Ed Templeton’s Unsparing Photographic Diary of Skateboarding Life
The New Yorker
May 22, 2023
By Kelefa Sanneh
Ed Templeton's new book of photographs, “Ed Templeton: Wires Crossed,” published by Aperture, re-creates the years from 1995 to 2012, when he was skating and shooting obsessively. The photographs, many with lovingly handwritten captions, depict the intimacy and aimlessness of touring life: a van full of young people who feel as if they know everything important about one another, all of them always looking for something fun to do, and often finding it.
Ed Templeton looks back at the subversive skate culture of the 90s and 00s
Dazed & Confused
May 10, 2023
By Alex Merola
The photographer and skating legend speaks to us about his new photo book which brings together work from his archive, paying homage to the hedonistic, troubled kids from the skate parks of his youth.
The Huntington Commissions Artist Betye Saar to Create Site-Specific, Immersive Installation
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens
May 3, 2023
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens announced today that it has commissioned artist Betye Saar to create a large-scale, immersive installation for the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art. Provisionally titled Drifting Toward Twilight, the site-specific work will feature a 17-foot-long wooden canoe that incorporates found objects, paint, neon, natural materials, and plant matter harvested by Saar from the Huntington grounds.
Amoako Boafo | Artist Plate Project Returns for Third Edition
Hypebeast
May 3, 2023
By Shawn Ghassemitari
The Coalition for the Homeless‘ Artist Plate Project has become a platform for established and emerging creatives to showcase their work, while providing meals for low-income New Yorkers. In conjunction with the upcoming Frieze New York, the 2023 Artist Plate Project will boast a remarkable list of global creatives, including Alice Neel and Amoako Boafo, Hank Willis Thomas and Huma Bhabha to Philip Guston and the late Virgil Abloh, amongst many.
Roberts Projects turns historic car dealership into characterful LA art space
Wallpaper
May 3, 2023
By Ellie Stathaki
Roberts Projects has just launched its new home in Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles. The gallery, which is now situated within a generous, expansive space that has been restored by Johnston Marklee, also celebrates its 23rd anniversary in 2023. The structure that hosts the business is a historic 1948 building – a 10,000 sq ft former automobile showroom – and it has now been given a facelift, tweaked to fit its new purpose as a fresh hub for the Los Angeles art community.
From Morocco to Malaysia: new publication traces the US artist Betye Saar’s journeys of discovery
The Art Newspaper
May 2, 2023
By Ben Luke
Richly produced book documents how the nonagenarian artist’s work has been informed by her decades of travel.
“My secret heart seeks the dusty, musty, forgotten corners./It constantly haunts, hunts, collects, gathers objects, images, feelings.” In her 1993 poem My Secret Heart, Betye Saar—whose sculptures, using diverse cultural imagery to reflect on injustice and African American life, form one of the most influential bodies of work in recent American art—tells us about the processes of witnessing, remembering and collecting at the heart of her work. Often, she draws on the experience of travel.
Choctaw-Cherokee Artist Jeffrey Gibson Shows Us His Hudson Studio, Where He Riffs on Native American Iconography
Artnet News
April 25, 2023
By Katie White
The artist invited us into the former schoolhouse, where he and his team create electrically colorful works. Jeffrey Gibson’s studio could be considered his biggest work of art. Just about a decade ago, Gibson undertook a major project, converting a former schoolhouse in Hudson, New York, into a 14,000-square-foot workshop and studio. Ten years later, the project is nearly complete.
Wangari Mathenge Was a Lawyer. Now, She’s Making Her U.S. Solo Debut at Roberts Projects
Cultured
April 21, 2023
By Melissa Smith
It wasn’t that long ago that Wangari Mathenge was a practicing attorney. When she quit her job and started considering what to do next, two choices presented themselves: she could either join the family business in Kenya, or finally take her painting “seriously.” The latter, to Mathenge, meant pursuing art as a full-blown career. In 2019, Mathenge enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, completing her MFA in 2021.
Ed Templeton | Wires Crossed
Bonnenfanten, Maastricht, The Netherlands
April 15 – September 17, 2023
In Wires Crossed, Ed Templeton shows the subculture of skateboarding from 1995 to 2012 through photographs, drawings and texts. Templeton is a photographer, artist and one of the most influential skateboarders of all time. During his many tours throughout America, Templeton (Garden Grove, California, 1972) recorded skate culture using his 50-mm camera.
Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence
artbook
Spring 2023
Edited by Claudia Schmuckli
Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence features a new body of paintings and sculptures by American artist Kehinde Wiley confronting the legacies of colonialism through the visual language of the fallen figure. It expands on a subject the artist first explored in his 2008 series Down—a group of large-scale portraits of young Black men inspired by Wiley’s encounter with Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521–22) at the Kunstmuseum Basel.
To search, to seek, to see: Betye Saar brings her travels to the Gardner Museum
The Boston Globe
March 17, 2023
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.”
Kehinde Wiley’s New Exhibition Is a Chapel for Mourning
The New York Times
March 16, 2023
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 | An Archaeology of Silence
de Young Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco
March 18 – October 15, 2023
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).
Collins Obijiaku: An emerging portraitist in search of new postures and perspectives on the African continent
smART Magazine
March 10, 2023
By Navya Pothamsetty
Collins Obijiaku’s portraits are relatively simple: a profile of a single person against a simple background. Born in the Kaduna region in northern Nigeria, the internationally-exhibited, self- taught artist is now based just north of Abuja—the strategically central capital of the nation. The deceptively simplified surfaces of Obijiaku’s creations belie miles of depth beneath the facade of their sartorial expression, and the identities assumed in their skin complexion. Captivated at first glance, the Obijiaku viewer is invited to observe, on closer inspection, how small differences in clothing, posture, and gaze animate two- dimensional portraits to vivid life.
Black American Portraits | Featuring Wangari Mathenge
Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA
February 8 – June 30, 2023
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.
Kehinde Wiley is reaching for a new language of grace
Los Angeles Times
February 16, 2023
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.