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almost over!
NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith
October 19, 2008 - January 26, 2009
Radcliffe Bailey Storm at Sea, 2006 Piano keys, African sculpture, model boat, paper, acrylic, glitter, and gold leaf 212 x 213 inches Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York © Radcliffe Bailey
José Bedia
Las Cosas que me Arrastran (The Things That Drag Me Along)
1996/2008
Dimensions variable (approx. 25’ across)
Mixed media
Photo: Matthew Septimus. Courtesy P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.
Pepón Osorio
Lonely Soul
2008
Approx. 106 ½ x 83 x 77 inches
Wooden crutches, fiberglass, Styrofoam, wood, resin, photographs, metals, human hair, one-thousand pins, hair clips, and wheelchair wheels
Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York
Photo: Matthew Septimus. Courtesy P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
Amalia Mesa-Bains
The Curandera's Botanica
2008
Dimensions variable
Mixed media
Collection of Richard L. Bains
Photo: Matthew Septimus. Courtesy P.S.1 Contemporary Art CenterP.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith, an exhibition co-organized by The Menil Collection that brings together a multigenerational group of North, South, and Central American artists who address the value of ritual in the artistic process and the wider implications of spirituality in contemporary art. On view in the 2nd Floor Main Gallery, Project Rooms, and Corner Gallery.
Including some 50 works of sculpture, photography, assemblage, video, performance, and other media, NeoHooDoo asserts that the drive towards a spiritual practice is as relevant today in our burgeoning global society as it has ever been. Artists have long engaged with ritualism to enrich their work, drawing on the traditions of shamans, griots, and oral historians. NeoHooDoo “grew out of a desire to explore the multiple meanings of spirituality in contemporary art,” states P.S.1 Curatorial Advisor and Menil Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Franklin Sirmans.
In the late 1960s poet Ishmael Reed adopted the 19th-century term “HooDoo,” referring to forms of religion and their practice in the New World to explore the idea of spiritual practice outside easily definable faiths or creeds and ritualism on contemporary works of literature and art. “Neo-HooDoo,” he writes in his 1972 collection of poetry, Conjure, “believes that every man is an artist and every artist a priest.” His seminal poems, “The Neo-HooDoo Manifesto” and “The Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic,” delve even deeper into this artistic practice to demonstrate its vitality as an international, multicultural aesthetic that embraces spiritual creativity and innovation.
From Vancouver to Havana, Guatemala City, and Bahia, the artists in NeoHooDoo began using ritualistic practice as a means to recover “lost” spirituality and to reexamine and reinterpret aspects of cultural heritage throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. Visual artists from across the Americas, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988), José Bedia (b. 1959), Rebecca Belmore (b. 1960), Jimmie Durham (b. 1940), and Ana Mendieta (1948–1985) have freely combined disparate materials and mediums to create spaces where art and audience can interact unhindered by history or societal constraints. For these artists, ritual practice often emerges as a form of catharsis and political critique to approach issues such as race, gender, slavery, and colonization. This exhibition also will look at younger artists such as video artists Michael Joo and Regina José Galindo, who carry on many of these practices and themes decades later, reconfiguring the work of their predecessors into performative displays of ritual through film and gallery installations.
Challenging conceptions of “insider” and “outsider” art, the artists in the exhibition frequently create work using everyday objects that resonate both within the confines of a gallery or museum and among their own localized audiences who may or may not visit art institutions. Situating their work in a vernacular aesthetic, the meaning of the work fluctuates according to its context. Items such as light bulbs, wine bottles, artificial flowers, piano keys are repositioned in assemblages confronting themes of exploitation, genocide, and poverty. The 53 pieces of discarded waste paper comprising Jimmy Durham’s A Street-level Treatise on Money and Work are brought to the center of a dialogue on the destruction of native cultures and Dario Robleto addresses American notions of manifest destiny in Deep Down I Don’t Believe in Hymns by taking a military-issued blanket and “infesting” it with hand-ground dust made from vinyl recordings of Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer” and Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love.”
Franklin Sirmans developed NeoHooDoo as one of P.S.1’s curatorial advisory programs, a unique system that allows diverse curators to present experimental exhibition work. Current curatorial advisors include Chief Curatorial Advisor Klaus Biesenbach, Senior Curatorial Advisor Neville Wakefield, Andrea Bellini, Phong Bui, Lia Gangitano, Susanne Pfeffer, and Franklin Sirmans.
NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring texts by Arthur C. Danto, Greg Tate, Robert Farris Thompson, Jen Budney and Julia Herzberg. The catalogue will also include an interview with Ishmael Reed by Franklin Sirmans and a work by renowned poet Quincy Troupe. The fully illustrated, color catalogue will be available for purchase at Artbook @ P.S.1 (144 pp., $45.00).
Artist List:
Terry Adkins, Janine Antoni, Radcliffe Bailey, José Bedia, Rebecca Belmore, Sanford Biggers, Tania Bruguera, James Lee Byars, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, William Cordova, Jimmie Durham, Regina José Galindo, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Hammons, Michael Joo, Brian Jungen, Kcho, Marepe, Ana Mendieta, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Pepón Osorio, Adrian Piper, Ernesto Pujol, Dario Robleto, Betye Saar, Gary Simmons, George Smith, Michael Tracy, Nari Ward
The exhibition is co-organized by The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas, and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. It was previously presented at The Menil Collection and will travel to the Miami Art Museum from February 20 until May 24, 2009.
The exhibition is made possible by The Friends of Education of The Museum of Modern Art, David Teiger, and with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency.
The accompanying publication is made possible by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
The presentation at The Menil Collection was generously supported by The Brown Foundation, Inc., Houston, Anonymous, William J. Hill, Beth and Rick Schnieders, Sara Dodd Spickelmier and Keith Spickelmier, Barbara and Charles Wright, Michael Zilkha, The Cullen Foundation, Houston Endowment, and the City of Houston.
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Black Alphabet is the first Exhibition of African American Art in Zacheta Art Gallery and it shows for the first time in Poland a differnt view over the African Americans claim to being the dominant force in world popular culture, from music to lifestyle. Rap, gangster duels, sports stars launching their own brands: all this is familiar to us as the popular face of contemporary America.
From the 60’s onwards, when all forms of race segregation were removed in the U.S.A., artists representing the African American community could freely, without encountering obstacles, join the developments taking place in American social, scientific, cultural and artistic life, and also, an element not without its significance, join the market.
African American art refers both to contemporary, as well as to historical, problems of slavery, and political, social and cultural violence, as well as to the question of the identity of the black race in the U.S.A. as a fundamental element in the national structure of the country. The youngest generation of artists draws its inspiration from new black culture, hip-hop and street culture. To the so-called "post-black" generation belong those who do not deal with questions of race and slavery, but who rather freely explore new media and techniques, engaging with questions of a strictly artistic nature.
black alphabet - conTEXTS of contemporary african-american art
23 September 2006 - 19 November 2006
black alphabet is the first presentation in Europe of a group exhibition from the USA focused on the most powerful elements in contemporary American art created by African American artists. It will thus enable a deep and engaged exploration of this highly significant element within American culture, that at best is known only selectively, and at worst is absolutely unknown, on the 'old continent'…
FRANKLIN SIRMANS - WORDS OF ART
Franklin Sirmans is the Terri and Michael Smooke Department Head and Curator of Contemporary Art at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Prior to that he was Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Menil Collection in Houston. Sirmans has worked in the Publications Department of Dia Center for the Arts, was editor at Flash Art Magazine, and a curatorial advisor at PS 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York. In addition, he has taught at Maryland Institute College of Art and Princeton University. In 2009, Sirmans was one of the inaugural Gold Rush Awards recipients from Rush Philanthropic for his contributions to social awareness through the arts and in 2007, the David C. Driskell Prize Winner.
He has also contributed to several books and catalogues including, most recently, 30 Americans: Rubell Family Collection; Definition: The Art and Design of Hip Hop (Collins Design, NY) and Barkley Hendricks: Birth of the Cool (Nasher Museum, Duke University). A former Editor of Flash Art and Art AsiaPacific magazines, Sirmans has written for several publications including The New York Times, Essence Magazine, Art in America, Artnews and Grand Street.
Sirmans' long list of achievements (many of which are not included in my little blurb) have no bearing on his approachable manner and the ease with which he flows from scholar to friend. And after bumping into my old friend in the most auspicious circumstances, I became curious how and when the the boy next door ( a nod to the often overlooked borough of Queens) fell in love with art. Stoosh Culture sits down with him for the back story.......
When did you discover art?
I guess it all began with the posters of Bob McAdoo, Walt Clyde Frazier, and Pele that I put up on my walls as a kid. In high school, the posters of sports figures morphed into pictures of scantily clad ladies torn from the pages of my stepmom's magazines like Elle and Vogue, and a little bit of Essence. My father would take me to openings which i sometimes reluctantly attended amidst sports events. My stepmom is an entertainment lawyer and we always engaged in questions of artistry, just usually in regard to music. Of course, the rise of music videos in the late 80s might have helped me too. Not sure. My mom is a very spiritual person so I think i got a certain quiet reverance for art objects from her.
What lead you to become a curator?
My passion was really for writing. But, art criticism is even less a substantial moneymaker than curating. In any event, it really began to gel and my approach is one that incorporates what to me is the essence of curating. Looking, seeing, thinking, writing and editing. The writing of essays, especially thematic ones, led quite naturally into curating. While working at the Dia Center for the Arts in the early 90s, I had the opportunity to be around some really great minds, including the curator there Lynne Cooke and many internationally recognized artists and writers, such as Hanne Darboven, Ann Hamilton, Jessica Stockholder, and Frederic Bruly Bouabre and writers/thinkers like Henry Louis Gates, Homi Bhabha, Greg Tate, and many others.
When you look at work what are you looking for? What moves you?
Even after these years, i don't know if i can answer that question. On the one hand, i'm looking for the proverbial "quality." Is it made well? Does it look good? Then, i often gravitate to subject matter after that or how does it make me feel? Does it humor me? Scare me? Repel me? I guess all those things move me to some degree. But, again, I dont think i can really say what it is i'm looking for. One of them best things about working in contemporary art is that sense of surprise that occurs again and again and again, when encountering new work.
How do you approach the organization of a show? What do you look for in the space?
Spaces are important and i guess im constantly trying to make the work sing as best it can in a given context. The artwork always comes first though. Having organized shows in small city apartments, bars, alternative spaces and museums, i believe there is always something that can work better in each different kind of space.
What was you curatorial debut?
My first real show was a group show at Marymount Manhattan College Art Gallery. My sophomoric attempt to be provocative had a strange title, something like Is Identity Dead? It was in the wake of the great 1993 Whitney Biennial that was praised for its inclusion of a diverse group of artists and derided as "whining agitprop" by others. John Haber, a critic, called that Whitney show an "attitude adjustment." My show included artists like Derrick Adams (recently showed at Collette Blanchard Gallery, NY), Sol Sax, Michael Richards (r.i.p.), and others who i cant remember.
Is there any artist's work you consider yourself an expert in?
I came to a greater understanding of art and the art world via an article called New Art New Money. Written by Cathleen McGuigan, it was the cover article of the New York Times Magazine in February 1985. I was about to turn 16 and the sight of Basquiat on that cover made me look deeper at him and at contemporary art. So, since then, the artist and his work have been a passion of mine. Expert is a big word, but i think i deserve a seat at any table of "experts" on JMB.
What do you have coming up at LACMA?
We just opened Steve Wolfe On Paper, a show that has been seen at the Whitney and the Menil Collection in Houston where i was working when the concept originated. Vija Celmins just opened in Houston at the Menil, so i am still fitting into my role in Los Angeles at LACMA. There, i am working on a big show of work that is in the LACMA collection for next spring with my colleague Christine Kim. It is tentatively called Human Nature: Contemporary Art from the Permanent Collection. The lead title comes from a wonderful neon work by Bruce Nauman from 1983. We're excited to see a lot of work that hasn't been on view before and to revisit other works while providing a new context for their viewing.
Can you share your top three favorite books on art and/or art theory?
Peter Schjeldahl, The Hydrogen Jukebox. Greg Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk. Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium.
What do you think is the most important thing collectors should look for when collecting contemporary art?
Does it move you? After that, explore issues of composition, form, color etc... Then, ask yourself what does it mean? I may change the order of this, but you get the gist.
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