Posts tagged exhibitions

Pursuit of Freedom

The Nigger Huck Finn Pursues Happiness Beyond the Narrow Constraints of your Overdetermined Thesis on Freedom – Drawn and Quartered by Mister Kara Walkerberry, with Condolences to The Authors

With a title as prickly and unsettling as the imagery it represents, this installation by Kara Walker MFA 94 PT/PR went on view yesterday at Sikkema Jenkins & Co in New York, where it continues through May 22. It’s the first time the 2010 piece – which has been shown in San Francisco and Torino, Italy – is being exhibited in NYC. The installation makes use of Walker’s signature cut paper silhouettes, along with framed gouache and ink on paper pieces.

Hip-Hop-Era Giacometti

Huma Bhabha 85 PR could hardly dream of a better response to Unnatural Histories, her current solo show at MoMA PS1, than this ecstatic summary in The New Yorker:

A stunning abundance of recent sculpture and works on paper by the Pakistani-born virtuoso. Who would have thought that today’s strongest sculptor would advance forms of pedestalled figures with heart-wrenching, humanistic content? For all their slangy use of Styrofoam, wire mesh, crumpled drainpipes, bones, and other detritus – along with the more traditional wood, plaster, and bronze – Bhabha’s creations convincingly resuscitate several sorts of lapsed tradition, both primitive and classical. She’s our hip-hop-era Giacometti. 

In its own rave review (called Huma Bhabha Does Rodin Meets Mad Max), The Village Voice calls Bhabha’s sculpture “a rare species of mesmerizing bravura 3D art.”

And New York Times critic Karen Rosenberg notes that the juxtaposition of the materials she uses is “arresting,” with the overall effect of the show being to “bookend the history of figurative sculpture, from ancient fertility icons to what could be the last vestiges of the human race.”

In this post from polich tallix foundry, you can find out more about Bhabha’s process for producing her lost-wax cast pieces – some weighing as much as 1,100 lbs.

Unnatural Histories continues at MOMA PS1 through April 1.

Looking at Global Inequity

On Tuesday, February 12 Leila Heller Gallery in Manhattan will host a panel discussion on the extreme economic disparities in global society. The 6:30–8 pm discussion is free and open to the public, and is being held in conjunction with a two-person exhibition at the gallery featuring the work of Gayle Mandle MFA 97 PT/PR and her daughter Julia Mandle.

Panelists include Chrystia Freeland, author of the well-received new book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else; Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, who recently published The Price of Inequality; Roger Mandle, an art historian and former president of RISD, among many other art-focused positions throughout his career; and Gayle. The topical show itself runs through February 16.

Well-Adjusted Artists?

In an interview in the January issue of Modern Painters (and published on ARTINFO), Painting faculty member Christopher K. Ho clearly shows his “mordant wit.” He also talks about the inspiration behind his new show Privileged White People, which opened last week at Forever & Today in NYC.

In looking at the genesis of his well-named exhibition, Ho told aritst/interviewer Roger White – a privileged white person himself – that in teaching at RISD for over a decade, he has “encountered many preternaturally well-adjusted students. Their social ease impresses me,” he admits, adding that “looking back on my own early 20s, I didn’t have that at all.” 

So Ho began wondering: “How does well-adjustedness manifest in art? What is the visual and formal vocabulary of well-adjustedness, or of a generation of particularly well-adjusted people?”

Read more about it in the interview or better yet: see the show. Privileged White People continues through February 17.

Supermodels

Casey #4–50

To celebrate the launch of Horses, Rizzoli’s handsome 224-page monograph of new photographs by Jill Greenberg 89 PH, her New York gallery Clampart has been hosting a stunning show called Jill Greenberg: Horse (singular) this fall. And the exhibition has now been extended through December 21.

Mr. P #1587

In the book, Greenberg writes about “how the photography relates to gender issues and whether horses are perceived as feminine or masculine,” she says. She ends up “getting to the place where they’re both” – a combination of manly muscle, sensual eyes and soft, pastel colors.

Sid #174

In contrast to her previous series on monkeys and bears, the Horse photographs aren’t quite as anthropomorphized, Jill maintains. “If the monkeys and bears series were portraits of animals as actors, these are pictures of horses as if they were supermodels. It’s about figure studies and their physiques and their silhouettes.”

For more on Jill, check out last month’s interview with her on Los Angeles I’m Yours.

The Wired World of Pixilerations

Fantastic Show – through this Sunday

Breather by Robin Francesca Williams 06 IL

Take one look at the list of alumni with work in the RISD ICONS show – from Melinda Beck 89 GD towards the beginning of the alphabet to JooHee Yoon 11 IL at the end – and it’s clear that  there’s a lot of concentrated talent packed into a relatively small space at Woods-Gerry Gallery this week. (You can find photos from the opening here.)

A spread from Punk Farm by Jarrett Krosoczka 99 IL

Mounted in conjunction with last week’s ICON7 international illustration conference, it’s a show about just what its subtitle promises: A Legacy of Illustration from Rhode Island School of Design. And though the work is mostly 2D (as is to be expected), you can also “behold” The Brimp, a broccoli-shrimpy creature created by the inimitable Erminio Pinque 83 IL.

The show is open 10–5 daily, except on Sunday, when you have one last chance to catch it between 1 and 5.

Documenting Decline

After Ki Ho Park 86 PH /MFA 10 first graduated from RISD in the mid 1980s, he worked as a freelance photojournalist in Korea for 25 years, mostly documenting Asia’s rising economic dynamism for magazines like Fortune, Business Week and Time.

In 2008, when Ki Ho returned to RISD for grad school, he was shocked to see how much the America he knew – the economic powerhouse from the 1980s and ’90s – had changed. So he began photographing some of the ravages of the Great Recession, focusing on bankrupt businesses and deserted storefronts around the country.

Now, the resulting exhibition (and book) Everything Must Go is on view through the end of the month at Gallery Kayafas in Boston.

Watch for more on Ki Ho and some of the ways RISD artists and designers are surviving, driving and reviving the economy in the spring issue of RISD XYZ, the alumni magazine, due out in early May.

Meet Michelle Rawlings

It’s not every day a RISD student gets a solo show at an up-and-coming gallery. This Saturday Empathicalism, the fourth solo show for Michelle Rawlings MFA 12 PT, opensat the Oliver Francis Gallery in Dallas, the city where her father, Mike Rawlings, also happens to be mayor. The show, which examines the role of cultural institutions in shaping adolescence, features inkjet prints like Rawlings’ I Love You All (above).