The Black Doll Symposium | Featuring Betye Saar
Duke University, Department of African and African American Studies
March 15th - March 16th, 2024
Hosted by the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University, The Black Doll Symposium is a virtual, interdisciplinary conference convened to celebrate and discuss the exciting and varied topic of black dolls. We are thrilled to invite everyone in the diverse community of collectors, curators, dollmakers, scholars, and advocates of Black dolls to join us for two days of roundtable discussions, film screenings, and audience Q&A sessions.
Suchitra Mattai | We are nomads, we are dreamers
Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY
May 11, 2024 – August 25, 2024
We are nomads, we are dreamers is a solo exhibition of newly commissioned works by Suchitra Mattai, celebrating the migratory oceanic journeys of past, present, and future diasporic communities. Inspired by the Park’s position along the East River, which flows into the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, Mattai’s installation features a series of monumental, soft sculptures made from vintage saris. Activated by monthly dance performances, this exhibition pays homage to the artist’s Indo-Caribbean ancestors and the stories of many Queens residents.
Jeffrey Gibson Unveils a Limited-Edition Blanket: "I Feel Real When You Hold Me"
Sotheby’s
February 15, 2024
Jeffrey Gibson, 51, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and an artist of Cherokee descent, is the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States with a solo exhibition. He plans to unveil new sculpture, painting and multimedia work at his pavilion, as well as a site-specific installation in the courtyard. To help fund the project, Portland Art Museum and SITE Santa Fe have partnered with Sotheby’s and Sharon Coplan Hurowitz to publish a series of limited-edition cashmere blankets featuring Gibson’s design. Beginning today, an exclusive release of 60 blankets will be offered to the public on Sotheby’s Marketplace.
Jeffery Gibson | Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art
Barbican, London
February 13, 2024 - May 26, 2024
Jeffery Gibson is included in Unravel: the Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at Barbican, London. The exhibition sets out to ask why textiles are a particularly resonant medium to address ideas of gender and sexuality, the movement and displacement of people, and histories of extraction and violence, as well as understanding the world through connecting with ancestral practices and communing with nature.
Things that are not meant to work; an interview with Justin Williams
Autre Magazine
January 31, 2024
By Chimera Mohammadi
In Justin Williams’s newest exhibition, Synonym, at Roberts Projects, waves of stories collide and crash across timelines, pouring onto the canvas in lush and decadent palettes. Williams creates wormholes between his ancestral memories and the present day.
At 97, Betye Saar Traces Her Decades-Long Relationship With Art Back to This Unexpected Source
Cultured Magazine
January 29, 2024
By Mara Veitch
As a child, Betye Saar witnessed the construction of the Watts Towers from broken glass, rusty tools, and seashells, and determined that history is best represented in the detritus of real people’s lives. Though she’s sworn off of deadlines, Saar has one more museum show in the works, Drifting Toward Twilight, now on view at The Huntington in Saar’s native Los Angeles.
Betye Saar | Under The Silver Moon
Flaunt Magazine
January 26, 2024
Betye Saar's Under The Silver Moon is featured on Flaunt Magazine's 25th anniversary cover. When asked where was the most magical moon she's ever observed, Saar responded:
"Up at Yonderosa, my daughter’s desert ranch, there are many magical moons. The new moon that looks just like a sliver of a fingernail. Or the full moon that casts a shadow of the Joshua Trees almost like a flashlight."
Artist Jeffrey Gibson on Native American Histories, the Pet Shop Boys, and the Call of Community
Artnet News
January 26, 2024
By Katie White
“I’ve been thinking a lot about how time unfolds, how culture unfolds,” said Jeffrey Gibson, in a conversation this past December. “We live in a time right now where we can look in retrospect and try to understand how one thing led to the next. But looking into the future, it’s nearly impossible to determine what happens next.”
Betye Saar’s Stellar Installation
Frieze
January 15, 2024
By Stephanie Seidel
Celestial bodies, constellations and zodiac signs feature prominently in the work of American artist Betye Saar. Through ritual acts, she assembles syncretic spaces that incorporate spiritual, autobiographical and politically charged elements foraged from flea markets and the annals of history.
Jeffrey Gibson’s 15-Year Survey Is an Unapologetic Expression of Love
Artsy
December 29, 2023
By Clare Gemima
At the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Washington State University, Jeffrey Gibson’s current solo exhibition, They Teach Love, stands as a vibrant departure from the conventional narratives entrenched in the Western art canon.
Horizons | Featuring Lenz Geerk
Casa Masaccio, Corso, Italy
September 23, 2023 – January 1, 2024
Lenz Geerk is included Horizons at Casa Masaccio which hosts six pictorial works by Antonietta Raphaël in dialogue with new works made for the occasion by Dominique Fung and Lenz Geerk. "Lenz Geerk subvert(s) the predominant male narrative by depicting women in action, surrounded by their work tools and rejecting stereotypes,” Cloé Perrone points out. Geerk, in fact, titling all the works on display Helen, focuses all the attention on the female figure.
The Defining Artworks of 2023 | Featuring Betye Saar
ARTnews
December 18, 2023
In its own room in the Huntington Library’s American art galleries is a new commission (and acquisition) by longtime LA-based artist Betye Saar. At the center of this blue-lit gallery is a 17-foot vintage wood canoe that Saar had had in her collection for a number of years. Where is this boat going? Saar has left it intentionally open ended, but in the room there is a palpable sense of hope—of a new beginning just on the horizon.
Anonymous Was A Woman Names Suchitra Mattai Among 2023 Winners
ARTnews
December 14, 2023
By Maximilíano Durón
Suchitra Mattai is among the 15 Anonymous Was A Woman 2023 winners. Anonymous Was A Woman is a grant-making nonprofit that has awarded over $7 million to women-identifying artists since 1996. The list of nearly 300 past recipients is a who’s who of today’s leading artists, many of whom received the award at critical points in their careers.
Reginald Sylvester II’s Afrofuturistic Works Are Omens of The Apocalypse
Elephant Magazine
November 30, 2023
T-1000 opens at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles and is named in reference to the Terminator 2: Judgement Day villain—an artificially intelligent shapeshifter that utilizes different metals to take human form and wreak havoc. With materials like rubber, steel, and paint, Sylvester’s new body of work examines the impact of living in an intelligence-driven state and the harm that these forms of oppression have on our current and future lives. You need not fear a moment when cyborgs project themselves from the future when we have our own very real horrors unfolding right before our eyes.
For Jeffrey Gibson, Beauty Has a Purpose
W Magazine
November 29, 2023
Interview by Camille Okhio
"Painting is what I knew and understood first. I always thought I would move to New York and be an artist. Painting completed that picture for me. The other ones I became interested in later. Through movement, I wanted to communicate being free in your body. I want to show many bodies of color, in joy and movement, without self-consciousness. When you are a queer person of color, there are so many codes you grow up thinking you’re responsible for. Performance has given me the entitlement to put those down and listen to my body and what it wants."
Mia Middleton now represented by Roberts Projects
Roberts Projects is thrilled to announce representation of Mia Middleton, whose pictorial works explore interiority, memory and evocation. Middleton’s intimate paintings capture a tension and threshold between conscious and subconscious, desire and aversion, reality and fantasy. This announcement follows the gallery’s first exhibition of Middleton’s work – Love Story – this past April.
Middleton is a semiotician in a profoundly visual sense. Often working in a sequence of poetic vignettes, Middleton’s uncanny ability to delve into the transience of existence invites viewers to contemplate the interplay between interiority and exteriority, corporeality and the world beyond. The artist’s skillful manipulation of composition, color and subject matter produces striking freeze-frames that compels viewers to cross the threshold into a profound psychological exploration.
Betye Saar Reassembles the Lives of Black Women
The New Yorker
November 20, 2023
By Hilton Als
Betye Saar’s studio and house, where she has lived for more than sixty years—she is now ninety-seven—are dedicated to history, especially American history as it relates to Black women. In her work, that history is often told through pop-culture artifacts, which, in Saar’s hands, take on a witty poetic resonance—an aura—that they wouldn’t otherwise have. Her layered assemblages, which sometimes resemble the interior of a hope chest, are also filled with inquiry: into the nature of mythology, and specifically how and why we mythologize the Black woman.
Kehinde Wiley | An Archaeology of Silence
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
November 19, 2023 – May 27, 2024
Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence showcases Kehinde Wiley’s new, monumental body of work created against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the global rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. The exhibition premiered earlier this year at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the MFAH is the first stop on the tour. Expanding upon his “Down” series from 2008, the American artist (born 1977) meditates on the deaths of young Black people slain around the world. The works in An Archaeology of Silence stand as elegies and monuments, underscoring the fraught terms in which Black people are rendered visible, especially at the hands of systemic violence.
Suchitra Mattai now represented by Roberts Projects
Roberts Projects is honored to announce representation of Suchitra Mattai. This announcement follows the gallery’s first exhibition of Mattai’s work – In the absence of power. In the presence of love. – this past July.
The Guyana-born artist explores how memory, myth, and oral traditions can be used to unravel colonial and patriarchal narratives. Drawing from European tapestry traditions, Indian miniature painting, and other craft-based traditions like embroidery and weaving, she imagines a “future space” where new mythologies are formed to celebrate and monumentalize the experiences and labor of brown women.
Betye Saar | Drifting Toward Twilight
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA
November 11, 2023 – November 30, 2025
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.
Amoako Boafo | Soul of Black Folks
Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO
October 8, 2023 – February 19, 2024
Amoako Boafo: Soul of Black Folks is the debut museum solo exhibition tour for Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo (born 1984). One of the most acclaimed artists of his generation, Boafo’s works focus the viewers’ gaze on his subjects’ presence through his portraits representing Black life.
Forecast Form | Featuring Suchitra Mattai
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA
October 5, 2023 – February 25, 2024
The show takes pains to get its arms around the region’s multifarious history, opening with Suchitra Mattai’s An Ocean Cradle, 2022, a broad tapestry woven of fragments of silky Indian saris. A conceptual seascape, it nods to South Asian heritage on various islands and in Guyana, where indentured Indian labor was imported to replace enslaved people when the practice was abolished in British Caribbean colonies in the 1830s.
Cowboy | Featuring Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe
Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Denver, CO
September 29, 2023 - February 18, 2024
The exhibition Cowboy will bring together loans and new commissions from 27 artists representing a wide range of perspectives including Asian American artists, Latinx artists, and Native artists. The exhibition aims to shift the narrative of this figure’s cultural power and significance to be both historically accurate and creatively imaginative.
Jeffrey Gibson to Represent United States at 60th Venice Biennale in 2024
July 27, 2023
U.S. Pavilion Presented by Portland Art Museum and SITE Santa Fe; Co-Commissioned by Kathleen Ash-Milby, Louis Grachos and Abigail Winograd
Roberts Projects congratulates Jeffrey Gibson who will represent the United States at the 2024 Venice Biennale. The Portland Art Museum in Oregon and SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, announced today that Jeffrey Gibson will represent the United States at La Biennale di Venezia, the 60th International Art Exhibition.