All eyes are on Baltimore this week as the Ravens took the Super Bowl title and Beyoncé cranked out perhaps the most electrifying halftime performance in history. It’s a great time to recognize that “Charm City” – a nickname created by then Mayor William Donald Schaefer and a bunch of ad agencies to boost the city’s national profile – is once again on the map as a vacation destination. In honor of Black History Month, here’s a list of Baltimore’s events and exhibitions that pay tribute to the African-American men and women who helped shape the nation. Baltimore is a city shaped by the contributions of African-American visionaries including the likes of world famous jazz singer Billie Holiday; great orator Frederick Douglass, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall; and female abolitionist and “conductor” of the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman.
“Girl with Flag,” Bryan Collier
“The Mountaintop” and Beyond
“The Mountaintop” CENTERSTAGE Through Feb. 24 The Lorraine Hotel. April 1968. In room 306, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. unwinds and prepares. A visit from a hotel maid offers welcome diversion and a challenging new perspective – but also raises profound and surprising questions. Already a worldwide sensation and recently hailed in a star-studded Broadway production, Katori Hall’s new play receives its Baltimore premiere.
It is no longer news that many Nigerian artifacts are in Europe and America held by both public institutions such as Museums, Universities and Galleries as well as by private individuals, but what is new is the collaborative efforts being made by the Nigerian government and the countries where these artifacts are taken in the first place to repatriate them back to the country where they rightly belong. One of these collaborative diplomatic efforts yielded a positive result yesterday when the French Embassy in Nigeria handed over five Nok Terracotta figures seized by the French Customs service in Paris. Nok arts came to light in 1928, when Co. J. Dent Young found a small terracotta head amongst the gravel from tin mining operations near the village of Nok in Jos Plateau of central Nigeria and since then these cultural materials were named after the village where the finds were made. It is indeed unfortunate that so much Nok materials have been looted over time to supply the international art market which is supposed to be the exclusive cultural artifacts of the Nigerian people. So when the French Ambassador to Nigeria Jacques Champagne de Labriolle handed over 5 stolen artifacts of Nok origin to the National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCCM) last Tuesday many stakeholders in the art sector landed the move, describing it as a right step in the right direction.
Annibale Carracci, attrib. (Italian, 1560 – 1609), Portrait of an African Slave Woman, ca. 1580s. PRINCETON, NJ – The Princeton University Art Museum presents Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, an exhibition exploring the presence of Africans and their descendants in Europe from the late 1400s to the early 1600s and the roles these individuals played in society as reflected in art. Africans living in or visiting Europe during this time included artists, aristocrats, saints, slaves, and diplomats. The exhibition of vivid portraits created from life—themselves a part of the wider Renaissance focus on the identity and perspective of the individual—encourages face-to-face encounters with these individuals and poses questions about the challenges of color, class, and stereotypes that a new diversity brought to Europe. Aspects of this material have long been studied by scholars, but this exhibition marks the first time the subject has been presented to a wider American public. Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe will be on view at the Princeton University Art Museum from February 16, 2013 to June 9, 2013, and will feature over 65 paintings, sculptures, prints, manuscripts, and printed books by great artists such as Dürer, Bronzino, Pontormo, Veronese, and Rubens. Organized by the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore in collaboration with the Princeton University Art Museum, the exhibition includes artworks drawn from major museums and private collections across Europe and the United States, including works from both Princeton and the Walters. “The exhibition focuses new attention on an important but poorly understood aspect of Western history and the history of representation and thus continues our commitment to expanding the borders of scholarship and public understanding,” according to Princeton University Art Museum Director James Steward. “This exhibition affords an exceptional opportunity to discover great works of art and encourages us to reflect on our understanding of cultural identity both past and present.” The presence of Africans and their descendants in Europe was partially a consequence of the drive for new markets beginning in the late 1400s. This included the importation of West Africans as slaves, supplanting the trade of slaves of Slavic origin. There was also increasing conflict with North African Muslims and heightened levels of diplomatic and trade initiatives by African monarchs.
Artist Jennie C. Jones Studio Museum in Harlem is awarding its Wein Prize, one of the most lucrative in contemporary art, to Jennie C. Jones, a 44-year-old Brooklyn-based painter and sculptor whose work – which she describes as “listening as a conceptual practice” – centers on music.
The prize, with a $50,000 award, has been given every year since 2006 to established or emerging African-American artists. It was started by George Wein, a founder of the Newport Jazz Festival, in honor of his wife, Joyce Alexander Wein, a longtime trustee of the museum who died in 2005. The prize, whose announcement was delayed by Hurricane Sandy, will be given at a museum gala on Feb. 4. Thelma Golden, the museum’s director and chief curator, said in an interview that Ms. Jones was chosen “not only to celebrate the rigor and strength of her practice, but also because of the thinking about what this amazingly generous prize could do for her at this point in her career.” Ms. Jones, who will have a solo exhibition in May at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, has been featured in several shows over the last decade at the Studio Museum and in Chelsea. Her work often uses the language of Minimalism to explore, and sometimes appropriate, avant-garde jazz and other modern music. “I kept seeing these amazing parallels in ideologies for both disciplines, especially in jazz and abstraction,” Ms. Jones has said. “Conceptualism allows these different media to occupy the same space.” article by Randy Kennedy via nytimes.com
One of Camilo José Vergara’s photographs on view at the New-York Historical Society.
Since the 1970s Camilo José Vergara has been photographing murals of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. painted on walls in cities across the United States. Through them, he has documented social and political changes in the country itself. On a wall in the Callowhill section of Philadelphia, above, Dr. King is the potent orator of the Washington marches; on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem he’s a solitary, anxious visionary. In Los Angeles his figure is all but buried under fresh graffiti; in the South Bronx, the site of turf wars between blacks and Latinos in the 1970s, his face is scratched out.
Most of the murals were based on published images of Dr. King, edited to context. With trends in immigration, he takes on Latino and Asian features. Over time he is joined by a shifting pantheon of timely heroes: Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, Michael Jackson and President Obama. As one person explained to Mr. Vergara: “Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so Obama could run. Obama ran so we all can fly.” On the evidence of the 30 pictures in “The Dream Continues: Photographs of Martin Luther King Murals by Vergara” at the New-York Historical Society through May 5, the popularity of other heroes brightens and fades while Dr. King’s mystique lives on.
Jae Jarrell’s “Urban Wall Suit,” from 1969, recently bought by the Brooklyn Museum.
As the curator of American art at the Brooklyn Museum began work on an exhibition to coincide with next year’s anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, she happened on a trove of works from the Black Arts Movement, the cultural arm of the black power movement of the 1960s and ’70s, the New York Times reported.
Noticing that the collection bridged two generations of works already among the museum’s holdings — by earlier African-American artists like John Biggers, Sargent Johnson and Lois Mailou Jones, and by their contemporary successors — the curator, Teresa A. Carbone, persuaded the museum to acquire it.
“Even at a time when people are more aware of the established canon of black artists,” Ms. Carbone said, “these artists are only now gaining the recognition they deserve.”
The collection — 44 works by 26 artists — was assembled by David Lusenhop, a former Chicago dealer now living in Detroit, and his colleague Melissa Azzi. About a dozen years ago the two began buying pieces they felt were prime examples of the Black Arts Movement.
Masks in Malvin Gray Johnson’s painting “Negro Masks” (1932). (Librado Romero/The New York Times)
It’s easy to take for granted just how quickly art travels today, whether by JPEG or shipping crate. For a sense of how slow things were just a century ago, and how much could get lost en route from one continent to another, visit “African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde,” a small but highly compelling show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s one of several exhibitions timed to the centennial of the Armory Show of 1913, where many New Yorkers caught their first glimpse of Modern art from Europe (much of it influenced by African sculpture).
Meticulously researched and thoughtfully presented by Yaëlle Biro, the Met’s assistant curator in the department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, it tells the story of African art’s early reception in the United States with exceptional candor. And it makes clear that Americans received Modern art and African art as a single import, derived from French and Belgian colonies, distilled in Paris and presented on these shores by a few tastemaking dealers and collectors.
Mickalene Thomas: Qusuquzah, Une Trés Belle Négresse 2, part of the 2012 Art Basel
The 11th annual art carnival known as Art Basel Miami Beach is set to kick off next week and will feature Art Africa Miami as its cultural hub. The Miami Beach Convention Center will be hosting the showcase for more than 50 contemporary artists from the global African Diaspora from Dec. 6 to 9. Typically, Art Basel (which was founded in 1970) pulls from more than 250 leading art galleries from the U.S., Canada, Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia, exhibiting modern artworks by more than 2,000 artists. Until 2011, when Neil Hall — owner of TheUrbanCollective’s Art Africa Miami — stepped in, the main show hadn’t had black galleries represented.
Philip Kwame Apagya, Come on Board, 2000/2003 Courtesy of The Walther Collection
Arthur Walther,64, is a German-American art collector who began collecting artwork and photography in China in the early 1990′s. Following his retirement as a general partner at Goldman Sachs and the founding partner of the firm’s German operations, Walther focused on his collection. The wave of modernization and economic reform flooding through China resulted in artists recording and analyzing the changes that were occurring. As China competed more in the global market, Walther found himself shying away from their artists and collecting more work from contemporary African artists.
“A number of these [artworks] overlapped continuously,” Walther said at the exhibition of his latest exhibition, Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive, which is being shown at the Chelsea Arts Building in New York. “I collected Chinese art very slowly. In the nineties and early 2000, [Chinese art was] a real examination and investigation by the artist of society and of the transformations and of their histories. Which before didn’t happen to that degree [because art] was all propaganda and political.”
Fore presents twenty-nine emerging artists of African descent who live and work across the United States. Born between 1971 and 1987, the artists inFore work in diverse media, often blending artistic practices in new and innovative ways. While some artists create large-scale oil paintings, others draw on top of photographs, or combine sculpture and two-dimensional work. More than half of the works in Fore have never been exhibited publicly; some are site-specific and react directly to the Harlem neighborhood and its social landscape.
Fore is the fourth in a series of emerging artist exhibitions presented by the Studio Museum, following Freestyle (2001), Frequency (2005–06) andFlow (2008). This exhibition traces the development of artistic ideas sinceFlow, taking into account social, political and cultural conditions in the United States. Whether gathering and assembling everyday objects, referencing urban architecture and economies, or using film and video to mirror the transmission and reception of information through social media, the artists in Fore emphasize that contemporary art is deeply tied to its location, time and historical context. This exhibition investigates questions at the core of the Studio Museum’s mission, exploring art’s relationship to U.S. and global communities.
perFOREmance, two three-day performance presentations in December 2012 and February 2013, provides a platform for the new and commissioned performances in Fore.
Organized by Lauren Haynes, Naima J. Keith and Thomas J. Lax, Assistant Curators at the Studio Museum, Fore continues the Studio Museum’s mission as the nexus for artists of African descent, locally, nationally and internationally, and for work inspired by black culture.
Narcissister “Mannequin” Photo: Tony Stamolis
Firelei Báez / b. 1980, Santiago, Dominican Republic; Lives and works in New York, New York Sadie Barnette / b. 1984, Oakland, California; Lives and works in Los Angeles, California Kevin Beasley / b. 1985, Alexandria, Virginia; Lives and works in New York, New York Crystal Z. Campbell / b. 1980, Prince George’s County, Maryland; Lives and works in New York, New York and Amsterdam, The Netherlands Caitlin Cherry / b. 1987, Chicago, Illinois; Lives and works in New York, New York Jamal Cyrus / b. 1973, Houston, Texas; Lives and works in Houston, Texas Noah Davis / b. 1983, Seattle, Washington; Lives and works in Los Angeles, California Abigail DeVille / b. 1981, New York, New York; Lives and works in New York, New York Zachary Fabri / b. 1977, Miami, Florida; Lives and works in New York, New York Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle / b. 1987, Louisville, Kentucky; Lives and works in Los Angeles, California Steffani Jemison / b. 1981, Berkeley, California; Lives and works in New York, New York Yashua Klos / b. 1977, Chicago, Illinois; Lives and works in New York, New York Eric Nathaniel Mack / b. 1987, Columbia, Maryland; Lives and works in New York, New York Harold Mendez / b. 1977, Chicago, Illinois; Lives and works in Chicago, Illinois Nicole Miller / b. 1982, Tucson, Arizona; Lives and works in Los Angeles, California Narcissister / b. 1971, New York, New York; Lives and works in New York, New York Toyin Odutola / b. 1985, Ife, Nigeria; Lives and works in San Francisco, California Akosua Adoma Owusu / b. 1984, Alexandria, Virginia; Lives and works in Alexandria, Virginia and Ghana Jennifer Packer / b. 1984, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Lives and works in New York, New York Taisha Paggett / b. 1976, Los Angeles, California; Lives and works in Chicago, Illinois and Los Angeles, California Valerie Piraino / b. 1981, Kigali, Rwanda; Lives and works in New York, New York Nikki Pressley / b. 1982, Greenville, South Carolina; Lives and works in Los Angeles, California Jacolby Satterwhite / b. 1986, Columbia, South Carolina; Lives and works in New York, New York, and Provincetown, Massachussetts Sienna Shields / b. 1976, Rainbow, Alaska; Lives and works in New York, New York and Rainbow, Alaska Kianja Strobert / b. 1980, New York, New York; Lives and works in Hudson, New York Jessica Vaughn / b. 1983, Chicago, Illinois; Lives and works in New York, New York Cullen Washington Jr. / b. 1976, Alexandria, LA; Lives and works in New York, New York Nate Young / b. 1981, Phoenixville, Pennsylvania; Lives and works in St. Paul, Minnesota Brenna Youngblood / b. 1979, Riverside, California; Lives and works in Los Angeles, California
Fore is made possible thanks to Leadership Support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Major support provided by Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support provided by the Ed Bradley Family Foundation.
All eyes are on Baltimore this week as the Ravens took the Super Bowl title and Beyoncé cranked out perhaps the most electrifying halftime performance in history. It’s a great time to recognize that “Charm City” – a nickname created by then Mayor William Donald Schaefer and a bunch of ad agencies to boost the city’s national profile – is once again on the map as a vacation destination.
One of Camilo José Vergara’s photographs on view at the New-York Historical Society.
