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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.

REDCAT, the CalArts School of Art, and IndigenousArts@CalArts are pleased to welcome the editors, book designer, and artist contributors of the landmark anthology, An Indigenous Present, for an evening of conversation and celebration. Our Own Work, Our Own Audiences celebrates the release of An Indigenous Present (published by BIG NDN Press/DelMonico Books) which surveys an intergenerational field of Indigenous North American contemporary artists, musicians, filmmakers, choreographers, architects, writers, photographers, and designers whose work upends the conventions of the mainstream art world and non-Native publics by making work that embodies Indigenous ways of being and knowing.

This conversation will feature An Indigenous Present co-editors Jeffrey Gibson and Jenelle Porter, and book designer Sébastien Aubin. Currently based in Montreal, Sébastien Aubin is a proud member of the Opaskwayak Cree Nation in Manitoba. He is the owner of OTAMI- a design studio in Montreal and also Artist in Residence at Concordia University. Jeffrey Gibson is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent who currently lives and works near Hudson, NY. Gibson’s approach to art-making is defined by its hybrid and cosmopolitan nature, largely informed by his international upbringing in the U.S., Korea, and Germany. Jenelle Porter is a curator and writer based in Los Angeles.

Celebrating the launch of the new book An Indigenous Present, conceived by artist Jeffrey Gibson, this panel takes a closer look at Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living from the perspective of Indigenous intersectionality. Made in L.A. artists Teresa Baker, Melissa Cody, Ishi Glinsky, and Esteban Ramón Pérez join Gibson and curator Pablo José Ramírez in this conversation on Indigeneity through a larger understanding of native land, diasporic and queer histories, mestizaje, and ideas of ancestry.

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.

A short documentary—produced by The Huntington and directed by Kyle Provencio Reingold, program director of Ghetto Film School LA—is presented within the exhibition, Betye Saar: Drifting Toward Twilight, at The Huntington. The film features footage of the work in progress in Saar’s studio, documenting her process of selecting natural materials in partnership with The Huntington’s Botanical curators.

“Paraventi: Folding Screens from the 17th to 21st Centuries” is an extensive exhibition curated by Nicholas Cullinan that investigates the histories and semantics of folding screens by tracing trajectories of cross-pollination between East and West, processes of hybridization between different art forms and functions, collaborative relationships between designers and artists, and the emergence of newly created works.

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.

Accra! The Rise of a Global Art Community showcases the work of 18 artists who have deep connections to Accra, Ghana and their impact on global art discourse. Portraits, abstraction, textiles, works on papers and sculpture explore cultural identities, political histories, mythology, trauma and healing.

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.

In Queer Nature, New York based artist Jeffrey Gibson celebrates the beauty of plants and fungi with House of Spirits, an installation fusing vibrant colour and pattern. This large-scale, suspended artwork is intricately crafted to form a collage of printed fabrics, incorporating botanical illustrations alongside language and patterns informed by Gibson’s own perspectives on queerness, and the endless diversity of plants and nature.

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. 

Kehinde Wiley unveils an exclusive series of portraits of African heads of state. A project exploring the staging of power, on which the artist has been working confidentially since 2012. It was as a result of the election of Barack Obama in 2008 that Kehinde Wiley began to ponder the question of presidential leadership. In 2012, the American artist, whose work reinterprets representations of power and prestige in the history of portrait painting, imagined an original series dedicated to African heads of state.

Featuring Jeffrey Gibson, Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction foregrounds a robust if over-looked strand in art history’s modernist narratives by tracing how, when, and why abstract art intersected with woven textiles (and such pre-loom technologies as basketry, knotting, and netting) over the past century.

Jeffrey Gibson asks us to co-envision a future and to move toward it. Ceaselessly prioritizing collective imagination as a tool toward manifestation and realization, the artist has stated, “Don’t accept the circumstances you are in; acknowledge that you are in them and then find a future.” Gibson’s form of hard-earned optimism evokes a time frame that unites and collapses past, present, and future into a flowing and responsive mindset, rooted in the belief that a critical engagement with the past can help us shape a brighter horizon.

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.

This summer, the Ashmolean launches its contemporary exhibition series Ashmolean NOW. The museum’s Gallery 8 will become a laboratory for contemporary artists who have been invited to create new work inspired by the Ashmolean’s historical collections.