NEW YORK: NO SUCH PLACE: Contemporary African Artists in America

Sherin Guirguis, Untitled (Wadi II), 2012, Mixed media on hand-cut paper, 48 x 48 inches. Image via Edward Tyler Nahem Facebook page. 

NO SUCH PLACE: Contemporary African Artists in America

February 26 - April 3, 2015

Curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah & Dexter Wimberly

Featuring ruby onyinyechi amanze, Modou Dieng, Brendan Fernandes, Derek Fordjour, Sherin Guirguis, Vivienne Koorland, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, and Adejoke Tugbiyele.

EDWARD TYLER NAHEM FINE ART

37 West 57th Street

New York, NY

From etnahem.com:

Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art is pleased to present NO SUCH PLACE: Contemporary African Artists in America, a group exhibition that highlights recent work by eight contemporary African artists living and working in the United States.

NO SUCH PLACE focuses on artists who express cultural duality and punctuate the complexities of African identity. These multi-generational artists from African countries as varied as Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa, seek to debunk the idea of Africa as a singular, monolithic "place”, therefore initiating discussion on "Africaness" in the context of contemporary culture.

"There is no such thing as contemporary African art – there is only contemporary art from Africa,” said Bisi Silva, independent curator and founder/director of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos, Nigeria. Silva warns against generic geographical descriptions of art from a continent that is so vast and diverse. Taking a cue from Silva’s statement, NO SUCH PLACE investigates the overlapping signifiers and great diversity present in these particular artists’ work, providing a space that fosters a broader dialogue about culture, aesthetics, religion and politics. NO SUCH PLACE dives into artistic intuition, exploring how these eight artists process identity and represent their individual points of view.

According to Nahem "There is a new and talented wave of artists emanating from all corners of the rich cultural tapestry known as Africa. We are excited to share in this exploration of contemporary work from a small group of artists from the diaspora, whose diversity lends itself to age, gender, roots and geography. Their new world is ideally one that opens us up to our own concept of the newness of Africa today. We are excited to provide such a forum and hopefully to be a meeting ground and catalyst for its growth and dissemination."

Exhibit Link

Eight African Expats Dispel Western Conceptions of Their Continent’s Art

ON VIEW: I SEE YOU: The Politics of Being

January 26- June 1, 2014

THE HARVEY B. GANTT CENTER FOR AFRICAN-AMERICANARTS + CULTURE

Levine Center for the Arts

551 South Tryon Street

Charlotte, NC

Featured artists include ruby onyinyechia manze, Endia Beal, Michaela Pilar Brown, WandaRaimundi-Ortiz, Toyin Odutola and Alexandria Smith

This exhibition presents the work of six contemporary artists who expand the constructs of female identity in the 21st century. Surveying the range of ideas and illusions of the feminine mystique, this exhibition explores how women of the African Diaspora are seen, from their perspective and through the eyes of others. Juxtaposing historical ideologies and the contemporary, and self-presentation and imposed representation, the viewer is centered within a global community of image making and identity from a female perspective. Whether through implications of the body, or figurative representations of women, this mixed-media exhibition explores the artists' desires to deconstruct and redefine history, identity and culture.

This exhibition was organized by the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture.

Exhibit Link

Photographer Endia Bea studies minority women in corporate environments

NEW YORK: Crossing the Line - Contemporary Drawing and Artistic Process

Curated by Dexter Wimberly and Larry Ossei-Mensah

July 11 – August 16, 2013

MIXED GREENS

531 West 26^th Street, 1^st Floor

New York, NY

Mixed Greens is proud to present Crossing the Line: Contemporary Drawing and Artistic Process, a group exhibition co-curated by Dexter Wimberly and Larry Ossei-Mensah. The curators initiate an expansive visual discourse that brings the act of drawing front and center, showing its importance as the foundation of art making. Crossing the Line features new works by a group of emerging female artists hailing from Nigeria, the Dominican Republic/Haiti, South Korea, Trinidad, Iran, and the United States. All are exploring drawing within the context of their dynamic artistic practices and re-defining how drawing fits into the broader global contemporary art conversation. The exhibition presents distinct approaches to representational and abstract drawing, as well as experimental, site-specific mixed media and video installations that are equally influenced by drawing.

The Artists:

Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze is a Brooklyn-based artist of Nigerian birth and British upbringing who has found empowerment in the authenticity of the hybrid. Amanze was recently awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to create a new body of work in her native Nigeria to fully piece together the gaps in her identity. She has been greatly influenced by memories of architecture and space, the politics of home, nomadic stories, and urban landscapes. Drawing from her background in textiles and printmaking, Amanze’s drawings reflect a fragmented and layered material sensibility that is highly intuitive to process. She received a BFA from Tyler School of Art in 2004 and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy in 2006. Residencies have included Cooper Union in NYC and Gallery Aferro in Newark, NJ.

Firelei Báez is a Haitian-Dominican artist who makes large-scale, intricate works on paper indebted to a convergence of interests in anthropology, science fiction, black female subjectivity, and “women’s work.” Her art explores the humor and fantasy involved in self-making within diasporic societies. Such societies often utilize cultural ambiguities to build psychological and even metaphysical defenses against cultural invasions. She received a BFA from The Cooper Union’s School of Art in 2004, participated in The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2008, and received an MFA from Hunter College in 2010. Her residencies include The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace and The Lower East Side Print Shop. Báez’s work has been written about in The New York Times, The LA Times, and Art in America, among others. She was a recipient of the prestigious Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award as well as the Jaque and Natasha Gelman Award in Painting.

Born in Queens NY, Oasa Sun DuVerney’s works on paper and video performances use consumerist culture as a means to unmask our society’s collective aggression. DuVerney received her MFA from Hunter College and is the 2011 recipient of the Tony Smith Award. She exhibits her work nationally and has been featured in the New York Times, the New York Daily News, and the Gotham Gazette. She also won awards from the Brooklyn Arts Council and the Citizens Committee for “The Brooklyn Hi-Art Machine,” a public project which brings together a small Brooklyn neighborhood every summer to confront gentrification through art making. In 2012, DuVerney’s work was exhibited in the three-person exhibition, Through a glass, darkly, at Postmasters Gallery in NYC and the group exhibition, Me Love You Long Time, at Aljira Art Center in Newark, NJ. She is currently an LMCC Workspace Artist-in-Residence. DuVerney lives in Brooklyn.

Sanam Enayati was born in the United States and raised in Tehran, Iran. Her newest body of work investigates the physicality of basic human emotions. By identifying one emotion and letting it transform and overlap with another, Enayati seeks to create a new, non-familiar space/reality through a series of “feminine” and “domestic” processes, repetitive movements, and obsessive behaviors. The emotions inspire a series of compulsive movements within the non-familiar space/reality, transmuting an orderly, obsessively made space into complete chaos. After making marks as memories of that space, Enayati then abandons the space and enters into the nostalgic episodes by making drawings and paintings. Enayati holds a BFA from the Illinois Institute of Art in Chicago, IL, an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in NYC, and a Masters of Fashion Design focused on sociology and psychology from Istituto Marangoni in Milan, Italy.

Heeseop Yoon was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea. She is known for her large-scale line drawing installations and very intricate black and white drawings. Yoon’s concentrated freehand drawings record cluttered spaces and comment most directly on the (in)accuracy of perception. She holds her BFA from Chung-ang University in Seoul and an MFA from City College of NY. Yoon has had solo and two-person shows at prestigious venues including Triple Candie, NYC; Smack Mellon, NYC; and Arario Gallery, Seoul, South Korea. She has exhibited in museums and art centers internationally, including MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; John Michael Kholer Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; The Bronx Museum, NYC; Seoul Arts Center, Seoul, South Korea; and CAST, Australia and Median Art Center, Beijing, China. She has participated in several residencies including the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Program, Skowhegan’s School of Painting and Sculpture, Artist Alliance Inc, and Stiftung Künstlerdorf Schöppingen in Germany. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

The Curators:

Contemporary art curator and entrepreneur, Dexter Wimberly, was born and raised in Brooklyn. Curatorially, Wimberly focuses on contemporary urban history. “I love art that reflects our times, and I am excited to be in the position to work with artists who are shaping contemporary culture and bringing the beauty of under-exposed aspects of modern life to a greater public. I feel that this is my calling within the arts.” A passionate collector and supporter of the arts, Wimberly has personally exhibited the work of more than 70 individual artists. Dexter Wimberly also maintains a critical dialogue with emerging artists throughout the world by way of group exhibitions, public programs, and lectures at institutions such as The Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Brooklyn Historical Society, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), The Savannah College of Art and Design, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and The Brooklyn Arts Council.

Larry Ossei-Mensah is an independent curator and cultural critic who has emerged as dynamic voice for the rising creative class. Ossei-Mensah is a modern day flâneur who documents cultural and contemporary art happenings for various publications such as Arise, Uptown, and Whitewall Magazine in addition to his personal blog My Global Hustle. His writings include profiles of Swizz Beatz, El Anatsui, Yinka Shonibare, Mickalene Thomas, Rashid Johnson, and Derrick Adams. In 2009, Ossei-Mensah was featured in the NY Times Styles section curated by the legendary Bill Cunningham “Celebrating Art and Music.” The multihyphenate Ossei-Mensah was chosen for Young Curators, New Ideas IV in the summer of 2012 where he demonstrated a curatorial acumen that makes him one to watch. Ossei-Mensah received his BA from Clark University in Business Management and earned his MBA in Marketing from Les Roches in Switzerland. He currently serves on the acquisitions committee for the Guggenheim’s Young Collectors Council and is on the board for ArtBridge. Ossei-Mensah lives in NYC.

Crossing the Line: Contemporary Drawing and Artistic Process from Mixed Greens on Vimeo.

Exhibit Link

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