CHAPEL HILL: The First Sweet Music

Lonnie Holley, Gabriel's Horn, 2011, mixed media, 67" x 51" x 18" inches. 

Curated by Rich Blint

Featuring the work of David Hammons, Diedra Harris-Kelley, Lonnie Holley, Jayson Keeling and Jacolby Satterwhite

November 13 – December 13, 2014

Opening Reception: Thursday, November 13, 2014, 6-8 pm

THE JOHN AND JUNE ALLCOTT GALLERY

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

115 South Columbia Street

Chapel Hill, NC     

From press release:

"Then of a sudden up from the darkness came music. It was human music, but of a wildness and a weirdness that startled the boy as it fluttered and danced across the dull red waters of the swamp. He hesitated, then impelled by some strange power, left the highway and slipped into the forest of the swamp, shrinking, yet following the song hungrily and half forgetting his fear. A harsher, shriller note struck in as of many and ruder voices; but above it flew the first sweet music, birdlike, abandoned, and the boy crept closer."

 --W. E. B. Du Bois, The Quest for the Silver Fleece (1911)

Under the press of enduring asymmetrical arrangements in global life, visual representations of black Atlantic experience in contemporary art have been preoccupied with scenes of historical slight and modern re-castings of the brutal encounter of subjects throughout the diaspora with the habits of power ordering Western society. Through fantastical re-stagings, strategies of inversion, to expressions of radical self-fashioning and other aesthetic conceits, black artists of the New World south have embraced the convention of “imaging back” to empire—a mode of visual address that has largely proven fertile expressive ground. The First Sweet Music, an exhibition of five cross-generational artists working in photography, painting, sculpture, and video, offers flashes of the “black ecstatic” as another way into this fraught and dense visual terrain, presenting works as a way of orienting the viewer’s gaze to the beauty, grace, and true drama that propels and sustains the heroic activity of human living under the vulgarity of protracted subjugation. Echoing Toni Morrison’s invitation in the opening pages of her novel Sula to the insurance collector descending on a struggling community of the newly free, the exhibition is a metaphorical injunction to “stand in the back of The Greater Saint Matthews Church and let the tenor’s voice dress [you] in silk” in order to see and get “closer” to the higher (or lower) “birdlike” frequencies resonant with the forces that are much of the substance of black survival.

Lonnie Holley’s Gabriel’s Horn (2011) is such a heralding. Thoughtfully mixed in media, this sculpture of found and seemingly disparate objects utilizes the biblical and almost didactic clarity of the horn that crowns it to underscore the need to disturb the slumber in American life concerning the arrested and dangerous state of our democratic project. David Hammons’ untitled sculpture of Venetian blinds (circa 1986) answers this call across time, space, and form in his dramatically elegant and emotionally incisive re-purposing of this everyday material signifying sight and blindness in a time of desperate urban neglect punctuated by crime, drug abuse, and the overall dispiriting loss of human life and energy. Diedra Harris-Kelley’s remarkably successful paintings are studies in abstract and figurative rapture. Depicting the artist laboring with the imaginative in her studio (haunted and aided by “demons” and ancestors), and an open-mouthed, wide-eyed figure with horns for hair, these works startle with a mature interiority. Through his photographs, Jayson Keeling pairs well with Harris-Kelley. Thoughts and Visions of a Severed Head (Whisper)(2012), an archival inkjet pigment print of a cast of the artist’s head produced by John Ahearn, is a contemporary riff on the 1853 short story by the Belgian painter, Antonie Wertz, which details the slow, painful death of a beheaded man. Keeling’s appropriated self-portrait contemporizes Wertz’s critique of the rise of capital punishment, relating it to a severed black body politic represented here not simply as the dead and gone, but the quietly powerful, with light radiating from the top of the head and those blinding eyes—to say nothing of the purse of the mouth and spiritual quality of the whisper. Jacolby Satterwhite’s Reifying Desire 6 (2014) once again extends the artist’s studied pursuit of what he identifies as infinite visual possibility. For him, “visual restraint lies within my body of archives ranging from collected movements by myself and other performers, my mother’s drawings...Merging them together into a dense crystal of information results in the reification of process, a concrete time-based visual system bleeding formal, philosophical, and political ideas”. Like the boy in Dubois’ century-year-old novel, these artists are not fearful of the more dissonant notes that attend corporeal “blackness” and seek to draw closer to a visual vocabulary that renders the existentiality, the “inside thing” of life down here below legible and endlessly seductive.

Exhibit Link

NEW YORK: Bigger Than Shadows

Rico Gatson, Untitled (Nat Turner), 2011. Image via Dodge-Gallery.com.

Curated by Rich Blint and Ian Cofre

November 10 - December 22, 2012

Opening Reception: November 10, 2012, 6-8pm

DODGEgallery

15 Rivington Street

New York,  NY

Bigger Than Shadows is a group exhibition that explores recent work on the black male body that refashions, riffs on, or re-inflects dominant constructions about the figure known as the black male. Black maleness conjures a host of contradictory associations in the American imagination—from questions about historical morality, creative virtuosity, inherent pathology, to notions of outsized masculinity and, paradoxically, the very absence of masculine authority. Bigger Than Shadows aims to clear space for a timely exchange among emerging and established artists about contemporary and future-oriented visual re-presentations of racialized corporeality—of the black male body in the flesh. Participating artists include Derrick Adams, Noah Davis, Rico Gatson, Adler Guerrier, Lyle Ashton Harris, Duron Jackson, Jayson Keeling, Yashua Klos, Deana Lawson, Kambui Olujimi, Ebony G. Patterson, Robert Pruitt, Jacolby Satterwhite and Zachary Fabri.

Duron Jackson will present a new sculpture titled Bones Crusade, 2012, which expands on his previous work on incarceration, surveillance, and the influence and distortionary effects of these systems. Other sculptural works by Rico Gatson and Adler Guerrier draw from multiple references, engaging the urban landscape and its impression on the body through abstractions of language and perception.

The revelatory photographic contributions from Lyle Ashton Harris, Jayson Keeling, and Deana Lawson are documents of subjects that defy immediate categorization. Harris's and Lawson's examinations of Southern subcultures join Keeling, who is working with a bust of his own face cast by John Ahearn, rephotographing the sculpture to draw attention to subtleties of form through distance.

Yashua Klos's constructions are both fragile and monumental, negotiating aspects of identity through fragmentation, collage, and camouflage. Similarly reconstructed, an array of visual styles will be on display including a contribution from The Human Structure Series (2011) by Derrick Adams, an example of Ebony Patterson's Species Series (2011), a new, large-scale drawing by Houston-based artist Robert Pruitt, a quiet and ambiguous figurative painting by Los Angeles-based Noah Davis, new work by Kambui Olujimi, and a virtual, Hieronymus Bosch-esque video tableau titled Country Ball, 1989-2012, by Jacolby Satterwhite that is built from memory rather than morality.

Rich Blint earned his Ph.D. in the Program in American Studies at New York University. His areas of specialty include African-American literature and culture; the literature of the Anglophone Caribbean; as well as racial visuality, media studies, and U.S. popular culture. He is co-editor of a special issue of African American Review on James Baldwin (forthcoming Winter 2013); guest editor of the Winter/Spring 2008 issue of Black Renaissance Noir, a journal of pan-African culture and politics; and has written critically about the work of Wangechi Mutu and Deana Lawson. The recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the C.L.R. James Institute, Rich has taught courses and guest lectured at New York University, Columbia University School of Law, Vassar College, and the Brecht Forum. He serves on the Executive Board of Vanderbilt University’s Issues in Critical Investigation: The African Diaspora and is currently Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies at Hunter College, The City University of New York.

Ian Cofre, a graduate of Columbia University, is an independent curator working primarily with emerging artists. Frequently collaborating with Omar Lopez-Chahoud, recent projects include co-writing "The Art Fair Effect," an essay for the Bronx Museum's Taking AIM!The Business of Being an Artist Today (2011) and co-curating the exhibitions Tracing the Unseen Border (2011) at La MaMa La Galleria and Southern Exposure (2009) at Dumbo Arts Center. Other shows include Behind Closed Doors (2011), a curated solo project by Manuela Viera-Gallo at Y Gallery and The Doubtful Guest (2010) at Kill Devil Hill in Greenpoint, NY. He most recently served as Director of the now-closed Sue Scott Gallery and Studio Manager for Mickalene Thomas before that.

Exhibit Link

NEW YORK: Jayson Keeling in Conversation

Jayson Keeling, still from The Great Masturbator, 2011. Video, 10:31 min. Image via thirdstreaming.com.

Artist in conversation with writers Rich Blint and Greg Tate

Friday, December 9, 2011, 7pm

THIRD STREAMING

10 Greene Street, 2nd Floor
New York, NY

As part of Keeling’s one person exhibition, See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang, Yeah. City All Over! Go Ape Crazy! the artist will discuss his practice in conversation with Rich Blint, writer and cultural critic, and Greg Tate, writer/journalist and director of Burnt Sugar.

Jayson Keeling lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Keeling began his career as a photographer and film director in the fashion, film, music and the porn industries. Through the use of photography, video and other media, he creates art works that provoke and dismantle pop iconography and the accepted politics of sex, gender, race, and religion. He has been included in exhibitions at El Museo del Barrio, La Mama la Galleria, The Andy Warhol Museum, Exit Art, GBE@passerby, Apex Art, Real Art Ways, Queens Museum of Art, The Bronx Museum, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. Keeling has been awarded residencies from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in 2009 and 2007, as well as the Apex Outbound Residency in Ethiopia, 2009. His one-person exhibition See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang, Yeah. City All Over! Go Ape Crazy is on view at Third Streaming through February 25, 2012.

Rich Blint, a New York-based writer and cultural critic, is currently completing his dissertation, Trembling on the Edge of Confession: Racial Figuration and Iconicity in Modern American Culture, in the American Studies Program at New York University. Blint is co-editor (with Douglas Field) for a special issue of African American Review focused on James Baldwin (2012) and was guest editor of Black Renaissance Noir, a journal of pan-African politics and culture (Winter/Spring, 2008). He serves on the Executive Board of Vanderbilt University’s, Issues in Critical Investigation: The African Diaspora, and on the Editorial Board of The Feminist Wire. He has taught courses at NYU, The Brecht Forum, and Hunter College, The City University of New York.

Greg Tate is a writer/journalist, composer and the artistic director of Burnt Sugar, a band that fuses jazz, rock, funk, and African music in a lyrical, exploratory and improvisational manner. He is also a founding member of the Black Rock Coalition. He was recently acknowledged by The Source magazine as one of the ‘God­fathers of Hiphop Journalism’ for his ground­breaking work on the genre’s social, political, economic and cultural implications in the period when most pundits considered it a fad. Writing for the Village Voice from 1987-2003, he offered critic and insight on prominent musicians, actors, artists and activists. His writings on art, culture and politics have also been published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Artforum, Rolling Stone, VIBE, Essence, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, Tate London, ICA London, Museum of Contemporary Art Houston and The Studio Museum In Harlem, among others. His books include Flyboy in the Buttermilk, Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience and Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture. In 2010 Tate was honored with a United States Artist Fellow award.

Jason Keeling: See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang, Yeah. City All Over! Go Ape Crazy.

Jayson Keeling, Mathias, 2003, Pigment print, 30 x 40 inches. Image via thirdstreaming.com.

Exhibit dates: October 28, 2011 - February 25, 2012