Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power shines a bright light on the vital contribution of Black artists made over two revolutionary decades in American history, beginning in 1963 at the height of the civil rights movement. The exhibition examines the influences, from the civil rights and Black Power movements to Minimalism and developments in abstraction, on artists such as Romare Bearden, Barkley Hendricks, Noah Purifoy, Martin Puryear, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Alma Thomas, Charles White, and William T. Williams. Los Angeles-based artists appear throughout Soul of a Nation, and more deeply in three specific galleries, foregrounding the significant role of Los Angeles in the art and history of the civil rights movement and the subsequent activist era, and the critical influence and sustained originality of the city’s artists, many of whom have lacked wider recognition.

Featuring the work of more than 60 influential artists and including vibrant paintings, powerful sculptures, street photography, murals, and more, this landmark exhibition is a rare opportunity to see era-defining artworks that changed the face of art in America.

TheBombay Beach Biennale is a renegade celebration of art, music, and philosophy that takes place each year on the literal edge of western civilization, at the shores of the Salton Sea. The Biennale, founded in 2015, transforms abandoned housing, vacant lots, and decaying shoreline into a unique canvas for creative expression. Artists, philosophers, creators and makers across many mediums donate their time and talents to the volunteer-led happening.

The 2019 event encompassed over 150 activations in 72 hours, including an academic conference, live music, performances, opera, ballet, film screenings, and multiple museum openings. Many of the art installations will become permanent fixtures within the town, which is being transformed through an ongoing infusion of artwork, creativity, and community engagement.  

The annual gathering is a celebration for the local residents, artists, volunteers and supporters who are investing their time and resources into the revitalization of Bombay Beach and increasing awareness of the Salton Sea environmental crisis.

I stand waist deep
in the decadence of forgetting.
The vain act of looking the other way.
Insisting there can be peace
and fecundity without confrontation.
The nagging question of blood hounds me.
How do I honor it?
– Essex Hemphill, The Father, Son and Unholy Ghosts, 1996

VSF is pleased to present unholy ghosts, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Diedrick Brackens (b. 1989, Mexia, TX). Employing the loom to explore intricate weaving techniques from West Africa, Kente textiles, and European tapestries, Brackens stitches together narratives of the American South, rebirth, and the changing of seasons for his new body of work. The titles and themes for this exhibition take inspiration from Essex Hemphill’s poem The Father, Son and Unholy Ghosts.

For Brackens, who identifies as a black queer person, the act of naming and birthing oneself is a radical gesture. Drawing from his personal life, ancestry, American history, and folklore, Brackens’ weavings are encoded with symbolic animals and materials that tease the knotted threads of American identity and sociopolitics. A bloodhound sniffs the ground for a subterranean figure in hiding, alluding to the terrorization of black bodies through the omnipresence of state-sanctioned violence. Catfish, on the other hand, occupy the space of spirits; swimming parallel to a levitating body, inside the heart of an aquatic being, or by hands outstretched to the sky, they are both ancestor and sustenance, the origin of human life. The silhouetted figures are born from Brackens’ projected shadow, a mirror of the self sewn with jet black yarns.

For the three non-figurative works, Brackens reimagines newborn receiving blankets distributed by American hospitals. Weaving his own version of the familiar swaddling cloth, a material meant to provide comfort in place of the trauma of leaving the womb, Brackens channels the domestic history of textiles while acknowledging the practice of hand weaving as an ancient act of creation.

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce The Eighties, an exhibition of work from the 1980s by Chris Martin. Featuring both paintings and works on paper, and including many works that have never before been exhibited, the show provides a window into a seminal period in the Brooklyn-based artist’s 40-year career. It opens on March 16 and will remain on view through April 27, 2019. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, March 16 from 6:00pm until 8:00pm.

The Eighties charts Chris Martin’s transformation from a painter of slow, heavily worked canvases into a radical figure willing to invite the widest possible range of materials and experiences into the studio. If he entered this period as a strictly abstract painter, he emerged as one who employed abstraction as methodology rather than an end result, and who became increasingly interested in infusing his work with archetypal symbols, found materials, and other vivid remnants of lived experience. Some works are truly composite objects: large-scale paintings constructed from multiple canvases, with their geometric formalism slipping into recognizable imagery.

On March 14, Maceo Paisley officially released his book, Tao of Maceo at NAVEL. The book launch was accompanied by a performance with dancer, Brianna Mims and a screening of Paisley’s short film, DYNAMITE, as well as a short Q&A with Maceo & Autre managing editor, Summer Bowie.

“The quotations in my works are like robbers lying in ambush on the highway to attack the passerby with weapons drawn and rob him of his conviction.” – Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” 1928

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to announce appear to use, a solo exhibition of Haim Steinbach, on view from March 16 – May 18, 2019 at the gallery’s Los Angeles location. For his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in over a decade, Steinbach will present a new body of work including objects, sculptures, site-specific installations, wall paintings and language-based work.

Since the 1970s Haim Steinbach has developed a widely influential practice that redefines structures of presentation and investigates the relationship between object and art, object and architecture, culture and language, and collection and display. With nods to the tradition of Duchamp and the conceptual logic of Minimalism, Steinbach’s work redefines the status of the object in art.

In this new exhibition Steinbach builds a site-specific architecture, reconstructing the gallery’s space. Using exposed building materials, such as free-standing stud walls and plasterboard, the artist invites the viewer to rethink the ways in which architecture influences our understanding of object, context, surface, the human body, and the relationships forged between them. Steinbach utilizes these materials as both language and form, engendering an experience where the viewer is invited to navigate the space; raising an awareness to how the body functions in its surroundings, while exploring rhythm, repetition and seriality.

Entering the gallery, the viewer first encounters two works that highlight the artist’s ongoing exploration of language, color and narrative. Untitled (Pantone 17-5641) features a tin box supporting a green rectangle. Display #103—the band if it is white and black the band has a green string includes the quote from Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons.” The quote is integrated into a wall, an architectural construct. It faces the tin box that sits in a handcrafted wooden box.

Encore

Reenactment in Contemporary Photography

Contemporary artists who reenact older works of art often put a new spin on the original themes. Featuring seven photographers—Eileen Cowin, Christina Fernandez, Samuel Fosso, Yasumasa Morimura, Yinka Shonibare CBE, Gillian Wearing, and Qiu Zhijie—this exhibition explores how re-staging can highlight underrepresented stories and critique established narratives. Presented in three categories—personal history, political history, and art history—the works showcase very different approaches to engaging with the past.