RESIDUAL EFFECTS: KERRY JAMES MARSHALL

A Kerry James Marshall painting sold for $5 million, but he didn’t see any of it

SEATTLE: Kehinde Wiley

Kehinde Wiley, Randerson Romualdo Cordeiro, 2008. Image via seattleartmuseum.org.

A New Republic

February 11 - May 8, 2016

SEATTLE ART MUSEUM

1300 First Avenue

Seattle, WA

From seattleartmuseum.org:

Kehinde Wiley is one of the leading American artists to emerge in the last decade and he has been ingeniously reworking the grand portraiture traditions. Since ancient times the portrait has been tied to the representation of power, and in European courts and churches, artists and their patrons developed a complex repository of postures and poses and refined a symbolic language. This language, woven into all aspects of a portrait, described the sitter’s influence and power, virtue and character, or profession. In his consideration of portrait traditions, Wiley has been especially drawn to the grand aristocratic portraits of the 18th century.

The artist began his first series of portraits in the early 2000s during a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. He set out to photograph and recast assertive and self-empowered young men from the neighborhood in the style and manner of traditional history painting. Since then he has also painted rap and sports stars but for the most part his attention has focused on ordinary men of color in their everyday clothes. Trained at Yale in the 1990s, Wiley was steeped in the discussions concerning identity politics during this decade and he brings his personal insights and theoretical studies to his practice.

Wiley’s portraits are highly stylized and staged, and draw attention to the dialectic between a history of aristocratic representation and the portrait as a statement of power and the individual’s sense of empowerment.

Exhibit Link

CHICAGO: Patrick Earl Hammie

Inheritance

February 25 - March 26, 2016

Artist reception: Thursday, February 25, 2016, 6:00pm - 9:00pm

Artist talk: Saturday, March 19, 2016, 2:00pm

KRUGER GALLERY CHICAGO

3709 North Southport Avenue

Chicago, IL

From krugergallerychicago.com:

Inheritance, a solo exhibition of paintings and drawings by Patrick Earl Hammie, will be on view at Kruger Gallery Chicago.

Hammie is an American visual artist best known for his large-scale portrait and figural paintings. His work draws from art history and visual culture to examine ideas related to cultural identity, masculinity, beauty, and sexuality. His paintings often use allegory to implicate power structures, and question systems of racism and sexism. Hammie is currently based in Champaign, Illinois.

As an exhibition, Inheritance presents a female and male figure locked in physical dialogue, hefting weight, and reorienting inherited expectations of ruined and objectified bodies that recall and carry on complex legacies of suffering and struggle. Informed by historical representations of Otherness, and recent shifts that locate women and people of color as central influencers of culture and politics, this exhibition provides occasion for us to encounter difference toward considering their capacity for establishing new narratives. Paintings such as Nadir feature a commanding woman rotating a reclined man’s body to his side. Constructing moments where traditionally masculine strengths (dominance) and traditionally feminine strengths (care and empathy) are conflated in the woman’s actions while the man’s body is vulnerable to public critique, Hammie introduces the woman as an active authority and relieves the man from macho performance.

Hammie was recently named an “Artist to Watch,” by the International Review of African American Art, for “producing phenomenal work that reflects their singular talent and merits our attention.” His work is a part of several collections including the Kohler Company Collection, JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, John Michael Kohler Art Center, and William Benton Museum of Art. In 2008, he received the Alice C. Cole ’42 Fellowship through Wellesley College, and in 2011, was an artist-in-residence at the John Michael Kohler Art Center. Hammie has exhibited in galleries throughout the U.S. and abroad including the Kunst in der Carlshütte in Büdelsdorf, Drawing Center in New York, and Indianapolis Art Center and has received awards from the Tanne Foundation, and Alliance of Artist Communities with the Joyce Foundation.

Hammie was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1981. He received his BA from Coker College and MFA from the University of Connecticut. He currently serves as an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Exhibit Link

NEW YORK: Henry Taylor

Henry Taylor, Man on Horse With Hat, Marta Naples (Detail), 2014, Acrylic on canvas,  58..25 x 69.75 inches. Image via blumandpoe.com.

Henry Taylor

March 1 - April 4, 2015

BLUM & POE

19 East 66th Street

New York, NY

UNTITLED

30 Orchard Street

New York, NY

From Blum & Poe web site:

Blum & Poe, in conjunction with UNTITLED, is pleased to announce a two-part solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Henry Taylor.

Continuing his long-standing investigation into portraiture, Taylor instills his paintings with a multitude of observations, portraying not only the subject, but also a broader social stance. Grounded in realism and energized with a raw simplicity and idiosyncratic detail, his paintings address both political and historical concerns related to the human condition. In Taylor's hands, the canon of portraiture is not merely a convention, but rather a system through which the artist processes his views, travels, and interactions in the world.

Taylor's paintings and sculptures offer a window into the experiences of an avid chronicler, capturing his immediate environments, whether within his studio or recent travels to Haiti, Columbia, Cuba, Ethiopia, and Texas. Functioning as source material for his works, Taylor's copious notes, photographs, and sketches contribute to a practice that is immediate in its execution and generous in spirit, always connected to the communities in which the artist places himself.

Henry Taylor was born in Oxnard, CA (1958) and studied painting at California Institute of the Arts. His most notable exhibitions include a retrospective at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; Body Language, Studio Museum, Harlem, NY; 2013 Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Blues for Smoke, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Made in LA, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Human Nature: Contemporary Art from the Collection, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; and 30 Americans, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL.

Exhibit Link