Painting (Painting)

Beau Soleil #7 ’s title (translated as Beautiful Sun) gives a good sense of its effect. By virtue of a grid of dots, slightly different in size and placement, a subtle shimmering is created. In readily showing its effect as an image of light, the work exists between abstraction and representation—and perhaps points to the folly of such a distinction—rows and columns of spots become the dawn breaking through thick morning air.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

A Splinter (Study for Painting) is a large graphite work on paper by Hernan Bas that was intended as a study for a later painting. The composition features three unfinished figures, all of whom appear to be observing something unrendered or external to the picture plane. Around the group of figures roughly framed by the outline of a triangle, is a frenzy of loose marks and smudged lines that juxtapose the delicate features of the figures’ faces.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This untitled work from 2012 is a print originally made as part of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s artist limited edition series. It’s contrasting dark and vibrant tones presage his later series of works, exhibited at L. A.’s Hammer Museum as Scorched Earth. These larger works share a map-like quality, looking like aerial views of some scarred urban landscape.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

From suicides, to gang violence, to the epidemic abuse of force by police departments (predominantly against Black men), to school and mass shootings, there is perhaps no more urgent issue in the United States than gun control. The color blue is a proxy for both sadness, and a color that is emblematic of American law enforcement services. I Am Blue, 1 by American Artist is a sculpture that fuses a school desk with a ballistic shield.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

American Artist is engaged in a multiyear research project that traces and teases various interconnections between the life and work of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (b. 1947, Pasadena, CA); the evolution of rocketry and sci-fi in Los Angeles; and the post-war movement of African-diasporic families from the Southern to the Western United States, a phenomenon known as the Second Great Migration. Using a historical materialist frame of study, American Artist’s undertaking asks of the region and the frequency of Black people practicing art and science in Altadena, an enclave northeast of Los Angeles.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

American Artist is engaged in a multiyear research project that traces and teases various interconnections between the life and work of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (b. 1947, Pasadena, CA); the evolution of rocketry and sci-fi in Los Angeles; and the post-war movement of African-diasporic families from the Southern to the Western United States, a phenomenon known as the Second Great Migration. Using a historical materialist frame of study, American Artist’s undertaking asks of the region and the frequency of Black people practicing art and science in Altadena, an enclave northeast of Los Angeles.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

American Artist is engaged in a multiyear research project that traces and teases various interconnections between the life and work of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (b. 1947, Pasadena, CA); the evolution of rocketry and sci-fi in Los Angeles; and the post-war movement of African-diasporic families from the Southern to the Western United States, a phenomenon known as the Second Great Migration. Using a historical materialist frame of study, American Artist’s undertaking asks of the region and the frequency of Black people practicing art and science in Altadena, an enclave northeast of Los Angeles.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Art of War 1, City in Broad Daylight, Leaving the House, Justice is a Virtue, and Lions are Stronger than Men are linocut prints from the series Sultana’s Dream . This series by artist Chitra Ganesh comprises a large-scale narrative suite inspired by a 1905 feminist utopian (eponymous) text written by a Bengali writer and social reformer, Rokeya Sakhhawat Hossain. Educated thanks to the support of her elite family, Hossain was one of the few Bengali women of her generation writing in English.

Photography (Photography)

The American War , which takes its title from the Vietnamese term for what Americans call the Vietnam War, has toured the United States extensively with the goal of presenting a Vietnamese perspective of that history. The project began in 2005 when Fletcher visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. He was shocked by images that depicted the lasting effects of the war and the atrocities committed by the United States.

Photography (Photography)

Collier Schorr’s prints upend conventions of portrait photography by challenging what it means to “document” a subject. American Flag (Scratch) (1999), for example, depicts an unidentified male subject clad in an American flag-print singlet. With his head and extremities out of frame, the camera focuses on his flush-red torso, his left nipple protruding from the singlet’s strap.

NFT (NFT)

For Sentimentite Agnieszka Kurant collaborated with Justin Lane, CEO and Co-Founder of CulturePulse, to gather global sentiment data that has been harvested from millions of Twitter and Reddit posts related to 100 seismic events in recent history. Kurant’s fictional mineral-currency is at once data visualization, a sly commentary on global markets, and a speculative narrative about the connection between technology and geology (for example ‘conflict minerals’ used in smartphones). Inspired by the way natural forces shape rocks, landscape, and planets over time, Sentimentite ’s evolving forms are shaped by dynamic social and political ruptures in the 21st century.

NFT (NFT)

For Sentimentite Agnieszka Kurant collaborated with Justin Lane, CEO and Co-Founder of CulturePulse, to gather global sentiment data that has been harvested from millions of Twitter and Reddit posts related to 100 seismic events in recent history. Kurant’s fictional mineral-currency is at once data visualization, a sly commentary on global markets, and a speculative narrative about the connection between technology and geology (for example ‘conflict minerals’ used in smartphones). Inspired by the way natural forces shape rocks, landscape, and planets over time, Sentimentite ’s evolving forms are shaped by dynamic social and political ruptures in the 21st century.

In 1940 Rivera came to San Francisco for what would be his last mural project in the city, Pan-American Unity . Currently housed at City College of San Francisco as a permanent installation, for a time it was in storage and not on public display. During the same period, he created the charcoal sketchentitled Shasta (1940), of large construction machinery that the artist saw near the Mount Shasta dam.

NFT (NFT)

For Sentimentite Agnieszka Kurant collaborated with Justin Lane, CEO and Co-Founder of CulturePulse, to gather global sentiment data that has been harvested from millions of Twitter and Reddit posts related to 100 seismic events in recent history. Kurant’s fictional mineral-currency is at once data visualization, a sly commentary on global markets, and a speculative narrative about the connection between technology and geology (for example ‘conflict minerals’ used in smartphones). Inspired by the way natural forces shape rocks, landscape, and planets over time, Sentimentite ’s evolving forms are shaped by dynamic social and political ruptures in the 21st century.

Photography (Photography)

Observing the sky after 11 September 2001, Dennis Adams photographed elements which had been lifted by drafts and were floating above the city of New York. The artist was only able to identify the objects after developing and enlarging the prints: you can read “He’s no terrorist”. The front page of the newspaper thrusts back to ‘the event’ of the 21st century and is revealed only through the detailed observation of the image; the painful twist of the newspaper could be a rustling wing.

Photography (Photography)

Gutmann’s photographs Untitled Nob Hill and From the North Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge are some of the oldest pieces in the Kadist Collection and serve as historical anchors for many of the more recent works. Distinctly modernist in style, the photos depict two of San Francisco’s most recognizable sites—the affluent neighborhood of Nob Hill and the iconic Golden Gate Bridge—through extremely estranged angles and balanced compositions. Moreover, these two images are representative of Gutmann’s work inasmuch as they epitomize two of the photographer’s visual obsessions: the automobile and the city of San Francisco.

Installation (Installation)

Palimpsest is a series of what artist Phi Phi Oanh calls “pictorial installations”. Lacquerscope is the name she has given to the lacquer projection machines that she created from lenses and old parts of small format film projectors. The name harkens back to the early age of mechanical reproduction that also coincides with the “invention” of Vietnamese lacquer painting in the last century.

Painting (Painting)

Both Head-Portrait with Red and Blue Background and Man with Blue Tie are classic examples of Weeks’ deftness of line, shape, and color. These two works illustrate his signature flattened style -a vast departure from figurative painting of the time- and hints of influence from modernist painters like Henri Matisse and Maynard Dixon, although with a somewhat darker tone. Both figures stare with with expressionless faces and hollow eyes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video Make down is a 34 minute sequence shot that shows the artist removing make-up in front of a mirror. The peculiarity of the scene consists in two symbolic details: first, the make-up itself, covering his face, hair and torso – a thick kaki layer, reminding of military camouflage – and second, the paper used to remove the make-up – black and white prints of stills taken from Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1965 film, “La bataille d’Alger” ( The Battle of Algiers). These still images put together recreate a sequence in which a young Algerian woman takes off her veil and puts on Western make-up.

Painting (Painting)

Both Head-Portrait with Red and Blue Background and Man with Blue Tie are classic examples of Weeks’ deftness of line, shape, and color. These two works illustrate his signature flattened style -a vast departure from figurative painting of the time- and hints of influence from modernist painters like Henri Matisse and Maynard Dixon, although with a somewhat darker tone. Both figures stare with with expressionless faces and hollow eyes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Andrew Norman Wilson’s work Kodak the artist uses computer-generated imagery to create narratives that question the reliability of images in the age of post-production. The artist creates disturbances in typical notions of time and space to highlight the existential terror of humans trying to make sense of their memories and perception in the 21st century. On its surface, Kodak questions how improvements in digital imagery have affected the analog film industry, but it also showcases the consequences for how humans relate to their memories.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Luiz Roque’s short film Zero we follow a dog moving alone onboard an aircraft that flies over a vast desert. The dog seems tranquil as if keeping up with its daily routine in an environment in which the human presence is completely absent. The disturbing image of the animal left adrift — perhaps the only remaining living being in existence — is interspersed with the shiny mirrored surface of high-tech skyscrapers emerging out of the sand, in what might have once been an oasis.

Photography (Photography)

The title of this series – Two videos, three photographs, several related masterpieces and American art – is paradoxical, suggesting the work is conceived in relation to its medium and a situation in art history and the region of the world in which it was made. Paradoxical but in the end, often true of the way in which art history is written. The presence of black men and the term “American Art” brings us back to Robert Mapplethorpe’s Black Book .

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Historically, blondeness has been a signifier for desirability and beauty, speaking to “purity” — the purity of whiteness — like no other bodily attribute except, perhaps, blue eyes. In the twenty-first century, blondeness is the look desired by American presidents, pop stars, rappers, television announcers, Hollywood celebrities, the boy next door, and some Asian Americans, African Americans, white Americans, Arab Americans, and LatinX Americans. The desirability of blonde hair has no genre boundaries, no pronoun limitation, and no class limit.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Chase ATM emitting blue smoke, Bank of America ATM emitting red smoke, TD Bank ATM emitting green smoke was shot in the American Southwest at Mid-century modern architectural structures that were built to house regional independent banks and have since been bought up by Chase, Bank of America, and TD Bank. The video utilizes transparency and opacity effects in multimedia software to question the perceptibility of finance. It offers a complex metaphor (toxic assets, emergency flares, house/mortgage on fire) about the financial sector and the effects of the ‘crisis’ that led to the disappearance (and the ghostly memory) of many local and regional banks.

Photography (Photography)

Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U. S. naval shipbuilding company—in Maine. Gary Gilpatrick, Insulator (2008) belongs to a group of portrait-like photographs of the shipyard’s workers lunchboxes. Created over the period of a year, Lockhart’s film and accompanying still photographs are intended as an exploration of the social spaces inside this kind of workplace.

Photography (Photography)

Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor, through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U. S. naval shipbuilding company—in Maine. Stanley “Tom” Durrell, Tinsmith (2008) belongs to a group of portrait-like photographs of the shipyard’s workers lunchboxes. Created over the period of a year, Lockhart’s film and accompanying still photographs are intended as an exploration of the social spaces inside this kind of workplace.

Photography (Photography)

Half Dome Hough Transform by Trevor Paglen merges traditional American landscape photography (sometimes referred as ‘frontier photography’ for sites located in the American West) with artificial intelligence and other technological advances such as computer vision. This photograph was taken at Half Dome, a frequently visited granite rock formation in Yosemite National Park, California. For this work, Paglen created a digital file of the 8 x 10 inch photographic negative so that the artificial intelligence program can apply computer vision to evaluate the content of the image.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The work La Loge Harlem focuses on the history of Harlem and its development over the last 200 years. It was a playground for the rich in the 19th century and where Old New York had its summer homes and diversions. The center image is a portrait of the artist’s grandmother when she was 16 in 1949.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

From the series the Old and the New (XI) by Carlos Garaicoa belongs to the series Lo viejo y lo nuevo / Das Alte und das Neue (The Old and the New) which was first exhibited in 2010 at Barbara Gross Gallery in Germany. Here, Garaicoa’s interest in vernacular Cuban architecture shifts towards the European context: a series of twelve nineteenth-century French engravings have been reworked into delicate paper models. Here, the two-dimensional old-school architectural renderings have become the foundation for new hollow three-dimensional structures.