Sculpture (Sculpture)

My Shape (2018) is the final work of the exhibition “Sorry”, taking the form of a Levi’s denim jacket pattern, expanded three or four times larger than its original shape. Adorned with different pockets, visible through the transparency of the paper and different light bulbs illuminating the form, white cables link the piece to hidden plug sockets, recalling a similar piece made by the artist for the 2015 Ricard Foundation prize. The work is representative of a series of recurrent concepts in the artist’s work manipulation of scale, abstraction through monumentalization, highlighting of tangential objects integrated like sculptural elements by the artist, in a way in which others might try and hide them, as well as the melding of the intimate alongside objects of mass production and the globalization of tastes.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In 8 Ball Surfboard (1995),Alexis Smith combines her long-term interests in California culture and conceptual assemblage. The surfboard, an emblem of Southern California, emblazoned with the image of an eight-ball, references numerous tropes and clichés of American popular culture, specifically subcultures related to pool halls, surfing, and beaches. Indeed, this model-scale surfboard may be a future pop-culture relic, referencing a particular surfer or era of board design.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Set to the iconic and spiritual music of Alice Coltrane’s Turiyasangitananda (1937–2007), Cauleen Smith’s film Sojourner travels across the US to visit a series of sites important to an alternative and creative narrative of black history. While the approach may appear spiritual, it is more futuristic (Afrofuturism and Radical Jazz) than religious. Smith is interested in using the individual stories of “those who have formed their own solutions” as a reconstructive and healing lens for considering the past.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The title of Alicia Smith’s video work, Teomama , means “God Carrier” in the Aztec language of Nahuatl. It was the name given to medicine men and women who carried the bones of Huitzilopochtli—the god of war, sun, and human sacrifice in ancient Mexico, and the national deity of the Aztecs. Of the many legends featuring Huitzilopochtli, the origin story of Tenochtitlan (present day Mexico City) is perhaps one of the most well-known.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Iron Sorrows (1990) brings together what are for Alexis Smith common motifs and materials such as scavenged and repurposed metal, and street signage. Iron is one of nature’s most abundant metals. Smith, a philosopher of human detritus and poetic associations, presents it in this work as simultaneously everywhere yet paradoxically forgotten, lost in the heaps of refuse that fill junkyards and vacant lots.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Sable Elyse Smith’s Pivot III resembles playground equipment uselessly reconfigured. The stainless-steel asterisks, assembled from prison visitation-room seating, are painted 2K black and blue: colors evoking the US criminal justice system, its racist enforcement, and the heavy-duty finish of finance capitalism with which the culture industry is enmeshed. The work consists of six long rods, affixed via plate to each of the faces of a central cube, from which they radiate in perfect symmetry.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Kosmic Music is a musical score comprised of two parts: a single mixed media drawing titled Colors and Satellites, and a pair of mixed media drawings titled Koral Reef . Conceived of together as a single musical score, the three drawings exemplify a specific stage in the evolution of Wadada Leo Smith’s Ankhrasmation Language, which he has been developing since 1967. Although at first glance the works in Kosmic Music might appear abstract compositions drawn on paper, as with other scores produced by Smith, suggestions of musical structures are revealed upon closer inspection: an entanglement of musical sheets and bright geometric forms.

Installation (Installation)

Adam Smith

Installation (Installation)

Failed Handshake #1

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Leyla Stevens’s two-channel video Patiwangi, the death of fragrance is an immersive video installation that addresses erased histories. In the left channel, set in a fine museum storage facility, art conservators unfurl and inspect modernist Balinese paintings, prints, and sculptures. In the right channel, Javanese-Australian dancers, Ade Suharto and Melanie Lane, echo each other’s movements.

NFT (NFT)

On March 30, 2015, at 5:52am, David Horvitz caught his daughter, Ela Melanie, as she was being born, in the back of an Uber driving through Midtown Manhattan. He held her up in the morning light as the car drove down Park Avenue, blocks away from the Museum of Modern Art, where Zanna Gilbert, the mother, was a fellow. After arriving at the hospital, Horvitz tweeted a photo and later e-mailed his friends and family with additional images.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Silver & Gold combines video, performance, and original costumes into a self-proclaimed “filmformance” that evokes the legendary filmmaker Jack Smith and his tribute to 1940s Dominican movie starlet Maria Montez in a magical and joyfully twisted exploration of race, glamour, sexuality, and the silver screen. Taking Smith’s interest in Hollywood’s obsession with the reproduction of the exotic as a point of departure, Bustamante embodies Miss Montez. Here, video and the body function as both material and subject in her bizarre search for the new bejeweled body part that is at once her curse and oracle.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Political artist, painter, writer, performer, photographer, David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992 in New York City, was one of the leading figures of the New York Downtown artistic scene of the 80s. His use of image, language and collage generated a new method of idea communication. The series of five videos Collaborative Film Collection made in collaboration with Marion Scemama in 1989 is emblematic of his artistic practice, it unfolds through performance, films, photographs, texts and paintings.

Installation (Installation)

Future Gestalt re-imagines a large-scale sculpture “ Smoke” by Tony Smith as embodying a futuristic intelligence that communicates with a group of communitarians undergoing experimental psychotherapy. Future Gestalt is not a video of a performance, rather, it is a documentation of the last of four unscripted sessions of guided participation led by the artist. Through the title and form, the sessions suggest Gestalt therapy, promoted as a form of personal transformation in California at the Esalen Institute.

Painting (Painting)

This painting is the direct result of the artist’s research into her roots. Kudzanai-Violet Hwami sought to find a way to immerse herself in present-day Zimbabwe, spending a month at an artist-run space Dzimbanhete on the outskirts of Harare and living with a traditional healer. According to the artist, the experience left her feeling othered by the inability to fully integrate herself into the place she called home.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

By Way of Revolution is a series of works by Helina Metaferia that addresses the inherited histories of protest that inform contemporary social movements. In the project, Metaferia works intrinsically with female descendants of prominent historical black activists to produce video art; with women of color organizations to produce socially engaged work; with “radicalism” archives and performance stills to produce works on paper and tapestries; and with museum, gallery, and public spaces to produce participatory performances. The Call is an ongoing video project of performances by descendants of prominent civil rights activists across the United States.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Eija Riitta was born in 1954 in Liden, Sweden, and is “objectum-sexual.” Since June 17, 1979, her name is Eija Riitta Berliner Mauer taking the name of her husband, the Berlin Wall. In animism all elements of nature are considered as alive and have souls. “Objectum-sexuality” is an extension of this belief.