Recent exhibitions at established contemporary galleries in the famous Chelsea art district in New York City brought together two prominent and cutting edge African-American artists: Kara Walker at Sikkema Jenkins & Co, and Simone Leigh at nearby Matthew Marks Gallery.
Both artists, highly regarded in the competitive US contemporary market, have shown previously in SA.
Kara Walker was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012 and became an Honorary Academician of the Royal Academy of Art in London in 2019. Her work is in the collections of prominent institutions worldwide, including Kunstmuseum Basel; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Tate London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others. Her work is usually subtly confrontational and often deals directly with the painful histories of race and slavery — in the US particularly, but globally too. She has made the cut-out silhouette a medium of choice, its deceptive simplicity a way of drawing on histories of black performativity to reflect on narratives of race and gender.
African-American artists with SA connections captivated in NY
Kara Walker and Simone Leigh, highly regarded in the competitive US contemporary market, have shown previously in SA
Image: Supplied
Recent exhibitions at established contemporary galleries in the famous Chelsea art district in New York City brought together two prominent and cutting edge African-American artists: Kara Walker at Sikkema Jenkins & Co, and Simone Leigh at nearby Matthew Marks Gallery.
Both artists, highly regarded in the competitive US contemporary market, have shown previously in SA.
Kara Walker was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012 and became an Honorary Academician of the Royal Academy of Art in London in 2019. Her work is in the collections of prominent institutions worldwide, including Kunstmuseum Basel; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Tate London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others. Her work is usually subtly confrontational and often deals directly with the painful histories of race and slavery — in the US particularly, but globally too. She has made the cut-out silhouette a medium of choice, its deceptive simplicity a way of drawing on histories of black performativity to reflect on narratives of race and gender.
A little porcelain for the heart
The Chelsea show had a typically baroque and provocative title - The High and Soft Laughter of the Nigger Wenches at Night, in the Colorless Light of Day. It comprised a new body of coloured-watercolour and ink collages and works on paper, alongside a series of bronze busts. In it, she eschews her previous palettes of monochromatic silhouettes in favour of colourful ink drawings with formal compositional structures. Arranged in a tangle of overlapping limbs and brushed contortions, the drawings are closer to abstract landscapes rather than coherent representation of bodily forms. Alongside the drawings were four bronze busts, drawn from an interactive installation the artist currently has on view at the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art, entitled Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine). The sculptures, all of human faces, form an expressive and somewhat sombre counterpoint to the colourful pastoral tableaux of the drawings.
Image: Supplied
The nearby Matthew Marks gallery in West Chelsea was showing sculpture by another prominent African-American woman artist, Simone Leigh. She has had one-person museum exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Tate Modern, London, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, among others. In 2022, Leigh was awarded the Golden Lion at the 59th Venice Biennale where she represented the United States. Her exhibition in the United States Pavilion in Venice was subsequently shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC.
Image: Supplied
The show in Chelsea, her first with the Matthew Marks Gallery, comprises eleven significant new sculptures in ceramic and bronze, situated in Leigh’s oeuvre over the last two decades exploring Black female-identified subjectivity. Leigh is best known for her sculptures that incorporate forms associated with African diasporic traditions, an approach that is very evident here, in a series featuring partially abstracted female bodies. Artemis (2022–24) is a life-size sculpture of a headless woman with a skirt comprised of breast-like forms. The surface of the sculpture is covered with intricate lace drapery made from porcelain.
Another new sculpture is a larger-than-life-size bust of a woman, also headless, and completely covered in hundreds of miniatures, hand-rolled porcelain rosettes. A stand-out work, centrally positioned on the gallery floor, is another female figure her lower body draped in a dress of gleaming and immaculately crafted cowrie shells. The highly detailed surfaces of these works reference the repetition of handwork and unacknowledged acts of labour and care traditionally associated with women’s work. Many of Leigh’s sculptures investigate the body as vessel, merging the female figure with vernacular African architectural forms.
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