Today our guest is artist Nnenna Okore.  Finding reusable value in discarded materials, Okore enriches her work with layers of meaning through familiar and painstaking processes.

As many Web sites, blogs, and Twitter users have pointed out, [Kendrick] Lamar’s video—directed by him, his manager and childhood friend Dave Free, and the German photographer Jonas Lindstroem—draws directly from the work of the photojournalist Gordon Parks. 

Is it beautiful? Is it he or she? The decision is up to you. The English artist Annie Kevans contributes a portrait of Hari Nef, the transgender fashion model. “Like art, beauty is subjective, and there is an inherent freedom in that,” Kevans says. “In this unique time in history, when global discrepancies have never been more apparent, transgender models such as Hari Nef and Andreja Pejic remind us how fortunate we are to live in a society that not only accepts diversity but finds it beautiful.”

Kendrick Lamar’s new “ELEMENT.” video is striking, but it’s also much more than that. Beyond its stunning imagery, the video doubles as an homage to the legendary photographer Gordon Parks. In 3 minutes and 33 seconds, co-directors Jonas Lindstroem and the Little Homies (comprised of Kendrick Lamar and Dave Free) referenced some of Parks’ most remarkable work, all while making a statement of their own.

Lalla Essaydi’s photograph “Converging Territories #29” pursues a similar idea, to earthier results. A cloaked woman’s back is turned from the camera, her shape and even surroundings swaddled in sumptuous, swirling eddies of Arabic calligraphy.

Two of the most subversive pieces in Revival are from Arab artist Lalla Essaydi’s Bullets Revisited series. The photos are eerily reminiscent of 19th century Orientalist paintings that fetishized Arab women through a Western gaze.

“Osimili” an exhibition of works by Nigerian artist Nnenna Okore started on June 1 and will run through July 15, 2017, at Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco.

In the Feature section, Jenkins Johnson (San Francisco) turns the spotlight to photographer Gordon Parks, who chronicled the years of racial segregation and the struggle for Civil Rights. Poignant testimonies of disadvantaged families in Harlem in the 1940s and of ordinary racism in the 1960s. Karen Jenkins-Johnson is the first black gallery owner to join Art Basel. "I am still considered a second-class citizen, and at the fair, people tend to address my white team rather than me,” she sighs, “But we are beginning to reap the rewards of the fight started by our parents. There is still a long way to go, but there is also hope."

Jenkins Johnson Gallery of San Francisco, exhibiting at the Swiss edition of [Art Basel] for the first time, will show a selection of images by the African-American photographer Gordon Parks in the Survey sector.

In the wake of the controversy surrounding the display of Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016) at the Whitney, which came to focus on (among other things) the ethics of transforming documentary photography into art, New York’s Jenkins Johnson Gallery presents Gordon Parks’ photographs, including his celebrated images of the civil rights struggle.

With the exhibition Gordon Parks -  I Am You. Selected Works 1942-1978, Foam presents 120 works from the collection of  The Gordon Parks Foundation, including vintage prints, contact sheets, magazines, and film excerpts.

The “King” of art fairs is fertile ground for fresh perspectives — and ripe with opportunities for smart collectors, explains Natalie Hegert, who spoke to this year’s newest participants.

Owner Karen Jenkins-Johnson is using her Art Basel in Basel debut to present three artists whose social critiques on issues such as violence, marginalized communities, and civil rights feel especially topical right now.

Jenkins Johnson Gallery's presentation of the Gordon Parks solo booth at Art Basel 2017 was featured on Artsy's homepage.

Congratulations to Lavar Munroe, who is a participating artist in Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, Chief Curator, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

Concurrent with Jenkins Johnson Gallery's presentation of his work at EXPO Chicago from September 13 - 17, Lavar Munroe will speak on the panel, Race and Representation in Contemporary Institutions,moderated by Perry Irmer, president and CEO, the DuSable Museum of African American History. Other panelists include Michelle Joan Wilkinson, curator, National Museum of African American History & Culture, and Bomi Odufunade of Dash & Rallo Art Advisory.

Born in Australia, raised in Nigeria and currently based in Chicago, artist Nnenna Okore has exhibited her multimedia works widely around the globe. Through September 10, 2017, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art’s 70-foot-tall rotunda is filled with Okore’s suspended burlap installation, Sheer Audacity. Okore fuses metaphorical content with labor-intensive processes and tactile material, and over the course of her career, her works have spanned topics from recycling and consumerism to the inescapable cycles of nature and life.

“Osimili,” Okore’s upcoming solo exhibition at San Francisco’s Jenkins Johnson Gallery (June 1 – July 15, 2017), also incorporates burlap material in wall-bound works resembling wild, overgrown flora. Okore spoke with art ltd. about this new series, her role as a mentor and chair of the art department at North Park University, and the common threads that wind through the varied works in her oeuvre.

Lavar Munroe's painting, Fallen, Godspeed, Glory (Angel No. 2), 2016, appeared on hit Fox TV Show, Empire, in its most recent episode, Toil & Trouble, Pt.1. In the middle of a heist, Munroe's painting is found hanging on the cover of a safe Cookie's sister, Carol, is sent in to crack.

LOS ANGELES — Spanning the length of a large gallery wall at the California African American Museum is a slim rectangular grid of 100 images of women whose names and identities are unknown. Approaching the wall, the individual portraits of black women emerge into focus with their movement and features punctuated by fluid brushstrokes and pops of watercolor. Many of the women are dancing while others are simply posing. Some appear frenetic, while a few exercise calm, quiet rituals of self-care, like braiding hair. Each of the 9-by-12 inch works on white recycled paper is affixed to the wall by two pins. They are not framed. Freed from the narrow confines of boxes, these unidentified women demand that their stories be told.

We are all worried about Black and Latino girls considered “critically missing” in Washington, D.C.  but for Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle it all has started years ago. Hinkle is using has used her artistic talent to depict the bodies and lives of Black women who have gone missing, and whose stories have been erased.

Jenkins Johnson Gallery: If the shows mounted here have been inclusive, they've also been especially attuned (and allotted generous space) to works by women artists, who are often constrained or confronted by gender/identity politics, social upheaval, sexism and backlash. 

Last week, people of color mobilized on social media to spread awareness of the alarming number of black and brown young women currently considered “critically missing” in Washington, D.C. 

The viral effort, along with sharing facts regarding the missing teens, encouraged others to question why cases about missing black women often go uncovered by the nightly news and other mainstream media sources. “As a society, we only pay attention when a particular type of woman goes missing,” artist Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle told The Huffington Post. 

Few industries are as controversial as the sex industry. And few workers are as judged, stigmatised and heaped with the pre-conceived notions of others as sex workers.

It was these ideas that lead London-based photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten to turn her lens to women who use their bodies to earn a living, in an attempt to understand what might lead a person to go into sex work by choice. The resulting photobook, called The Act, features escorts, pornstars, lap and pole-dancers, a stripper, a webcam girl, sex “slaves”, a dominatrix, a burlesque dancer; aerial artistes and a ping pong girl. Each is depicted on a stage to highlight how their work involves an element of performance. 
 

Photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten's latest project, The Act, captures women in the sex industry in theatrical scenes and allows them to tell their own stories.

Curator, Christian L. Frock offers a review of Dialogues in Drawing upon the opening of the exhibition.

One hundred drawings by Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle of 100 missing African American women simultaneously startle and beguile. Their subject represents the tip of a statistical iceberg of almost unfathomable scope — thousands of black women disappear every year in the United States, whether through criminal activity or for other motives, but their names and faces most often remain obscure.

Mounted in celebration of Women’s History Month, Dialogues in Drawing features 17 artists, and black women are well represented.

While contemporary art in its purest definition belongs to the present, it often proves difficult to disentangle the present moment from history. Artist Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle understands this — and she embraces it fully. She’s made it the crux of her work, giving the past and present equal footing and importance in her artistic production.

“Humanity Today,” the Jenkins Johnson Gallery’s latest exhibition, wants people to talk and think and question the world in 2017. The exhibition title itself, open for interpretation, posits the question: What do you, the viewer, believe is the state of humanity today?

The California African American Museum kicks off its exhibition cycle this Wednesday with shows about the 1992 LA Uprising and historical disappearance of African-American women.

How do artists stand up for what they believe in? With the rise of right-wing politics in the U.S. and Europe, people across all seven continents have felt a renewed urgency to fight for civil liberties. Though the pundits and politicians may have changed since the 1960s, many of the same issues are at stake.

In her upcoming work, The Evanesced, debuting March 2 at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, Hinkle calls attention to Black women who go missing as a result of sex trafficking and domestic abuse. Her archival photographs and drawings capture a sense of joy and trauma.

 

Contemporary black radical aesthetic practices that emphasize materials that surface, texture, and visualize blackness ineluctably trouble, if not unravel, the panoptic qualities of the visual itself. It is without a doubt that images play a hyperactive role in our understanding of black life, but what of the material matters of black resistance?

With so many things to do in San Francisco, it's easy to miss the many fantastic art exhibits and shows that pass through smaller galleries, as opposed to big museum shows. While it's nearly impossible for even the most ardent art lover to see it all, TimeOut has once again curated a collection of must see exhibits currently (or soon to be) gracing the walls of San Francisco's finest art spaces.

Carlos Javier Ortiz, a photojournalist and filmmaker who has documented the effects of violence in Chicago for more than a decade, has been named one of four winners of the 2017 Studs Terkel Community Media Award.

Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery is hosting a major new collaborative project by internationally renowned artists Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat.

What Can Be Seen will present a bold, playful reimagining of the city’s historic museum collections alongside new work by the artists, produced especially for the exhibition.

Join us in celebrating our 3 year anniversary in collaboration with Oakland Museum of California! We’re excited to have Oakland-born artist Sadie Barnette and her father, former Black Panther Rodney Barnette speak on the theme, Moments. Sadie Barnette has used the 500-page FBI surveillance file kept on her father as source material for a series of art works currently on view in OMCA’s All Power To The People: Black Panthers at 50 exhibition.

Impressions: African American artists and their connection to African Art

Featuring artwork by Andrea Chung, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle and Robert Pruitt and artifacts from the San Diego Mesa College African Art Collection

Co-curated by Alessandra Moctezuma and Denise Rogers, Ph.D.

February 9 – March 1, 2017

Reception: Thursday, February 9, 4:30 – 6:30 pm, Art Gallery D101

Artists’ Lecture at 6:30 pm following reception.

The exhibition Africas Capital, dedicated to African cities. Is the occasion to discover during an urban wandering the contemporary African art scene through all the media: paintings, photos, installations, videos, sculptures, sound creations ...

Children’s Museum of the Arts is pleased to announce Weather or Not, That is the Question, an exhibition about the power, mystery, and grandeur of weather and its impact on our environment. 

Exhibition at Jenkins Johnson Gallery features established masters and exciting emerging artists.

A review of the past year in black art makes clear that the challenges are as real as the possibilities.

Ethiopian photographer and contemporary artist Aida Muluneh has lived all over the world before returning to her homeland where she found inspiration for her art.

ADDIS ABABA - Surrounded by untidy stacks of paper and abandoned half-empty coffee cups, photographer Aida Muluneh chain smokes cigarettes in her Addis Ababa office and rails against the negative portrayals of Africa by foreigners.

Collect a set of instructions that encourage you to experience the galleries in new and different ways

In the early hours of Monday morning, history was made on the occasion of KSA’s (King Sunny Ade) 70th birthday and 50th anniversary on stage, which held at the Federal Palace Hotel and Casino. The legendary musician’s vintage Fender Telecaster Guitar was auctioned off at an astounding N52.1 million, thanks to the masterful artistic design by none other than – Victor Ehikhamenor.

Untitled takes a curatorial approach, combining 129 galleries from 20 different countries. This year the show is bright and bold, though that shouldn’t distract the viewer from the many conversations around gender, race and, of course, US politics.

The booths and fair tents have now been vacated, and life in Miami restored to normal traffic woes. But the female voices present at Miami Art Week – an annual flurry of fairs that descend upon the city each December – have resonated far beyond these temporary events.

One by one, over 6 days, Forced Entertainment performers condense 36 Shakespeare plays into a series of works of less than an hour each played out on a one meter tabletop – each play comically and intimately retold via a series of lovingly made miniatures and a collection of everyday unextraordinary objects.

To be, or not to be a bottle of balsamic vinegar, that is the question.

It really was the question, at least  when the unorthodox British performance troupe Forced Entertainment conceived of its latest project, “Table Top Shakespeare,” which runs Tuesday through Saturday at the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA.

The beauty of art is that it starts with one person’s dreams and ideas, which are then realized in a painting, sculpture or other art medium. From there it lives on forever, hopefully for all the world to see. That’s one reason it’s so important that the artwork of black artists, who often document the good and bad of our lives, flourish in this new, emerging worldview.

In the past three years, McArthur Binion has been one of the art world’s bigger stories — celebrated for his grid paintings that play with people’s perceptions of surface and foundation, and celebrated for his re-emergence from a level of obscurity that had reduced him to a kind of footnote for 30 years.

Three months ago, Artspace canonized the Chicagoan as one of “108 international artists who are revolutionizing painting today.” A year earlier,Art+Auction magazine called Binion one of the world’s “25 most collectible mid-career artists.” And around the same time, the Wall Street Journallauded Binion’s paintings for their “beauty and meaning.”

Maybe it’s watching our democratic institutions threatened with dismantlement on a daily basis as a rich egomaniac with autocratic tendencies prepares to assume the US presidency, but I had trouble concentrating at the 2016 Untitled art fair. An air-conditioned, art-filled tent on a beach (in a city that’s sinking but refuses to reckon with climate change) is basically a physical manifestation of the neoliberal art world bubble; as someone without a stockpile of money, I did not feel reassured being inside it.

Painter Ben Aronson's works will be featured in museum exhibitions throughout the United States and interntionally, including: The New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT; Takaoka Art Museum, Takaoka, Japan; The Orangerie, Gera, Germany; Taizhou Museum, Taizhou, China; The Mazovian Museum, Plock, Poland; Mon Cultural Museum, Mawlamyine, Myanmar.

Tim Etchells, in collaboration with choreographer Meg Stuart, perform an improvised evening, "Shown & Told," at the Kaaitheatre in Brussels from November 30 - December 2, 2016.

BLACK PORTRAITURE[S] III: Reinventions: Strains of Histories and Cultures is the seventh conference in a series of conversations about imaging the black body. It offers a forum that gives artists, activists, and scholars from around the world an opportunity to share ideas from historical topics to current research on the 40th anniversary of Soweto. Presenters will engage a range of topics such as Biennales, the Africa Perspective in the Armory Show, the global art market, politics, tourism, sites of memory, Afrofuturism, fashion, dance, music, film, art, and photography.

The conference will be held November 17-19, 2016 in Johannesburg and held in collaboration with the U. S. Department of State, U.S. Ambassador to South Africa, Patrick H. Gaspard, Goodman Gallery, Hutchins Center for African & African American Research/Harvard University, New York University’s LaPietra Dialogues, Tisch School of the Arts and the Institute of African American Affairs.

Tim Etchells and Forced Entertainment are partaking in a mini-residency at the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts in Brighton from November 10 - 12. The group will present the UK premiere of "Real Magic," their new performance directed by Etchells, and their 6-hour improvised durational work around storytelling, "And on the Thousandth Night."

Tim Etchells and collaborator, violinist Aisha Orazabayeva, present their dynamic, improvised sound and voice performance "Seeping Through" at Tom Thumb Theatre in Margate on Friday, November 11.

A few years ago, the artist Robert C. Jackson decided to write a book about contemporary realist painting. He chose 19 fellow artists whom he considered the most interesting, and instead of writing about them from his own point of view, he decided to interview them and let them explicate their own work. He also interviewed himself, bringing the total to 20. In 2014, the results were published in book form, along with reproductions of all the artists’ work, under the title Behind the Easel. The Pennsylvania-based Jackson, at 52 a senior and much-respected figure in the world of representational painting, had created a sort of democratic manifesto for contemporary realism, and now his book has become the basis of an exhibition at the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington, “Truth and Vision: 21st Century Realism,” which opens on October 22 and runs through January 22.

Litmus Press selects Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle's book SIR for publication, Fall 2017. Litmus calls her manuscript "timely and resonant with [their] mission... The cross-genre SIR articulates an intimate familial history that speaks urgently to the vulnerability of the black male body in the ongoing crisis of U.S. racial politics." 

Gallery Artist Scott Fraser included in "Truth & Vision: 21st Century Realism," inspired by Robert C. Jackson's 2014 publication, "Behind the Easel: The Unique Voices of 20 Contemporary Representational Painters."

KERRY JAMES MARSHALL’S AMERICA
An exhilarating retrospective at the Met Breuer is not an appeal for progress in race relations but a ratification of advances already made.

Marshall’s compliment to the Met is expressed by a show within the show, of works from the museum’s collection that he particularly values. He selected paintings by four modern African-American artists—Horace Pippin, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Charles Wilbert White (a W.P.A. muralist who was an inspirational teacher of Marshall’s in college)—and three African sculptures: a Dan mask, a Senufo oracle figure, and a Bamana Boli (a featureless animal encrusted with “sacrificial” matter, including blood). But most of the works are by dead white men, from Veronese and Holbein through Ingres and Seurat to Balthus and de Kooning, with surprising nods to George Tooker, Paul Cadmus, and Andrew Wyeth. In each case, an intellectual spark leaps to some aspect of Marshall’s art: eloquent figurative distortion, from Ingres and de Kooning; dark tonality, from Seurat and Ad Reinhardt; and theatrical violence, from nineteenth-century Japanese prints. Only one choice baffled me: a blushy Bonnard nude, which feels antithetical to Marshall’s manner. (Is that the ironic point of its inclusion?)

The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum held its annual fundraising gala in New York, a gathering of artists, curators and collectors, where 40 artists including Rashid Johnson, Tony Lewis, Rodney McMillian, and Adam Pendleton, were honored.

Painter McArthur Binion, featured in Viewpoints, was recently profiled by Artspace writer Loney Abrams.

Glycerin. Sheep brains. Embalmed specimens. Miscellaneous laboratory paraphernalia.

Since joining the Washington University faculty in 1986, artist Ron Leax has built a national reputation for rigorous yet playful sculptures and installations that explore the natural world while interrogating the language and concepts we use to describe it. In Leax’s work, the familiar taxonomies of empirical knowledge — books, catalogues, sample libraries — are overwhelmed by the very forces they seek to master.

Concerns about representation and space continue to be on the forefront of on-campus discussions and not just within Yale College.

The fourth edition of the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London opened Wednesday morning at Somerset House, the neoclassical palace overlooking the River Thames. This year, 1:54 is showcasing 40 galleries from 18 countries, representing a diverse spread of the vast African continent and its diaspora in the Victorian east and west wings of the Tudor mansion.

We the People
Yes, we the people, we are responsible for the world around us.
The first three words of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America. 
Three words that remind the individual power of each and every one of us. Indeed, the world around us is built and transformed by individual acts put together: investment of economic actors, decision-intellectual position or opinion decisions leaders, political leaders, but also and especially succession individual actions that might be considered trivial but, repeated, become major. 

Melanie Pullen makes #314 on ArtNet's Top 500 Artists from the United States, Born 1966 or After.

Letters, hand-written, stamped and posted, are archaic throwbacks to a culture we nostalgically dub ‘slowness’ – slow food, slow beer, slow sex, slowed down hand-made things. The art gallery however has remained largely immune to this threat to slowness. Instead, in a witheringly ephemeral world the art gallery has thrived as the uber trading hub, temple, and outpost for the authenticity and provenance of things. An ‘alternative religion for atheists’, Sarah Thornton notes in Seven Days in the Art World, it is a reminder that faith in the fetish object, its ritualised practice, culture and economy, remains very much alive.

'We were kids - but good kids. If I may say so myself. We're much smarter now, so smart it's pathetic. Except for Bavink, who went crazy'

A husband forms gruesome plans for his new fridge; a government employee has a haunting experience on his commute home; prisoners serve as entertainment for wealthy party guests; an army officer suffers a monstrous tropical illness. These short stories contain some of the most groundbreaking and innovative writing in Dutch literature from 1915 to the present day, with most pieces appearing here in English for the first time. Blending unforgettable snapshots of the realities of everyday life with surrealism, fantasy and subversion, this collection shows Dutch writing to be an integral part of world literary history.

Joost Zwagerman (1963-2015) was a novelist, poet, essayist and editor of several anthologies. He started his career as a writer with bestselling novels, describing the atmosphere of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Gimmick!(1988) and False Light (1991). In later years, he concentrated on writing essays - notably on pop culture and visual arts - and poetry. Suicide was the theme of the novel Six Stars (2002). He took his own life just after having published a new collection of essays on art, The Museum of Light.

Hinkle’s work focuses on perceptions and misperceptions of the black female body, tackling issues of race head-on. She’ll give an artist talk Sept. 18 at 6:30 p.m. in the Moss Arts Center’s Merryman Family Learning Studio.

In Real Life: Studio provides a glimpse into the working processes of artists. Throughout the fall a select group of artists utilizes spaces in the museum to convene and rehearse new material, including theater, dance, music, and performance. While some artists and collectives will simply discuss or workshop material, others will produce a new project from rehearsal to final performance.

In her new fine art series "The Act," photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten addresses the sex industry through the women who choose to work within it. Presented individually on tailor-made sets, her subjects include escorts, porn stars, burlesque performers, strippers, erotic dancers, and a dominatrix. Each image is accompanied by an interview, conducted by Fullerton-Batten herself. At the heart of the project is an exploration of agency—as an adult, as a woman, as a sexual being. 

My most recent projects have involved social commentary on various aspects of past and present society. The role of the sex industry in today’s society and sex-worker rights have been heavily debated and disputed in recent years. The content of these often heated discussions have interested me and I finally decided to take on the challenge of building a project around the work and lives of young women engaged in the sex industry. As a fine-art photographer and despite my own personal open-mindedness, I approached this particular project with some trepidation as I knew it could be controversial and, in some respects, overstep the boundary between erotic fine-art imagery and pornography. The project is comprehensive and includes main images of the women ‘at work’, personal portraits of each of them, a video and written ‘stories’ of their lives built up from my interviews with them.

The Collective, a contemporary art programme, consists of rotating exhibitions and a permanent collection. Through The House of St Barnabas’ spirit of collaboration and commitment to nurturing talent, the organisation invites artists, galleries and curators to either permanently donate or loan works to the club.  It shows a range of work, including pieces by Damien Hirst, The Chapman Brothers, Tracey Emin, Roxy Walsh and Tom Gallant.

The Provincetown, Massachusetts, Collection of Tom And Robert Adamson Displays Art By Leading Contemporary Realists. 

“We seldom go on art walks or to visit galleries. We rely heavily on the internet and on Karen Jenkins-Johnson and her galleries in San Francisco and New York...."

This week I’m in residence at Tate Modern, London, for the opening of Tate Exchange, located on Level 5 of the new building, Switch House. My programme consists of separate but overlapping events that run from Thursday 29 September until Sunday October 2nd.

Bunched under the name The Give & Take my residency explores the idea of exchange in different spheres of life, work and society; the complex processes by which we teach and learn from each other, the systems we are caught in that both frustrate and make possible our connection. The work itself is constructed as an exchange – a framework of events that’s built to encourage conversations, meetings, arguments, encounters between members of the public, artists and thinkers.

In partnership with the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) as part of FIAF’s 2016 Crossing the Line Festival, Times Square Arts will highlight the human details that bring us together with Tim Etchells’ Eyes Looking, which will appear on Times Square’s electronic billboards from 11:57 p.m. to midnight every night in October. This project is a part of Midnight Moment, a monthly presentation by the Times Square Advertising Coalition (TSAC) and Times Square Arts.

There has been a reshuffling of the deck as far as Bay Area galleries are concerned, especially in the city, where quite a few have moved from downtown and created art hubs in less centralized, more affordable locations, not to mention a proliferation of new galleries in Oakland as well as San Francisco. Too much to do justice to in this brief space, but, in microcosm, here's what's happening this fall.

Join Teaching Specialist Molly Medakovich for an in-depth exploration of Scott Fraser’s Three Fishermen.

A few years ago, the artist Robert C. Jackson decided to write a book about contemporary realist painting. He chose 19 fellow artists whom he considered the most interesting, and instead of writing about them from his own point of view, he decided to interview them and let them explicate their own work. He also interviewed himself, bringing the total to 20. In 2014, the results were published in book form, along with reproductions of all the artists’ work, under the title Behind the Easel. The Pennsylvania-based Jackson, at 52 a senior and much-respected figure in the world of representational painting, had created a sort of democratic manifesto for contemporary realism, and now his book has become the basis of an exhibition at the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington, “Truth and Vision: 21st Century Realism,” which opens on October 22 and runs through January 22.

The National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, DC, has added 173 photographs by the American photographer Gordon Parks to its collection as part of an acquisition of 304 works from the now closed Corcoran Gallery of Art. Many of the works will be shown at the National Gallery as part of the exhibition Gordon Parks: The New Tide, 1940-50 (11 November 2018-18 February 2019), which surveys his early work.

Parks (1912-2006) was the kind of photographer whose work ranged widely. He chronicled crime in American cities like Chicago, where he visited a morgue to document the aftermath of murder. He photographed the March on Washington in 1963, for which 250,000 people came out to hear Martin Luther King Jr give his “I Have a Dream” speech. He did high fashion shoots for Life and Vogue magazines on the streets of New York, reported on segregation in the American South and visited Alexander Calder in his Connecticut studio. He even followed Muhammad Ali to Miami in 1970 to profile the fighter just before his first match in more than three years following his suspension for refusing to go to Vietnam.

Fondazione Berengo sponsors a program to further its commitment to keeping the glassmaking traditions of Murano alive. The program is designed to allow students and artists who have worked in glass to develop and refine their skills by working in a traditional Murano furnace. The residents are encouraged to experiment with both traditional and innovative processes involving glass as a medium consistent with the foundation’s mission. Artists work side-by side with the glass maestros who provide guidance and a hands-on experience.

The resident will work in the Berengo Studio furnace on Murano which is designed to accommodate a wide variety of glass working techniques. In addition to furnaces for blowing and casting, the factory contains a cold-working facility and annealing ovens, designed for blowing, casting or kiln forming. 

Generally, the Fondazione Berengo requires that the resident be sponsored by an educational or cultural institution. The length of the residency varies, depending on an individual’s experience, the project and, if applicable, the requirements of the sponsoring institution. A stipend for living expenses is provided.

Visual activist Zanele Muholi, who hails from Umlazi in KwaZulu-Natal, is officially the most powerful female artist in Africa, according to ArtReview magazine’s annual Power 100 list of influencers in the contemporary art world.

Muholi, who made it on the list at position 95, joins big names such as Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor (at number 20) and South African artist William Kentridge at position 62.

ArtReview describes Muholi as a “Johannesburg-based photographer, film maker and self-titled ‘visual activist’ at the forefront of both celebrating the existence of, and campaigning against the violence faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex communities in her native South Africa and beyond”.

In a land far away, where the halls are lined with student and faculty work, where your imagination is brought to life, lies the Kimura Art Gallery.

Located on the second floor of the art building, most students outside of the art department have never heard of the internationally renowned gallery lying just on the other side of campus. The Kimura Gallery has shown work from artists all over the world, and their hope, according to their website, is to show a “space that provides students, faculty, and the community with the opportunity to view and experience artwork that explores national and international contemporary culture.”

The Kimura Gallery is made possible by Charles Licka, his wife Geanne Ilgen, and Becky White. Their hard work and dedication to the gallery is what keeps everything running smoothly.

In a very personal portrait series Arrivals and Departures Jacob Aue Sobol tells of his journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway across the Asian continent. Kajsa Gullberg observed in her hometown Copenhagen that in February, the highest suicide rates are always recorded, and arranged in response sumptuous still life with roses, peonies and lilies in the series winter depression . 

Following on from the success of Paradise Lost in 2014, tactileBOSCH are delighted to be taking part in Cardiff Contemporary once again to produce Garden of Earthly Delights.  Garden of Earthly Delights will be a dizzying array of site-specific installation, video, painting, photography, sculpture, sonic art, interdisciplinary collaborations and spontaneous interventions. Come and join us at the launch.

As you begin a journey of discovery through the atmospheric Custom & Immigration building, you will be completely immersed, interacting with art works, music and live performance. Local, national and international artists provide a contemporary response to the Hieronymous BOSCH (Garden of Earthly Delights) tryptych in a celebration of his 500 year anniversary. Over 70 artists are taking part in the exhibition with various events happening over the month.

This exhibition features work by the internationally acclaimed Dutch photographers, Hendrik Kerstens and Erwin Olaf. Inspired by the moody manipulation of light and shadow that characterises the paintings of Dutch masters such as Rembrandt and Vermeer, these photographers create emotionally charged portraits that draw attention to the liminal nature of contemporary life.

Dutch masters of light: Hendrik Kerstens and Erwin Olaf is part of a series of events that mark the 400th anniversary of the first Dutch contact with Western Australia. On 25 October 1616, Dirk Hartog made landfall with his ship the Eendracht at Dirk Hartog Island, in the Shark Bay area.

Ben Aronson, who creates street scenes in New York, Paris and San Francisco, uses a style that is a curious combination of specific and vague.

As We See It: The Collection of Gail and Ernst von Metzsch will feature over 80 paintings by more than 30 American artists, whose careers have been championed by Boston-based collectors Ernst and Gail von Metzsch throughout their 36 years of collecting.

Atlantic Center for the Arts is a nonprofit interdisciplinary artists' community and arts education facility dedicated to promoting artistic excellence by providing talented midcareer artists an opportunity to work and collaborate with some of the world's most distinguished contemporary artists in the fields of music composition, and the visual, literary, and performing arts. Community interaction is coordinated through on-site and outreach presentations, workshops and exhibitions.

Fans may recognize Russell Tovey as the beleaguered werewolf in BBC’sBeing Human, Patrick’s love interest in HBO’s Looking, or, more recently, as the enigmatic new character on ABC’s runaway hit Quantico. But what may be lesser-known about the actor is his off-screen relationship with contemporary art—a serious passion he regularly touts on Instagram.

African American artists have lately become the focus of new levels of attention in the museum sphere, and an artnet analysis of auction data shows a rising market for a distinct group of black artists in the last eight years—coincidentally or not, during the term of America’s first black president.

This recent recognition of African American artists has been a long time coming. Many observers have pointed out that Western art galleries and museums have long shown and collected many more white male artists than people of color or women. To find out how African American artists fare at auction, we take a look at data from the last 30 years, focusing on American artists born after 1955. For this analysis, rather than individual prices, we focus on auction volume (the total of their sales in a given year), which offers a broader reflection of the appetite for artists’ work.

A camera does not just shoot images. It is a powerful instrument against oppression, racism, violence and inequality.Gordon Parks has described the camera as his choice of weapon, and his life has used the medium of photography intelligently and enlighteningly to show the shadows of the American way of life and to mediate between the groups of a fragmented society. As an important chronicler of the struggle for equality of African Americans he treated issues such as poverty, exclusion and injustice that have lost none of its urgency. 

San Francisco’s Jenkins Johnson Gallery presents Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle’s intimate collages which interrogate narratives around the black female body, history and power. In these works, the tactile collage technique operates to dismantle any fixed notions of identity, instead bringing about new and transformative visions that forcefully challenge stereotype and convention.

London’s biggest festival of contemporary African culture has returned with a bang for its fourth edition; taking place at Somerset House, one of London’s most iconic venues, 1:54 has established a reputation as a place of discover and the key place to acquire contemporary African art in Europe. This year, What’s On Africa contributor, Luar Klinghofer was at the fair, to bring you highlights from the first few days.

The 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair has announced the 40 galleries from 18 countries that will be exhibiting at the fair’s fourth London edition, to be held at Somerset House from October 6 to 9, during Frieze Week.

As usual, this year’s fair will display the work of artists from Africa and its diasporas—more than 110 in total this year. FORUM, the fair’s educational wing, also returns to the fair, offering a variety of programming curated by Koyo Kouoh, the artistic director of the RAW Materials Company arts center in Dakar, Senegal.

On September 24, 1956, against the backdrop of the Montgomery bus boycott, Life magazine published a photo essay titled “The Restraints: Open and Hidden.” Staff photographer Gordon Parks had traveled to Mobile and Shady Grove, Alabama, to document the lives of the related Thornton, Causey, and Tanner families in the “Jim Crow” South. As the Civil Rights Movement began to gain momentum, Parks chose to focus on the activities of everyday life in these African- American families – Sunday shopping, children playing, doing laundry – over-dramatic demonstrations. Guest curated by Columbus Staten University students, Gordon Parks – Segregation Story features 12 photographs from “The Restraints,” now in the collection of the Do Good Fund, a Columbus-based nonprofit that lends its collection of contemporary Southern photography to a variety of museums, nonprofit galleries, and non-traditional venues. Students’ reflections, enhanced by a research trip to Mobile, offer contemporary thoughts on works that were purposely designed to present ordinary people quietly struggling against discrimination. As the readers of Lifeconfronted social inequality in their weekly magazine, Parks subtly exposed segregation’s damaging effects while challenging racial stereotypes.

The Golden Gate section of the National Council of Negro Women has named San Rafael resident Karen Jenkins-Johnson, owner of Jenkins Johnson Gallery in San Francisco, as its Business Person of the Year.

Cornell Art Museum at Old School Square presents a new exhibition that focuses on the idea of fame and different ways it can be interpreted through artwork. Andy Warhol once stated, “everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” hence the title of this exhibit. The contemporary works included have been shown in galleries and museums worldwide.

Fifteen Minutes is a group show of works that express the idea of celebrity and works by artists who have become celebrities themselves. This exhibition includes two works by Andy Warhol, Blackglama (Judy Garland), 1985 and Portrait of Olga Berde Mahl, 1986.  Other participating artists include Annie Kevans, Jemima Kirke (actress from the hit HBO series, “Girls”), Robert Mars, Jack Newmann, Nathan Ritterpusch, Daniel Stanford, Ken Tate and Russell Young. 

Lush women, powdered wigs, decadent feasts and magnificent monuments? For a long time the Baroque era was brought solely in connection with clichéd notions. But a closer look at the European cultural history of the years 1580 to 1770 brings surprises to light: advanced knowledge in medicine, a classical antique ideal of beauty, pioneering economic developments, scientific rationality and an all-pervasive order structure.

Timotheus Tomicek is an Austrian artist, filmmaker and photographer.He was born in 1978 in Vienna and studied at the Vienna Film Academy / Paris. Tomicek is known in his artistic activity for its inconsistent cross-media operation.

Half a century ago in America, nonviolent protests and acts of civil disobedience, organised by leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, helped put the spotlight on the bigotry and injustice that black Americans faced. The civil-rights movement prompted lawmakers to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing discrimination based on "race, color, religion, sex or national origin", and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. A fifty-something African-American photographer Gordon Parks, who also directed the Blaxploitation film “Shaft” in 1971 and co-founded “Essence” magazine in 1970, was an integral part of that movement, from taking intimate portraits of the characters involved, to photographing the myriad rallies that took place in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet Parks, who straddled protest and photography, remains outside the pantheon of great black leaders in civil rights, and is less known than his mostly white contemporaries in photography. 

When LIFE photographer Gordon Parks decided not to snap his shutter on the Swedish-born actress--who was born 100 years ago on Aug. 29--it paved the way for one of the most treasured portraits of her ever made

This University Teaching Gallery installation examines the contested relationship between art, justice, and African American culture from the 19th through 21st century in the United States. The over 40 works on display range from prints by Kara Walker and Glenn Ligon that challenge the nexus between vision and justice during slavery to photographs by Bruce Davidson and Gordon Parks that synoptically summarize events from the segregation era through the civil rights movement.

This exhibition examines the realities of life under segregation in 1950s America, as seen through the lens of groundbreaking photographer Gordon Parks (1912–2006). As the first African American photographer hired full time by Life magazine, Parks was frequently given assignments involving social issues affecting black America. In 1950, one such project took him back to his hometown in Kansas for a photo essay he planned to call “Back to Fort Scott.”

The city has been a subject of art for several decades: artists observing, criticizing, and celebrating our relationship to the built environment. This selection of American works provides a glimpse into how our urban world has evolved. 

Over the years, we have interviewed many iconic and influential photographers, but none have affected me like Melanie Pullen. Her curiosity in pushing the limits of her viewership is extremely endearing, and her work takes aim at a violence that has now become an all-too-standard aspect of modern media. The way she talks about her work is very precise, she is fully aware of what she wants to convey, but she also allows room for it to take on a life of its own, which can be a very delicate balance to achieve. If I had a list of past interviewees who I would love to learn from, Melanie would be at the very top. -SuzAnne Steben, Managing Editor

At the Art Institute of Chicago, an exhibition looks at the relationship between the photographer and author as they were becoming famous.

Gordon Parks (1912-2006) never got much respect from art museums when he was alive. A staff photographer for Life magazine from 1948 to 1972, renowned for stories on poverty, African-American and celebrity themes, he was older, and more conventional, than the wild tribes of frame-bending street shooters favored by curators in the 1960s and 70s.

No other artist more than Rembrandt evokes the richness of the Dutch Golden Age. As well as the master of Leyden is known for his paintings, he has made about three hundreds etchings. Selected from one and the same private art collection, one hundred of them are exhibited at Penthes. Portraits and self-portraits, Biblical and historical scenes or simple street scenes reveal the Master’s talent for capturing movement, light and shadow, and imbuing his subjects with expressions of lifelike immediacy. An app on tablet, especially designed for the exhibition, will give the visitors every details they’ll need to explore the works of Rembrandt.

In introduction of the exhibition and as enlighment of the meeting between the Netherlands and Switzerland, a presentation of the historical moments and unknown ties will show how closed and connected the two countries are.

Acclaimed LIFE magazine photographer Gordon Parks photographed boxing great Muhammad Ali, who died June 3, 2016, at a pivotal time in Ali's life in 1966 and 1970. Parks created a "psychological portrait" of the boxer with these unique, intimate photos -- some of which have never been seen before -- during a period in which Ali changed his name from Cassius Clay, converted to Islam and declared himself a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War.

Muhammad Ali, the three-time world heavyweight boxing champion who helped define his turbulent times as the most charismatic and controversial sports figure of the 20th century, died on Friday in a Phoenix-area hospital. He was 74.

His death was confirmed by Bob Gunnell, a family spokesman. Ali, who lived in Phoenix, had had Parkinson’s disease for more than 30 years. He was admitted to the hospital on Friday with what Mr. Gunnell said was a respiratory problem, but no other details were provided.

Ali was the most thrilling if not the best heavyweight ever, carrying into the ring a physically lyrical, unorthodox boxing style that fused speed, agility and power more seamlessly than that of any fighter before him.

But he was more than the sum of his athletic gifts. An agile mind, a buoyant personality, a brash self-confidence and an evolving set of personal convictions fostered a magnetism that the ring alone could not contain. He entertained as much with his mouth as with his fists, narrating his life with a patter of inventive doggerel. (“Me! Wheeeeee!”)

Portraits that reflect personal and cultural identity are the focus of "Portraiture: A Group Photography Exhibtion", on display at Jenkins Johnson Gallerythrough July 9. Above, "Tails I," 2014, Hendrik Kerstens.

Masters of their fields, the photographer Gordon Parks and the writer Ralph Ellison bonded over a shared vision of using their creative talents to address racial injustice. That commitment led to the powerful, enduring 1952 photo essay “A Man Becomes Invisible.”

But that Life magazine project was not their only collaboration. A new exhibition, “Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem,” for the first time shows images from a lesser-known 1948 project of theirs, “Harlem Is Nowhere.” On view through Aug. 28 at the Art Institute of Chicago, the exhibition offers the two men’s counternarrative (the reality, that is) of the living conditions of black Americans during that time. Among the show’s more than 50 objects — the known surviving material belonging to both “A Man Becomes Invisible” and “Harlem Is Nowhere” — are newly discovered images, photographs that have never been exhibited and items that had not been definitely identified as belonging to either project.

Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison are both recognized as major figures in American art and literature: Parks, a renowned photographer and filmmaker, was best known for his poignant and humanizing photo-essays for Life magazine. Ellison authored one of the most acclaimed—and debated—novels of the 20th century, Invisible Man (1952). What is less known about these two esteemed artists is that their friendship, coupled with a shared vision of racial injustices and a belief in the communicative power of photography, inspired collaboration on two projects, one in 1948 and another in 1952.

The unself-conscious, joyfully naked children in the photographs of Sally Mann are like forest sprites, splashing in the cool water of a muddy river at twilight, frolicking in the languid Southern summer, or swooping through the primordial woods within whose depths lurks black magic. That's the uneasy spell cast by Mann, a respected photographer who, as a young mother with three youngsters, enlisted her children to be her models. It was a critical decision that has yielded mythic, nostalgic, even feral black & white pictures and no small amount of controversy. The response to the children's nudity, in particular, has led to censorship in several prominent publications and sometimes obscured her artistic accomplishment. There have been objections to her kids being too young to understand the implications of their poses, some of which are provocative; accusations of child abuse; fear of pedophiles and stalkers; as well as child pornography laws that threaten the artist and the pursuit of her work. Though Mann has said she thinks "childhood sexuality is an oxymoron," and emphatically stated that her photographs are not erotic, it's what's in the eye and mind of beholders that's troubling and difficult to reconcile.

The exceptional intimacy of Sally Mann’s “Immediate Family” photos has been famous, and famously controversial, ever since their publication in 1992. In Mann’s uncommonly beautiful decadelong series, her three children — Emmett, Jessie and Virginia — are captured from toddlerhood through adolescence, at play and at rest. They’re captured striking adventurous and languorous poses, often unclothed, on the family’s sprawling property in the rural Virginia hills.

Beauty and the Beast presents an examination of animals in photography in celebration of the San Diego Zoo Centennial. Showcasing a diverse range of photographers, the exhibition highlights the many ways animals are featured from portraits to supporting subjects.

Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco announces its first solo exhibition by renowned American photographer Sally Mann. Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia features intimate black and white silver gelatin prints of the American South that highlight childhood and the growth of Mann’s three children Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia from her acclaimed series Immediate Family (1992) and At 12: Portraits of Young Women (1988). The show runs from May 5 to July 9, 2016 with an opening reception on Thursday, May 5, 5:30 to 7:30. Running concurrently with Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia is Portraiture: A Group Photography Exhibition that features ethnically diverse and world-renowned artists, whose portraits reflect their personal and cultural identity, while also utilizing paint, props, pattern, and the lack thereof to emphasize their subject.

"There are no couches or cushioned seating in my studio," says young Bahamian artist Lavar Munroe, "because for me the studio is not a place to be comfortable." For Munroe, his studio in Washington, D.C., is a "sacred space," a place to turn off his phone, disconnect from the internet, and delve deeply into a process that he trusts but can rarely predict where it will lead.

This first solo exhibition by internationally-renowned photographer Sally Mann highlights intimate black and white silver gelatin prints of Mann's three children's daily lives, curated from her acclaimed series Immediate Family. The show also features Mann's photographs of adolescent girls on the cusp of womanhood from the series At 12: Portraits of Young Women.

An award-winning photographer and 2016 recipient of ICP’s Infinity Award for Documentary and Photojournalism, Muholi presented several portraits from her recent book, Faces and Phases, a clip from Zanele Muholi, Visual Activist co-produced with Human Rights Watch, and a selection of recent self-portraits. Working with and within the communities she belongs to, Muholi situates her work as visual activism out of necessity. Inseparable from her very existence is an irreversible sense of urgency: “one of the most painful parts of photographing the community is when someone dies.”

“Actively avoiding offensive stereotypes is pretty much one of the most important things I could do,” Moroccan-born, New York-based photographer Lalla Essaydi says. “I take on art history writ large, undermining European artists’ objectifying and exoticizing representations of North African women.” Essaydi used thousands of bullet casings to create “Bullets Revisited #3.” The triptych turns “the domestic space into a psychological one, charged with contemporary realities,” she says. The text on the woman’s skin is deliberately indecipherable, Essaydi says, to challenge “the European assumption that text constitutes the best access to reality.”

The title of a new exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts , “She Who Tells a Story,” undersells the high quality of the work therein. The name is borrowed from an Arabic word, rawiya, which also refers to a group of female photographers working as a collective in the Middle East. But the title makes it sound as if this provocative show — devoted to photography by women from Iran and the Arab world — is just another exercise in narrative, just more storytelling, a needless addition to the overflowing swamp of narrative that drowns out critical thinking.

SAVANNAH, Georgia — Contrary to his gentle voice and friendly manner, Lavar Munroe’s first U.S. museum exhibition, Journey Elsewhere: Musings from a Boundless Zoo, is filled with grotesque half-animal, half-human figures wielding hostile gloves and knives like predators. Currently on display at the SCAD Museum and the Gutstein Gallery in Savannah, Georgia, the Washington, DC–based artist’s paintings, sculpture, and installation explore the politics of power, subjugation, and othering. Munroe’s personal version of the contemporary zoo was inspired by his interest as an undergraduate in the “human zoos” that exhibited Native Americans and Africans through the 1950s, as well as his memories of death and violence while growing up in the Bahamas.

Carlos Javier Ortiz is a filmmaker and documentary photographer who focuses on urban life, gun violence, racism, poverty and marginalized communities. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in a variety of venues including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts; the International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago; the Detroit Institute of Arts; and the Library of Congress. In addition, his photos were used to illustrate Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Case for Reparations (2014) article, which was the best selling issue in the history of The Atlantic Magazine. His photos have also been published in The New Yorker, Mother Jones, among many others. He is represented by the Karen Jenkins-Johnson Gallery in San Francisco.

Most artistic collaboration is ad hoc and short-lived. But what happens when it goes on for decades, and yet takes place within the most ephemeral of genres, live performance? This probably wasn't the question a group of University of Exeter drama graduates set out to answer in 1984 when founding a company that was not quite traditional artists' collective and not quite traditional theater group.

The racist elements so visible in this year’s political scene give the lie to the notion, bruited about in certain circles a decade ago, that we as a society no longer discriminate; that we have become "post-racial." The documentary photographer Gordon Parks (1912-2006), who covered the civil rights movement for decades, notably for Life magazine, would not have been amused or fooled. A large selection of his works in black and white as well as color shows us amnesiacs a review of history as if written by lightning (to paraphrase southerner Woodrow Wilson’s praise for the racist 1915 film "The Birth of a Nation"). Selections from photo essays on the 1963 march on Washington and the Black Muslim and Black Panther movements depict the turbulent sixties, when President Johnson’s support for civil rights effectively delivered the south to the once-abolitionist GOP. 

The International Ibsen Award was established in 2007 and is regarded as one of the world’s most prestigious theatre prizes. Just last month The Spalding Gray National Consortium named Tim Etchells as the recipient of the 2016 Spalding Gray Award. The Forced Entertainment theatre collective was established in Sheffield, England by Tim Etchells in 1984, and the group is renowned for its ground-breaking, genre-defying theatrical approach. Forced Entertainment have made their mark within performance theatre in particular, but in recent years have also investigated the theatrical possibilities of exploiting the potential of video and digital platforms. In its statement, the International Ibsen Award Committee said that “the committee has chosen to honour this continually surprising and not least entertaining theatre group, because Forced Entertainment revive and challenge the theatre, and recognise and utilise the power inherent in the art form. Forced Entertainment take the theatre’s role within society deeply seriously." 

Each year on August 16, a throng of faithful mourners gather in Melbourne cemetery to commemorate the death of their idol: Elvis Presley. They are dressed in leather jackets, some with their hair greased back, most with large bunches of flowers, striking sultry poses in worship of the American star. It was 1985 when photographerPolixeni Papapetrou first encountered this annual ritual and was drawn to document the near-religious-scale cult.

Her series Elvis Immortal, which charts these earnest pilgrims over a 15 year period in black and white square format, is on show at Ararat Regional art gallery, Victoria.

This, a Special Issue of TAYO Literary Magazine, in support of the #SayHerName movement, focuses exclusively on the lives of black women affected by their interactions with State sanctioned violence on the street.

In it, find salient vignettes from Jasmine Evans, a Hurston Wright Founding Members Award finalist in Fiction; fellow Co–Guest Editor rahdiyah ayobami, a critical essay from the Amanda Davis Prose finalist; gorgeously unrelenting poetry from Zoe Flowers, Tara Betts, Kira Allen, Melodic Rose; raw, brilliant, and visceral art from the interdisciplinary visual artist, writer, and performer Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle; and other black women writers raising their voices in cacophonic unison from across the nation. They write over the silence.

Gordon Parks: Higher Ground. Presenting a solo exhibition of over sixty works by one of the most important photojournalists of the 20th century. Parks (1912 - 2006) was the first black photojournalist to work at Life magazine, from 1948 to 1972. Through Life, Parks documented the stories of those he photographed, personalizing his assignments to tell the broader story of the African American experience. The gallery's second solo exhibition for Parks will commemorate his photo essays on the Civil Rights Movement.

With so many things to do in San Francisco, it's easy to miss the many fantastic art exhibits and shows that pass through smaller galleries, as opposed to big museum shows. While it's nearly impossible for even the most ardent art lover to see it all, we've once again curated a collection of must see exhibits currently (or soon to be) gracing the walls of San Francisco's finest art spaces. Plan accordingly.

Some images are difficult to ignore. The dashboard camera footage of Sandra Bland's arrest, three days before her wrongful death in prison. The still image of Michael Brown's body covered by a sheet, just after the unarmed 18-year-old was fatally shot by a police officer. Protest photos of massive crowds bearing a single message, so simple it's absurd: "Black Lives Matter."

A camera is not in itself political. But the photographic tool carries with it the potential for widespread awareness, reform and revolution. Contemporary protest movements are propelled by the images and videos circulating across social media, broadcasting in plain sight the systemic injustices and atrocities still inextricably linked with blackness in America.

"I realized that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all kinds of social ills. Then I knew I had to have one. "

Gordon Parks was the youngest of fifteen children in a poor family in Fort Scott, Kansas. Born in 1912, he held various jobs until he could buy in 1937 in a pawnshop in Seattle, a camera, and was hired for fashion images in a mall in Minneapolis. It was clear her talent, and in 1942 received from the Farm Security Administration a grant that, among others, had obtained before Dorothea Lange. (Translated from Spanish)

Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco presents Gordon Parks: Higher Ground, a solo exhibition of over sixty works by one of the most important photojournalists of the 20th century. The gallery’s second solo exhibition for Parks, February 4 through April 2, 2016, commemorates his photo essays on the Civil Rights Movement.

Gordon Parks (1912 - 2006) was the first black photojournalist to work at Life magazine, from 1948 to 1972. Through Life, Parks documented the stories of those he photographed, personalizing his assignments to tell the broader story of the African American experience. By gaining their trust unlike any other photojournalist, Parks’ empathy and charisma enabled him to gain access into his subject’s world. The show will include works from the essays for Life magazine, Invisible Man, 1952; Segregation Story, 1956; Duke Ellington, 1960 The March on Washington, 1963; The Nation of Islam, 1963; Muhammad Ali, 1970; and The Black Panthers, 1970.

Rema Hort Mann Foundation (RHMF) is thrilled to announce the recipients of the 2016 Emerging Artist Grant in Los Angeles. Each grantee receives a $10,000 unrestricted grant for demonstrating critical and rigorous work as well as an ability and commitment to making substantial contributions in the arts.

Jenkins Johnson Gallery in San Francisco is pleased to present Gordon Parks: Higher Ground, a solo exhibition of over sixty works by one of the most important photojournalists of the 20th century.

The words “Lord, plant my feet on higher ground” rang out from the churches of Alabama, as black Americans opened their hymnals to sing. The year was 1956, and in Montgomery a woman by the name of Rosa Parks had just refused to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger. Nearby in Mobile, photojournalist Gordon Parks, formerly of the Farm Security Administration, told the story of the Thornton family for Life magazine, where the American public at last were given a glimpse into the daily lives, joy, and suffering of African American men, women, and children living in the Jim Crow South.

Gordon Parks Higher Ground at the Jenkins Johnson Gallery in San Francisco, February 4 – April 2

Explore the works of Gordon Parks, the man considered to be the most important black photographer  of the 20th century. The exhibit at the Jenkins Johnson Gallerysurveys works spanning nearly half a century — The Black Panthers, the favelasof Brazil, fashion models and stars.

When I was growing up, my mother, Bette Parks Sacks, often told me stories about her youth in Mississippi. She spoke in a slow, sweet drawl, despite the fact that she’d spent her entire adult life in Chicago. I knew of the hardships and beauty of the South, transmitted to me through vivid recollections of her childhood and adolescence. I knew of her deep connection to the land, a holdover from a less-than-idyllic time when she picked cotton from sunup to sundown, beginning at the age of six. I knew that when she and her father headed to Chicago, in the nineteen-fifties, the day after she graduated from high school, they’d left everything behind, including almost all existing photographs of their large family. At the time, I didn’t realize that these intensely personal stories were part of a much larger historical narrative, one that was shared by millions of other black people who went on the same journey.

They still exist: Artists work reflects the spirit of Romanticism, aimed at outspoken universal poetry. The photo book "Hit or miss" Timotheus Tomicek for example.

What is inside?

To be exact: pictures, illustrations, sculptures, text fragments, sometimes quotes or just a sentence or a word. 112 pages, there were 84 pictures. But what exactly is to see? The pattern of a carpet, a pretzel, a black cat, a swing, a white, somewhat perplexed-eyed donkey, a candle, which is reminiscent of Gerhard Richter, a water strider, a swing with the inscription "Realité" Sunset kitsch, a red curtain, a flying carpet, fruit flies on a piece of pear ...

To illuminate the problem with exoticizing women of color, it is sometimes necessary to employ visual art as a vehicle for under- standing issues that are too provocative to talk about. Full disclosure, I am a white woman. For this reason, I walk in a casing that allows for the privilege of not being “exoticized” as a person of color. Although, as a woman I am not without the burden of being objectified, I cannot overlook the history that separates my privilege from the history inscribed on  a black woman’s body. To that end, when women talk about their bodies, the under recognized power of the Other lingers, demanding to be heard. For their concurrent solo exhibitions at the Museum of the African Diaspora, Los Angeles based artists Alison Saar and Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle focus on the African American, and African, woman’s body as a carrier of profound stories to create narratives that provoke awareness and revere both the beautiful and ugly sides of history.

Los Angeles-based Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle’s first solo exhibition in San Francisco features samplings from three concurrent bodies of work and includes mixed-media works on paper and wood panel, alongside a series of artifacts and objects. Hinkle’s largely figurative images combine photographic imagery with hand-drawn and painted details to create fantastical female figures of wonder.

Los Angeles- based photographer Melanie Pullen presents an expanded series of portraits featuring men she's met on the street- "lost boys" -holding vintage soda bottles. The lighting is dramatic and evocative of late night haunts, abandoned transit stations and darkened alleys. Simultaneously mesmerizing and bizarre, the images speak to a complicated narrative we'll never know. 

It’s back to the future at Art Basel Miami Beach, which presents for the second time a selection of art historical projects, courtesy of 14 galleries, in the Survey section. The fact that contemporary art did not emerge from a vacuum is reflected in the sector, whose focus is on works made pre-2000 (curators and dealers have welcomed the historical backdrop, which gives the Florida fair gravitas).

In November and December, the photography world sets up camp in Paris and Miami for a series of fairs attracting top galleries from around the globe.

In Miami, no fair is bigger than Art Basel Miami Beach, which returns to the Miami Beach Convention Center December 3-6 with 267 galleries from 32 countries. Noah Horowitz, who previously served as executive director of New York’s Armory Show, will oversee the fair for the first time. Be sure to swing by first-time exhibitor Jenkins Johnson Gallery, which will be showing Roy DeCarava’s photographs of jazz legends and everyday New York scenes from the 1940s through the 1970s.

Following its successful debut last year, Survey will return with 14 exhibitions of work made before 2000 brought by leading galleries from Brazil, China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. The sector will include works by Charles Burchfield, Peter Campus, Gianni Colombo, Roy DeCarava, Rosalyn Drexler, Dorothy Iannone, Wang Jinsong, Heinz Mack, Roberto Burle Marx, Shinjiro Okamoto, Miguel Ángel Rojas, Peter Saul, Keith Sonnier and Ettore Spalletti. The 14th edition of Art Basel's Miami Beach show, whose Lead Partner is UBS, will take place at the Miami Beach Convention Center from December 3 to December 6, 2015. 
 

I AM USING MY FIRST MONTHS IN NIGERIA to learn more about navigating Lagos, to cook Nigerian foods, and to learn the local mythologies. Over these past weeks I have met a few students who are excited about the Kentifrica Project and the potential for empowerment and the creative leadership that it brings. I have also been working closely with my host, Dr. Adepeju Layiwola—an artist, scholar, activist, and professor at the University of Lagos. I am learning so much about the effects of colonialism on Nigerian history and culture, specifically in relationship to Benin and royal court art that was taken from the royal palace in 1897 by the British. The clash between cultural ideas concerning what is considered art, and what has ritual and ancestral importance in relationship to power, display, and economic gain is astounding and informing my work immensely. I am also making connections between how I was raised in Kentucky and the foods in the American South that are influenced by the food I am eating here. The connections are so rich! Louisville is in Lagos, and vice versa.

Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco presents its first solo show by Los Angeles photographer Melanie Pullen. The exhibition features photographs from Soda POP!, her new series that plays with cultural assumptions; she combines things typically associated with childhood, such as computer games, and places them in adult nighttime settings. The unease is heightened featuring young people marginalized by society, neglected street kids, or male prostitutes.

After “re-imagining” their galleries, the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) reopened yesterday with three solo exhibitions, featuring artists Tim Roseborough, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle and Alison Saar. On a material basis, the trio’s work couldn’t be more different — from digital prints to rough-hewn figurative sculpture — but connective themes between the shows enrich each in turn, bridging generations, conceptual approaches and subject matter.

“I see you — anew,” Los Angeles artist Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle seems to say to the West Africans in photographs from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which she alters, reimagines and reclaims with paint and India ink in her “The Uninvited” series.

Those works — along with pieces from “The Kentifrica Project” and “TheTituba Series” — are now on exhibit in “Who Among Us … The Art of Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle” at the Museum of the African Diaspora.

Issue no 9

1814: Your latest series Soda POP!. Can you tell us a bit about that?
MP: Soda POP! is a tribute to a cross dresser that I became friends with in Greenwich Village in 1983 when I was eight years old. I couldn’t sleep so I would have to sit awake in my room until all hours of the night and my window was level with the street, one block off Christopher Street next to the old pier on the Hudson. So this six-foot seven black man would show up outside my window every night at midnight and would change his clothes in front of me, put on a blonde wig and wait for tricks… he didn’t wear underwear by the way. While he was waiting we’d talk and we became friends.

In 1845, so the legend goes, an unclothed girl was spotted running on all fours through the wilderness near Del Rio, Texas, appearing barely human. Joined by a pack of wolves, the young girl allegedly attacked a herd of goats. The tale, though often ridiculed, spread like wildfire, and before long a group of Mexican vaqueros teamed up to hunt for the mythical Lobo Wolf Girl. 

On the third day of searching, the group supposedly captured the young girl by Espantosa Lake, surrounded by wolves. She was captured but soon escaped, tearing planks off a boarded-up window and escaping without a trace into the night. In 1852, she was said to be spotted for the final time, suckling two wolf cubs. After that, she was never seen or heard from again. 

Stories like this, hovering in an area closer to fiction than truth, reappear throughout history, popping up in different spots around the globe for centuries. Every story is unique yet familiar -- a child, lost or neglected, takes up in the wild with the creatures residing there, adapting to their characteristics and modes of survival, slowly melting into their species. Instances of such feral children have been reported from 1845 to 2008, in habitats ranging from Cambodia to Russia to the United States.

Timotheus Tomicek, World, 2013
Cloud shots taken from airplane windows are a dime a dozen for the Instagram generation, so it's refreshing and enchanting in equal parts to see a photographer take our own self-publicising imagery to a new and distinctly more philosophical place. Timotheus Tomicekis fascinated by the limbo presented by air travel – a strange kind of semi-presence which exists far above earth and yet utterly apart from it – and with the word “WORLD” scrawled haphazardly in eyeliner on an airline window, this separation is simultaneously reinforced and diminished.

Artist Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle manipulates language, images, and myths to create a personal narrative presented in three bodies of work: The Kentifrica Project, THE UNIVITED SERIES, and drawings based on I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. Hinkle’s interdisciplinary artistic practice invites participation to explore issues of identity, culture, and geography.

British artist Annie Kevans has been commissioned by exhibition curator Thierry-Maxime Loriot to create a series of works for the exhibition La Planète Mode de Jean Paul Gaultier.  The exhibition originated at the Barbican Gallery in London and is currently at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. The show has received critical acclaim, and opens at the famous Grande Palais on April 1

Moroccan-born, New York-based photographer Lalla Essaydi (b. 1956) explores issues surrounding the role of women in Arab culture and their representation in the western European artistic tradition. Her large-scale photographs are based on nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings, but work to subvert those stereotyped and sexualized representations. Aside from their timely and provocative subject matter, Essaydi’s photographs are technically impressive. Behind each of her images is weeks of preparation, as the text is composed, the fabrics are dyed to match the setting in which they will appear, and the architectural backdrops are carefully constructed. The entire field of the almost life-size photographs appears in sharp focus, the result of her use of a large-format camera and traditional film.

Moroccan-born, New York-based photographer Lalla Essaydi (b. 1956) explores issues surrounding the role of women in Arab culture and their representation in the western European artistic tradition. Her large-scale photographs are based on nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings, but work to subvert those stereotyped and sexualized representations. Aside from their timely and provocative subject matter, Essaydi’s photographs are technically impressive. Behind each of her images is weeks of preparation, as the text is composed, the fabrics are dyed to match the setting in which they will appear, and the architectural backdrops are carefully constructed. The entire field of the almost life-size photographs appears in sharp focus, the result of her use of a large-format camera and traditional film.

Moroccan-born photographer Lalla Essaydi is bringing her work to San Diego in a new exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art.

The exhibition features 10 large-scale contemporary photographs of women from three different series by the artist, based on 19th century Orientalist paintings. (Orientalist painting is a term used by art historians for 19th century art depicting the Middle East.)

“ReOrientations” examines the historical genesis and contemporary manifestations of Orientalism — a concept that places the East (the Middle East and Asia) in opposition to the European West. Orientalist images often characterize the “Orient” as exotic, violent, or hypersexualized. “ReOrientations” examines the legacy of Orientalism through a consideration of historical and contemporary artworks.  The exhibition features 19th-century French Orientalist paintings and works on paper from the collection of the Dahesh Museum, placed alongside photographs by contemporary artists Lalla Essaydi and Ibi Ibrahim.

Let's be honest, the Middle East has gotten a bad rap. With an expanding amount of media attention drawn to violent acts by violent groups, it's no wonder the identity of this region of 20-some nations remains as elusive, distorted and inaccessible to the western world as ever. This week, however, Colorado College's new I.D.E.A. Space exhibit opens the proverbial iron curtain with ReOrientations: Defining and Defying 19th Century French Images of the Arab World.

I am sure there was the coolest smart art that I missed out on, these are works that were most visceral initially or came by frequency in tune with my radar and frequency. Beginning with Spring Break, moving on to Volta, a quick tour of the Armory Show, and Pulse. Spring Break was a break from the frowns and furs of the Armory, but really it wasn’t a break—I was there for hours upon hours. 

You've probably written on paper, crumbled it up, and even cut it. But have you ever used it to create a giant installation of puppets? Such was the showpiece greeting attendees at the latest fair to take part in Armory Arts Week, Art on Paper. Unlike most other fairs during the busy New York City art season, Art on Paper sticks to a unifying theme of works using and inspired by, you guessed it--paper. 
 

Despite Art on Paper’s name, the work at the first-time Armory Week fair includes as many different materials as at any other fair, with art created on paper and art inspired by paper on view.

Kenyatta A.C Hinkle is an interdisciplinary visual artist, writer, and performer who integrates cultural criticism, personal narrative, social practice, and historical research to interrogate structures of power concerning race and representation. Hinkle questions how these structures influence ideas of self through drawing, painting, collage, video, and performance. Hinkle conducts extensive experimentation and play to form several bodies of work simultaneousl

In his landmark book, Orientalism, the late scholar Edward Said wrote of "exteriority," a disconnect between the traveler's fantasies and reality. Reading the travelogues of French writers, Said once explained that he found "representations of the Orient had very little to do with what I knew about my own background in life."

The work of photographer Lalla Essaydi sits somewhere inside the gaps Said felt so keenly. Part of a new wave of Moroccan artists enjoying success under the liberalized reign of King Mohammed VI (who holds some of Essaydi's pieces in his private collection), she lives in New York City and works from her family home in Morocco, a large and elaborate house dating back to the 16th century. The portraits she shoots inside -- always of women -- recall 19th century French depictions of Arab concubines, popularly known as odalisques.

Paintings, sculptures, photographs, and works on paper by 40 contemporary artists will be exhibited at the galleries of the American Academy of Arts and Letters on historic Audubon Terrace (Broadway between 155 and 156 Streets) from Thursday, March 12 through Sunday, April 12, 2015. Exhibiting artists were chosen from a pool of over 200 nominees submitted by the members of the Academy, America’s most prestigious honorary society of architects, artists, writers, and composers.

A major new exhibition at the Cantor Arts Center, She Who Tells a Story, presents the pioneering work of 12 leading women photographers from Iran and the Arab world. The artists explore identity, narrative, representation, and war in daily life, inviting a broader understanding of the Middle East than what Westerners glean through media reports. The 79 photographs and two videos—a collection of stories about contemporary life—especially refute the belief that women from this region are oppressed and powerless. The exhibition was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) and runs at the Cantor, its only West-Coast venue, January 28 through May 4.

The 81 works, created almost entirely within the last decade, range in style from fine art to photojournalism and represent the women’s diverse perspectives. The photographers are: Jananne Al-Ani, Boushra Almutawakel, Gohar Dashti, Rana El Nemr, Lalla Essaydi, Shadi Ghadirian, Tanya Habjouqa, Rula Halawani, Nermine Hammam, Rania Matar, Shirin Neshat, and Newsha Tavakolian. In Arabic, the word rawiya means "she who tells a story," and through their work, these 12 pioneering artists collectively portray a region that has undergone unparalleled change and endured continuing conflict.

This exhibition examines constructions of racial identity to complicate popular rhetoric around race. The artworks interrogate oversimplifying binaries and destabilize the often unexamined position of “whiteness.” The artists deploy visual texts in the service of asking uncomfortable questions, reflecting upon identity, and asking the viewer to consider his/her own role in building, enabling, or perpetuating stereotypes. Invited artists are Sandra Brewster, Steve Cole, Andrea Chung, Brendan Fernandes, Vanessa German, Kenyatta Hinkle, Ayanah Moor, James Seward, and Alisha Wormsley.

Gordon Parks, one of the most celebrated African American artists of his time, is the subject of this exhibition of groundbreaking photographs of Fort Scott, Kansas—focusing on the realities of life under segregation during the 1940s, but also relating to Parks’s own fascinating life story. 

In 1950, Gordon Parks was the only African-American photographer working for Life magazine, a rising star who was gaining the power to call his own shots, and he proposed a cover story both highly political and deeply personal: to return to Fort Scott, Kan., the prairie town where he had grown up, to find his 11 classmates in a segregated middle school. 

heated debates never end about what’s “in” in the art world and what isn’t. One year the buzz is that Realism is coming back or fading away, that Abstraction is where the action is, or Pop art or color fields or drips and cubes, on and on. Yet over centuries it has proven to be excellence, inspiration and extraordinary passion that make art memorable, regardless of artificial categories. All important aspects being equal — craftsmanship, design, color theory — what is truly fresh and lasting is the innovation that accompanies the skills. In today’s expanding galaxy of New Realism, few American painters light up the sky as does still-life master Scott Fraser.

Like Us is an substantial exhibition that highlights the key themes of my practice. The work is often intense, sometimes strange, sometimes beautiful, frequently emotional, accessible yet complex and always looking to create connections with the audience and stimulate thought and discussion.

Amongst the thousands of photographers on show at Paris Photo recently, there were two very dark highlights: a set of shadowy photogravures by American photographer Roy DeCarava, made in 1991 from mid-20th century negatives; and a new but equally black photobook by young Japanese photographer Daisuke Yokota. 

Aside from being dark and monochrome, these two sets of pictures initially seemed to have little in common. The former is classic and figurative, the latter more experimental and abstract. But closer inspection revealed a shared inspiration between these unlike series: music. 

Most art books are not in the first person, so while there is some truth to the analyses, some things are always off. Robert C Jackson set out to interview 20 contemporary representational artists (himself included) and showcase their artwork within the context of their interviews. Here you will meet Steven Assael, Bo Bartlett, Debra Bermingham, Margaret Bowland, Paul Fenniak, Scott Fraser, Woody Gwyn, F Scott Hess, Laurie Hogin, Robert C Jackson, Alan Magee, Janet Monafo, John Moore, Charles Pfahl, Scott Prior, Stone Roberts, Sandra Mendelsohn Rubin, Daniel Sprick, Will Wilson, and Jerome Witkin. Each of these artists has a very elusive quality -- a unique voice. Seeing their work from across a room they are all recognisable. Their artworks are showcased in this large book with over 140 illustrations of their paintings as well as photographs of the artists in their studios and an epilogue by Pamela Sienna.

South Africa’s traumatic social history, its remarkable transformation and its diversity of culture and landscape, is a crucible for creative engagement. NIROX offers residency to international and local artists, providing insight and access to the region’s extraordinary cultural and environmental heritage. Conversely, artists bring their spotlight into the region. The program has no predilection for style or dogma, emphasizing work that is relevant, challenging and uplifting.

In 2014 FHE established a Visiting Artist & Master Printer program with the goal of creating a world-class program that promotes creative interaction between professional artists and students while also creating sustainability within the printmaking field—by training the next generation of artists and printmakers.