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| Alma Thomas (1871–1978), Late Night Reflections, 1972. Acrylic on canvas, 28 ¾ x 44 inches. Collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA. Purchase, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University Fund for Acquisitions and bequest of Marjorie Pfeffer by exchange. 2010.13.1 Photo by Peter Paul Geoffrion. Image via whitney.org. |
Blues for Smoke
Curated by Bennett Simpson
February 7 - April 28, 2013
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York, NY
The
Whitney Museum of American Art presents Blues
for Smoke, an interdisciplinary exhibition that explores a wide range of contemporary
art through the lens of the blues and the blues aesthetic. Turning to the blues
not simply as a musical category but as a field of artistic sensibilities and
cultural idioms, the exhibition features works by nearly fifty artists from the
1950s to the present, as well as materials culled from music and popular
entertainment. Blues for Smoke was
conceived and developed by Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art curator
Bennett Simpson, in consultation with the artist Glenn Ligon. The New York
installation is being overseen by Whitney curator Chrissie Iles. The exhibition
will appear from February 7 through April 28, 2013, in the Museum’s third-floor
Peter Norton Family Galleries.
Throughout
the past century, writers and thinkers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph
Ellison, Albert Murray, Amiri Baraka, and Cornel West have asserted the
fundamental importance of the blues both to American music (in its legacy and
influence on jazz, R&B, rock, and hip-hop) and to developments in
literature, film, and visual art. In all its diversity, the blues has been
hailed as one of America’s greatest cultural achievements and, along with jazz,
has even been called America’s classical music.
The
origins of the blues lie in the vernacular culture of African Americans living
in the Mississippi Delta and New Orleans around the turn of the twentieth
century—people for whom slavery was a recent memory and basic civil rights were
far in the future. As the literary historian Houston A. Baker writes, the blues
emerged from a matrix of “work songs, group seculars, field hollers, sacred
harmonies, proverbial wisdom, folk philosophy, political commentary, ribald humor,
elegiac lament, and much more.” Rather than retelling this story, Blues for Smoke proposes that certain
topics in contemporary art might be understood through and animated by the
prism of the blues. These include a grappling with personal and social
catastrophe; an emphasis on improvisation and movement; the performance of
extravagant or ambiguous identities; modes of abstraction and repetition; the
expression of sexuality and intimacy; and an impulse towards archiving,
sampling, and translation.
The
exhibition includes more than ninety works in a wide variety of mediums,
including photography, video, painting, drawing, sculpture, and multimedia
installations, such as Stan Douglas’s Hors-champs
(1992), which will appear in the Museum’s Lobby Gallery, and David Hammons’s Chasing the Blue Train (1989), which
will greet visitors as they enter the show. Many works in the exhibition
clearly conjure the history and aesthetics of the blues, including Romare
Bearden’s collages of musicians, Roy DeCarava’s atmospheric photographs of
music halls, and Beauford Delaney’s portrait paintings of African American
cultural figures. Other works, such as HBO’s hit drama The Wire, discussed by Glenn Ligon in the exhibition catalogue from
the perspective of its distillation of the “blues imagination,” demonstrate the
reach of the blues beyond music. Still others communicate blues ideas without
expressly naming them as such: the emphasis on memory and cross-cultural
interpretation in works such as Ligon’s “Richard Pryor” paintings, Renée
Green’s Import/Export Funk Office
(1992–93), and Kara Walker’s stirring video Fall
Frum Grace: Miss Pipi’s Blue Tale (2011).
Blues for Smoke will include a number
of listening posts and video viewing stations presenting musical selections,
television programs, and other documentary materials. Highlights include: Azealia
Banks, Bad Brains, Jaki Byard, Death Grips, Duke Ellington, Lightnin’ Hopkins,
Henry Flynt, Joseph Jarman, Jeanne Lee, Alan Lomax, Shabazz Palaces, Sun Ra,
Cecil Taylor, Big Mama Thornton, and Othar Turner and The Afrossippi Allstars.
The
exhibition’s title is drawn from a 1960 solo album by virtuoso jazz pianist
Jaki Byard in which improvisation on the blues form becomes a basis for
avant-garde exploration. The title suggests that the expanded poetics of the
blues is pervasive—but also diffuse and difficult to pin down. By presenting an
uncommon heterogeneity of subject matter, art historical contexts, formal and
conceptual inclinations, genres and disciplines, Blues for Smoke holds artists and art worlds together that are
often kept apart, within and across lines of race, generation, and canon. “Though
it takes up ideas from the past, this exhibition is pitched at the present
moment,” says curator Bennett Simpson. “The questions and topics the blues make
us think about, from ambivalent feelings to form as cultural expression, are
fundamental to recent art. As I see it, the blues are about anticipation.”
Live Performances
Blues for Smoke will be accompanied by
a series of concerts, performances and readings throughout the run of the
exhibition. Whitney curator Jay Sanders will present a program that explores
the enduring legacy and innovative possibilities of the blues in contemporary
music. Featured artists include Annette Peacock, Lonnie Holley, Cooper-Moore,
Matana Roberts, and Loren Conners, as well as a group of younger emerging
artists showcased in a weekend-long festival at the museum. Additional details here.
Exhibition Catalogue
This
exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue published by MOCA
and Prestel/Delmonico. In addition to an introductory overview by Bennett
Simpson and an artist statement by Jack Witten, the publication includes an
essay by musician and historian George E. Lewis on blues and the avant-garde,
as well as newly commissioned poems by Gregg Bordowitz, Fred Moten, and
Nathaniel Mackey.
Visual Artists Included
in the Whitney Presentation of Blues for
Smoke
Jean-Michel
Basquiat, Romare Bearden, Gregg Bordowitz, Mark Bradford, Edward Clark, Roy DeCarava,
Beauford Delaney, Jeff Donaldson, Stan Douglas, Jimmie Durham, Melvin Edwards, William
Eggleston, Charles Gaines, Renée Green, David Hammons, Kira Lynn Harris, Rachel
Harrison, Barkley L. Hendricks, Leslie Hewitt, Martin Kippenberger, Jutta
Koether, Liz Larner, Zoe Leonard, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Dave
McKenzie, Rodney McMillian, Mark Morrisroe, Matt Mullican, Senga Nengudi, Kori
Newkirk, Lorraine O’Grady, John Outterbridge, William Pope.L, Jeff Preiss, Amy
Sillman, Lorna Simpson, Henry Taylor, Alma W. Thomas, Bob Thompson, Wu Tsang,
Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Jack Whitten, William Thomas Williams, Martin
Wong
About
the Whitney
The Whitney Museum of
American Art is the world’s leading museum of twentieth-century and
contemporary art of the United States. Focusing particularly on works by living
artists, the Whitney is celebrated for presenting important exhibitions and for
its renowned collection, which comprises over 19,000 works by more than 2,900 artists.
With a history of exhibiting the most promising and influential artists and
provoking intense debate, the Whitney Biennial, the Museum's signature
exhibition, has become the most important survey of the state of contemporary
art in the United States. In addition to its landmark exhibitions, the Museum
is known internationally for events and educational programs of exceptional
significance and as a center for research, scholarship, and conservation.
Founded by sculptor and
arts patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1930, the Whitney was first housed
on West 8th Street in Greenwich Village. The Museum relocated in 1954 to West
54th Street and, in 1966, inaugurated its present home, designed by Marcel
Breuer, at 945 Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side. While its vibrant program
of exhibitions and events continues uptown, the Whitney is constructing a new
building, designed by Renzo Piano, in downtown Manhattan. Located at the corner
of Gansevoort and Washington Streets in the Meatpacking District, at the
southern entrance to the High Line, the new building, which has generated
immense momentum and support, will enable the Whitney to vastly increase the
size and scope of its exhibition and programming space. Ground was broken on
the new building in May 2011, and it is projected to open to the public in
2015.
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