Interview by Tara Anne Dalbow

Growing up on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana, Wendy Red Star witnessed the ways her cultural heritage was practiced, performed and integrated into the daily lives of her tribe. These customs seemed deeply disconnected from the displays in history museums that rendered her people as ancient artifacts. Spanning self-portraiture, archival imagery, large-scale installations, mixed-media collage and performance, Red Star’s practice interrogates and undermines representations of Native Americans as primitive peoples and foregrounds the dynamism of contemporary Indigenous experience.

In conjunction with Betye Saar’s Mojotech exhibition for Getty’s PST ART: Art and Science Collide, Roberts Projects will hold a panel discussion on the intersections between gender, art and technology that have emerged over the last five decades. The title Dear Genius is taken from a letter sent to Betye Saar by her friend, Dr. Helen Anderson, when Mojotech opened at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center in 1987.

Panelists are Nancy Baker Cahill, Sarah Rosalena and Mindy Seu, with Jori Finkel as moderator.

Interview by Jan Garden Castro

Suchitra Mattai’s multidisciplinary work explores how memory, myth, and oral traditions can be harnessed to unravel received narratives rooted in patriarchal and colonialist systems. By re-imagining the past, she opens up the future. Drawing on Indian miniature painting, European tapestry, and craft-based practices like embroidery and weaving, the Indo-Caribbean artist postulates a “future space” of alternative mythologies that celebrate and monumentalize the experiences and labor of brown women. Within this space, standard binaries—between old and new, East and West, history and mythology, labor and leisure—can be placed in conversation, questioned and reconfigured. 

By Lakshmi Rivera Amin

Apparently, my grandmother has kept her wedding sari tucked away in a chest at the foot of her bed for most of my life. One sleepy morning, she plucked it from a sea of fabric and gently set it on her carpeted floor, deciding that it was time to sift through her hidden collection of sumptuous silken saris and give them their regular aeration. I gawked at the faded sari, a legendary familial artifact of sorts that I’d only seen in photographs since childhood. She shrugged and continued pulling garments from the chest. The shimmering threads basked in the sun and breathed for the first time in months as each stitch unraveled a flood of memories; Ba knew exactly when and where she’d worn all of them. Every sari had a story to tell.

By Cathy Fan

The London-based painter Daniel Crews-Chubb (b. 1984) makes his first major museum solo debut at the Long Museum in Shanghai, which will feature more than 30 works from two pivotal series that delve into the evolution of figurative representation across history. Known for his dynamic and vibrant compositions, Crews-Chubb creates chimerical figures through a complex, intuitive process involving painting, drawing, and collage. He employs spontaneous methods of applying paint—such as spilling, throwing, and spraying ink and pigment—to create a lively base that brings his figures to life.

By Gameli Hamelo

While she was still a high school student in Metuchen, New Jersey, Suchitra Mattai found herself puzzled by a history class she was taking. The course was called World History, but despite its name, it was clearly about the West, not the entire globe. Years later, she realized she had encountered an “obviously absurd gap” in the course’s curriculum.

Opening on 7 November, the artist’s first major solo museum exhibition will centre on two series that explore representations of the figure across history, featuring more than 30 works, including 9 works from the series that gives the exhibition its name and 5 new paintings from the Out of Chaos series. Crews-Chubb’s vibrant, turbulent compositions of chimerical figures emerge from a laborious process of intuitive painting, drawing, and collage. Working from his subconscious, he uses aleatory methods of paint application—spilling, throwing, and spraying ink and pigment—to create a dynamic ground from which he coaxes figures.

By Katie White

In his Chicago studio, Nigerian-born artist Luke Agada gives form to adaptation. His paintings, surrealistic scenes painted in sunburnt hues of rust browns and tans, are elusive and chimerical. In these paintings, figurative beings hover at the threshold of recognizability, tendon-like entities suspended between worlds. Agada admits he’s consumed with visualizing a “Third Space”—a term defined by the Indian writer and scholar Homi Bhabha to describe the place where the two-way influences of the colonizing and the colonized culture meet. These spaces are both physical and psychic, and Agada’s paintings take on the metamorphic ambiguity of memory.

This comprehensive show presents key paintings—portraits, but also a series of self-portraits—by Amoako Boafo (b. 1984 in Accra), dating from 2016 to the present day. As one of the most important voices of a new generation of Black artists, Boafo portrays friends, acquaintances and public figures who convey contemporary notions of Black self-empowerment and self-conception.

By Joel E. Mendoza

“Maybe ‘apocalypse’ is the opportunity we are looking for, even if we don’t quite know it yet.” This message from Santa Clara Pueblo sculptor Rose B. Simpson is printed at the feet of her over-eight-foot-tall figurative sculpture “Ground (Witness)” (2016) at the Autry Museum of the American West. The artist’s evocative “maybe” can provide a generative perspective in this political moment, as many Indigenous communities continue to survive the apocalyptic reality of European settler colonialism. 

Roberts Projects is pleased to announce representation of Luke Agada, in association with moniquemeloche gallery, Chicago. This announcement follows the gallery's recent solo exhibition with the artist, Between Two Suns, which opened on September 28th and will be on view until November 2nd, 2024.

By Sarah Cascone

The vibrancy of the large-scale textile installations, mixed-media paintings, and colorful sculptures of Suchitra Mattai (1973–) draws in the viewer, helping the Guyanese artist tell complex stories about migration and colonialism.

Last month, Mattai opened her first solo show in Washington, D.C., at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA). Her work looks to write brown people back into a global history from which they have been left out, through a practice she calls “brown reclamation.”

Strike Fast, Dance Lightly: Artists on Boxing presents a critical look at the sport of boxing through a variety of artistic media. Featuring over 100 artworks spanning from the late 19th century to present day, this dynamic presentation is the largest comprehensive survey of artwork depicting the global sport and its cultural impact. Strike Fast, Dance Lightly illuminates the connections between boxing and artists, and underscores the rich history of a centuries-old sport and its influence on artistic movements.

The Belvedere in Vienna, Austria presents Europe’s first major museum exhibition of Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo (b. 1984, Accra, Ghana). Boafo portrays his friends, acquaintances, and people from public life, presenting a contemporary image of Black self-empowerment and self-perception. This form of Black subjectivity is expressed in the appearance of the sitters, who confront the viewer as self-confident individuals.

By Armand Limnander

In honor of the 2024 US Elections, Betye Saar has created a poster featuring a drawing by Saar, made in 1971.

Eight years ago, as the United States faced an unprecedented presidential election, we asked a group of artists to create the political posters they’d like to see. Four years after that, as Black Lives Matter protests roiled the country, artists of color shared with us their points of view. 

By Mark Jenkins

When introducing viewers to her Indian heritage, Suchitra Mattai is also reconstructing it for herself. The title of the multidisciplinary artist’s ambitious National Museum of Women in the Arts exhibition, “Myth From Matter,” encapsulates her process. Mattai repurposes Indian artifacts — often old saris — to weave a vision of her ancestral homeland.

By Ariana Marsh

Upon exiting the parking lot at Tippet Rise Art Center in Fishtail, Montana, visitors follow a path up a small ridge, which soon gives way to a painterly panorama of soft valleys, jagged mountains, and the region’s infamously vast sky. There, stamped across the landscape, as if to claim it as its own, is a blood-red fingerprint the size of a giant’s. Its swirls and ridges are encased within glass that is anchored to a rough granite rock, and on sunny days, the sculpture glitters and glows, as if charged from beyond by the very ancestors it honors

Interview by Shaquille Heath

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” During my conversation with Wendy Red Star, I kept thinking about Shakespeare not only because of the alluring way in which Red Star talks about her work as inherently possessing a divine sense of poetry in itself, but specifically because of that famous verse, which references the fact that names do not inherently change who or what we are. But even the most famous poets make mistakes—and this might be one of his.

Betye Saar and Suchitra Mattai are some of many participating artists to donate works for auction in support of the Harris Victory Fund. The Artists for Kamala online sale will open on October 1st and conclude on October 8th. The sale will have both an auction component as well as some pieces sold on a fixed price basis. All funds raised will go directly to the Harris Victory Fund. 

Roberts Projects congratulates Wendy Red Star who is a recipient of the 2024 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.

By Salomé Gómez-Upegui

Overlooked narratives lie at the center of Suchitra Mattai’s extraordinary artworks. A Guyanese-American artist of South Asian descent, she creates monumental installations, vibrant mixed-media compositions, and elaborate textile sculptures that spotlight the voices of women, so often erased from history, while also reflecting on the past of her ancestors, once brought from India to Guyana as indentured laborers by colonial British settlers.

Interview by Katie Kern

Luke Agada opens his first Los Angeles show at Roberts Projects on Sept. 28. It wasn't exactly a clear path for him to arrive here, growing up in Lagos and studing veterinary medicine before finding his way to painting. Below, CULTURED sat down with the artist to talk about the question of home, certain colors becoming a safe haven, and the painters he turns time and again for inspiration.

Jeffrey Gibson's I want to make you feel free (2024) is now open for bidding in the Benefit Auction for Democracy Matters 2024. The painting on paper with mixed media collage measures 17 x 17.5 x 0.5 in (43.2 x 44.5 x 1.3 cm) unframed, 21 x 21.5 x 3 in (53.34 x 54.61 x 7.62 cm) framed. This work is signed and dated by the Artist on verso. Jeffery Gibson Studio.

Roberts Projects is honored to announce representation of Wendy Red Star (Baaeétitchish – Does Things Well). This announcement follows the gallery’s first solo exhibition of Red Star’s work – Bíikkua (The Hide Scraper) – this past August.

Wendy Red Star, of the Piegan clan and from the district of Pryor, engages in a multidisciplinary artistic practice grounded in the history and cultural knowledge of the Apsáalooke (Crow) people. Raised on the Crow reservation in Montana, her work reflects her deep connection to her community, culture, and land.

Former veterinarian Luke Chidiebube Agada has emerged as a rising star in the art world. Born in Lagos in 1992, Agada’s journey from self-taught artist to acclaimed painter, as captured by artsy.net, has captivated the attention of galleries and collectors alike.

Agada’s unconventional path led him from veterinary medicine to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he completed his MFA in 2023. His bold career shift is now bearing fruit with his first Los Angeles solo exhibition, “Between Two Suns,” opening at Roberts Projects on September 28th.

By Ben Davis

The Guyanese American artist (b. 1973) regularly works in fabric—indeed, one of her signature materials is cut-up saris. As for subject matter, she draws on her family’s history as part of the South Asian diaspora in the Caribbean, as with her recent show at ICA San Francisco with included a vibrant colorful sculptural recreation of her grandparents’ home.

Combining richly colored textiles, found objects, beads, and more, multidisciplinary artist Suchitra Mattai (b. 1973, Georgetown, Guyana) explores themes of history, identity, and belonging. The forces that lead certain stories to be remembered, or forgotten, are central to her art. Drawing on her Indo-Caribbean roots, Mattai weaves together personal narratives, collective mythologies, and colonial history. Her two- and three-dimensional works offer a reimagined vision of the past that centers the perspectives of women and people of color, especially those from Southeast Asia.

Musicians, songwriters, and producers Swizz Beatz (Kasseem Dean) and Alicia Keys have stood as giants in the global cultural landscape for decades. As collectors, the Deans have lived their ethos of “artists supporting artists,” acquiring a world-class collection of paintings, photographs, and sculptures by diverse, multigenerational artists.

The master’s degree program in Curatorial Practice (MACP) at the School of Visual Arts in New York City is pleased to announce its Artists Roundtable special events for fall/winter 2024.

The Artists Roundtable, an international forum for leading practitioners, is hosted by Kate Fowle, faculty member of the MA Curatorial programs at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Suchitra Mattai, a multidisciplinary American artist of Indo-Caribbean descent, creates mixed-media paintings, sculptures, and installations that shed light on untold histories. Based in Los Angeles.

The Center for Indigenous Studies at Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, New York) will organize a convening in Venice on the relationship of Indigenous North American art and cultures to global histories. Diverse speakers, including practitioners, academics, artists, and theorists, will address the interdisciplinary, transnational nature of Jeffrey Gibson's work in the U.S. Pavilion.

By Zach Bernsten

Created during Betye Saar’s residency at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987, “Mojotech” is a pioneering achievement in altar assemblage. The sprawling exhibit intertwines ritual objects with circuit boards and computer parts, creating a potent display about the impact of technology on the natural world.

Future Imaginaries explores the rise of Futurism in contemporary Indigenous art as a means of enduring colonial trauma, creating alternative futures and advocating for Indigenous technologies in a more inclusive present and sustainable future. Over 50 artworks are on display, some interspersed throughout the museum, creating unexpected encounters and dialogues between contemporary Indigenous creations and historic Autry works.

By Maxwell Rabb

Luke Chidiebube Agada started out as a self-taught artist while pursuing a degree in veterinary medicine, making and selling art to pay bills. Just one year into his veterinary career, Agada quit and enrolled in an MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, from which he graduated in 2023. This abrupt pivot is paying off with his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, “Between Two Suns,” on view at Roberts Projects from September 28th through November 2nd.

By Anh-Minh Le

In her solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, Suchitra Mattai renders memories into vibrant mixed-media creations that reflect her Indo-Caribbean heritage in their materials and motifs. 

“The whole exhibition is about how we remember,” Mattai told the Chronicle before the opening reception of her exhibition in June. “If you think of memory as ephemeral — as fragmented, as chosen — we sometimes choose what we want to remember and what we want to forget. There’s a breaking and a building of forms and ideas.”

Sleep, so familiar yet strange at the same time. Like eating and drinking, it is a necessary part of life. A daily recurring phenomenon which takes up a third of your life. During sleep, the brain is being cleansed, causing connections between the brain cells to change. While at the same time strengthening some connections so you remember things. Sleep also reduces stress and emotions. Within science a lot has been discovered about our sleeping habits, yet great mysteries about sleep still remain. Many people within the arts are drawn to this fascinating theme. From 24 August, the family exhibition Sleep! takes you on a small exploration into the vast domain of sleep and dreams, through the eyes of about 50 visual artists and designers. They will let you experience the essential importance and privilege of rest.

“Mia’s works are smaller in scale and she describes them as freeze-frame moments. She thinks of her paintings as pinpricks of information that allude to a larger whole. She draws on experience and memory – there’s a bit of fantasy and they have this luscious quality to them.”

By Kat Barandy

Backdropped by the New York City skyline, a collection of vibrant artworks by Suchitra Mattai is scattered across the Socrates Sculpture Park. The exhibition, we are nomads, we are dreamers, transforms the park into a space of contemplation and an exploration of identity, diaspora, and the reclamation of history. This sculptural installation is part of a busy year for the LA-based artist, represented by Roberts Projects, whose work continues to challenge and reframe the boundaries of art, culture, and memory.

By Ed Templeton

I turned pro in 1990. I was 18 years old, and I was immediately swept into this incredible world of skateboarding — pro skateboarders, all of them young and living hard and fast lives. What kills me is that this didn’t set into me, photographically speaking, until 1994, when I realized: Look at this life I get to live. I had been painting, but I wasn’t as clued into photography yet. I came across a bunch of influential photo books at around that time — ’94, ’93 — and just had an epiphany that I should be documenting this. Like, who gets this access? I mean, I’m the ultimate Insider. I’m a pro skateboarder who wants to document skateboarders.

Join Ed Templeton in conversation with OCMA CEO and Director Heidi Zuckerman as they discuss youth subcultures, skateboarding, the role of chance in artistic practice, and what it means to be an image maker. California-based artist Ed Templeton is known for his interdisciplinary practice, most notably of photographs documenting people and street life of Huntington Beach, California, intimate portraits of his wife, and paintings depicting the psychological complexity of American suburbia. He first gained recognition as a teenage skateboard prodigy in the late 1980s and taught himself to photograph on the fly while actively touring for competitions. All of Templeton’s subjects come from his own life: “Everything I’ve ever shot has just been on the path that I’ve been on, be it skating or travel or street photography.” Blurring portraiture and landscape, Templeton works across photography, painting, and drawing to explore the ugliness, banality, and beauty of the familiar everyday world.

By Sara Roffino

For her current show, “Bíikkua (The Hide Scraper),” at Los Angeles’s Roberts Projects, Wendy Red Star stepped back from the humor that often carries through her work. Instead she dug into the Apsáalooke history of bishkisché, traditional leather pouches, to share a little-documented history of her people. Bishkisché were functional objects used to transport goods through the Great Plains. They were also creative expressions, meticulously designed and painted by Apsáalooke women and passed down through generations as keepsakes.

The exhibition Sleep! at the Kunsthal KAdE takes you on an exploration into the deep landscape of sleeping and dreams, through the eyes of some fifty visual artists and designers. Here, for a moment, another time reigns. The viewer experiences the four sleep stages from slumber and light rest,  deep sleep and (sleep) walking through the dream to the great hall where the bed is central. “Did you sleep well?” is a question that is often asked to each other. A basic question in which the response of the person questioned immediately provides insight into the alertness, mood and ability to put things into perspective of the person in question. Sleeping is, just like eating and drinking, a basic necessity of life. Magazines are full of tips & tricks for a good night's sleep every week: with the golden rule of rest, cleanliness and regularity recurring as an ideal form of sleep hygiene.

By Victoria L. Valentine

"When You See Me: Visibility in Contemporary Art/History" is on view at the Dallas Museum of Art in Dallas, Texas, from April 7, 2024 - April 13, 2025.

By Kate Meadows

It’s difficult to imagine that Socrates Sculpture Park, located on the waterfront of Astoria, Queens, was once a landfill. The illegal dumping site was repurposed in 1986 by a coalition of artists led by Mark di Suvero and has since transformed into a riverside haven. At the height of summer, the park is lush with greenery and teeming with local visitors. For the past several decades, Socrates has dedicated its five acres to exhibiting large-scale works, which remain free to access by the public year-round. Director of exhibitions and curator, Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas chose to devote the park’s 2024 programming to themes of migration, mapping and ecology as a means to challenge traditional notions of public art.

Interview by Eva Recinos

"I think being an artist is something you know that you are, and you might not recognize it for a long time because I think there are these preconceived ideas about what it is to be an artist and engaging in a professional practice. But the thing is, as we all know, it’s super complicated to be an artist. How do you have the time to make all the work? How do you fund the work? How do you grow your practice? These are all things that, when I was younger, seemed like a mystery. I think if you just trust in the art and the process, that is the only thing you can control. And the other things fall into place. I know that sounds maybe silly, but I do feel like whatever limited time you have, whatever resources you have—if you use that time to make, and to make your work better, and to develop new ideas and curiosities, that’s super important too."

By Stephanie Sporn

For centuries, painters have taken creative liberties when depicting their sitters’ attire, whether for sheer visual impact or to imbue their works with symbolic significance. This phenomenon, in which the artist doubles as stylist, has been the subject of recent solo shows, including exhibitions on Gilded Age master, John Singer Sargent, and purveyor of contemporary cool, Barkley L. Hendricks. Today, a new generation of sartorially savvy artists are leading the charge, capturing clothing to stunning effect – but rather than merely painting fashion, these women consider style as a means to convey notions of heritage, pride, and power.

Interview by Elisa Carollo

In “she walked in reverse and found their song" at ICA SF, Mattai examines the power of memory in the creation of personal stories.

Cultural artifacts are vessels of collective memories: symbolic elements that a community can identify with to find a sense of belonging and some of the most powerful statements on the status of a specific society. With a labor-intensive practice drawing from her Indo-Caribbean lineage, artist Suchitra Mattai creates works that evoke, preserve and translate traditions passed through generations, using the potentialities of materials to reactivate forgotten or erased histories and memories.

By Emily Wilson

In her exhibition at San Francisco’s Institute of Contemporary Art, artist Suchitra Mattai explores her own immigration story and those of her ancestors.

When people leave their home countries, Mattai said, they can carry only so many physical possessions. That makes their memories all the more precious as ties to their past lives. In recalling them, their identities clarify and are reinforced, but they can also shift, thanks to the fragility and malleability of the mind.

The five-acre strip that comprises Socrates Sculpture Park in New York stretches along the East River as it flows towards the Atlantic Ocean. It’s this position en route to the sea – with its suggestion of travel and migration – that inspired Suchitra Mattai’s exhibition for Socrates, which exclusively shows newly commissioned work (until 25 August). Outdoor exhibitions tend, for obvious reasons, to feature sculptures made from durable materials such as metal or stone, but here the Guyanese American artist has chosen to use fabric, weaving strips of vintage saris collected from women of the South Asian diaspora. A series of abstract stem- or pod-like forms are dressed in the colourful weavings while textile orbs hang suspended, fruit-like, from nearby trees. The sun, wind and rain will, of course, change these works, which is partly the point: a metaphor for experiences of journeys across oceans and adaptation to local environments.

By Rima Suqi

“Suchitra Mattai: We are nomads, we are dreamers” is the artist’s first New York City solo show, drawing upon “themes of identity, migration, and memory.” It’s currently on view at Socrates Sculpture Park, in a lovely spot on the East River waterfront, and features  a series of large vibrant sculptures made from vintage saris collected from women of the South Asian diaspora. Mattai also created a series of seven smaller sculptures that are hanging from trees in a grove on the property, as well as a billboard featuring a thirty-foot collage. On view through August 25, 2024

By Maria Vogel

In Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe's most recent body of work, figures engage in one of the most physically taxing activities available–boxing. For Quaicoe's birthplace of Accra, Ghana, the sport symbolizes much more than its renowned physicality; It’s a commonly walked upon path whose success can be the very thing that provides expulsion from the cycles of poverty present in Ghanian villages. Following his own trajectory that took him away from Accra, the artist now resides in Portland, Oregon, a place where his recommendations of favorite haunts take on a much more relaxed stance than his latest paintings.

Interview by Emily Wilson

In this episode, Emily chats with south asian multidisciplinary artist Suchitra Mattai.  Suchitra, born in Guyana and now based in Los Angeles, discusses her journey and the influences behind her artwork. She details her move from a background in statistics to a career in art, highlighting how her work addresses themes of memory, labor, migration, and colonization. Suchitra shares insights about her solo exhibit, 'she walked in reverse and found their songs' at ICA San Francisco, which explores her ancestors’ forced migration and personal history through installations made of used saris. The episode also includes discussion about how she combines different materials to tell stories and reconcile her multicultural experiences. Additionally, Suchitra talks about the impactful art pieces and places that inspire her creative process.

By Alisha Wexler

“It feels almost like being reunited with an old friend,” says Wendy Red Star as she reflects on the bittersweet emotion of discovering locked-away aspects of her Crow heritage across digital collections, auctions, eBay, and museum archives. “It’s thrilling but there are moments of deep sadness.” Now her findings have made their way to Roberts Projects, on view from July 13 until August 24.  

The Crocker Museum of Art has announced acquisition of “Home Sweet Home (After Seurat, Manet and Pippin)” a monumental painting by Chicago-based artist Wangari Mathenge. Born in Kenya in 1973, the artist was inspired by her hometown, staging photos about a mile from where she grew up, bringing the photos back to her studio in Chicago where she painted “Home Sweet Home (After Seurat, Manet and Pippin)” on four canvases, creating one grand composition. The 96-inch-by-290-inch painting was acquired in April 2023 with plans to install the painting in the main museum entrance at Friedman Court. The acquisition was made possible with the support of Simon K. Chiu in honor of the Crocker’s staff, docents, volunteers, and supporters. The acquisition of this work will help the Crocker Museum expand its collection of BIPOC artists.

By Kate Mothes

Situated along the East River in Long Island City, New York, a new outdoor public installation by Suchitra Mattai invites visitors to consider how history, heritage, and cultures connect across land, oceans, and time. We are nomads, we are dreamers at Socrates Sculpture Park comprises six monumental forms evocative of continents or ancient monuments, cloaked in woven vintage saris. Reflecting themes of femininity and fertility, a series of seven sack-like sculptures are suspended from branches in a nearby grove of trees.

Wendy Red Star is known for photographing herself within elaborately constructed scenes, engaging the viewer directly and foregrounding her presence within narratives of her own design. In Stirs Up the Dust, from a series of celestial couture garments titled Thunder Up Above, Red Star reimagines the regalia associated with powwow, a circular dance celebration found throughout Indigenous Plains cultures including Red Star’s Crow Nation, in futuristic terms.  

By Gabriella Nugent

The rise of figuration since the mid-2010s has been coterminous with the art world’s attempt to become more inclusive. Not only have there been increased demands for ‘women artists’ in the context of the #MeToo movement that began in 2017, but the global Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 galvanised the appeals for decolonisation – that is to say, the expansion of collections beyond white artists typically from Western Europe and North America. In this context, public and private institutions have depended on figurative art to demonstrate, in quite a literal way, that they are being more equitable. This trend has developed in parallel across institutions and the art market: since the mid-2000s, there has been a growth in sales of figurative painting, which subsequently has been bolstered by an institutional embrace.

By Jackson Arn

Make your way to Socrates Sculpture Park, in Queens, where Suchitra Mattai has brought a collection of newly commissioned work. The most purely pleasurable parts of “We are nomads, we are dreamers,” her solo exhibition (through Aug. 25), are six large textile sculptures that look like giant tree stumps covered in rainbow bark (actually hand-woven together from vintage saris), at the park’s center. If a breezy, slightly sweaty Sunday morning stroll in late June were a work of art, it might look like a Mattai.

By Matt Stromberg

Bishkisché is an Apsáalooke term referring to rawhide containers used to transport goods great distances on horseback, produced by women in several North American Indigenous groups. Throughout her ongoing investigation into the history of bishkisché, Wendy Red Star made studies of 226 examples of these functional objects in the form of meticulously rendered paintings reproducing each one’s unique, richly colored geometric designs. Bíikkua (The Hide Scraper) features 184 of these works, each named for a woman in her tribe, in an attempt to reclaim the abstractions that have been subsumed into Western art history and pay homage to their origins and creators.

By Lisa Yin Zhang

Socrates Sculpture Park is yet another underrated green space in the city, with sculptures that erupt vertiginously from tufts of grass along undeveloped waterfront. Beautiful as they are — shiny fabrics ripple in wave formations around their sides — Suchitra Mattai’s sculptures are grotesque as well: Their mirrored surfaces reflect sunlight like warning beacons, and their black bases appear as if twisted uncomfortably out of their own skin. Inspired by the East River’s passage into the Atlantic Ocean, host to myriad migration journeys including that of Mattai’s family, the sculptures recall topographical masses on a slow course, embodying both the promise of new possibilities and the threats of such collisions.

In this eclectic grouping, the artists are not thematically linked, although each brings the familiar into the work, whether through images or materials of our urban and natural world.

The exhibition Suchitra Mattai: Bodies and Souls explores migration, matriarchy, and materiality. Mattai uses found objects, such as vintage saris, to create colorful monumental installations. She wraps, braids, stitches, and weaves fabrics together as allegories for historical and personal narratives. For her first museum exhibition in Florida and the Southeast, Mattai will premier new installations in conversation with recent works, highlighting the artist’s ongoing investigations of the past and present.

Lenz Geerk, Beach Couple V is featured in the July issue of Harper's Magazine. Accompanying author Dan Piepenbring reviews of Rosalind Brown’s debut novel Practice (Farrar, Sraus and Giroux), Yoko Tawada’s novel Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel (New Directions), and Private Spaces in Public Places (John Hopkins University Press). 

Image featured: Lenz Geerk, Beach Couple V, 2021, acrylic on canvas. © Lenz Geerk, image courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California.

“We are all the living ends of very, very long threads,” Jeffrey Gibson says. Here, the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States in Venice reflects on identity, cosmology, and his breakthrough Indigenizing and queering Western forms.

The artists in Dream On are hopeful of putting the world to rights in uncertain and frightening times. They are not enticed by doom-mongering in their art. For them, old folklore, legends, rituals and incantations form the starting point for new artworks. New life is breathed into historical customs and stories, which serve as mirrors for current social problems and the depiction of an alternative future. They dare to muse nostalgically and dream about things to come while laughing.

By Lisa Wainwright

When Fred Wilson (b.1954) one-upped Picasso’s canonical Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907; Museum of Modern Art, New York) by mounting a replica of a kifwebe mask onto a life-size reproduction of the painting in Picasso/Whose Rules?, it was an emancipatory tactic aimed at liberating the African object from European Modernism’s historic hold. Over the face of the seated figure, Wilson attached the wooden facsimile with a video running behind its eyes, which showed the artist and two Senegalese friends staring back. The men ask questions in three different languages: ‘whose rules decided what is great?’ and ‘if your modern art is our traditional art, does that make our contemporary art your cliché?’.

We are nomads, we are dreamers is a solo exhibition of newly commissioned works by Suchitra Mattai that celebrates the migratory oceanic journeys of past, present, and future diasporic communities. Join in for a Garden Party in the Park in celebration of our 2024 Summer Exhibition Suchitra Mattai: We are nomads, we are dreamers. Featuring a conversation with the artist and curator, dance performance, and refreshments inspired by the exhibition’s garden. This event is free to attend.

Jeffery Gibson has received worldwide praise for his vibrant and culturally meaningful installation for the US Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, the first solo presentation there by a Native American artist. Like the work that has come to exemplify his broader practice, the installation in Venice fuses his Choctaw-Cherokee heritage and multicultural experiences with references from history and pop culture to comment on the state of the world today. He is known for works that combine intricate Indigenous artisanal craft, such as beadwork and quilting, with language that speaks to the Indigenous struggle for freedom and equality, as exemplified by his 2020 work TO FEEL MYSELF BELOVED ON THE EARTH, an intricately beaded multicolored punching bag sculpture that recently entered the Hirshhorn collection.

By Gordy Grundy

Roberts Projects presents twelve paintings from 1998 to 2015. The expansive gallery gives each piece the space it deserves.

Beginning with his collection of photographs and video, Havekost used a computer to enhance, recolor, shift-shape and minimize the detail of his images, thereby altering the reality to his vision. There is no realism to his photorealism, yet you can see it. These modifications are printed for evaluation and then hand-painted onto canvas.

By Christopher Garcia Valle

Jeffrey Gibson—who was profiled for the Summer 2024 “Icons” issue of Art in America and whose work features on the issue’s cover—is a painter, sculptor, video artist, and proponent of various forms of craft and performance that pay tribute to his Native American heritage. A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, Gibson was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and grew up in Germany, New Jersey, South Korea, and Maryland. This year, he is representing the United States in the Venice Biennale—the first time a Native American artist has done so with a solo show since the illustrious international event was inaugurated in 1895.

Jeffrey Gibson, a member of the Mississippi band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, is the first Indigenous artist to be chosen to represent the United States with a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale, which is considered the Olympics of the art world. Correspondent Seth Doane visits the site of the Biennale, and meets with Gibson at his studio in Upstate New York, where he created his exhibition titled "the space in which to place me."

Suchitra Mattai was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and immigrated to Canada as a young child. The history of her ancestors—brought from India to work as indentured laborers in Guyana—deeply influences her practice. Using techniques passed down through generations, she weaves materials marked by the past into a collective story of migration and gendered labor. In this exhibition Mattai turns inward, examining the power of memory in the creation of her own stories: sometimes factual, sometimes fantastical, with divergent pieces collapsing and combining into something new.

"Suburbia. Building the American Dream" draws us into the imaginary of the idyllic family home and shows how this lifestyle has been sold and promoted by fiction and the entertainment industry. The exhibition goes back to the origins of residential neighbourhoods in the early nineteenth century, explains how they developed massively in the 1950s, and reviews the economic, political and social context of their relentless expansion across the United States.

Interview by Alison Stewart

Suchitra Mattai's first solo show in New York City features a series of enormous, soft sculptures made from vintage saris. The exhibition pays homage to the artist’s Indo-Caribbean ancestors and the stories of many Queens residents. Mattai joins us alongside curator Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas to discuss the show, titled We are nomads, we are dreamers, which is on display through Sunday, Aug. 25.

By Tara Anne Dalbow

Betye Saar has made art for over six decades, yet in many ways, her work feels more relevant and urgent than ever. Her intricate and inventive collages, assemblages, and installations, dating back to the 1960s, merge the political with the mystical, imbuing historical narrative with personal, ancestral memory. Comprised of salvaged objects as various as washboards, handkerchiefs, African masks, jewelry boxes, and window panes, her constructions interrogate racism, sexism, cultural identity, and national mythology.

Roberts Projects is delighted to announce Kehinde Wiley: A Maze of Power at The Musée des Civilisations noires (Museum of Black Civilizations) in Dakar, Senegal. Initiated in 2012, the unprecedented series explores the staging of power through the lens of African heads of state. The portraits reflect the distinctive cultural elements of each state, thus highlighting the immense diversity of the African continent, and reveal the identity of an individual through the double prism of the artist and his model.

Explore the complexities of visibility in our latest exhibition, When You See Me: Visibility in Contemporary Art/History. The exhibition aims to broaden and complicate official histories and their corresponding visual strategies to allow for richer representations of those who have been traditionally excluded or erased. When You See Me features nearly 60 works by a diverse, intergenerational group of 50 artists who contend with visibility both socially and formally. Their works explore invisibility, hypervisibility, the desire to be seen, and the right to be private.

Taking the 1990s as its cultural backdrop, Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today is the first major group exhibition in the United States to envision a new approach to contemporary art in the Caribbean diaspora, foregrounding forms that reveal new modes of thinking about identity and place. Over 20 artists are featured in this exhibition, many of whom live in the Caribbean or are of Caribbean heritage.

Forecast Form is anchored in the concept of diaspora, the dispersal of people through migration both forced and voluntary. Here, diaspora is not a longing to return home but a way of understanding that we are always in movement and that our identities are in constant states of transformation.

By Evan Nicole Brown

The American assemblage artist Betye Saar spent her childhood salvaging lost, discarded and forgotten things, like small glass beads, broken necklaces and scraps of colored paper left in trash bins or littering the ground where she walked. Born in 1926, she was raised during the Great Depression and so, Saar wrote to me recently, she was taught to “use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”

Interview by Kimberly Fisher

"When art inspires it creates a new way of seeing something in the world that previously was perceived as fixed or indelible. The great shifts that have happened socially and culturally throughout the world have often been helped by artists. Their ability to destabilize known narratives is at the core practice aimed at equity."

By Terry Nguyen

Multidisciplinary artist Suchitra Mattai’s monumental woven tapestries will be on display at Socrates Sculpture Park throughout the summer. “We are nomads, we are dreamers” features newly commissioned works that explores themes of cultural transmigration and diasporic inheritance linked to Mattai’s Guyanese heritage. According to Mattai, her process is “not exactly weaving but an invented process … similar to embroidery,” as she told Artnet; she entwines vintage saris (some inherited from family members) with a mass of scarves, tassels, and other found fabrics into large vibrant tapestries, which she wraps around the base of large metal armature, whose stainless mirror surfaces are positioned to reflect the sky above; they range from 35 to 41 feet long. Opens May 11.

On the occasion of its tenth anniversary, ICA Miami presents “Toward the Celestial,” a selection of works from its permanent collection highlighting the museum’s programmatic development, as well as recent commissions and previously unshown works. The exhibition is organized thematically, and journeys from microscopic to macroscopic images in order to explore the dimension of time and orders of scale. The exhibition’s title alludes to Betye Saar’s Celestial Universe (1988) banner, which was featured in the artist’s 2021 survey and has been part of installations of the artist over multiple decades suggesting both imminent presence and the recording of time through alternative ideological structures.

Interview by Ben Davis

Gibson is one of the most visible artists currently working, and with his Cherokee and Choctaw heritage, he is also the first Native American to represent the U.S. in Venice. Representing your country at the Biennale is among the highest honors that any artist might receive, and also among the most fraught. Even from this show’s title, which is “The Space in Which to Place Me,” you can tell that Gibson is pondering what national representation means.

Interview by Phyllis Hollis

Nigerian artist living and working in Chicago. Examines themes of globalization, migration and cultural dislocation within the framework of a postcolonial world. MFA in Painting and drawing from School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023. Teaching Fellow at the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL. Recently named a 2024 Breakout Artist by NewCity Magazine.

By Bob Hicks

Wendy Red Star, who lives in Portland and whose work is in permanent art collections nationally and internationally from the British Museum to the Denver, Baltimore and Portland museums of art; the Metropolitan, Whitney, and Museum of Modern Art in New York; and beyond, has been named the winner of 2024’s Bonnie Bronson Visual Arts Fellowship.

The fellowship, named for the prominent Oregon artist who died in a mountain climbing accident in 1990, is awarded annually to an artist living and working in the Northwest. It comes with a $10,000 cash prize and the purchase of a piece of art to be added to the Bonnie Bronson Collection housed at Reed College.

By Shelley Holcomb

There are few names that inspire as much admiration and intellectual curiosity as Betye Saar. A true vanguard in the historic Los Angeles art scene, Saar’s distinguished career as an assemblage artist has consistently pushed boundaries, intertwining history, memory, and emotion to forge a profound connection between her viewers and past generations. In an era where themes of identity are on the tip of everyone’s tongues in the art world, Betye Saar, at the age of 97, is not a newcomer to this discourse; she has, in fact, been setting the stage for us all for decades. 

By Emily Steer

Artists have been fascinated by the night sky and its dazzling cosmos for centuries. From Van Gogh’s trippy The Starry Night (1889) to Théodore Géricault’s eerie, green-tinged After the Deluge (1819) and Georgia O’Keeffe’s geometric Starlight Night (1917), many have attempted to capture the inherent mysteries of the universe as viewed from the ground. Some have taken it a step further, with Jeff Koons launching his mini sculptures to the moon using an un-crewed Odysseus lander this February.

So why are these artists continually drawn towards space? With a solar eclipse just behind us, we explore some of the most exciting contemporary artworks that look to infinity and beyond.

By Jori Finkel

To enter Kehinde Wiley’s show An Archaeology of Silence is to step into darkness, where only the art itself seems to emit light. The space feels somewhere between a crypt and a cathedral, featuring paintings and bronze sculptures of reclining Black bodies, spread out in repose or entombed like corpses, that appear to glow from within.

The show, now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, culminates with a monumental sculpture of a fallen man on horseback, draped over the horse as if he had just been shot, his Nikes dangling below the saddle. Made in the year after George Floyd was killed by the police in Minneapolis, this monument—and more broadly, the show as a whole—confronts the “legacy and scope of anti-Black violence,” according to Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation.

By Maxwell Rabb

This year’s Earth Day comes against a stark backdrop. Last year was the warmest on record, and a recent UN climate report recently warned that it’s “now or never to limit global warming.” 

As the impacts of climate change grow increasingly urgent, the art community is recognizing its role in addressing environmental challenges through various initiatives and practices. Among the most significant of these is the Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC), founded in 2020, which unites a network of galleries in their commitment to sustainability. The organization—comprising over 900 members—emphasizes how galleries can collectively help to curb environmental damage.

The United States Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia presents a multidisciplinary exhibition by Jeffrey Gibson, an artist recognized for a hybrid visual language that employs abundant color, complex pattern, and text to articulate the confluence of American, Indigenous, and Queer histories and imagine new futures. Gibson’s exhibition for the U.S. Pavilion, the space in which to place me, engages concepts that have shaped the artist’s practice over his 20-year career. Bringing together sculpture, multimedia paintings, paintings on paper, and video, the exhibition explores the dimensions of collective and individual identity and the forces that shape its perception across time. 

By Jillian Steinhauer

People in Venice might hear the jingle dress dancers before they see them. On April 18, some 26 intertribal Native American dancers and singers from Oklahoma and Colorado will make their way through the winding streets and canals of the Italian city. Wearing brightly colored shawls, beaded yokes and dresses decorated with the metal cones that give the dance its distinctive cshh cshh rattling sound, they’ll make their way to the Giardini, one of the primary sites of the Venice Biennale. There, they’ll climb atop and surround a large red sculpture composed of pedestals of different heights and perform.

Review by Kriston Capps

From Grandma Moses to Rashid Johnson, “Revolutions” spans a ludicrous range of painters. Right from the start, the show dials up the contrasts: The first works to greet viewers are a stately 1884 portrait by society painter John Singer Sargent hanging next to an electric 2020 portrait by Ghanaian star Amoako Boafo. 

Roughly speaking, these works could serve as chronological capstones for the Hirshhorn’s collection. But there’s something else to this pairing: It’s an unlikely diptych that tees up the push-and-pull between figuration and abstraction that defines the collection — and the century.

Interviewed by Guy Trebay

"The main challenge, I guess, to being an artist is how to make a living. But being a creative person means you have to find ways to do this. I studied design at U.C.L.A., and after I graduated, I made greeting cards, I made jewelry, I got into printmaking and then sold my prints. I taught art classes in colleges all over the states. My creativity kept evolving with my needs as I got married and bought a house, had my daughters and put them through college. Through it all, I loved making art. It kept me going."

Artist foundations are historically rooted in the stewardship of an artist’s own works, but more and more artists are choosing inventive approaches to make a greater impact. Moderator James Bewley, Senior Program Officer at the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, examines these models with Yona Backer, Director of Third Streaming which oversees the Alvin Baltrop Trust, Anthony Huberman, Director of Giorno Poetry Systems, Kéwé Lô, Director of Kehinde Wiley’s organization Black Rock Senegal, and Elizabeth Smith, Executive Director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.

By Olivia McEwan

In "Constructing Whiteness," white walls ingeniously link to the text conceptually, explaining the extent to which the British cotton economy relied on the labor of enslaved people in the Southern United States. Nearby is LA-based artist Betye Saar’s I’ll Bend But I Will Not Break (1998), an iron shackled to an ironing board bearing an 18th-century diagram of the British slave ship Brookes, behind which is a cotton sheet bearing the Ku Klux Klan symbol. 

Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden presents “Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960,” a major survey of artwork made during a transformative period characterized by new currents in science and philosophy, and ever-increasing mechanization. “Revolutions” captures shifting cultural landscapes through the largely chronological presentation. In its first rotation, the installation presents 208 artworks in the museum’s permanent collection by 117 artists—including Francis Bacon, Jean Dubuffet, Lee Krasner, Wifredo Lam, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe and Jackson Pollock—made during 100 turbulent and energetic years.

In the 20th century, textiles have often been considered lesser—as applied art, women’s work, or domestic craft. Woven Histories challenges the hierarchies that often separate textiles from fine arts. Putting into dialogue some 160 works by more than 50 creators from across generations and continents, the exhibition explores the contributions of weaving and related techniques to abstraction, modernism’s preeminent art form.  

Hosted by the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University, The Black Doll Symposium is a virtual, interdisciplinary conference convened to celebrate and discuss the exciting and varied topic of black dolls. We are thrilled to invite everyone in the diverse community of collectors, curators, dollmakers, scholars, and advocates of Black dolls to join us for two days of roundtable discussions, film screenings, and audience Q&A sessions.

We are nomads, we are dreamers is a solo exhibition of newly commissioned works by Suchitra Mattai, celebrating the migratory oceanic journeys of past, present, and future diasporic communities. Inspired by the Park’s position along the East River, which flows into the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, Mattai’s installation features a series of monumental, soft sculptures made from vintage saris. Activated by monthly dance performances, this exhibition pays homage to the artist’s Indo-Caribbean ancestors and the stories of many Queens residents.

By Lita Barrie

One of the first galleries in L.A. to focus on African-American artists like legends Betye Saar and Kehinde Wiley, Roberts Projects has continued to represent significant black artists and help them develop their careers – from the emerging to the established. This tightly-curated selection of works subvert the meaning of “oasis” from diverse perspectives exploring the relief we seek from hardship.

By Mark Westall 

Referencing the tradition of accumulative sculpture that characterizes artistic conventions, Saar’s mixed-media assemblages emerge from a unique succession of gestures that meaningfully build upon each other. This process of accumulation takes aesthetic objects with profound epistemic weight—such as vintage wooden boxes, found objects and photographs—and thoroughly transforms them into mythical entities compounded by historical time.

Roberts Projects is pleased to present a tightly-curated selection of works that interpret and subvert the meaning of 'oasis' from a diverse range of perspectives. Works by contemporary artists including Amoako Boafo, Daniel Crews-Chubb, Suchitra Mattai, Collins Obijiaku, Ed Templeton, and Brenna Youngblood conjure sensations of relief that nurture the human spirit while contemplating the hardships from which we seek refuge. Major hishlight sof the booth include Betye Saar's Oasis and Suchitra Mattai's between oceans. 

By Benjamin Sutton

This year’s edition of PST Art, the J. Paul Getty Trust’s recurring programme of exhibitions, events and scholarship, launches it's third edition on 15 September and looks at the intersections of art and science. While the entire lineup of gallery exhibitions that will be part of the PST Art programme has yet to be revealed, shows that are in store include Betye Saar exhibiting her large-scale, cyberpunk altar installation Mojotech (1987) at Roberts Projects, among other exhibitions at many of the city’s foremost galleries.

By Zachary Small

Last summer, Jeffrey Gibson received an honor that most artists wait for their entire lives. Would he represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, the art world’s version of the Olympics? Only a few weeks after accepting, there was another auspicious ring on the telephone. It was the curator David Breslin, wondering if Gibson would become the sixth artist to alter the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s facade with newly commissioned sculptures. For the commission, Gibson will return to the ancestral spirit figures he started assembling in 2015. They will be on view from September 2025 through May 2026.

In what is sure to be a highlight of Frieze Los Angeles this year, Eileen Harris Norton will debut her book All These Liberations in a panel discussion about the dramatic rise of the city’s contemporary art scene in recent decades, as well as the collector and philanthropist’s role as an indefatigable champion of artists of color, particularly women. The scholarly tome—edited by Taylor Renee Aldridge, a curator at the California African American Museum (CAAM), who will join the discussion along with artist Alison Saar—places Harris Norton at the heart of a burgeoning milieu of marginalized voices starting in the 1980s and traces the social and civic purpose with which she has approached collecting. That is to say, with boundless curiosity and compassion.

You may know Ed Templeton as a painter. (He is part of the stable of artists at Roberts Projects on La Brea). You may know him as a photographer. (His images of punks, weirdos and burnouts in the environs of Huntington Beach appear regularly in exhibitions and surface regularly on his Instagram, @ed.templeton). You may also know him from his appearance, with Deanna Templeton, a fellow artist and his wife, in Beautiful Losers, a 2008 documentary directed by Aaron Rose and Joshua Leonard that chronicled the scene around the Alleged Gallery in downtown Manhattan in the 1990s. The film came after a related exhibition and catalog. In addition to all of these various roles, Templeton, in the early 1990s and early 2000s, was a professional skateboarder. And throughout those years, he was never without a 50-millimeter camera.

Gana Art is set to host the first solo exhibition of Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe in Asia, titled Embodiment. Born and raised in Ghana, Quaicoe graduated from Ghanatta College of Art and Design for Fine Art and moved to Oregon in 2017 where he actively participated in institutional exhibitions including the Rubell Museum (Miami, FL), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR) and Museo Picasso Malaga (Malaga, Spain). Also appeared on the cover of Teen Vogue and Vanity Fair, his work is in the permanent collection of the Vanhaerents Art Collection in Brussels, the Denver Art Museum and other major venues.

LA-based Roberts Projects will exhibit works by artists that interpret and/or subvert the idea of “oasis” from a range of perspectives. A major highlight of the booth is Betye Saar’s neon work Oasis, which debuted at MOCA Los Angeles in 1984. This year marks the 40th anniversary of that transcendent solo exhibition of room-sized installations, which offered profound insight into tradition, spirituality and African American identity. 

Jeffery Gibson is included in Unravel: the Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at Barbican, London. The exhibition sets out to ask why textiles are a particularly resonant medium to address ideas of gender and sexuality, the movement and displacement of people, and histories of extraction and violence, as well as understanding the world through connecting with ancestral practices and communing with nature. 

By Yaya Azariah Clarke

Throughout Justin’s oeuvre, there is a powerful presence of folklore. There is often a central character on his canvas, spilling a narrative to a tight-knit group or simply into the ether. There’s a stroke of mystery with a heavy dose of the human condition; pensive thoughts and people searching for something – objects, answers – beyond themselves.

Gordon Parks. Jean-Michel Basquiat. Lorna Simpson. Kehinde Wiley. Nina Chanel Abney. These names loom large in the past and present of art—as do many others in the collection of musical and cultural icons Swizz Beatz (Kasseem Dean) and Alicia Keys. Expansive in their collecting habits, the Deans, both born and raised in New York, champion a philosophy of “artists supporting artists.” The first major exhibition of the Dean Collection, Giants showcases a focused selection from the couple’s world-class holdings. The Brooklyn Museum’s presentation spotlights works by Black diasporic artists, part of our ongoing efforts to expand the art-historical narrative.

Conceived by artist Jeffrey Gibson, An Indigenous Present reflects the diverse and expanding field of Indigenous creative practices. To celebrate the publication of this landmark volume, Gibson, co-editor Jenelle Porter, and contributing artist Dyani White Hawk join in conversation with Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney’s Alice Pratt Brown Director. 

Betye Saar is featured in Entangled Pasts: 1768 – Now at The Royal Academy of Art. Entangled Pasts explores themes of migration, exchange, artistic traditions, identity and belonging, creating connections across time which explore questions of power, representation and history. 

Kehinde Wiley is featured in Entagled Pasts: 1768 – Now at the Royal Academy of Art. The exhibition bring together major contemporary and historical works as part of a conversation about art and its role in shaping narratives of empire, enslavement, resistance, abolition and colonialism – and how it may help set a course for the future.

In his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, the Long Beach Museum of Art presents Ed Templeton’s 17-year photographic project, Wires Crossed: The Culture of Skateboarding, 1995-2012, which explores youth culture through Templeton’s lens and peers into the lives of amateur and professional skateboarders.

By Chimera Mohammadi

In Justin Williams’s newest exhibition, Synonym, at Roberts Projects, waves of stories collide and crash across timelines, pouring onto the canvas in lush and decadent palettes. Williams creates wormholes between his ancestral memories and the present day.

By Mara Veitch

As a child, Betye Saar witnessed the construction of the Watts Towers from broken glass, rusty tools, and seashells, and determined that history is best represented in the detritus of real people’s lives. Though she’s sworn off of deadlines, Saar has one more museum show in the works, Drifting Toward Twilight, now on view at The Huntington in Saar’s native Los Angeles.

Betye Saar's Under The Silver Moon is featured on Flaunt Magazine's 25th anniversary cover. When asked where was the most magical moon she's ever observed, Saar responded:

"Up at Yonderosa, my daughter’s desert ranch, there are many magical moons. The new moon that looks just like a sliver of a fingernail. Or the full moon that casts a shadow of the Joshua Trees almost like a flashlight."

Groove surveys over five hundred years of intaglio prints drawn from the extensive collections of the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the Hammer Museum. The intaglio medium comprises engravings, etchings, dry point, aquatint, and mezzotint, all of which involve the use of a copper or zinc plate that is incised, inked, and printed. These materials and techniques have remained more or less the same since the fifteenth century. The exhibit includes examples of Renaissance engraving, through contemporary etchings.

By Stephanie Seidel

Celestial bodies, constellations and zodiac signs feature prominently in the work of American artist Betye Saar. Through ritual acts, she assembles syncretic spaces that incorporate spiritual, autobiographical and politically charged elements foraged from flea markets and the annals of history. 

Suchitra Mattai is featured in Common Threads, an exhibition at Apple Park. Her work, show pony, weaves together vintage saris to celebrate the spirit and labor of women, shaping a future that is imagined but not yet fully visible. 

In a painting from the series A Day of Rest, the London and Chicago based painter Wangari Mathenge depicts three women sitting by the fireplace in her studio in Kenya. The A Day of Rest series portrays 20 women the artist found through an organisation that trains and empowers domestic workers. The first paintings in the series were created in 2023. Wangari will be painting further works this year. 

Kehinde Wiley's A Portrait of a Young Gentleman, is currently 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.

Lenz Geerk is included Horizons at Casa Masaccio which hosts six pictorial works by Antonietta Raphaël in dialogue with new works made for the occasion by Dominique Fung and Lenz Geerk. "Lenz Geerk subvert(s) the predominant male narrative by depicting women in action, surrounded by their work tools and rejecting stereotypes,” Cloé Perrone points out. Geerk, in fact, titling all the works on display Helen, focuses all the attention on the female figure. 

In its own room in the Huntington Library’s American art galleries is a new commission (and acquisition) by longtime LA-based artist Betye Saar. At the center of this blue-lit gallery is a 17-foot vintage wood canoe that Saar had had in her collection for a number of years. Where is this boat going? Saar has left it intentionally open ended, but in the room there is a palpable sense of hope—of a new beginning just on the horizon. 

By Maximilíano Durón

Suchitra Mattai is among the 15 Anonymous Was A Woman 2023 winners. Anonymous Was A Woman is a grant-making nonprofit that has awarded over $7 million to women-identifying artists since 1996. The list of nearly 300 past recipients is a who’s who of today’s leading artists, many of whom received the award at critical points in their careers.

Interview by Folasade Ologundudu

Reginald has his first solo show open right now at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles when we sit down to talk about his work and art practice. Reginald Sylvester II works predominantly in abstraction, making large-scale paintings and sculptures which often include found objects. His show at Roberts Projects, T-1000, features new and interconnected sculptures and paintings. In his latest series he transcends the traditional canvas, discovering novel methods of creative process through experimentation with and investigation into physical, industrial, and spiritual engagements with rubber, steel, and aluminum.

At the booth of Roberts Projects, visitors are greeted with a meticulously curated selection of artworks, each a standout in its own right, making it a challenge to pinpoint just a few highlights. Jeffrey Gibson—who will represent the U.S. at next year’s Venice Biennale—is renowned for his large-scale beaded paintings and mixed-media works, and presents a new piece at the booth: LOVE ME WITH ALL MY FAULTS (2023), priced at $120,000. At the other entrance is the more muted but equally striking Crossers (2023) by Luke Agada, selling for $12,000. As if distorted by heat, an image appears wavy and shimmering, as if rippling in a heat haze, with lines bending and colors blending in a mirage-like effect.

Kehinde Wiley announces the release of his latest limited-edition print, Portrait of Marie-Agnès Diene, in alliance with Black Rock Sénégal and Kehinde Wiley Shop. This charitable partnership marks the fourth annual collaboration between the artist and Black Rock Sénégal, a dynamic artist-in-residence program in Dakar dedicated to fostering creative exchange and dialogue throughout the African diaspora. Since 2019, Black Rock Sénégal has partnered with Kehinde Wiley to produce a series of unique charitable print editions, with 100% of sale proceeds going directly towards the general operating support of Black Rock Sénégal.

T-1000 opens at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles and is named in reference to the Terminator 2: Judgement Day villain—an artificially intelligent shapeshifter that utilizes different metals to take human form and wreak havoc. With materials like rubber, steel, and paint, Sylvester’s new body of work examines the impact of living in an intelligence-driven state and the harm that these forms of oppression have on our current and future lives. You need not fear a moment when cyborgs project themselves from the future when we have our own very real horrors unfolding right before our eyes. 

Roberts Projects is thrilled to announce representation of Mia Middleton, whose pictorial works explore interiority, memory and evocation. Middleton’s intimate paintings capture a tension and threshold between conscious and subconscious, desire and aversion, reality and fantasy. This announcement follows the gallery’s first exhibition of Middleton’s work – Love Story – this past April. 

Middleton is a semiotician in a profoundly visual sense. Often working in a sequence of poetic vignettes, Middleton’s uncanny ability to delve into the transience of existence invites viewers to contemplate the interplay between interiority and exteriority, corporeality and the world beyond. The artist’s skillful manipulation of composition, color and subject matter produces striking freeze-frames that compels viewers to cross the threshold into a profound psychological exploration.

By Hilton Als

Betye Saar’s studio and house, where she has lived for more than sixty years—she is now ninety-seven—are dedicated to history, especially American history as it relates to Black women. In her work, that history is often told through pop-culture artifacts, which, in Saar’s hands, take on a witty poetic resonance—an aura—that they wouldn’t otherwise have. Her layered assemblages, which sometimes resemble the interior of a hope chest, are also filled with inquiry: into the nature of mythology, and specifically how and why we mythologize the Black woman.

Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence showcases Kehinde Wiley’s new, monumental body of work created against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the global rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. The exhibition premiered earlier this year at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the MFAH is the first stop on the tour. Expanding upon his “Down” series from 2008, the American artist (born 1977) meditates on the deaths of young Black people slain around the world. The works in An Archaeology of Silence stand as elegies and monuments, underscoring the fraught terms in which Black people are rendered visible, especially at the hands of systemic violence.

REDCAT, the CalArts School of Art, and IndigenousArts@CalArts are pleased to welcome the editors, book designer, and artist contributors of the landmark anthology, An Indigenous Present, for an evening of conversation and celebration. Our Own Work, Our Own Audiences celebrates the release of An Indigenous Present (published by BIG NDN Press/DelMonico Books) which surveys an intergenerational field of Indigenous North American contemporary artists, musicians, filmmakers, choreographers, architects, writers, photographers, and designers whose work upends the conventions of the mainstream art world and non-Native publics by making work that embodies Indigenous ways of being and knowing.

Black Rock Senegal announces they are now accepting applications for the next cycle of the multidisciplinary artist-in-residency program located in Dakar, Senegal. Named for the volcanic rocks that blanket its shoreline, Black Rock is a multidisciplinary artist-in-residence program founded by renowned artist Kehinde Wiley in 2019. The residency brings together international artists to live and work in Dakar, Senegal for 1–3 month stays.

Roberts Projects is honored to announce representation of Suchitra Mattai. This announcement follows the gallery’s first exhibition of Mattai’s work – In the absence of power. In the presence of love. – this past July.  

The Guyana-born artist explores how memory, myth, and oral traditions can be used to unravel colonial and patriarchal narratives. Drawing from European tapestry traditions, Indian miniature painting, and other craft-based traditions like embroidery and weaving, she imagines a “future space” where new mythologies are formed to celebrate and monumentalize the experiences and labor of brown women. 

Celebrating the launch of the new book An Indigenous Present, conceived by artist Jeffrey Gibson, this panel takes a closer look at Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living from the perspective of Indigenous intersectionality. Made in L.A. artists Teresa Baker, Melissa Cody, Ishi Glinsky, and Esteban Ramón Pérez join Gibson and curator Pablo José Ramírez in this conversation on Indigeneity through a larger understanding of native land, diasporic and queer histories, mestizaje, and ideas of ancestry.

Renowned American artist Betye Saar’s large-scale work “Drifting Toward Twilight”—recently commissioned by The Huntington—is a site-specific installation that features a 17-foot-long vintage wooden canoe and found objects, including birdcages, antlers, and natural materials harvested by Saar from The Huntington’s grounds. The commission is personal for Saar, who has fond memories of visiting The Huntington as a child and of the trees and landscape in her north Pasadena neighborhood.

A short documentary—produced by The Huntington and directed by Kyle Provencio Reingold, program director of Ghetto Film School LA—is presented within the exhibition, Betye Saar: Drifting Toward Twilight, at The Huntington. The film features footage of the work in progress in Saar’s studio, documenting her process of selecting natural materials in partnership with The Huntington’s Botanical curators.

Realized for the exhibition Mia Middleton: Love Story, April 22 – June 3, 2023, at Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California. Mia Middleton (b. 1988) is a Sydney-based artist whose pictorial works explore interiority, memory, and evocation. Middleton’s small-scale paintings capture a tension and threshold between conscious and subconscious, desire and aversion, reality, and fantasy. In these intimate freeze-frames, ephemeral moments are stripped of their context and suspended in time, intimating a narrative without creating one and inviting viewers into a psychological framework of uncertainty and discovery.

The eclectic patterns, tasselled fabrics and intricate embroidery in Suchitra Mattai’s exhibition deliver a striking first impression. A handful of the artist’s largescale works dominate the three rooms of Roberts Projects housing her show. The most prominent of these is a group of massive, hanging soft-sculptures collectively titled phala (fruit) (all works 2023). These oversize ornaments are connected to the ceiling by silver chains and gold cords; some are spherical, and others are teardrop shaped. Each is wrapped in a mesh of saris woven so tightly it is almost impossible to tell where individual garments begin and end.

“Paraventi: Folding Screens from the 17th to 21st Centuries” is an extensive exhibition curated by Nicholas Cullinan that investigates the histories and semantics of folding screens by tracing trajectories of cross-pollination between East and West, processes of hybridization between different art forms and functions, collaborative relationships between designers and artists, and the emergence of newly created works.

Betye Saar is included in Cooking, Cleaning, Caring: Care Work in the Arts Since 1960 at The Josef Albers Museum. Videos, photographs, installations and paintings by international artists that have brought together care work in art since 1960 deal with the social, economic and political meanings as well as the visibility of work that is mostly carried out by women.

Amoako Boafo: Soul of Black Folks is the debut museum solo exhibition tour for Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo (born 1984). One of the most acclaimed artists of his generation, Boafo’s works focus the viewers’ gaze on his subjects’ presence through his portraits representing Black life.

Accra! The Rise of a Global Art Community showcases the work of 18 artists who have deep connections to Accra, Ghana and their impact on global art discourse. Portraits, abstraction, textiles, works on papers and sculpture explore cultural identities, political histories, mythology, trauma and healing.

The show takes pains to get its arms around the region’s multifarious history, opening with Suchitra Mattai’s An Ocean Cradle, 2022, a broad tapestry woven of fragments of silky Indian saris. A conceptual seascape, it nods to South Asian heritage on various islands and in Guyana, where indentured Indian labor was imported to replace enslaved people when the practice was abolished in British Caribbean colonies in the 1830s.

The exhibition Cowboy will bring together loans and new commissions from 27 artists representing a wide range of perspectives including Asian American artists, Latinx artists, and Native artists. The exhibition aims to shift the narrative of this figure’s cultural power and significance to be both historically accurate and creatively imaginative. 

On the occasion of Kehinde Wiley's solo exhibition A Maze of Power at Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac, l'Université populaire is inviting the artist as well as Sarah Ligner and Claire Tancons to discuss the representation of power. The conference "Le pouvoir a-t-il une image?" will take place on Wednesday, September 27, from 6:30pm to 8pm at the Théâtre Claude Lévi-Strauss. Sarah Ligner is the Head of the Historical and Contemporary Globalization Collection at the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac. Claire Tancons is a curator and art historian.

Kehinde Wiley unveils an exclusive series of portraits of African heads of state. A project exploring the staging of power, on which the artist has been working confidentially since 2012. It was as a result of the election of Barack Obama in 2008 that Kehinde Wiley began to ponder the question of presidential leadership. In 2012, the American artist, whose work reinterprets representations of power and prestige in the history of portrait painting, imagined an original series dedicated to African heads of state.

By Dionne Searcey

The American artist Kehinde Wiley shot to fame in 2018 with his unconventional presidential portrait, at least as far as U.S. presidential portraiture goes: Barack Obama seated amid a brightly colored, flowery background. Now, Mr. Wiley is again breaking the mold with a series of portraits of 11 current and former African presidents in an exhibition that opened Monday in Paris.

Featuring Jeffrey Gibson, Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction foregrounds a robust if over-looked strand in art history’s modernist narratives by tracing how, when, and why abstract art intersected with woven textiles (and such pre-loom technologies as basketry, knotting, and netting) over the past century.

The book coincides with the first Ashmolean NOW exhibition which opened, July 2023. This first exhibition in the Ashmolean Now Program presents two linked solo shows: paintings/drawings by Flora Yukhnovich, and paintings/drawings by Daniel Crews-Chubb. The double-sided style of the book will mirror the exhibition concept, while presenting itself as a unique, well-designed object that has a life beyond the exhibition.

Renowned American artist Betye Saar’s large-scale work Drifting Toward Twilight—commissioned by The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens—will go on view November 11, 2023, in the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art.

Featuring more than 100 works drawn primarily from the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the exhibition spans more than two centuries and includes nineteenth-century studio photography; portraits from the Harlem Renaissance; images from the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Lives Matter eras; pictures of Black celebrities and political figures; and artists’ self-portraits.

This landmark volume is a gathering of Native North American contemporary artists, musicians, filmmakers, choreographers, architects, writers, photographers, designers and more. Conceived by Jeffrey Gibson, a renowned artist of Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee descent, An Indigenous Present presents an increasingly visible and expanding field of Indigenous creative practice. It centers individual practices, while acknowledging shared histories, to create a visual experience that foregrounds diverse approaches to concept, form and medium as well as connection, influence, conversation and collaboration. An Indigenous Present foregrounds transculturalism over affiliation and contemporaneity over outmoded categories.

Using the framework of “Transgressive Materiality,” a select group of curators and academics who are expert in the different fields of Craft processes, South Asian and Caribbean culture, discuss Suchitra’s practice as well as other contemporary artists and how the three aspects intertwine and inform the contemporary art landscape.

By Zachary Small

Jeffrey Gibson, a multimedia artist who challenges the absence of Native American practices in visual culture, will represent the United States at the next edition of the Venice Biennale.

He is one of the first Indigenous artists to represent the country at the Biennale, according to organizers with the State Department who selected Gibson for what is generally considered the art world’s version of the Olympics.

The lives of Black people are often flattened through the limited gaze of anti-Blackness and white supremacy. This conversation will explore the nuances of being Black through an interdisciplinary lens of storytellers, artists, scholars, faith leaders, and activists.

Mapping an Art World: Los Angeles in the 1970s-80s revisits the decades leading up to the founding of The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in 1979 and the opening of MOCA’s Grand Avenue building in 1986.

For Amoako Boafo, the best part of success is sharing it with his community, those who inspire him, and bringing along as many people as he can on his journey.

While it originated in New York in the 1960s with Black literary activist Amiri Baraka, the Black Arts Movement quickly gained traction in Southern California in the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles. Drawing on new mediums flourishing on the West Coast, the Black Arts Movement as it manifested there put the focus on community uplift and radical change.

Soul of Black Folks is the debut solo museum exhibition for Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo (b. 1984), one of the most influential artistic voices of his generation. Working primarily in portraiture, Boafo is known for his vibrant use of color and thick, improvisational gestures created by his finger painting technique.

This summer, the Ashmolean launches its contemporary exhibition series Ashmolean NOW. The museum’s Gallery 8 will become a laboratory for contemporary artists who have been invited to create new work inspired by the Ashmolean’s historical collections.

Leaving one’s preconceptions at the door is easier said than done, but Nesbit’s latest exhibition demands just that. The boundary-blurring artist takes the rhetorical technique of synchysis, a deliberate jumbling of words to create a sense of bewilderment, and applies it to visual composition.

Black Rock Senegal announced today the 2023-2024 participants for the fourth 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 fourth year of the program will run between August 2023 and May 2024 and will welcome sixteen artists from around the world.

By Jenna McKnight

A vaulted ceiling punctured with skylights features in a 1940s auto dealership that architectural studio Johnston Marklee has converted into a bright home for the Roberts Projects art gallery. Roberts Projects chose the local studio to transform the brick and cinder-block building into its new home as it moved from Culver City to the mid-Wilshire district, which has seen an influx of art galleries in recent years.

The FLAG Art Foundation and The Church are pleased to co-present Strike Fast, Dance Lightly: Artists on Boxing, an expansive, two-venue group exhibition that centers on the sport, psychology, ethos, and spectacle of boxing.

By Kayla Curtis-Evans 

Mia Middleton doesn’t accept many things at face value. Instead, she dissects the unexpected, the unknown, and the unexplored. Her exhibition at Roberts Projects, aptly titled, Love Story, is her version of a classic narrative exploring interpersonal relationships. With it, she dissects our expectations and assumptions when it comes to navigating the turbulence of love.

By Annie Block

Roberts Projects, a welcome addition to the gallery scene in Johnston Marklee’s hometown of Los Angeles, occupies a 1940’s, former car dealership in the Mid-Wilshire district. The second commission from the client, the new gallery is three times the footprint of the original Culver City location, encompassing three intimate exhibition areas plus a daylit central hall.

A Living Legacy marks the Frye’s seventieth anniversary, bringing together eight artworks—all acquired in 2022 and on view at the museum for the first time. The exhibition reflects the museum’s engagement with both local and global artists and celebrates the collection as a unique, ever-evolving, and always imperfect chronicle of artistic production: a living legacy of the Fryes’ visionary patronage. 

The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations’ Office of Art in Embassies is launching the traveling exhibition, A More Perfect Union: American Artists and the Currents of Our Time, as part of a year-long initiative for its 60th Anniversary called the Democracy Collection.

By Kelefa Sanneh

Ed Templeton's new book of photographs, “Ed Templeton: Wires Crossed,” published by Aperture, re-creates the years from 1995 to 2012, when he was skating and shooting obsessively. The photographs, many with lovingly handwritten captions, depict the intimacy and aimlessness of touring life: a van full of young people who feel as if they know everything important about one another, all of them always looking for something fun to do, and often finding it.

Illuminating concepts of identity, race, gender, and memory, Colliding Visions: Contemporary California Collage features 25 works by five Southern California artists – Chelle Barbour, Genevieve Gaignard, Patricia Jessup-Woodlin, Betye Saar, and Brenna Youngblood – whose unique viewpoints have been assembled as a visual conversation between the museum walls.

By Alex Merola

The photographer and skating legend speaks to us about his new photo book which brings together work from his archive, paying homage to the hedonistic, troubled kids from the skate parks of his youth.

The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens announced today that it has commissioned artist Betye Saar to create a large-scale, immersive installation for the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art. Provisionally titled Drifting Toward Twilight, the site-specific work will feature a 17-foot-long wooden canoe that incorporates found objects, paint, neon, natural materials, and plant matter harvested by Saar from the Huntington grounds.  

By Shawn Ghassemitari

The Coalition for the Homeless‘ Artist Plate Project has become a platform for established and emerging creatives to showcase their work, while providing meals for low-income New Yorkers. In conjunction with the upcoming Frieze New York, the 2023 Artist Plate Project will boast a remarkable list of global creatives, including Alice Neel and Amoako Boafo, Hank Willis Thomas and Huma Bhabha to Philip Guston and the late Virgil Abloh, amongst many.

By Ben Luke

Richly produced book documents how the nonagenarian artist’s work has been informed by her decades of travel. 

“My secret heart seeks the dusty, musty, forgotten corners./It constantly haunts, hunts, collects, gathers objects, images, feelings.” In her 1993 poem My Secret Heart, Betye Saar—whose sculptures, using diverse cultural imagery to reflect on injustice and African American life, form one of the most influential bodies of work in recent American art—tells us about the processes of witnessing, remembering and collecting at the heart of her work. Often, she draws on the experience of travel.

By Ellie Stathaki

Roberts Projects has just launched its new home in Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles. The gallery, which is now situated within a generous, expansive space that has been restored by Johnston Marklee, also celebrates its 23rd anniversary in 2023. The structure that hosts the business is a historic 1948 building – a 10,000 sq ft former automobile showroom – and it has now been given a facelift, tweaked to fit its new purpose as a fresh hub for the Los Angeles art community. 

By Melissa Smith

It wasn’t that long ago that Wangari Mathenge was a practicing attorney. When she quit her job and started considering what to do next, two choices presented themselves: she could either join the family business in Kenya, or finally take her painting “seriously.” The latter, to Mathenge, meant pursuing art as a full-blown career. In 2019, Mathenge enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, completing her MFA in 2021.

In Wires Crossed, Ed Templeton shows the subculture of skateboarding from 1995 to 2012 through photographs, drawings and texts. Templeton is a photographer, artist and one of the most influential skateboarders of all time. During his many tours throughout America, Templeton (Garden Grove, California, 1972) recorded skate culture using his 50-mm camera.

By Christopher Knight

To unveil its latest, and perhaps most dramatic, architectural renovation and expansion, the Hammer has now launched a fleet of small exhibitions and single-artist shows, as well as one biggie. “Together in Time: Selections From the Hammer Contemporary Collection,” assembled by director Ann Philbin, chief curator Connie Butler and four members of the curatorial staff, pulls together 73 paintings, sculptures, videos and mixed-media works.

By Catherine G. Wagley

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

By Dionne Searcey

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

By Navya Pothamsetty

Collins Obijiaku’s portraits are relatively simple: a profile of a single person against a simple background. Born in the Kaduna region in northern Nigeria, the internationally-exhibited, self- taught artist is now based just north of Abuja—the strategically central capital of the nation. The deceptively simplified surfaces of Obijiaku’s creations belie miles of depth beneath the facade of their sartorial expression, and the identities assumed in their skin complexion. Captivated at first glance, the Obijiaku viewer is invited to observe, on closer inspection, how small differences in clothing, posture, and gaze animate two- dimensional portraits to vivid life.

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

Led by Claudia Schmuckli, curator in charge of contemporary art and programming, this talk explores Kehinde Wiley’s new body of work that sheds light on the brutalities of American and global colonial pasts.

The poetic installations by Betye Saar (b. 1926) entice us to contemplate and dream, yet their origins are of a quite different nature. Through her installations, objects and drawings, the American artist reflects on Black identity, the history of racism in the United States and the permeating discrimination in western society.

Phoenix Art Museum will present renowned artist Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe and curator Larry Ossei-Mensah in conversation during the Museum’s spring Lenhardt Lecture, a key component of the Dawn and David Lenhardt Contemporary Art Initiative. Coinciding with the program at PhxArt, the Museum has acquired Quaicoe’s portrait Profile of Larry Ossei (2022), which will be on view this spring in the Museum’s Katz Wing for Modern Art and is the fifth work acquired by the Museum through the Lenhardt Contemporary Art Initiative.

Presented in conjunction with the unveiling of the Hammer’s building expansion, this exhibition is the largest presentation of the Hammer Contemporary Collection in the museum’s history. Occupying nearly all gallery spaces, Together in Time highlights acquisitions since 2005—the year the Hammer began collecting contemporary art. Included in the exhibition are works in a wide range of media by Los Angeles-based and international artists.

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

Celebrated contemporary artist and leading figure of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, Betye Saar (b. 1926, United States) is a traveler, collector, and storyteller. Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer explores Saar’s trips to Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, highlighting works influenced by her many trips and her engagement with global histories of travel.

By Carly Pippin

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

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

By Jessica Lynne

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

Johnston Marklee Architects Nicholas Hofstede, AIA, Managing Director and Ted Zhang lead a conversation and walkthrough of Roberts Projects new gallery space, discuss the distinctive elements and the firm's upcoming projects in Los Angeles and beyond.

Nicholas Hofstede has directed the development of significant cultural and institutional projects, recently overseeing completion of the Menil Drawing Institute Houston and renovations of Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the UCLA Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios. Ted Zhang has been involved in the design of numerous arts and culture projects, including the expansion of the Hilbert Museum of California Art at Chapman University.

Betye Saar will sign copies of her latest catalogue Betye Saar: Black Doll Blues at Roberts Projects' new gallery location.

Published by Roberts Projects, Betye Saar: Black Doll Blues features new watercolor works on paper and assemblages by 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.

By Jenny Hartman, Fiorella Valdesolo

Known for his portrait of Barack Obama, Kehinde Wiley has long repurposed European painting traditions to explore contemporary Black culture. For his latest body of work, at L.A.’s Roberts Projects through April 8, he looked to 18th-century Japanese artist Itō Jakuchū’s nature paintings, surrounding his subjects with delicate flora and fauna. The show, Colorful Realm, inaugurates the gallery’s new Mid-Wilshire space. More of Wiley’s canvases and sculptures will be on view at San Francisco’s de Young Museum from March 18 in Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence.

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

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

Sam Fragoso sits down with renowned artist Kehinde Wiley on the opening night of Colorful Realm, his new exhibition at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles.

“Portraiture is trying to approximate the temperature of someone. The way that they dress, the way that they see themselves as elevated. I encourage my models to go through art history books and look at the poses that old aristocrats were holding in original paintings.”  -Kehinde Wiley, episode 315 of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

by Alayo Akinkugbe

The New York-based artist – who mixes Japanese Edo period landscaping with western easel painting traditions to dazzling effect – discusses his new exhibition in LA, and configuring Black bodies within “non-western models of freedom of space.”

Colorful Realm, an exhibition of new work by superstar L.A.-born artist Kehinde Wiley, opens at Roberts Projects on Jan. 21. The collection of nine paintings takes inspiration from the Edo period, blending Wiley’s signature style of portraiture with elements and techniques of Japanese nature paintings.

By Julian Lewis

Soliciting pedestrians in the Matongé neighborhood of Brussels, Kehinde Wiley, forty-five, looked more like a sidewalk canvasser than he did a world-famous artist. He sidled up to strangers in an orange hoodie and lime-green Air Jordans, extending a hand and flashing a gap-toothed grin.

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

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.

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.

Craft in America is the Peabody Award-winning series exploring America’s creative spirit through the language and traditions of the handmade. Two episodes entitled INSPIRATION reveal the magic and influence of craft. Featuring: Simon Rodia and Watts Towers; three generations of the Saar family: Alison Saar, Betye Saar, and Maddy Leeser; Hmong artists Suzanne Thao, Tousue Vang, Chef Yia Vang, and Mandora Young; textile artist Mary Little; weaver Diedrick Brackens; and potter Ayumi Horie.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By Robin Wander

Wendy Red Star: American Progress on view at the Anderson Collection at Stanford University is a solo exhibition of works by the artist Wendy Red Star, who was raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana. With historical research, Stanford student collaborations, large-scale installations, and images of sovereignty, Red Star asks viewers to grapple with the layered complexity of American history.

“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.

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.

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 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.

By Tulsa Kinney

Back in 2006, I approached Bennett Roberts at his gallery on Wilshire Boulevard with a bit of chagrin. The LA art dealer had always been nothing but nice, helpful and accommodating to me as a person and as an arts writer. So my heart was heavy when I had to break it to him—before he could read it in the latest edition of Artillery—that we had panned his Kehinde Wiley show. Roberts, unflinching, seemed to be suppressing a grin. Was it because a review in Artillery had no significance to him, or was it his absolute confidence that Wiley was already untouchable? I chose to believe the latter.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 pleased 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.
 

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.

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.

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.

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 by Travis Fullerton © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

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 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.

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. We are assuming this new name following the passing of our long-time partner and friend Jack Tilton. We are proud to have developed a seventeen+ year partnership that spans countless historically relevant exhibitions and an integrated gallery program of emerging artists as well as mid-career and renowned, international artists. Roberts Projects will continue this trajectory, and such the programing, artists and visionary nature of the gallery will remain the same.

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.