WHYY
By Brother by Charles Searles 1967-1969. (Delaware Art Museum, Acquisition Fund, 2020)
A massive, groundbreaking Black art exhibition installed in 1971 in Wilmington will be recreated by the Delaware Art Museum next fall.
“Afro-American Images 1971: The Vision of Percy Ricks” will feature most of the works that were originally part of the ambitious exhibition “Afro-American Images 1971,” a show of about 130 works representing more than 60 artists installed 50 years ago in the Wilmington Armory (now St. Anthony’s Community Center).
The original show was created by Percy Ricks and Aesthetic Dynamics, Inc. a multiracial artist collective he founded. The reboot is a tribute to Ricks, a well-respected Wilmington artist and arts educator who died in 2008.
âI was half-dreading the 100th anniversary, but in fact, the research and the events that happened were very, very considered,â says Murphy.
âIn 1966, it was just an utterly unquestioning, nationalist commemoration. I remember as a schoolgirl buying into that, like a lot of us did, in those days. There was a TV series that went on all week, called Insurrection, a mockumentary of each day of the Rising. Iâve seen it since; itâs kind of fascinating. We were kind of thrilled by that. We felt it was like a totally accurate representation of the way things were, had television cameras been there. So to move from that, directly after that, to Belfast, was quite a shock. We had moved â inadvertently â into a fairly loyalist neighbourhood. And then when the trouble started, we moved into a nationalist neighbourhood. I can remember hearing gunfire and thinking: the Rising must have been like this. That it wasnât this kind of great, glorious flag-waving
Basquiat and other artists of color lead a swell of auction sales
An auction at Sothebys in New York, May 12, 2021. As live auctions resumed at Sothebys on Wednesday night, bidders there and at Christies the previous night welcomed a shift toward diversity in the contemporary art market. Nina Westervelt/The New York Times.
by Zachary Small and Robin Pogrebin
NEW YORK
(NYT NEWS SERVICE)
.- Just as the art market withstood the trauma of the Sept. 11 attacks and the economic plunge of 2008, so did the purchasing of high-priced paintings prevail at Sothebys on Wednesday during the first live contemporary auction since the onset of the pandemic in March 2020.
Wangechi Mutu
Until 25 June at Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street, Manhattan
The Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu, the artist behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s inaugural façade commission, presents a series of engrossing bronze sculptures that are both graceful and phantasmagoric, comprising hybrid goddess figures and menacing sharp-toothed reptiles and animals. The large-scale works
Crocodylus and
MamaRay (both 2020) the first two pieces viewers encounter in the gallery are fantastical anthropomorphic beings that challenge Eurocentric aesthetics and also symbolise ideas around strength and balance and the gendered and racialised body. Viewers discover at the end of the exhibition that the creatures have laid bronze eggs and will proliferate, a reference to the “triumphant female goddess”, according to the gallery. The Legion of Honor in San Francisco is currently hosting an expansive exhibition devoted to the artist titled