CHICAGO: Zohra Opoku

Draped Encounters/Beyond Visage

April 14 - May 14, 2016

Curated by Erin Gilbert

KRUGER GALLERY CHICAGO

3709 North Southport Avenue

Chicago, IL

From krugergallerychicago.com:

Kruger Gallery Chicago presents Draped Encounters/ Beyond Visage, the first US solo exhibition of works by Ghanaian-German artist Zohra Opoku. Opoku is a photographer, filmmaker and installation artist whose work is informed by fashion, nature, Ghana and psychic energy.

Draped Encounters/Beyond Visage presents two recent bodies of work shot between 2012 and 2015. Opoku is a former fashion designer, who employs textiles and the language of fashion to explore issues of identity and representation. In carefully choreographed moments of tropical gardens and urban ruins, Opoku interrogates the relationship of textiles to natural and built environments. In her photographs, films and installations, Opoku uses second hand textiles, imported from Europe and the US to Ghana, to thread an African feminist handwriting in the work. Staged in Accra, Ghana, these images document the travels of a woman of African descent who performatively traced the transatlantic.

The first body of work, entitled Handwash Only, began in 2008 and was originally conceived of as a research series. Named for the washing instructions on clothing tags, this series addresses the daily hassle of washing by hand in Africa.  These images capture clothes hung by the owner and rearranged in a gust of wind. These natural compositions offer a glimpse from the public sphere to the private sphere, mythologizing the owners, seen only through their laundry-hanging rituals. These clothes represent a shared experience. Opoku observed that the African wax print, which she associates with a classical Ghanaian dress code, is seldom seen on traditional clotheslines. To create the illusion of Ghanaian identity, Opoku includes the rarely found African print wax in her clothesline compositions.

The second body of work is a set of film stills from Textures in Motion which bears witness to the engagement between the body, textile and environment. In the video Ms. Opoku uses artists as models, then drapes and disguises them to mimic a distinctly west African mystical practice of masquerade. Rather than the physical identity it is the psychic energy, the movement of the artist, which renders them visible in these draped encounters.

According to Okopu, “The entity or force of a spirit: In the African world the Western differentiation between consciousness and unconsciousness does not exist. Africans invented different names for the soul, which can be located outside a body. It is called “sassa” by the Ashantis. In my disguise practices I capture what we can’t see with our physical eye — the dynamic spirit “sassa.” (Ours Lagos Photo 2015 Festival Interviews).

Zohra Opoku (b.1976) is a German born, Accra-based versatile artist whose work employs media including installations, photography and video to explore the sophistication of textile cultures in disparate spaces targeting fashion’s political and psychological role and socio-cultural dynamics in relation to African history and individualistic or societal identities. Opoku received an MFA from the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg.

Opoku has been included in exhibitions nationally and internationally. In 2015 alone she was featured Material Effects at the Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, Michigan; Future Africa: Visions in Time in Denmark; Making Africa at the Guggenheim Bilbao; and Making Africa at the Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Switzerland. Her work has been exhibited in galleries in London; Berlin; Accra, Ghana; and Capetown, South Africa. Her work will be featured in a solo presentation at 1:54 Art Fair in New York, May 6-8, 2016 by Mariane Ibrahim Gallery.

Exhibit Link

ASPEN: Shinique Smith

Installation view: Shinique Smith, Resonant Tides, 2015. Photo by Tony Prikryl via aspenartmuseum.org. 

Resonant Tides

November 8, 2015 - September 4, 2016

ELK CAMP RESTAURANT, SNOWMASS

Vista Trail

Aspen, CO

From aspenartmuseum.org:

New York–based artist Shinique Smith combines an array of visual sources in her work. Incorporating graffiti, fashion, dance, Abstract Expressionism, and Japanese calligraphy, her practice addresses cultural and social issues around production, consumption, surplus, and waste. For the 2015–16 ski season, Smith created Resonant Tides, a new site-specific work at Elk Camp on Snowmass Mountain, continuing her exploration into the connections and values we ascribe to objects—both discarded and prized—and examining the very notion of “belonging.”

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NEW YORK: Zachary Fabri

Zachary Fabri, lorem ipsum Prince Hall 1791, image via artingeneral.org.

lorem ipsum

September 13 – October 25, 2014

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 13, 6 – 8pm

ART IN GENERAL

79 Walker Street

New York, NY

From Art in General press release:

Art in General is pleased to present lorem ipsum, a newly commissioned installation by Zachary Fabri for the Storefront Project Space curated by Kristen Chappa.

Best known for his video work and performances that feature the artist as protagonist, Art in General will present a lesser-known trajectory within Zachary Fabri’s practice. Here, he will create a site-responsive installation for the public storefront space featuring a series of large-format graphic prints. This project, titled lorem ipsum, conflates the aesthetics of American Apparel with American Black Nationalist titles predating 1920, when Marcus Garvey popularized Pan-Africanism in the United States and abroad. The installation, manifesting as printed signage, borrows the design and marketing strategy of a trendy urban clothing store chain in order to brand a political ideology and reroute possible perceptions of the exhibition site.

Fabri’s artistic practice seeks to create a space for discourse around social and political systems of oppression through artworks that manifest in a range of mediums, including drawing, performance, photography, sculpture, and video. Continually investigating the movement and politics of the body, Fabri’s work prompts viewers to locate themselves as “insider” or “outsider.” Fabri often meditates on the memory and weight of history; the ideologies and beliefs that define us. His works offer reminders of the ideas that shape identity—exploring its limits and possible transformations.

Zachary Fabri was born in Miami, Florida in 1977 and currently lives in Brooklyn. He received a Bachelor of Fine Art in graphic design from the New World School of the Arts, Miami, in 2000, and later relocated to New York City to receive a MFA from Hunter College in 2007. Fabri’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally at Sequences Real-time Festival, Reykjavik, Iceland; the Nordic Biennale: Momentum, Moss, Norway; Gallery Open, Berlin; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Real Art Ways, Hartford; the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, New York. Fabri has completed residencies at the Jardim Canadá Art and Technology Center in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and LMCC in New York City. Upcoming exhibitions include Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond at the Brooklyn Museum, October 2014 – January 2015.

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TOTAL RECALL: Remembering the Workers of the Domino Sugar Factory

BlackArtistNews photo. © 2014, All rights reserved.

For 20 years, Robert Shelton punched the clock at Brooklyn's cavernous sugar refinery. He served as a docent at Kara Walker's art exhibit there, sharing with visitors the story of his life.

Text | Leigh Raiford and Robin J. Hayes for theatlantic.com

Published | July 3, 2014

2737-42.  That was the number Robert Shelton punched into a clock at the Domino Sugar factory for 20 years. “As long as you live. You never forget. That’s my number,” Shelton says. And when he returned to the refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for only the second time since the factory closed in 2004, this time as a volunteer for Creative Time’s installation of Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety, Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” “I had tears in my eyes because it brings back the memories.”

Memories of working the dangerous kiln on a shop floor that regularly reached 140 degrees. Of a hazardous but well-paid union job that enabled Shelton to stop working three jobs, buy his first car, and move his family out of the Roosevelt Housing Projects and into a Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstone.  Of friendships made with the diverse group of Polish, Italian, Caribbean immigrants and other African Americans who also worked at the refinery. Of ongoing labor conflict with Domino Sugar Corporation that resulted in the longest strike in the history of New York City.

Today, with its original brickwork, soaring ceilings, stunning sunlight, and East River views it's not surprising that the site will soon be a 35-story residential and commercial “megaproject” in the now very desirable Williamsburg neighborhood. The only other time Shelton has been back to the factory since 2004 was a couple of years ago to advocate for affordable housing in the development. "We don’t want luxury apartments," Shelton says. "Why should someone who has a lot of money come from upstate or from Connecticut and benefit rather than people who have lived there all their life? It has been a long delay because the developers only want to give a small percentage…for regular people like me.”

Shelton is the only volunteer on the floor of the provocative installation who ever worked at Domino’s sugar refinery. Of the several “interpreters” who are on hand to answer visitor questions, his is the only intimate connection to the factory. He found out about the exhibit through an article in the New York Times and knew immediately he wanted to be involved. 

Commissioned by Creative Time arts organization, Walker’s “marvelous sugar baby,” a massive “mammy sphinx” fashioned from 40 tons of compressed white sugar, and the coterie of molasses-covered serving boys, have been seen by thousands of visitors over the course of its nine-week run.  “A Subtlety” powerfully brings the history and feeling of slavery into the present. Like much of Walker’s similarly themed work, it produces “a giddy discomfort” in the viewer. The Mammy Sphinx wears only a head scarf.  Her breasts and labia are massive and exposed, signaling both productive and reproductive labor. 

In the vibrant public conversation that has surrounded this exhibit, the factory itself—its history and especially its workers—have become mere backdrop, a focus on plantation slavery unfortunately muting the history of the industrial urban workers who produced the commodity in factories. It's a history that spanned decades, beginning before the Civil War: The factory complex on the Brooklyn waterfront that now hosts Walker's exhibit originally opened in 1856. By 1870, it was processing more than half of the sugar consumed in the United States, was rebuilt in 1882 after a fire, and continued to refine sugar until its doors closed in 2004.

Robert Shelton’s story sheds light on this forgotten narrative.

Read complete story here.

NEW YORK: Betye Saar

REDTIME EST: An Installation by Betye Saar

March 15 – May 3, 2014

Opening Reception:  Saturday, March 15, 2014, 5:00-7:00pm

MICHAEL ROSENFELD GALLERY

100 Eleventh Avenue at 19^th Street

New York, NY

Betye Saar artist statement on michaelrosenfeldart.com:

REDTIME: EST is a selection of assemblages which focus on political works dating from 1966 to 2014.

 

In the late 1960s, I began to collect derogatory black images. Then the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. triggered a creative retaliation and I made The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972). This assemblage transformed a demeaning mammy figure in to an empowered warrior.

 

Throughout the years, several series of my art have used derogatory images where I recycled windows, washboards, trays and cages. REDTIME: EST is a collection of assemblages which emphasize the color red – the color of anger, danger, violence, heat, passion, blood and fire.

 

REDTIME: EST is my visual tribute to the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Exhibit Link