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."

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.

A video presentation of Taylor White’s first solo presentation with the gallery. Seen together, these works, and this exhibition, are as close to a perfect harmony as a dissonant melody can be. Large-scale paintings are presented alongside more intimately scaled mixed-media work. Dominating, colorful abstraction gives way to found and imagined landscapes as though seen through windows or down rifle scopes. Each painting has a tough balance within itself. Multilayered pieces contain sociological determinations between industrial and rural, memory and nostalgia, identity and community. Alienation from society, loss of identity, and the loss of self are buried in the deeper parts. 

Betye Saar: Black Doll Blues brings together a selection of new watercolor works on paper, portraits of Saar’s personal collection of Black dolls. Referencing the underrepresented history of Black dolls as seen through Saar’s artistic lens, the works on view distill several intersecting themes, imagery, and objects in Saar’s oeuvre, highlighting her prominent usage and reinvention of derogatory imagery. 

SINGULAR DUALITY:  ME CAN MAKE WE is a solo exhibition by Amoako Boafo featuring new large-scale paintings that explore the tension of internal and external worlds, and of the complexities of shadow and light. Boafo’s second solo show with Roberts Projects expands on his oeuvre representing and celebrating Blackness, while introducing significant new themes.

Daniel Crews-Chubb narrates this tour of his exhibtion Solitary Us: Couples Paintings at Roberts Projects, July 10 - August 14, 2021. Featuring nine mixed-media collage paintings, this new body of work, produced during the lockdown period in the UK amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, continues Crews-Chubb’s exploration of human relationships and are self-reflective and reactionary to the sense of isolation the artist experienced at the time.

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.

Otis College of Art and Design presents Pioneers of the Feminist Art Movement: Rachel Rosenthal. This video is part of a series of Oral Histories about early feminist artists produced on the occasion of  Doin' It in Public: Art and Feminism at the Woman's Building Ben Maltz Gallery October 1, 2011 – January 28, 2012. In conjunction with the Getty Foundation's larger initiative, Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–80, which highlights the Post World War II Los Angeles art scene.

Dominic Chambers walks us through Like the Shape of Clouds on Water, his exhibition of paintings currently on view at The August Wilson African American Culture Center, Pittsburgh, PA (September 18 – December 13, 2020).

"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.

Jeffrey Gibson speaks about his ceramic works featured in Every Eye Open, as part of Roberts Projects participation in Gallery Platform LA, August, 2020. Gibson fashions his ceramics in the style of early Mississippian culture ceramic “head pots,” paying due to the complexities of American history by accessing a less prominent ceramics tradition.

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.

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.

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.

The exhibition "Betye Saar: Call and Response" looks at the relationship between found objects, sketches the artist then makes in small sketchbooks--which Betye Saar has made throughout her career--and finished works. In this short video LACMA’s Senior Curator of Modern Art and organizing curator of the exhibition, Carol S. Eliel, shares a few highlights from this rare look into a process that has spanned Saar’s entire career.

A multi-channel video created specifically for the screens of Times Square, She Never Dances Alone (2019) is Jeffrey Gibson’s celebration of the Indigenous matriarchy, centering on the jingle dress dance, a powwow dance that originated with the Ojibewea tribe and is traditionally performed by women to call upon ancestors for strength, healing, and protection. This Midnight Moment is presented with the Brooklyn Museum on the occasion of Gibson’s exhibition When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks. 

Kehinde Wiley, who traveled to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, discusses his connection and engagement with the world through "The World Stage" series. Through Wiley’s comprehensive exchange, the artist’s contemporary yet historical oeuvre accentuates international cultures and their denizens, evoking discourse on an ever-expanding examination of globalization.

Zhao Zhao's "Repetition" takes its form as a cube composed of smaller stone blocks, originally sourced from found demolished Buddha sculptures destroyed in the aftermath of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Zhao Zhao amassed a collection of dilapidated relics, later cutting them down to their largest quadrilateral shape. The ensuing pieces were then assembled to form a sculptural whole, carefully obscuring the original sources.  The end result - a perfect cube - embodies the persistence of beliefs, however abstract, despite their altering forms and how authority and its power is projected through the aesthecization of discourse.

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 the artist's upcoming project Chariots commissioned by English Heritage to be on view at Wellington Arch. 

A behind the scenes look at Kehinde Wiley’s working process for his current exhibition The Yellow Wallpaper on view at William Morris Gallery, London (February 22 - July 12, 2020). The film follows Wiley as he travels the streets of Dalston, East London to cast for a new body of work featuring female subjects and includes CCH Pounder's narration of American novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s iconic The Yellow Wallpaper (1892). The effect is that of examining the complex role of social class, status, religion, colonialism and the negotiation of gender. 

At 93, there’s no stopping when it comes to the legendary artist Betye Saar. Produced by LACMA Productions this documentary features the artwork of Betye Saar along with interviews and rare footage from the artist's archives.

The concept that painting can exist as an energized and haptic environment into which the artist transforms performative gestures into elliptical structures is at the heart of Evan Nesbit's art-making practice.  Nesbit speaks about his process and upcoming exhibition at Roberts Projects.

Smile is a four-channel video artwork Kehinde Wiley began while completing his MFA at Yale University in 2001. The artist revisited the project 15 years later, once again asking young men he found on the streets of New York to smile unceasingly in front of a camera for one hour. Within the video, the young men can be seen stoically submitting to discomfort and humiliation as their expressions distort under the pain and duress of the pursuit to appear happy. 

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 and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 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.

Los Angeles based Iranian American artist Ardeshir Tabrizi weaves historical and modern-day narratives in his Persian-inspired stitch paintings.

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. "Betye Saar: The Legends of Black Girl's Window" is on view at The Museum of Modern Art through January 4, 2020 

Jeffrey Gibson is a visual artist, melding 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.

Jeffrey Gibson's I Was Here (2018) mixes documentary and dramatic styles and centers on Macy, a transgender woman and a member of the Choctaw Nation. Blurring the lines between a mystical, natural setting and Macy's daily reality, Gibson's film examines the private and personal routines of transformation and self. The film's location, the Choctaw reservation in central Mississippi where Gibson's family is from, plays a significant role in the film's blend of spirituality, ritual, and the fantastical. The film was commissioned by the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College for Gibson's 2018 exhibition This Is the Day.

Amoako Boafo is an award-winning portraiture and figurative painter from Ghana, Africa who is based in Vienna, Austria. He came to Los Angeles, California in 2019 as part of an artist-in-residency program. Here he shares his challenges and hopes.

In the lead-up to the Whitney Biennial 2019, we visited five artists in their studios to learn more about their work. The first episode of the series features Jeffrey Gibson in his studio in Hudson, NY. Gibson discusses the inspiration for his sculptures—garments and a flag that greets visitors over the ticket desk. 

Jeffrey Gibson's "One Becomes the Other” (2014–2018) is set in the Native American archives and art storage of the Denver Art Museum. We see a man speaking Kiowa pick up a hand drum from a shelf and begin to play. A woman in a long, white dress with colorful patterns enters the halls, dancing in time. There is an improvised moment where an art handler asks to participate in the filming. He opens a drawer, and finds a Navajo weaving comb like his grandmother’s. He talks to the comb as if it is his deceased grandmother, bringing himself to tears. The sleeping objects are understood as living.

Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day Curated by Johnson-Pote Director Tracy L. Adler Videoography by Brett Novak Jeffrey Gibson’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses a wide range of mediums and draws on a variety of influences and visual languages to comment on race, sexuality, religion, and gender, among other topical issues. Combining popular and queer culture with references to Native American history and current events, Gibson reflects on his Choctaw and Cherokee heritage as a means of exploring the significance, traditions, and rituals of personal adornment and identity.

Produced to accompany the exhibition, Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, this video series features the artist himself discussing his background, work, process, philosophy, and art historical influences.

Brenna Youngblood: Abstracted Realities
Seattle Art Museum
November 13, 2015 – April 17, 2016

Artist Brenna Youngblood is Seattle Art Musuems’s 2015 Gwendolyn Knight | Jacob Lawrence Prize Winner, and her exhibition Abstracted Realities is on view at the Seattle Art Museum through April 17, 2016. The Gwendolyn Knight | Jacob Lawrence Prize is awarded bi-annually to an early career black artist—an individual who has been producing mature work for less than 10 years.

A prominent member of the post-1980s generation of Chinese artists and a former assistant of Ai Wewei, the Beijing artist talks about his visually stunning, anti-authoritarian and provocative work. Lilly Wei talked to the artist in his Beijing studio in 2015.

The works presented in Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic raise questions about race, gender, and the politics of representation by portraying contemporary African American men and women using the conventions of traditional European portraiture. The exhibition includes an overview of the artist’s prolific fourteen-year career and features sixty paintings and sculptures.

Directed by Mike Mills. Deformer (2000) features artist and professional skateboarder Ed Templeton and his wife Deanna. Giving an intimate look at the artist's multifaceted practice.