COVER: Julie Mehretu / Flaunt / Issue 145

Julie Mehretu. “Untitled (Detail),” (2015). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 48 x 60 inches. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Alex Yudzon.
Image via flaunt.com

Julie Mehretu: “That Intermediate Space, That Indeterminate Space”

Text | William J. Simmons

Excerpt:

Julie Mehretu’s characteristically nuanced and lyrical understanding of her role as an artist in the 21st century is as pragmatic and grounded as it is hopeful:

“One of the big issues for me as I continue making paintings is a belief or an insistence that this continues to be necessary, considering what is taking place in the world and how fundamentally messed up it is. Given the devastating realities of life, what keeps pulling me back into the studio to keep painting? There’s a place in them that emerges from an effort to invent a way to deal with this moment. The new paintings come from this necessary investigative space. It’s not a justification; I feel that painting is necessary, essential, and crucial. The same is true for anyone making art.”

Pick up a copy of Flaunt Issue 145 on newsstands now or read full article here

COVER: Trenton Doyle Hancock / Juxtapoz / January 2016

Welcome to Trenton: Meet the Man Behind the Zebra

Interview by Gabe Scott

Excerpt:

Born in Oklahoma and raised in a racially turbulent Paris, Texas, Trenton Doyle Hancock has been weaving a complex fabric that laces elaborate fantasy into personal and familial folklore, while examining his own cultural and philosophical identity. From a young age, driven by his love for comic books and graphic novels, as well as the raconteur’s template they provide, his youthful fascinations have evolved into a fully realized alternate universe. Centered around creatures known as The Mounds, who co-exist with Hancock’s own alter-ego, Torpedo Boy, as well as other characters representing significant people in his life, he combines Southern roots and religious upbringing to comprise the narratives omnipresent in his practice. 

His personal mythology is rife with subplots and character crossovers, presented on an extravagantly theatrical scale. Life, death, afterlife, rebirth, transcendental contemplation, racism, love, hate and metamorphosis are all prime players in his great odyssey. To make this possible, Hancock’s artistic practice employs a series of formal conclusions as metaphors, and messages are meticulously honed so they can be threaded through his visionary needle. 

Over the past year, his major drawing retrospective, Skin and Bones: 20 Years of Drawing has toured museums around the country, while other aspects of his oeuvre and practice have been on display around the world. Film, performance, sculpture, writing and dance are all material in his monumental and ever expanding tapestry. 

Gabe Scott: Your drawing retrospective has traveled for the last 12 to 15 months. What has that done for you in terms of self reflection, the progress of your work, and ways you see all the individual works interacting as a whole? Do you feel differently about certain pieces? 

Trenton Doyle Hancock: I was very happy to have the opportunity to see all that stuff at once. A lot of those drawings had never been in the same room before. Walking through the show helped me objectively analyze my intentions as an artist—discovering myself anew. It enabled me to step back and make important connections about scale, material and content. That was one of the most valuable things I’d taken away from the show. It’s funny—right now, in the past week or two weeks, I’ve discovered what the drawing show has meant to me in terms of how to carry on. 

Seeing myself retrospectively has made me realize that I really like the "aesthetic of the timeline" or the collapsing of time into one space. I like seeing things I've made from different eras in the room at the same time, or all on a page. Currently, in my studio, I’m compiling information from my past, bringing it back together, and creating compositions. Like memory quilts or something like that—really digging into these specific areas of my past graphic life and exploiting them.

Read complete interview online here.

COVER: George Hunt / Memphis / September 2015

KINDHEARTED REVEAL: Kindhearted Woman an acrylic and collage on canvas work by George Hunt is featured on the cover of the September 2015 issue of Memphis magazine. The publication writes: “George Hunt is one of the most noted black artists in the [American] South, focusing on blues music images, civil rights, and traditional African Women. His painting America Cares/Little Rock Nine was featured on a U.S. postage stamp in 2005, after the original painting had hung in the Clinton White House for almost five years. He is recognized locally having created  25 original paintings used as posters for the Beale Street Music Festival. Hunt was named the official artist for The Year of the Blues in 2003, resulting in a national exhibit tour, and he was the first artist commissioned to paint an original image for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”

Click here to view more works by George Hunt.

COVER: Alex Jackson / New American Paintings / Issue 119

Alex Jackson, The Butter Thief (detail), oil and polyurethane on panel, 60 x 48 inches.

Alex Jackson artist statement from New American Paintings #119:

My work is heavily rooted in my experience as an African-American and East-Indian man. by employing a blend of characters, symbols, and iconography sourced from a variety of cultural and artistic mediums, I create a quasi-fictional world. Through the use of memories, narrative, research from personal experience, African-American history, Indian mythology, and literature, I have created a platform from which a discussion can be had around contemporary notions of race and identity. The rigid lines of racial and cultural division are challenged by the figure’s resistance to depiction in any particular mode or representation. The space in which the figure exists often presents a series of referential collisions, oscillating between the autobiographical and the mythic, the historical and the contemporary, and the fictional and the real, presenting a specific cross-cultural hybridity. This hybridity is an amalgamation of cultural beliefs, ancestries, and histories, as well as a blend of Western and Eastern pictorial vernaculars.

Pick up a copy of the August/September 2015 issue of New American Paintings on newsstands now or order online here.

COVER: Dread Scott / Sculpture / July-August 2015

Dread Scott, Burning the US Constitution, 2011. Pigment print, 2.21 x 1.67 ft. Image appears on cover of Sculpture courtesy of the artist.

Dread Scott: Radical Conscience

Text | A.M. Weaver

Excerpt:

Dread Scott’s edict is make “revolutionary” art -- to propel history forward.” Since the early 1990s, after graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and completing the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, Scott has joined the ranks of historical/political artists, following in the footsteps of John Heartfield, George Grosz, and Leon Golub, along with his activist contemporaries Ai Weiwei, Nari Ward, and Berry Bickle. By using his work to raise awareness of social injustices, Scott makes clear his intention of challenging the status quo. He employs irony and humor to make powerful statements pertaining to pressing issues, including freedom of speech on a global level, state-level violence against citizens, class inequality and racially motivated oppression.

In Scott’s lexicon, the phrase “by any means necessary” means deploying performance, installation, collage, and painting to convey his ideas and ideology. without being didactic, he convincingly articulates the concerns of marginalized communities across America -- the incarcerated, urban youth, and the 99%.

To read complete text for “Dread Scott: Radical Conscience” pick up a copy of the July/August 2015 issue of Sculpture magazine, on newsstands now.

BREAKBEAT ARTIST: Hebru Brantley

Hebru Brantley, Untitled: Negro Mythes Series, 2014, Oil on canvas, 85 ⅘ x 114 ⅕. Image via haymarketbooks.org.

Cover art of new poetry anthology features work by Hip-Hop art star

From haymarketbooks.com:

The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop

Edited by Kevin Coval, Quraysh Ali Lansana and Nate Marshall

Publication date: April 7, 2015

Hip-Hop is the largest youth culture in the history of the planet rock. It has produced generations of artists who have revolutionized their genre(s) by applying the aesthetic innovations of the culture. The BreakBeat Poets features 78 poets, born somewhere between 1961-1999, All-City and Coast-to-Coast, who are creating the next and now movement(s) in American letters. This is the first poetry anthology by and for the Hip-Hop generation. It is for people who love Hip-Hop, for fans of the culture, for people who've never read a poem, for people who thought poems were only something done by dead white dudes who got lost in a forest, and for poetry heads. This anthology is meant to expand the idea of who a poet is and what a poem is for.

The BreakBeat Poets are the scribes recording and remixing a fuller spectrum of experience of what it means to be alive in this moment.The BreakBeat Poets are a break with the past and an honoring of the tradition(s), an undeniable body expanding the canon for the fresher.

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Kevin Coval is the author of Schtick, L-vis Lives: Racemusic Poems, Everyday People and the American Library Association “Book of the Year” Finalist Slingshots: A Hip-Hop Poetica. He is the founder of Louder Than a Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival, Artistic Director at Young Chicago Authors, and teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Quraysh Ali Lansana is the author of eight poetry books, three textbooks, a children's book, editor of eight anthologies, and coauthor of a book of pedagogy. He is a faculty member of the Creative Writing Program of the School of the Art Institute and the Red Earth MFA Creative Writing Program at Oklahoma City University. He is also a former faculty member of the Drama Division of The Juilliard School. Lansana served as Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University from 2002-2011, where he was also Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing. Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy & Social Justice in Classroom & Community (with Georgia A. Popoff) was published in March 2011 by Teachers & Writers Collaborative and was a 2012 NAACP Image Award nominee. His most recent books include The Walmart Republic with Christopher Stewart (Mongrel Empire Press, September 2014) and reluctant minivan (Living Arts Press, May 2014).

Nate Marshall is the author of Wild Hundreds (University of Pittsburgh Press 2015). He won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and served as a Zell Postgraduate Fellow at the University of Michigan. A Cave Canem Fellow, Nate won the 2014 Hurston/Wright Founding Members Award and the 2013 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award. He is a founding member of the poetry collective Dark Noise. He is also a rapper.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Hebru Brantley breaks down the walls of cultural boundaries through his art. Inspired by his 1980’s Chicago upbringing, Brantley’s work touches on tough subjects in a way that may be easily digestible to the viewer, by telling his stories through youthful characters and their adventures. Brantley’s work can be described as pop infused contemporary art inspired by Japanese anime and the bold aesthetics of street art pioneers Jean Michel Basquiat, Kaws and Keith Haring. While spray paint is often at the forefront of his mixed-media illustrations, Brantley utilizes a plethora of mediums from oil, acrylic and watercolor to non-traditional mediums like coffee and tea.

Brantley is recognized internationally for his public works and solo shows and has collaborated artistically with manufacturer brands Nike, Hublot and Adidas. He has a B.A. in film from Clark Atlanta University, and has a background in design and media illustration.

BreakBeat Poets Official Page

BreakBeat Poets Publisher’s Page

COVER: Jean-Michel Basquiat / New York Spaces / October 2014

Art in Balance

Interior  Design | William T. Georgis Architect

Text | Jorge S. Arango

Photograph | Costas Picadas

For an art dealer’s Gramercy Park apartment, William Georgis creates a livable context for an ever-changing collection of paintings, sculptures, and furnishings.

Excerpt: 

A gallery and a home serve divergent purposes. Art in one is for sale, in the other purely for enjoyment. Furnishings are minimal in the former to maintain the attention to the art, while in the latter the balance between them must be comfortably calibrated for living. But when the homeowner is a prominent private art dealer like this client, these distinctions blur.  

Three Basquiats take up so much space that the entry hall seems “papered” in the artist’s imagery. At the end of the hall is a table in front of a Perriand console with works by, among others George Condo and Picasso.  

The place is chock-full of works by Alexander Calder, George Condo, On Kawara, Richard Prince, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol and others. Yet each feels integral to the spaces in which they appear. And the constant swapping of a Christopher Wool painting for a Twombly or a Prouvé commode for the Perriand, makes this a living, breathing barometer of the homeowner’s almost promiscuous curiosity and evolving tastes.  

“It’s an interesting study in visual appetite,” says Georgis. “Over time, it shows us the hand of the collector. A lot of designers think of their work as sacrosanct, flies preserved in amber. That’s not interesting to me.”

To read complete story and see more images pick up a copy of the October 2014 issue of New York Spaces.

COVER: Alex Bradley Cohen / New American Paintings / Midwest #113 / August-September 2014

Alex Bradley Cohen, Summertime, Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 44 inches. 

Artist statement:

My art is an extension of myself. It is everything I see and feel in the world. It is my play, it is my diary, it is my friend. It is a ritual that is part of my existence.

My art is narrative. My art is abstract.

I go about making art the same way a kid would stroll through the part. I collect visual objects, emotions, ideas, and feelings throughout the day. With this collection of information, I begin to create a narrative for the world around me. 

I like working in water-based mediums, finding that accessible materials bring me much pleasure. I like painting pictures of my friends, family, sitcoms, and historical events. I also like drawing and playing with ceramics. Through these mediums, I explore abstraction. Abstraction allows for play as well as a new world my narrations can exist in.

Alex Bradley Cohen web site

Pick up a copy of the August/September 2014 issue of New American Paintings on newsstands now or order online here.

COVER: Randell Henry / ArtVoices / Summer 2014

Text by Amy Bryan

Randell Henry creates large, colorful, paint collages incorporating Abstract Expressionism, Cubism, and the influence of Kente cloth of the West African Akan culture. He is an African American painter from Baton Rouge, Louisiana and has been a painting professor at Southern University there for over twenty years. His most recent interest is in doing miniature paintings as well as large paintings and exploring how they influence each other.

Henry received a Master of Fine Arts from Louisiana State University in 1982 and a Bachelor of Arts from Southern University in 1979. Since then he has exhibited at museums and galleries throughout the United States and in Ghana and Liberia, Africa. In 2010, he exhibited at the University of Liberia and the U.S. Embassy Residence of Ambassador Linda Greenfield-Thomas. He is currently included in The Visual Blues exhibit at LSU Museum of Art at the Shaw Center for the Arts.

Excerpt:

AMY BRYAN: Do you consider yourself an Abstract Expressionist?

RANDELL HENRY: Abstract Expressionism, Cubism, and African designs and textiles are major influences. I call myself a Cubic Expressionist.

AB: Your work displays your intense interest in color. How are you influenced by color?

RH: I learned a lot about color theory from Jean Paul Hubbard. He would paint with students. He used Payne’s gray and other beautiful grays. I learned to mix colors by watching him. He had his students buy high quality Grumbacher paint.

I put colors together that are not supposed to go together. Through simultaneous contrast (the affect that colors being placed with other colors have on their overall appearance) everything works out. I just use the primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) and black and white to make all my other colors. I also got grounded as a kid looking at artists.

I also look at art from African culture, lines in fabric design, [West African, Akan] Kente cloth lines and patterns and East African artists’ fabric designs. I also look at Jackson Pollock. Lines have a lot of personal significance.

Pick up a copy of the Summer 2014 issue of ArtVoices to read complete story and view more images or read online here.

COVER: Chris Ofili / Art in America / June-July 2014

Chris Ofili, Afro Margin Eight (detail), 2007, pencil on paper, 40 ¼ by 26 ½ inches. Images appears on Art in America courtesy of David Zwirner, New York/London and Victoria Miro, London.

From Art in America:

This month’s cover was designed by Turner Prize-winning Chris Ofili. The British-born, Trinidad-based artist has exhibited at institutions such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2005); Tate Britain, London (2005 and 2010); and the kestnergesellschaft, Hanover (2006). Ofili represented Great Britain in the 50^th Venice Biennale in 2003. A solo exhibition of his work will open at the New Museum in New York in October 2014.

Pick up a copy of the June-July 2014 issue of Art in America on newsstands now.

COVER: Ebony G. Patterson / Frieze / April 2014

Island Life

Art in the Caribbean

Comprising 700 islands, 13 states and 17 dependent territories, and hosting a range of languages including Creole, Dutch, English, French and Spanish, the Caribbean represents a rich and complex set of cultures and histories. Dan Fox asks six artists, curators and writers to reflect on how questions of identity, infrastructure and education shape art in the region today.

Quotes: 

 “The idea that anything intellectual happens in The Bahamas is anathema to the brand we have projected to the outside world.”

Amanda Coulson, Director, the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, Nassau

“It is getting increasingly difficult to draw a border around what is Jamaican art – as is also the case in the rest of the Caribbean.”

Charles Campbell, artist, writer and Chief Curator of the National Gallery of Jamaica

“Within the region, the contemporary visual arts are battling a legacy of being underdeveloped and underappreciated. There is not an economy of understanding concerning the development of contemporary art, and its evolution has not been supported in practical ways by local governments and federations.”

Holly Bynoe, artist, curator, writer and Director and Editor-in-Chief of ARC magazine

“Artists in the region are functioning in an arena with a relatively small audience, very limited primary art markets and, in many cases, non-existent secondary markets for contemporary practice. One challenge this poses is that much of the work is appreciated and valued outside of the region, creating a gap between the makers and their homegrown audiences.” 

Annalee Davis, artist and Founding Director of the Fresh Milk Art Platform, Inc.

“This question of identity often presents itself to Caribbean art. Artists either seem to address it directly or are determined to avoid it – both of which accentuate the enormity of the issue.”

John Cox, artist, curator, teacher, Creative Art Director of Baha Mar Ltd., and founder of Popopstudios International Center for the Visual Arts

“There are very few independent platforms, galleries or project rooms. The few that do exist are run by artists, with no specific curatorial or commercial strategy.”

Caryl Ivrisse-Crochemar, founder of espace d’art contemporain 14ºN 61ºW, Martinique, French West Indies

To read complete story and view images pick up a copy of the April 2014 issue of Frieze magazine on newsstands now or read online here.

COVER: Terry Adkins / Artforum / March 2014

Terry Adkins, Muffled Drums (detail), 2003-13, eleven found bass drums, mufflers, steel, 30' 3" x 3' 1/2" x 1' 7". 

Event Scores

Terry Adkins and George Lewis in Conversation

It’s still unusual to play an artwork, no matter how many interactive screens or relational games we’ve encountered. But playing the piece is often the first thing that happens in the practices of Terry Adkins and George Lewis – each of whom breached the borders between the visual arts and music, and each of whom came of age in the 1970s and ‘80s ferment of post-bop and cyborgs, identity politics and institutional critique. Artforum invited the vanguard, multidisciplinary artist Adkins – whose work features in the Whitney Biennial in New York this month – to talk with renowned composer and computer-music pioneer Lewis about performance, improvisation, history, race, and sensation. Tragically, Adkins passed away, at the age of sixty, as this issue was going to press. We hope that the conversation that follows might also serve as an unexpected valedictory of sorts, pointing toward the rich possibilities that Adkins’s work has opened up – and will continue to open for years to come.

Quotes from conversation:

“The Mars rover is my model of what I want to make as an interactive artist – an improvising machine that you set down on the surface of a hostile planet, where it makes its own way.”  

-- George Lewis

“I try to make sculpture that is as ephemeral and transient as music is.”

--Terry Adkins

“What your practice shows is the extent to which sound is abstract, functional, and socially embedded, all at once. You can see the tradition, and then you can hear it.” 

– George Lewis

“In your work, there’s a certain amount of surrender and a certain amount of anonymity: the will to let go, the will to allow possibilities to somehow take care of themselves, a kind of anonymous authorship where you just supply the matrix for possibility and remove yourself.”

--Terry Adkins

Click here to order a copy of the March 2014 issue of Artforum.

COVER: The Art of Miles Davis / Jazziz / Spring 2014

Seeing Miles

A selection of drawings and paintings from Miles Davis: The Collected Artwork

In the early 1980s, in an effort to keep his mind occupied with something positive when he wasn’t playing music, Miles Davis began drawing, sketching and painting. What began as a hobby soon turned into a serious passion that Davis pursued obsessively until his death in 1991. Judging by the selection of work handsomely presented in the coffee-table book Miles Davis: The Collected Artwork (Insight Editions) his efforts produced impressive, richly colored results.

Few of Davis’ pieces were exhibited during his lifetime. Over the last two decades, however, the Davis estate has worked with gallery owners and private parties to assemble a comprehensive collection of the musician’s visual art. In showcasing many of those pieces, The Collected Artwork documents for posterity a hitherto largely unexplored facet of Davis’ artistry. In addition to the prints, Davis’ observations about his own drawings and paintings are sprinkled throughout the book.

To read entire story and view more images pick up a copy of the Spring 2014 issue of Jazziz magazine on newsstands now.

COVER: Oscar Murillo / L'Officiel Art / Issue 9 / March - April - May 2014

From L’Officiel Art:

This ninth artist cover allows L’Officiel Art to go even more collector. For the first time, the logo has also been left to an artist’s reinterpretation. Oscar Murillo used this carte blanche to deliver a very personal work, which he conceived while he was working on his exhibition at the Mistake Room in Los Angeles.

For the logo, Oscar Murillo chose to use David Hammons’ work African American Flag which he had photographed in Harlem. He used it as a pattern to customize the three letters of the word “ART.”

“Carlos my uncle had become a travel companion and collaborator, a witness to some of the wonders that one encounters on the marathon that is being an artist. On a pre-Christmas trip to LA in preparation for the Mistake Room, Carlos and I were invited to stay in a beautiful 1930s villa, the Pink Panther! It was a week of indulgence in Beverly Hills. Concurrently it was a physical, psychological and cultural clash, the perfect opportunity to establish an image for what it has meant to no longer work Sundays. This picture of Carlos is the quintessence of my project: ‘I don’t work Sundays’ is the subtext and the manifested antithesis of a series of earlier exhibitions, installations, performances and video works.”

200 copies of the magazine with this collector cover version have been printed.