"Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott"
Featuring approximately forty paintings, this exhibition highlights the sixty-year-long career of #robertcolescott (1925–2009), one of America's most adventurous and subversive artists. Colescott's bold and richly rendered works traverse art history to offer a satirical take on issues of race, beauty, and twentieth-century American culture. Often ahead of his time, Colescott explored the ways in which personal and cultural identities are constructed and enacted through the language and history of painting. He anticipated urgent contemporary discussions around the power of images and shifting political and social values, while asserting the continuing validity of painting as a critical medium for exploring these questions. This exhibition offers a long overdue celebration of Colescott as one of the most consequential artists of his time.
Colescott is perhaps best known for works made during the 1970s in which he reimagined iconic artworks to examine the absence of Black men and women as protagonists in dominant cultural and social narratives. Paintings like George Washington Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975) offer irreverent parodies of familiar masterpieces, while incisively critiquing America's often brutally discriminatory past and present. His transgressive use of racial stereotypes to interrogate hierarchies of power was echoed in the strategies of younger artists in the 1990s such as Kerry James Marshall and Kara Walker. Along with a provocative approach to humor, Colescott's paintings also demonstrate an adventurous formal evolution and a studied analysis of the history of Modernism. In its complex interplay of high art and vernacular traditions alike, his work has opened new possibilities for chronicling the history of America while ridiculing its grandiosity and biases, exerting a profound impact on generations of artists grappling with similar issues.
This groundbreaking exhibition highlights the depth of Colescott's legacy as a standard bearer for figuration in the 1970s, a forerunner of the appropriation strategies of the 1980s, an overlooked contributor to debates around identity politics in the 1990s, and a sage pioneer in addressing some of the most challenging issues in global culture today. The exhibition builds upon the New Museum's long history with the artist, including "Robert Colescott: A Retrospective," a touring survey of his work that was presented at the museum in 1989.
"Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott" is co-curated by Lowery Stokes Sims and Matthew Weseley. It is organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. The presentation at the #newmuseum is coordinated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator. "Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca: Five Times Brazil"
This will be the first survey exhibition in the United States featuring works by Bárbara Wagner (b. 1980, Brasília, Brazil) and Benjamin de Burca (b. 1975, Munich, Germany). Working together for a decade, Wagner and de Burca produce films and video installations that feature protagonists engaged in cultural production such as music, theater, and dance. The duo typically collaborates with non-actors who participate in the making of their films, from writing scripts to staging performances on camera. The resulting works are marked by economic conditions and social tensions present in the contexts in which they are filmed, giving urgency to new forms of self-representation through voice, movement, and drama.
Installed on the Third Floor, "Five Times Brazil" will focus on five projects developed by the artists over a period of particular socio-political turmoil in Brazil: Faz que vai [Set to go] (2015) focuses on four dancers whose practices complicate Brazilian traditions; Estás vendo coisas [You are seeing things] (2016) delves into the landscape of Brega music in Recife; Terremoto Santo [Holy Tremor] (2017) investigates the accelerated growth of evangelical religions; Swinguerra (2019), commissioned for the Brazilian Pavilion in the 58th Venice Biennale, looks into popular dance competitions; and a new piece features a theater group associated with the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Workers' Movement)—an organization that has been fighting for land reform and against social inequities affecting rural workers in Brazil for forty years.
"Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca: Five Times Brazil" is curated by Margot Norton, Allen and Lola Goldring Curator, and Bernardo Mosqueira, ISLAA Curatorial Fellow, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by the #newmuseum. The catalogue includes a conversation between the artists and Margot Norton; and texts by Vivian Crockett, Bernardo Mosqueira, and Wendelien van Oldenborgh. "Kapwani Kiwanga: Off-Grid"
Over the past decade, Paris-based artist #kapwanikiwanga (b. 1978, Hamilton, Canada) has created complex installations, sculptures, performance lectures, and films that consider myriad subjects including marginalized histories and colonial economies. Drawing from her training in anthropology and the social sciences, Kiwanga's rigorously researched projects often take the form of installations that stage new spatial environments while exposing the ways in which bodies physically experience and inhabit structures of power and control.
Departing from archival investigations that range from the history of decolonization to the migration of plants across continents, Kiwanga's ethereal artworks bring attention to the backstories of systems of authority and their embodied effects. Through this process of research, Kiwanga's installations articulate a type of historical imagination, but they do so by constructing unique perceptual encounters with fluidity and estrangement.
Installed in the New Museum's Fourth Floor gallery, the exhibition debuts a new body of work that bridges historical research with a site-specific spatial intervention. Invoking both the use of police floodlights in targeted urban areas and the early eighteenth-century New York legal codes known as "lantern laws"—ordinances that required all enslaved individuals over the age of fourteen to carry lanterns or lit candles after dark—Kiwanga's installation continues the artist's investigation into disciplinary architectures and complex regimes of visibility. Weaving together different layers of opacity and transparency through textile and sculpture, Off-Grid subverts the application of artificial light as a means of control. Instead, the exhibition is solely illuminated by shifting patterns of natural light that change throughout the day. Disconnected from the electric lighting system, the exhibition also stages a type of speculative scenario, evoking both the sudden closure of cultural institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic and a not-so-distant future when museums and society will have to operate with limited access to power.
"Kapwani Kiwanga: Off-Grid" is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director and Madeline Weisburg, Curatorial Assistant, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by the #newmuseum. The catalogue includes a conversation between the artist and Massimiliano Gioni; a conversation between Simone Browne and Madeline Weisburg; and texts by Glenn Adamson, Rashid Johnson, Kathleen Ritter, and Yesomi Umolu. "Doreen Lynette Garner: REVOLTED"
The #newmuseum will premiere a solo presentation of new works by Doreen Lynette Garner (b. 1986, Philadelphia, PA), whose sculptural and performance practice examines the suppressed histories of medical experimentation, malpractice, and exploitation enacted upon Black #people. Deploying the slippage between the beautiful and the grotesque, Garner's intricate sculptures—often comprised of silicone, insulation foam, glass, beads, crystals, pearls, synthetic hair, and other materials—uncannily evoke corporeal flesh, organs, and wounds. While Black women remain at the center of her practice, Garner has recently shifted her focus to rendering white flesh to reflect on the damage inflicted by colonial and imperialist logics, including in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Whereas past projects have centered on the visceral confrontation of trauma, this body of work will focus on the notion of ancestral revenge, imagining ways to act out a ritualistic catharsis of the enduring forms of violence her work exposes. Garner's works for the exhibition will build on her ongoing research into the inhumane practices of J. Marion Sims, an early-nineteenth-century physician once regarded as the "father of modern gynecology," who conducted recurrent surgical operations without anesthesia on at least ten enslaved Black women, including Betsey Harris, Lucy Zimmerman, and Anarcha Wescott. This new project interrogates the politics of redress, the allure and abuse of power, and considers the reclamation of torture as a mode of restitution.
One new work will repurpose the material remains of the 2017 performance Purge wherein Garner and a group of Black women staged a vesicovaginal fistula repair on a silicone skin replica of a bronze statue of Sims that once stood in Central Park. The remnants will be transformed into a boxer's punching bag through which visitors will be invited to release their rage. Additional activations will further complicate fraught processes of physical and spiritual reparation.
"Doreen Lynette Garner: REVOLTED" is curated by Vivian Crockett, Curator. |
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