Kapwani Kiwanga’s research-driven sculptures, installations, videos, and performances tie together objects from particular locales, evidence of economic and political power, the global African diaspora, and the history of colonialism to idiosyncratically reread established histories, often focusing on disruptions centered around belief, mythology, and impermanence.
BHM
Solid Memories: A Conversation with Dominique White
In “Deadweight” (currently on view at London’s Whitechapel Gallery), Dominique White uses fugitive materials to imagine an abstract future.
Gary Simmons
MIAMI Peréz Art Museum The artist’s questioning of how our shared past is remembered and which histories we’ve been taught to forget—why and by whom, and what is at stake—was especially timely in its presentation in a state whose governor and extremists have been leading the charge for the destruction of education and a war on truth through censorship, book banning, and whitewashing how American history is taught.
Kehinde Wiley
HOUSTON Museum of Fine Arts Nearly all of the figures in the exhibition are deceased, wounded, or in repose, in striking contrast to Wiley’s previous works in which his subjects are (almost) invariably dynamic, assertive, and commanding.
Melvin Edwards: “You don’t play around with that power”
Recipient of the 2024 Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award Melvin Edwards began his now mythical “Lynch Fragments” in Los Angeles in 1963, when he was 26, and he has continued welding and forging them in New York, New Jersey, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Brazil, and elsewhere.
El Anatsui
LONDON Tate Modern Long before being commissioned for Turbine Hall, El Anatsui knew the Tate name. When he was growing up in Ghana (formerly known as Gold Coast, a British Crown colony until 1957), the only cube sugar available was supplied by the London-based conglomerate, Tate and Lyle.
Object Lessons: Karon Davis
I come from a dance background. Both of my parents are dancers—I came out of the womb, and they were like, “Here are your tap shoes, here are your ballet shoes.” I had a show coming up in New York, and Curtain Call seemed like the perfect subject matter; it was where my heart was leading me.
Rhea Dillon
LONDON Tate Britain Metaphorical storytelling lies at the core of Dillon’s work, and in “An Alterable Terrain,” she applies that approach to sculpture, overlaying expressive narrative onto the language of minimal abstraction.
Michael Richards
NEW YORK Bronx Museum of the Arts As “Art You Down?” makes clear, Michael Richards, who died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, was an artist ahead of his time. He focused his practice on Black identity and social injustice, often using casts of his own body to invest the work with personal and political meaning.
Martin Puryear
NEW WINDSOR, NEW YORK Storm King Art Center Among the highlights of the exhibition is the earliest maquette that Puryear completed for Lookout; dating to 2016, the model is rendered in wood, the medium of his best-known public works.
