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An investigation into Betye Saar's lifelong interest in Black dolls, with new watercolors, historic assemblages, sketchbooks and a selection of Black dolls from the artist's collection.

This volume features new watercolor works on paper and assemblages by Betye Saar (born 1926) that incorporate the artist's personal collection of Black dolls. These watercolors showcase the artist’s experimentation with vivid color and layered techniques, and her new interest in flat shapes. While Saar has previously used painting in her mixed media collages, this is the first publication to focus on her watercolor works on paper.

An immersive, site-responsive installation by multimedia artist Jeffrey Gibson, They Come From Fire will transform the exterior windows on the facade of the museum’s main building as well as its two-story interior Schnitzer Sculpture Court. This dynamic work will celebrate Portland’s Indigenous history, presence and vitality through the use of suspended glass panels, text, and photographic imagery created with Indigenous, BIPOC, LGBTQ+ artists, and other community members on and around the empty monument pedestals in the Park blocks in front of the museum.

By Deborah Vankin

The art gallery scene here continues to expand: Culver City’s Roberts Projects is relocating to a new, triple-in-size location in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, punctuating how galleries are coalescing in Hollywood and its environs.

“The energy in Culver City has changed and we wanted to be closer to where the art world was moving towards — which feels like Mid-City,” gallery co-founder Julie Roberts said. “We absolutely needed more space, exhibition and administrative. And for artists with larger archives, we needed a space that was more flexible, so curators could spend more time putting things together.”

Roberts Projects is thrilled to announce its next chapter with the move to a newly restored, expansive space located in a historic 1948 building in the Mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles. This relocation marks the gallery’s 23rd year as a significant voice in the Los Angeles arts community. The new creative venue will occupy a 10,000 sq ft historic automobile showroom and feature four exhibition spaces, a bookshop, and a permanent site-specific space conceived by the trailblazing artist Betye Saar. The main exhibition space will be highlighted by a 30-foot-high vaulted ceiling with illuminated “wings.” This major expansion will triple the gallery’s footprint and provide an experience that is reflective of the gallery’s mission and long-term commitment to Los Angeles.

Revisiting 5+1 is a reflection on the historic 1969 Stony Brook University exhibition and features work by the original six artists, all of whom were Black men, with an addition of six Black women artists, all trailblazers at a time when their work in abstraction was challenged by both the mainstream art world and Black art institutions. 

Metal of Honor: Gold from Simone Martini to Contemporary Art explores how four artists, of different times and different places, use gold as an artistic strategy for innovation and honor. Works by Simone Martini (c. 1284-1344, Italy), whose novel compositions and masterful techniques were unequaled in Europe and well ahead of his time, are juxtaposed with works by three contemporary painters—Kehinde Wiley, Stacy Lynn Waddell, and Titus Kaphar.

Zhao Zhao: A Long Day features a selection of 82 of the artist's most important works from his artistic career spanning from 2006 to the present, including paintings, installations, sculptures and studies on ancient culture. The aim is to present imprints of civilisation left by the long-lasting ancient Chinese culture on today’s world by illustrating the relationship between ‘past and present’ and between ‘East and West’ in a more modern and accessible way of contemporary art.

By Chris Fite-Wazzilak

Myth, play and refusing to disappear: the kaleidoscopic swirl of They Play Endlessly serves as a concise introduction to the work of American artist Jeffrey Gibson, encapsulating as it does his use of painting, craft and collage as means to unpick and repattern what is understood as contemporary Native American culture.