News

By Catherine G. Wagley

Acclaimed artist Betye Saar brings her “Heart of a Wanderer” exhibition to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum through May 21. The 96-year-old artist is credited with “redefining Black consciousness in art.”

By Dionne Searcey

“An Archaeology of Silence” opens in San Francisco, after a string of police killings of Black men. Along with powerful art, it offers a respite room to those needing a break.

Kehinde Wiley’s new body of paintings and sculptures confronts the silence surrounding systemic violence against Black people through the visual language of the fallen figure. It expands on his 2008 series, Down — a group of large-scale portraits of young Black men inspired by Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521–1522). 

Following its debut at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 2021, the group exhibition Black American Portraits travels to Atlanta’s Spelman College Museum of Fine Art. Co-curated by Spelman College Museum of Fine Art’s Executive Director Liz Andrews and Tate’s Britton Family Curator-at-Large Christine Y. Kim (both formerly of LACMA), the exhibition reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, sitters and spaces – this time placing Black women portrait artists center stage. 

By Carly Pippin

A Buddhist chant in an Indonesian temple. A bustling Moroccan marketplace. A Haitian Vodou ceremony.

In the 1970s, cultural encounters like these launched artist Betye Saar into a nearly six-decade love affair with travel. Now 96 years old, Saar has visited more than 31 countries, documenting her experiences along the way in vividly colored travel sketchbooks combining hand-drawn observations with knickknacks, ephemera, and found items collected from her destinations.

By Jessica Lynne

Kehinde Wiley is ebullient yet poised on the afternoon of our Zoom conversation. The painter — one of contemporary art’s most celebrated — joined from a sunlit room in Roberts Projects, where a new series, “Colorful Realm,” was being prepared to open to the public. 

By Jori Finkel

After 15 years in Culver City, Roberts Projects has taken over a 1948 warehouse near the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) at 442 South La Brea Avenue, formerly known as the Max Barish Chrysler-Plymouth showroom. There, it has opened its largest and most flexible space yet: 10,000 sq. ft including galleries, offices and a study room.

The first monograph on the sinuous, exhilaratingly colorful and pattern-filled portraiture of Amoako Boafo.

Exclusively portraying individuals from the diaspora and beyond, Boafo invites a reflection on Black subjectivity, diversity and complexity. His portraits, notable for their bold colors and patterns, celebrate his subjects as a means to challenge portrayals that objectify and dehumanize Blackness. As Boafo has stated, “the primary idea of my practice is representation, documenting, celebrating and showing new ways to approach Blackness.”

This major exhibition is devoted to one of today’s leading artists, whose multidisciplinary practice combines aspects of traditional Indigenous art and culture with a modernist visual vocabulary. Born in Colorado in 1972, Jeffrey Gibson is of Cherokee heritage and a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw. His vibrant work, which is represented in more than twenty permanent collections across the United States, is a call for Indigenous empowerment as well as queer visibility and environmental sustainability.

A new rooftop installation has opened at the Aspen Art Museum as part of Jeffrey Gibson's exhibtion titled THE SPIRITS ARE LAUGHING. The Installation combines an assemblage of anthropomorphized sculptural heads that incorporate stones, fossils, and other natural materials, representative of geolic and natural time. These sculptures are in dialogues with a grouping of Gibsons' signture brightly colored flags, each with a different pattern, text, lyric or slogan. 

Next week Ghanian-born, Austria-based painter Amoako Boafo will debut dot.ateliers, Accra’s latest artist residency and art exhibition space. The three-story structure designed by David Adjaye is an “architectural tool” for sustainable design for the community-guided project that serves as a multifaceted space for incubation, mentorship, and gathering. Dot.ateliers opens with Postcards from Home, a solo exhibition of Boafo’s works curated by Aindrea Emelife that reflects on the artist’s relationship with his hometown, and will be followed with a group exhibition curated by Akworkor Thompson, Play it Loud, in January.

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.