Special member-only screening of the documentary Betye Saar: Ready to be a Warrior, chronicling the life and work of the 96-year-old artist who, in her own words, is “an ordinary woman who does extraordinary things.” Diving into the decades-long evolution of her artistic language and exploration of race, gender, and social justice, the film pulls together interviews with friends, family, curators, gallerists, and fellow artists, as well as coverage of the 2019 solo exhibition Betye Saar: The Legends of Black Girl’s Window at MoMA.

The screening will be followed by a live conversation between director Angela Robinson Witherspoon, curator Esther Adler, producer Abdul Malik Abbott, artist Anthony Ramos, and actor CCH Pounder.

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.

We are pleased to announce Collins Obijiaku's contribution to the 2022 TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art auction, taking place October 22, 2022

The annual auction is held at The Rachofsky House in Dallas, benefiting two organizations – the Dallas Museum of Art and amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research. Register to bid here. TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art is an annual contemporary art auction held at The Rachofsky House in Dallas, benefiting two organizations—the Dallas Museum of Art and amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research. 

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.

What’s Going On features nearly 200 works by an eclectic mix of around 40 well-known contemporary artists from the collection of the Miami-based art collectors Don and Mera Rubell. The title of the show references Marvin Gaye’s seminal 1971 album of the same name and its anthemic titular single, which decried injustice and other social ills. Gaye was a student at the long-closed Randall Junior High School, which has been converted by the New York-based firm Beyer Blinder Belle Architects to house the new museum.

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. 

A sumptuous survey of over 300 women painters and their work spanning almost five centuries.

Great Women Painters is a groundbreaking book that reveals a richer and more varied telling of the story of painting. Featuring more than 300 artists from around the world, it includes both well-known women painters from history and today's most exciting rising stars.

As part of the Reiffers Art Initiatives mentorship 2022, Kehinde Wiley will mentor the young French-Senegalese artist Alexandre Diop. This collaboration will result in an exhibition at the Acacias Art Center – Reiffers Art Initiatives from October 19 – November 19, 2022.

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.

Published by Chronicle Books and edited by Osei Bonsu, this deluxe hardcover survey, featuring profiles of 50 artists on the rise, is the definitive guide to contemporary African art. Artists include Amoako Boafo, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Bronwyn Katz—from household names to up-and-coming artists, African Art Now features some of the most exciting artists working today.

Spanning over two centuries from around 1800 to the present day, Black American Portraits chronicles the ways in which Black Americans have used portraiture to envision themselves in their own eyes.

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.

Joan Didion: What She Means is an exhibition as portrait, a narration of the life of one artist by another. Organized by critically acclaimed writer and New Yorker contributor Hilton Als, the exhibition features approximately 50 artists ranging from Betye Saar to Vija Celmins, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Maren Hassinger, Silke Otto-Knapp, John Koch, Jorge Pardo, Ed Ruscha, Pat Steir, and many others. The more than 200 works include painting, ephemera, photography, sculpture, video, and footage from a number of the films for which Didion authored screenplays.

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.

Inheritance, an exhibition of photography by Ivan McClellan and paintings by Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, foregrounds Black agricultural workers and teases out the cyclical nature of knowing, learning, and harvesting amongst these communities.

In Our Time: Selections from the Singer Collection includes a selection of paintings and works on paper collected by Iris and Adam Singer over the span of 16 years. Anchored by the work of 27 contemporary artists living and working in cities such as London, Beijing, New York, New Haven, Los Angeles, Accra, and Nairobi, In Our Time speaks to the immediacy of this moment on a global scale, as well as the key ideas, narratives, and concerns that artists have been exploring over the past 25 years.

The W. E. B. Du Bois Medal will be awarded to seven honorees “who embody the values of commitment and resolve that are fundamental to the Black experience in America” for their contributions to African and African American culture, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research announced on Wednesday.

Jeffrey Gibson: THIS BURNING WORLD is a site-specific commission that marks the beginning of the institutional memory of the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco. Rather than featuring studio-made objects, the exhibition will comprise of multiple elements that together reveal the formidable practice of this singular voice: an architectural intervention within the confines of the ICA SF, an immersive projection installation, commissioned partnership and performance activations, and a comprehensive vinyl-wrap on the building’s facade.

Since Otis Quaicoe’s move from Accra, Ghana, to Portland in 2017, his figural paintings have adjusted and shifted in congruence with a heightened cultural awareness of his relocated body. As he looked at Blackness and race in American society from the perspective of an African immigrant, Quaicoe became more interested in depicting the nuances of skin tone that emerge in velvety grayscale. 

Outriders: Legacy of the Black Cowboy is an exercise in unearthing images of the drivers, fiddlers, cowpunchers, cattle rustlers, cooks, singers, bulldoggers, and broncobusters with African heritage.

Zeitz MOCAA presents an exhibition that explores Black self-representation through portraiture and figuration in painting. Titled When We See Us, this timely exhibition celebrates global Black subjectivities and Black consciousness from pan-African and pan-diasporic perspectives.

As an extension of the Kehinde Wiley exhibition, organized at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini during the 59th Venice Biennale, the Musée d’Orsay is displaying three monumental works by the artist within its Nave: a painting, Femme piquée par un serpent (Woman Bitten By A Snake) (Mamadou Gueye), and two recently-completed sculptures (An Archeology of Silence and The Young Tarantine).

Interview by Shaquille Heath

Kehinde Wiley discusses his artistic practice, current projects and upcoming exhibition at Roberts Projects opening this fall.

I specifically remember the moment I saw my first Kehinde Wiley work, strolling about the Seattle Art Museum when they exhibited A New Republic. I remember looking up at Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps, ready for the horseman to jump out of the canvas - and trample me – with both hooves and Timbs.

The images in Ed Templeton: 87 Drawings cover a span of over thirty years, from 1990 to 2021, and deliver a remarkable retrospective of the artist’s intimate drawing style. A special edition of 20 copies available now, features a numbered and signed letterpress print by Ed Templeton measuring 9.5 x 12 inches, presented with a signed copy of the book in a custom clamshell box.

Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art (Tephra ICA) presents What Makes the Earth Shake featuring works by proliferate, figurative painter Dominic Chambers. This is the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work in the Washington, DC metropolitan region.

Frac Lorraine presents a survey of rarely exhibited immersive, site-specific installations from 1980 to 1998 by Betye Saar. Rooted in the artist’s critical focus on Black identity and intersectional feminism as well as the racialized and gendered connotations of found objects, Saar’s installations expand on her celebrated repertoire and offer broadened insight into ritual, spirituality, and cosmologies in relation to the African American experience and the African diaspora.

Promised Land explores different notions of performativity, with special emphasis on how forms of popular culture and ritual converge with the representation of contemporary art. Here performativity is understood as an attempt to formulate various notions of becoming, reinvention, and enhancement of political consciousness as a condition of possibility to overcome the present of any struggle - individual or collective, socio-political or otherwise. Curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose.

By Taliesin Thomas

Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972) is a multimedia artist based in Hudson. Gibson’s dynamic art practice explores a diverse cross-section of influences, including Native American indigenous craft traditions, cultural narratives, symbols of power, history, personal identity, and contemporary social issues relevant to BIPOC and queer communities.

The Portland Art Museum announces an exclusive print designed by Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band Choctaw, b. 1972). The edition of 50 prints, titled They Come From Fire, is a multilayered offset relief print on several layers of handmade Japanese colored gampi paper. The final layer is screen printed gold ink flocked with metallic mica to add shimmer to the text.

Jeffrey Gibson presents THE SPIRITS ARE LAUGHING, an ambitious flag spinning and speaking performance at Anderson Park Meadow at the Aspen Institute. The live piece incorporates a group of fifteen color guard performers in a specialized choreographed presentation. The group will wear unique helmet regalia constructed from tin and aluminum commercially produced cans and perform using flags designed by the artist.

Roberts Projects is pleased to participate in the second edition of Gallery Weekend Los Angeles. The event features over 70 local galleries and art spaces drawn from both Gallery Association Los Angeles' membership as well as non-profit and alternative art spaces that have been invited to participate.

A collective publication in The Drawing Centre series, titled Family1, gathered about sixty artists as well as occasional (or motivated) draftspersons, emulating the now-defunct Permanent Food magazine. Now on view as an exhibition of the same title with 62 artists selected by 4 curators, who each chose 15 artists.

Drawn from the acclaimed Rubell Museum in Miami, Florida, 30 Americans showcases works by some of the most significant artists of the last four decades, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mickalene Thomas, Kara Walker, Hank Willis Thomas, and Kehinde Wiley.

Encompassing a wide range of media, subject matter, sensibilities and approaches, the exhibition will engage with the complexities and contradictions of approaching art through the lens of gender and the idea of “woman artist” as an easily defined or decisive category.

There’s Light: Artworks & Conversations Examining Black Masculinity, Identity and Mental Wellbeing is an expansive new anthology of artworks and interviews showcasing the intricacies of contemporary Black male identities, edited and published by author and conceptual artist Glenn Lutz.

The moon has been bound to life and consciousness since the beginning of humankind. It has served elemental and vital functions such as providing light and measuring time, but it has also influenced the more ethereal and spiritual realms of gods, myths, and magic. This exhibition operates at the crux of a lunar spectrum, between the lure and mystery of the unattainable moon and the eternal quest to conquer the moon in its material form.

Fire Figure Fantasy is ICA Miami’s first major exhibition to showcase its permanent collection, with a focus on recent acquisitions. Since its founding in 2014, ICA Miami has established itself as a singular voice in artistic stewardship and research with a collection that champions leading emerging and established artists. Local and national voices are represented in dialogue with some of the most experimental global practices, further enriched by the dynamic context of Miami. Cultivating substantive dialogue between newly commissioned works and works from the last fifty years, the collection is a living testament to the museum’s mission to advance the exchange of art and ideas.

DAKAR, Senegal, June 27, 2022 — Black Rock Senegal announced today the 2022-2023 participants for the third year of its Artist-in-Residence program. Founded by renowned artist Kehinde Wiley in 2019, Black Rock Senegal seeks to support new artistic creation through collaborative exchange and to incite change in the global discourse about Africa. The third year of the program will run between July 2022 and March 2023 and will welcome sixteen artists from around the world.

Amoako Boafo: Soul of Black Folks is the debut museum solo exhibition for Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo (b. 1984), one of the most influential artistic voices of his generation. Soul of Black Folks presents over thirty works created between 2016–2022, including a site- specific wall painting made specifically for CAMH. The subjects featured in Boafo’s paintings represent the nuance and complexities of Black life globally. Conditions such as COVID-19, the constant resistance against systemic oppression, the active combating of Anti-Black rhetoric, and the commodification of Black bodies in the media are some of the concerns that heighten this exhibition’s urgency and relevance.

Featuring over twenty artists, the special exhibition This Is Not America’s Flag spotlights the myriad ways artists explore the symbol of the flag of the United States of America, underscoring its vast, divergent, and complex meanings.

Titled after Alfredo Jaar’s iconic 1987 work, A Logo for America, This Is Not America’s Flag provides a critical discourse on the symbol’s meaning, the complexity and contradictions of contemporary national identity, and artists as active citizens.

Featuring over twenty artists, the special exhibition This Is Not America’s Flag spotlights the myriad ways artists explore the symbol of the flag of the United States of America, underscoring its vast, divergent, and complex meanings.

Titled after Alfredo Jaar’s iconic 1987 work, A Logo for America, This Is Not America’s Flag provides a critical discourse on the symbol’s meaning, the complexity and contradictions of contemporary national identity, and artists as active citizens.

On the occasion of the Kunsthaus Zürich extension, designed by British architect David Chipperfield, Lenz Geerk’s recently acquired painting is currently on view as part of the Highlights of the Permanent Collection through the end of 2022. Sculptor with Model and Sculpture II (2020) is part of an ongoing series, based on Picasso’s The Vollard Suite (c. 1930s), in which Geerk investigates the relationship between three subjects. While Picasso eroticizes the relationship between the artist, model, and art in the series, casting himself in the role of the sculptor pictured throughout, Geerk deftly reverses the artist/muse dynamic.

Jeffrey Gibson’s The Body Electric features a selection of paintings, sculptures, commissioned community-engaged performances, and video installations, as well as a newly commissioned mural, THE LAND IS SPEAKING ARE YOU LISTENING (2022), activating SITE Santa Fe’s front lobby and main galleries. Viewed together, the body of work presented in this exhibition encourages contemplation of representation, exclusion, and belonging.

As part of SITE Santa Fe’s opening weekend for the exhibition of Jeffrey Gibson: The Body Electric, Gibson will take the stage for a My Life in Art Talk with long-time friend and inspiration, artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is an internationally known as an artist, curator, lecturer, printmaker, professor, and cultural arts worker who uses humor and satire to examine myths, stereotypes, and the paradox of American Indian life.

Given the effects of climate change, the global need for clean water, and the specific issues on the East End of Long Island, the topic of water is timely and important. In the exhibition, the theme of water is depicted as a natural element, a scientific subject, an issue of social justice, a historical factor, an ecological question, an aesthetic tradition, a metaphor, and a simple necessity for the existence of life on Earth.

Inspired by Holbein's The Dead Christ in the Tomb, as well as historical paintings and sculptures of fallen warriors and figures in the resting state, the American artist has created a haunting series of prone black bodies, reconceptualizing classical pictorial forms to create a contemporary take on portraiture. For this new body of work, Wiley sheds light on the brutalities of American and global colonial pasts using the language of the fallen hero.

“Coming of Age”, in loving memory and honour of Virgil Abloh, is unveiled at the Fondation Louis Vuitton from 13th to 27th April 2022. An extension of the original “Coming of Age” exhibition, this new physical embodiment and homage of Virgil’s world combines exhibition spaces, events and digital activations, allowing for participation on a global scale.

SITE Santa Fe is pleased to present The Body Electric, a solo exhibition spanning Jeffrey Gibson’s multi-decade practice. Gibson’s merging of artistic styles, and historical and contemporary cultural references synergizes to create vibrant, multilayered works of art that express the complexities and relationships between injustice, marginalization, and personal identity. The Body Electric features a survey of the artist’s painting, sculpture and installation, as well as two newly commissioned works; the performance To Name An Other and a large scale mural, THE LAND IS SPEAKING ARE YOU LISTENING, activating SITE Santa Fe’s front lobby and main galleries.

This exhibition pairs two monumental paintings created 400 years apart—one by Artemisia Gentileschi, an Italian artist and one of the most successful female painters of the 17th century, and the second by Kehinde Wiley, a Black American contemporary artist celebrated for his recontextualization of Old Master paintings. The subject, Judith and Holofernes, appears repeatedly throughout art history with well-known works by Caravaggio, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Sandro Botticelli, Gustav Klimt, and many others. Taken from the Book of Judith, the tale recounts how a Jewish widow saved the town of Bethulia from the Assyrian army by seducing and then beheading General Holofernes.

The first global survey exhibition dedicated to the use of clothing as a medium of visual art, Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art examines work by thirty-five international contemporary artists, from established names to emerging voices, several of whom will be exhibiting for the first time in the United States. By making or altering clothing for expressive purposes, these artists create garments, sculpture, installation, and performance art that transform dress into a critical tool.

Curated by Christophe Leribault, An Archaeology of Silence includes a collection of new monumental paintings and sculptures, expanding on Kehinde Wiley's body of work DOWN from 2008. Initially inspired by Holbein’s painting The Dead Christ in the Tomb as well as historical paintings and sculptures of fallen warriors and figures in the state of repose, Wiley created an unsettling series of prone Black bodies, re-conceptualizing classical pictorial forms to create a contemporary version of monumental portraiture, resounding with violence, pain, and death, as well as ecstasy.

Betye Saar, Mystic Sky with Self-Portrait,1992 is currently on view as part of Creative Communities at the Harvard Art Museum. The exhibition features prints from the Brandywine Workshop and Archives. The collection spans the history of the workshop, from the early 1970s to today, and includes works by artists who had not yet found representation in the marketplace or museum collections when they arrived at Brandywine—a key constituency of the organization, which seeks to create opportunities for such artists. The exhibition is on view through July 31, 2022 at the Special Exhibitions Gallery, Harvard Art Museums.

The most exciting rising stars in contemporary art – who’s who and what’s next – featuring 107 artists born since 1980, as chosen by a new generation of art experts and leaders. This stunningly illustrated survey brings together more than 100 of the most innovative and interesting contemporary artists working across all media and spanning the globe. These are tomorrow’s art superstars as chosen by the future leaders of the art world: the curators, writers, and academics with their fingers on the pulse of contemporary art and culture.  Published by Phaidon Books.

Elephant features an in depth article on painter Wangari Mathenge by essayist Alejandro Oliva. "For Mathenge, the authenticity of her subjects, the interiors they populate, is more about making a mark in the historical record: this is what it looks like to be a Black Kenyan woman, or a Black Kenyan family, living in a home in Chicago or London or Kenya.”

Amoako Boafo and Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe are featured in a new exhibition wing dedicated to contemporary African artists at the Palm Spring Art Museum. Also on view are artists including Serge Clottey, Adeji Taiwah, and Simphiwe Ndzube, among others.

Jeffrey Gibson, a Member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and Half Cherokee is an interdisciplinary artist based in Hudson, New York. His artworks make reference to various aesthetic and material histories rooted in the Indigenous cultures of the Americas and in modern and contemporary subcultures. His exhibition I AM YOUR RELATIVE is a site-specific project co-commissioned by MOCA and the Toronto Biennial of Art. The work consists of a series of brightly coloured stages that can be moved and reconfigured for spontaneous gatherings and organized performances within the Museum.

ICA Miami welcomes Dr. Zoé Whitley, curator and director of Chisenhale Gallery, London, who will discuss the work of Betye Saar on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition survey “Serious Moonlight.” In conversation with exhibition curator Stephanie Seidel, Whitley will discuss Saar’s installations and the broader context of her work. Whitley most recently exhibited Saar’s works as the co-curator of the award-winning exhibition “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” initiated by Tate Modern in London in 2017, which toured throughout the United States until 2020.

A profile of artist Jeffrey Gibson, whose beadwork, ceramics, sculptures and paintings are inspired by his complex cultural heritage. NYC-ARTS is the portal through which arts enthusiasts everywhere can access the Tri-State Area's cultural best -- via television presentations, online and mobile components, and social media engagement.

A pioneer of second-wave feminist and post­war Black nationalist aesthetics, Betye Saar’s (b. 1926) practice examines African American identity, spirituality, and cross-cultural connectedness. The Trickster (1994), recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art, reflects Saar’s continued introspection, her assertion of the aesthetic and conceptual power of African cultural forms, and the belief that art can be made from anything. This is her first assemblage to enter the National Gallery’s collection where it joins one print and two mixed media works by her.

The iconic artist on infusing her work with the mystical and recreating her mural LA Energy from 1983. Frieze talks to Los Angeles-born artist Betye Saar (b. 1926), presenting with Roberts Projects at Frieze Los Angeles. As one of the artists who ushered in the development of Assemblage art, her practice reflects on African American identity, spirituality and the connectedness between different cultures. Her symbolically rich body of work has evolved over time to demonstrate the environmental, cultural, political, racial, technological, economic, and historical context in which it exists.

Featuring historic images, text and archival materials, this publication accompanies the presentation, Betye Saar: L.A. Energy at Frieze Los Angeles, Roberts Projects Booth A12. In July 1983, Betye Saar was commissioned to create a large-scale public art initiative for the City of Los Angeles. Titled L.A. Energy, the joyful mural incorporated several key motifs of Saar’s practice, including collaged elements and the interplay of varying hues to highlight a decidedly West Coast color palette.

Art:LIVE is a series of original video content that brings to the viewer accessible expert insights into recent developments in contemporary art and culture, produced in partnership with Frieze’s Global Lead Partner Deutsche Bank. This edition will feature renowned Los Angeles-born artist Kehinde Wiley who talks to Art:LIVE about his career – including being commissioned for the presidential portrait of Barack Obama, recently on view at LACMA, new work on view at Huntington Library in Los Angeles – participating as a juror in this year’s Deutsche Bank Frieze Los Angeles Film Award.

The inaugural presentation in the Hammer Museum’s new works on paper gallery highlights acquisitions of prints and drawings from 2012 to the present. Over the last decade, through purchases and many generous gifts, the museum has built a robust collection in this medium. This exhibition shows, for the first time, many contemporary prints and drawings in the collection, ranging from the conceptual to the political, the abstract, the gestural, and the poetic.

Janine Sherman Barrois and Lyndon Barrois Sr. are the kinds of neighbors and friends any art lover would want to have. Last November, the Los Angeles–based couple welcomed guests to their home to celebrate the opening of two LACMA exhibitions: “Black American Portraits” and the L.A. stop of the Obama portraits tour. Donors, notable collectors, curators, museum directors, and the exhibition’s esteemed artists—many of whom are featured in the couple’s collection—were among the invited guests.

Crenshaw is a neighborhood in transition. Construction of a light rail line connecting Crenshaw and LAX airport and the opening of SoFi Stadium in nearby Inglewood have boosted home values and brought in new businesses, while accelerating gentrification and displacement. Destination Crenshaw was incorporated as a non-profit in November 2017 to draw attention to the area’s Black history and culture.

Alleged's inaugural episode features Aaron Rose in conversation with artist, photographer and professional skateboarder Ed Templeton. Aaron Rose is an artist, filmmaker and curator.

Stretching the Body brings together a group of thirteen women artists from different generations and geographical origins, who through the medium of painting reflect on the genre of portraiture and the theme of the human figure. The exhibition title is a play on words in the English language, referencing the classic action of stretching the canvas and the physical exercise of stretching in order to highlight the space of painting as a physical and conceptual perimeter within which to explore new notions of corporeality.

Organized by the U.S. Department of State, the USA Pavilion celebrates the American spirit: the people, the ideas, and the contributions that improve lives around the world to build a brighter tomorrow.

Jeffrey Gibson will participate in What is Left Unspoken, Love. Organized during a time of social and political discord, when cynicism often seems to triumph over hope, this exhibition will examine love as a profound subject of critical commentary from time immemorial yet with a persistently elusive definition. As poet and painter Etel Adnan wrote, love is “not to be described, it is to be lived.”

For just a few short weeks, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is hosting Artists Inspired By Music: Interscope Reimagined, which pairs paintings by Ed Ruscha, Amoako Boafo, Kehinde Wiley, and Anna Weyant with songs or albums from Interscope Records. The exhibition came about as a means to celebrate the music label’s 30th anniversary, and Dr Dre, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar, Nine Inch Nails, and Lady Gaga are among the musicians from which the participating artists drew their inspiration.

A glimpse into the Jessica and Kelvin Beachum Family Collection beholds an artistic world of hope, Black joy, reality, and aspiration. Each composition within the collection offers a unique story. These non-linear narratives on the Black experience, with their own distinct actualities exhibit a reality not often portrayed, yet a collective, lived experience that strives to represent a livelihood untouched.

Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art explores the numerous ways that artists in the United States have made sense of their own experiences of the paranormal and the supernatural, developing a rich visual culture of the intangible.

Curated by Cui Cancan, the exhibition focuses on Zhao Zhao's most important works within past few years, including painting, sculpture, installation, and other objects. This is Zhao Zhao’s first large scale solo exhibition in Shanghai.

This exhibition is focused on Zhao Zhao’s recent works and presents a few dozen of the most important pieces. The exhibition connects his Green, White, and Pink series from different periods, and integrates his Western Trilogy with streetwear projects developed in different cities to tell a new story under the exhibition title “Zhao Zhao”.

The untimely death of Virgil Abloh, a multi-hyphenate who changed fashion as artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear while also leading his own brand, Off-White, was felt in the hearts of many this past November. The newest person to pay homage to Abloh’s rich legacy is the young painter Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, whose portrait of Abloh now appears on the cover of a newly released special issue of Teen Vogue.

The Obama Portraits Tour, organized by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, will travel to five cities across the U.S. from June 2021 through May 2022 and is expected to reach millions of people who might not otherwise have an opportunity to view these remarkable paintings. In addition to the artworks themselves, The Obama Portraits Tour will feature audio-visual elements, educational workshops, and curatorial presentations.

Featuring Wangari Mathenge, Otis Kwame Kye Quiacoe, Betye Saar and Kehinde Wiley.

To complement the presentation of The Obama Portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald on tour from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG), LACMA presents Black American Portraits. Remembering Two Centuries of Black American Art, guest curated by David Driskell at LACMA 45 years ago, this exhibition reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, sitters, and spaces.

Kehinde Wiley will participate in a special collaboration with Interscope Records in celebration of their 30th anniversary. For this project, Interscope commissioned 30 artists to reimagine the covers of iconic albums produced by the record label since its inception. Kehinde created a portrait of Dr. Dre for the re-release of a limited edition run of his album 2001. The resulting painting will be on show at Los Angeles County Museum of Art from January 30 – February 13, 2022 as part of the exhibition “Artists Inspired by Music: Interscope Reimagined.”

The Museum of Contemporary Art and Vans have collaborated on a collection of footwear and apparel that celebrates creativity with California roots. LA-based artist Brenna Youngblood distills an alternative Americana as seen through a dry art historical lens, often integrated found objects and materials into her compositions, imbuing her work with a sensual, tactile quality. The Vans x MOCA Classic Slip-On highlights her unique vision with an allover print inspired by her art.

Podcast hosted by Ben Luke

An in-depth interview on the artist's influences and cultural experiences, from Richard Dyer to John Singer Sargent. Perhaps more than any other contemporary artist, Wiley has situated himself within the history of Western portrait painting. He makes direct reference to the art of the past, quoting from artists like Holbein, Titian, Rubens, Gainsborough and David, but replacing the royal, noble and ecclesiastical figures depicted by the Old Masters with ordinary people he has encountered on the street.

Launched in 2020 the Kehinde Wiley Shop began as a partnership between Kehinde Wiley and Black Rock Senegal to create limited-edition apparel and merchandise featuring a selection of the artist’s personal favorite compositions from his archive that would support Black Rock Senegal, the non-profit artist-in-residence program founded by Wiley in Dakar, Senegal in 2019.

In this exhibition, Kehinde Wiley shifts his focus from one European tradition - Grand Manner portraiture – to another – landscape painting. Through new artworks, including film and painting, Wiley looks at European Romanticism and its focus on epic scenes of oceans and mountains, building relationships with our collection of historical landscapes and seascapes by Turner, Claude, Vernet and Friedrich. Like his work before, this new work will look back at Old Masters as a way to create new connections and raise fresh questions.

Jeffrey Gibson speaks to Anne Ellegood, Director, ICA LA, about key moments in his career and upcoming projects. Using song lyrics or punching bags, Jeffrey Gibson (b.1972, Colorado) recontextualizes the familiar to offer a succinct commentary on cultural hybridity and modernist strategies within contemporary art. Drawing influence from popular culture, critical theory as well as his own individual Cherokee and Choctaw heritage, his sculptures, beaded works and paintings seamlessly coalesce traditional Native American craft with contemporary cultural production. His work is a vibrant call for queer and Indigenous empowerment, envisioning a celebration of strength and joy within these communities.  

Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, a Ghanaian painter, is one of the Rubell Museum’s 2021 Artists-in-Residence. Quaicoe creates empowering lush portraits of his family and friends where color and texture functions as a unique language to represent the character of the subject. During his time at the Rubell Museum, Quaicoe explored the phenomenon of twin births through double portraiture, on view in this exhibition.

As told to Janelle Zara

With a solo show now on at the ICA Miami, the 95-year-old artist reflects on discovering her calling, finding acceptance, and history repeating itself.

‘An early work that stands out in my mind is Record for Hattie [1975], which is about my great-aunt Hattie Parson Keys. When she passed, I inherited her ephemera – notes, letters, dance cards, gloves, handkerchiefs – essentially her life’s mementos. I made the piece so long ago, but I think my process is the same to this day.

For this landmark exhibition, Wiley has invited a selection of contemporary African artists living throughout the world to each produce a self-portrait. Together these portraits will present a new exploration of identity, perception, and self-regard within the global stage through the lens of figuration, exploring notions of perspective, authorship and control within acts of expression that directly address the self. All proceeds benefit Black Rock Senegal, a multidisciplinary artist-in-residence program founded by Kehinde Wiley in Dakar, Senegal. Self-Addressed will open at Jeffrey Deitch gallery in Los Angeles on November 6, 2021.

The Obama Portraits Tour, organized by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, will travel to five cities across the U.S. from June 2021 through May 2022 and is expected to reach millions of people who might not otherwise have an opportunity to view these remarkable paintings. In addition to the artworks themselves, The Obama Portraits Tour will feature audio-visual elements, educational workshops, and curatorial presentations. This special presentation will exchange the conversations surrounding the power of portraiture and its potential to engage communities.

ICA Miami presents a survey of rarely exhibited immersive, site-specific installations from 1980 to 1998 by Betye Saar. Rooted in the artist’s critical focus on Black identity and intersectional feminism as well as the racialized and gendered connotations of found objects, Saar’s installations expand on her celebrated repertoire and offer broadened insight into ritual, spirituality, and cosmologies in relation to the African American experience and the African diaspora. Saar’s intimately scaled works of the 1960s and 1970s–poignant examinations of race and gender through assemblages of readymades and found objects–became icons of Black feminist art.

The City of Los Angeles’s Cultural Affairs Commission has approved plans for the initial stage of Destination Crenshaw, the $100 million public art and environmental revitalization project that aims to turn a 1.3-mile-long stretch of South Los Angeles into a hub for Black arts and culture.  Kehinde Wiley and Brenna Youngblood are two of the artists commissioned for the project.

Curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah
Presented in partnership with Contemporary Arts Museum Houston 

Amoako Boafo: Soul of Black Folks, is the premier museum solo exhibition for Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo. The show is a presentation of over 20 works created between 2018-2021. Soul of Black Folks is a timely exploration into the varying strategies that Boafo employs within his practice to capture the essence of the Black figure.

This exhibition concerns the intersections of four powerful words—INFINITE INDIGENOUS QUEER LOVE. The two outer terms suggest boundless spaces and generative, tender relationships. The two interior terms convey markers of identity that Jeffrey Gibson disassembles and reconstructs through his artistic practice as a queer Choctaw-Cherokee man. Altogether this title offers a bold, declarative framework for this exhibition which debuts a series of collages, an immersive display featuring three hanging fringe sculptures, and recent videos created with collaborators, musicians, and performers. Shown together, these dazzling artistic expressions suggest that identity is pieced together by public life, popular culture, and intimate human bonds.

Destination Crenshaw, the 1.3-mile public art corridor on Crenshaw Boulevard with a lineup of top names including Kehinde Wiley and Alison Saar, had kept its works of art tightly under wraps while awaiting a Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission vote. On Wednesday, the commission greenlighted plans for all seven permanent installations scheduled to debut in the first phase of the project in fall 2022. Fundraising for the $100 million Destination Crenshaw — which now stands at $61.5 million — is getting a boost from DeMar DeRozan, a Chicago Bulls player, who will lead a new private fundraising drive, organizers said.

This attempt at, and resistance of containment, on the part of art and artist could be summed up in Boafo’s predicates: “I paint so I don’t have to explain my work, my life.” His utterance recalls Joan Didion’s varied thoughts on magic: we find enchantment in working and not by analyzing contents or the very act of working. This is a script that Boafo—who opens his second solo at Roberts Projects this September,  SINGULAR DUALITY: ME CAN MAKE WE—is familiar with. His ethos to language seeks to undo the words, the script, almost as if fearful of what the definitive, last word might herald. Some might wager that we find magic—the occult—in the meta-voice of the artist, which is to say whether Boafo summons the voice of his paintings through explication. In my head, I ask: What does this movement of paint mean here, and here, or there?

What we see is political. Taking up space is resistance. Walking through the gallery space hung with pictures, museum-goers act out and internalise a version of history… what happens when this space is infiltrated by those history has sought to exclude? With Black Bodies, White Spaces: Invisibility and Hypervisibility we see the coming together of artists exploring the Black Body in painting and posit how doing so is a form of resistance.

Kehinde Wiley's "A Portrait of a Young Gentleman", is now on view through January 3, 2022, at The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.  The large-scale portrait was inspired by Thomas Gainsborough’s "The Blue Boy" (ca. 1770). Commissioned through Roberts Projects, the new portrait celebrates the 100th anniversary of the purchase of the Gainsborough painting by Henry and Arabella Huntington, the founders of the institution.

Black Rock Senegal, Kehinde Wiley and Roberts Projects are pleased to announce Dimietrus Study (2021), the third annual limited edition print to support the Black Rock Senegal artist-in-residence program. All net proceeds from the signed edition of 30 prints will benefit Black Rock as a charitable contribution.

Kehinde Wiley’s Dimietrus Study (2021) features a portrait of a young, Black New Yorker amidst a wreath of pink and blue flora that Wiley originally created in 2008. Returning to the composition, Wiley explains, “This portrait continues a theme that exists within the selection of prints I have made for Black Rock Senegal.

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. In addition, the show will include approximately a dozen small travel sketchbooks with more finished drawings—relating to leitmotifs seen throughout Saar’s oeuvre—that she has made over a lifetime of journeys worldwide.

When the artist Betye Saar learned the Aunt Jemima brand was removing the mammy-like character that had been a fixture on its pancake mixes since 1889, she uttered two words: “Oh, finally.” Those familiar with Saar’s most famous work, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, might have expected a more dramatic reaction. After all, this was a piece of art so revolutionary that the activist and scholar Angela Davis credited it with launching the Black women’s movement. 

Black Rock Senegal announces applications are open for the 2022 cycle of multidisciplinary artist-in-residency program located in Dakar, Senegal. After two successful years welcoming over thirty artists from around the world to Kehinde Wiley's coastal compound, we Black Rock Senegal is thrilled to once again open doors to a new cohort of artists for the 2022 artist-in-residency cycle.

Jeffrey Gibson, a Choctaw-Cherokee artist, is best known for his abstract painting, sculpture and prints which carry an autobiographical cultural inflection. Gibson’s influences range from 19th-century beadwork and Native American iconography, to contemporary street art. This exhibition, To Feel Myself Beloved on the Earth takes its title from “Late Fragment”, the final poem in the poet and short story writer Raymond Carver’s last published work, “A New Path to the Waterfall.”

Roberts Projects is thrilled to announce The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens has commissioned Kehinde Wiley to create a new work inspired by Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy (ca. 1770). Wiley’s A Portrait of a Young Gentleman (also the original title of the Gainsborough painting) will be a large-scale portrait in the Grand Manner style that will be added to The Huntington’s permanent collection. The new painting will be on view from Oct. 2, 2021, through Jan. 3, 2022, in The Huntington’s Thornton Portrait Gallery, opposite the institution’s iconic and recently restored Blue Boy. The acquisition of the Wiley portrait celebrates the 100th anniversary of the purchase of the Gainsborough painting by Henry and Arabella Huntington, the founders of the institution.

Jeffrey Gibson will be honored at the Socrates 35th Anniversary Benefit on September 23, 2021. Gibson is an interdisciplinary Choctaw-Cherokee artist and recipient of a 2019 MacArthur “Genius” grant; his enormous technicolor ziggurat Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Our House was on view as part of the Socrates Sculpture Park’s MONUMENTS NOW exhibition in 2020. The honorees embody the Park’s commitment to artists and the power of their art to shape our culture and lives.

Roberts Projects is pleased to announce Kehinde Wiley will be participating in Destination Crenshaw with a new monumental sculpture commission. Wiley’s bronze equestrian monument, featuring a young Senegalese woman as the rider, continues his series “Rumors of War,” an ongoing response to Confederate statues still standing in the U.S. despite the national reckoning on race and inequality. 

Roberts Projects is pleased to participate as a founding member of the newly formed Gallery Climate Coalition in Los Angeles. As a member of GCC, the gallery will aim to reduce our carbon footprint by 50% over the next ten years, in line with the Paris Agreement. The goal of the GCC is to facilitate a greener and more sustainable art world.

The award-winning international artist Amoako Boafo has been selected to create the inaugural Suborbital Triptych, painted on exterior panels of a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket. The Uplift Art Program invites today’s leading artists to push the limits of the next frontier, sharing their vision with collectors, space enthusiasts and culture-lovers throughout the galaxy. Its seminal project, the Suborbital Triptych series, is emblematic of Uplift’s mission to further scientific discoveries and creative experimentation by granting artists access to the most advanced space technologies.

Roberts Projects is pleased to participate in the inaugural Gallery Weekend Los Angeles with Daniel Crews-Chubb Solitary Us: Couples Paintings. Organized by Gallery Association Los Angeles (GALA), the event features over 70 local galleries and art spaces drawn from both GA(LA)’s membership as well as non-profit art spaces, alternative art spaces, and museums. The first event of an ongoing initiative, this Gallery Weekend is focused on making art accessible for both residents and visitors, and underscores the importance of viewing art in person once again.

By Makeda Easter for Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art will honor contemporary artists Amy Sherald and Kehinde Wiley and filmmaker Steven Spielberg at its 2021 Art + Film Gala, the museum is expected to announce Wednesday. As LACMA’s premier fundraiser, the 10th annual event on Nov. 6 will bring together art and fashion figures, civic leaders and celebrities. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, last year’s in-person gala was canceled and the museum did not honor any new artists or filmmakers during an intimate virtual gathering. The 2019 gala honoring assemblage artist Betye Saar and “Roma” writer-director Alfonso Cuarón raised more than $4.6 million for the museum.

UN Women, the agency of the United Nations dedicated to gender equality and women’s empowerment, will host the first all-Black, all-women global selling exhibition and auction titled “A Force for Change”, with proceeds benefiting Black women across the world and the participating artists. The exhibition includes 26 works by prominent and emerging female artists of African descent to recognize and elevate awareness of the transformative power of Black women’s art in social justice movements, and to support UN Women’s nascent global Black Women’s Programme. Works by artists Cinthia Sifa Mulanga, Tschabalala Self, Sungi Mlengeya, Wangari Mathenge, Zanele Muholi, and Selly Rabe Kane are included, among many others. 

Since 2018, “Atlas” brings together works from Collezione Prada in Torre's six floors, in the form of an exhibition project. The fourth floor is reopening to the public with an unprecedented dialogue between the works by Goshka Macuga and an installation by Betye Saar. Using various juxtapositions and combinations between different artists, "Atlas" represents a possible mapping on the ideas and visions that guided the shaping of the collection and the collaborations with artists that contributed to the activities of Fondazione Prada.

A monumental sculpture by renowned artist Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw-Cherokee), the title, Because Once You Enter My House, It Becomes Our House, comes from a song Gibson associates with nightclubs that have provided haven and community especially for LGBTQ+ people and BIPOC. The ziggurat form references the earthen architecture of the ancient Mississippian city of Cahokia, which flourished in the seventh through fourteenth centuries, well before European contact.

On Sunday, May 30th, 9:30am PST (12:30pm EST) Betye Saar will be awarded the twenty-sixth Wolfgang Hahn Prize by the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig.  The Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig acquired the assemblage The Divine Face from 1971 together with the Museum Ludwig for the museum’s collection as part of the prize awarded to Betye Saar. The work will be presented in the museum’s collection from June 1 – September 12, 2021 along with two etchings recently acquired through the “Perlensucher am Museum Ludwig” initiative as well as a collage and an artist’s book.

Created on the occasion of the 2020 Wolfgang Hahn Prize, Betye Saar's "The Mystic Eyes (Page from 1970 Betye Saar Sketchbook)" 2020 explores the all-seeing eye, a motif that makes it seem as if a benevolent deity is looking down upon us. The ancient symbol is said to lend power and offer protection from harm.

Kehinde Wiley is pleased to announce the newest product to benefit Black Rock Senegal. The Conspicuous Fraud Series #1 (Eminence) Notebook draws inspiration from an artwork by Kehinde Wiley of the same name, made by the artist while he was in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001. This early work is part of a larger series which emphasizes and explores the beauty of natural black hair.

Roberts Projects congratulates Betye Saar who will be inducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters on Wednesday, May 19th at 4pm PT (7pm ET.) The American Academy of Arts and Letters is an honor society of the country’s 300 leading architects, artists, composers, and writers. The election is considered the highest form of recognition of artistic merit in the United States.

Betye Saar, Her Daughters, and the House That Never Stopped Making Art. The pioneering artist and her three daughters on family, creativity, and why being able to see beauty, even in difficult times, is the true mother of invention.

African-born, Chicago-based artist Wangari Mathenge presents a collection of new drawings. Mathenge paints small groups of individuals in conversational sittings viewed from interesting perspectives, which provides insight into both the subject and circumstance. This intimate series of works on paper sees her father at times in familial settings – reading, draped across chairs or posing with a child.

Roberts Projects is pleased to present The Edge of Blue featuring contributions from Amoako Boafo, Lenz Geerk, James Hayward, Ruth Ige, Betye Saar, and Beatrice Wood. Illustrating the poetic depths of the color blue, the works on view use restricted palettes to explore emotional, psychological themes. They point us to reflect on how the same stories can be told in different ways, and that new stories need to be told in as many ways as possible.

By Samuel Rutter and Caitlin Youngquist for The New York Times T Magazine

Though the pandemic’s grip is starting to loosen, and relief finally feels within reach, this past year has underscored our country’s long history of violence, new examples of which serve as reminders of older ones. Among them are the myriad atrocities perpetuated against Indigenous people in what we now call America (and beyond), individuals whose experiences are to this day too often distorted or left untold. 

In the 1970s, Betye Saar (born 1926) emerged as part of the Black Arts Movement and remains best known for her collage and assemblage works that challenge racial stereotypes. Internationally acclaimed, she has received multiple lifetime achievement awards in recent years. Betye Saar’s success continues through her own work and that of her daughters, Lezley Saar (born 1953) and Alison Saar (born 1956), who are also accomplished artists. While they too engage with themes of race, gender, spirituality, and identity, often through narrative, each contributes a unique voice.

By Kristin Farr for Juxtapoz 

Amoako Boafo paints flesh with his fingers. “This lack of instrumental barrier sets me free and diffuses a barrier between myself and the subject. I am able to connect with the subject in a more intimate way, which allows me to create an expressive skin tone. I don’t think this type of stroke can be achieved by a brush,” the artist explains. He’s described his portraits as self reflection focused on identity, and challenging preconceived notions. 

 

Kehinde Wiley’s Leviathan Zodiac (2011) from The World Stage: Israel series, was recently acquired by Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida for their permanent collection. An important addition to the museum’s holdings, the painting is now on display in the institution’s newly renovated Great Hall. The World Stage: Israel was presented at Roberts & Tilton (2011) and traveled to the Jewish Museum, New York, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco and Boise Art Museum.

By Megan O'Grady for The New York Times T Magazine

“The Ascendants XI (Homage to Ecclesiastes Three, One Through Eight)” (2021), made exclusively for T by the Chicago-based artist Wangari Mathenge, who said: “As part of the diaspora, I’m interested in what can ease the sense of displacement. The figures here might long to step out into a different kind of world, but for now they sit in comfortable silence in a shared space they’ve created for themselves. Who are the people you feel safe with? Maybe you take them for granted, but they are actually really important.”

Los Angeles–based artist Betye Saar (b. 1926) emerged in the 1960s as a major voice in American art. Part of a generation of artists, many of them African American, who embraced the medium of assemblage, she is known best for incisive collages and sculptures that confront and reclaim racist depictions.

By Emily Steer for Elephant

Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe’s Self-Portrait (2019) features on the cover of Elephant’s brand-new Spring/Summer 2021 issue. It is a powerful image, depicting the Ghanaian artist locked in an intense gaze with the viewer, against a brilliant yellow background. This potent and very direct eye contact threads through many of Quaicoe’s paintings, of both himself and others.

Roberts Projects is thrilled to announce representation of New Haven-based artist Dominic Chambers. Drawing loosely upon a tradition of contemporary mystical realism, Dominic Chambers creates paintings that immediately reference literary narratives cited in books, various mythologies and Black history, both in its oral tradition and written account.

By Tom Seymour for Artnet

The artist reflects on life in America and Ghana's failure to recognize its homegrown scene. Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe never thought he’d leave Accra. But then life happened. He fell in love, eloped, and moved from his native Ghana to Portland, Oregon, in 2017.

Roberts Projects is delighted to participate in Art Basel OVR: Pioneers. A tightly curated presentation surveying two decades of Betye Saar’s iconic washboard assemblages, Dark Times looks to outline the historic relationships between women’s roles, the divisions of labor, and social class based on race.

By Enuma Okoro for Financial Times

This past week we hit 11C in New York. It’s not exactly spring yet, but after what feels like an incredibly long winter, the slight rise in temperature was enough to get me scouring the internet for exhibitions welcoming masked visitors. I’ve been so cautious and homebound the past few months, and I’ve missed venturing out to see art in real life, up close and personal.

By Jay Cheshes for Wall Street Journal Magazine

As lockdowns began spreading around the world last winter, artist Kehinde Wiley, 43, was working in Norway, shooting footage in the fjords for an upcoming show exploring the European landscape and seascape traditions—an “epic painting and film project,” he calls it—opening late this year at the National Gallery in London. “Gorgeous,” he says, of the Nordic locale, “but then, of course, the reality of the pandemic started to make itself clear.”

By Cady Lang for Time Magazine

Amoako Boafo is a rising art-world superstar. The 36-year-old Ghanaian artist’s work, characterized by bright colors and textured finger painting, highlights Black identity and the African diaspora with complexity and warmth: in the 2020 painting The Pink Background, for example, two men lean into each other as if posing for a photo, both clad in suits and standing before a rose-colored backdrop.

Inspired by the late David Driskell’s landmark 1976 exhibition, “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” the documentary "Black Art: In the Absence of Light" offers an illuminating introduction to the work of some of the foremost Black visual artists working today.  Directed by Sam Pollard (Atlanta's Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children) the film shines a light on the extraordinary impact of Driskell’s exhibit on generations of Black artists who have staked a claim on their rightful place within the 21st-Century art world.

Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe: Black Cowboy takes as its subject the lesser-known history of Black cowboys of the American Frontier as seen through lens of contemporary portraiture. Quaicoe, a Ghanian painter living in Portland, Oregon, utilizes color to accentuate his subjects’ themes of empowerment while embracing ideas of personal narrative. His portraits of Black cowboys modernize the genre without continuing a popular yet inaccurate and exclusionary account of US history.

Black Rock Senegal today announced the 2021 participants for the second year of its Artist-in-Residence program. Founded by renowned artist Kehinde Wiley in 2019, Black Rock Senegal seeks to support new artistic creation through collaborative exchange and to incite change in the global discourse about Africa. The second year of the program will run between February and December 2021.

By Dionne Searcey for The New York Times

A Congolese painter whose art reflects how globalization and consumerism have transformed African society. A Nigerian-American filmmaker whose work focuses on cultures and experiences of Africans and the diaspora. A visual activist from Texas who forces her viewers to confront issues that are deemed difficult to tackle. These are among the 16 artists selected for the 2021 residency at Black Rock Senegal, the seaside studio in the West African capital city of Dakar belonging to Kehinde Wiley, the painter best known for his portrait of former President Barack Obama.

Roberts Projects is thrilled to announce representation of Los Angeles-based artist Brenna Youngblood. In assemblage, multimedia collage, painting, sculpture and installation, Brenna Youngblood takes as her subject the distilling and revising of an alternative Americana as seen through a dry art historical lens. Her work incorporates both autobiographical and fictional narratives to explore the iconography of the Black experience, the methods, politics and ethics of representation, and the legacy of abstraction.

Interview by Shaquille Heath for Juxtapoz

Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe wants you to feel seen. And I mean that sincerely. It is at the heart of what he does. In every brushstroke, every flower, every mouth covered and eyeball exposed. He is methodical. A powerful narrator, he documents Black life by painting subject’s likeness, enriched with flourishes from his personal memory bank. It is almost historical fiction, yet his instincts are spot on. 

On December 30, 2020, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo announced the opening of the new Moynihan Train Hall, along with Kehinde Wiley's site-specific art installation Go, 2020. Commanding the expansive ceiling of the 33rd Street Midblock Entrance Hall, Wiley’s hand-painted glass triptych celebrates the vibrancy and virtuosity of bodies in motion at monumental scale.

Kehinde Wiley's second annual charitable print to support Black Rock Senegal is now available.  Named for the volcanic rocks that blanket its shoreline, Black Rock is a residency program created by renowned artist Kehinde Wiley which seeks to incite change in the global discourse around West Africa in the context of creative evolution.

By Allyssia Alleyne for Artsy

At the start of 2020, it was impossible to predict that this year would transform the art world as we knew it. By March, the COVID-19 pandemic began to throw entire years of museum, gallery, and biennial exhibitions into the balance, and it may have forever rocked the international art fair circuit. In June, the Black Lives Matter movement swept through the art world and ushered in a long overdue reckoning with the inequity and systemic racism of the art industry. Amoako Boafo was one of the artists at the forefront of these waves of change.

By Shannon Lee for Artsy

At the start of 2020, it was impossible to predict that this year would transform the art world as we knew it. By March, the COVID-19 pandemic began to throw entire years of museum, gallery, and biennial exhibitions into the balance, and it may have forever rocked the international art fair circuit. In June, the Black Lives Matter movement swept through the art world and ushered in a long overdue reckoning with the inequity and systemic racism of the art industry. Betye Saar was one of the artists at the forefront of these waves of change.

The Frost Art Museum FIU is hosting their first virtual 17th annual Breakfast in the Park on Sunday, December 6, 2020. This much-anticipated annual event will feature a lecture by 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Grant winner Jeffrey Gibson

By Patricia Spears Jones for The New Yorker

My runes are in ruins, little laughter here for my sarcasm
What to do, this chart confuses, conflates moon, which phase
And honey, local or from some exotic shore and what of money
My savings stuffed beneath deflating mattress. Each cold

Palm Springs Art Museum is pleased to announce its signature fundraising gala, Art Party, will be held virtually in your home on Friday, December 4. This online event will feature the world premiere of a new performance art piece by internationally acclaimed artist Jeffrey Gibson, as well as a behind-the-scenes studio tour showcasing highlights of his creative process. The evening will be capped off with a celebrity MC and performances by guest entertainers.

Join novelist, poet, and MacArthur Fellowship recipient Ishmael Reed for a conversation on the empowering role of art as a vehicle for reclaiming elements of African spirituality and culture. Reed has explored this theme in his writing, including in his collaboration with Betye Saar on A Secretary to the Spirits in the 1970s. He is the author of more than thirty titles including the acclaimed novel Mumbo Jumbo, as well as non-fiction, plays, and poetry. Six collages from the Morgan collection that Betye Saar made in response to Reed’s poems are currently on view in the exhibition, Betye Saar: Call and Response.  
 

By Carrie Dedon

Brenna Youngblood’s abstract paintings are invariably more layered—literally and figuratively—than first meets the eye. Originally trained as a photographer, Youngblood works with an extensive personal archive of photographs and objects that she collages onto the surfaces of her densely painted canvases. In a 2013 interview she discussed the importance of this textured surface, and the integration of everyday objects into it.

By Katrice Dustin for The Travel Almanac

Betye Saar’s 1972 work The Liberation of Aunt Jemima was once credited by activist Angela Davis with marking the beginning of the Black Women’s Movement. The piece—arguably Saar’s most widely known—depicts the mammy caricature of Aunt Jemima reimagined as a freedom fighter: a broom in one hand, a rifle in the other. Fast forward almost fifty years later to the second American Civil Rights Movement, and that same Jim Crow era symbol of systemic racism has finally been set free from the legacy of slavery, with Quaker agreeing in Spring 2020 to discontinue the infamous Aunt Jemima branding on their maple syrup bottles.

Kehinde Wiley is participating in 30 Americans, an exhibition showcasing many of the most important contemporary artists from across the United States. Created from the 1970s to present, the artworks, including paintings, installations, sculptures, and videos, are aesthetically and thematically diverse. This provocative exhibition explores how artists shed light on issues of racial, sexual, and historical identity.

Join Boston University Alumni Association and the College of Fine Arts for a discussion about artist-run spaces. We will hear from six artists from around the world. They will discuss the history of alternative exhibition spaces, their own practice, and how their experimental and creative approaches in exhibiting artworks redefine the landscape of contemporary art culture.

Jeffrey Gibson presents Nothing is Eternal, a newly commissioned video with musical composition commissioned by the Wattis Institute. Conceived during this pandemic era, the immersive video work depicts the American flag in unsettling stillness, as a marker of territory, and projected onto bodies, while set to a heartrending soundtrack. At once melancholic and beautiful, Gibson renders the iconic image of the flag as both elastic and unyielding. The slow transformation through time, color, and form reflects both a distillation of our social collapse and the reinvention of self and community, referencing the movement and change that is so desired for this nation.

By CCH Pounder for Interview Magazine

In the annals of art history, there is a tendency to see the “found object” as a raw material best suited for the cynical, winking gestures of Dada or Pop Art. But at the age of 94, Betye Saar has spent more than a half-century creating radical, poetic, socially textured assemblages by turning mere stuff into profound masterpieces: an ironing board, advertising signs, glass bottles, throwaway items often discovered at flea markets and thrift stores, and collected in her Southern California studio.

By Jessica Lynne for Town & Country

Few artists have had careers as storied as Betye Saar’s. Her recently opened exhibition, Betye Saar: Call and Response, on view through January 31 at the Morgan Library and Museum, makes that abundantly clear. Saar’s work consistently challenges flattened representations of Blackness, instead articulating an artistic code informed by Saar’s maternal lineage, spiritual symbolisms, and cultural motifs that span the African diaspora.

Zhao Zhao’s take on the Louis Vuitton Capucines is a puzzle of over three hundred laser-cut parts elegantly sewn together into a sophisticated composition. Treading the balance between tradition and innovation, numerous exclusive techniques, such as silkscreen printing, high-frequency embossing and 3D embroidery, have been utilized to transform over hundreds of pieces of leather comprised of five different types. Zhao Zhao's collaboration with Louis Vuitton draws on the fashion house’s rich history of collaborating with artists, including high profile projects by Takeshi Murakami, Richard Prince, Stephen Sprouse, and Yayoi Kusama.

Kehinde Wiley is participating in Memling Now: Hans Memling in Contemporary Art, with paintings inspired by Hans Memling, one of the most significant painters of the Burgundian Bruges genre. The exhibition brings together five contemporary artists whose work has and continues to find inspiration in Memling’s enduring masterpieces, including his world-renowned Ursula Shrine. Works both old and new by the invited artists are being integrated into the existing display of Memling works at the Sint-Janshospitaal, a centuries’ old hospital that has been recently completely restored and serves as a museum for the works of Hans Memling.

By Taylor Dafoe for Artnet

More than 150 prominent American photographers and artists have teamed up for a five-day print sale benefiting groups fighting voter suppression in five swing states. Dawoud Bey, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, Catherine Opie, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, Stephen Shore, and Alec Soth are among those participating in the flash fundraiser, called States of Change, which is live now through October 18.

Betye Saar: Call and Response looks at the relationship between Betye Saar’s finished works and the preliminary annotated sketches she has made in small notebooks throughout her career. In addition, the show will include approximately a dozen of Saar’s travel sketchbooks with more finished drawings and collages—often relating to leitmotifs seen across her oeuvre—which she has made over a lifetime of journeys worldwide. Selections will cover the span of her career, from the late 1960s up through a sculptural installation made specifically for this exhibition.

By Valentina Di Liscia for Hyperallergic

How do you reach hundreds of millions of potential voters three weeks before an election? Public art may be one way. As part of “Art for Action,” works by artists including Jeffrey Gibson, Jenny Holzer, Tomashi Jackson, and Carrie Mae Weems are on display on 350 digital screens in 16 cities across the US through Election Day, with seven additional artists showing on screens in Columbus and Cleveland, Ohio.

Amref Health Africa ArtBall is a premier contemporary African, Pan-African, and Black art auction to benefit Amref Health Africa’s COVID-19 mitigation work on the ground in Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Tanzania, South Sudan, Senegal, Zambia, Malawi, and South Africa. Pillars of this work consist of training health workers, providing access to clean water and proper sanitation, testing and laboratory strengthening, and mitigating secondary impacts. Amref Health Africa is the largest African-based NGO in the world with over 100 health-centered programs across 35 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, reaching over nine million people per year.

Critical Resistance seeks to build an international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe. We believe that basic necessities such as food, shelter, and freedom are what really make our communities secure. As such, our work is part of global struggles against inequality and powerlessness. The success of the movement requires that it reflect communities most affected by the PIC. Because we seek to abolish the PIC, we cannot support any work that extends its life or scope.

By Terence Trouillot for Artsy

On a hot summer day this year, I was relieved to speak to the Ghanaian artist Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe over the phone and not through a screen. Sure, it would have been nice to see him face-to-face, but there was something quite familiar and soothing to just hear (and focus on) the timbre and natural joy in his voice—his friendly disposition signaled by the cadence in his speech. I asked him how he was doing amid the protests and forest fires in Portland, Oregon, where he lives and works. He told me solemnly, “I come to the studio to shut the world out.”

In 2017, Wiley made his first ever film installation. Narrenschiff (German for Ship of Fools) is a three-channel digital projection with direct reference to the 15th-century book of the same title by the German theologian, Sebastian Brant. The book satirised politicians, clerics and other well-known or influential people and was a huge success of the time, narrating the story of a crew of fools lost at sea.

Dominic Chambers creates large scale paintings and drawings that reference literary narratives cited in books, various mythologies, and African-American history. Specifically, working through color field paintings, his current work is invested in exploring moments of contemplation and meditation through reading and leisure.

New York Times T Magazine

In each installment of The Artists, T highlights a recent or little-shown work by a Black artist, along with a few words from that artist putting the work into context. This week, we’re looking at a new piece by Betye Saar, known for her legendary work in assemblage, and whose solo show “Call and Response” opens Sept. 12 at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. Betye Saar’s new work is a collection of found objects, including a sarcophagus from Egypt and wood pieces from a local craft store.

Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City
Wednesday, September 16, 2020, 6:30 – 8pm EST

Artist Jeffrey Gibson has curated a series of performances by Indigenous artists to activate his project, ‘Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Our House‘ for the ‘MONUMENTS NOW‘ exhibition. After an inaugural performance by acclaimed violinist Laura Ortman on July 24, the series continues with a new original work by dancer Emily Johnson live-streamed to the Park’s Facebook & Zoom accounts.

Edited by Antwaun Sargent, the publication accompanies the traveling exhibition, surveys the work of a new generation of Black artists, and features the voices of a diverse group of curators who are on the cutting edge of contemporary art. 

By Andrianna Campbell-LaFleur for Wall Street Journal

Ghanaian painter Amoako Boafo, who lives in Vienna and studies at the Academy of Fine Arts there, was virtually unknown in the United States until the painter Kehinde Wiley contacted him in 2018 via Instagram. Wiley sent a short note and a line of encouragement and eventually an introduction to his Los Angeles dealers, Julie and Bennett Roberts of Roberts Projects. Boafo soon had a solo show at the gallery, and another is scheduled for next year.

By Dionne Searcey for The New York Times

When Covid-19 started spreading across the globe in late winter and some nations began sealing their borders, the American artist Kehinde Wiley was abroad and quickly had to decide where he wanted to ride out the coming viral storm. He chose Dakar, Senegal, site of his spacious, magnificently windswept Black Rock studio complex on the sea.

Mojo Rising features Betye Saar’s ongoing mojo focus, and local artists who are inspired by these ideas to create cultural narratives and engaging objects that challenge normalizing tropes, and reveal practices influenced by Saar’s ceaseless commitment to making, sharing, teaching and encouraging artists in Los Angeles and beyond.

Online Auction August 5 - 29, 2020

Newport Art Museum will present a virtual Benefit Auction, supporting art, artists, and the Museum, from August 5 – 29. The Auction will feature the work of 70 established artists who have donated their exceptional artworks, including paintings, prints, and photographs.

Roberts Projects is thrilled to announce its selection as a member of the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA), a nonprofit organization of the nation’s leading galleries in the fine arts. ADAA seeks to promote the highest standards of connoisseurship, scholarship and ethical practice within the profession since its inauguration in 1962. Members have extensive expertise across primary and secondary markets and established reputations for upholding the best practices in the field.
 

Roberts Projects is pleased to participate in Gallery Platform LA with Jeffrey Gibson: Every Eye Open. The presentation brings together a selection of ceramics in the style of early Mississippian culture ceramic “head pots,” paying due to the complexities of American history by accessing a less prominent ceramics tradition.

Proceeds from Jeffrey Gibson's, Time Warp, will provide critical funding to Headlands in support of the development of new work and ideas through programs for artists and the public that build understanding and appreciation for the role of art in society. Proceeds will also benefit NDN Collective, an Indigenous-led organization dedicated to building Indigenous power and Black Lives Matter, a global organization whose mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.

By Kate Caruso for Artillery

When I talk with Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, his smiling face lights up the video conference window as he speaks of joy.  He hopes to bring joy to the subjects of his portraits, and to those that view them.  Picking up the range of tonality in Blackness, his portraits demand attention with a quiet yet confrontational gaze.  He talks a lot about empowerment which is registered in the stately and real postures of his sitters, who apperar before us like subjects in court portraiture.

As part of Sotheby's 500 Years of Art: Summer Talks series, Kehinde Wiley and the Duke of Devonshire explore the ways in which contemporary artists are inspired and influenced by the great art of the past, referencing it to explore ideas about identity, status and culture.

Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City
On view through March 2021

Jeffrey Gibson’s commission for the ‘MONUMENTS NOW‘ exhibition, Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Our House, serves as an homage to ingenuity of Indigenous North American peoples and cultures, to pre-Columbian Mississippian architecture, and to queer camp aesthetics. Gibson has designed the multi-tiered structure to reference the earthen architecture of the ancient metropolis of Cahokia, the largest city of the North American Indigenous Mississippian people at its height in the thirteenth century.

Dior men’s Artistic Director Kim Jones collaborates with the Ghana-born, Vienna-trained artist Amoako Boafo through an intimate, all-encompassing and honest cultural conversation that began in 2019. Their meeting at the Rubell Museum in Miami was artistic love at first sight; Kim Jones and Amoako Boafo have a true mutual admiration for each other’s work.

Drawing inspiration from the Old Masters, from Titian and Gainsborough to Van Dyck and Ingres, Kehinde Wiley: Peintre de L'Épopée presents twenty works centered around a uniquely political and aesthetic perspective, making visible history’s invisible figures, allowing the viewer to engage with the notions of perception as it pertains to power and place.
 

Renowned artist Betye Saar defies description and categorization in her mixed media practice, which deals with her travels and personal history, politics, spirituality, and race. Saar is well known for her pioneering collage and assemblage-work in the late 1960s and 70s. In this visit, the groundbreaking artist talks about her sketchbooks and making art from “anything”—true to her assemblage-dominant practice.

Betye Saar is participating in ‘Untitled, 2020. Three perspectives on the art of the present’, conceived and curated by Caroline Bourgeois, Muna El Fituri and the artist Thomas Houseago. Accompanied by a wealth of references and quotes and ranging from the twentieth century through to the present day, the works set up a dialogue that triggers emotional, sensory, visual and tactile connections.

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983 explores what it meant to be a Black artist in America during two revolutionary decades, from the 1960s and the Civil Rights movement to the early 1980s and the emergence of identity politics. The story unfolds in thematic sections, with a special emphasis on aligned groups in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and another focus on the work of Betye Saar.

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.

Daniel Crews-Chubb gives a tour of his South London studio in this video offering an intimate glimpse into the mixed-media artist's work and upcoming project Chariots commissioned by English Heritage to be on view at Wellington Arch.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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. 

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.

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.