EXHIBITIONS TIMELINE
11.13.15- 4.3.16 | Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis | Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts | Philadelphia
3.12.17 - 7.3.17 | Kerry James Marshall: Mastry | Museum of Contemporary Art | Los Angeles
10.24.18 - 2.10.19 | Posing Modernity: The Black Model From Manet and Matisse to Today | Wallach Art Gallery | New York
5.24.19 - 1.12.20 | Artistic License, What Could Have Been | Guggenheim | New York
9.20.19 - 1.5.20 | Jason Moran | Whitney Museum of American Art | New York
5.14.16 - present | IDENTIFY: Performance Art as Portraiture | National Portrait Gallery | Washington, DC
PROCESSION: THE ART OF NORMAL LEWIS
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
"Procession: The Art of Normal Lewis” is the first comprehensive museum survey of the late Norman Lewis. A Bermudian-American artist, teacher, and scholar, Lewis was a vital figure in the Harlem Renaissance and in the Abstract Expressionist movement as well as an artist-activist whose work often commented on the marginalization of black artists and the dispossession of black communities.
The word “procession” was important to Lewis in terms of his artistic process as well as processional gatherings from protest marches to Carnival, all of which carried the duality of death and rebirth, of anger and of pleasure. Lewis formed an artist collective called Spiral along with Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, and Hale Woodruff. Spiral convened over “the potential of Black artists to engage with issues of racial equality and struggle in the 1960s through their work." In particular, Sprial protested the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1968 exhibition “Harlem on my Mind” which celebrated the vitality of the place, Harlem, without representing any art by artists from Harlem.
The exhibition of ninety paintings and works on paper explores the way that Lewis was an artist caught in the in-between. He wasn’t accepted with the white Abstract Expressionists, with whom he presented alongside at venues such as the Venice Biennale, with the same widespread adulation because of his identity. At the same time, he wasn’t entirely a member of the black artist community who almost exclusively painted representationally about issues of class and race.
While Lewis is now known as a central figure with an evolving career in the art of the 1930s-70s, had he not faced the discrimination that was inherent to the time, his works, which now sell at auction for $350,000 and above, would likely be selling at the same rate as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollack, whose paintings sell for anywhere from $11 million to $270 million.
Curators: Ruth Fine in coordination with PAFA Senior Curator and Curator of Modern Art Robert Cozzolino
Title unknown (March on Washington), 1865. oil on fiberboard. L. Ann and Jonathan P. Binstock. Copyright Estate of Norman W. Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC.
KERRY JAMES MARSHALL: MASTRY
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (and traveled to other venues)
"Kerry James Marshall: Mastry" was born at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and traveled to various museums around the country including the Met Brauer. The blockbuster career retrospective inserts the African American narrative into art history through iconography, symbolism, and color. His work is emphatic and rhetorical, not least in the way that he addresses the problems with the formal representation of art in institutions with his formalist approach to figure painting.
Curator Helen Molesworth remarked “To be black in America is to be double marked. On the one hand you are visible and your blackness is marked on your body, and on the other hand, your blackness renders you invisible to culture at large. So you’re always seen and aways invisible simultaneously.”
Artist Kerry James Marshall noticed from a young age that every museum he attended was missing images of people who looked like him. Molesworth called this an absence that was “so severe it was a presence.” Marshall decided that he not only needed to make images to counter the absence, but to counter the absence with such heavy handedness and skill that his body of work be accepted into the canon, and therefor changes the canon. He began to paint only ebony black figures, what Molesworth calls “unapologetically black.” She notes in the aesthetic world of Kerry James Marshall, blackness gets to be “a color, an identity, an aesthetic, a philosophy. We made blackness up and we can un-make it up.” Marshall’s painterly approach to making the invisible visible is technical and full of symbolism and detail. Every attribute of every painting has meaning and greater purpose in his goal of creating a new normal in the world of art institutions.
Curated by Helen Molesworth.
Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955) Untitled 2009 (Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shaiman Gallery, New York)
POSING MODERNITY: THE BLACK MODEL FROM MANET AND MATISSE TO TODAY
Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University
Curated by Denise Murell and based on her dissertation for Columbia University, the exhibition "Posing Modernity: The Black Model From Manet and Matisse to Today—and the scholarship that went into it—shone a bright light on the historical representation of black models in a multitude of important ways. It addressed the ignored figures in some of the world’s most celebrated works of art, and it traced the stylistic evolution of artists’ interpretations of black models from pejorative caricatures to beautiful icons.
The exhibition begins with an analysis of the black figure, Laure, in Manet’s ultra-famous “Olympia,” who was previously met by white scholars with a colonial gaze or as altogether invisible. Murrell reclaims the importance of Manet’s decision to include Laure in the painting and goes deeper to explore the loving pictorial conventions he used to illustrate her. Murell probes the meaning of her inclusion, and asks why we know nothing about her.
It is well-known that modern and impressionist artists gave a great deal of creative attention to individuals and groups who functioned outside of the white bourgeoise, who led what the bourgeoisie considered “fringe lifestyles,” like the artists themselves. Academia has done a lot to explore the so-called bohemian figures these artists painted from Toulouse Lautrec’s cabaret performers to Degas’ ballet dancers and absinthe drinkers, to Picasso’s “Saltimbanques,” or circus performers, to Manet’s prostitutes. But somehow, Matisse’s painting of a beautiful black “Woman in White,the presence of Jeanne Duval, whom Charles Baudelaire called a “Black Venus” in Manet’s “Lady with a Fan,” and Laure, the second of the two only figures in Manet’s “Olympia,” for example, have not been included in this extensive scholarship.
In focusing this exhibition, which eventually traveled to the Musée D’Orsay in Paris, on the black individuals represented as subjects rather than objects that we do have in popular art history, she is not only casting an important light on their overlooked presence, but loudly and critically commenting on the lack of attention given to them by scholars over time. Murrell’s work centers, reframes, and reclaims. Between the flawlessly researched lines, it asks, why and how has the canon of art history managed to ignore the importance of the black figure in even some of the world’s most iconic artworks? Art historians are called to respond in their current and future work.
Curated by Denise Murrell.
Édouard Manet, Lady with a Fan, 1862. Oil on canvas; 89.5 x 113 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.
ARTISTIC LICENSE: SIX TAKES ON THE GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION, "WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN"
Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection
Artist, photographer, performer, and scholar, Carrie Mae Weems made a powerful statement in response to the Guggenheim’s invitation to mine their collection and curate an exhibition. She took a formal and technical approach to addressing a question that has plagued her and currently plagues the art world at large: “What Could Have Been?” Using a black-and-white color palette, she brought together a range of media by diverse artists across several decades and juxtaposed objects that likely have never been shown together to create a balanced and intuitive aesthetic.
The reduction of the spectrum of color to black and white serves as an allegory for the ways the art world has reduced itself in its systemic racism, sexism, and classism. It is missing so much in the name of a distinction of “whitness” and “blackness,” which are made-up concepts in the first place. Exploring this in the form of conceptual art, like Joseph Beuys’ highly conceptual “Virgin,” an assembly of a table, chair, and lightbulb, is exceptionally fitting.
Calling out institutional neglect has been an important element of Weems’ body of work, and many institutions are now hip to their own neglect, and in that neglect, their inability to paint a holistic picture of the art of the United States and the world.
The use of black-and-white to explore issues of institutional representation was also employed by Norman Lewis’ collective, Spiral, noted above. This group used only monochromatic works in their first group exhibition—likely a comment on society’s predilection for segregating by color, the need for integration, and the absence of artists of color in institutional exhibitions.
Curated by Carrie Mae Weems.
JASON MORAN
Whitney Museum of American Art
Jason Moran is an artist, composer, and the current Artistic Director for Jazz at Washington, DC’s Kennedy Center. His experimental compositions are always in dialogue with his environment and the artists who came before him. In “Jason Moran,” the Whitney presents three sculptures that make up Moran's STAGED series, tributes to the iconic jazz venues of New York's past.
Moran said, "I love playing music from the past, but considering America's desire to raze cultural landmarks, why not fabricate those spaces as well? Architecture continues to inform music, from the big bands of the Savoy Ballroom, to the small groups at the Three Deuces. From the vast ballroom to the tiny stage."
Many culturally rich and eminent African-American landmarks have been lost to city planning and gentrification. Moran’s STAGED calls attention to this reality and puts a spotlight on vibrant and artistically generative jazz spaces from the Jim Crow era. By recreating scenes from Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, midtown’s Legendary Three Dances, and Alphabet City’s Slugs’ Saloon. By illuminating the joy, creativity, and solace these spaces provided, a contrast to the violent and painful environment from which they were born is evident. At times, instruments exhibited in the installation are played, but when they are not, Moran offers a soundtrack of Work Songs inspired by the melodies of prisoners and manual laborers that were developed in parallel to the jazz greats. The transhistorical installation is an allegory both to the destruction of African American cultural heritage, as well as the stifling of black voices in these spaces even at the height of the genre of jazz music.
Organized by the Walker Art Center, and curated by Adrienne Edwards with Danielle A. Jackson.
Jason Moran, STAGED: Savoy Ballroom 1, 2015
IDENTIFY: PERFORMANCE ART AS POTRAITURE
National Portrait Gallery
"DENTIFY: Performance Art as Portraiture" is an experimental series of site-specific performances that counteract the historical lack of representation on the National Portrait Gallery’s walls. The series also serves to critique the history of American portraiture at large and create an opening for change. Unwrapping the idea of what a portrait can be, each performance artist uses their physical body to address the bodies who have been rendered invisible by American history, and thus by the vast majority of Western-centric art institutions.
"IDENTIFY" is a responsible and innovative solution to a critical museum representation problem that is especially pronounced at the National Portrait Gallery. Through a new take on portraiture, the performance series relates a problematic past to a hopeful future, interweaving space, emotion, and time. That "IDENTIFY" performs these explorations in a building with a rich history of both innovation and exclusion is equally significant.
The National Portrait Gallery was founded in 1962 with a charge by Congress to collect and exhibit portraits of “men and women who have made significant contributions to the history, development, and culture of the people of the United States." The Portrait Gallery adheres to a founding set of bylaws that enforce this mission through stringent accession guidelines. The museum is not allowed to collect posthumously made portraits, and the bylaws further stipulate that the Board must ensure subjects meet a high standard of achievement to be voted into the collection.
"IDENTIFY" is a dynamic response to the critical need to make the invisible visible. It is an example of what Maura Reilly calls “not affirmative action curating, but smart curating." Further, "IDENTIFY" addresses directly the museum’s inability to change the history of American portraiture in its favoring of the white and wealthy. A particularly transhistorical form of art, performance is the best singular medium to emotionally tie together past and present stories of underrecognized aspects of our cultural identity. Through performance, a damaging history and a commitment to a better future can at once be expressed, received, and considered.
This elevates the museum space from a repository of portraits of the elite to an arena for problematizing the Institution, for healing and inclusion, and for the start of a decolonizing practice.
“The artists selected for IDENTIFY draw on autobiography and archival resources to consider their personal stories through the lens of historical exclusion,” shared Portrait Gallery Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Dorothy Moss. The series, which began in May 2016, has featured a range of emerging and established performance artists whose works probe the question of how to make the absent present and how to offer, in Maura Reilly’s words, “new perspectives on old stories. Artists presented include María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Sandy Huckleberry, J. J. McCracken, James Luna, Martha McDonald, Jeffrey Gibson, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, Sheldon Scott, and Wilmer Wilson, IV.
Curated by Dorothy Moss.
Views of IDENTIFY: Performance Art as Portraiture, featuring Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, photos by Paul Morigi