Kenseth Armstead’s videos, drawings, and sculptures draw upon and re-envision the legacy of Africans and their diaspora in the United States. In his decade-long “Spook” project, Armstead explored the life and legacy of James Armistead Lafayette, a double-agent spy for George Washington during the American Revolution.
BHM
Poetry in Motion: A Conversation with Mildred Howard and Johanna Poethig
Cultural Corridor/Urban Flow is a nine-and-a-half-mile-long public artwork on the first Bus Rapid Transit Line in Oakland, California. Designed by Johanna Poethig and Mildred Howard, with Peter Richards and Joyce Hsu, the line’s 34 stations are visually connected with a “ribbon” of words and images rendered in laser-cut aluminum on handrail panels and decorative windscreens.
Theaster Gates
NEW YORK Gagosian For Theaster Gates, the gallery operates not as a place for pleasurable viewing but as a performative space of social practice focused on cultural recuperation and empowerment.
Kapwani Kiwanga
ROTTERDAM Kunstinstituut Melly Kapwani Kiwanga’s recent exhibition featured three installations and a hanging cloth work—all addressing strategies of resistance, from historical slavery to the American civil rights era, to today’s anti-racist movements and demonstrations. Botany played an unexpected, and key, role in all but one of these new works, as Kiwanga drew out the histories of various plants smuggled into America by enslaved Africans.
Dubious Origins: A Conversation with Sanford Biggers
By remixing references and aesthetic values from multiple cultures and time periods, Biggers reconsiders questions of authenticity, art historical authority, and provenance, infusing his hybridized forms—which he calls “objects for a future ethnography”—with overlapping and sometimes diametrically opposed meanings that demand to be grasped simultaneously.
Welcoming: A Conversation with Donté K. Hayes
Influenced by hip-hop, history, and science fiction, Donté K. Hayes explores memories of the past to project possible futures. The ceramic vessels in his “Welcoming” series use the pineapple as a surrogate for the Black body, tapping into its dual significance as a symbol of welcome and hospitality for some groups and a symbol of racist exclusion and agricultural colonization for others.
Betye Saar
NEW YORK The Morgan Library & Museum Each finished work in the exhibition is accompanied by pages from Saar’s working sketchbooks—these pairings open a fascinating window onto Saar’s process, illuminating what she calls “the mysterious transformation of object into art.”
Richard Hunt
CHICAGO The Art Institute of Chicago Richard Hunt’s career trajectory reads like a modern-day version of a Baroque-era prodigy’s story. In 1957, while he was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), the Museum of Modern Art purchased one of his works. Soon after, his sculptures were on display at the Whitney, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Thaddeus Mosley
NEW YORK Karma Still making work at the age of 94, self-taught sculptor Thaddeus Mosley serves as an outstanding example of why Black Lives Matter. Although well known in the Pittsburgh area, where he has been exhibiting since 1959, his work has only recently gained a broader audience, due in part to his inclusion in the 2018 Carnegie International.
Kara Walker
LONDON Tate Modern Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus, created for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, is a brilliantly trenchant and brutal anti-monument to Britain’s shameful, often overlooked role in the slave trade.
