Peter Jemison and Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, both then associated with the American Indian Community House in SoHo, are highlights of the MoMA exhibition.Īgain, individual artists, seen through their art, are what you come to any show to see and MoMA has wonderful ones: Randy Williams with a furious 1982 assemblage titled “AIDS Not So Holy” Willie Birch with an exquisite prayer-card of a painting of Gandhi Howardena Pindell with jewel-like punched paper collages and Janet Olivia Henry with a 1983 tabletop tableau called “The Studio Visit,” in which the artist (in the person of a Lieutenant Uhura doll) stares down a Barbie-wigged curator. The gallery was also helping to keep the flame of multiculturalism alive by exhibiting artists from other ethnically defined downtown institutions. “Black exists in the presence of Blackness.”) In the 1980s, the space became an incubator for experimental performance, dance and video, forms that, by the middle of the decade, were beginning to lose the attention of an art world in thrall to a reinvigorated market for collectible objects. (“There’s a notion that Black exists in the absence of white,” Bryant says in a catalog interview. Black art must take more risks.”Īnd JAM, advocate for an expansive Blackness, did. Tiara-crowned, dressed in a gown made of white dinner gloves, and wielding a whip, she castigated the gathered company: “That’s enough! No more bootlicking. The title of the inaugural TriBeCa show, “Outlaw Aesthetics,” advertised “downtown” loud and clear, as did the interruptive arrival on opening night of the artist Lorraine O’Grady in her debut turn as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire. Hammons and Nengudi, along with their gallery-mate Houston Conwill (1947-2016), were also involved in performance work, which became increasingly part of the JAM program as it moved, following eviction, to larger quarters, the first a storefront on Franklin Street in TriBeCa (1980-1984), the next an industrial loft on Broadway in SoHo (1984-1986). At MoMA we see examples of such matchups, including a freshly made Hammons print hung next to a 1963 Jasper Johns, with both looking totally and equally great. His use of street-level, racially-charged materials - fried chicken parts, hair from barbershop floors - caused an uproar among JAM artists and decisively established JAM as an uptown version of that downtown phenomenon, the alternative space.Īt the same time Bryant was careful to symbolically anchor the gallery where it was, on establishment turf, with a 1976 group show that paired emerging Black artists with established white stars. (One of Reynolds’s two pictures is a portrait of the singer Roberta Flack, an early JAM supporter.Īnd in 1975, Bryant gave the Conceptualist David Hammons, like Nengudi a Los Angeles transplant, a first New York solo. Small prints by Valerie Maynard and paintings by the Jamaican artist Mallica (Kapo) Reynolds are straightforwardly representational. The 57th Street gallery measured only around 700 feet square and the work representing it here is modest in size and much of it traditional in forms.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |