NEW YORK: Duron Jackson

Duron Jackson. Rikers Island Jail, NY, 2010. Graphite and blackboard paint on wood panel, 36 x 24 in. (91.4 x 70.0 cm).
Collection of the artist. © 2010 Duron Jackson. Photo by Ricky Day. Image via BrooklynMuseum.org.

RUMINATION

November 16, 2012–February 10, 2013

BROOKLYN MUSEUM

200 Eastern Parkway

Brooklyn, NY

The second season of Raw/Cooked presents a series of four exhibitions by under-the-radar Brooklyn artists who have been invited by the Brooklyn Museum with support from Bloomberg to show their first major museum exhibitions. The artists are given the opportunity to work with the Museum’s collection and to display in spaces of their choosing, however unconventional.

The four artists in the series were recommended by an advisory board of well-known Brooklyn artists, including Michael Joo, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Amy Sillman, and Mickalene Thomas, each of whom proposed several promising artists. Brooklyn Museum curator Eugenie Tsai made the final selections.

Raw/Cooked opens on November 16 with Rumination, an exhibition of the work of Bedford-Stuyvesant–based artist Duron Jackson, recommended by Thomas. Jackson’s multimedia installation evokes a private library or reading room, where viewers are invited to contemplate themes of race and power embedded in American history and culture. A minimalist white cube chair is situated at the center of a carpet, both constructed by the artist from black-and-white dominoes. Jackson’s Blackboard Paintings—large-scale geometric abstractions rendered in graphite and blackboard paint—cover the surrounding walls. These works present abstracted aerial views of specific American prisons. Jackson juxtaposes his abstract works with Malvina Hoffman’s early modern sculptural portrait, Senegalese Soldier. Drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection, Hoffman’s larger-than-life-sized bust stands at the center of the installation. InRumination, Jackson brings together historical and contemporary cultural representations to explore the inter-related histories of incarceration, surveillance, and control.

Jackson's work can also be seen in Ain't Pressed a two person show with Brandon Coley Cox at the Reginald Ingraham Gallery in Los Angeles. The exhibit run is November 1 - December 20, 2012.

YouTube: Raw/Cooked: Duron Jackson

Raw/Cooked is organized by Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum.

Exhibit Link

NEW YORK: Bigger Than Shadows

Rico Gatson, Untitled (Nat Turner), 2011. Image via Dodge-Gallery.com.

Curated by Rich Blint and Ian Cofre

November 10 - December 22, 2012

Opening Reception: November 10, 2012, 6-8pm

DODGEgallery

15 Rivington Street

New York,  NY

Bigger Than Shadows is a group exhibition that explores recent work on the black male body that refashions, riffs on, or re-inflects dominant constructions about the figure known as the black male. Black maleness conjures a host of contradictory associations in the American imagination—from questions about historical morality, creative virtuosity, inherent pathology, to notions of outsized masculinity and, paradoxically, the very absence of masculine authority. Bigger Than Shadows aims to clear space for a timely exchange among emerging and established artists about contemporary and future-oriented visual re-presentations of racialized corporeality—of the black male body in the flesh. Participating artists include Derrick Adams, Noah Davis, Rico Gatson, Adler Guerrier, Lyle Ashton Harris, Duron Jackson, Jayson Keeling, Yashua Klos, Deana Lawson, Kambui Olujimi, Ebony G. Patterson, Robert Pruitt, Jacolby Satterwhite and Zachary Fabri.

Duron Jackson will present a new sculpture titled Bones Crusade, 2012, which expands on his previous work on incarceration, surveillance, and the influence and distortionary effects of these systems. Other sculptural works by Rico Gatson and Adler Guerrier draw from multiple references, engaging the urban landscape and its impression on the body through abstractions of language and perception.

The revelatory photographic contributions from Lyle Ashton Harris, Jayson Keeling, and Deana Lawson are documents of subjects that defy immediate categorization. Harris's and Lawson's examinations of Southern subcultures join Keeling, who is working with a bust of his own face cast by John Ahearn, rephotographing the sculpture to draw attention to subtleties of form through distance.

Yashua Klos's constructions are both fragile and monumental, negotiating aspects of identity through fragmentation, collage, and camouflage. Similarly reconstructed, an array of visual styles will be on display including a contribution from The Human Structure Series (2011) by Derrick Adams, an example of Ebony Patterson's Species Series (2011), a new, large-scale drawing by Houston-based artist Robert Pruitt, a quiet and ambiguous figurative painting by Los Angeles-based Noah Davis, new work by Kambui Olujimi, and a virtual, Hieronymus Bosch-esque video tableau titled Country Ball, 1989-2012, by Jacolby Satterwhite that is built from memory rather than morality.

Rich Blint earned his Ph.D. in the Program in American Studies at New York University. His areas of specialty include African-American literature and culture; the literature of the Anglophone Caribbean; as well as racial visuality, media studies, and U.S. popular culture. He is co-editor of a special issue of African American Review on James Baldwin (forthcoming Winter 2013); guest editor of the Winter/Spring 2008 issue of Black Renaissance Noir, a journal of pan-African culture and politics; and has written critically about the work of Wangechi Mutu and Deana Lawson. The recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the C.L.R. James Institute, Rich has taught courses and guest lectured at New York University, Columbia University School of Law, Vassar College, and the Brecht Forum. He serves on the Executive Board of Vanderbilt University’s Issues in Critical Investigation: The African Diaspora and is currently Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies at Hunter College, The City University of New York.

Ian Cofre, a graduate of Columbia University, is an independent curator working primarily with emerging artists. Frequently collaborating with Omar Lopez-Chahoud, recent projects include co-writing "The Art Fair Effect," an essay for the Bronx Museum's Taking AIM!The Business of Being an Artist Today (2011) and co-curating the exhibitions Tracing the Unseen Border (2011) at La MaMa La Galleria and Southern Exposure (2009) at Dumbo Arts Center. Other shows include Behind Closed Doors (2011), a curated solo project by Manuela Viera-Gallo at Y Gallery and The Doubtful Guest (2010) at Kill Devil Hill in Greenpoint, NY. He most recently served as Director of the now-closed Sue Scott Gallery and Studio Manager for Mickalene Thomas before that.

Exhibit Link