Hank Willis Thomas, who was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, has emerged as one of the most prolific artists of his generation. Formally trained as a photographer, over the last 15 years, he has considered the relationship we have to images and what they say about our priorities and privileges, focusing primarily on popular, found imagery from history, sport, and fashion.
BHM
Martin Puryear
VENICE U.S. Pavilion, 58th Venice Biennale
“Liberty/Libertà,” Martin Puryear’s U.S. pavilion exhibition, uses subtle, disarming, and purposeful juxtapositions to create a mindful meditation on what it means to be an American artist and citizen today.
Nari Ward
NEW YORK New Museum
Amazing Grace (1993), an installation of fire hoses and nearly 300 abandoned baby strollers first shown at a firehouse in Harlem, originally referred to the crack epidemic, AIDS, and homelessness sweeping through that neighborhood. Now, as one walks through the strollers along a pathway formed from the hoses while listening to Mahalia Jackson sing the gospel song of the title, it is hard not to think of family separations and the ongoing humanitarian crisis at the border.
Wangechi Mutu On Her New Fifth Avenue Façade Commission at The Met
“The idea of a hybrid for me represents human potential, super-human powers, and the feeling of being in transition as well as being alienated.”
Critical Aspirations: A Conversation with Ilana Harris-Babou
Ilana Harris-Babou is often considered a video artist, but her practice fluidly negotiates sculpture, installation, performance, photography, and online platforms like Instagram.
Mixed Messages: Mark Bradford’s What Hath God Wrought
In the late fall of 2018, an odd delivery appeared on the campus of the University of California, San Diego. From the flatbed of a trailer, construction crews unloaded five precisely machined, nearly 40-foot-long tubes.
Mortal Coils: A Conversation with Angela Hennessy
Artist and educator Angela Hennessy lives and works in Oakland, California, where she teaches at California College of the Arts. Through writing, studio work, and performance, her practice examines mythologies of blackness embedded in linguistic metaphors of color and cloth.
Object Lessons: Sonya Clark
“The original Confederate Flag of Truce was divided and divided and divided again. It got deconstructed, and here we have the effort of reconstructing it, of putting it back into the world, in as many different ways as we can.”
In Public and In Color: A Conversation with Leonardo Drew
Drew recently unveiled City in the Grass, a monumental commission for Madison Square Park in New York City, which remains on view through December 15, 2019. An eponymously titled solo show at his New York gallery, Galerie Lelong & Co., is on view through August 2.
Matthew Angelo Harrison: Future Perfect
Matthew Angelo Harrison met me at Stanford University’s Automotive Innovation Facility on a brisk day in February. Surrounded by oak trees on the edge of campus, the building is clad in green corrugated metal. Inside, it is a bright, clean space with six garage bays; it looks more like a lab than a body shop.
