’re here to listen to their needs. That’s been the hallmark of this fair since it was launched in 2012.”

Major exhibition of work by artist Summer Wheat opens at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art

Fri, 14 Feb 2020 12:00:00 -0600

Major exhibition of work by artist Summer Wheat opens at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
By Staff

KANSAS CITY, MO.- Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art will present Summer Wheat: Blood, Sweat, and Tears, with an opening reception taking place Thursday, February 6, 2020, from 6:00–8:00 p.m., followed by an artist talk on Friday, February 7, at 6:00 p.m. The exhibition will remain on view through May 24, 2020.

"This major exhibition of work by artist Summer Wheat presents a period of development in process and reinforces her commitment to a strong presentation of female subjects,” stated Erin Dziedzic, director of curatorial affairs at Kemper Museum. “Evolving from Wheat's drawing practice, these vibrant and gestural tapestry-like paintings present new context for advancing historical representations of women, community, labor, and exuberance.”

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In Blood, Sweat, and Tears, artist Summer Wheat’s vibrantly colored paintings depict a community of heroic females doing the “heavy lifting and running things.” Using an inventive process of pushing paint through aluminum mesh, Wheat’s large-scale paintings resemble medieval tapestries showing female figures as hunters, fishers, and beekeepers. These women rewrite historical imagery through themes such as labor, discovery, and expressions of joy where traditionally only men were present.

Introducing the technical progression of Wheat’s work over the last three years, this exhibition further emphasizes the relationship between drawing, painting, and sculpture. Beginning with drawings referencing inspiration from a broad spectrum of art historical references, ranging from Egyptian pictography to Native American imagery, from French Post-Impressionism to American Pop Art, Wheat questions the history of these narratives by proposing a contemporary perspective.

“The imagery in this exhibition presents a tradition in which women were the original hunters, technologists, and artists,” says Wheat. “Blood, Sweat, and Tears, depicts women catching and releasing fish, a symbol of fertility and transformation, as well as female beekeepers and gardeners. This array of women connected by geometric patterns echoes the psychological space of women supporting each other. They are marching together connecting to creatures from land and water, demonstrating an inherent link to natural elements and to the intricate depths of the unconscious.”

Blood, Sweat, and Tears is a milestone for Wheat as she continues to be inventive with her process and the reauthoring of everyday life, and debuts a number of new paintings and drawings created specifically for this exhibition. Blood, Sweat, and Tears is organized by Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, and curated by Erin Dziedzic, director of curatorial affairs.

A full-color catalogue will be available in conjunction with this exhibition; authors include: Erin Dziedzic, director of curatorial affairs, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art; Nina Bozicnik, associate curator, Henry Art Gallery; Anna Stothart, director, Lehmann Maupin Gallery; Owen Duffy, art historian, writer, and curator based in New York; Yael Friedman, New York-based freelance writer; and David Pagel, L.A. Times critic, professor of art theory and criticism at Claremont Graduate University, and adjunct curator at the Parrish Museum; with an introduction by Sean O’Harrow, executive director, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.

Summer Wheat (b. 1977, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma) has had major solo exhibitions at KMAC, Louisville, Kentucky (2019); Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, California (2018); Smack Mellon, New York, New York (2018); Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington (2017); and Oklahoma Contemporary, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (2016). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas (2018); Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, New York (2018); and Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York, New York (2017). Her work is in the collections of the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky; The Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina; The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington; de Young Museum, San Francisco, California; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas; and Pérez Art Museum, Miami, Florida. Wheat is the recipient of the 2019 Northern Trust Purchase Prize at EXPO Chicago.

7 Tips on How Artists Can Actually Succeed in Business, From Negotiating Contracts to Finding the Right Mentors

Wed, 12 Feb 2020 12:00:00 -0600

artnet
By Sarah Cascone

Dexter Wimberly and Heather Bhandari share their insights for building a viable art career.\

Pursuing a career in the visual arts is a daunting proposition. There’s a reason that the cliché of the starving artist remains an enduring one: Talent and hard work alone can’t guarantee a sustainable career.

It’s easy to overlook the fact that making art, while a deeply personal pursuit, is also a business, and to succeed professionally requires a certain amount of business know-how. And while art school imparts valuable lessons, it doesn’t necessarily prepare students for the financial realities of everyday life as a working artist navigating the notoriously opaque art market.

That’s why independent curators Dexter Wimberly and Heather Bhandari founded the Art World Conference, a financial literacy and professional development event dedicated to tackling the business side of art, from setting prices to signing contracts to legacy planning.

“Because of our backgrounds and love of artists, we feel uniquely positioned to disseminate information to make the lives of artists and arts professionals more sustainable,” the duo told Artnet News in an email. “We also believe it is a social justice issue: more artists and arts professionals from diverse backgrounds, where there is no financial safety net, need to be able to envision a life-long career in the arts.”

Building off the lessons of Bhandari’s book, Art/Work, a professional development guide for artists, the Art World Conference launched in New York last April with speakers like Hyperallergic’s Hrag Vartanian, digital strategist Jiajia Fei, United States Artists CEO Deana Haggag, and marketing and communications strategist Tiana Webb-Evans.

Always envisioned as a multi-city affair, the conference branches out this week to Los Angeles during Frieze. (This will be followed by events in New York and Chicago, timed to Frieze New York in May and Expo Chicago in September, respectively.)

“We hope artists will walk away armed with resources to help them make good choices,” Bhandari and Wimberly said, “and the knowledge that they are running the most interesting businesses out there.”

Ahead of this week’s edition of the Art World Conference, we asked the pair to jointly offer a few financial tips for artists looking to secure their future.

Determine What You’re Worth

There are ways to determine value and worth from a market perspective. You can think about the materials you’re using, the production involved in a work, the size, your resume, education, and pricing history, along with the market rate of other artists with similar resumes and work. If you’re pricing time, resources like the W.A.G.E. calculator can help give a ballpark figure to charge. However, it’s much easier said than done because there is social, cultural, and economic currency to consider. Artists are worth more than a produced object, especially now, when many visual artists don’t even produce objects. Because this question is so difficult, it’s a conversation we’ve programmed into our LA conference. The topic is “Sustainability: On Currency, Value, and Solidarity.”

Realize That You Run a Business

The biggest trap for artists is thinking their practice is not a business. Once artists understand they are, essentially, small business owners, the world opens up to a lot of financial possibilities, resources, and a clarity that’s hard to find when everything you do is considered personal.

We believe that a lot of artists succumb to the stereotypes that artists aren’t good with money, or [that] if an artist is concentrating on the business side of things, the studio is going to suffer. Or that struggle and hardship create good art. Those are all stereotypes that need to be eradicated. Artists are creative thinkers who make something out of nothing every day. They connect with people, fill needs, communicate information, question systems, and inspire. But if they’re told that’s not valuable and they believe it, we, as an art community, will continue to work unpaid and for “exposure.”

Manage Expectations Before Signing a Contract

Signing with a gallery should be a two-way street where both sides figure out if it’s a good fit. If the context, audience, community, money, and opportunity expectations are aligned, then the contract should be easy. It should simply outline what’s already been discussed as fair. Numerous conversations and studio visits should lead up to that moment.

That said, all contracts should be reviewed by a lawyer. Artists should refer to books that have sample contracts (to see if theirs is out-of-the-ordinary), and speak to other artists in the gallery before they sign. The more artists share information with each other, the more equitable the contracts will be. Artists should go into every relationship knowing what they want by way of money, context, press, that dreaded word “exposure,” learning, etc. Then they’re in a good position to know what they require from the contract and where there is room to compromise.

Don’t Assume You Need an MFA

Every artist needs to figure out if an MFA makes sense for them. Is there something they will gain that they cannot achieve outside of participating in academia? Of course, if an artist wants to teach at the college level, an MFA is required. Outside of that, it is optional. Each person needs to decide for themselves and figure out how that debt will be handled upon graduation.

Because we know many artists choose to get MFAs at institutions that don’t provide significant financial aid or teaching assistantships, we will offer a session on debt management and saving at every conference. One mistake many people (not just artists!) make is thinking that when they’re in debt they cannot yet think about the future or build credit. That’s simply not true.

Harness Technology to Self-Promote

Websites and social media are integral to an artist’s career. Not having a website or social media account is akin to not having a phone number or email address. Now that the art world is becoming more decentralized, artists are able to connect directly with people online. They are able to share, sell, and even exhibit on their own through their website, Instagram, and other online platforms. While there are surely successful artists doing it without tech, it’s a lot harder to expand your circle without an online presence, especially if you don’t already have institutional support.

Pick Your Mentor Wisely

Mentorship is huge and it can come in many forms: former teachers, employers, family members, and even peers. It can come through books and online learning. Mentors can come from inside and outside the art world. We recently heard advice that everyone should have one mentor over 65 years old and one under 25 years old. So much can be learned by those around you who simply think differently. The first step is reframing what you think a mentor should look like, and [then] thinking about what you need and what you can give. Again, it is a two-way street.

Don’t Overlook the Boring Stuff

One of the reasons we founded the conference was to have three topics—taxes, legacy planning, and investing—on the minds of artists. Once it’s on their radar, something can be done, resources can be tapped, and progress can be made. One thing artists should know is that you are never too young or too broke to think about these things.

The Golden Rule

Separate personal finances from your business finances, however small or large the business is.

Culture Type: The Year in Black Art 2019

Wed, 05 Feb 2020 16:00:00 -0600

Culture Type
By Victoria L. Valentine

ONCE RELEGATED TO THE MARGINS, artists of African descent continued to migrate toward the center of the art world in 2019, claiming space on just about every front as the decade came to a close. Black contemporary artists won many of the year’s most prestigious and lucrative international art prizes. They shared their work and broadened their audiences by engaging in thoughtful public dialogues, publishing books, and staging exhibitions.

Martin Puryear represented the United States at the Venice Biennale with a solo exhibition in the American Pavilion. Carrie Mae Weems dominated the CONTACT Photography Festival presenting five projects around Toronto. Mark Bradford mounted a sprawling museum survey in China. Coming into her own at 93, Betye Saar opened fall solo exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York. Historic artists were also the subjects of shows.

Making grand statements in New York’s public spaces, black artists installed works on The High Line, in Times Square, and in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and secured forthcoming commissions in Central Park and Prospect Park in Brooklyn. An international slate of young fashion photographers gained notice. Ghana-born, Vienna-based figurative painter Amoako Boafo was a rising art star to watch, a role that came complete with an exhibition at Roberts Project in Los Angeles, a Rubell Museum residency in Miami, and art fair presentations with Mariane Ibrahim.

Meanwhile, numerous auction records were set in 2019 and African American artists with highly praised practices joined the world’s top galleries: Nathaniel Mary Quinn went to Gagosian; Glenn Ligon and Ed Clark signed up with Hauser & Wirth; and Pace added Sam Gilliam to its roster. The following review presents highlights of the year in black art—key exhibitions, awards, appointments, news, and more:

FILM | Visual artist Rashid Johnson makes directorial debut with “Native Son,” a feature film based on Richard Wright’s 1940 novel. HBO acquires film Jan. 24. Deal is struck ahead of film’s premiere at Sundance Film Festival. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks wrote screenplay. Ashton Sanders of “Moonlight” plays lead role of Bigger Thomas. Film begins airing on HBO April 6. | Video by HBO

JANUARY

LIVES | Jan. 3: Joe Casely-Hayford, OBE one of first black British fashion designers to win international acclaim, dies at age 62. His designs “fused sharp Savile Row-honed tailoring with a quirky East End streetwear sensibility.” Tribute published in The Root notes designer hailed from family that thrived in realm of arts and culture. British painter Chris Ofili remembers Casely-Hayford in article for The Guardian.

EXHIBITIONS | Jan. 8: “Charles White: Monumental Practice,” rare selling exhibition of works by Charles White opens at David Zwirner in New York. On view through Feb. 16, show is centered around four eight-foot-tall drawings, studies for Mary McLeod Bethune mural White completed in 1978 for Los Angeles public library. | Photo © Charles White Archive. Courtesy David Zwirner

PUBLIC ART | Jan. 10: Artist Rico Gatson unveils eight mosaic portraits commissioned by MTA Arts & Design for 167th Street subway station in Bronx, N.Y. Installations feature African American and Latino cultural and political figures with connections to borough, including James Baldwin, Gil Scott-Heron, Maya Angelou, Audrey Lorde, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

EXHIBITIONS | Studio Museum in Harlem launches tour of more than 100 works from permanent collection at Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco. Traveling to five additional venues, “Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem” is curated by Connie H. Choi and features nearly 80 artists, including Mark Bradford, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Glenn Ligon, Derrick Adams, Terry Adkins, Dawoud Bey, Jordan Casteel, Elizabeth Catlett, Noah Davis, David Hammons, Hughie Lee-Smith, Norman Lewis, Chris Ofili, Mickalene Thomas, Bob Thompson, Alma Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, Jack Whitten, Fred Wilson, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. More

NEWS | Jan. 15: American Alliance of Museums (AAM) announces Facing Change: Advancing Museum Board Diversity & Inclusion, new three-year, $4 million project designed to diversify museum boards and leadership. AAM data shows 46 percent of museum boards are all white, and just 5.2 percent of board members are African American. Facing Change is funded by grants from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Alice L. Walton Foundation, and Ford Foundation.

FASHION | Jan. 16: British fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner presents “Grace Wales Bonner:A Time for New Dreams” at Serpentine Galleries in London. Exhibition concludes with staging of her Autumn/Winter 2019 collection, Mumbo Jumbo (Feb. 17).

AWARDS & HONORS | Jan 17: College Art Association (CAA) names winners of 2019 Awards for Distinction. Howardena Pindell receives Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement and artist Senga Nengudi is recognized with Distinguished Feminist Award – Visual Art. Christophe Cherix, chief curator of drawings and prints at the Museum of Modern Art, is among finalists for Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for catalogs (“Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions 1965–2016”). Finalists for Barr Award for smaller institutions includes Mark Sloan, director and chief curator at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at College of Charleston, for “Fahamu Pecou: Visible Man.” Awards given at February CAA conference.

AWARDS & HONORS | Jan. 22: Seattle Art Museum announces assemblage artist Aaron Fowler (left) is recipient of 2019 Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize, which includes $10,000 and solo exhibition at museum (“Aaron Fowler: Into Existence,” Dec. 13, 2019-June 28, 2020). | Photo courtesy the artist

PUBLIC ART | Jan. 22-March 3: During the 2019 Winter Season, as part of Art Series, New York City Ballet (NYCB) commissions artist Shantell Martin to install her signature black-and-white drawings on promenade and in lobby areas of David H. Koch Theater where NYCB performs.

EXHIBITIONS | Jan. 22, 2019-Feb. 4, 2020: To address historic underrepresentation of women artists on walls of Gracie Mansion, Chirlane McCray, first lady of New York City, organizes all-female exhibition at mayor’s residence. Curated by Jessica Bell Brown, “She Persists: A Century of Women Artists in New York” features 44 artists with significant ties to city, including Jordan Casteel, Simone Leigh, Lorraine O’Grady, Faith Ringgold, and Kara Walker. More

AWARDS & HONORS | Jan. 22: United States Artists announces 2019 fellows, 45 winners of $50,000 unrestricted awards, including visual artists Juliana Huxtable, Simone Leigh, and Firelei Báez (at right), along with ceramicist Samuel Harvey. | Photo by Jorge Alberto, Courtesy United States Artists

REPORTS | Jan. 28: After publishing Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey 2015, a groundbreaking account assessing museum diversity, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation follows up with Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey 2018, finding uneven, but meaningful progress. Opportunities for African American curators are improving, while change in leadership positions remains a challenge.

AWARDS & HONORS | Jan. 29: New York Foundation for the Art (NYFA) announces three new inductees into NYFA Hall of Fame, including artist Sanford Biggers. Inductees are celebrated at annual benefit April 11.

NEWS | Jan. 30: Angola announces it won’t be participating in the 2019 Venice Biennale, citing budget constraints while affirming its commitment to being represented at international cultural events. In 2013, Angola participated in the biennale for the first time and the nation’s pavilion won the Golden Lion, the international exhibition’s highest award.

AWARDS & HONORS | Ghana-born, Vienna, Austria-based Amoako Boafo (above) makes portraits that celebrate blackness. After recommendation from Kehinde Wiley, up-and-coming artist begins 2019 with “I See Me,” a solo exhibition at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles and has whirlwind year of international recognition. In Vienna, Boafo receives STRABAG Artaward International in June (winning about $17,000) and his related solo show opens in October at STRABAG Haus. Over summer, Boafo is featured in group exhibitions—“Punch” curated by Nina Chanel Abney at Jeffrey Deitch Los Angeles and another at Luce Gallery in Torino, Italy. In September, newly based in Chicago, Mariane Ibrahim gallery presents his work at EXPO Chicago. In November, Boafo is named first artist-in-residence at Rubell Museum’s new location in Miami. During Miami Art Week (Dec. 2-8), his work is on view at Rubell Museum, at Art Basel Miami Beach in solo show presented by Mariane Ibrahim, and City of Miami Beach acquires a paintings for public art collection. | Photo by Eva Kelety, Courtesy STRABAG Kunstforum

FEBRUARY

NEWS | Feb. 2: British-Ghanaian architect David Adjaye calls need for black British museum “long overdue.” Adjaye has designed many cultural institutions around the world, including Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., and Studio Museum in Harlem’s forthcoming new building.

EXHIBITION | Feb. 2: “Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze,” Jordan Casteel‘s first major museum exhibition, opens at the Denver Art Museum, her hometown museum.

AWARDS & HONORS | Feb. 4: High Museum of Art announces 2019 David C. Driskell Prize goes to Huey Copeland, professor of art history at Northwestern University and author of “Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America.” Prize includes $25,000 cash award given at celebratory dinner at museum on April 26.

MAGAZINES | Feb. 7: Ava DuVernay guest edits special “Art of Optimism” issue of Time magazine. She titles introduction to project “Why Art is the Antidote for Our Times” and features many creatives, South African artist Nelson Makamo (cover image), Ethiopian photographer Aida Muluneh, and American photographer Clay Benskin, among them.

NEWS | Feb. 7: Studio Museum in Harlem announces multiyear partnership with Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1. Described as “wide-ranging collaboration” that includes exhibitions and programming, first project is presentation of Studio Museum’s 2018-19 artist-in-residence exhibition at MoMA PS1.

AWARDS & HONORS | Feb. 7: International Center of Photography (ICP) announces 2019 Affinity Awards. Juried prizes go to photographer Dawoud Bey (Art) and Zadie Smith (Critical Writing and Research), for essay on Deana Lawson, which appeared in The New Yorker and artist’s monograph published by Aperture. Annual awards are given out April 2 at ICP fundraising gala in New York City.

AWARDS & HONORS | Feb. 12: Gordon Parks Foundation selects Guadalupe Rosales and Hank Willis Thomas as 2019 fellows. Opportunity includes $20,000 to support new or ongoing project realized as exhibition at foundation in Pleasantville, N.Y. Their shows “Must’ve Been A Wake-Dream:Guadalupe Rosales” and “Exodusters: Hank Willis Thomas” open fall 2019.

MEDIA | Feb. 12: Kim Sajet, director of National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., writes in The Atlantic about outsized interest in Obama portraits. She describes clamor to see paintings of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, respectively, as “pilgrimage” effect that has tripled attendance at Smithsonian museum.

LIVES | Feb. 12: Nigerian curator of contemporary African art, Bisi Silva, (1962-2019) dies. She was 56. Founder of Center for Contemporary Art, Lagos, nonprofit gallery and education center, Silva was bold and visionary curator, with international profile and particular expertise in photography.

“Twenty, 25 years ago, curators of contemporary art might have been completely and totally scared of going to ‘the Dark Continent.’ Now it’s like, ‘Oh, Bisi, I want to go to Lagos, I want to go to Ghana.’” — Bisi Silva

FORUMS | Feb. 13-16: In New York, College Art Association (CAA) annual conference includes keynote address by Baltimore-based bead artist Joyce C. Scott and artist interview with New York artist Julie Mehretu, who works in abstraction. Howardena Pindell and Senga Nengudi are among those who receive Awards for Distinction at gathering.

NEWS | Feb. 14: Prada seeks counsel from artist Theaster Gates after public outcry over “Pradamalia” charms featuring monkeys with big red lips. Prada removes racist products from stores and website and forms Diversity and Inclusion Council co-chaired by Gates and filmmaker Ava DuVernay.

NEWS | Feb. 15: ARTnews reports after seven years in Seattle, Mariane Ibrahim is moving eponymous gallery to Chicago. She focuses on contemporary art with roster of emerging artists primarily from Africa and wider diaspora. Gallery re-opens in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood Sept. 20 with solo exhibition of Ayana V. Jackson.

ART FAIRS | Feb. 15-17: Inaugural edition of Frieze Los Angeles staged at Paramount Studios. Hamza Walker, executive director of Laxart, curates series of talks and music initiatives, including Name That Tune programming with artists Arthur Jafa and Lauren Halsey. Artists Kori Newkirk and Karon Davis (right), co-founder of Underground Museum, participate in Frieze Projects. Naima Keith of California African American Museum (CAAM), and Kristin Sakoda of Los Angeles County Arts Commission, are among those participating in panel discussions during fair. Mark Bradford creates a poster for fair featuring “Life-Size” artwork offered as limited edition benefitting Art for Justice Fund, which focuses on ending mass incarceration. Commissioned for Frieze x Gucci ‘Second Summer of Love’ series, “Black to Techno” Jenn Nkiru’s film about Detroit and Berlin techno, debuts. | Shown, KARON DAVIS, “Cat’s Cradle,” 2019 | Photo by Mark Blower, Courtesy Frieze

FORUMS | Feb. 17: In collaboration with Studio Museum in Harlem, Park Avenue Armory hosts “Culture in a Changing America,” daylong series of interdisciplinary conversations along two tracks (Art & Identity and Art & Activism) featuring Thelma Golden, Julie Mehretu, LeRonn P. Brooks, Leslie Hewitt, Malik Gaines, Mabel O. Wilson, Amanda Williams, Walter Hood, Lynn Nottage, and Bill T. Jones, among many others.

NEWS | Feb. 21: For her senior thesis project at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, photography student Deyane Moses presents “Blackives,” exhibition documenting school’s white’s only admission policy dating from late 1800s to 1950s. MICA president issues statement acknowledging school’s racist past.

APPOINTMENTS | Feb. 25: Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in New York adds three new board members: A.C. Hudgins, high-profile collector of African American art and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) trustee; Kellie Jones, author, curator, and professor in art history, archaeology, and Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University; and Glenn Lowry, director of MoMA.

REPRESENTATION | Feb. 26: Vielmetter Los Angeles announces representation of Austin, Texas-based artist Deborah Roberts.

LIVES | International curator and critic Okwui Enwezor (1963-2019), who pushed contemporary art world to broaden its Western orientation, dies March 15, in Munich. He was 55. Enwezor was artistic director of Haus der Kunst in Munich from 2011 to 2018, and also served as artistic director of 56th Venice Biennale (2015), becoming first black curator to organize historic event. He co-curated “El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale,” which opens at Haus der Kunst a week before he dies. | Photo: Venice Biennale

MARCH

MAGAZINES | A photograph by Los Angeles-based Paul Mpagi Sepuya appears on cover of March 2019 edition of Artforum. Inside, editor-in-chief David Velasco reflects on meeting photographer in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn (where he lived from 2003-14), and asking him to do a single-subject project for magazine. Sepuya suggests his self-portraits. | Cover Image: PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA, Detail of “Darkroom Mirror (_2070386),” 2017

APPOINTMENTS | March 4: Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (ICA at VCU) in Richmond adds new members artist Adam Pendleton and curator Adrienne Edwards to advisory board.

APPOINTMENTS | March 4: In newly created role of chief people officer, Makele Ndessokia will lead human resources division of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark.

APPOINTMENTS | March 4: Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town, South Africa, names Koyo Kouoh executive director and chief curator.

REPORTS | March 4: Mary Louise Schumacher, Arts & Culture Fellow at Harvard University’s Neiman Foundation for Journalism, reports results of survey of 327 visual art writers and critics, asking about “priorities and pressures of their work.” Just 60 percent were willing to disclose their race. Of those, 167 identify as white, and only four as black. Among findings Schumacher publishes in Neiman Reports is selection of “artists that they believed were worthy of championing.” She asked respondents to name three. Names of more than 400 are put forward. Artists that came up most often “tackle thorny, political issues” and are all non-white (listed in no particular order): Kara Walker, Anicka Yi, Kerry James Marshall, Hank Willis Thomas, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Postcommodity (a collective of Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist).

PUBLIC ART | March 4: Artist Hank Willis Thomas and MASS Design Group selected to create Boston memorial honoring Martin Luther King Jr., and Coretta Scott King. Called “The Embrace,” design features four intertwined arms and hands. It’s 22-feet high rendered in bronze. Team bested four other groups represented by artists Yinka Shonibare, Adam Pendelton, Barbara Chase-Riboud, architect David Adjaye, and landscape architect Walter Hood. King Boston expects to break ground on memorial in July 2020. | Photo: Hank Willis Thomas and MASS Design Group/King Boston

AWARDS & HONORS | March 4: Los Angeles-based artist Lauren Halsey wins 2019 Frieze Artist Award. Recognition includes commission for Frieze New York in May, curated by Courtney J. Martin.

AWARDS & HONORS | March 7: Paris-based Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga wins inaugural Étant donnés Prize at Armory Show in New York. $10,000 award recognizes artist of French nationality or France-based.

AWARDS & HONORS | March 8: Pérez Art Museum Miami announces Los Angeles-based artist Christina Quarles is inaugural recipient of Pérez Prize, new annual $50,000 award funded by Darlene and Jorge M. Pérez through their Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation.

AWARDS & HONORS | March 11: Sharjah Art Foundation in United Arab Emirates announces Nigerian artists Otobong Nkanga and Emeka Ogboh are recipients of Sharjah Biennial 14 Prize

NEWS | March 13: Part of Desert X biennial, site-specific, stretched fabric installation by Eric N. Mack mysteriously disappears from defunct gas station in Coachella Valley, Calif. Incident is believed to be act of vandalism, possibly involving fire.

NEWS | March 19: Artist Kehinde Wiley announces Black Rock Senegal, his new residency program. Two months later, he celebrates opening of artist-in-residence program at newly built waterfront compound designed by Senegalese architect Abib Djenne with interiors by Fatiya Djenne and Aissa Dione, where artists will live and work. In July, Wiley selects inaugural group, 16 artists including Sonya Clark, Nona Faustine, Devin B. Johnson, Heather Jones, Kambui Olujimi, and Zohra Opoku. | Photo by Mamadou Gomis, © Kehinde Wiley

BIENNIALS | March 19: Prospect.5 co-curators Naima Keith and Diana Nawi announce eight-member director’s council. Tapped as collaborators on curatorial planning and programming for the New Orleans triennial, members are curators and arts leaders from around country: Rita Gonzalez (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Deana Haggag (United States Artists), Gia Hamilton (New Orleans African American Museum), Eungie Joo (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), Thomas J. Lax (Museum of Modern Art), Courtney J. Martin (Dia Art Foundation), Valerie Cassel Oliver (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts), and Franklin Sirmans (Pérez Art Museum Miami). Prospect. 5 opens to public Oct. 24, 2020.

NEWS | March 20: Tamara Lanier of Norwich, Conn., files a lawsuit against Harvard University, accusing institution of profiting from two photos of slaves, 1850 daguerreotypes that depict her ancestors.

EXHIBITIONS | March 25: Previously unknown photograph of Harriet Tubman goes on public display for first time at Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

EXHIBITIONS | March 26: De Young Museum announces landmark exhibition “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” is traveling to San Francisco.

BIENNIALS | Co-curated by Rujeko Hockley and Jane Panetta, 2019 Whitney Biennial opens May 17 and runs through Oct. 27. Touted as most diverse biennial in museum’s history, about 55 percent of 75 artists are black, including Janiva Ellis (above, “Uh Oh, Look Who Got Wet,” 2019), John Edmonds,Brendan Fernandes, Tomashi Jackson, Steffani Jemison, Autumn Knight, Simone Leigh, Joe Minter, Wangechi Mutu, Daniel Lind-Ramos, Jennifer Packer, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Martine Syms. Tiona Nekkia McClodden wins 2019 Bucksbaum Award. Show’s tenure is clouded by sustained series of protests and complaints aimed at Warren B. Kanders, museum’s vice chair who eventually announced his resignation July 25. | Photo by Ron Amstutz, Courtesy Whitney Museum

APRIL

REPRESENTATION | April 4: Gagosian gallery announces representation of Nathaniel Mary Quinn. The Brooklyn-based artist is recognized for his composite portraits.

AWARDS & HONORS | April 4: Author and journalist Wil Haygood receives fourth James A. Porter & David C. Driskell Book Award for “I Too Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100” at Driskell C. Driskell Center at University of Maryland, College Park, and delivers 2019 Distinguished Annual Lecture in Visual Arts.

REPRESENTATION | April 5: Glenn Ligon, New York-based artist known for text-based paintings, joins Hauser & Wirth gallery.

PUBLIC ART | April 8: Throughout year, Theaster Gates opens several exhibitions and engages in inordinate amount of activities and projects, among them, he installs two artworks composed of de-commissioned fire hoses in Chicago Transit Authority’s Red Line 95th Street Station. He also contributes DJ booth (performance space/radio station) to site, adding live music intervention to Chicagoans daily commute. | Photo: via @MayorRahm

APPOINTMENTS | April 10: Yale Center for British Art hires Courtney J. Martin as director. She joins center in July. Martin, who earned her Ph.D. in art history from Yale University, is serving as deputy director and chief curator at Dia Art Foundation when announcement is made.

EXHIBITIONS | April 11: “Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite” opens at Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. Exhibition is first major museum show dedicated to Kwame Braithwaite, a “key figure of the second Harlem Renaissance.”

APPOINTMENTS | April 11: American Federation of Arts appoints two new members to board of trustees, including Belinda A. Tate, executive director of Kalamazoo Institute of Arts in Michigan.

EXHIBITIONS | April 14: “Oliver Lee Jackson: Recent Paintings” opens at National Gallery of Art. Oakland, Calif.-based Oliver Lee Jackson is focus of rare solo exhibition by a black artist at Washington, D.C., museum. | OLIVER LEE JACKSON, “No. 7,” 2017. | Photo M. Lee Fatherree

NEWS | April 16: For limited time, Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem Thelma Golden gets her own ice cream flavor at Sugar Hill Creamer in Harlem. Golden Chai features chai tea from Serengeti Teas & Spices, also in Harlem.

AWARDS & HONORS | April 17: American Academy of Arts & Sciences announces new 2019 members including artist Mark Bradford, scholar/curator Kellie Jones, and Elizabeth Alexander, a poet/scholar who serves as president of Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, an ardent supporter of arts and culture.

EXHIBITIONS | April 19: Simone Leigh‘s solo exhibition, “The Hugo Boss Prize 2018: Simone Leigh, Loophole of Retreat,” opens at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

LIVES | April 20: Abstract artist Mavis Iona Pusey (1928-2019) dies in Falmouth, Va. She was 90. Two months later, Arts Students League, where Pusey studied, mounts her first major solo exhibition in New York: “In Memoriam: Mavis Iona Pusey, 1928–2019.” Hallie Ringle, curator of contemporary art at Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, is organizing retrospective and monograph of Jamaican-born Pusey, in collaboration with Studio Museum in Harlem. Ringle wrote brief obituary of artist for Burnaway. More

APPOINTMENTS | April 22: Valerie Gay is named deputy director for audience engagement and chief experience officer at Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. She previously served as executive director of Art Sanctuary in Philadelphia.

PUBLIC ART | April 23: Amanda Williams and Olalekan Jeyifous selected to design new monument honoring Shirley Chisholm. Titled “Our Destiny, Our Democracy,” 40-foot tall steel work will be installed at southeast corner of Prospect Park by end of 2020. Under NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, inaugural commission for She Built NYC is also first monument in Brooklyn dedicated to female historic figure. Artists chosen from among four other finalists: Tanda Francis, LaVaughn Belle, Mickalene Thomas, and Firelei Báez.

AWARDS & HONORS | April 25: Open Society Foundations announces winners of 2019 Soros Arts Fellowships, including Firelei Baez, Kaneza Schaal, and Tinashe Mushakavanhu and Nontsikelelo Mutiti. Eleven artists, curators, researchers, and filmmakers “working at the intersection of migration, public space, and the arts” receive $80,000 stipends to fund nine individual and collaborative projects.

EXHIBITIONS | April 26: Harvard University’s Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art at the Hutchins Center presents “Gordon Parks: Selections from the Dean Collection,” with Maurice Berger serving as consulting curator. Owned by Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean and Alicia Keys, the works are from largest privately held collection of photographs by Gordon Parks and include Segregation series, and images of 1963 March on Washington, Harlem, Rio de Janeiro, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, fashion portraits, and collaboration with Ralph Ellison.

EXHIBITIONS | April 30: Paying tribute to pivotal gallery founded by Linda Goode Bryant, Museum of Modern Art in New York announces plans to present “Just Above Midtown 1974 to the Present.” Curated by Thomas J. Lax, exhibition is scheduled to open fall 2022.

BIENNIALS | 58th Venice Biennale opens May 11 and runs through Nov. 24, with Martin Puryear representing United States with solo exhibition (“Liberty Libertá”) in American Pavilion (above). Thirteen black artists are included in international exhibition curated by Ralph Rugoff in Central Pavilion. American artist Arthur Jafa wins Golden Lion, with Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga receiving special mention. Jury includes Hamza Walker, director of Laxart in Los Angeles. Zoé Whitley curates British Pavilion presenting works by Irish artist Cathy Wilkes. Eight African countries stage national pavilions, and a few other nations present African perspectives. British-Ghanaian architect David Adjaye designs Ghana’s inaugural pavilion. Titled “Ghana Freedom,” filmmaker Nana Oforiatta Ayim serves as curator. African Art in Venice Forum (May 7-9) is chaired by curator Osei Bonsu. In addition, curator Jeffreen M. Hayes organizes “AFRICOBRA: Nation Time.” Exhibition is official Venice Biennale collateral event. | Photo Courtesy Madison Square Park Conservancy

MAY

MAGAZINES | May 2019: Out magazine publishes Art issue. Guest edited by writer/curator Kimberly Drew, South African photographer Zanele Muholi is featured on one of two covers. Inside, collector Bernard Lumpkin, and artists Devin Morris, Rakeem Cunningham, Mickalene Thomas, and her partner Racquel Chevremont, are featured.

FESTIVAL | May 1-31: Taking place throughout greater Toronto, annual Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival opens. Among the many artists represented in the global event, New York-based Carrie Mae Weems is lead participant, mounting her first solo presentation in Canada, in five parts—exhibitions at University of Toronto’s art museum, CONTACT Gallery, and three outdoor installations. | Installation view of CARRIE MAE WEEMS, “Slow Fade to Black,” 2010, Metro Hall, King St. W. at John St., Toronto (April 23–June 4, 2019). | Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid, Courtesy Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, the artist, and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, NY.

ART FAIRS | May 2-5: At Frieze New York, Pérez Art Museum Miami Director Franklin Sirmans collaborates with Linda Goode Bryant on a themed section of gallery booths paying tribute to Just Above Midtown Gallery. Art fair’s Booth Prize winner is Jenkins Johnson Gallery recognizing solo exhibition of photographer Ming Smith and Frame Prize goes to Company gallery, for display of Jonatan Lyndon Chase paintings.

ART FAIRS | May 3-5: After four years in Brooklyn, 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair moves New York edition to Manhattan, at Industria in West Village.

EXHIBITIONS | May 8: Curated by Bridget R. Cooks, “Ernie Barnes: A Retrospective,” opens at California African American Museum in Los Angeles, featuring more than 50 works made by Ernie Barnes between 1962 and 2007.

PUBLIC ART | May 13-18: During mural festival at Maya Angelou Community High School, more than two dozen artists, including Victoria Cassinova, Shepard Fairey, Rob Hill, Shawn Michael Warren, and French artist JR, paint monumental tributes to legendary poet for whom South Los Angeles school is named. More

APPOINTMENTS | May 22: Laxart, nonprofit art space in Los Angeles, names five new board members, including artist Glenn Ligon.

APPOINTMENTS | May 23: Smithsonian names Melanie A. Adams director of Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, D.C. Adams previously served as deputy director for learning initiatives at Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul.

NEWS | May 24: After report that seventh grade students from Helen Y. Davis Leadership Academy were harassed and racially profiled during field trip to Museum of Fine Arts Boston, museum releases details of investigation into accusations and announces new website aimed at making MFA Boston a “safe space” for everyone.

APPOINTMENTS | May 28: Curator, scholar, and veteran museum director Spencer Crew is named interim director of Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, in wake of Lonnie G. Bunch III’s appointment as secretary of Smithsonian Institution.

TALKS | Brooklyn Museum hosts Breaking the Canon, rapid-fire talks with artists Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Eric N. Mack, and Linda Goode Bryant in conversation with curators Eugenie Tsai, Ashley James, and Catherine Morris, respectively.

EXHIBITIONS | May 31: First major retrospective of Guyana-born, British artist Frank Bowling opens at Tate Britain. Known for pushing possibilities of paint, he is recognized for his Map Paintings and Poured Paintings.

AWARDS & HONORS | May 31: Authored by Denise Murrell, “Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today” wins 2019 Exhibition Catalogue Award from Dedalus Foundation.

EXHIBITIONS | Opening May 18, Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles presents solo exhibition featuring all new work by David Hammons, including tent city in courtyard of gallery (above), which is not too far from city’s skid row and growing homeless population. Hammons dedicates show to jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman. Hauser & Wirth describes as artist’s first solo exhibition in city in 45 years and largest to date. | Photo by Fredrik Nilsen Studio, © David Hammons

JUNE

EXHIBITIONS | June 1: London-based, British artist Claudette Johnson is known for her figuration. “Claudette Johnson: I Came to Dance” opens at Modern Art Oxford in UK. Her first institutional solo show since 1990 surveys work from the 1980s to present.

“I do believe that the fiction of ‘blackness’ that is the legacy of colonialism, can be interrupted by an encounter with the stories that we have to tell about ourselves. I’m interested in our humanity, our feelings and our politics; some things which have been neglected.” — Claudette Johnson

LIVES | June 1: New York-based Camille Billops (1933-2019), singular figure recognized as print maker, filmmaker, and archivist, dies at age 85. With her husband and longtime collaborator, she established Camille Billops and James V. Hatch Archives at Emory University in Atlanta. Extensive research collection contains materials on African American visual and performing arts gathered over 40 years. Shortly before her death, lengthy profile explored her relationship with her estranged daughter and documentary film she made about it. More | Photo © 1991 Ruth Williamson

PUBLIC ART | June 3: Nari Ward‘s “City in the Grass” is unveiled at Madison Square Park. Installation is artist’s first public art work.

LIVES | June 4: New York painter Joe Overstreet (1933-2019) dies at age 85. An artist and activist, he co-founded Kenkeleba House in 1974. Lower East Side artist space provides exhibition opportunities for artists of color. Recent exhibitions surveyed his abstract works over years, including 1970s “Flight Pattern” paintings on un-stretched canvases, and other series experimenting with paint applications, shaped canvases, and various ways of hanging and supporting his work. More

NEWS | June 4: Gordon Parks Foundation annual gala brings music legends together to commemorates Great Day in Hip-Hop photograph captured by Gordon Parks in 1998 for XXL magazine. Image paid tribute to 1958 Art Kane photograph that gathered jazz musicians on same Harlem stoop at 17 East 126th Street. Earlier in year, an exhibition at foundation explored history of event.

EXHIBITIONS | June 5: Presentation of recent works and large-scale painting from 1970s, Howardena Pindell‘s first-ever solo exhibition in UK opens at Victoria Miro gallery in London.

ACQUISITIONS | June 5: Art Gallery Ontario acquires Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs, vast collection of more than 3,500 photographs dating from 1840 to 1940, documenting region and its people following abolishment of slavery.

EXHIBITIONS | June 6: Faith Ringgold’s first solo exhibition at European Institution opens at Serpentine Galleries in London.

EXHIBITIONS | June 9: Featuring artists Allison Janae Hamilton, Tschabalala Self, and Sable Elyse Smith, “MOOD: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2018–19” opens at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, N.Y. On view through Sept. 8, the showing marks the first time Studio Museum in Harlem has presented an artist-in-residence exhibition outside the museum.

EXHIBITIONS | June 12: Curated by Zak Ové “Get Up, Stand Up Now” at Somerset House in London brings together intergeneration slate of more than 100 black British artists.

APPOINTMENTS | June 17: Los Angeles County Museum of Art announces three new members of board of trustee, including Melody Hobson, president of Chicago-based Ariel Investments and co-founder of Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, and Robbie Robinson, partner at Chicago-based merchant bank BDT & Company, who has served as personal advisor to President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.

EXHIBITIONS | June 21: Organized by guest curator Chaédria LaBouvier, “Basquiat’s “Defacement”: The Untold Story” opens at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Exhibition is centered around personal painting Jean-Michel Basquiat made in wake of death of fellow artist Michael Stewart, who was beaten by police. | JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, “Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart),” 1983. | Collection of Nina Clemente, New York

FILMS | June 21: “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am” opens. Documentary about Toni Morrison by Timothy Greenfield Sanders features opening montage by Mickalene Thomas and works by 21 other artists are included throughout film, helping to illustrate certain aspects of Nobel Prize-winning author’s life.

EXHIBITIONS | June 25: “Lubain Himid: Work from Underneath,” first U.S. solo museum exhibition of British artist and 2017 Turner Prize winner Lubaina Himid, opens at New Museum in New York.

ACQUISITIONS | June 25: Museums are swapping paintings by white male artists for works by black artists, filling historic gaps in their collections with works by Norman Lewis (1909-1979), Alma Thomas (1891-1978), Mickalene Thomas, Frank Bowling, and Nick Cave, among others.

EXHIBITIONS | June 28: “Suzanne Jackson: Five Decades” opens at Telfair Museums in Savannah, Ga. First career-spanning survey is the most comprehensive presentation to date of painter Suzanne Jackson, who ran Gallery 32 in Los Angeles from 1968-70. | SUZANNE JACKSON, El Paridiso, 1981-1984. | Photo by David Kaminsky, © Suzanne Jackson

LIVES | June 30: Prominent figure in apartheid-era South Africa, artist David Koloane (1938-2019) dies June 30. He was a painter, teacher, and activist. A retrospective of Koloane (“A Resilient Visionary: Poetic Expressions of David Koloane”) is on view at Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town for one year through June 1, 2020.

COMMENCEMENTS | Across nation, academic institutions invite artists to address graduates and receive honors. May 4: Photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier gives keynote address and receives honorary doctorate (see video) at Pennsylvania’s Edinboro University, her alma mater. May 13: Chicago photographer Dawoud Bey and British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien receive honorary doctorates at School of the Art Institute of Chicago commencement. May 18: San Francisco Art Institute gives honorary doctorate to artist Emory Douglas, Black Panther Party’s minister of culture. May 19: Ford Foundation President Darren Walker delivers commencement address at University of Vermont. June 1: Equal Justice Initiative Founder Bryan Stevenson is keynote speaker at Rhode Island School of Design commencement; Theaster Gates receives honorary degree. June 21: Lonnie G. Bunch III, secretary of Smithsonian Institution delivers keynote address at Northwestern University commencement. | Video by Edinboro Now

JULY

MEDIA | July 5: Elizabeth Méndez Berry, director at Nathan Cummings Foundation, and Ford Foundation Program Officer Chi-hui Yang, publish op-ed in New York Times calling foul on “Dominance of the White Male Critic.” Even as black art production grows more prominent, in absence of respected black critics, white art critics continue to hold powerful sway on how art is received and evaluated.

LIVES | July 7: Steve Cannon, writer and publisher of literary magazine A Gathering of Tribes, dies at age 84. His Lower East Side townhouse served as gallery and salon welcoming artist, writers and musicians. Annual festival dedicated to jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker was planned there. At its height in 1990s, avant-garde scene included David Hammons, Paul Beatty, Ishmael Reed, and Sun Ra Arkestra. More

GRANTS | July 8: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awards University of Maryland, College Park three-year $2 million grant to support African American History, Culture and Digital Humanities initiative.

LIVES | July 9: Philip Freelon, architect-of-record for Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, dies at age 66, due to complications from ALS. In 1990, he founded Freelon Group in Durham, N.C. In 2014, Freelon Group joined Perkins & Will and Freelon served as managing director of expansive firm’s Durham and Charlotte offices. | Screenshot from Perkins & Will video about Freelon’s background and family

APPOINTMENTS | July 10: Spelman College President Mary Schmidt Campbell joins board of Getty Trust in Los Angeles.

APPOINTMENTS | July 11: United Talent Agency announces Arthur Lewis as creative director of UTA Fine Arts and UTA Artist Space, advising visual artists represented by agency and overseeing exhibitions, programming and partnerships through Beverly Hills presentation and event space.

AWARDS & HONORS | July 11: Studio Museum in Harlem names 2019-2020 artists-in-residence: E. Jane, a Philadelphia-based conceptual artist and musician; Naudline Pierre, a Brooklyn painter (right); and Elliot Reed, a performance artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. | NAUDLINE PIERRE, “Lead Me Gently Home,” 2019. | Courtesy the artist

APPOINTMENTS | July 11: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia elects artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby, ex-officio member of board of trustees. Los Angeles-based artist is alum of PAFA, where she received post-baccalaureate degree in 2006 before studying for MFA at Yale.

NEWS | July 12: Sadie Roberts-Joseph, 75, civil rights activist and founder of Baton Rouge African American history Museum, found suffocated to death in trunk of her car behind abandoned house. Four days later, local police arrest her tenant on murder charge.

APPOINTMENTS | July 16: Former news anchor Robyne Robinson is appointed board chair of recently reopened Minnesota Museum of American Art in St. Paul.

PUBLIC ART | July 17: In wake of NAACP opposition, artist Steve Locke cancels plans for public memorial in form of slave auction block at Boston’s Faneuil Hall. Intent of work was to highlight slave trade profits helped fund landmark. More

FILMS | July 17-Oct. 13: Solange partners with 15 museums and theaters in Paris, London, and throughout United States, to present free screenings of film that accompanies her fourth album “When I Get Home.”

ACQUISITIONS | July 24: Led by Ford Foundation and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a consortium of four foundations, also including J. Paul Getty Trust and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, acquires Johnson Publishing Company Archive for $30 million, through auction process. Documenting African American experience over past seven decades, archive contains materials related to Ebony and Jet magazines. Collection of more than four million photographic prints and negatives, along with video and music content, is donated to Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and Getty Research Institute. | Adam Clayton Powell and Malcolm X attend school boycott rally in New York City, March 1964. | Photo: G. Marshall Wilson/Johnson Publishing Company

EXHIBITIONS | July 27: Curated by Diana Nawi, “Mark Bradford: Los Angeles” opens at Long Museum in West Bund, China. Named for Mark Bradford‘s hometown, city where he was born, grew up, educated, and now lives and works, exhibition explores his work over past decade, considering both his collage “paintings” and sculpture.

REPORTS | July 29: New York City Department of Cultural Affairs releases study about workforce demographics at nonprofits that receive city funding. Findings show large and small arts organizations do not reflect communities they serve. Whites represent 32 percent of population and make up 66 percent of arts workforce; by contrast African Americans represent 10 percent of staff and 22 percent of population.

REPRESENTATION | July 29: Groundbreaking, Washington, D.C.-based painter Sam Gilliam joins Pace Gallery, marking first time in six-decade career he is represented in New York.

APPOINTMENTS | July 31: Artist Gary Simmons joins board of directors at Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts in Los Angeles.

TELEVISION | CBS News ramps up coverage of African American artists in 2019, featuring Mark Bradford in a 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper (May), Simone Leigh profile on CBS This Morning (April), and report on CBS Sunday Morning (July) about curator Denise Murrell‘s exhibition “Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today,” which includes cameo by artist Mickalene Thomas (see video above, ad runs first). | Video by CBS News

AUGUST

EXHIBITIONS | Aug. 10: “Double Merge,” special site-specific installation of two massive drape paintings by Sam Gilliam goes on long-term view at Dia Beacon in Upstate New York. | SAM GILLIAM, Installation view of “Double Merge,” 1968, Dia, Beacon, N.Y. | © Sam Gilliam/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, Photo by Bill Jacobson Studio, New York

AWARDS & HONORS | Aug. 11: Los Angeles conceptual artist Charles Gaines receives 60th MacDowell Medal at public event in Peterborough, N.H.

MAGAZINES | Aug. 14: Coinciding with 400th anniversary of the first ship to arrive on shores of United States carrying enslaved Africans, New York Times Magazine publishes The 1619 Project, sweeping examination that seeks to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” Staff writer Nikole Hannah-Jones conceives project, which features contributions by many writers, editors, fact checkers, and artists, including photographer Dannielle Bowman, who shoots cover, Adam Pendleton. Lyle Ashton Harris, Diana Ejaita, Michael Paul Britto, D’Angelo Lovell Williams, J Murff, and Djeneba Aduayom. In addition, objects from collection of Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture are employed to explain history of American slavery.

MAGAZINES | Aug. 19: Days after death of Toni Morrison (1931-2019), Kara Walker delivers illustration for cover of The New Yorker magazine dedicated to the celebrated Nobel Prize-winning author (near left).

BOOKS | Aug. 20: Authored by Darby English and Charlotte Barat, “Among Others: Blackness at MoMA” is published. With contributions by Mabel O. Wilson, and many other artists, curators, and scholars, the fully illustrated volume (far left) undertakes the Museum of Modern Art’s complex record with black artists, black audiences, and art about blackness.

MAGAZINES | Aug. 27: Juxtapoz releases fall 2019 issue featuring profile of artist Derrick Adams, with image from his “Floater” series on cover (above center).

LIVES | Aug. 29: Artist Barbara Johnson Zuber (1926-2019) dies in Troy, N.Y. She was 93. Born in Philadelphia and raised in Harlem, she was first African American woman to graduate with BFA degree from Yale University. Her work is represented in collection of Johnson Publishing Company.

AWARDS & HONORS | Aug. 29: Howardena Pindell wins 2019 Artist Award, $25,000 annual prize administered by Artists’ Legacy Foundation.

PUBLIC ART | Monumental public art works by Simone Leigh, Wangechi Mutu, and Kehinde Wiley are installed in New York. Awarded inaugural High Line Plinth commission, Leigh’s towering “Brick House” sculpture (right) is unveiled in June, overlooking 10th Avenue. “The NewOnes, will free Us,” Mutu’s inaugural facade commission (center), opens at Metropolitan Museum of Art on Sept. 9. Later in month, Wiley’s “Rumors of War” is unveiled before crowd of hundreds in Times Square and is on view for two months before being reinstalled permanently in front of Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond (left). | Photos: From left, By Travis Fullerton, © VMFA; By Bruce Schwarz, Courtesy The Met; By Timothy Schenck, Courtesy High Line

SEPTEMBER

EXHIBITIONS | Sept. 5: David Zwirner gallery presents “Light Break” and “the sound i saw,” two exhibitions providing comprehensive look at photographic career of Roy DeCarava, curated by art historian Sherry Turner DeCarava, widow of artist. Two publications accompany shows: “Light Break,” a new catalog, and expanded edition of “the sound i saw,” an artist book by DeCarava.

FASHION | Sept. 5: 2019 Vanity Fair Best-Dressed List is released. Fashionable group is probably most diverse ever selected by magazine. Artist Kehinde Wiley and art collector and philanthropist Pamela J. Joyner make list, published in October 2019 issue. Fashion designer/curator Duro Olowu and writer/curator Kimberly Drew are on judging committee.

AWARDS & HONORS | Sept. 6: Architectural Record announces recipients of 2019 Women in Architecture Awards, including Mabel O. Wilson, curator, author, and professor of architecture and African American and African Diasporic studies at Columbia University, honored for her distinguished work as educator.

EXHIBITIONS | Sept. 10: After joining Hauser & Wirth in 2018, Amy Sherald, who is celebrated for her imaginative portraits, opens first exhibition with gallery, “in the heart of the matter…” in New York.

APPOINTMENTS | Sept. 11: Cameron Shaw named deputy director and chief curator at California African American Museum in Los Angeles.

EXHIBITIONS | Sept. 11: After spending early years of her career in Germany and France, abstract artist Mildred Thompson (1936 – 2003) became artist-in-residence at Spelman College and spent the rest of her life in Atlanta. “Mildred Thompson: The Atlanta Years, 1986-2003” explores the work she made during period and is described as her “first large-scale, interdisciplinary solo exhibition in city.” More

ACQUISITIONS | Sept. 12: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., announces 29 acquisitions, nearly all of them by African American artists including Jordan Casteel, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Emma Amos, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Kehinde Wiley, Clementine Hunter, Thornton Dial, Sam Doyle, Ronald Lockett, and Purvis Young.

PUBLIC ART | Sept. 16: David Hammons and Whitney Museum of American Art celebrate groundbreaking of his “Day’s End” public art installation on the Hudson River waterfront with sunset gathering.

AWARDS & HONORS | Sept. 16: J. Paul Getty Trust awards 2019 J. Paul Getty Medals to Lorna Simpson, Mary Beard, and Ed Ruscha. One of Simpson’s deep-blue abstract images, enlarged and transformed into a wall installation, sets scene for celebration at The Getty Center in Los Angeles.

EXHIBITIONS | Sept. 20: “Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott,” career-spanning survey of Robert Colescott (1925-2009), known for his satirical and insightful paintings, opens at Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in Cincinnati. Co-curated by Lowery Stokes Sims and Matthew Weseley, exhibition features 85 works dating from 1949 to 2002, and will travel to four additional museums.

EXHIBITIONS | Sept. 21: “Pope.L: Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration,” collaborative programming co-organized by three New York institutions, showcases provocative performance practice of Pope.L. Trio of presentations begins with “Pope.L: Conquest,”collective performance presented by Public Art Fund; and continues with “Pope.L: Choir,” an installation at Whitney Museum of American Art (Oct 10); and “member Pope.L, 1978–2001,” survey exhibition at Museum of Modern Art (Oct. 21).

AWARDS & HONORS | Sept. 24: Artes Mundi Prize shortlist is announced. All six finalists are artists of color, including Firelei Báez (Dominican Republic), Dineo Seshee Bopape (South Africa), and Carrie Mae Weems (United States). Winner of biennial prize (approx. $50,000) will be announced in January 2021.

MAGAZINES | Sept. 25: Selfie-portrait by Arthur Jafa covers fall 2019 Living Legends issue of Cultured magazine featuring profile of artist and filmmaker by poet Morgan Parker: “Between Stillness: Arthur Jafa and the Cinematic Revolution.”

AWARDS & HONORS | Sept. 25: Joan Mitchell Foundation announces 25 winners of 2019 Painters & Sculptors Grants. Paul Stephen Benjamin (Atlanta), Jamal Cyrus (Houston), Lauren Halsey (Los Angeles), Daniel Lind-Ramos (Loiza, P.R.), and Suzanne Jackson (Savannah, Ga.) are among artists receiving $25,000 in unrestricted funds.

MEDIA | Sept. 26: The Root releases 2019 Root 100 List. Several notable figures in arts are on list of most influential African Americans, aged 25 to 45: photographer John Edmonds, writer and historian Tanisha C. Ford, curator Jeffreen Hayes, artist Amanda Williams, curator Chaédria LaBouvier, artist Diamond Stingily, artist Alexandra Bell, and artist Delano Dunn.

NEWS | Sept. 26: Months-long clash between Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities continues as she takes action to limit commission’s power.

AWARDS & HONORS | Sept. 26: MacArthur Foundation announces 2019 MacArthur Fellows. Group of 26 “geniuses” includes Queens, N.Y., artist Cameron Rowland and Oakland, Calif.-based landscape architect Walter Hood.

APPOINTMENTS | Sept. 27: Ford Foundation President Darren Walker is elected to board of trustees at National Gallery in Washington, D.C.

EXHIBITIONS | Sept. 29: After touring four museums, “Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection” arrives at Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) expanded and transformed with additions from BMA’s collection, and other institutions and private collectors. New version is titled “Generations: A History of Black Abstract Art.” Landmark exhibition tells intergenerational history of artists—such as Norman Lewis, Alma Thomas, Jack Whitten, Sam Gilliam, Charles Gaines, Mark Bradford, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, Kevin Beasley, and Shinique Smith (shown)—who since post-war era have expressed themselves through abstraction. More | SHINIQUE SMITH, “Black, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red, Pink,” 2015. | The Joyner / Giuffrida Collection

AWARDS & HONORS | Sept. 30: Norway art museum Henie Onstad Kunstsenter announces Nigerian-born, Antwerp, Belgium-based Otobong Nkanga is winner of inaugural $100,000 Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award.

LIVES | An important figure in post-war Abstraction, Ed Clark (1926-2019) dies Oct. 18 in Detroit. He was 93. Clark is recognized for innovation and experimentation—using a push broom to move paint across canvases in broad strokes and working with shaped canvases, most notably oval ones. At time of his death, Clark’s first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth gallery was on view in New York. | Photo by Chester Higgins

OCTOBER

EXHIBITIONS | Oct. 2: At Tate Modern in London, “Fons Americanus,” monumental fountain by Kara Walker, opens in Turbine Hall. Walker is first black artist to create installation for space and first American artist selected for Hyundai Commission. | KARA WALKER, Inatallation view of “Fons Americanus,” 2019, Tate Modern, London | Photo © Tate, by Matt Greenwood

EXHIBITIONS | Oct. 2: “Maren Hassinger: Passing Through,” New York-based Maren Hasseniger‘s first solo exhibition outside United States, opens at Tiwani Contemporary in London. Hassinger, whose artistic roots date back to 1970s and 80s African American avant garde in Los Angeles, is presenting new and existing works.

EXHIBITIONS | Oct. 3: “Frederick Douglass: Embers of Freedom” opens at SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Ga. Presents fascinating look at unrivaled collection of materials in Frederick Douglass Family Archive of Walter and Linda Evans displayed in dialogue with artworks by contemporary artists—including Kevin Beasley, Lyle Ashton Harris, Lubaina Himid, Titus Kaphar, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Betye Saar, Raphaël Barontini, and Isaac Julien.

AUCTIONS | Oct. 4: Mickalene Thomas‘s rhinestone-embellished portrait of supermodel Naomi Campbell sets new auction record for artist when “Naomi Looking Forward” (2013) sells for nearly $700,000 at Sotheby’s London Contemporary Art Day Auction.

PUBLIC ART | Oct. 5: New York City plans to replace Central Park monument to 19th century physician J. Marion Sims (he conducted gynecological research on enslaved black women) with new sculpture by contemporary artist. After open call, four finalists are named: Simone Leigh, Wangechi Mutu, Kehinde Wiley, and Vinnie Bagwell. Hearing intended as celebration event announcing selected artist, turns controversial when juried panel votes in favor of Leigh’s design and coalition of community activists backs Bagwell’s. Ultimately, Leigh withdraws and city decides Bagwell’s proposal will be realized.

BIENNIALS | Oct. 7: Whitney Museum of American Art announces David Breslin, curator and director of collection, and Adrienne Edwards, curator of performance, will serve as co-curators for 2021 Whitney Biennial.

AWARDS & HONORES | Oct. 7: Fresh from winning MacArthur Genius Grant on Sept. 26, Oakland, Calif.-based landscape architect Walter Hood nabs 2019 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, $250,000 cash award given annually to “highly accomplished artist from any discipline who has pushed the boundaries of an art form, contributed to social change and paved the way for the next generation.”

BOOKS | Oct. 10: Written by Kelsi Bracmort and illustrated by Takeia Marie, “Simone Visits the Museum” wins Best Children’s Book Award from International Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society at annual conference in Hyattsville, Md.

AWARDS & HONORS | Oct. 10: Institute of Contemporary Art Boston names Firelei Báez ICA Watershed Artist for 2020. Opening in May 2020, commission will be her largest sculptural installation to date.

APPOINTMENTS | Oct. 11: Dwight A. McBride is named president of New School in New York City. Currently serving as provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at Emory University in Atlanta, he is first black president and first person of color to lead institution, which includes several colleges, Parsons School of Design, among them.

NEWS | Oct. 11: Discovery of African American Last Supper frieze is reported. Made by Akili Ron Anderson in 1982, monumental wall sculpture is uncovered during demolition work in former church building in Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, D.C. | Photo by Evy Mages, Used with permission

ACQUISITIONS | Oct. 11: St. Louis Art Museum announces it purchased “Seated Woman” by Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012). Mahogany sculpture sold for $389,000 at Swann Auction Galleries African-American Fine Art Sale (Oct. 8), setting artist record.

FORUM | Oct. 11-13: During his tenure as artist-in-residence at Park Avenue Armory, Theaster Gates hosts his annual Black Artists Retreat outside Chicago for first time. New York City gathering “welcomes black artists and allies from Chicago, New York, and beyond for a weekend of communion, celebration, and multi-disciplinary exploration of this year’s theme: sonic imagination.”

Oct. 12: Art + Practice in Los Angeles presents “Stephen Towns: Rumination and a Reckoning” and “Ramsess: The Gathering.” Exhibitions showcase work of Stephen Towns and “Ramsess,” male artists from Baltimore and Los Angeles, respectively, who use medium of quilting to tackle weighty issues such as legacy of slavery and role of women’s labor, consider memory, and celebrate black history figures.

AWARDS & HONORS | Oct. 15: Los Angeles-based Arthur Jafa wins 2019 Prix International d’Art Contemporain (PIAC), international prize for contemporary art given every three years by Prince Pierre Foundation in Monaco. Recognized for his video, “Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death” (2016), Jafa receives cash award (about $83,000) and funding to support new work.

ACQUISITIONS | Oct. 16: UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) acquires nearly 3,000 quilts by more than 400 well- and little-known Africa American artists, including more than 500 by Rosie Lee Tompkins, through posthumous bequest from Eli Leon (1935-2018), Oakland, Calif., psychologist and quilt scholar who assembled unparalleled collection over three decades.

MAGAZINES | Oct. 18: Chicago artist Nick Cave ranks among The Greats for 2019 in New York Times “T” Style Magazine, where he’s photographed by Renee Cox.

EXHIBITION | Oct. 19: Los Angeles-based artist Christina Quarles‘s first solo exhibition in European museum opens at The Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire, UK, presenting new and recent paintings and drawings.

MUSEUMS | Oct. 21: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) reopens after renovation with expansive new exhibition spaces and a rehang of its collection with more diverse selections on view. Shows featuring Betye Saar (“The Legends of Black Girl’s Window”) and Pope.L (“member: Pope.L, 1978–2001”) are central to museum’s new programming, which also includes a presentation of works by Michael Armitage (“Projects 110”), a collaboration between MoMA and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

REPRESENTATION | Oct. 22: Chicago-based photographer Dawoud Bey joins Sean Kelly Gallery in New York.

FORUMS | Oct. 25-27: Organized by curators Julie Crooks (Art Gallery Ontario), Dominique Fontaine, Gaëtane Verna (The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery), and Pamela Edmonds, inaugural Black Curators Forum occurs in Toronto at AGO and The Power Plant. Conference theme is “Beyond Representation” and Courtney J. Martin, director of Yale Center for British Art, gives keynote address. More

EXHIBITIONS | Oct. 26: For more than six years, Botswana-born, New York-based Meleko Mokgosi has been developing “Democratic Intuition” (2013-2019), a series of paintings presented chapter by chapter at museums across the country. Project “questions conceptions of democracy in relation to the daily lived experiences of southern Africans.” Special presentation at Jack Shainman gallery’s The School in Kinderhook, N.Y., brings seven of eight chapters together, providing rare opportunity to view Mokgosi’s near-complete vision.

BIENNIALS | Oct. 26-Nov. 23: Titled “How to Build a Lagoon with Just a Bottle of Wine?” second Lagos Biennial opens in Nigeria with Antawan I. Byrd, Tosin Oshinowo and Oyinda Fakeye serving as co-curators.

BOOKS | Oct. 29: “The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion” by curator/critic Antwaun Sargent is published, showcasing work of 15 photographers, including Campbell Addy, Arielle Bobb-Willis, Awol Erizku, and Tyler Mitchell. | Cover image: TYLER MITCHELL, “Untitled (Hijab Couture), New York,” 2019

EXHIBITIONS | Oct. 29: Following retrospective staged by Leslie Umberger at Smithsonian American Art Museum, David Zwirner gallery in New York presents rare exhibition, an opportunity to see broad selection of works by Bill Traylor (c.1853–1949) from The William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation and Family Collections sold to benefit Harlem Children’s Zone and Dreyfus Foundation.

APPOINTMENTS | Oct. 30: Forthcoming Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles taps Sandra Jackson-Dumont as new director and CEO. Jackson-Dumont has served as chair of education at Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since 2014.

APPOINTMENTS | Oct. 31: Tom Finkelpearl suddenly departs after five years as commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Former museum leader with deep connections in city’s arts community, he steps down amid series of bumps in process of diversifying city’s monuments, though challenges are not cited as reason.

EXHIBITIONS | Major museum exhibitions on East and West Coasts showcase work of Los Angeles-based artist Betye Saar. Opening at Los Angeles County Museum of Art in September, “Betye Saar: Call and Response” (left) is described as “the first exhibition at a California museum to address her entire career and the first anywhere to focus on her sketchbooks” and is documented with publication. “Betye Saar The Legends of Black Girl’s Window” (right) at MoMA explores her printmaking and title work is the subject of small volume. | Photos Courtesy LACMA, MoMA

NOVEMBER

ART FAIRS | Nov. 1-3: Founded by Tokini Peterside, Art x Lagos celebrates fourth year, hosting 22 galleries showcasing about 60 artists (Watch video). Documentary photographer Etinosa Yvonne wins Nigerian art fair’s 2019 Art x Prize.

EXHIBITIONS | Nov. 3: First-ever comprehensive retrospective of abstract artist Julie Mehretu opens at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Organized by Christine Y. Kim of LACMA and Rujeko Hockley of Whitney Museum of American Art, exhibition considers New York-based Mehretu’s two-decade career. | JULIE MEHRETU, “Sun Ship (J.C.),” 2018. | © Julie Mehretu, Photo by Tom Powel Imaging, Inc., White Cube Mason’s Yard Courtesy the artist, White Cube, and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

AWARDS & HONORS | Nov. 5: Detroit-born, Oakland, Calif.-based Indira Allegra wins 2019 Burke Prize from Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York City. $50,000 award recognizes artist under 45 years old working in fiber, clay, glass, metal, or wood.

TALKS | Nov. 7: Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta hosts “When, Where, and How We Enter,” with curators Valerie Cassel Oliver, Lauren Haynes, Melissa Messina, and Hallie Ringle discussing legacy of black women abstract painters.

APPOINTMENTS | Nov. 8: Victoria & Albert Museum in London announces Gus Casely-Hayford is joining museum as inaugural director of V&A East. Casely-Hayford has been serving as director of Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., since February 2018.

AWARDS & HONORS | Nov. 8: Betye Saar wins 2020 Wolfgang Hahn Prize from Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany. Museum is dedicating (about $110,000) to acquire Saar’s work, presenting an exhibition of her work (April 22,-July 6, 2020), and producing a coinciding publication. She is the first black woman to win the prize.

PERFORMANCE ART | Nov. 8-9: After six years of planning, Dread Scott stages Slave Rebellion Reenactment, reimagining German Coast Uprising of 1811, largest uprising of enslaved people in U.S. history. Artist and hundreds of volunteers march for 26 miles, along Louisiana’s River Road from St. John the Baptist Parish to St. Charles Parish and on to New Orleans. Watch Video | Photo by Soul Brother

ART FAIRS | Nov. 9-11: Also Known as Africa (AKAA) art fair stages fourth edition in Paris, France, with 45 galleries and about 100 artists represented.

EXHIBITIONS | Nov. 12: Presenting 60 works by artists such as Robert S. Duncanson, Aaron Douglas, Clementine Hunter, William H. Johnson, Bob Thompson, Rashid Johnson, Whitfield Lovell, Carrie Mae Weems, and Leroy Foster, from 19 private collections, “Detroit Collects: Selections of African American Art from Private Collections” opens at Detroit Institute of Arts.

EXHIBITION | Nov. 12: British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen is photographing all of London’s Year 3 students. Ambitious project is realized in part by unveiling of “class portrait” today at Tate Modern, with accompanying exhibition opening February 2020.

MAGAZINES | Nov. 13: London-based Art Review magazine releases 2019 Power 100 list, including 11 black artists, curators, scholars and a collector—Thelma Golden, Kerry James Marshall, Felwine Sarr, and Fred Moten, among them.

AWARDS & HONORS | Nov. 13: Torkwase Dyson, whose multidisciplinary practice explores black spacial politics, receives $50,000 Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize at Studio Museum’s annual fall gala in New York.

AWARDS & HONORS | Nov. 13: Ivory Coast photographer Joana Choumali wins 2019 Prix Pictet, award of about $100,000. She is first African artist to receive global photography award focused on environment and sustainability issues.

MAGAZINES | Nov. 13: Inaugural Time 100 Next list includes Los Angeles-based painter Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Brooklyn photographer John Edmonds.

AUCTIONS | Nov. 13-14: In New York, major works by Alma Thomas (“A Fantastic Sunset,” 1970), shown at right, Charles White (“Banner for Willie J,” 1976; “Ye Shall Inherit the Earth,” 1953), and Norman Lewis (“Ritual,” 1962) are featured in contemporary evening sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s for first time. All four works set new records at auction for artists.

AUCTIONS | Nov. 14: Kerry James Marshall‘s “Vignette 19” (2014), six-feet tall painting depicting three couples captured in park-like vignette, sells for more nearly $18.5 million at Sotheby’s New York. Historic price is second-highest ever paid at auction for work by living African American artist. (Marshall also holds record for highest.)

MUSEUMS | Nov. 14: Baltimore Museum of Art announces it will acquire works exclusively made by women artists in 2020.

APPOINTMENTS | Nov. 14: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York hires first black curator in 80-year history, announcing appointment of Ashley James, as associate curator, contemporary art. She previously served as assistant curator of contemporary art at Brooklyn Museum, where she led institution’s presentation of “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.”

AWARDS & HONORS | Nov. 15: Stephanie Comilang wins 2019 Sobey Art Award. Comilang has film-based practice and divides her time between Toronto and Berlin. Given by Sobey Art Foundation in partnership with National Gallery of Canada, $100,000 honor is regarded as Canada’s top award in contemporary art.

AUCTIONS | Nov. 15: “The Conservationists” (2015), first major painting by Kenyan-born artist Michael Armitage to appear at auction blasts way past expectations with bids soaring to 30 times low estimate ($50,000-$70,000) and selling for more than $1.5 million, new record for artist whose work is on view in solo exhibition at MoMA.

BOOKS | Nov. 19: First monograph of Los Angeles-based photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya is published by Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis documenting his exhibition organized by the museum.

AWARDS & HONORS | Nov. 19: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum names six finalists for the 2020 Hugo Boss Prize. Shortlist includes artists Kevin Beasley (b. 1985, Lynchburg, Va.), Deana Lawson (b. 1979, Rochester, N.Y.), work shown at left, and Elias Sime (b. 1968, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia). Winner will be announced in fall 2020.

ACQUISITIONS | Nov. 20: Frank Bowling‘s “Penumbra” (1970) is acquired by The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (which comprise de Young and Legion of Honor museums). Part of his “Map” series, monumental painting (measuring 8 x 23 feet) is on view in “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, 1963-1983” at de Young, through March 15, 2020.

AWARDS & HONORS | Nov 20: Anonymous Was a Woman grantees are announced. 2019 winners include Elia Alba, Torkwase Dyson, Nona Faustine, and Rhodessa Jones. Award is unrestricted grant of $25,000 given to women artists more than 40 years old.

EXHIBITIONS | Nov. 23: Nubuke Foundation in Accra celebrates reopening after two year’s of construction with retrospective of pioneering Ghanaian photographer James Barnor, on view through May 10, 2020.

MEDIA | Nov. 28: ARTnews publishes list of 20 most important artworks of decade. “A view of a landscape: A cotton gin motor,” 2012–18 by Kevin Beasley ranks No. 18 and works by other African American artists occupy five of top six spots: (6) “Attica Series Desk,” 2016 by Cameron Rowland; (5) “Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama,” 2018 by Amy Sherald; (3) “Untitled (Studio),” 2014 by Kerry James Marshall; (2) “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” 2014 by Kara Walker; and (1) “Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death,” 2016 by Arthur Jafa.

BIENNIALS | Nov. 30, 2019-Jan. 31, 2020: Bamako Encounters opens in Bamako, Mali. Titled, “Streams of Consciousness,” latest edition of photography biennale is curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and features about 80 artists.

APPOINTMENTS | Black man takes over “world’s largest museum, education, and research complex” when Lonnie G. Bunch III is named secretary of Smithsonian Institution on May 28, overseeing 19 museums and National Zoo. Bunch, founding director of Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), begins new leadership post June 16 and is officially installed Nov. 1. Appointment is groundbreaking on multiple fronts, Bunch is first African American to serve as secretary, first historian to hold post, and first museum director to be elevated to position in 74 years. In June, public calls ramp up for cultural institutions to reject funding from Sackler family in wake of opioid crisis, he says family name will remain on Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of Art, which focuses on Asian art. In September, Bunch publishes “A Fool’s Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump” and embarks on national book tour. | Photo Courtesy NMAAHC

DECEMBER

AWARDS & HONORS | Dec. 3: Shortlisted for Turner Prize, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, and Tai Shani form collective and jury awards British art prize to more than one artist for first time. $52,000 prize is split four ways. | Photo by Stuart C. Wilson/Stuart Wilson/Getty Images for Turner Contemporary

APPOINTMENTS | Dec. 3: Artsy names entrepreneur Everette Taylor chief marketing officer. Taylor founded ET Enterprises in 2013. Portfolio of tech companies includes ArtX, new platform designed to help emerging artists amplify their work. |

ACQUISITIONS | Dec. 6: Inaugurating new Legacy Purchase program, city of Miami Beach dedicates $100,000 to buying work of art from Art Basel Miami Beach for city’s public collection. Works by seven artists including Amoako Boafo, Todd Gray, Ebony G. Patterson, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Didier William are considered. City’s Art in Public Places committee narrows shortlist to Boafo, Patterson, and William. In public vote, Miami Beach citizens choose “…as the garden secretes a swarm of monarchs feast…” (2019) by Patterson. City elects to also purchase Boafo’s “Cobalt Blue Earring” (2019).

AUCTIONS | Dec. 6: Hindman Auctions in Chicago holds Property from Ebony Fashion Fair: The Final Show sale. Ebony Fashion Fair, traveling runway show created by Eunice W. Johnson and Johnson Publishing Company in 1958, ceased operations in 2009. In years since, multiple auctions of clothing from collections have been held at Hindman in Chicago. Auction house is hosting last sale of collection.

MAGAZINES | Calvin Tompkins visits press-averse artist David Hammons at his Yonkers, N.Y., studio and publishes a story about experience in Dec. 9 edition of The New Yorker.

NEWS | Dec. 14: After besting other bidders and buying Kerry James Marshall‘s “Past Times” (1997) at Sotheby’s New York in May 2018, Sean “Diddy” Combs showcases most expensive painting by living African American artist at auction at 50th birthday bash at his Beverly Hills home.

NEWS | Dec. 18: Spelman College in Atlanta receives $2 million gift from Leonard & Louise Riggio for new academic center “designed to bring the arts, technology and innovation into close collaboration with one another.” Riggio is founder and former chairman of Barnes & Noble.

AWARDS & HONORS | Dec. 18: Photographer Tyler Mitchell and artist Nina Chanel Abney named 2020 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellows. Each artist awarded $20,000 to develop exhibition for presentation at foundation in forthcoming year. | Photos: From left, by Jet Toomer and Owen Smith-Clark

MEDIA | Dec. 19: Essence highlights five black women in the art world—not artists, but the pros who work with them, including Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels of Jack Shaiman Gallery and Ashley Stewart of Gagosian Gallery.

MUSEUMS | Dec. 19: What moved you in 2019? Annually, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis asks creatives what was noteworthy the previous year—ideas, objects, and events. “2019 According to…” features insights and picks from 24 people, including artists Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Carolyn Lazard, Anthea Hamilton, and Tia-Simone Gardner. Among their picks: Grace Wales Bonner’s “Mumbo Jumbo” (Autumn/Winter 2019) runway show at Serpentine Galleries in London; Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play” on Broadway; “Watchmen” on HBO; Jerron Herman’s “I wanna be with you everywhere” at Performance Space New York; Tourmaline’s “Salacia” on The High Line; Toni Morrison’s death; and Turner Prize artists’s statement of solidarity. “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval” authored by Saidiya Hartman, shows up twice.

PUBLIC ART | Dec. 23: On same wall were commissions by Kerry James Marshall and Henry Taylor were once on view, “The Baayfalls,” a mural by Harlem-based painter Jordan Casteel is installed on The High Line at 22nd Avenue. CT

ART FAIRS | On Dec. 2, a Creative Minds talk between artist Kehinde Wiley and art collector and music producer Swizz Beatz (watch video) launches Miami Art Week (Dec. 2-8). A selection of galleries throughout Art Basel Miami Beach present works by artists such as Arthur Jafa (above at Gavin Brown’s Enterprises), Ed Clark, Ja’Tovia M. Gary, David Hammons, Christina Quarles, Frank Bowling, Kehinde Wiley, Faith Ringgold, and Wangechi Mutu, among others. Featuring large-scale works, ABMB’s Meridians sector includes Woody De Othello, Theaster Gates, Isaac Julien, Adam Pendleton, Torey Thornton and Fred Wilson. Amoako Boafo, Aaron Fowler, Todd Gray, Tau Lewis, Ebony G. Patterson, Cinga Samson, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Didier William appear in Nova and Positions sectors. Also at ABMB, UBS presents works by Shinique Smith. There are many other satellite fairs and a slew of programming at various venues focuses on black art and artists. Among the many parties, ARTnews celebrates forthcoming “The Deciders” issue, guest-edited by Swizz Beatz. “Mickalene Thomas: Better Nights” is on view at Bass Museum of Art. Under the direction of Franklin Sirmans, Pérez Art Museum Miami plans a full schedule of events. Rubbell Museum opens in new location and presents sprawling inaugural exhibition featuring more than 300 works by 100 artists, including a multigenerational selection of important African American artists, including Boafo, the museum’s 2019 artist-in-residence. | Photo Courtesy Art Basel

[USA / Chicago Guide / Part 1] A city of architecture and contemporary art

Sun, 02 Feb 2020 12:00:00 -0600

Men's Ex Online
By Koichi Nanyo

Why is Chicago Worth Watching Now?

Chicago is the third largest city in the United States after New York and Los Angeles. Anyone who thinks only of Al Capone and President Obama should immediately update their knowledge and image. See the world-famous elements of Chicago, the ancestor of skyscrapers and the city of contemporary art and street culture.

The skyscraper's rhythm and comfort

The skyscraper towering the skyscrapers and the myriad of window lights, Chicago is the ancestor of the image of the city that everyone can imagine first. Although it looks quite eastward in the United States on the map, it is still midwest. In the Midwest of Illinois, Chicago has developed as a logistics hub and gateway to the more inland western and Pacific coasts.

Chicago skyscrapers have a unique rhythmic feel. The individuality of each building is strong, and the height to the top is uneven and not side by side, so if the weather is good, you can see the blue sky from between the buildings of the wide skyscaper. There may be some room in the grid that is separated by a grid pattern, but it is far from crushed. And the Chicago metro is a “metro”, not a subway. The train is supported by piers without passing underground, and trains run as if passing through buildings. The feeling of oppression is extremely small in the city.

Originally linked to Canada and the Atlantic Ocean through Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River, Chicago was a trade zone for the American Indian Natives. In the 16th century, France became the British colony after France, and after the American Revolutionary War, it became a logistics point due to the water blessed terrain. It’s a remnant of the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange), which is still dominant in the financial sector, a commodity futures exchange that starts with physical grains such as wheat and soy and today also handles financial derivatives.

The fire of 1871 began a rush of modern skyscrapers in Chicago, the archetype of a modern city. From a somewhat schematic perspective, from a movie “Gang of New York”, wooden barrack streets to a modern high-rise buildings made of brick and concrete with a steel structure became commonplace in the United States in the early 20th century. The change in the cityscape began in Chicago. The construction method that made high-rise buildings made of iron and glass possible was used for monuments such as the Expo in Europe and in Chicago. It was used for practical purposes such as increasing floors and increasing efficiency. Bauhaus celebrated its 100th anniversary in Germany in 2019, but it wasn’t so small that Chicago architect Luis Sullivan claimed that shape follows function.

In fact, Chicago continues to inspire Europe and the world. Virgil Abloh, who was named Artistic Director of the Men’s Division at Louis Vuitton in 2018, was born near Chicago and studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He succeeded in his own brand “Off-White” in Milan, based on street fashion, and gained attention in the collection that paid tribute to the late Princess Diana, and attracted worldwide attention in terms of statements and behavior. He is considered a seasonal designer.

Nevertheless, Chicago has a strong business and transportation business, such as transportation, insurance, and fast food industries. Is it a city that you should visit? Let’s find out the secret.

The sharpness of a modern city with a focus on architecture and art

Chicago has become famous as a contemporary art city because the Chicago Architectural Biennial is held every two years from September to the beginning of the following year. This is an art, architecture and design installation exhibition that boasts one of the largest scales in North America. Standing, a common or related theme exhibition will also be held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA). During the Expo Chicago meeting in late September, “Art of the Mart” will take place on the walls of the 1930s Art Deco Merchandise Mart (aka The Mart), a historic building in the city. From dusk, the projection mapping projected on almost the same area as the American football field is a masterpiece.

At the time of the interview, the work of Virgil Abloh at the MCA and the theme exhibition approaching the background, “FIGURES OF SPEECH,” were held for an extended time, and it was busy. His resources are said to have been influenced by the culture of subculture of the 1990s, including Russian weapons such as Sputnik, Mig 29, and Scud missiles, rock bands such as Nirvana, Guns & Roses, Japanese back-end fashion and Mark. Mentioned architectures include Jacobs and the Chicago Building, a landmark of Mies van der Rohe, designed by IBM Building (now AMA Plaza) and Marina City. Interestingly, Michael Jordan, a charismatic basketball player and sneaker boom who also flourished in the local Chicago Bulls, also temporary turned from a local white sox to a major leaguer. Leaping from his brand in Milan to Louis Vuitton and announcing collaborations with well-known brands such as IKEA, Nike and Levi’s, this is a far-fetched perspective that seems to be a charismatic designer who never stops.

At Expo Chicago, there are many galleries from not only Chicago and New York, but also Canada, California, and far away Australia, establishing a unique position as a contemporary art market that offers ample space. The city is famous for being a logistic hub. Large-scale works that cannot be held at small trade fairs in large cities are also gathered, so the exhibition works are of high quality and rich in variety.

At the same time, the Chicago Cultural Center, home to the Chicago Architectural Biennial, continues to show that art and architecture are key components of public space.

The building at 78 East Washington Avenue was built in 1893. Initially, the neoclassical building, which was used a city library, has impressive impressions of columns and round roofs reminiscent of Greece and Rome, and mosaics of tiles that fill the halls and stairs. In this space, the theme of how architecture forms a human community, town, environment and public space will be exhibited. Not only from architecture, but also art and technology have been exhibited. It is a theme that can be raised only because the history of disputes among people with diverse backgrounds has never been less.

Once every two years, with biennial as the fulcrum, the simultaneous occurrence of architecture and art will cause the whole city to swing, so if you are staying in chip atmosphere, I would definitely recommend the center of the skyscraper. That’s the Peninsula Chicago, a hotel just off the Water Tower, a history building that escaped the fire of 1871. Surrounded by high-rise buildings, the spacious room overlooking the street boasts one fo the best comforts in Chicago hotels. The Peninsula itself is a hotel brand that relies on fine-grained Oriental hospitality, and it is convincing that it has earned the top five-star rating recognized by locals.

The Peninsula Chicago

The Peninsula Chicago is a hotel favored not only by tourists and businessmen, but also by local groups. During the period of Biennial and Expo Chicago, they tied up with famous art galleries and exhibited several pieces of contemporary art in the hotel lobby and hall for a limited time. Enjoy the charm of luxury hotel royal roads, such as the bustle at dusk of the “Z Bar” terrace with a view facing the skyscrapers, and the breakfast in the main hall, which was renewed a few years ago in the image of Chicago during the Art Deco period. Enjoy the core.

After the fall of architecture and art, Chicago enters the off-season, aka Windy City, where cold winds from Lake Michigan pass between buildings. The best season in Chicago comes every two years, of course, as well as autumn, where there are many art events, but the content that can be enjoyed regularly in the spring and summer also has plenty of high-quality art and architecture. Next, we will focus on those regular elements.

NADA Chicago Will Return for 2nd Year in September 2020

Sun, 02 Feb 2020 12:00:00 -0600

Chicago Gallery News
By Staff

The New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) announced the dates for the second NADA Chicago, taking place September 24–27, 2020 at the Chicago Athletic Association Hotel. This is the same weekend the 9th edition of EXPO CHICAGO will take place not far away on Navy Pier.

The contemporary art fair will take place throughout three floors of the iconic Chicago Athletic Association Hotel, with a selection of galleries in the hotel’s historic Stagg Court and Tank Room spaces, a takeover of 13 hotel rooms on the fourth floor, and a dedicated space for talks and performances in the Drawing Room on the second floor. The landmark hotel is located across from Chicago cultural landmarks Millennium Park and the Art Institute of Chicago.

NADA Chicago further exemplifies NADA’s expanded commitment to year-round programming and producing alternatives for galleries to exhibit artwork in new settings. This March, NADA will host the second edition of the New York Gallery Open, a new initiative designed to bring visitors and collectors to art spaces across New York City for public tours, talks, and performances. NADA House, the organization’s collaborative exhibition on Governors Island, will be on view from May through August 2020.

About NADA

Founded in 2002, New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) is a not-for-profit 501c(6) collective of professionals working with contemporary art. Its mission is to create an open flow of information, support, and collaboration within the arts field and to develop a stronger sense of community among its constituency. Through support and encouragement, NADA facilitates strong and meaningful relationships between its members working with new contemporary and emerging art. In addition NADA hosts annual art events in Miami, New York, and Chicago, including NADA Miami, the New York Gallery Open, NADA House, and the NADA Chicago.

EXPO CHICAGO boosting art collector outreach with new hire

Wed, 22 Jan 2020 10:27:00 -0600

Chicago Business Journal
By Lewis Lazare

EXPO CHICAGO, the city’s annual international exposition of contemporary and modern art, is adding a new position, head of VIP Relations and Strategic Initiatives, which will be filled immediately by Eboni Gates.

She will be tasked with a job that has become increasingly important in the world of art expositions — cultivating deeper relationships with the fair's most important customer base, serious art collectors.

They are the customers who travel to art expositions around the world and make the big-ticket purchases that please art dealers and keep those dealers coming back to international fairs such as EXPO CHICAGO.

Gates has an MA in art business from the Sotheby’s Institute London and a BA in art history from New York University.

Most recently, Gates ran her own consulting firm, Gates Consulting Group, from an office in Chicago. A spokeswoman for EXPO CHICAGO said Gates will continue her consulting work part-time while holding down her new full-time job with EXPO CHICAGO.

Before moving to Chicago in 2018, Gates was New York City-based and worked with a wide range of not-for-profit and corporate clients there, including Morgan Stanley Global Wealth Management, the Museum of the City of New York, and TD Charitable Foundation, among others.

The ninth edition of EXPO CHICAGO is set to unfold Sept. 24-27. In recent years, the fair has attracted more than 35,000 visitors annually.

Programming sponsors for the upcoming edition of EXPO CHICAGO include financial institution Northern Trust (NASDAQ: NTRS) and the Art Institute of Chicago.

EXPO CHICAGO appoints Eboni S. Gates Head of VIP Relations and Strategic Initiatives

Wed, 22 Jan 2020 10:20:00 -0600

artdaily
By Staff

CHICAGO, IL.- EXPO CHICAGO, The International Exposition of Contemporary and Modern Art, today announced the appointment of Eboni S. Gates as Head of VIP Relations and Strategic Initiatives in advance of the ninth annual edition, returning to Navy Pier's Festival Hall September 24 – 27, 2020. EXPO CHICAGO’s VIP Relations team provides collectors, art advisors, civic leaders, museum directors, board members, trustees, patrons and artists with unique access to Chicago's cultural scene. As Head of VIP Relations and Strategic Initiatives, Gates will cultivate the exposition's offerings for local, regional and global arts patrons.

“We are extremely proud to welcome Eboni to the team as she brings her extensive professional background and international relationships to the benefit of EXPO CHICAGO," said Tony Karman, President | Director of EXPO CHICAGO. “I am confident that her experience will build on our existing programming, further our collector outreach and develop new strategic partners in support of our exhibitors and the exposition.”

Gates has spent the last two decades helping transform arts and culture institutions through her expertise in arts management, strategic philanthropy, executive recruitment and diversity equity and inclusion. Gates will use her vast knowledge base in her role to identify new partners and create bespoke opportunities for supporters of the fair by conceptualizing customized events and experiences, while spearheading the exposition's integrations with sponsors and institutions across the city.

"As a leading international art fair, EXPO CHICAGO is a prodigious asset to the City of Chicago and a motivating force for the galleries, collectors and artists that constitute the global art world. In my newly appointed role as Head of VIP Relations and Strategic Initiatives, I look forward to increasing the visibility of the vibrant cultural and creative center that is Chicago," states Gates. " EXPO CHICAGO has become a highly anticipated and preeminent international art exposition, and I am delighted to be a part of the team who will continue that success and find dynamic new and exciting ways to engage art patrons, both local and global."

Eboni S. Gates
Eboni S. Gates has spent the last two decades helping transform arts and culture institutions through her expertise in arts management, strategic philanthropy, executive recruitment and diversity equity and inclusion. Founder of Gates Consulting Group, her clients have included notable institutions and private sector clients such as DRG Talent Advisory, Museum of the City of New York, Studio Museum in Harlem, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Morgan Stanley Global Wealth Management and numerous contemporary art collectors. She has also held leadership positions at Museum of the City of New York, RBC Capital Markets Charitable Foundation, TD Charitable Foundation, Livet Reichard Arts Management and Artnet. Since arriving in Chicago in June of 2018, Eboni has deeply embedded herself in the culture fabric of Chicago. Currently, she serves as a member of both the Leadership Advisory Committee and the Acquisitions Committee for The Society of Contemporary Art (SCA) at the Art Institute of Chicago. She will also continue to serve as an advisor to DRG Search Advisory. Previously, she served as gala co-chair and Executive Committee member of Museum of Modern Art's (NY) Friends of Education Committee. Gates received her MA in Art Business from the Sotheby's Institute London, and a BA in Art History from New York University.

EXPO CHICAGO Names Curators of 2020 Program

Mon, 25 Nov 2019 12:00:00 -0600

Artforum
By Staff

Expo Chicago, the city’s international exposition of contemporary and modern art, which is returning to Navy Pier’s Festival Hall in September 2020, has selected Marcella Beccaria, the chief curator of Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Italy, and Humberto Moro, the deputy director of Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, as section curators of its upcoming edition. Beccaria will be in charge of Expo Chicago’s on-site installation program “In/Situ,” and Moro will oversee “Exposure,” which showcases solo and two-artist presentations by emerging galleries.

“We are thrilled to be working alongside Marcella Beccaria, whose vision has contributed to shape one of the strongest museums in Europe,” said Expo Chicago’s artistic director, Stephanie Cristello. “Her interdisciplinary approach will lend a new perspective to our large-scale installation program, as well as Humberto Moro, whose highly-respected and rigorous approach with galleries in the US and Latin America will provide a unique understanding of what it means to exhibit within the expansive context of the Americas.”

Both appointments follow the curators’ inclusion in the exposition’s “Curatorial Initiatives” program, which offers midcareer and established curators the opportunity to participate in the annual event. Beccaria and Moro follow Jacob Fabricius, the artistic director of the Kunsthal Aarhus in Denmark, and Naima J. Keith, vice president of education and public programs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, who served as curator of “In/Situ” and “Exposure,” respectively, for Expo Chicago in 2019.

Artists Who Resist the Gaze of Collectors

Sat, 16 Nov 2019 12:00:00 -0600

Hyperallergic
By Max L. Feldman

For the most part, the art at art fairs reflects the changing whims of the ravenous hordes of investors banging on the door of the contemporary art world, looking to “flip” works of art like stocks. Installations immediately look like a high-risk investment. Meanwhile, it is hard to look at abstract paintings and not think about formulae determined by some artistic futures market.

It’s good, then, that the two standout booths at this year’s EXPO Chicago art fair — Kameelah Janan Rasheed at NOME (Berlin) and Exhibit A.A.A.: Art and Architecture Atlas of Brazil, curated by Mexican architect Sol Camacho at Bergamin & Gomide (São Paolo) — had explicit historical and political contexts that made intellectual demands on viewers and resisted the calculated gaze of collectors in search of trendy visuals or themes.

Rasheed uses a Xerox machine to tell fragmentary narratives from a distinctively American experience of race. This obviously means something specific in Chicago, a city with a historical and current racial divide, largely along economic lines, than it does in Berlin, where NOME is located. In central Europe, many white liberals still pat themselves on the back for embracing a very narrow vision of multiculturalism, where the differences between all cultures are smoothed out for easy consumption. In Chicago, however, the stakes are different because the intersection of class and race is obvious to anyone not in denial.

Rasheed’s work navigates these intersections, combining and recombining linguistic and visual registers, from mathematics to scholarly writing heavy with numbered footnotes to speech fragments in standard and colloquial English. This is visually presented in a way that resembles the inter-titles from silent movies, but unaccompanied by any images. The point is not to encourage self-flagellation in White viewers. Rasheed’s aims are, rather, emancipatory all the way down: she wants to open up what we might call a racialized “horizon of experience,” forcing everyone to rethink how we tell ourselves stories about our shared social world and what kind of collective political project might be possible in the future.

Their non-linearity, meanwhile, means that each assemblage of words shoots off in all sorts of directions at once. Lazy Equations (2019) contains four lines of text. It reads ““1 + 1” = 2. we are already human! But lazy equations can trick our efforts,”. The line “we are already human!” comes with a footnote, which says “not yet”. The whole thing, from the use of scare quotes, non-capitalization, footnote fragment, and a line that ends in a comma, frustrates any attempt to use the reading skills developed since childhood. You can’t make sense of the narratives by just letting your eyes move from left to right and down the page. Nor can you piece together a whole story by reading left to right from one work to another, which were all displayed in the booth like the plot of a mystery novel where the reader couldn’t remember who was the crook and who the cop.

Long Division (2019), meanwhile, is set out in the mathematical form its title would suggest. It says “THEBLACK” in all capitals, but differently weighted typefaces. Above this says “finding further numbers new means Of sentences. may be established” and “(chance.” To open The interior,)” beneath it. The footnote at the bottom of the visual field corresponds to the number one hovering just above the letter “k” in “THEBLACK”. It says “how precarious”. Footnote 67, which comes after the word “chance”, meanwhile, doesn’t even appear in this piece.

Like Lazy Equations, Long Division stops the reading eye in its tracks. It prevents the writer from being able to clearly describe the work, since we are forced to push at the boundaries of what counts as acceptable punctuation or any publication’s style-guide. It’s a nightmare for any word processor’s spellcheck function.

There’s something sneakily playful about Rasheed’s placement of these statements in white typeface on a black background. Hopefully this recalls what the Frantz Fanon of Black Skin, White Masks calls the “epidermalization of inferiority” and will make collectors at least a tiny bit uncomfortable (but since NOME sold everything straight away, this might not be so). For Fanon, colonized subjects or victims of racism are “locked in” to their bodies because Whiteness is the standard model of who counts as a subject in the first place and is predicated on denying this possibility to Black people. Many White collectors might simply see what Rasheed is trying to do, and the deeper values supporting her aims, as good for commerce in art-world terms, but somebody else’s problem politically.

At least in their organizational form, Rasheed’s work and the 71 pieces displayed in Camacho’s Art and Architecture Atlas are polar opposites. Where Rasheed’s fragments are deliberately incomprehensible, Camacho neatly organized the works, which include paintings, drawings, and gouaches of hypothetical structures, along with chairs, sculptures, and inkjet prints of existing buildings, into eight themes for maximum lucidity: “blocks,” “walls,” “façades,” “surfaces,” “color,” “texture,” “subtraction,” and “transparency & shadows.”

Camacho’s lucid approach extends to the written material, too. Instead of composing a press release in any standard sense, the booth presented visitors with something more like an educational pamphlet. Here, Camacho points out that mid-to-late 20th century Brazilian art and architecture have been openly political — as artists and architects have criticized segregation and a lack of public space or opportunity for many people in Brazil — and have been formally experimental.

The point is not that the way out of the colonization of art by data-driven business models (note that every speech EXPO president and director Tony Carman delivered throughout the week mentioned “commerce” and “collaboration” as if they were synonymous) is to think geometrically or architecturally. Nor is it to lazily suggest we have to make some “return” to the political, as if politics ever went away prior to Trump in Rasheed’s United States or Bolsonaro in Camacho’s Brazil. It is, rather, to say that the only work that is worth making or looking at will resonate with how we speak and think and act in a shared public space.

If contemporary art is going to mean anything — and it should mean something — it has to be not only about what the viewer sees and how they see it, but the social space in which seeing and talking about what they see takes place. Ideally, if politicized contemporary art does something, then it makes itself felt not just in the viewer’s worldview but in the invisible relationships between them and everyone they interact with, encouraging a sense of responsibility for how we all respond to the past here and now, and our duties to the future, whatever the fractures of today’s social experience.

Expo Chicago Engages Local Arts Community

Thu, 03 Oct 2019 12:00:00 -0500

Berlin Art Link
By Paul Laster

Once upon a time, the Chicago International Art Exposition on Navy Pier was the biggest art fair in North and South America. Modeled after Art Basel and launched in 1980, it attracted an international mix of galleries, curators and collectors.

“It felt a little magical,” Chicago Commissioner of Cultural Affairs and Special Events Mark Kelly told Berlin Art Link. “It felt like the sun was shining on us and Chicago was being seen and appreciated as a cultural capital.”

Over time, a competitor named Art Chicago took its place and continued uncontested, but it faced new challenges when The Armory Show in New York opened in 1999 and Art Basel Miami Beach debuted in 2002. As the Chicago fair’s attendance dipped, financial problems developed and it was bought by Merchandise Mart Properties, but through mismanagement, it closed in 2011.

“It was a different fair at the Merchandise Mart,” Commissioner Kelly recalled. “It didn’t feel like a special moment for the arts community. I thought an era had ended, but Expo Chicago came roaring back at Navy Pier and it engaged the entire city.”

The party responsible for Expo Chicago rising from the ashes of Art Chicago is Founder, President and CEO Tony Karman, a former Art Chicago director who had been active in Chicago’s civic, business and cultural communities for over 30 years. Karman, who had never missed a Chicago art fair, launched Expo Chicago in 2012 as an international art fair to serve national, regional and local communities.

“The fair benefits from an incredible backdrop,” he said. “Chicago is a vibrant city. I love running into people from around the world that I’ve told to come to Chicago… It’s awakened in a way that I’d never seen in my 37 years living in the city. It’s really happening here.”

Enlisting the architectural firm Studio Gang to design the first edition of the fair, he made the presentation as important as the art. Fostering collaboration with local institutions, he invited arts organizations and art schools to create special exhibitions that promoted their programs. It’s a component you don’t often see at international art fairs.

There are many notable artists who live and work in Chicago—ranging from ones that were born there, like Theaster Gates and Barbara Kasten, to ones that migrated to the city, such as Nick Cave and Kay Rosen, who had solo booths at this year’s fair.

Running into Cave at the fair with his students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, we asked him about the importance of Expo Chicago for artists, and seeing Kay Rosen in her Berlin publisher’s booth, we spoke to her dealer about connections that he’s made when visiting.

“I think it’s really important to have a fair of this caliber in Chicago,” said Cave, “It surveys what’s happening on the international art scene, which is why artists come. I’m walking my grad students through the fair to discuss what it all means and the importance of it. It gives them a chance to see how artists coexist, and provides a context for envisioning their work in the broader art world.”

It was the sixth year as an exhibitor for Berlin’s René Schmitt Graphics. The editions dealer had previous knowledge of Kay Rosen’s conceptual word works but didn’t know the artist until he was introduced to her at Expo Chicago a few years ago. They began talking about collaborating on an edition and a new print portfolio, which was on view in his booth, after having been realized out of that conversation.

“Chicago is about making connections,” Schmitt told us. “Besides my strong relationships with the MCA and Art Institute, the reason why I keep returning is that the first time I did the fair people came by and said, ‘Welcome to Chicago,’ and I thought, this is my city.”

A key ingredient to Expo Chicago’s success is programming, which has been enthusiastically handled by Stephanie Cristello since she joined the fair in 2013. Recently named Artistic Director, she organizes the talks, selects guest curators and oversees special exhibitions, offsite programming and public art initiatives.

She also edits ‘The Seen,’ Chicago’s International Journal of Contemporary and Modern Art, and organizes two curatorial initiatives, which bring international curators to the fair to meet with colleagues, explore Chicago’s cultural scene and discover its artists. Several Chicago artists have received their first solo shows by way of studio visits from the curators—and the visiting dealers often check out the artists’ studios, as well.

“Because a lot of Chicago artists have been successful, dealers think there must be other good artists here,” Chicago gallerist Rhona Hoffman told us at the fair. “So now when they come to the fair they are looking to find artists, which hopefully means that local artists won’t feel they have to leave in order to make it.”

EIGHTH ANNUAL EXPO CHICAGO OPENS FALL ART SEASON WITH STRONG SALES AND RECORD ATTENDANCE OF INTERNATIONAL COLLECTORS AND CURATORS

Tue, 24 Sep 2019 15:09:48 -0500

Eighth Edition Welcomed 38,000 Visitors September 19 – 22, 2019, Solidifying Chicago as a Major International Art Destination
Press Release

CHICAGO—EXPO CHICAGO, The International Exposition of Contemporary and Modern Art, concluded its eighth edition on Sunday, September 22, with record attendance of international collectors and curators alongside 38,000 visitors, exceptional presentations from exhibiting galleries and strong sales, in what was its most global edition to date. On opening day alone, the exposition welcomed more than 8,000 VIP guests while raising $265,000 to benefit the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago during Vernissage. Collectors, curators, artists and art professionals enjoyed an exclusive first look at 135 leading galleries from 24 countries and 68cities throughout Navy Pier’s iconic Festival Hall.

“We are extremely proud of our recent eighth edition—the quality of work presented by our participating exhibitors translated into strong sales, an overwhelmingly positive response to our critically acclaimed programing, and significantly contributed to our powerful forward momentum,” said EXPO CHICAGO President | Director Tony Karman. “Chicago knows how to welcome the world and our date alignment with the third Chicago Architectural Biennial, our special exhibitions and presentations, along with our ongoing collaborations with our renowned museums, institutions and galleries contributed greatly to our successes,” he added. “I am confident that many more calendars will be marked for Chicago next September.”

The eighth edition marked considerable institutional representation, with museum curators, trustees and patrons from worldwide cultural organizations including Andy Warhol Museum, Aspen Art Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, Centre Pompidou, The Contemporary Austin, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, de Young Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art Moscow, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Milwaukee Art Museum, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Palm Springs Art Museum, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Royal Academy of Arts London, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Serpentine Galleries, The Speed Art Museum, and more.

Notable collectors, curators and museum directors in attendance included Marcella Beccaria(Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea), Greg Bell (Vulcan, Inc.), Étienne Bernard (Frac Bretagne), Fred Bidwell (Collector), Giovanna Borasi (Canadian Centre for Architecture), James Cuno (J. Paul Getty Trust), Mireya Escalante (Coppel Collection), David Eskenazi (Collector), Larry and Marilyn Fields (Collectors), Maxine and Stuart Frankel(Collectors), Pamela Joyner and Fred Giuffrida (Collector), Jack and Sandra Guthman(Collectors), Lisa Goodman and Josef Vascovitz (Collectors), Louis Grachos (Palm Springs Art Museum), Kenneth C. Griffin (Collector), John and Sharon Hoffman (Collectors), Kirse Junge-Stevnsborg (Malmö Art Museum), Naima J. Keith (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Prospect.5) Noel Kirnon (Collector), Alicia Knock (Centre Pompidou), Patricia Marshall (Art Advisor), Marie Martraire (San Francisco Kadist Foundation), Lisa Melandri and Wassan Al- Khudairi (Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis), Ron Pizzuti (Collector), Sheikha Hoor al Qasimi (Sharjah Art Foundation), Claire Le Restif (Centre d'Art Contemporain d'Ivry — Le Crédac), Marc Richards (Collector), María Inés Rodríguez (Museu de Arte de São Paulo),Beth Rudin DeWoody (Collector), Alain Servais (Collector), Jill Snyder (moCa Cleveland),Marjorie and Ambassador Louis Susman (Collectors), Roberta Tenconi (Pirelli HangarBicocca), Michael and Leslie Weissman (Collectors), and Helen Zell (Collector).

Featuring one of the most rigorous and challenging platforms for contemporary art and culture, under the leadership of EXPO CHICAGO Artistic Director Stephanie Cristello, dynamic programming engaged visitors throughout Chicago, including the /Dialogues Symposium, On Utopia, created in partnership with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; curator Jacob Fabricius’ immersive IN/SITU installation series, transforming Navy Pier’s Festival Hall; EXPO CHICAGO and the City of Chicago’s citywide outdoor installations IN/SITU Outside and OVERRIDE | A Billboard Project presented in partnership with the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE); the participation of over 60 curators in the Curatorial Forum in partnership with Independent Curators International (ICI); and the expansion of the Curatorial Exchange program.

EXPO CHICAGO welcomed several new galleries in 2019 as well as numerous returning galleries, all of whom drew critical praise for their curated and ambitious presentations. Exhibitors both new and returning noted that they received strong support from both nationally and internationally renowned collectors, museum curators and institutions, along with the greater Midwest collector base.

“We elected to participate at EXPO CHICAGO for the first time this year given the opportunity it presented for our growing network with collectors and museums across the Midwest. We wereparticularly excited to present Lorna Simpson’s work since she has a longstanding relationshipwith the city––the MCA was an early supporter and staged her first major museum survey exhibition in 1992. The concept was the result of a perfect storm and the response has been overwhelming. We are thrilled to have placed all 10 works with incredibly prominent collectors and institutions across the country." — Marc Payot | Hauser & Wirth

"We are thrilled to be back at EXPO CHICAGO! The quality of the curators and collectors in attendance has been quite impressive, and the pace of this fair allows us to have longer and more meaningful conversations about the artists we are presenting in the booth. Sales have been great, and you cannot beat fall in Chicago!" — Kevin Scholl | Vielmetter Los Angeles

“It was our first year at EXPO CHICAGO and our decision to participate was significantly influenced by our appreciation of the outstanding institutions in the city and the collectors based here and in the wider Chicago area who are very important to us. We have certainly benefitted from new connections with collectors and representatives from museums." — Thaddaeus Ropac | GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC

“It has been an incredible experience for the gallery to return to EXPO CHICAGO after a number of years. We sold works across the board by our programs artists; Alex Katz, Eduardo Terrazas, Gabriel de La Mora, Eddie Martinez, Annie Morris & Sean Scully. In addition to strong sales, we had many interesting conversations with a considered and knowledgeable collecting community. We look forward to coming back next year. A big thank you to the fair organizers who made the experience seamless and welcoming.” — Tarka Russell | Timothy Taylor

“EXPO CHICAGO is consistently a great fair for us. The dynamic programming and presence of esteemed international and midwestern collectors—along with the city’s world-class institutions—makes for a unique and unmissable experience.”
— MollyTaylor|Kasmin

"We are thrilled to be here for the first time, meeting incredible people, from collectors to museum directors and curators. We are also very impressed with the level of the collections we have been visiting. We hope to keep coming back and doing business in Chicago for a long time." — Thiago Gomide | Galeria Bergamin & Gomide

"The energy this year felt very positive. We were so pleased to return and felt especially welcomed by Chicago's collectors and institutions. Highlights from Lisson Gallery's sales include Stanley Whitney's On the Way to Summer, 2007 as well as a number of his works on paper. Other selections include a work on paper by Carmen Herrera, Channa Horwitz's Canon Eleven Moiré Four, 1984, an oil and ink drawing from Wael Shawky's The Gulf Project Camp and a recent painting by French abstract painter, Bernard Piffaretti, among others. In all, it was a successful fair for Lisson Gallery, and we feel encouraged about future editions of EXPO CHICAGO." — Jeannie Freilich | Lisson Gallery

"EXPO CHICAGO is one of our favorite fairs to do because of the long-standing history of collecting in Chicago, the fantastic curatorial attendance, and the high level of quality in ourcolleagues’ booths. We have done two-artist booths here for the last three years, and we never cease to be amazed by the great conversations these pairings generate." — Lauren Wittels | Luhring Augustine

"The opening of EXPO CHICAGO is always a robust event. This year had great attendance and swift sales for from local, national and international collectors. On opening day we placed numerous works including sculptures by Rose B. Simpson and works on paper by Judy Chicago. Museums and curators were out in full force and we look forward to continuing conversations well into the future." — Jessica Silverman | Jessica Silverman Gallery

“The fair was exponentially stronger this year, not only in terms of the galleries exhibiting but also the work that was on view, and there was a significant increase in the number of visitors and collectors from outside of Chicago. We placed work in collections in Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Houston, and Chicago.” — Monique Meloche | Monique Meloche

"Our time at the fair this year was very successful, with strong sales for Dansaekhwa artist Ha Chong-Hyun, as well as Haegue Yang, Suki Seokyeong Kang, with a number of works still in discussion. We are pleased to have been able to participate for the past three years and look forward to future participation. The local institutional support for this art fair is unparalleled, which is incredibly encouraging. We also have a strong and steady client base within the region that remain loyal to galleries that make the effort to bring a thoughtfully curated presentation, which I always strive for." — Tina Kim | Tina Kim Gallery

“We are happy with our EXPO CHICAGO experience as a first-time exhibitor. The solo presentation by Artur Lescher was a success. There was institutional interest and we were able to place works in several private collections in the US. Many new contacts were made, and the EXPO CHICAGO team went above and beyond to support us in preparation of and during the fair.” — Daniel Roesler | Galeria Nara Roesler

"We have had a fantastic edition, alongside our inaugural opening in Chicago. Our high expectations were met! We have sold out of our booth, works placed to new and old collectors. In addition to the warm welcome to Chicago from many local collectors, we have had positivereception from institutions and private collections, local and global.”— Mariane Ibrahim-Lenhardt | Mariane Ibrahim

"The museum community is extremely supportive of the fair and welcoming to galleries coming to Chicago for EXPO CHICAGO. We, therefore, find the fair to be an extremely valuable point of contact with curators and museum directors who we would normally only see in passing at fairs in more established markets. In addition, the patrons and museum supporters in the community are extremely engaged, intelligent, and hungry to learn more about artists that we bring to the fair. Overall this results in a very engaged audience." — Nick Koenigsknecht | Peres Projects

"On the first day of the fair we had strong sales, selling works by Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Derrick Adams, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Gladys Nilsson, Claire Zeisler, Michael Rakowitz, Jacob Hashimoto, Anne Wilson, Torkwase Dyson, and Martha Tuttle. Most of our sales happened within the first few hours. It seems that most people are quite happy with the attendance, quality of attendance, and the sales they have made." — Rhona Hoffman | Rhona Hoffman Gallery

"We were thrilled to return to Chicago for the gallery’s third consecutive participation at EXPO CHICAGO. We met a significant number of local collectors and international curators who have fully engaged with the gallery program; and we were happy to place work with new local collectors, many of whom we connected with in the opening hours of the fair." — Dmitry Komis | David Lewis Gallery

"EXPO CHICAGO has again solidified itself as an essential point of access to major collectors and curators of the Midwest and beyond. This year again under the organization of Tony Karman was notable for having, to date, the gallery’s most successful opening day, in which we sold over 10 works to a mixture of new and existing clients." — David Nolan | David Nolan New York

"EXPO CHICAGO is always an exciting time for us, it's a unique moment where we actually get to host people in our spaces and this year was really one for the books- from announcing representation of iconic New York artist, Deborah Kass, at the start of the week, to unveiling our new rooftop sculpture deck at our Washington Blvd. gallery and opening Jeffrey Gibson's CAN YOU FEEL IT and Kennedy Yanko's HANNAH at Elizabeth St. on Friday, we are filled to the brim with joy. Now more than ever, we are electrified by our program and incredibly optimistic for all that's in store for our gallery as we continue to grow, expand, and one up ourselves. Chicago has always been an incubator for the arts, and we are dedicated to continuing it's legacy as a humble giant." — Chanelle Lacy | Kavi Gupta

"This year we were quite pleased with the reception of Sarah Ann Weber's work at EXPO CHICAGO. On the first day we saw a number of works confirmed to excellent collections in the Midwest. EXPO continues to be a great opportunity for us to connect with collections and institutions from across the region. This week the University Club of Chicago premiered their recent acquisition of two major works of Faith Wilding, one of which will be loaned to the MCA Chicago for an exhibition next year. I think this helped bring even more attention from both curators and collectors to our presence here at the fair." — Stefano di Paola | Anat Ebgi

"Our third year in the curated EXPOSURE section of EXPO CHICAGO far exceeded our expectations. Our presentation of new works by Summer Wheat and Cammie Staros was very well received by curators and collectors, with sales by both artists. We were excited for Summer Wheat to receive the 2019 Northern Trust Purchase Prize for her painting Extinguishers, which was acquired by The Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. It was also incredible to seeWheat’s paintings as part of EXPO CHICAGO’s OVERRIDE billboard project, as well asprojected on Art on theMART's 2.5 acre façade. EXPO did a tremendous job attracting curators from around the country, and we were pleased to reconnect with local clients and so many others that traveled for the fair." — Seth Curcio | Shulamit Nazarian

"This was Deli’s first time exhibiting at EXPO CHICAGO and it exceeded our expectations. Wewere encouraged to apply by the wonderful Stephanie Cristello, who made sure that our first experience was a good one. We nearly sold out the booth and it was mostly to new collectors in the Midwest. Definitely looking forward to next year!" — Max Marshall | Deli Gallery

"EXPO CHICAGO has been a great experience for us. Really well planned and organized, we met a lot of collectors and institutions. Thanks to Tony Karman and Stephanie Cristello for making this moment happen. Thanks to Kameelah Janan Rasheed for the success she gave to the gallery, through her dedication to the arts and her practice." — Luca Barbeni | NOME Gallery

Curatorial Forum

In an effort to draw leaders from top institutions to the exposition, EXPO CHICAGO once again hosted the Curatorial Forum, welcoming more than 40 mid-career and established curators for the fifth year. Participating institutions included Art Institute of Chicago, Art Museum of the University of Memphis, Aspen Art Museum, Atlanta Contemporary, Blue Star Contemporary, The Brooklyn Museum, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Chrysler Museum of Art, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Contemporary Arts Center, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, de Young Museum – Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Hirshhorn Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art | Virginia Commonwealth University, Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Materials & Applications, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, Museum of the African Diaspora, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Prospect.5, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, San Diego History Center, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Serpentine Galleries, Smart Museum of Art, Storefront for Art and Architecture, The Contemporary Austin, The Factory Contemporary Arts Center, Tufts University, Williams College and Art in Embassies, U.S. Department of State.

The Forum also included a private Keynote Lecture in partnership with Independent Curators International (ICI), in addition to a series of break-out sessions focused on critical questions relevant to contemporary practice and context, led by internationally recognized leaders in the field. Featuring keynote speaker Zoe Butt, the Artistic Director of The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. "This year again, Independent Curators International (ICI) and EXPO CHICAGO partnered on the Curatorial Forum, bringing together curators from across the United States to connect with the fair, with Chicago's cultural institutions, and with one another to build regional and national networks for collaboration. The 2019 Curatorial Forum was the largest yet, with over 40 participants and an additional focus on architecture made possible by an expanded partnership with the Graham Foundation. A keynote lecture by Zoe Butt, Artistic Director of the Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Vietnam, set the tone for the convening with a call for transformation of curatorial practices and institutional platforms, inspired by artists-initiated spaces. The three days of programs offered an inspiring experience that prompted the participating curators to meet again in the near future for continued exchange and new collaborations, and we look forward to following the Forum's impact over the months and years to come." — Renaud Proch | Executive Director, Independent Curators International

Support of the 2019 Curatorial Forum was provided by Heritage Auctions; Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; Marjorie and Ambassador Louis Susman and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Tremaine Foundation; Terry Dowd Inc.; and Willis Towers Watson.

Curatorial Exchange

EXPO CHICAGO’s second annual Curatorial Exchange is a leading international initiative developed in partnership with foreign consulates and cultural agencies. The Curatorial Exchange offered 17 select mid-career and established curators based around the world the opportunity to engage closely with their peers, convening as part of a four-day program that included access to exhibitions, top private collections, artist studios, museums and institutions during EXPO CHICAGO. In 2019, the Curatorial Exchange brought curators from Brazil (supported by Red Bull Arts Detroit), Canada (supported by the Consulate General of Canada in Chicago), Denmark (supported by the Ministry of Culture of Denmark and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark), France (supported by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in Chicago and New York), Italy (supported by the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago), The Netherlands (supported by the Dutch Culture USA, a program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York) and Spain (supported by Red Bull Arts Detroit).

Participating Curators included Art Museum at the University of Toronto Curator Sarah Robayo Sheridan (Canada), Ateliers Médicis Director Cathy Bouvard (France), Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art Chief Curator and Curator of Collections Marcella Beccaria (Italy), Centre d'art Contemporain d'Ivry Director Claire Le Restif (France), Centre Pompidou Curator Alicia Knock (France), Frac Bretagne Director Étienne Bernard (France), Independent Curator Iben Bach Elmstrom (Denmark), KADIST San Francisco Director Marie Martraire (USA), Kunstfort Vijfhuizen Curator & Artistic Director Zippora Elders (Netherlands), Kunsthalle Amsterdam Artistic Director Bas Hendrikx (Netherlands), Latitudes Founders Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna (Spain), Mercer Union Director of Exhibitions & Programs Julia Paoli (Canada), Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) Curator-at-Large María Inés Rodríguez (Brazil), Pirelli HangarBicocca Curator Roberta Tenconi (Italy), Triangle Marseille Director Céline Kopp (France), Winnipeg Art Gallery Curator of Indigenous and Contemporary Art Jaimie Isaac (Canada).

This year, EXPO CHICAGO expanded upon the Curatorial Exchange program by introducing the inaugural Red Bull Arts Detroit Global Curatorial Initiative, a multi-city, fully funded curatorial initiative that took place surrounding the eighth annual exposition (September 18 – 23, 2019). Conceived as a two-part professionalization and cultural immersion program engaging Chicago and Detroit, the fellowship provided three international curators the opportunity toparticipate in EXPO CHICAGO’s 2019 Curatorial Exchange program, followed by the opportunity to visit Detroit and engage the city’s artists, galleries and institutions. The programallowed the exposition to expand its reach, securing a more in-depth opportunity for dialogue between global cultures and the Midwest. The inaugural participants of the Red Bull Arts Detroit Global Curatorial Initiative included Latitudes (Spain) Co-Founders Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna; and Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) Curator-at-Large María Inés Rodríguez (Brazil).

Support of the 2019 Curatorial Exchange was provided by Red Bull Arts Detroit; Italian Cultural Institute in Chicago; Consulate General of Canada in Chicago; Dutch Culture USA, a program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York; the Ministry of Culture of Denmark and Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark; the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in Chicago and New York; the University Club of Chicago; and the Art Institute of Chicago.

2019 Programming

EXPO CHICAGO’s robust programming allowed visitors the opportunity to extend discussionand discourse beyond the booths of the fair. /Dialogues, presented in partnership with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, once again offered panel discussions, conversations andprovocative artistic discourse between today’s most respected art professionals including afeatured symposium On Utopia, featuring a performative intervention by artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov and conversations featuring artists Sheikha Hoor Al Qassimi, Jan Tichy (SAIC MFA 2009), Jill Snyder, Samson Young and more.

Additional panels included a panel discussion with Prospect.5 curators Grace Deveney, Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi moderated by Sarah Thornton that considers how the African diaspora has shaped the vision for P.5, slated to open in New Orleans in the fall of 2020; a discussion with artist Charles Atlas in alignment with his new commission for Art on theMART; and a conversation on the cosmos with artists Eduardo Terrazas and Edra Soto (SAIC MFA 2000), moderated by Hans Ulrich Obrist in advance of his book launch for Creative Chicago: An Interview marathon.

Located on the Exchange Stage by Northern Trust, Exchange by Northern Trust: An Interactive Conversation Around the Art of Collecting featured exclusive panels open to invited VIP guests. Highlights of the 2019 program included a conversation between British painter and President of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Christopher Le Brun and Director of The J. Paul Getty Trust, James Cuno; a panel on private collections featuring collectors and philanthropists Pamela Joyner and Fred Giuffrida and Rebecca McDade from Northern Trust; a case study on diversity, inclusion and accessibility within an institution with moCa Cleveland Executive Director Jill Snyder; and a discussion on collaborative museum models with Miranda Lash of the Speed Art Museum.

Curated by Jacob Fabricius, the 2019 IN/SITU program featured major suspended installations in addition to large-scale work capitalizing on the unique architecture of Navy Pier’s FestivalHall. IN/SITU featured the work of Janine Antoni (Luhring Augustine | New York), Neil Beloufa(Mendes Wood DM | Sao Paulo, Brussels, New York), Stine Deja & Marie Munk (ANNKA KULTYS GALLERY | London), Morgan Fisher (Bortolami | New York), Lena Henke (Bortolami | New York), Rodney McMillian (Vielmetter Los Angeles | Los Angeles), Dan Peterman(Rhoma Hoffman Gallery | Chicago), Scott Reeder (Kavi Gupta | Chicago) and Kay Rosen(RENÉ SCHMITT | Berlin).

IN/SITU Outside, in partnership with the Chicago Park District and the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events featured The Ship of Tolerance (2019) by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov;Collages for the Esplanade Apartments (2019) by Assaf Evron; and Chris Pappan andMonica Rickert-Bolter’s Founders Inflatable (2019) in collaboration with the Floating Museum. IN/SITU Outside installations will be on display for an extended period of timethroughout Chicago’s neighborhoods and along the lakefront.

OVERRIDE | A Billboard Project, in collaboration with Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairsand Special Events, allowed EXPO CHICAGO to once again further extend its reach throughout the city by placing the work of 15 artists from local, national and international galleries onChicago’s City Digital Network. As part of a dedicated site-specific installation series, Chicago- based artists Jessica Campbell and Zekkiyyah Najeebah presented their works exclusively on the billboard located at 515 W. Ida B. Wells Dr. alongside work by Summer Wheat and pioneering feminist artist Betty Tompkins. The citywide public art initiative launched September 9 and is on view through October 29. For a complete listing of all OVERRIDE artists and documentation, click here.

20 Special Exhibitions were included in this year’s exposition highlighting EXPO CHICAGO’smission to illustrate and preserve the important link between the arts, philanthropic and nonprofit organizations through unique and high-quality exhibitions. Top museums, universities, organizations and institutions participated. For a complete list of participants and projects, click here.

Northern Trust

Returning for the seventh year as EXPO CHICAGO’s Presenting Sponsor, Northern Trust’s partnership continues to ensure the fair’s longevity and ability to attract art influencers fromaround the world. In addition to sponsorship of the VIP Collectors Lounge, Northern Trust once again offered clients a private VIP experience in the Northern Trust Anchor Lounge. The Northern Trust Exchange Stage provided a dedicated venue for Northern Trust’s signatureprogramming, Exchange by Northern Trust: An Interactive Conversation Around the Art of Collecting, which featured panel discussions with top arts professionals from around the world.

On Friday, September 20, Northern Trust awarded the Northern Trust Purchase Prize to two galleries participating in the EXPOSURE section (galleries ten years and younger): NOME, Berlin and Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles. Four of Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s archivalinkjet prints from NOME, including Lazy Equation, Long Division, II, Connect the Dots andPerimeter, and Summer Wheat’s piece Extinguisher was selected from Shulamit Nazarian. The pieces were gifted to the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY.

Sponsors

In addition to Presenting Sponsor Northern Trust, premier sponsors included AXA Art Americas Corporation, Louis Vuitton, Athena Art Finance, McLaren, Ruinart Champagne, Leslie Hindman Auctioneers, NetJets, Yvel and LALIQUE Additional sponsors include The Conservation Center, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Financial Times, Vista Residences, Chartwell Insurance Services, Columbia College Chicago, Fashion Outlets of Chicago, United Airlines and The Peninsula Chicago. Additional EXPO CHICAGO beverage sponsors include Hennessy, Boxed Water, Belvedere Vodka, Pipeworks Brewing and Terrazas de los Andes.

The official Hotel Sponsor was Peninsula Hotel Chicago. Hotel partners included Aloft Chicago, Ambassador Chicago, Loews Hotel Chicago, Park Hyatt Chicago, The Robey Chicago, St. Jane Chicago and W Chicago Lakeshore.

Media sponsors include Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Mansion Global Reserve, and PENTA.

EXPO CHICAGO Announces 2020 Alignments

Tue, 24 Sep 2019 14:59:13 -0500

EXPO CHICAGO Announces 2020 Alignments
Press Release

CHICAGO – EXPO CHICAGO, the International Exposition of Contemporary & Modern Art (September 24–27, 2020), is pleased to announce its year-round alignments with several globally recognized creative partners surrounding the ninth annual edition. In 2020, EXPO CHICAGO will partner with Nick Cave and Navy Pier to present the artist’s dance-based town hall The Let Go in April; ART WORLD CONFERENCE to present an annual convening of artists and arts professionals off-site during the exposition; and the Malmö Art Museum, Danish Arts Foundation and ART 2030 for an Off-Site Pavilion Exhibition with a Nordic focus opening in September in alignment with the exposition before traveling to Scandinavia.

“As EXPO CHICAGO looks to its ninth edition in 2020, we continue to solidify our place as a year-round platform for creative endeavors on both a local and global scale,” said EXPO CHICAGO President | Director Tony Karman. “Opening with Nick Cave’s interactive performance The Let Go at Navy Pier in April 2020, the ninth edition of the exposition will feature numerous alignments, including Art World Conference and a pavilion exhibition featuring Scandinavian artists,” he added. “These initiatives and soon to be announced programs will add vital cultural experiences to the City of Chicago, ensuring that next year’s exposition is as engaging and critically acclaimed as our past editions.”

The Let Go by Nick Cave | April 3 12, 2020

Interdisciplinary artist Nick Cave will transform Navy Pier’s Festival Hall into a dance-based town hall—part installation, part performance—to which the Chicago community will be invited to “let go” and speak their minds through movement, work out frustrations and celebrate independence as well as community. The reimagined Festival Hall A at Navy Pier will allow for social gatherings and be activated by “chase,” a multi-colored, 40-foot high, 100-foot-long mylar sculpture that glides across the dance floor. The multi-disciplinary experience is presented by Navy Pier in partnership with EXPO CHICAGO and the Park Avenue Armory in New York.

“The most important part of my practice as an artist is when the work intersects directly with the moment in time we are all sharing and with each other,” said artist Nick Cave. “The Let Go is exactly what we need going into the 2020 election season, where all our energies will be on high and what we really need is to be clear headed. I am thrilled to share this work at this time with my hometown community of Chicago.”
“Nick Cave is one of the most imaginative, innovative and inclusive artists in the world, and we are fortunate to have him in Chicago as an active member of our cultural community,” said Navy Pier Chief Programming and Civic Engagement Officer Michelle T. Boone. “Navy Pier is thrilled to partner with Nick Cave, the Park Avenue Armory, EXPO CHICAGO and the many local artists, performers and citizens that will be a part of this dynamic experience.”

ART WORLD CONFERENCE | September, 2020

Art World Conference will take place in Chicago in alignment with the ninth edition of EXPO CHICAGO in September, 2020. The conference is an annual convening of artists and arts professionals focused on career development, empowerment and the sharing of practical, actionable information on business and financial literacy to build and sustain careers in the arts. Art World Conference brings together innovators, thought leaders, arts professionals and visual artists at all stages of their careers. Through panel discussions, conversations and workshops led by dozens of experts in the field, Art World Conference addresses many of the opportunities and challenges faced by visual artists and arts professionals who are transforming the creative sector and culture-at-large. Topics range from financial planning, contracts, negotiation, taxes, managing debt, real estate and investing to new technologies, public projects, social media and growing audience.

“Artists are creative professionals and entrepreneurs,” said Art World Conference organizers,Dexter Wimberly and Heather Bhandari. “Whether small or large, they are running businesses. Therefore, they need to be aware of the day-to-day operations of a business: taxes, contracts and expectations when working with other businesses. The conference is about providing information, ideas, and resources so that artists can chart their own paths toward their individual goals, which may involve upward mobility, economic sustainability, reaching new audiences, saving for retirement, creating a stable digital archive, or a complex mix of these many things.”

Off-Site Exhibition Pavilion | September, 2020

Following the Palais de Tokyo collaboration in 2017 and a continuation of the exposition’s core Curatorial Initiatives program, the Nordic Pavilion exhibition, co-organized by EXPO CHICAGO and the Malmö Art Museum, will present works by Scandinavian artists in dialogue with artists from Chicago and the region, in alignment with the ninth annual exposition. The presentation and program will be supported by Danish Arts Foundation and aligned with ART 2030, a mission-driven organization that works with internationally renowned artists to achieve the UN Global Goals. The thematic of the Nordic Pavilion exhibition aligns with the UN’s Goal 11: to make cities and human settlements inclusive, resilient and sustainable. The exhibition will originate in Chicago during EXPO CHICAGO 2020 at a location to be announced and travel to Scandinavian institutions, beginning with the Malmö Art Museum in 2021.

“With the launch of the Nordic Pavilion in 2020, EXPO CHICAGO continues to be one of the only art fairs in the world organizing major institutional exhibitions with international partners,”said EXPO CHICAGO Artistic Director Stephanie Cristello. “I am confident that Kirse’s keen curatorial eye and unique culturally, socially and politically engaged approach will be the perfect complement to the work being forged by artists in Chicago and the region, and look forward to introducing the different contexts the artists and partners from the United States and Scandinavia will bring to both platforms for the exhibition.”

“Countries in Scandinavia see themselves as sustainability pioneers, even though the statistics say we are among some of the most CO2 producing countries, due to the high level of living and equality,” said Malmö Art Museum Director and 2018 Curatorial Exchange Participant Kirse Junge-Stevnsborg. “I look forward to considering how art can put focus on how we can share our experiences and learn from each other across countries and on a global scale.”

ARTnews in Chicago: Collector Beth Rudin DeWoody and Artist Theaster Gates in Conversation, On the Ground at Expo Chicago, and More

Mon, 23 Sep 2019 12:00:00 -0500

ARTnews

During last week’s edition of the Expo Chicago art fair, ARTnews organized various events around the Windy City, including a preview for a Theaster Gates–organized exhibition at the Stony Island Arts Bank and a talk with Gates and collector Beth Rudin DeWoody about that show.

The show at Stony Island Arts Bank, “In the Absence of Light: Gesture, Humor and Resistance in the Black Aesthetic,” features works by black artists from the collection of DeWoody (who has been on the ARTnews “Top 200 Collectors” list since 2005), and was presented by the Rebuild Foundation in partnership with Expo Chicago, ARTnews, and the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection. At the talk about the show, Gates—who organized the exhibition with DeWoody and Laura Dvorkin—said of its genesis:

When presented with 450 works by black artists, and not wanting to have a show about black artists, how do you tease out this nuanced subjectivity? How do you start to make a story out of artists who were working over seven decades? It didn’t feel like curation for me—I have enough titles. It felt like deep looking and deep listening, and trying to frame an emotional position.

DeWoody said that she has long held work by black artists in her collection—the first work she bought came from the famed painter Benny Andrews, who was also her teacher. “I didn’t consciously think, ‘Oh, this is a black artist, I’ve got to have it,’ ” she said of that purchase, and added, “My collecting has always been that way. I had a lot of artists in the collection that I didn’t realize were black. Their message didn’t have a political background, where I’d say, ‘Yes, this is political work by a black artist.’ They were just artists.”

Over at Expo Chicago, as 135 dealers showed their wares, ARTnews Editor-in-Chief Sarah Douglas led a panel about diversity and inclusion in museums. Put on by Northern Trust, the panel included Joyce Foundation director Tracie Hall, collector Carl Thoma, and Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland director Jill Snyder.

A look around these events and more follows below.

EXPO CHICAGO

EXPO Kicks off EXHIBITION Weekend with In-Person and Virtual Programming

Editors’ Picks: 16 Events for Your Art Calendar This Week, From a Virtual EXPO Chicago to a Live Performance at the Met

Editors’ Picks: 16 Events for Your Art Calendar This Week, From a Virtual EXPO Chicago to a Live Performance at the Met By Artnet News

Monday, September 21

Tuesday, September 22

Wednesday, September 23

Wednesday, September 23 and Wednesday, September 30

Thursday, September 24

Thursday, September 24–Sunday, November 15

Thursday, September 24–December

Friday, September 25

Friday, September 25–Sunday, September 27

Saturday, September 26

Through Saturday, October 10

Through Sunday, October 6

Through Saturday, October 31

Through Sunday, November 1

EXPO CHICAGO Debuts EXHIBITION Weekend, ‘Alternate Assembly 2020,’ As Virtual Fall Events

EXPO CHICAGO Debuts EXHIBITION Weekend, ‘Alternate Assembly 2020,’ As Virtual Fall Events By Chadd Scott

Amanda Williams’ latest multi-platform project ‘What Black Is This, You Say?’ examines Blackness in its multitude of variations

Amanda Williams’ latest multi-platform project ‘What Black Is This, You Say?’ examines Blackness in its multitude of variations By Darcel Rockett

EXPO CHICAGO launches Dine& Virtual Salon series pairing multidisciplinary artists in conversation

EXPO CHICAGO launches Dine& Virtual Salon series pairing multidisciplinary artists in conversation By Jose Villareal

Chef Erick Williams heads virtual dinner-arts series Thursday to benefit anti-racism efforts

Chef Erick Williams heads virtual dinner-arts series Thursday to benefit anti-racism efforts By Phil Vettel

If Museums in the US Want to Be More Inclusive, They First Have to Recognize—and Unlearn—Old Habits and Biases

If Museums in the US Want to Be More Inclusive, They First Have to Recognize—and Unlearn—Old Habits and Biases By Renaud Proch

EXPO CHICAGO Moving From Traditional September Dates To April 2021

EXPO CHICAGO Moving From Traditional September Dates To April 2021 By Chadd Scott

Expo Chicago was postponed until April 2021 due to COVID-19.

Expo Chicago was postponed until April 2021 due to COVID-19. By Justin Kamp

After Initially Hoping to Stick to Its September Opening, EXPO Chicago Has Been Postponed Until April 2021

After Initially Hoping to Stick to Its September Opening, EXPO Chicago Has Been Postponed Until April 2021 By Sarah Cascone

Another coronavirus change: Expo Chicago art fair moves to next spring

Another coronavirus change: Expo Chicago art fair moves to next spring By Steve Johnson

Expo Chicago Postpones September Fair to 2021 Over Coronavirus Concerns

Expo Chicago Postpones September Fair to 2021 Over Coronavirus Concerns By Tessa Solomon

Major exhibition of work by artist Summer Wheat opens at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art

Major exhibition of work by artist Summer Wheat opens at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art By Staff

7 Tips on How Artists Can Actually Succeed in Business, From Negotiating Contracts to Finding the Right Mentors

artnet By Sarah Cascone

Culture Type: The Year in Black Art 2019

Culture Type By Victoria L. Valentine

[USA / Chicago Guide / Part 1] A city of architecture and contemporary art

Men's Ex Online By Koichi Nanyo

NADA Chicago Will Return for 2nd Year in September 2020

Chicago Gallery News By Staff

EXPO CHICAGO boosting art collector outreach with new hire

Chicago Business Journal By Lewis Lazare

EXPO CHICAGO appoints Eboni S. Gates Head of VIP Relations and Strategic Initiatives

artdaily By Staff

EXPO CHICAGO Names Curators of 2020 Program

Artforum By Staff

Artists Who Resist the Gaze of Collectors

Hyperallergic By Max L. Feldman

Expo Chicago Engages Local Arts Community

Berlin Art Link By Paul Laster

EIGHTH ANNUAL EXPO CHICAGO OPENS FALL ART SEASON WITH STRONG SALES AND RECORD ATTENDANCE OF INTERNATIONAL COLLECTORS AND CURATORS

Eighth Edition Welcomed 38,000 Visitors September 19 – 22, 2019, Solidifying Chicago as a Major International Art Destination Press Release

EXPO CHICAGO Announces 2020 Alignments

EXPO CHICAGO Announces 2020 Alignments Press Release

ARTnews in Chicago: Collector Beth Rudin DeWoody and Artist Theaster Gates in Conversation, On the Ground at Expo Chicago, and More

ARTnews

Editors’ Picks: 16 Events for Your Art Calendar This Week, From a Virtual EXPO Chicago to a Live Performance at the Met
By Artnet News

EXPO CHICAGO Debuts EXHIBITION Weekend, ‘Alternate Assembly 2020,’ As Virtual Fall Events
By Chadd Scott

Amanda Williams’ latest multi-platform project ‘What Black Is This, You Say?’ examines Blackness in its multitude of variations
By Darcel Rockett

EXPO CHICAGO launches Dine& Virtual Salon series pairing multidisciplinary artists in conversation
By Jose Villareal

Chef Erick Williams heads virtual dinner-arts series Thursday to benefit anti-racism efforts
By Phil Vettel

If Museums in the US Want to Be More Inclusive, They First Have to Recognize—and Unlearn—Old Habits and Biases
By Renaud Proch

EXPO CHICAGO Moving From Traditional September Dates To April 2021
By Chadd Scott

Expo Chicago was postponed until April 2021 due to COVID-19.
By Justin Kamp

After Initially Hoping to Stick to Its September Opening, EXPO Chicago Has Been Postponed Until April 2021
By Sarah Cascone

Another coronavirus change: Expo Chicago art fair moves to next spring
By Steve Johnson

Expo Chicago Postpones September Fair to 2021 Over Coronavirus Concerns
By Tessa Solomon

Major exhibition of work by artist Summer Wheat opens at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
By Staff

artnet
By Sarah Cascone

Culture Type
By Victoria L. Valentine

Men's Ex Online
By Koichi Nanyo

Chicago Gallery News
By Staff

Chicago Business Journal
By Lewis Lazare

artdaily
By Staff

Artforum
By Staff

Hyperallergic
By Max L. Feldman

Berlin Art Link
By Paul Laster

Eighth Edition Welcomed 38,000 Visitors September 19 – 22, 2019, Solidifying Chicago as a Major International Art Destination
Press Release

EXPO CHICAGO Announces 2020 Alignments
Press Release