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| Nathaniel Donnett, How to Get Rich On A Shoestring Budget, 2010, Shoestrings and plastic on paper bags, 56 x 51 inches. Image via nathanieldonnett.com. All rights reserved. |
Perspectives
of the African American Experience
June 27 – September 8, 2014
Featuring
Derrick Adams, Nathaniel Donnett, Bradley McCallum & Jacqueline Tarry
Discussion
with artist Derrick Adams: July 15, 2014, 6 – 8 pm
Discussion
with artists Bradley McCallum & Jacqueline Tarry: August 7, 2014, 6 – 8 pm
Residences
at The Little Nell Building
501 East
Dean Street
Aspen, CO
From
quintenzgallery.com:
This
summer Quintenz Gallery presents Relevance,
an exhibition of four artists’ interpretation of the ongoing and evolving
narrative that is the African American and American experience. Artwork by Derrick
Adams, Nathaniel Donnett, and Bradley McCallum & Jacqueline Tarry comprises
new shifts in contemporary art practices and media while addressing complicated
and multivalent issues of race, community, and power.
Any
discussion of race in America—even one focusing on representation—is not just
about images. It is about human bodies that are informed by notions of
ethnicity rooted in a specific time and place. It is about the public and
private interactions between these bodies and how they coexist. And, it is
about how such realities impact the distribution of power within social areas
we navigate daily, from the interpersonal to the geopolitical.
Derrick Adams destabilizes
urban and identity politics through performance, collage, sculpture, and
installation. In Relevance, Adams’ mixed-media collages rupture visual and
symbolic lines between human figures and domestic architectural spaces. Bodies,
structures, and landscapes emerge from cut scraps of popular lifestyle
magazines in artwork reflecting today’s fragmented, over-inundated visual culture.
Adams’ visually rich surfaces depict his own socio-cultural moment and
investigation. “I draw from my own experiences and come up with my own
philosophies and perspective on art making,” Adams says. An interdisciplinary
artist based in Brooklyn, New York, Derrick Adams received a MFA from Columbia
University and a BFA in Art & Design from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
Nathaniel Donnett explores
the psychosocial relationships between the collective and individual, the
perceptions of the self and society, while drawing from the inventiveness,
psychology, improvisation and music in African American culture. Donnett works
in mixed media, drawings, paintings, installation, sculpture, video, and
performance using everyday materials, and objects. In this exhibition these particular
drawings considers the figurative as other and psychosocial symbolism of brown
paper bags and mixed media works with plastic. His artwork is an investigation
of identity, perceptions of beauty, self-reflection, and societal contradiction
and consent. Donnett, a 2010 Artadia winner, lives and works in Houston, Texas
and studied at Texas Southern University.
Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry are a mixed-race artists’ collaborative
since 1998. Their work, exhibited globally, moves fluidly beween large scale
projects, painting, photography, video, and self-portraiture. McCallum &
Tarry focus their work on community, race, identity, and injustice, creating
art to preserve moments in time that might otherwise become nothing more than
faded photographs. They reimagine historic and iconic photographic images,
thereby reviving, continuing, and deepening narratives which may have become
static. The artists live in Brooklyn, New York. McCallum holds an MFA from Yale
and Tarry completed the Whitney ISP program in 2003.
