News

By Julia Halperin

Some artists are drawn to small paintings for practical reasons; when materials, studio space and shipping have never been more expensive, they’re relatively cheap to make and easy to store and transport. Small paintings are also intimate, seductive and unpretentious. As Middleton puts it, they “creep up on you.”  While the artists who make them vary in style and approach, they seem to share a somewhat old-fashioned view of what art is for: individual communion rather than collective spectacle — only one viewer can stand in front of each of these pieces at a time.

By Sam Lubell

Before the Eaton fire raced across Altadena, destroying more than 9,000 of its buildings, many, even in nearby Los Angeles, barely knew of the place’s existence. This sleepy 42,000-person hamlet hugging the glowing foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains is not part of that city but an unincorporated community of Los Angeles County, and just far enough off the beaten track to blissfully avoid notice.

Interview by Christophe Cherix

The Los Angeles fires brought back to my mind a conversation with Betye Saar about some of the very first etchings she made at home, right out of college. These prints often show charred vegetation rendered in beautiful color overlays, making the burnt wilderness glow in extraordinary shades of ochre and orange. Betye explained at the time that the house she had moved to, in 1962, was located in a canyon that had been devastated by fires three years earlier. When I heard she was safe back home, after having been evacuated for a few days this January, I asked Betye if she would tell us more about these early etchings, which in my mind had always been more about healing and resilience than destruction.

Roberts Projects congratulates Suchitra Mattai, producer and Adam J. Graves, director on the nomination of Anuja, for an Academy Award, Best Live Action Short Film. Anuja tells the story of a gifted nine-year-old girl who, alongside her sister Palak, faces a life-changing opportunity that tests their bond and mirrors the struggles of girls worldwide.

I was in the early stages of developing a coming-of-age film, when Suchitra Mattai (my wife and producing partner) happened upon an unsettling statistic: globally, nearly one in ten children under the age of fifteen is subject to child labor (i.e., labor that is detrimental to one’s health, development, and education). – Adam J. Graves

The recent wildfires in Los Angeles have profoundly impacted our art community, disrupting lives, livelihoods, and creative spaces. We want to express our support and solidarity with everyone affected during this incredibly challenging time. We also wish to recognize and commend the extraordinary efforts of first responders and volunteers who have worked tirelessly to address this crisis in our city. 

As part of our commitment to supporting the recovery efforts, we are actively contributing to relief initiatives and collaborating with other arts organizations to maximize our collective resources and support those affected. Together, we aim to provide meaningful assistance and help our art community rebuild stronger than ever.

The exhibition offers the first sustained look at a pivotal moment in Betye Saar’s career, when a visit to Chicago’s Field Museum in 1974 transformed the way she conceived of herself as an artist. A display of more than 60 objects—including a ceremonial robe from Cameroon, costumes and jewelry designed by Saar, drawings, photos, archival materials, and more—casts new light on the way Saar’s early career in costume design informed her pioneering work in assemblage and installation. Let’s Get It On is presented as part of a series of exhibitions and events linked to Panafrica: Histories, Aesthetics, Politics, a multi-year research project at the Neubauer Collegium that is exploring the connections between Pan-African politics and culture.

By Kriston Capps

Suchitra Mattai uses vintage saris and vivid found materials to weave exquisite tapestries that challenge fixed histories about art and migration.

People like to send the artist Suchitra Mattai fabrics. Her mother, who lives in Edison, N.J., home to one of the largest South Asian populations in the United States, collects saris from secondhand shops and mails them to her daughter, who lives in Los Angeles and is of Indo-Caribbean descent. Friends, relatives and friends of relatives all send their finds: silks, fringe, trim and more.

A Garden of Promise and Dissent inaugurates The Aldrich’s newly renovated campus and Sculpture Garden. This intergenerational group exhibition of twenty-one artists explores the animation of the “garden” as a site of private expression (poetics) and public action (praxis). Gardens offer solace, community, nutrition, and well-being; they provide safe spaces for rebellion and empowerment; they alleviate climate change, revitalize, and widen access to land use–providing localized food resources and alternative medicine. Gardens symbolize growth, death, and regeneration as well as represent care, resilience, and hope. 

A new commission from legendary artist Betye Saar entitled Seeking Secrets of Destiny was installed yesterday at the Legacy Gallery inside the expanded Legacy Museum in downtown Montgomery, Alabama.

“We are thrilled to have a newly commissioned piece from the legendary Betye Saar at the Legacy Museum gallery,” EJI director Bryan Stevenson said. “Ms. Saar’s lifetime of work on memory and history makes her latest piece perfect for our collection which uses art to reinforce learning about the legacy of slavery. We are also excited that her piece will be positioned next to a work from her talented daughter, Alison Saar.”

Interview by Tara Anne Dalbow

Growing up on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana, Wendy Red Star witnessed the ways her cultural heritage was practiced, performed and integrated into the daily lives of her tribe. These customs seemed deeply disconnected from the displays in history museums that rendered her people as ancient artifacts. Spanning self-portraiture, archival imagery, large-scale installations, mixed-media collage and performance, Red Star’s practice interrogates and undermines representations of Native Americans as primitive peoples and foregrounds the dynamism of contemporary Indigenous experience.

Opening on 7 November, the artist’s first major solo museum exhibition will centre on two series that explore representations of the figure across history, featuring more than 30 works, including 9 works from the series that gives the exhibition its name and 5 new paintings from the Out of Chaos series. Crews-Chubb’s vibrant, turbulent compositions of chimerical figures emerge from a laborious process of intuitive painting, drawing, and collage. Working from his subconscious, he uses aleatory methods of paint application—spilling, throwing, and spraying ink and pigment—to create a dynamic ground from which he coaxes figures.

Roberts Projects is pleased to announce representation of Luke Agada, in association with moniquemeloche gallery, Chicago. This announcement follows the gallery's recent solo exhibition with the artist, Between Two Suns, which opened on September 28th and will be on view until November 2nd, 2024.

Strike Fast, Dance Lightly: Artists on Boxing presents a critical look at the sport of boxing through a variety of artistic media. Featuring over 100 artworks spanning from the late 19th century to present day, this dynamic presentation is the largest comprehensive survey of artwork depicting the global sport and its cultural impact. Strike Fast, Dance Lightly illuminates the connections between boxing and artists, and underscores the rich history of a centuries-old sport and its influence on artistic movements.

The Belvedere in Vienna, Austria presents Europe’s first major museum exhibition of Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo (b. 1984, Accra, Ghana). Boafo portrays his friends, acquaintances, and people from public life, presenting a contemporary image of Black self-empowerment and self-perception. This form of Black subjectivity is expressed in the appearance of the sitters, who confront the viewer as self-confident individuals.

By Mark Jenkins

When introducing viewers to her Indian heritage, Suchitra Mattai is also reconstructing it for herself. The title of the multidisciplinary artist’s ambitious National Museum of Women in the Arts exhibition, “Myth From Matter,” encapsulates her process. Mattai repurposes Indian artifacts — often old saris — to weave a vision of her ancestral homeland.

Roberts Projects congratulates Wendy Red Star who is a recipient of the 2024 MacArthur Fellowship. 

The fellowship is awarded to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.

Interview by Katie Kern

Luke Agada opens his first Los Angeles show at Roberts Projects on Sept. 28. It wasn't exactly a clear path for him to arrive here, growing up in Lagos and studing veterinary medicine before finding his way to painting. Below, CULTURED sat down with the artist to talk about the question of home, certain colors becoming a safe haven, and the painters he turns time and again for inspiration.

Roberts Projects is honored to announce representation of Wendy Red Star (Baaeétitchish – Does Things Well). This announcement follows the gallery’s first solo exhibition of Red Star’s work – Bíikkua (The Hide Scraper) – this past August.

Wendy Red Star, of the Piegan clan and from the district of Pryor, engages in a multidisciplinary artistic practice grounded in the history and cultural knowledge of the Apsáalooke (Crow) people. Raised on the Crow reservation in Montana, her work reflects her deep connection to her community, culture, and land.

Combining richly colored textiles, found objects, beads, and more, multidisciplinary artist Suchitra Mattai (b. 1973, Georgetown, Guyana) explores themes of history, identity, and belonging. The forces that lead certain stories to be remembered, or forgotten, are central to her art. Drawing on her Indo-Caribbean roots, Mattai weaves together personal narratives, collective mythologies, and colonial history. Her two- and three-dimensional works offer a reimagined vision of the past that centers the perspectives of women and people of color, especially those from Southeast Asia.

Musicians, songwriters, and producers Swizz Beatz (Kasseem Dean) and Alicia Keys have stood as giants in the global cultural landscape for decades. As collectors, the Deans have lived their ethos of “artists supporting artists,” acquiring a world-class collection of paintings, photographs, and sculptures by diverse, multigenerational artists.

Future Imaginaries explores the rise of Futurism in contemporary Indigenous art as a means of enduring colonial trauma, creating alternative futures and advocating for Indigenous technologies in a more inclusive present and sustainable future. Over 50 artworks are on display, some interspersed throughout the museum, creating unexpected encounters and dialogues between contemporary Indigenous creations and historic Autry works.

By Sara Roffino

For her current show, “Bíikkua (The Hide Scraper),” at Los Angeles’s Roberts Projects, Wendy Red Star stepped back from the humor that often carries through her work. Instead she dug into the Apsáalooke history of bishkisché, traditional leather pouches, to share a little-documented history of her people. Bishkisché were functional objects used to transport goods through the Great Plains. They were also creative expressions, meticulously designed and painted by Apsáalooke women and passed down through generations as keepsakes.

The exhibition Sleep! at the Kunsthal KAdE takes you on an exploration into the deep landscape of sleeping and dreams, through the eyes of some fifty visual artists and designers. Here, for a moment, another time reigns. The viewer experiences the four sleep stages from slumber and light rest,  deep sleep and (sleep) walking through the dream to the great hall where the bed is central. “Did you sleep well?” is a question that is often asked to each other. A basic question in which the response of the person questioned immediately provides insight into the alertness, mood and ability to put things into perspective of the person in question. Sleeping is, just like eating and drinking, a basic necessity of life. Magazines are full of tips & tricks for a good night's sleep every week: with the golden rule of rest, cleanliness and regularity recurring as an ideal form of sleep hygiene.

Interview by Eva Recinos

"I think being an artist is something you know that you are, and you might not recognize it for a long time because I think there are these preconceived ideas about what it is to be an artist and engaging in a professional practice. But the thing is, as we all know, it’s super complicated to be an artist. How do you have the time to make all the work? How do you fund the work? How do you grow your practice? These are all things that, when I was younger, seemed like a mystery. I think if you just trust in the art and the process, that is the only thing you can control. And the other things fall into place. I know that sounds maybe silly, but I do feel like whatever limited time you have, whatever resources you have—if you use that time to make, and to make your work better, and to develop new ideas and curiosities, that’s super important too."

By Stephanie Sporn

For centuries, painters have taken creative liberties when depicting their sitters’ attire, whether for sheer visual impact or to imbue their works with symbolic significance. This phenomenon, in which the artist doubles as stylist, has been the subject of recent solo shows, including exhibitions on Gilded Age master, John Singer Sargent, and purveyor of contemporary cool, Barkley L. Hendricks. Today, a new generation of sartorially savvy artists are leading the charge, capturing clothing to stunning effect – but rather than merely painting fashion, these women consider style as a means to convey notions of heritage, pride, and power.

Wendy Red Star is known for photographing herself within elaborately constructed scenes, engaging the viewer directly and foregrounding her presence within narratives of her own design. In Stirs Up the Dust, from a series of celestial couture garments titled Thunder Up Above, Red Star reimagines the regalia associated with powwow, a circular dance celebration found throughout Indigenous Plains cultures including Red Star’s Crow Nation, in futuristic terms.  

The exhibition Suchitra Mattai: Bodies and Souls explores migration, matriarchy, and materiality. Mattai uses found objects, such as vintage saris, to create colorful monumental installations. She wraps, braids, stitches, and weaves fabrics together as allegories for historical and personal narratives. For her first museum exhibition in Florida and the Southeast, Mattai will premier new installations in conversation with recent works, highlighting the artist’s ongoing investigations of the past and present.

By Evan Nicole Brown

The American assemblage artist Betye Saar spent her childhood salvaging lost, discarded and forgotten things, like small glass beads, broken necklaces and scraps of colored paper left in trash bins or littering the ground where she walked. Born in 1926, she was raised during the Great Depression and so, Saar wrote to me recently, she was taught to “use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”

Interview by Phyllis Hollis

Nigerian artist living and working in Chicago. Examines themes of globalization, migration and cultural dislocation within the framework of a postcolonial world. MFA in Painting and drawing from School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023. Teaching Fellow at the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL. Recently named a 2024 Breakout Artist by NewCity Magazine.

Renowned American artist Betye Saar’s large-scale work “Drifting Toward Twilight”—recently commissioned by The Huntington—is a site-specific installation that features a 17-foot-long vintage wooden canoe and found objects, including birdcages, antlers, and natural materials harvested by Saar from The Huntington’s grounds. The commission is personal for Saar, who has fond memories of visiting The Huntington as a child and of the trees and landscape in her north Pasadena neighborhood.