This has been a remarkable year for Black Rock Senegal which opened its doors in May 2019, sharing Kehinde Wiley’s magnificent vision with friends from near and far. In August 2019, Black Rock launched the inaugural year of the artist residency, welcoming the first three artists to live and make work on the compound. As of today, Black Rock has hosted 15 artists working in literature, multimedia, painting, photography, sculpture and textiles.

By Carolina Miranda for LA Times

I’m starting with a throwback: a rendering by Betye Saar for a mural that occupied a wall on Fifth Street in downtown L.A. from 1983 to 1987. Located near the old headquarters of SoCal Edison at the base of Bunker Hill, the work, titled “L.A. Energy,” is now a point of inspiration for an online exhibition of Saar’s works on galleryplatform.la. Organized by Roberts Projects, the show explores notions of spiritual power.

Roberts Projects is pleased to participate in Gallery Platform LA with Betye Saar: L.A. Energy. The presentation brings together a curated selection of historic works interpreting the symbolism and ideas of the artist's monumental 1983 Los Angeles public mural of the same name through a multiplicity of techniques, images and intersectional narratives. Featuring mixed media collages on homemade paper dating from 1982–1988, the works on view evolved out of several preceding themes in Saar’s oeuvre celebrating Haitian voodoo flags, evocative color, cultural symbols denoting spiritual power and ritualized accumulation, and early abstractions exploring spatial dimension.

By Harley Wong for Artsy

Amoako Boafo has experienced a meteoric rise in the art world over the past year. Known for large-scale portraits of Black subjects rendered in bold, gestural strokes, Boafo has only gained momentum in 2020. Recently, in April 2020, he donated a painting, Aurore Iradukunda (2020), to an online benefit auction supporting the Museum of the African Diaspora during the COVID-19 pandemic.

By Victoria L. Valentine for Culture Type

The exhibition catalogue that accompanies “Betye Saar: Call and Response,” the artist’s showcase of sketchbooks and related artworks, is a real treasure.

Organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the exhibition features sketchbooks dating from 1970 to 2015. The show represents an important milestone for Saar, given it is the first exhibition at a museum in her home state of California to address her entire career and the first anywhere organized around her sketchbooks.

In this “new normal” of social distancing, shuttered businesses, lost wages, and closed schools thousands of more New Yorkers are facing food insecurity. 100% of the proceeds of this emergency benefit auction, organized by artist Doron Langberg and facilitated by Yossi Milo Gallery, will support Food Bank For New York City, the city’s leading hunger-relief organization.  Founded in 1983, the mission of Food Bank For New York City is to end hunger by organizing food, information and support for community survival and dignity.

Museum of the African Diaspora + Artsy are thrilled to present MoAD: Diaspora Unite! Artists of African Descent Benefit Auction 2020 featuring works from some of the more important artists of African descent around the globe. In creating an expansive, yet focused auction representing the infinite iterations of the African diaspora, MoAD brings together artists who have close ties to the museum in support of their mission as they continue the significant work done by the museum over the last 15 years since they’ve opened their doors to the public. This auction will provide critical funding to account for the loss of revenues due to COVID-19 as MoAD makes every effort to open their doors once again.

Roberts Projects is pleased to announce representation of Wangari Mathenge, a historically-focused painter who reinterprets traditional African patriarchal society alongside her own. Juxtaposing modern and contemporary references, Mathenge's work is dedicated to the investigation and incorporation of a visual testimony of the oft-discounted black female experience within the context of both customary African society and the Diaspora. Shifting the dialogue around painting and identity, the artist's portraits highlight these silent exchanges and hierarchical dynamics. Often depicting people with whom she has significant relationships, her paintings are realized through structured compositions emboldened with gestural strokes and mark making.

By Taylor Dafoe for Artnet

In the light-filled gymnasium of an old schoolhouse in Hudson, New York, a punching bag adorned with neon beads and tassels hangs near a long-forgotten basketball hoop. A totemic sculpture stands in a carpeted classroom and masks are strung through the woodshop.

This is the studio of Jeffrey Gibson, a Choctaw-Cherokee artist known for his signature hybrid of Native American iconography and materials with late-capitalist aesthetics. It’s Indigenous Futurism, to borrow a label posited by Anishinaabe writer Grace L. Dillon: the regalia of pow-wows meets that of ‘90s rave culture, while quilted tapestries are patterned with Op art.

In recent months 93-year-old artist Betye Saar has been cast in the spotlight, with glowing reviews for major shows at New York City's Museum of Modern Art (October 21, 2019 – January 4, 2020) and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (September 22, 2019 – April 5, 2020.)  Saar's primary art form is assemblage – sculptures made from found items that she pieces together, often addressing spirituality and black oppression – that turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. Correspondent Serna Altschul reports.

The Yellow Wallpaper is an exhibition of new portraits by American artist Kehinde Wiley. This will be the first solo exhibition of new work shown by Wiley at a UK museum and also the first to feature exclusively female portraits. The works feature women that the artist met on the streets of Dalston and offer a visual response to American novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s acclaimed feminist text, The Yellow Wallpaper (1892).

‘The Yellow Wallpaper is a work of literary fiction that explores the contours of femininity and insanity. This exhibition seeks to use the language of the decorative to reconcile blackness, gender, and a beautiful and terrible past.’ — Kehinde Wiley

Jeffrey Gibson, an artist of Choctaw and Cherokee descent, incorporates elements of Native American art and craft into his practice, creating a rich visual and conceptual dialogue between his work and the histories that inform it. In Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks, he selected objects from our collection, which are presented alongside his recent work. The resulting multimedia, floor-to-ceiling installation questions long-held institutional categorizations and representations of Indigenous peoples and Native American art. It also provides a context for Gibson’s work and acts as a contemporary lens through which to see historical works by both Indigenous and non-Native peoples.

By Jason Farago for The New York Times

A French masterpiece has come to New York for the first time ever, and has been greeted with a curious silence.

It’s Jacques-Louis David’s “Bonaparte Crossing the Alps,” from 1801, and you know it even if you’ve never seen it in person, so enduring is its propaganda. To commemorate Napoleon’s victory over Austria at the Battle of Marengo, David painted him charging up a mountain on a piebald steed, right arm pointing skyward, trademark bicorne on his head, cool and cocksure as his horse bucks its front heels. In copies the artist and his studio made afterward Napoleon wears a red cape, but here, in the original, he’s wrapped in a mantle of gold, starchy and solid in the Alpine air.

By Isis Davis-Marks for Artsy

Wangari Mathenge’s paintings often show people caught in a particular moment. Maybe they’re drinking a cup of coffee, like the woman in Coffee At Cassell’s (2019), or gazing wistfully at something beyond the frame, as in The Cacophony of Silence (2019). Some of her figures are based on herself or pictures of family members.

“I’ve heard comments about how empowering and inspiring it is for black people to see themselves reflected this way,” Mathenge said. “However, for me, painting is merely an expression of myself, a form of catharsis. Currently, it takes the form of figurative painting, but if it ever morphed into abstraction, it would still feel the same to me—something of me that I offer to the world unsolicited.”

Kehinde Wiley’s triumphant Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (2005), a hallmark of our collection, comes face to face with the nineteenth-century painting on which it is based: Jacques-Louis David’s Bonaparte Crossing the Alps (1800–1). The unprecedented pairing of these two magisterial portraits, in the exhibition Jacques-Louis David Meets Kehinde Wiley, also marks the first time David’s original version of Bonaparte Crossing the Alps is on view in New York.

Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, California
January 11 - October 4, 2020

The group exhibition considers the landscape as inhabited, worked, and experienced through the viewpoints of marginalized people.

Tuesday, January 21, 2020
7pm

What might look like junk to the ordinary person is magically turned into compelling and memorable works by artist Betye Saar. In the exhibition Betye Saar: Call and Response, an ironing board takes on the shape of a slave ship, a cocktail tray becomes a tool for meditation and discovery, and a washboard—inscribed with “Extreme Times call for Extreme Heroines” and paired with a mammy figure holding guns—becomes a call to action.

Noah Davis died at the young age of 32 in 2015, but he’s now remembered as a talented painter, a generous member of the Los Angeles arts community, and the founder of one of the city’s most unconventional institutions.

The Underground Museum—a family-run venue that Davis launched with his wife, Karon Davis, to showcase his own work as well as that of his peers—ended up becoming a wildly singular venue that, via a partnership with Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), was able to present the likes of William Kentridge and Deana Lawson to fresh audiences.

As a direct response to the Confederate statues that line Monument Avenue in Richmond, Kehinde Wiley conceived the idea for Rumors of War when he visited the city in 2016 for the opening of Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic at VMFA. Rumors of War takes its inspiration from the statue of Confederate Army General James Ewell Brown “J.E.B.” Stuart created by Frederick Moynihan in 1907. As with the original sculpture, the rider strikes a heroic pose while sitting upon a muscular horse. However, in Wiley’s sculpture, the figure is a young African American dressed in urban streetwear. Proudly mounted on its large stone pedestal, the bronze sculpture commemorates African American youth lost to the social and political battles being waged throughout our nation. Photo: The Washington Post (Steve Helber/AP)

Betye Saar: Taking Care of Business / U.S.A. (Director: Christine Turner) will be included in the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.  At age 93, there's no stopping the legendary artist Betye Saar.  World Premiere.

Works selected across the Indie Episodic, Shorts and Special Events sections of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival were announced on December 10, 2019, underlining Sundance Institute's commitment to showcasing boldindependent storytelling regardless of form, format or length.

Amoako Boafo, a 35-year-old artist from Ghana backed by powerful collectors Don and Mera Rubell, steps into the art fair’s fray.

About a decade ago, Amoako Boafo was working as a pallbearer in his home city of Accra in Ghana, selling portraits for $100 apiece in shows mounted in hotel lobbies. Now, the 35-year-old is being positioned to break out at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair.

In a special event hosted by Creative Minds Talks, Kehinde Wiley will be joined by producer, philanthropist, and close friend Kasseem "Swizz Beatz" Dean for a conversation about art, philanthropy, and empowerment.

Betye Saar will be awarded the twenty-sixth Wolfgang Hahn Prize from the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst on April 21, 2020. This recognition of the artist, who was born in Los Angeles in 1926 and is still little known in Germany, is highly timely, the jury consisting of Yilmaz Dziewior, director of the Museum Ludwig; Christophe Cherix, Robert Lehman Foundation chief curator of drawings and prints at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York; and the board members of the association decided. For more than fifty years, Betye Saar has created assemblages from a wide variety of found objects, which she combines with drawing, prints, painting, and photography.

After nearly a decade of focused work in printmaking, artist Betye Saar created her autobiographical assemblage Black Girl’s Window in 1969. This exhibition explores the relation between her experimental print practice and the new artistic language debuted in that famous work, tracing themes of family, history, and mysticism, which have been at the core of Saar’s work from its earliest days. Celebrating the recent acquisition of 42 rare, early works on paper, this is the first dedicated examination of Saar’s work as printmaker.

In 1969, Betye Saar made an artwork that would prove pivotal in her career. Taking an old window frame, she filled its 10 sections with a constellation of images. Across the top three panels, she placed colorful printed moons and stars, evoking the night sky. In each of the six squares that follow she set symbolic figures, including an eagle bearing a shield with the word “love,” a map of a human head according to the pseudoscience phrenology, and a pair of skeletons, one white and one black. Below these, in the bottom half of the window, Ms. Saar painted the silhouette of a black girl, her eyes made from lenticular lenses and her hands — marked with astrological signs — pressed against the glass.

Kehinde Wiley’s triumphant Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (2005), a hallmark of Brooklyn Museum's collection, comes face to face with the nineteenth-century painting on which it is based: Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801). The unprecedented pairing of these two magisterial portraits, in the exhibition Jacques-Louis David Meets Kehinde Wiley, also marks the first time David’s original version of Napoleon Crossing the Alps will be on view in New York at Brooklyn Museum, January 24 – May 10, 2020.  Seen together, the works by David and Wiley reveal how race, masculinity, power, and representation layer onto portraiture and shape the writing of history.

Roberts Projects congratulates Jeffrey Gibson who is a recipient of the 2019 MacArthur Fellowship. The fellowship is awarded to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction. Jeffrey Gibson's work melds indigenous North American materials and forms with those of Western contemporary art to create a new hybrid visual vocabulary and prompting a shift in how Native American art is perceived and historicized.

In size, “Betye Saar: Call and Response” is a modest show. Just 18 sculptures and collages, plus a selection of sketches, are tucked into a single small gallery at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Resnick Pavilion.  The focus is on objects made in the last 25 years of a prolific career that was launched six decades ago.

Betye Saar: Call and Response looks at the relationship between preliminary sketches in small sketchbooks, which Saar has made throughout her career, and finished works.

At 93, with major attention finally coming her way, an artist central to the black women’s revolution says she’s waited long enough.

Where Art Might Happen: The Early Years of CalArts focuses on the first ten years of the art school and for the first time brings together the school’s teaching concepts and the artistic practices that developed out of them in a group exhibition.

Black Rock Senegal announces the official selection of artists for the inaugural year of its artist-in-residence program developed by Kehinde Wiley.

Published for the artist's solo exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum (October 19, 2018 - February 10, 2019), this new series of paintings by Brooklyn-based painter Kehinde Wiley (born 1977) re-envisions the museum's holdings as a starting point for succinct observations about representation throughout the history of art.

Roberts Projects congratulates Jeffrey Gibson on his participation in this year's Whitney Biennial.

Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer showcases the artist’s highly acclaimed multi-disciplinary work and chronicles a pivotal moment in the artist’s career when his contemporary artistic practice converged with his Native American heritage.

Roberts Projects congratulates Amoako Boafo on receiving the top honor of the 2019 STRABAG Artaward International.

Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day is a vibrant, celebratory exhibition in which the artist brings together his Choctaw and Cherokee heritage and a range of diverse artistic and cultural influences to explore race, sexuality, religion, and gender.

On Saturday, November 2, 2019, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) will honor artist Betye Saar and filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón.

The award celebrates Gordon Parks’ legacy and honors those who continue Park’s vision for social change through their work in the arts and humanitarianism. 

Betye Saar, who turns 93 in July, remains both an evolving and an emerging artist. She professes to want to work less hard, “to sit and look at the sky, or watch my garden grow, but still I have ideas.” Though her prints, assemblages, and installations have been exhibited steadily since the ’60s, attention to her work has burgeoned in the past decade, among artists of younger generations and curators internationally.

The benefit event recognizes artists who have made significant contributions to the canon of art history.

Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the diverse group of 168 scholars, artists, and writers come from a great variety of backgrounds, fields of study, and accomplishments. 

Roberts Projects is pleased to announce Betye Saar’s participation in Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983 at The Broad, Los Angeles. The exhibition shines light on a broad spectrum of Black artistic practice from 1963 to 1983, one of the most politically, socially, and aesthetically revolutionary periods in American history.

NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein is pleased to present new paintings by Egan Frantz. The exhibition, entitled Paintings, will run from March 17 through May 5, 2019. Egan Frantz’s oeuvre encompasses an extensive variety of media including sculpture, installation, furniture design, and printed matter in addition to the traditional painted canvas or variations on that format. 

A new multi-disciplinary artist-in-residency program in Dakar, Senegal.

Jeffrey Gibson's exhibition at the New Museum explores the material histories and futures of several Indigenous handcraft techniques and aesthetics.

The new series of paintings re-envisions the museum’s holdings of masterpieces as a starting point for succinct observations about representation throughout the history of art.

Roberts Projects is pleased to announce the Getty Research Institute (GRI) has acquired the archive of Betye Saar (American, b. 1926) as part of GRI’s new African American Art History Initiative.

The exhibition features over 50 works of sculpture, painting, installation, and video made between 2014 and 2018, a number of which were made expressly for this exhibition.

The exhibition venerates the 10-year anniversary of the ‘Beautiful Losers’ documentary that made its US premiere on August 8, 2008 at the IFC center in New York.

Daniel Joseph Martinez for receiving the Career Achievement Award honoring brilliance and resilience in conjunction with the Hammer Museum’s biennial, Made in L.A. 2018.

Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer, the first major museum exhibition of the artist’s work, chronicles a pivotal moment in Gibson’s career when his contemporary artistic practice converged with his Native American heritage.

Established in 1991, the award recognizes individual sculptors who have made exemplary contributions to the field.

Roberts Projects is pleased to announce TIME named Kehinde Wiley to the 2018 TIME 100, its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Roberts Projects is pleased to announce the unveiling of Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of President Barack Obama for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

Julie and Bennett Roberts announce, as of January 1, 2018, Roberts & Tilton is now known as Roberts Projects.

Through the lens of the Whitney’s collection, An Incomplete History of Protest looks at how artists from the 1940s to the present have confronted the political and social issues of their day.

Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic features sixty paintings and sculptures from the artist’s prolific career.

The exhibition features U.S. Latino and Latin American artists from the late 1950s to the present who have used the deceptively simple idea of “home” as a powerful lens through which to view the profound socioeconomic and political transformations in the hemisphere. 

Kehinde Wiley received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design on Saturday, June 3rd, 2017. As a descendant of a long line of classical portrait painters, Kehinde Wiley uses the visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful, majestic and sublime in his representations of contemporary urban people of color. (Image: Kehinde Wiley; photo Tony Powell, courtesy of Art in Embassies, US Department of State.)

The Craft & Folk Art Museum (CAFAM) presents Betye Saar: Keepin’ It Clean, a solo presentation of the seminal contemporary artist’s washboard assemblage sculptures, which she began in the late 1990s and continues to make to this day. Born in 1926, Saar is a prolific artist and iconic figure of the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s, whose complex assemblage sculptures address race, memory, and Black consciousness.

Roberts & Tilton is pleased to announce representation of Chinese artist Zhao Zhao, emblematic for his practice addressing overlapping social, political, and aesthetic actions in a world undergoing unprecedented upheaval. Born from the artist’s circumstances of change, Zhao Zhao’s work complicates notions of aestheticizing disruption, based on whether control is a reliable way to mediate social interaction and how meaningful dialogue is introduced around spheres of conflict.

Betye Saar is participating in the exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85. Focusing on the work of black women artists, the exhibition examines the political, social, cultural, and aesthetic priorities of women of color during the emergence of second-wave feminism.

Galerie Rudolfinum Prague presents an exhibition of the German artist Eberhard Havekost, one of the leading representatives of the new generation of painters, who works with digital visual language.

Roberts & Tilton congratulates Daniel Joseph Martinez, recipient of the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation’s 2017 Achievement Award. The highly coveted award recognizes significant contributions by established artists representing the highest standards of creative excellence. A survey of Martinez’s work, including a newly commissioned installation, will open in September 2017 at the CIFO Art Center, Miami.

Desert X focuses attention on and creates conversation about 21st-century environmental, social, and cultural conditions as reflected in the greater Palm Springs area. Consisting of a decommissioned blade from a wind turbine rising out of the Palm Springs Art Museum’s sculpture garden, Jeffrey Gibson’s ALIVE! is 52 feet tall and painted to contain the phrases “I AM ALIVE!”, “YOU ARE ALIVE!”, “THEY ARE ALIVE!” and “WE ARE LIVING!”.

Roberts & Tilton is pleased to announce its representation of Jeffrey Gibson. Drawing influence from popular music, fashion, literature, cultural and critical theory, and his own individual heritage, Gibson’s work recontextualizes the familiar to offer a succinct commentary on cultural hybridity and the assimilation of modernist artistic strategies within contemporary art. The artist’s debut exhibition with Roberts & Tilton will open in Fall 2017.

Roberts & Tilton is pleased to announce Michael Dopp’s organization of “Grey Goo Gardens” an exhibition conceived as Arturo Bandini’s year-long installation at Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX. Arturo Bandini is a collaborative project by Michael Dopp and Isaac Resnikoff. The installation at Ballroom Marfa occupies a small building designed by Joakim Dahlqvist that fluidly transposes interior and exterior space, mirroring the duo’s promiscuous curatorial sensibility.

Fondazione Prada presents “Uneasy Dancer”, a comprehensive survey of work by Betye Saar (Los Angeles, 1926). This exhibition, hosted at the Nord Gallery, opens to the public from 15 September 2016 through 8 January 2017.  Curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose, “Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer” is the first exhibition of the American artist in Italy, and brings together over 80 works including installations, assemblages, collages and sculpture produced between 1966 and 2016. 

Daniel Joseph Martinez has been awarded the Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin. The highly coveted prize is awarded annually to scholars, writers, composers, and artists from America who represent the highest standards of excellence in their fields. Daniel Joseph Martinez’s Berlin Fellowship will focus on an interrogation of war and architecture, contemplating the disappearance of Western civilization in an age of intelligent machines.

Los Angeles-based artist Kori Newkirk discusses his Modified Cadillac (Prototype #2) (1997), on view now in the exhibition Don’t Look Back: The 1990s at MOCA. Mining the symbolism of prototype and stereotype, the work-a silhouette of a late 1970s or early 1980s Cadillac made by applying hair pomade and black pigment directly to the gallery wall-engages with the formal properties of its materials, the politics of identity, and Newkirk’s own personal history.

Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic presents a stunning retrospective of this artist’s prolific career through nearly 60 paintings and sculptures. Wiley’s work raises intriguing questions about race, gender, and the politics of representation by portraying contemporary African American men and women using the conventions of traditional European portraiture.

Just three months shy of her 90th birthday, Los Angeles artist Betye Saar gives a tour of her studio and explains what keeps her inspired.

Daniel Joseph Martinez’s is participating in Wasteland, a group exhibition curated by LAND ’s Director and Curator, Shamim M. Momin. Drawing on T.S. Eliot’s seminal modernist poem, The Waste Land, as the thematic thread between the 14 participating artists, the exhibition presents a reflexive, complex, multi-dimensional conversation about the poetics of despair, the search for true connection, the tenuous state of morality, and the uncertainty, yet necessity, of the future.

Kehinde Wiley is one of the leading American artists to emerge in the last decade and he has been ingeniously reworking the grand portraiture traditions.

There is a touch of alchemy to Betye Saar’s artwork: transforming the simple and mundane into powerful art. Since the 1960s, her compelling, astute and expressive works reflect on African- American identity, spirituality and the interconnectedness between different cultures. This timely retrospective brings together recent work as well as historical pieces created over her six decade long career.

By Mike Bickal of ABC News

A Constellation traces connections among twenty-six artists of African descent: eight who emerged in the mid- to late twentieth century, and who are represented in the exhibition by works from the Studio Museum’s permanent collection, and eighteen younger artists whose works are being shown at the Studio Museum for the first time.

CBS News senior correspondent Rita Braver profiles Kehinde Wiley and visits the artist’s traveling retrospective exhibition “A New Republic.” “If you look at the paintings that I love in art history, these are the paintings where great, powerful men are being celebrated on the big walls of museums throughout the world,” said Kehinde Wiley. “What feels really strange is not to be able to see a reflection of myself in that world.”

Ed Templeton (born 1972) is an iconic figure in the subculture of skateboarding. His paintings, photographs, drawings, and mixed-media installations take their inspiration from the skate community he is a part of and the suburban environment in which he lives.