GAVLAK announces representation of April Bey
April Bey. Photo: Blair J. Meadows Photography.
LOS ANGELES, CA
.-GAVLAK announced the representation of Los Angeles-based artist April Bey. The gallerys guiding mission of promoting works by women and LGBTQ artists is enhanced and enriched through its amplification of Beys vision.
April Beys (Bahamian/American) work delivers audacious critiques of the mainstreaming and monetization of radical politics via a diverse range of media. Moving deftly between painting, printmaking, collage, video, intimately scaled artists books and immersive installations, Bey wittily skewers pop cultures sacred cows. Icons and anti-heroes of both American and Bahamian culture populate the bold and bright environs of her compositions, allowing for ambiguity in our assessments of their impact and legacies. Beys incorporation of mass-produced objects and reproductive media including printmaking and video underscores the means by which images com
Minneapolis Institute of Art acquires complete archive of works created by Highpoint Editions
Jim Hodges, of Summer, 2016. From Seasons. Sugar-lift aquatint, spit-bite aquatint, drypoint (scribes, sandpaper), scraping, burnishing, woodcut in dark blue on Gampi paper, screenprint in light blue, and color digital pigment print on Gampi paper with cutouts; edition of 28, plus 6 artists proofs, 34 × 24 in. (86.36 × 60.96 cm) (image); 41 × 30 1/2 in. (104.14 × 77.47 cm) (sheet) Highpoint Editions Archive, The Friends of Bruce B. Dayton Acquisition Fund and the Christina N. and Swan J. Turnblad Memorial Fund 2020.85.53.
MINNEAPOLIS, MN
.-The Minneapolis Institute of Art today announced it has acquired the complete archive of works by Highpoint Editions, the publishing arm of Highpoint Center for Printmaking (HP), a nonprofit printmaking art center established in 2001 in Minneapolis. The 20-year archive comprises 310 published prints and multiples, plus 700 items of ancillary
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When artist and art historian David Driskell brought his groundbreaking “Two Centuries of Black American Art: 1750-1950 exhibition to a series of museums in 1976 and 1977, some people thought that more than 200 works by 63 artists (and some anonymous crafts workers) was too much of a good thing. Driskell did not agree.
“I was not looking for a unified theme,” Driskell told The New York Times in a 1977 interview. “And this, of course, usually upsets the critics because they want to see a continuous kind of thing.”
When you are trying to right the exclusionary wrongs of history, less is never going to be more. That was true for Driskell, and it is true for “Black Art: In the Absence of Light,” a new HBO documentary that uses Driskell and his landmark exhibition as a jumping-off point for a wide-ranging, densely populated look at the past, present and future of Black art and artists in America.
Kerry James Marshall (photo: HBO)
In 1976, David Driskell took on the monumental task of mounting “Two Centuries of African American Art.” First displayed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art before traveling across the country to Dallas, Atlanta and New York, the show presented a cross section of art made by Black people in America. A new HBO documentary, “Black Art: In the Absence of Light,” looks at the legacy of Driskell (1931-2020), a Black American scholar, artist and curator, and his revolutionary landmark exhibition.
Weaving together interviews with major contemporary artists, curators, art historians, collectors and Driskell himself, the documentary contextualizes the history and power of Black art in America. “Black is not the absence of color. Black is a particular color,” the artist Kerry James Marshall tells us, sitting in his studio. The particularity of Blackness as it pertains to art is the backbone of this documentary. Where the documentary shines
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If you try to visit the Los Angeles County Museum of Art this week, you can enter the Resnick Pavilion and browse its gift shop, where you might peruse one of several catalogs featuring the work of Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara, who is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the museum. You can also pick up one of several Nara-designed skateboard decks, Nara T-shirts and Nara colored pencil sets. While you’re at it, don’t forget the Nara disposable bandages. (Only $12!)
What you cannot do is see the Nara exhibition in the BCAM building across the way. Nor can you view any of the exhibitions currently installed inside the Resnick Pavilion, which include a show of photography by Vera Lutter, which chronicles LACMA’s now-demolished east campus, and an architectonic installation by Korean artist Do Ho Suh.