The Museum was originally founded as a non-collecting institution, but the mandate to preserve and document the work of artists of African descent quickly became important to its mission. The Museum’s collection, now including over 9,000 objects, has a particular focus on the institution’s exhibition history and Artist-in-Residence program. The collection continues to grow through the stewardship of the Museum’s Acquisition Committee and generous private donors.
The below list includes the over 700 artists currently represented in the collection. It will be updated periodically to reflect the Museum’s ongoing work to increase access to its collection.
Our Artists
Nina Chanel Abney
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David Levinthal
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Raul Acero
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Joe Lewis
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BK Adams
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Joseph ("Joe") S. Lewis III
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Derrick Adams
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Nate Lewis
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Tunji Adeniyi-Jones
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Norman Lewis
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Terry Adkins
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Tony Lewis
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John Ahearn
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Georges Liautaud
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Mequitta Ahuja
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Joe Light
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Adebisi Akanji
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Glenn Ligon
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Akintunde Akinleye
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Kalup Linzy
Kalup Linzy: If it Don’t Fit was the first museum survey of the artist’s work, and included over twenty videos made over the last seven years, a drawing suite and a one-night acoustic performance. From his original take on the soap opera and sketch comedy genres to his music videos and filmic shorts, this compilation tracks the artist’s clever and complex approach to questions of race, gender, class, sexuality and national identity. The title, If it Don’t Fit, is appropriated from a song Linzy used in a recent video. With innuendo and double entendre, this blues lyric speaks to both the disappointments and hopes of attempting to belong to aesthetic genres, social categories and intimate relationships. Linzy first presented his cast of comedic and dramatic characters at the Studio Museum in African Queen (2005), and then again in Frequency (2005), a group exhibition of emerging artists. Since then, he has continued to work as a writer-director-actor and singer-songwriter. His work draws on a variety of American pop- and counter-culture genres, including early video and performance art, gay drag performance, reality television competitions and YouTube videos. The video component of If it Don’t Fit is organized into three hour-long programs, which were on view throughout the duration of the exhibition. Each highlights a recurring theme in Linzy’s work. Taking its point of departure from the artist’s ongoing negotiation of love, longing and loss, The Pursuit of Happyness features both narrative and music videos. Da Churen brings together works from the artist’s iconic “Churen” (2003-05) series, which traces a set of family archetypes, narrated over a series of phone calls. Finally, Ride to Da (Art) Club juxtaposes videos that self-reflexively take on issues of ambition and belonging in the contemporary art world as well as the pop music and club scene. |
Njideka Akunyili Crosby
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James Little
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Laylah Ali
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Birth Livingstone
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Devin Allen
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Tom Lloyd
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Jules Allen
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Donald Locke
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Charles Alston
A foundational figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Charles Alston moved to Harlem from North Carolina in 1915. Through his roles as an influential teacher and activist, he dedicated his life to the cultural enrichment, artistic advancement, and empowerment of Black Americans. After mastering an Academic Realist style as a teenager, Alston became increasingly interested in African art and aesthetics while in graduate school at Columbia University Teacher’s College . After graduating, he remained in Harlem and cofounded the Harlem Art Workshop in 1934. In response to a need for additional space, he secured a facility at 306 West 141st Street, or “306,” which would serve as a center for creative minds in Harlem, including Ralph Ellison, Augusta Savage, and Richard Wright. In 1935, Alston became the first Black supervisor for the Federal Art Project when he received an assignment to direct the Works Progress Administration (WPA) murals in Harlem Hospital. The Federal Art Project approved his designs, which were heavily influenced by the work of Mexican muralism, jazz music, and Social Realism, but the hospital administration rejected the works for an excess of African American subject matter. The hospital eventually allowed production of the murals to proceed after protests and extensive press coverage and, in 1936, two were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art. In response, Alston also cofounded the Harlem Artists Guild in the hope of convincing the WPA to fund more Black artists. In 1963, he became a founding member of Spiral, an artist collective that sought to contribute to the civil rights movement by increasing gallery and museum representation for Black artists. Alston earned a BA from Columbia University and an MA from Columbia University Teachers College. The Studio Museum has presented Alston’s work in group exhibitions such as Invisible Americans: Black Artists of the 30’s (1968); New York/Chicago: WPA and the Black Artist (1978); and Challenge of the Modern: African-American Artists 1925–45 (2003).
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Hew Locke
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Francisco Alvaroado-Juarez
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Ronald Lockett
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Ghada Amer
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Michelangelo Lovelace
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Emma Amos
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Whitfield Lovell
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Hurvin Anderson
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Alvin Loving
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Noel Anderson
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Charlie Lucas
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Benny Andrews
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Andrew Lyght
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Joël Andrianomearisoa
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David R. MacDonald
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Antony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones
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Manuel Macarrulla
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Philip Kwame Apagya
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Lakwena Maciver
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Diane Arbus
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Eric N. Mack
Born 1987, Columbia, MD |
Edgar Arceneaux
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Dwight Mackintosh
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Kenseth Armstead
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Turiya Magadlela
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Jabu Arnell
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Stevenson Magloire
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Alexandre Arrechea
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Ibrahim Mahama
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Albert Artwell
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Carolyn Maitland
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Alice Attie
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William Majors
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B.K.
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Mustafa Maluka
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Kobina Badowah
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Kerry James Marshall
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Firelei Báez
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Delita Martin
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Radcliffe Bailey
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Richard Mayhew
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Rushern Baker
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Valerie Maynard
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John Bankston
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Howard McCalebb
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Henry Wilmer Bannarn
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Dindga McCannon
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Edward Mitchell Bannister
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Fred W. McDarrah
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Anthony Barboza
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Allie McGhee
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Sadie Barnette
Born 1984, Oakland, CA
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Dave McKenzie
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Mambu Bayoh
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Rodney McMillian
For more than a decade, Rodney McMillian has been exploring the domain of home as part of a larger examination of the intersection of race, class, gender and socioeconomic policy. Rodney McMillian: Views of Main Street is the first exhibition to reveal the full trajectory of this major aspect of the artist’s complex and varied practice in painting, sculpture, video and performance. Organized by guest curator Naima J. Keith, Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Programs at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition brings together more than twenty key works made from 2003 to the present that use symbols of domesticity to scrutinize the political and economic biases within the myth of a universal, middle-class “Main Street.” In works such as Couch (2012)—a sateen sofa sawed in half and then cemented back together—McMillian uses post-consumer objects including discarded mattresses, carpets, chairs and bedsheets as both the material and the subject matter of his art, as he evokes the physical, psychological and economic distress of communities hit by loan defaults, home foreclosures and unemployment. McMillian juxtaposes these sculptures with works such as Untitled (The Supreme Court Painting) (2004-06) that challenge the terms that government and the media use to discuss justice, democracy and the rights of citizens in their private space, especially as these political ideals are experienced by African Americans. "As the title suggests, I hope this exhibition will bring out the complexities of the conversations that happen on different Main Streets, with their disparities of race, class and economics,” Rodney McMillian said. “Perhaps more important, I hope to question what ‘Main Street’ means. When I’ve heard that expression, I have never believed it referred to me or other African Americans, regardless of our economic station." Rodney McMillian (b. 1969, Columbia, SC) received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2002. He is also an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been featured in past exhibitions at the Studio Museum, including When the Stars Begin to Fall (2014), The Bearden Project (2012), Philosophy of Time Travel (2007) and Frequency (2005). His works are in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Orange County Museum of Art; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Visitors have the opportunity to view more of Rodney McMillian’s work in the exhibitions Rodney McMillian: The Black Show, on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (February 3–August 14, 2016) and Rodney McMillian: Landscape Paintings, on view at MoMA PS1 (April 3–August 29, 2016). Rodney McMillian: The Black Show forms an extended meditation on the United States in patterns cut by class, economic status, culture, race, gender, and history. It brings together a tightly focused selection of new and recent work that offers Blackness as subject, form, process, emotion, and politics. Accompanying Views of Main Street and The Black Show will be will be a full-color scholarly publication titled Rodney McMillian, co-edited by Naima J. Keith and Anthony Elms, Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. In addition to its contributions by Keith and Elms, the book will feature newly commissioned essays and responses by leading figures including Charles Gaines, artist; Rita Gonzalez, Curator of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Dave McKenzie, artist; and Steven Nelson, Professor of African and African American Art History, University of California, Los Angeles. Thelma Golden will offer the introduction and Amy Sadao, Director of the ICA Philadelphia, will provide the foreword. Rodney McMillian: Landscape Paintings is comprised of a suite of paintings on found bed sheets and a video that provoke questions about history and identity by engaging the tradition of landscape representation. |
Endia Beal
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Lloyd McNeill
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Derrick Beard
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Danielle Mckinney
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Romare Bearden
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Julie Mehretu
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Kevin Beasley
Born 1985, Lynchburg, VA |
Harold Mendez
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Gino Beghe
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Nii Ahene Mettle-Nunoo
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Aisha Bell
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Troy Michie
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Alexandra Bell
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Cristina de Middel
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Cleveland John Bellow
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Sam Middleton
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Essie Bendolph Pettway
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Wardell Milan
A city within a city, Harlem is in a constant state of flux. It is hardedged. It is immediate. It is fantastical. It is real, hyper-real and hyperrealized. In counterbalance to this reality, Wardell Milan: Drawings of Harlem offers a new physical possibility for experiencing this space. The works in the exhibition illustrate, in panoramic scope, the people, places, storefronts, churches, iconic fixtures and moments in time that are the essence of this cosmopolitan neighborhood. Commissioned and organized by Studio Museum PR Manager and Editor in Chief Ali Evans, this exhibition originated from Milan’s 2008 sketches of Harlem created for the pages of Studio magazine, following his year as an artist in residence. Upon completing the sketches, the museum invited him to continue drawing throughout the following year for this project. A merger of the artist’s photographic eye and impressionistic hand, the exhibition included more than forty works on paper based on photographs Milan took throughout Harlem. Some works are loosely drawn, while others display close attention to detail. Some have color, though most are Black and white. Representing moments experienced as fleeting, the works in Drawings of Harlem bring together contemporary photography and the fundamental artistic practice of drawing. |
Mary Lee Bendolph
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Nicole Miller
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Kajahl Benes
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Tom Miller
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Rigaud Benoit
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Adia Millett
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Leonardo Benzant
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Lev Timothy Mills
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Dawoud Bey
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George Mingo
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Wilson Bigaud
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Joe Minter
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Sanford Biggers
Born in Los Angeles, California, in 1970, Sanford Biggers is a multimedia artist who seamlessly weaves U.S. history into broader contexts of global histories, narratives, and styles. He is best known for working with found materials to reexamine both conceptual and physical matter. Biggers treats history as a conceptually found material, using physical objects and art historical traditions from different locales and contexts to upend received historical narratives, with his artworks functioning as repositories of memory. Biggers employs various visual forms in his exploration of found objects to contemplate methods of transformation and to confront the legacy of slavery and the historical treatment of Black bodies in the United States. In his 2007 work Lotus, he etched detailed diagrams of slave ships onto a lotus flower, the Buddhist symbol of purity. Biggers’s experiences visiting fabric shops in immigrant communities in Los Angeles with his mother as a young boy and teaching English, and later, completing a 2003 residency in Japan largely informed his later artistic practices. His exposure to cultures outside of the United States allowed him to envision and execute a conceptual practice that brings together disparate cultures and contexts. Biggers received a BA from Morehouse College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He was a 1999–2000 Studio Museum artist in residence and was featured in the Museum’s groundbreaking exhibition Freestyle (2001). |
Tyrone Mitchell
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Camille Billops
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Nandipha Mntambo
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McArthur Binion
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Tracey Moffat
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Robert Blackburn
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Meleko Mokgosi
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Nayland Blake
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Anna Moon
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Betty Blayton Taylor
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Jay Moon
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Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom
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Fred Moore
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Alexander "Skunder" Boghossian
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John L. Moore
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Chakaia Booker
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Mario Moore
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Phoebe Boswell
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Philip Moore
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Seymour Etienne Bottex
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Sister Gertrude Morgan
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Frank Bowling
Frank Bowling’s decades-long engagement with painting has resulted in expansive formalist explorations of his materials involving techniques like pours, washes, investigations of color and light, and stenciling. He pairs his abstract works with enigmatic titles that reflect the life around him (the family home, friends, historical references, and landscapes), but which never upstage his material investigations recorded on canvas. Born in Guyana in 1943, Bowling moved to London in 1953; he graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1962. During the first half of the 1960s, Bowling found early success in London through works defined by expressive figuration that made clear autobiographical and sociopolitical references, among other subjects. New York, where Bowling would move to in 1966, proved to be a defining location for the artist and ushered in a shift from clear representational elements. Bowling’s abstract turn was marked by what would eventually be known as the Map Paintings—stylized, stenciled continents on color-washed and stained canvases first exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971. The artist’s subsequent work explored nonrepresentational painting with varying applications of paint. Furthering his artistic developments, Bowling integrated himself with contemporaries like Mel Edwards, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Al Loving, and Jack Whitten. Working as a journalist and editor, Bowling contributed to Arts Magazine until 1972. The artist also shared his stance on the possibilities of his formalist approach during the period’s debate on what “Black art” should be in essays and interviews across various publications. Bowling carried on spending time between New York and London, until settling mainly in London in 2008. Bowling’s experimentations with abstraction continued, from sculptural paintings in the 1980s that involved embedded objects on thickly textured canvases, to present-day uses of acrylic gels, collage, and stitched canvases. His practice asserts a commitment and curiosity for the material possibilities of paint. |
Rafael Morla
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Sonia Boyce
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Quentin Morris
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Diedrick Brackens
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Petrona Morrison
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Mark Bradford
Mark Bradford: Alphabet is a major new body of work that includes twenty-six individual works on paper produced over the last year, each depicting a single letter. Alphabet relates to Bradford’s ongoing merchant posters project in which he canvasses his South Los Angeles neighborhood for handmade advertisements and signs, and then repurposes their messages to comment on the needs and desires of not only his local community, but the world at large. His singular talent of investigating language and its meaning is present in this wonderful series, which also shows Bradford’s highly skilled approach to painting and collage.
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Aolar Mosely
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Andre Bradley
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Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe
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Peter Bradley
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Aimé Mpane
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John Braithwaite
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Zwelethu Mthethwa
[image:1-3] Zwelethu Mthethwa: Inner Views brings together three series by South African photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa (b. 1960). “Interiors” and “Empty Beds” document the domestic lives of migrant workers around Johannesburg, South Africa, while “Common Ground” focuses on the shared experience of natural disasters in urban areas, featuring houses in New Orleans, Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina and on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa, after wildfires. [audio:1] Zwelethu Mthethwa: Inner Views is made possible thanks to the generous support of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation and South African Tourism [image:4] |
Michael Bramwell
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Zanele Muholi
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Marc Brandenburg
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Marlon Mullen
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Kwame Brathwaite
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Lavar Munroe
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Greg Breda
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Zora J Murff
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Candice Breitz
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Oscar Murillo
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Murat Brierre
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Ambrose Rhapsody Murray
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Enick Brig
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J. B. Murray
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Michael Paul Britto
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Sana Musasama
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Moe A. Brooker
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Wangechi Mutu
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Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.
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Christopher Myers
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Aya Brown
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Cassi Namoda
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Frederick Brown
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Marilyn Nance
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Iona Rozeal Brown
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Narcissister
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James Andrew Brown
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Ruben Natal-San Miguel
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Beverly Buchanan
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Rudzani Nemasetoni
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Selma Burke
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Senga Nengudi
Senga Nengudi's "RSVP" series was originally made in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Made of pantyhose and attached to the wall, the works were originally activated by Nengudi and artist Maren Hassinger who moved through the composition and explored the materiality of this flexible yet restrictive material. Highlighting ideas of transference and memory, this new work in the series is activated by Rashaun Mitchell and Marýa Wethers, who participated in an intensive workshop with Nengudi and Hassinger to build the work. This program is a part of Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art. Organized by Thomas J. Lax, Assistant Curator and Edwin Ramoran, Manager of Public Programs and Community Engagement with Monique Long, Curatorial Fellow. For additional information on upcoming events related to this exhibition, please visit radicalpresenceny.org. Additional performances Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art is supported by generous grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the patrons, benefactors, and donors to CAMH’s Major Exhibition Fund. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition is made possible by a grant from The Brown Foundation, Inc. Funding for the presentation at the Grey Art Gallery is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts; Tisch School of the Arts, NYU; the New York University Arts Council; Susan and Steven Jacobson; Jane Wesman and Don Savelson; the Department of Art and Art Professions, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, NYU; the Grey’s Director’s Circle, Inter/National Council, and Friends; and the Abby Weed Grey Trust. Generous in-kind support has also been received from The Wall Street Journal and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Funding for Radical Presence at The Studio Museum in Harlem is generously provided by Lambent Foundation. The Studio Museum in Harlem’s exhibitions are supported with public funds from the following government agencies and elected representatives: The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; The City of New York; and Council Member Inez E. Dickens, 9th Council District, Speaker Christine Quinn and the New York City Council. Additional funding is provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. |
Charles R. Burwell
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Louise Nevelson
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Bourmand Byron
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Kori Newkirk
Los Angeles-based artist Kori Newkirk transforms everyday images and objects into lyrical expressions of life. Born in the Bronx in 1970 and raised in Cortland, New York, he fuses his formal art education with childhood memories, social and political commentary, and popular culture. His works in sculpture, photography, video and mixed-media explore issues of race, gender, masculinity, alienation and place. Newkirk’s formal training as a painter—he received his MFA from the University of California in Irvine—is evident in his command of composition, color and form. His approaches to subjectivity and objectivity, as well as his use of found materials, exemplify his innovative art practice. From his signature landscape works composed of plastic hair beads to the insertion of his body in social spaces and natural environments, his work reminds viewers of the isolation experienced by urban youth, the over-consumption of popular culture and the prevalence of racial stereotyping, as well as the beauty and experiences of African-American culture and life. Curated by Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, Kori Newkirk: 1997–2007 is the most extensive presentation of this artist’s work to date, and illuminates how the varied yet interrelated strands of Newkirk’s practice have converged and developed over time. The Studio Museum featured Newkirk’s work in Freestyle, the seminal 2001 group exhibition of emerging talent. Newkirk has also been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Kori Newkirk: 1997–2007 is initiated and sponsored by the Fellows of Contemporary Art. This exhibition is also made possible with major support from Altria Group Inc. and The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation. |
Shaun El C. Leonardo
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Rashaad Newsome
Rashaad Newsome: THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO SEE spotlights multimedia artist Rashaad Newsome’s work about the dance form known as Vogue. For over a decade, Newsome has worked with members of the Vogue community, which developed in New York City’s queer ballroom scene of the 1970s. With a particular interest in critiquing the popular appropriation of Vogue in the early 1990s, and with the aim to bring these queer communities of color from the Vogue scene into the institutional space, Newsome creates work that reframes how performers are represented, and highlights their enormous talent for style and bodily movement. The title of the exhibition draws from an emcee’s refrain, while simultaneously pointing to the desire of wanting queer bodies of color represented within the institutional space. Featuring video and collage works made between 2008 to 2014, THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO SEE explores the beauty, agency and complexities of Vogue and performance art. Rashaad Newsome: THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO SEE is organized by Amanda Hunt, Assistant Curator. |
Widline Cadet
Widline Cadet (b. 1992 in Pétion-Ville, Haiti; currently lives and works in New York) is a Haitian-born artist. Her practice draws from personal history and examines race, memory, erasure, migration, and Haitian cultural identity from a viewpoint within the United States. She uses photography, video, and installations to construct a visual language that explores notions of visibility and hypervisibility, Black feminine interiority, and selfhood. Cadet is a recipient of a 2013 Mortimer-Hays Brandeis Traveling Fellowship, a 2018 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture artist in resident, a 2019 Lighthouse Works fellow, a 2019 Syracuse University VPA Turner artist in resident, a 2020 Lit List finalist, the 2020 Museum of Contemporary Photography’s Snider Prize winner, and a recipient of a 2020 NYFA / JGS Fellowship in photography. She earned a BA in studio art from The City College of New York and an MFA from Syracuse University. |
Floyd Newsum
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Bill Caldwell
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Jackie Nickerson
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Jonathan Calm
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Arcmanoro Niles
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Louis Cameron
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Nisibandoki
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Benjamin E. Campbell
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Serge Alain Nitegeka
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Nanette Carter
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Otobong Nkanga
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Juan Cash
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Charles Nkosi
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Laurent Casimir
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Fred Noel
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Jordan Casteel
Born 1989 Lives and works in New York, NY 2014 MFA, Yale University, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT 2011 BA, Agnes Scott College, Decatur GA |
Motshile Wa Nthodi
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Elizabeth Catlett
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Leonel Nussa
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Catti
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Lorraine O'Grady
Over the course of more than three decades, artist and cultural critic Lorraine O’Grady has won acclaim for her installations, performances and texts addressing the subjects of diaspora, hybridity and Black female subjectivity. Born in Boston in 1934 and trained at Wellesley College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as an economist, literary critic and fiction writer, O’Grady had careers as a U.S. government intelligence analyst, a translator and a rock music critic before turning her attention to the art world in 1980. In her landmark performance Art Is…, O’Grady entered her own float in the September 1983 African-American Day Parade, riding up Harlem’s Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard (Seventh Avenue) with fifteen collaborators dressed in white. Displayed on top of the float was an enormous, ornate gilded frame, while the words “Art Is…” were emblazoned on the float’s decorative skirt. At various points along the route, O’Grady and her collaborators jumped off the float and held up empty, gilded picture frames, inviting people to pose in them. The joyful responses turned parade onlookers into participants, affirmed the readiness of Harlem’s residents to see themselves as works of art, and created an irreplaceable record of the people and places of Harlem some thirty years ago. These color slides were taken by various people who witnessed the performance, and were later collected by O’Grady to compose the series. The forty images on view capture the energy and spirit of the original performance. Lorraine O'Grady: Art Is... is organized by Amanda Hunt, Assistant Curator.
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Nick Cave
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Antoine Obin
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Momadou Ceesay
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Philomé Obin
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Paul Chan
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Sénèque Obin
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Dana C. Chandler Jr.
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Saturnino Portuondo Odio
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Vladimir Cybil Charlier
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Odili Donald Odita
This site-specific mural inaugurates the new Project Space at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Equalizer, by artist Odili Donald Odita (b. 1966), tells of two moments of migration from the African continent to the Americas. The first is the transatlantic slave trade, of the early 1500s to almost 1900, which remains the largest forced migration in world history. The second, and more recent, is the contemporary relocation and emigration of Africans in search of political and economic stability. Though abstract and without discernable figures or direct narrative references, Equalizer is what Odita calls a “conceptual journey” in which the interactions of shape and color become metaphors for land and sea, movement and settling, challenges and hope. The explosive image on the red wall illustrates movement out of Africa. The adjacent wall to the right, strong blues and mauve predominates, representing the Atlantic ocean which Odita describes as “all tooth and treachery.” The next wall, where faint pastels blend to form somber gray tones that then give way to bright, prismatic earth tones on the right, represents potential and possibility. On the final wall, the patterns move from more horizontal orientation to smaller, animated fractals that are a metaphor for both the difficulties of immigrant life and the possibility that the African émigré, whether historical or contemporary, may find a new place to call “home.” Odili Donald Odita was born in Enugu, Nigeria; raised in Columbus, Ohio and received an MFA from Vermont’s Bennington College in 1990. Since then, Odita has been included in exhibitions in Africa, North America and Europe, such as DAK’ART 2004, the Dakar Biennial of Contemporary Art and the 52nd International Art Exhibition at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Odita is currently Associate Professor of Painting at Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia. The Project Space is a dynamic new location dedicated to a new series of site-specific works and projects at the Studio Museum. This recent addition to the exhibition program continues the Museum’s commitment to activating multiple architectural sites throughout the building—such as the lobby, atrium and façade—that provide artists with laboratories for innovative, contemporary art projects. |
Zoe Charlton
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Kemi Odulana
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Colin Chase
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Toyin Ojih Odutola
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Jonathan Lyndon Chase
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Chris Ofili
Afro Muses presents 181 watercolors created over the last ten years by artist Chris Ofili. A part of his prodigious output of works on paper, this selection of watercolors has never been exhibited before. Organized by the artist and Thelma Golden, chief curator, this exhibition includes images of men and women with a few birds and flowers, arranged as individual works, couples and groups. Some of Ofili’s watercolors have become the starting point for larger paintings; these are created as fully realized works. Ofili describes making these works as both pleasurable and challenging. Deriving from a meditative exercise, this presentation represents the evolution of his particular studio practice. Upon first viewing, the images can easily be perceived as portraits of individuals. These ancient visages are oddly reminiscent of someone, somewhere at some moment in time. However, they are not actual representations, but rather figurative expressions. Like the characters that populate Ofili’s larger paintings, these intimate figures derive from impressions and references from everyday life, memory and the history of art. Chris Ofili: Afro Muses 1995–2005 is presented with the generous support of The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation 2004–2005 Exhibition Fund, Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond Learsy and The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation |
Barbara Chase-Riboud
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J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere
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Caitlin Cherry
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Kayode Ojo
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Carl Clark
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Tim Okamura
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Ed Clark
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Nnamdi Okonkwo
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Henry Ray Clark
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Senam Okudzeto
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Linda Day Clark
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Asiru Olatunde
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Wesley Clark
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Demetrius Oliver
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LeRoy Clarke
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Xiomara de Oliver
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Peter Clarke
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Karyn Andrea Olivier
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Cameron Clayborn
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Raymond Olivier
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Taha Clayton
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Ademola Olugebefola
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Chuck Close
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Kambui Olujimi
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Mike Cloud
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Bruce Onobrakpeya
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Derrick Alexis Coard
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Frida Orupabo
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Gregory Coates
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Chinedu Felix Osuchukwu
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Tony Cokes
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Hayward Oubre
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Willie Cole
Across various media including sculpture, installation, and printmaking, Willie Cole mines the possibilities of everyday objects, from steam irons and high heels to lawn jockeys and plastic bottles, uncovering a multiplicity of historical and cultural references. A self-described “archaeological ethnographic Dadaist,” Cole unearths, deconstructs, and reassembles connections by returning to these objects and transforming them, while embracing the very absurdity of this project. Born in Somerville, New Jersey, in 1955, Cole graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1976. He subsequently pursued theater and music, but the visual arts became his main focus. By the 1980s objects began to take hold as his primary artistic materials, coinciding with his 1988–89 residency at The Studio Museum in Harlem. The artist has been included in a number of Studio Museum exhibitions since the 1980s, and the Museum’s permanent collection includes works that span two decades of his career. Cole has had solo presentations at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, Montclair Art Museum, University of Wyoming Art Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Museum of Modern Art. His work has appeared in numerous group exhibitions at such institutions as Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City; British Museum; Brooklyn Museum; El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana; and Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, Charlotte, North Carolina. Cole has been awarded the David C. Driskell Prize, High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2006), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (1996), and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant (1995). |
Sanou Oumar
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Robert Colescott
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John Outterbridge
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Bethany Collins
Born 1984, Montgomery, AL |
Clifford Owens
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Elizabeth Colomba
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Muraina Oyelami
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Dan Concholar
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Jennifer Packer
Born 1984, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
Houston E. Conwill
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Pannell
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Brett Cook - Dizney
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Gordon Parks
Gordon Parks: A Harlem Family 1967 honors the legacy and the work of late iconic artist and photojournalist Gordon Parks, who would have turned 100 on November 30, 2012. The exhibition, organized by Director and Chief Curator Thelma Golden and Assistant Curator Lauren Haynes, will feature approximately thirty Black and white photographs of the Fontenelle family, whose lives Parks documented as part of a 1968 Life magazine photo essay. A searing portrait of poverty in the United States, the Fontenelle photographs provide a view of Harlem through the narrative of a specific family at a particular moment in time. This intimate exhibition will include all images from the original essay as well as several unpublished images—some which have never been displayed publicly. The Studio Museum in Harlem and The Gordon Parks Foundation, a division of the Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation are together creating an exhibition catalogue for Gordon Parks: A Harlem Family 1967, complementing the five-volume set German publisher Steidl is planning to publish in honor of Parks’s centenary. Gordon Parks: A Harlem Family 1967 is supported by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.
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William Cordova
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Benjamin Patterson
Co-presented by The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Goethe-Institut New York for Performa 13. Founding Fluxus member Benjamin Patterson performs the first-ever retrospective concert of his “action as composition” works. The retrospective will include his innovative Fluxus scores from the 1960s and other early works such as Duo for Voice, 1961 as well as the artist’s newest work. For tickets, please click here. Please note: this event is NOT hosted at The Studio Museum in Harlem. A part of Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at the Grey Art Gallery, NYU (September 10–December 7, 2013) and The Studio Museum in Harlem (November 14, 2013–March 9, 2014). For additional information on upcoming events related to this exhibition, please visit radicalpresenceny.org. |
Hervé Cortinat
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Ebony G. Patterson
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Eldzier Cortor
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Kamau Amu Patton
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Kyrae Cowan
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Lee Pate
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Adger W. Cowans
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Damien Paul
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Brandon Coley Cox
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Gerard Paul
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Renee Cox
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James Payne
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Ernest Crichlow
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Fahamu Pecou
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Allan Rohan Crite
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Adam Pendleton
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Emilio Cruz
A painter, poet, playwright, performance artist, and musician, Emilio Cruz spent his career investigating the human experience. His visual arts practice, which applied Expressionism to figuration in fantastical and allegorical scenes, evolved to reflect his study of various philosophies, religions, and natural and social sciences. Born in 1938 in New York City, Cruz spent his early years in the Bronx and Harlem. His father, a trained artist, was his first art teacher. After high school, Cruz worked as a commercial artist while taking night classes at the Art Students League. In the later 1950s, Cruz was introduced to the work of contemporary New York avant-garde artists working largely in abstraction and spent time in the art colony of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he studied under Seong Moy and formed friendships with Bob Thompson, Franz Kline, and Charles Olsen. After receiving a John Hay Whitney Foundation fellowship in Rome during the mid-1960s, Cruz settled in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where he met jazz musicians and participated in experimental theater events. As a visiting artist with the Missouri Arts Council in Saint Louis from 1968 to 1969, Cruz was involved with the Black Artists Group. In 1976, with his wife, Patricia, Cruz established Spectacle, Inc., a multimedia theater production company bringing together poetry, painting, movement, film, and music. From 1970 to 1983, he taught painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and then returned to New York City, where he taught at various institutions. In 1987 The Studio Museum in Harlem mounted Emilio Cruz: Spilled Nightmares, Revelations, and Reflections, a solo exhibition that included Thanksgiving and Other Holidays (1986). Since the 1980s the Museum has featured Cruz’s work in a number of group exhibitions. |
Elle Perez
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Michael Cummings
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Alexis Peskine
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Jamal Cyrus
Jamal Cyrus’s Texas Fried Tenor is part of Learning to Work the Saxophone, a series whose title is borrowed from the refrain of the Steely Dan song “Deacon Blues.” In Texas Fried Tenor, Cyrus explores the idea of the instrument as a tool of transcendence and personal expression and its importance in American music, particularly the musical legacy of Texas saxophonists. During the performance, included in the exhibition Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, Cyrus fries a saxophone while reciting a poem based on the Texas tenor saxophone tradition. This event is free to the public; please note: this event is NOT hosted at The Studio Museum in Harlem. A part of Three Duets, Seven Variations, a special series for the Performa 13 biennial, pairing six intergenerational artists for seven programs. This program is organized by Adrienne Edwards, Performa, and Thomas J. Lax, The Studio Museum in Harlem. For additional information on upcoming events related to Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, please visit radicalpresenceny.org. |
Lamar Peterson
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Ananias Léki Dago
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Dawit L Petros
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Leonard Daley
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Max Petrus
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Andrews Ofori Danso
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Loretta Pettway Bennett
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Bruce Davidson
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Loretta Pettway
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Kenturah Davis
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Martha Pettway
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Noah Davis
Noah Davis created some four hundred paintings, collages, and sculptures during his career and is widely considered to have been an artist at the vanguard of figurative painting. Davis’s painting practice was heavily influenced by visits to museums and gallery spaces. After studying at Cooper Union in New York, Davis moved to Los Angeles in 2004 and worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) bookshop. An enthusiastic painter in his teens, Davis returned to his practice after encouragement from friends and fellow artists. His work was first exhibited at The Studio Museum in Harlem in 2010, when he was one of twenty-nine artists included in Fore (2012–13), the fourth exhibition in the Museum’s “F” series featuring emerging artists. David Zwirner Gallery in New York presented Davis’s first monographic exhibition in 2020. The artist’s goal in creating his gestural paintings was to present Black figures taking part in everyday life, in order to counteract the predominance in U.S. media of images depicting Black people engaged in criminal behavior. In addition to his artistic endeavors, Davis envisioned more inclusive artmaking practices and spaces by cofounding the Underground Museum with his wife, fellow artist Karon Davis, in 2012. A Black-owned and-operated art space dedicated to offering greater access to art in underserved communities, the museum exhibits artwork in the Arlington Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, a historically Black and brown community. When the Davises first opened the Underground Museum’s doors, local museums refused to lend them artworks. Despite the early setback, they continued to pour their resources into the museum, using it as a gathering space for artists, activists, and the surrounding community. In 2015 The Underground Museum and MOCA launched a multiyear collaboration that presents exhibitions developed and envisioned by Davis before his untimely death at age thirty-two, using works from MOCA’s collection of contemporary art. |
Martha Jane Pettway
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Pat Davis
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Elizabeth Peyton
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Walter Davis
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Paul Pfeiffer
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C. Daniel Dawson
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Philadelphia Wireman
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Nzuji De Magalhaes
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Julia Phillips
Born 1985 in Hamburg, Germany |
Murray De Pillars
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Naudline Pierre
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Bernard De Seignara
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Andre Pierre
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Roy DeCarava
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Howardena Pindell
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Avel C. DeKnight
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Adrian Piper
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Nadine DeLawrence-Maine
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Valerie Piraino
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Abigail DeVille
Born 1981, New York, NY |
Michael Platt
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Aria Dean
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Stephanie Pogue
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TJ Dedeaux-Norris
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P.H. Polk
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Dorothy Dehner
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Ted Pontiflet
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Beauford Delaney
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Pope.L
Iconic performance artist Pope.L’s (formerly known as William Pope.L) Cage Unrequited is a marathon reading of John Cage’s edited anthology, Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961) by over eighty invited collaborators. The performance functions as a refuge, proposing a relationship between the earlier artist’s ideas of indeterminacy, mysticism and chance and the work of contemporary Black artists. This event is free to the public. Please note: this event is NOT hosted at The Studio Museum in Harlem. A part of Three Duets, Seven Variations, a special series for the Performa 13 biennial, pairing six intergenerational artists for seven programs. This program is organized by Adrienne Edwards, Performa, and Thomas J. Lax, The Studio Museum in Harlem. Also a part of Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at the Grey Art Gallery, NYU (September 10–December 7, 2013) and The Studio Museum in Harlem (November 14, 2013–March 9, 2014). For additional information on upcoming events related to this exhibition, please visit radicalpresenceny.org. Co-organized by the Grey Art Gallery, NYU; The Studio Museum in Harlem; and Performa. |
Joseph Delaney
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Charles Ethan Porter
Celebrated by his contemporaries as one of the most skilled still-life painters, Charles Ethan Porter (1847/49 – 1923) is best known for his stylistic range that merges meticulous realism and rich colors with fluid brushwork and sophisticated spatial effects. The Studio Museum in Harlem proudly presents Charles Ethan Porter: African-American Master of Still Life. This traveling exhibition, organized by New Britain Museum of American Art and curated by Hildegard Cummings, is the first museum exhibition of works by the artist. Presenting over forty works of Porter’s still-life paintings of flowers, insects, fruit, landscapes and portraits, this landmark exhibition and its accompanying catalogue introduces audiences to Porter’s timeless skills. From his use of rich palettes and meticulous attention to detail, Porter’s paintings can be seen as methodical and often theatrical studies of his immediate world. His native state, Connecticut, proved to be his most powerful muse, from his mother’s lustrous garden to the fields and woodlands of Connecticut. Porter’s fascination with nature’s vegetation and topography provided endless inspiration throughout his career. About the Artist
Charles Ethan Porter was born in the late 1840s in Rockville, Connecticut. In 1869 he was accepted into the prestigious National Academy of Design and began a four-year study in New York City. Porter taught art lessons to support himself through school, then completed his studies in 1873 and opened a small studio in New York City. In 1878, upon returning to Connecticut, Porter found the familiar landscape of New England altered by industrialization. Soon after, he left for Paris, France, where he continued his training and spent time painting in the French countryside. Branching away from his still lifes, Porter began to explore the landscape genre and incorporate elements of Impressionism into his work. In 1884, Porter moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where he introduced his impressionist-inspired new work, which defied the “established aesthetics” of the day. Porter returned to his hometown Rockville, Connecticut in 1897 where he continued to work until his death in 1923. Following its installation at The Studio Museum in Harlem, the exhibition traveled to the North Carolina Central University of Art Museum, Durham (August 3 through October 7, 2008). |
Louis Delsarte
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Larry Potter
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Karoly Demeter
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Robert A. Pruitt
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James Denmark
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Martin Puryear
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Delphine Desane
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Mavis Pusey
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Thornton Dial
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Christina Quarles
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Modou Dieng
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Clarence M. Queen
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Vincent S. Dillard
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Michael Queenland
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Jeff Donaldson
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Ronny Quevedo
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Godfried Donkor
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Nathaniel Mary Quinn
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Emory Douglas
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Erika Ranee
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Stan Douglas
Converging documentary and fictional footage, Stan Douglas’s film, Inconsolable Memories, is based in part on a Cuban film from 1968, Memories of Underdevelopment. The original film by, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, portrayed the alienation of a character named Sergio, a bourgeois intellectual struggling in the social climate of Cuba in the early sixties, after the Bay of Pigs invasion and missile crisis. Douglas’s film fast-forwards the same character to the 1980 Mariel Boatlift, when Fidel Castro allowed a temporary lift of emigration restrictions and some 125,000 Cubans left for the United States. Given the opportunity to leave, Sergio chooses to stay in the fractured city. In Inconsolable Memories, Douglas manipulates Alea’s original film by retaining the characters but introducing a divergent historical setting. The past and present overlap with the interplay of two Black-and-white, 16-mm film loops projected simultaneously onto one screen. Inconsolable Memories is accompanied here by a series of recent photographs by Douglas. Shot in and around Havana, these images reveal the urban landscape of Cuba today. They depict instances of the city’s recycled urban architecture, in which banks have been converted into motorcycle lots, villas are now schools, and a cinema has become a carpentry shop. Highlighting the evolutionary needs of the twenty-first century, the photographs trace a history of development, colonialism and the transformations of society. Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1960, Douglas works in film, video, photography and installation. He attended the Emily Carr College of Art and Design from 1979 to 1982 and currently lives and works in Vancouver. Internationally known for his use of innovative techniques to blur the boundaries between visual art, cinema and television, Douglas has presented his work in major exhibitions such as Documenta XI in Kassel, Germany, in 2002, and the 2005 Venice Biennale. |
Kameelah Janan Rasheed
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John Dowell
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Robert Rauschenberg
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Leonardo Drew
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Jeanne Raynal
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David Driskell
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Elliot Reed
Elliot Reed is an internationally exhibited performance artist based in New York. Elliot is a 2019 danceWEB scholar, 2019-20 Artist In Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and recipient of the 2019 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. Recent exhibitions include a commission with JACK Quartet (2020), MoMA PS1 (2020), The Getty Museum (2018), The Hammer Museum (2016), The Dorthy Chandler Pavilion (2018) The Broad (2017), University of Southern California (2016), and performances at MoonStep Tokyo (2017), MNSKTM Osaka (2017), VFD London (2017), and MOOI Collective Mexico City (2017). |
Préfète Duffaut
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Robert Reid
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DeShawn Dumas
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Mallica "Kapo" Reynolds
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Marlene Dumas
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Robin Rhode
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Delano Dunn
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Eugene Richards
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James Dupree
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Michael Richards
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D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem
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Tanea Richardson
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Andile Dyalvane
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Jamea Richmond-Edwards
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Torkwase Dyson
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Gregory Ridley
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Allan L. Edmunds
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Enrico Riley
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Melvin E. Edwards
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Faith Ringgold
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Victor Ehikhamenor
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Bob Rivera
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Alfred Eisenstadt
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Kenny Rivero
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Embah
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Larry Rivers
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Touhami Ennadre
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Andy Robert
Born in 1984 in Les Cayes, Haiti |
Awol Erizku
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Deborah Roberts
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Roberto Estopinan
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Prophet Royal Robertson
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Mel Ettrick
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Ellington Robinson
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Mary Evans
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Kenya (Robinson)
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Minnie Evans
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Marc Andre Robinson
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Wendy Ewald
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Nadine Robinson
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Zachary Fabri
Zachary Fabri presents a new live performance interweaving physical movement, monologue and sound from the galleries of The Studio Museum in Harlem to 125th Street, just beyond the Museum’s doors. Co-organized by the Grey Art Gallery, The Studio Museum in Harlem and Performa. A part of Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at the Grey Art Gallery, NYU (September 10–December 7, 2013) and The Studio Museum in Harlem (November 14, 2013–March 9, 2014). For additional information on upcoming events related to this exhibition, please visit radicalpresenceny.org. |
Jorge Luis Rodriguez
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Adebisi Fabunmi
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Sherrill Roland
Please join Studio Museum curators Connie H. Choi and Hallie Ringle for a tour of Fictions at 6 pm and a performance by artist Sherrill Roland of The Jumpsuit Project from 7 to 9 pm. In The Jumpsuit Project, an ongoing performance work, Roland seeks to challenge ideas around mass incarceration and create a safe space for discussion. While a graduate student, he was wrongfully convicted and spent nineteen months in prison due to a case of mistaken identity. Although eventually exonerated, Roland’s experiences with the justice system had a lasting effect on both his life and artistic practice. During his performance he will wear an orange jumpsuit—a reminder of his prison uniform—and invite visitors into his “cell,” a space that is roughly the size of the cell from his time in prison. Visitors are encouraged to engage in conversation with Roland during the course of his performance. Sherrill Roland’s The Jumpsuit Project is presented as part of Fictions, an exhibition on view at The Studio Museum in Harlem from September 14, 2017 to January 7, 2018. This event is free and open to the public, though pre-registration is encouraged.
Lead sponsor of Fictions Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem are made possible thanks in part to support from The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Council. Additional support is generously provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. |
Jadé Fadojutimi
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Tim Rollins & K.O.S
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Lamidi Olonade Fakeye
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Mosie Romney
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Charles Farrar
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Tracey Rose
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Nona Faustine
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Nellie Mae Rowe
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Frohawk Two Feathers
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John Rozelle
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Tom Feelings
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Duhirwe Rushemeza
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Amos Ferguson
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Tajh Rust
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Jose A. Figueroa
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Alison Saar
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David Fludd
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Betye Saar
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Derek Fordjour
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Lezley Saar
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Samuel Fosso
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Synthia Saint James
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Aaron Fowler
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Ed Salter
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LaToya Ruby Frazier
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Eve Sandler
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Roland Freeman
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Curtis "Talwst" Santiago
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Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller
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Jacolby Satterwhite
Jacolby Satterwhite (b.1986 in Columbia, South Carolina; currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY ) is known for a conceptual practice addressing crucial themes of labor, consumption, carnality, and fantasy through immersive installations, virtual reality, and digital media. He uses a range of software to produce intricately detailed animations and live action films of real and imagined worlds populated by the avatars of artists and friends. These animations serve as stages on which the artist synthesizes the multiple disciplines that encompass his practice. Satterwhite draws from an extensive set of references, guided by queer theory, modernism, and video game language to challenge conventions of Western art through a personal and political lens. He received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Arts, Baltimore and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Satterwhite’s work has been presented in numerous exhibitions both in the United States and in Europe, including most recently at Fabric Workshop & Museum, Philadelphia (2019); Pioneer Works, New York (2019); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019); the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2019); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2018); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2018); New Museum, New York (2017); Public Art Fund, New York (2017); San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco (2017); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2017); and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2013). He was awarded the United States Artist Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellowship in 2016. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. In 2019, Satterwhite collaborated with Solange Knowles on her visual album, “When I Get Home." |
Meschac Gaba
A modern staple in Harlem, Black hair braiding dates back to ancient Africa. The forms and styles range from purely functional to complex and symbolic. Stylistic choices often have profound implications; hair can be an indicator of age, authority, social status or religion. In some African cultures, strands of hair are even used as a potent substance with supernatural powers. In cities across Europe and the Americas, African hair braiders produce extravagant creations based on their traditional braiding skills and styles. In the space of the salon, these braiders unite capitalist commerce with traditional culture. Fascinated by West African hair braiding in Harlem and inspired by Manhattan skylines, Meschac Gaba created a new body of work while in residence at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens last year. Tresses features eighteen hair sculptures based on architectural landmarks in New York and in Benin. These wigs of woven artificial hair interpret well known edifices, such as the Chrysler Building in midtown Manhattan, Hotel Theresa in Harlem, and the Porte de non Retour in Ouidah, Benin. They emphasize the shared fragility, sentimentality and specificity of hair and architecture. Two seeming divergent products of humankind, hair and architecture meet here as equally significant symbols of modern culture. In making this work, Gaba assumes the role of the nouveau tresseur or tresseuse, a traditional Beninese hair braider, reassigning meaning to architectural forms and cultural experiences. Addressing the consequences of capitalism, Gaba has also created a series of prints based on the countries’ respective currencies, the U.S. Dollar and the West African Franc CFA. Juxtaposing self-portraits with images of his building perruques, Gaba fashions a new model of conceptual currency. These banknotes denote the imbalance of the global economy as African currencies become increasingly devalued against the Euro and the Dollar. Born in Cotonou, Benin in 1961, Meschac Gaba emerged onto the international contemporary art scene in 1999 when he presented the Museum of Contemporary African Art in the exhibition Mirror’s Edge at Bilmuseet in Umea, Sweden. It marked the beginning of an expansive conceptual and virtual project based on subjectivity of museum spaces. Parts and portions of this ongoing project such as Salle de Jeux, The Salon, and Library of the Museum, have been exhibited at S.M.A.K., Gent, Belgium (2000), at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2002), and in Documenta XI (2002), Kassel, Germany, respectively. Gaba’s complex and varied artistic practice provides an in depth examination of cultural appropriation, public space, the role of the western museum, and the changing global economy. His appropriation of tourist imagery –from cinema and souvenirs to magazines and museums—allows the viewer to deconstruct the western iconography and disturb modes of representation in contemporary art. Studio Museum in Harlem Associate Curator Christine Y. Kim organized Meschac Gaba: Tresses. Meschac Gaba: Tresses is presented with the generous support of the Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam, The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation 2004-2005 Exhibition Fund, and the Consulate General of The Netherlands in New York. |
Raymond Saunders
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Genevieve Gaignard
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Augusta Savage
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Charles Gaines
Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974–1989 is the first museum survey of Los Angeles–based conceptual artist Charles Gaines's early work. The exhibition features seventy-five works from the beginning of a singular career that now spans four decades. Highly regarded as both a leading practitioner of conceptualism and an influential educator at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), Charles Gaines is celebrated primarily for his photographs, drawings and works on paper that investigate systems, cognition and language. His early experiments examined the roles that systems and rule-based procedures play in the construction of forms, objects and meaning. Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974–1989 traces Gaines’s career, from his groundbreaking work in the 1970s—some of which debuted in exhibitions at famed New York galleries Leo Castelli and John Weber—to his investigations of subjectivity in the late 1980s. Exploring the ways in which Gaines’s early works on paper can be viewed as a crucial bridge between the first generation conceptualists of the 1960s and 1970s and the conceptually-based practices of artists who emerged in the ensuing decades, the exhibition includes rare and never-before-seen works, some of which were presumed lost. Considered against the backdrop of the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s and the rise of multiculturalism in the 1980s, the works in Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974–1989 are radical gestures. Eschewing overt discussion of race, they take a detached approach to identity that exemplifies Gaines’s determination to transcend the conversations of his time and create new paths in artistic innovation. Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974–1989 is organized by Naima J. Keith, Assistant Curator. The exhibition is accompanied by a 160-page, full-color hardcover catalogue that includes newly commissioned texts by Anne Ellegood, Malik Gaines, Courtney J. Martin, Bennett Simpson, Howard Singerman and Ellen Tani; introductions by Studio Museum Director and Chief Curator Thelma Golden and the exhibition's curator, Naima J. Keith; an illustrated chronology contextualizing Gaines’s life and work; and—for the first time—expository texts explaining the production process for each body of work. Additionally, several new media initiatives around Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974–1989 build on the Studio Museum’s active and growing presence in the digital realm, including a tumblr and a Facebook group promoting the discussion of Gaines's art and ideas. Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974–1989 is generously supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. |
Sidney Schenck
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Nikita Gale
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Dread Scott
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Ellen Gallagher
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William Scott
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Paul Gardere
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Thabiso Sekgala
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Alex Gardner
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Tschabalala Self
Tschabalala Self (b. 1990, Harlem) makes syncretic use of painting, printmaking, and assemblage to explore ideas surrounding the Black female body. Constructed with a combination of sewn, printed, and painted materials, Self’s exaggerated depictions of bodies traverse a variety of artistic and craft traditions. The physiological and psychological characteristics of her figures also reflect Self’s personal desire to articulate cultural attitudes and realities as they relate to race and gender. She writes, “The fantasies and attitudes surrounding the Black female body are both accepted and rejected within my practice, and through this disorientation, new possibilities arise.” Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at Tramway in Glasgow, the New Museum, and Art + Practice, among others. Self received her BA from Bard College and her MFA from Yale University. A 2017 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, she lives and works in New York and New Haven. |
Doreen Garner
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Robert A. Sengstacke
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Ja'Tovia Gary
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Paul Mpagi Sepuya
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Shaunté Gates
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Jamel Shabazz
Jamel Shabazz (b. 1960, Brooklyn, NY) attended John Jay College of Criminal Justice before devoting himself full-time to photography. His street portraits are evidence of meaningful conversations and exchanges, visual documents that reveal the beauty of the everyday person. Shabazz’s practice follows a long tradition of photographers, from James Van Der Zee to Dawoud Bey, who shaped the visual legacy of Harlem. His photographs seek to correct predominant negative depictions of African Americans, using sites such as Harlem and other communities throughout New York as symbols for a larger Black experience. Through his work, he creates open-ended narratives that transcend the moments they depict, offering powerful allegories for the present. The visual cacophony of the street and subways shape the formal and narrative elements of Shabazz’s photographs. Colors, textures, patterns, and signage are among the devices he employs to accentuate his subject’s character. By capturing the omnipresent force of street fashion in Harlem, he makes visible the self-expression and bonds that unite the Harlem community. Shabazz’s practice uses the power of the photograph to preserve collective memory and celebrate Black achievement. His work has been featured in several exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, including his 2017 solo presentation Jamel Shabazz: Crossing 125th. He has been included in solo and group exhibitions at the Central Library branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, the Nasher Museum at Duke University, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Shabazz maintains a commitment to social responsibility and young people’s access to photography, and has served as a teaching artist for the Studio Museum’s Expanding the Walls program, Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation, the Bronx Museum’s Teen Council youth program, the International Center of Photography, Friends of Island Academy, and the Mural Arts program in Germantown, Pennsylvania, among others. |
Theaster Gates
Theaster Gates’s See, Sit, Sup, Sip, Sing: Holding Court (2012) was created from tables, chairs and desks salvaged from a now-closed public school on Chicago’s South Side. Gates joins us in the Museum atrium for a special activation of the work by the artist. Designed as an experience for learning created by the people assembled in and around it, the installation will be a site for engaged conversation and dynamic interaction. A part of Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at the Grey Art Gallery, NYU (September 10–December 7, 2013) and The Studio Museum in Harlem (November 14, 2013–March 9, 2014). For additional information on upcoming events related to this exhibition, please visit radicalpresenceny.org. This program is organized by Thomas J. Lax, Assistant Curator and Edwin Ramoran, Manager of Public Programs and Community Engagement with Monique Long, Curatorial Fellow.
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Rudy Shepherd
Rudy Shepherd invites you to Induction Ceremony, a performance inaugurating inHarlem: Rudy Shepherd, currently on view in Jackie Robinson Park through July 25, 2017. The most recent in the series of sculptures that Shepherd began in 2006, Black Rock Negative Energy Absorber aims to dispel feelings of racial prejudice, violence or ordinary disdain by encouraging compassion. Leading a group of musical collaborators including Brian Alfred, Elia Einhorn, Christof Knoche and Ethan Meyer, Shepherd will activate his sculpture, expunging negative energy from the surrounding audience through a cathartic performance. Rudy Shepherd (born 1975, Baltimore, Maryland; lives and works in New York, New York, and State College, Pennsylvania) received a BS in Biology and Studio Art from Wake Forest University and an MFA in Sculpture from the School of Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been shown in exhibitions at institutions including MoMA PS1, Bronx Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Socrates Sculpture Park, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art and Regina Miller Gallery of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. His work was recently seen in the Studio Museum exhibitions When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South (2014) and Black: Color, Material, Concept (2015).
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Rico Gatson
Rico Gatson is a Brooklyn-based multimedia artist and object maker working across abstraction and figuration. Gatson graduated from Bethel College with a BFA in 1989 and Yale School of Art with an MFA in 1991. Gatson’s striking visual language utilizes iconography from sources such as African textiles and religious icon paintings. His art is influenced by the early twentieth-century geometric compositions of Russian Constructivist propaganda posters, whose creators believed that art should reflect the everyday lives of the people. Reimagining the Black figure’s place in history, the present, and the future, Gatson’s work also evokes Afrofuturism. He frequently combines these inspirations in one canvas, sculpture, video, or mural mosaic to create vibrant geometric compositions underpinned with powerful social commentary, often related to significant moments in Black history. Gatson’s work inspires thoughtful investigations and renegotiations of race, identity politics, and history. His abstract works powerfully offer loaded symbols and images that spark dialogue regarding the U.S. political landscape, especially as it relates to Black life and Black icons. Gatson has been featured in numerous exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem including Freestyle (2001) and a 2017 solo presentation of works on paper created over a ten-year period. His works in the permanent collection range from works on paper to video installations. |
Sienna Shields
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Cy Gavin
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Yinka Shonibare
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Buraimoh Gbadamosi
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David Shrobe
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Herbert Alexander Gentry
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Malick Sidibé
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Rennie George
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Durant Sihlali
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Justin Georges
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Thomas Sills
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vanessa german
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Gary Simmons
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Ficre Ghebreyesus
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Xaviera Simmons
Xaviera Simmons (b. 1974, New York, NY) Lives and works in New York, NY
2005 Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York, NY Maggie Flanigan Studio, 2-Year Actor Training Conservatory, New York, NY 2004 BFA, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY |
Ralph Gibson
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Coreen Simpson
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Mark Thomas Gibson
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Lorna Simpson
Lorna Simpson (b. 1960, Brooklyn, NY) examines notions of representation using techniques as varied as the juxtaposition of text and staged photography, to collage using imagery from Jet and Ebony magazines on paper. Early in her practice, Simpson committed to examining the role and possibilities of photography in the articulations of identity, culture, gender, and race, with an awareness of photography’s history. Simpson has built a multidisciplinary practice—including film, video, painting, drawing, collage, and sculpture—to expand her conceptual concerns. Simpson received her BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1983, and an MFA in visual arts from the University of California, San Diego in 1985. During the 1980s, she developed a visual strategy grounded in Conceptualism. She created large-scale photographic works with spare, staged images of Black figures, seen from behind or in fragments, on neutral studio backgrounds with incisive accompanying text. From the 1990s onwards, Simpson has looked to printing photographs on felt while also exploring the capacity of film and video to expand on the core themes of her practice—desire and isolation. Simpson consistently explores other avenues for her visual investigations and has also incorporated collage and painting into her practice. The artist has exhibited widely with solo presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago; Haus der Kunst, Munich; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among many others. She has been awarded several prizes, including a J. Paul Getty Medal in 2019. Her work has been included in several exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem since the late 1980s, including the solo presentation Lorna Simpson: Duet (2007). She was the inaugural recipient of The Studio Museum’s Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize in 2006. The Museum’s collection includes works that demonstrate the breadth of Simpson’s career. |
Aaron Gilbert
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Merton D. Simpson
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Sam Gilliam
Artist Sam Gilliam (1933–2022) is renowned for his abstract paintings that extend the boundaries of traditional two-dimensional works. Gilliam earned his BA (1955) and MFA (1961) from the University of Louisville in Kentucky. As a member of the Washington Color School, a collective informed by Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s and 1950s, Gilliam experimented with color and form in his work. In the 1960s, alongside fellow artist Thomas Downing, Gilliam developed bright-colored, nonrepresentational, expansive works characteristic of earlier Washington Color Field paintings. In 1965 Gilliam made yet another experimental change to his works, for the first time introducing the idea of an unsupported canvas. Inspired by laundry hanging from clotheslines, Gilliam began draping and suspending large areas of paint-stained canvas. This would be one of the many evolutions of his work throughout his nearly six-decade career. Gilliam transformed his canvas medium and the contexts in which it was displayed—stretching and draping, incorporating found materials within and alongside the canvas, and hanging painted canvas from the ceilings of exhibition spaces. Gilliam’s experimentation with his art form and material were concurrent with the social upheaval and tumultuous events of the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States. Gilliam is a foundational figure in The Studio Museum in Harlem’s history, and he is represented by numerous paintings and works on paper in the Museum’s permanent collection. He was first exhibited in X to the Fourth Power (1969), part of the Museum’s inaugural year of exhibitions. His work has also been highlighted in a number of exhibitions at the Museum including a solo show, Red & Black to “D”: Paintings by Sam Gilliam. |
Aaron Siskind
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Paul Giovanopoulos
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Michel Sivnil
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Rex Goreleigh
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Yarrow Slaps
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Simon Gouverneur
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Alexandria Smith
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Deborah Grant
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Alfred J. Smith
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Todd Gray
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Paul Anthony Smith
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Renee Green
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Aswuzi Smith
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Myra Greene
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Cauleen Smith
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Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
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George Smith
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Kojo Griffin
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Ira Smith
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Rashawn Griffin
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Mary T. Smith
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Dr. Eugene Grigsby
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Ming Smith
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Adler Guerrier
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Bayeté Ross Smith
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Alteronce Gumby
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Sable Elyse Smith
Sable Elyse Smith (b. 1986, Los Angeles) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator whose practice considers memory and trauma, working from the archive of her own body to mark the difference between witnessing and watching. “To see,” she writes, “is unbearable.” Her work has been presented at institutions including MoMA PS1, the New Museum, and Recess Assembly. It has also been seen through Artist Television Access in San Francisco and at Birkbeck Cinema in collaboration with the Serpentine Galleries. Sable Elyse Smith: Ordinary Violence is on view at the Queens Museum through February 18, 2018. Her writing has been published in Radical Teacher, Selfish Magazine, Studio, and Affidavit, and she is currently working on her first book. Smith has received awards from Creative Capital, Fine Arts Work Center, the Queens Museum, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and Art Matters. She recently served as a visiting critic at Columbia University and is currently a visiting artist in at Virginia Commonwealth University. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia. |
Roy Gumpel
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Shinique Smith
Multimedia artist, Shinique Smith, activated the Studio Museum Project Space with Like it Like that, an installation designed specially for the gallery. A Frequency alum known for her practice spanning sculptures made of clothing, collage on walls and paper, painting and drawing, Smith creates colorful works that tread the lines between accumulation and loss, containment and scatter, legibility and scribble. Created by Smith like an improvisational dance, Like it Like that joins the explosive energy of graffiti writing with the spontaneity of Abstract Expressionist painting. Though evoking an urban street scene from afar, upon closer inspection one realizes the mural is saturated with personal effects, especially from the artist’s youth. Thus, the gallery reflected less a public space and more an intimate retreat from authority and a shrine to all things “cool” that obsess modern youth. Accessible through the Main Gallery and adjacent to the new auditorium, the Project Space is a dynamic gallery dedicated to site-specific works and other projects and installations. |
Tyree Guyton
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Vincent Smith
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Carol Guzy
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Ephrem Solomon
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Hassan Hajjaj
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Jeff Sonhouse
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Chase Hall
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Vaughn Spann
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Lauren Halsey
Born 1987, Los Angeles, CA |
Georgia Speller
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Allison Janae Hamilton
Allison Janae Hamilton (b. 1984, Lexington, Kentucky) is an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, photography, video, and taxidermy. Using plant matter, layered imagery, sounds, and animal remains, Hamilton creates immersive spaces that consider the role of the American landscape in concepts of “Americana” and social constructions of space, particularly within the rural South. Hamilton’s work has been shown at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, The Jewish Museum, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Fundación Botín, Santander, and the Istanbul Design Biennial. Hamilton was a 2013–14 fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program and has been awarded residencies at Recess, New York; Fundación Botín, Cantabria, Spain; and the Rush Arts Foundation, New York. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University and her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. She lives and works in New York. |
Henry Speller
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Walter Lobyn Hamilton
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Stan Squirewell
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David Hammons
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Robert St. Brice
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Trenton Doyle Hancock
Trenton Doyle Hancock: Skin and Bones, 20 Years of Drawing chronicles the foundation and evolution of Hancock’s prolific career. The exhibition is the first in-depth examination of the artist’s extensive body of drawings, collages and works on paper. For over two decades, Hancock has immersed himself in drawing, testing the elasticity of the medium with a keen sense of humor. Hancock was born in 1974 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He lives and works in Houston, Texas. In 2007, Hancock was the recipient of The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize. Organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), Trenton Doyle Hancock: Skin and Bones, 20 Years of Drawing is curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, Senior Curator. The Studio Museum’s presentation is organized by Lauren Haynes, Associate Curator, Permanent Collection. Trenton Doyle Hancock: Skin and Bones, 20 Years of Drawing is supported by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and other supporters of CAMH. |
James Everett Stanley
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Inge Hardison
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Micius Stephane
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Kira Lynn Harris
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Lloyd Stevens
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Lyle Ashton Harris
Lyle Ashton Harris: Self/Portrait brings together a group of large-format Polaroid photographs of the artist’s friends, family and community; artists, art collectors and patrons; and the artist himself. Shot over the ten-year period, from 1998 to 2008, the sepia-toned “Chocolate Polaroids” capture the faces and backs of more than two hundred individuals. Harris (b. 1965) works in photography, installation and performance, often exploring ideas of kinship, gender, sexuality and the legacies of iconic artists. Exploring his ongoing interest in self-portraiture, desire and cultural history, Self/Portrait assembles twenty-two photographs from the series. Shot in a studio outfitted for the large-format Polaroid camera in SoHo, Manhattan, the photographs on view demonstrate the series’ formal and stylistic range. Some figures are backlit and others emerge out of dark expanses, alternately cinematic, stern and deadpan. Closely cropped, the images of the sitters’ faces and backs are simultaneously intimate and larger than life—towering before, and making themselves vulnerable to, onlookers. The relationship between viewer and subject echoes the artist’s connection to his sitters. While Harris carefully constructs his pictures, the photographs are also reflections of himself. “For me the process of portraiture is a way of negotiating intimacy,” Harris notes. Made with those around him, the series can be thought of as a visual autobiography. Facing forward and backward, both literally and metaphorically, the sitters in Harris’s series encourage us to reflect on ideas of time, history and memory. The artist’s use of the Polaroid format juxtaposes this instantaneous medium—commercially phased out over the duration of the series—with the long-lasting, memorializing effects of portraiture. Harris also extends an art historical genealogy that includes artists such as Andy Warhol (1928–1987), Chuck Close (b. 1940) and Adrian Piper (b. 1948), who have represented their communities’ relationships to the contemporary art world through particular, subjective points of view. As an archive of a segment of New York’s residents at the turn of the twenty-first century, Self/Portrait demonstrates the interaction between an artist’s identity and worldview and the experience of their sitters and viewers. Lyle Ashton Harris was born in the Bronx and currently lives and works between New York and Accra, Ghana. He received a BA with Honors from Wesleyan University in Connecticut (1988) and an MA from the California Institute of the Arts (1990), and he participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (1992). His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and is regularly featured in periodicals and publications. It is also represented in the Studio Museum’s permanent collection, and was included in the Museum’s African Queen (2005) and Collected. Propositions on the Permanent Collection (2009) exhibitions, as well as Performing MJ, a public performance in 2006. Lyle Ashton Harris: Self/Portrait is organized by Exhibition Coordinator and Program Associate Thomas J. Lax. Click above to hear Lyle Ashton Harris discuss the origins of the "Chocolate Polaroids" series, and themes within the work. |
Frank Stewart
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David Hartt
David Hartt: Stray Light presents color photographs, sculptures and a video installation by Chicago-based conceptual photographer David Hartt (b. 1967) reflecting on the iconic headquarters of the Johnson Publishing Company in downtown Chicago. The eleven-story Modernist building on South Michigan Avenue was home to Jet and Ebony magazines since its design in 1971. The building was heralded as the first major downtown Chicago building designed by an African-American architect since the eighteenth century. In the case of the Johnson family and its legacy, Hartt looks to the intersection of the publisher’s ideals and values, the style and aesthetics embodied by the site and the lasting cultural impact of the magazines. David Hartt: Stray Light was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where it was curated by Michael Darling, James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator. Support for this exhibition is generously provided by the Chauncey and Marion Deering McCormick Family Foundation. The presentation at The Studio Museum in Harlem was organized by Thomas J. Lax, Assistant Curator. |
Maya Stovall
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Bessie Harvey
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Tavares Strachan
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Kay Hassan
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Allen Stringfellow
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Maren Hassinger
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Devin Troy Strother
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Cynthia Hawkins
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Dick Stroud
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Hugh Hayden
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Jimmy Lee Sudduth
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Frederick Hayes
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Eldridge Suggs III
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Mike Henderson
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Martine Syms
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Barkley L. Hendricks
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Bruce Talamon
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Gregory Henry
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Michelle Talibah
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Leslie Hewitt
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Ann Tanksley
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Chester Higgins
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Henry Ossawa Tanner
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EJ Hill
Born 1985, Los Angeles 2013 MFA, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 2011 BFA, Columbia College, Chicago, IL
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Ron Tarver
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Candace Hill-Montgomery
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Henry Taylor
After years of working odd jobs—including a ten-year stint as a psychiatric technician—the painter Henry Taylor is finally receiving acclaim as one of today’s most engaging emerging artists. The Studio Museum in Harlem is proud to present his first museum solo exhibition, Sis and Bra, an exploration of economic and racial disparities of the United States through portraiture. Taylor, who finds inspiration in just about everything around him, has a refreshing, idiosyncratic perspective on the American cultural landscape. “Taylor started his formal art training later in life,” explains Associate Curator Christine Y. Kim. “While considered by some to be an ‘outsider artist’ because of his work’s aesthetics and biographical background, he focuses on the intimate and familiar world for inspiration, and situates these experiences within the living trajectory of contemporary American painting.” The exhibition features a selection of Taylor’s recent figurative paintings. While his pieces come in a variety of sizes and are often made on a wide range of found materials, including cigarette and cereal boxes, cutting boards and suitcases, these works are primarily on traditional canvases. Taylor frequently depicts friends, family members and acquaintances at barbecues, sporting events and other neighborhood activities. A perceptive portraitist, he captures nuances of expression and mood in his subjects, including his former hospital patients (Tasered, 2005) and family members such as his son Noah. In Homage to a Brother (2007), a portrait of Sean Bell, the African-American man shot and killed by plainclothes detectives on the eve of his wedding in Queens--Taylor utilizes found images of Bell’s neighborhood and environment to comment on the larger issues the killing brought up. Henry Taylor: Sis and Bra was organized by Christine Y. Kim former Associate Curator. About the Artist |
Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle
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Janet E. Taylor
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Arnold C. Hinton
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Margaret Taylor-Burroughs
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Nicholas Hlobo
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Pascale Marthine Tayou
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Wayne Hodge
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Thomas Teamoh
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Reggie Burrows Hodges
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Felandus Thames
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Geoffrey Holder
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Alma Thomas
Born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1891, Alma Thomas moved with her family to Washington, DC, in 1907. She was the first graduate of the newly formed art department at Howard University in 1924 and earned a master’s degree in education from Columbia University a decade later. After nearly forty years as an art teacher in the DC public school system, Thomas retired in 1960 and began to paint seriously for the first time in her career. Initially representational in her approach, she spent several years after her retirement developing what would become her signature abstract style. Color formed the basis of Thomas’s work. She applied bright paints onto often raw canvases to create lattice-like compositions where patterns appear from negative space. Thomas’s lifelong study of color theory and her gestural, staccato brushstrokes suggesting movement across the canvas expanded upon the work of the contemporaneous Washington Color School and the Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s and 1950s. She cited natural elements as inspiration and often titled her works with allusions to flowers, sun, and wind. The 1969 moon landing prompted a series of paintings exploring Thomas’s interest in space, a new extension of the natural world around her. Although best known for large-scale acrylic paintings, Thomas also painted watercolors throughout her career. These watercolors, several of which are in The Studio Museum in Harlem’s permanent collection, continued her experimentations with color, line, and pattern. Thomas achieved considerable success in the last decade of her life. She was the first female African-American artist to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1972. The Studio Museum mounted solo exhibitions of Thomas’s work in 1983, five years after her death, and in 2016. |
Fred Holland
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Hank Willis Thomas
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Lonnie Bradley Holley
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James "Son Ford" Thomas
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Alvin C. Hollingsworth
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Lava Thomas
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Charles Hoppe
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Mickalene Thomas
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Patricia Howard
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Philip Thomas
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Earlie Hudnall Jr.
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Bob Thompson
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David Huffman
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Justin Randolph Thompson
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Jibade-Khalil Huffman
Born 1981, Detroit, MI Lives and works in Los Angeles 2013 MFA, Roski School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles CA 2005 MFA, Graduate Program in Literary Arts, Brown University, Providence RI 2003 BA, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY |
Barthélémy Toguo
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Manuel Hughes
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Mose Ernest Tolliver
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Richard Hunt
Chicago-based sculptor Richard Hunt (b. 1935) is best known for his public commissions sited in more than 125 parks, schools and public areas across the nation, including the intersection of 125th Street and Morningside Avenue in New York, where the abstract forms of his Harlem Hybrid (1976) seem to draw together elements of the surroundings while creating a dynamic environment of their own. Richard Hunt: Framed and Extended explores three lesser-known but integral aspects of Hunt’s art—printmaking, small-scale sculpture and wall sculpture—that share a vocabulary with the public commissions and express the same sense of lightness and vitality. The exhibition’s title, drawn from one of Hunt’s wall sculptures, testifies to the artist’s practice of sculpture as the three-dimensional counterpart to drawing. The exhibition brings together some seventeen works that span Hunt’s career. These range from the bold, angular lines of his print Untitled (1965) and the sweeping, gestural combination of abstracted organic forms and hard-edged geometry in the freestanding Hybrid Form #3 (1970) to his Wall Piece Two and Wall Piece Seven (both 1989) and the recent freestanding Spiral Odyssey II (2014). Richard Hunt: Framed and Extended is organized by Lauren Haynes, Associate Curator, Permanent Collection, and Hallie Ringle, Assistant Curator. Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem are made possible thanks to support from the following government agencies: The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Council. Additional support is generously provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. |
Rigoberto Torres
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Clementine Hunter
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Tourmaline
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Bill Hutson
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Renee Townsend
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Juliana Huxtable
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Bill Traylor
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Kudzanai-Violet Hwami
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Brad Trent
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Hector Hyppolite
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Fatimah Tuggar
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Jerald Ieans
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Cornelius Tulloch
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Birney Imes
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Luce Turnier
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Texas Isaiah
Texas Isaiah (b. Brooklyn, NY, and active since 2013; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is a visual narrator. The intimate works he creates center the possibilities that can emerge by inviting individuals to participate in the photographic process. He is attempting to shift the power dynamics rooted in photography to display different ways of accessing support in one’s own body. Texas Isaiah’s work has been exhibited in spaces including Fotografiska, New York; Aperture Foundation Gallery, New York; Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles; UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles; Residency, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Kitchen, New York; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Selected interviews, articles, and commissions include British Vogue, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Adweek, Artforum, Them, The FADER, VSCO, Vice, LALA Magazine, and Cultured magazine. He is one of the 2018 grant recipients of Art Matters and the 2019 recipient of the Getty Images: Where We Stand Creative Bursary grant. |
Twins Seven Seven
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Alex Jackson
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Doris Ulmann
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Ayana V. Jackson
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Pierre-Joseph Valcin
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Duron Jackson
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Jina Valentine
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Gerald Jackson
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James Van Der Zee
James Van Der Zee (1886–1983), whose career spanned over eighty years, is one of the most renowned photographers of the Harlem Renaissance. His comprehensive practice documents a wide spectrum of life in twentieth-century Harlem, from the everyday to the aspirational. In 1900, at age fourteen, Van Der Zee purchased his first camera, and his earliest work documents his extended family at their home in Lenox, Massachusetts. Once in Harlem, Van Der Zee worked out of a commercial photography studio, where he carefully crafted his portraits of Black subjects, often manipulating photo negatives to achieve a distinctive, soft-edged effect. Due to the economic strain of the 1930s and the increasing popularity of the personal camera, Van Der Zee adopted photo restoration and incorporated passport and funerary photography into his practice, along with other miscellaneous commercial and editorial projects, to supplement his income. Throughout his career, Van Der Zee photographed many prominent artists and historical figures, including Muhammad Ali, Benny Andrews, Jean Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden, Countee Cullen, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Marcus Garvey and his United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Following The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s controversial 1969 exhibition Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968, in which Van Der Zee’s work received significant attention, the photographer generously donated sixty-six works to and was made a “Fellow for Life” at The Met. He received the Pierre Toussaint Award from the Archdiocese of New York in 1978 and the Living Legacy Award from President Jimmy Carter at the White House in 1979. With four honorary doctorate degrees, numerous awards, and an extensive archive of works, Van Der Zee died in 1983 at the age of ninety-six. His work remains an important touchstone in the history of photography, Black visual culture, and Harlem. In the brochure for The Studio Museum in Harlem’s 1982 exhibition Harlem Heyday: The Photography of James VanDerZee, art historian Deborah Willis wrote that Van Der Zee’s “artistry comes from his ability to combine his many elements as a painter, studio and journalistic photographer, but above all, his natural curiosity about people. This aspect of his works enabled him to make photographs which synthesized the elements of design and composition.” For over forty years, Mrs. Donna Van Der Zee, widow of James Van Der Zee, and The Studio Museum in Harlem maintained James Van Der Zee's archive. In December 2021, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with the Studio Museum and Mrs. Van Der Zee, announced a historic collaboration: The Met would assume stewardship of Van Der Zee’s archive, while working alongside the Studio Museum and Mrs. Van Der Zee to conserve, digitize, and provide public access to the photographer’s entire catalogue. |
Oliver Lee Jackson
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Carl Van Vechten
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Reginald Jackson
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Jessica Vaughn
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Tomashi Jackson
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Nontsikelelo Veleko
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Walter C. Jackson
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Sam Vernon
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Arthur Jafa
Arthur Jafa(b. 1960, Tupelo, Mississippi)
Across three decades, artist, filmmaker, and cinematographer Arthur Jafa has developed a dynamic practice comprising films, artefacts and happenings that reference and question the universal and specific articulations of Black being. Underscoring the many facets of Jafa’s practice is a recurring question: how can visual media, such as objects, static and moving images, transmit the equivalent "power, beauty and alienation" embedded within forms of Black music in US culture? Jafa’s films have garnered acclaim at the Los Angeles, New York and Black Star Film Festivals and his artwork is represented in celebrated collections worldwide including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Tate, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The High Museum Atlanta, The Dallas Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Stedelijk, LUMA Foundation, The Perez Art Museum Miami, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among many others. Jafa has recent and forthcoming exhibitions of his work at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Fundação de Serralves, Porto; the 22nd Biennale of Sydney and the Louisiana Museum of Art, Denmark. In 2019, he received the Golden Lion for the Best Participant of the 58th Venice Biennale “May You Live in Interesting Times.” |
William Villalongo
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February James
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Stacy Lynn Waddell
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E. Jane
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Andre D. Wagner
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Wadsworth Jarrell
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Adolfo Nadal Walcot
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Njena Surae Jarvis
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Derek Walcott
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Eliegene Jean
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Christian Walker
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Paul Jean
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Henderson Day (Bo) Walker
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Steffani Jemison
Steffani Jemison (b. 1981, Berkeley, CA) Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
2009 MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL 2003 BA, Columbia University, New York, NY |
Kara Walker
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AK Jenkins
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Larry Walker
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Olalekan Jeyifous
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Autumn Wallace
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Daniel LaRue Johnson
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Leon Waller
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David L. Johnson
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Nari Ward
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Joshua Johnson
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Burnham Ware
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Malvin Gray Johnson
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Andy Warhol
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Oliver Johnson
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Cullen Washington Jr.
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Rashid Johnson
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Albert Watson
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Rindon Johnson
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Ouattara Watts
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Serge Jolimeau
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Ian Weaver
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Ben F. Jones
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Stephanie Weaver
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Jennie C. Jones
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Lisa Diane Wedgeworth
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Lois Mailou Jones
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Carrie Mae Weems
Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953, Portland, OR) began her career studying modern dance at Anna Halprin’s studio workshop in San Francisco. She earned a BA at the California Institute of the Arts in 1981 and an MFA at the University of California, San Diego in 1984. Early on, she lived bicoastally between the Bay Area and New York City, where she took a photography class taught by Dawoud Bey at The Studio Museum in Harlem in 1976. Weems moved to New York permanently in 1994, where she found community with photographers such as Coreen Simpson and Roy DeCarava, who were invested in documenting the Black experience. Over the course of four decades, Weems has developed a complex oeuvre that integrates photography, text, fabric, audio, digital images, and installation to innovate new strategies of image-making. Her practice explores race, family relationships, cultural identity, sexism, and class politics. Through her work, Weems frequently interrogates who or what might be absent within visual culture and attempts to fill in these gaps with a critical sensibility. Weems often places herself within the work using multiple images, overlaid text, and performance to draw attention to her presence as a means of action. Her landmark Kitchen Table Series (1990) repositions and reimagines the Black female protagonist. Set at a kitchen table, the series features Weems by herself or with others, engaging in various, seemingly common, roles within an intimate domestic setting. The constructed images and associated text panels interrogate notions of tradition, gender, family, and relationships, reflecting the multifaceted subjectivities of Black women. Weems has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international museums and is represented in public and private collections around the world, including The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Tate Modern. In 2013 Weems received the MacArthur Genius Grant. |
Samuel Levi Jones
Samuel Levi Jones (b. 1978) deconstructs and manipulates books such as encyclopedias and textbooks, to critically explore systems of knowledge and power. Samuel Levi Jones: Unbound, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, is a site-specific installation, composed of deconstructed law books, that symbolically dismantles their implicit authority. In 2013, Jones began collecting the encyclopedias and reference books—often understood as authoritative sources of information, even though they are sometimes biased and inaccurate—that form the foundation of his current project. He tears the covers off these books and stitches the exposed binding surfaces together in grids, which he then mounts on canvas. The works recall the rational grid employed by Minimalists such as Agnes Martin and Sol LeWitt. Further, the raw edges reveal layers of cardboard and fabric and add textural roughness that evokes the painterly, gestural marks of Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock. For Unbound, Jones presents three new works that are his largest yet, and utilizes law textbooks disassembled into their structural components. Spines and covers form wall-to-wall painting-like works mounted on canvas or adhered directly to the wall (Unbound, Jaded and Don’t Feel Right). In the three wall works, form and materiality are emphasized, while function and value are called into question—the books have been stripped of authoritative identity. These works engage recent criticism of the law and the justice system with respect to human rights and social welfare. Samuel Levi Jones: Unbound is organized by Naima J. Keith, Associate Curator. |
James L. Wells
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Barbara Jones-Hogu
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Eric Wesley
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Jasmin Joseph
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Pheoris West
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William Joseph
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Linda Whitaker
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Isaac Julien
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Charles White
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Cyrus Kabiru
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Stanley Whitney
The Studio Museum in Harlem is proud to present Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange, the first New York City solo museum exhibition of the work of a painter (born Philadelphia, 1946) whose intensely color-based abstractions have won steadily mounting recognition since the mid-1990s. The exhibition will feature twenty-eight paintings and works on paper created between 2008 and 2015, including the 2013 title work. Following time spent in Italy and then later in Egypt in the mid-1990s, Whitney developed the weighty, almost architectural approach that has now become his signature style. Rhythmic and lyrical, with a combination of pre-ordained structure and improvisation inspired in part by his love of jazz, the square-format paintings arrange rectangles of vivid, single colors in a deliberately irregular grid, with the close-fitting, many-hued “bricks” or “tiles” stacked vertically and arrayed in horizontal bands. Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange is organized for the Studio Museum by Lauren Haynes, Associate Curator, Permanent Collection. A full-color catalogue will accompany the exhibition, featuring contributions by Lauren Haynes, Robert Storr, Lowery Stokes Sims and Stanley Whitney, with a foreword by Thelma Golden. Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange is made possible thanks to support from the following government agencies: The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; and the New York City Council. Additional funding is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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Glenn Kaino
On October 16, 1968, during the medal ceremony for the men’s 200-meter race at the Mexico City Olympic Games, American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised Black-gloved fists as a symbolic act of protest. Australian silver medalist Peter Norman stood firmly with Smith and Carlos, displaying his solidarity by wearing an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge during the medal ceremony. The gesture, seen around the world and preserved in images that still resonate today, became a catalytic symbol for myriad beliefs, ideas and social causes. For Glenn Kaino: 19.83, Los Angeles–based Kaino (b. 1972) presents the New York debut of two works that mark the genesis of his ongoing collaboration with Smith. The exhibition consists of two works: Bridge (2013), in the Museum’s atrium, and 19.83, in the Museum’s project space. Bridge, a site-specific intervention composed of gold-painted casts of Smith’s arm, is a reservoir of memories that reflects on the power of the athletes’ gesture nearly four decades after its occurrence. 19.83, the title of both the work here and the exhibition as a whole, refers to Smith’s world record–breaking time in the 200-meter race, 19.83 seconds. The work is a sculptural environment that takes the form of a three-level platform reminiscent of the one used to honor Olympic medalists. Plated in gold, the reflective and monumental object gives shape to the complexities of memory and brings form to the structures in which narratives are created, transmitted, challenged and remade. Together, these works examine the conditions in which symbolic moments enter history, how these circumstances evolve over time, and how memory and history compete for relevance in the present. Glenn Kaino: 19.83 is organized by Assistant Curator Naima J. Keith. Glenn Kaino (b. 1972) lives and works in Los Angeles. His upcoming and recent solo exhibitions include Glenn Kaino, Kavi Gupta Chicago | Berlin (2014); Tank, Prospect3, New Orleans, (2014); Tank, Grand Arts, Kansas City, (2015); Bring Me The Hands of Piri Reis, Honor Fraser, Los Angeles (2012); In Every Grain, U.S. Pavilion, 13th International Cairo Biennale, Cairo, Egypt (2012-); The Space Between, A.Bandit, The Kitchen, New York (2011); Glenn Kaino: Safe | Vanish, LA><ART, Los Angeles (2011); Honor Among Thieves, Performa09, in collaboration with Creative Time, New York (2010); Transformer: The Work of Glenn Kaino, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (2008); The Burning Boards, Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York (2007); Laws Were Made for Rogues, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2006); and Bounce: Glenn Kaino and Mark Bradford, Gallery at REDCAT, Los Angeles (2004). Recent group exhibitions include 12th International Biennial de Lyon, Lyon, France (2013); In|Situ, Expo Chicago, Chicago, IL (2013); Role Model-Role Playing, Museum der Moderne Mochsberg, Salzburg, Germany (2011); The Artists’ Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2010); Blackbelt, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2004); Whitney Biennial 2004, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2004), California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, California (2004); and One Planet Under a Groove, Brooklyn Museum, New York (2001). Public collections include Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. |
Jack Whitten
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Joyce Kalema
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Kehinde Wiley
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Lunga Kama
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Bernard Williams
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Martin W. Kane
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D'Angelo Lovell Williams
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Titus Kaphar
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Dan Williams
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James H. Karales
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Edna Williams
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Cyrus Karibu
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Fabian Williams
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Jayson Keeling
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Gerald Williams
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Paul Farwell Keene
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Lorna Williams
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William Keith
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Michael Kelly Williams
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Lauren Kelley
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Rachel Eulena Williams
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Khalif Kelly
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Randy Williams
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Arnold J. Kemp
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Walter Williams
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Michael S. Kendall
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William T. Williams
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John Kendrick
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Deborah Willis
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Seydou Keïta
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Ellis Wilson
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Clifford Prince King
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Fred Wilson
Born in 1954 in the Bronx, Fred Wilson obtained a BFA from State University of New York at Purchase in 1976. Before establishing himself as a practicing artist, Wilson worked as a freelance educator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Museum of Natural History, and the American Craft Museum (now Museum of Arts and Design), and also served as the first director of the Longwood Arts Project in the Bronx. Wilson’s practice spans several media, including installation, sculpture, photography, and printmaking. He initially zeroed in on the relationship between objects and museums, exploring how categorization, collecting rationales, and display tactics illustrate the ideologies and relationships of power imbedded in institutions. In his formative project Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson (1992–93) at the Maryland Historical Society in collaboration with The Contemporary in Baltimore, Wilson installed hundreds of museum objects in confrontational juxtapositions, such as polished repoussé silverware next to a rusty pair of slave shackles. The installation highlighted both Maryland’s history of racial violence and the Historical Society’s selective omission of that history. The artist has continued to explore these ideas through more object-based work. Wilson has been represented at institutions and in biennials around the world, including Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Center for Art Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore; and the 50th Venice Biennale. Among his many accolades include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant (1999). The artist has been featured in a number of exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, including two solo shows. The Museum’s permanent collection includes works that extend across three decades of his career. |
William Kitt
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LeRone Wilson
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Yashua Klos
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Paula Wilson
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Autumn Knight
Born 1980 in Houston, TX |
Wendy Wilson
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Gwendolyn C. Knight
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Frank Wimberley
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Jas Knight
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Hale Woodruff
Hale Woodruff worked in both abstraction and figural representation for most of his nearly six-decade career. Born in Cairo, Illinois, and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, Woodruff traveled broadly, studying art in Indianapolis, Chicago; Paris; and Mexico, among other locations. A painter, draftsman, and printmaker, he is best known for his scenes depicting the struggles and triumphs of Black life. His works incorporate influences as varied as African art, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, and Mexican Muralism, speaking to his capacious understanding of art history. A noted educator, Woodruff spent decades advocating for artists of African descent. He taught at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University) from 1931 to 1946, chairing the fine art department for a number of years. He also established the Atlanta University Art Annuals (1942–70) to counter the lack of exhibition opportunities for many African-American artists. Woodruff taught art at New York University from 1947 until his retirement in 1968. In New York City, he was active in the movements for racial justice and equity, particularly in the art world. Along with Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, and Norman Lewis, Woodruff founded Spiral, an African-American art collective originally formed in response to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963. The Studio Museum in Harlem’s collection includes dozens of paintings and works on paper by Woodruff that span more than four decades of Woodruff’s career. His work was first exhibited at the Museum in 1968, its inaugural year. Since then, the Museum has featured Woodruff’s work in numerous exhibitions, including a 1979 retrospective. |
Jeremy Kost
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Leroy Woodson
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Marcia Kure
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Shirley Woodson
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Robert LaVigne
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Saya Woolfalk
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Jerome Lagarrigue
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Sasha Wortzel
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D. Lammie-Hanson
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Richard Yarde
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Moshekwa Langa
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Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
[image:1-6] Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Any Number of Preoccupations, organized by Associate Curator Naomi Beckwith, will be British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s very first solo museum exhibition. Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977, London) was recently included in the Studio Museum’s Flow (Spring 2008), an acclaimed exhibition of new work by emerging African artists from across the world. On view from November 11, 2010—March 13, 2011, Any Number of Preoccupations will feature works created between 2003—when the artist completed her postgraduate work at the Royal Academy Schools—and 2010. The twenty-four works on view are a mix of her larger and smaller canvases of fictional portraits, primarily oil-on-canvas. Similar to a novelist, Yiadom-Boakye creates characters that have lively back stories; yet she leaves it up to the viewer’s imagination to fill in the details of these fictional lives. She works quickly, embracing the physicality and technicality of painting, and often destroys unsuccessful work—a strategy she says helps her maintain “freshness and urgency.” Language is a strong influence on Yiadom-Boakye; in addition to painting she is a prolific writer of fiction, poetry and essays. The catalogue for the exhibition features essays by Beckwith and renowned critic and curator Okwui Enwezor, a short story by Yiadom-Boakye, and a foreword by Studio Museum Director and Chief Curator Thelma Golden. Below, hear Lynette Yiadom-Boakye speak about her painting practice, exclusive to studiomuseum.org! [audio:1-3] |
Claude Lawrence
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Jan Yoors
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Jacob Lawrence
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Annie Mae Young
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Deana Lawson
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Purvis Young
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Hughie Lee-Smith
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Brenna Youngblood
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Simone Leigh
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Yéanzi
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Ralph Lemon
Drawing from an eight-year project by New York-based movement artist Ralph Lemon (b. 1952, Cincinnati) in conjunction with Little Yazoo, Mississippi resident Walter Carter (1907–2010), 1856 Cessna Road explores a friendship that evolved into a close collaboration and features digital animation, large-scale color photographs and a video installation. Ralph Lemon is a dancer, choreographer, writer and visual artist, and is the Artistic Director of Cross Performance, which he founded in 1995. In 2004, Lemon concluded the ten-year project The Geography Trilogy. Lemon’s most recent multimedia performance, How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? (2008–10), included the installation Meditation. Lemon has participated in solo and group exhibitions at many visual arts institutions including Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Hayward Gallery, London; The Kitchen, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, among others. Lemon is currently completing Four Walls, a live dance and film that will premiere in November 2012 at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York. Come home Charley Patton, the final book in The Geography Trilogy, will be published this fall by Wesleyan University Press. This fall, he will also curate a performance series titled Some sweet day at the Museum of Modern Art. |
Allan Zion
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