Kehinde Wiley, Mame Ngagne, 2007

The World Stage: Africa, Lagos ~ Dakar will feature of a selection of new paintings by former Studio Museum artist in residence Kehinde Wiley from his new multinational “World Stage” series. The exhibition, featuring paintings created during Wiley’s long-term travels in Nigeria and Senegal, is second in this series, for which Wiley temporarily relocates to different countries and opens satellite studios to become familiar with local culture and history (other “World Stage” sites include China, India, Poland and Turkey). Wiley, known for his stylized paintings of urban African-American male youths in poses borrowed from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European figurative paintings, continues that process, this time with models in poses based on regional sources.

Tanea Richardson’s Studio 2008

In a multilingual leap from French to English, and every language in between, “chic” defines that which is sophisticated and undeniably contemporary. Leslie Hewitt, Tanea Richardson and Saya Woolfalk are the latest in a prestigious group to share the Studio Museum’s eponymous work spaces. They’re hard at work developing and refining their projects to offer up distinct, carefully considered artworks for their July exhibition.

Kori Newkirk, Void of Silence, 2001, Courtesy The Project, New York

Kori Newkirk (b. 1970) is a celebrated multidisciplinary artist whose conceptual practice is based on transforming modest materials into loaded signifiers that question both cultural and aesthetic notions of beauty. Newkirk elegantly blends medium and message-using photographs, wax, hair pomade, beads and neon lights-to forge a new paradigm in art practice. This survey exhibition presents work produced since Newkirk received his MFA from the University of California at Irvine, includes a site-specific project and illustrates how interrelated strands of his practice have converged and developed over time.

Elizabeth Catlett-Mora, Separation, 1954, The Studio Museum in Harlem; gift of the artist 72.9.5

Labor, Love, Live: Collection in Context presents an intimate selection of works on paper from The Studio Museum in Harlem’s permanent collection. These drawings, prints and photographs depict scenes from the everyday lives of African Americans throughout the twentieth century, such as family gatherings, workers resting after a hard day’s labor and people in quiet moments of refl ection. Labor, Love, Live features works by modern and contemporary artists including Benny Andrews, Elizabeth Catlett-Mora, Valerie Maynard, Barthélémy Toguo and Hale Woodruff.

Lorna Simpson, Duet (film still), 2000

NEW YORK, NY, March 15, 2007 - For nearly three decades, artist, photographer and filmmaker Lorna Simpson has challenged traditional visual media and how they represent the female African-American body. Simpson’s work now on display at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Duet, is a split-screen cinematic representation of many of the themes she has explored in her photos and installations in the past-isolation, escapism and intermingling identities.

“Lorna Simpson is committed to exposing the social invisibility of the black female-the impulse to self-express and the challenges of finding a language for that expression,” says Associate Curator Christine Y. Kim. “Duet is the next step in the development of that language in the way she reworks how we perceive visual compositions.”

“While in a certain sense my work operates within a feminist critique, it’s about negotiating and taking aspects from it that I feel are valuable.” explains Lorna Simpson.

In the Duet installation in the Museum’s mezzanine south gallery, two images are projected onto a single screen, and the border between them becomes an imaginative site for visual and contextual exchange. On one side of the screen, two girls play a duet on the piano, while on the other side, two women talk about memory. As the film develops, the girls and women disappear into the “no space” that glues the two images together. The aural and visual simultaneity of the installation challenges traditional notions of effective communication and re-imagines its characters as parts of a communal identity.

“Duet moves to create a larger dialogue with the language of film by using a split screen, allowing two distinct scenes to play before our eyes and in our heads at the same time,” says Kellie Jones, Associate Professor of Art History at Columbia University. “Duet, like Simpson’s other work, introduces gray into the black-and-white binaries of absence and presence, loss and possession, and the desired and the undesirable.” Through music, dialogue and moving image, this work operates with and within the way we perceive images relationship and narrative.

Duet will be on display from April 11, 2007, through July 1, 2007. This installation of Duet runs concurrently with Simpson’s first mid-career retrospective, on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art from March 1, 2007 through May 6, 2007, and traveling to the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts in Michigan and the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, later this year.

About the Artist

Lorna Simpson is one of the most celebrated artists of her generation. Her groundbreaking work in photography, film and video installation often juxtaposes figure, gesture, narrative and text, challenging conventional notions of identity and racial and gender stereotypes. She attributes an internship in The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Education Department at the age of 18 with informing her own “sense of agency as an artist.” Born in Brooklyn, Simpson received a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City and a MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego. She began working in film in 1997. Last year, Simpson was the inaugural recipient of the Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, which recognizes the achievements of an African- American artist of “great innovation, promise and creativity,” was established by jazz impresario and philanthropist George Wein in memory of his wife Joyce, a Museum Trustee from 1994 until her death in 2005.

Henry Taylor, Sis and Bra, 2004

NEW YORK, NY, March 15, 2007 - After years of working odd jobs-including a ten-year stint as a psychiatric technician-the painter Henry Taylor is finally receiving acclaim as one of today’s most engaging emerging artists. The Studio Museum in Harlem is proud to present his first museum solo exhibition, Sis and Bra, an exploration of economic and racial disparities of the United States through portraiture. Taylor, who finds inspiration in just about everything around him, has a refreshing, idiosyncratic perspective on the American cultural landscape.

“Taylor started his formal art training later in life,” explains Associate Curator Christine Y. Kim. “While considered by some to be an ‘outsider artist’ because of his work’s aesthetics and biographical background, he focuses on the intimate and familiar world for inspiration, and situates these experiences within the living trajectory of contemporary American painting.”

The exhibition will feature a selection of Taylor’s recent figurative paintings. While his pieces come in a variety of sizes and are often made on a wide range of found materials, including cigarette and cereal boxes, cutting boards and suitcases, these works are primarily on traditional canvases. Taylor frequently depicts friends, family members and acquaintances at barbecues, sporting events and other neighborhood activities. A perceptive portraitist, he captures nuances of expression and mood in his subjects, including his former hospital patients (Tasered, 2005) and family members such as his son Noah. In Homage to a Brother (2007), a portrait of Sean Bell, the African-American man recently shot and killed by plainclothes detectives on the eve of his wedding in Queens–Taylor utilizes found images of Bell’s neighborhood and environment to comment on the larger issues the killing brought up.

Organized by Christine Y. Kim, Associate Curator, Henry Taylor: Sis and Bra will be on display from April 11, 2007 through July 1, 2007.

About the Artist

Henry Taylor was born in Oxnard, California in 1958 and drew and painted throughout his teens. One of eight children raised by a single mother, he worked odd jobs throughout his career, including a full time job as a psychiatric technician at Camarillo State Hospital from 1984 to 1994. He received a BA at the California Institute of the Arts in 1995, and his work has been featured in solo gallery shows on both coasts.

Philosophy of Time Travel

NEW YORK, NY, March 15, 2007 - What if history had a mind of its own, moving from the past, through the present and into the future? A team of five artists is exploring this idea with a large-scale installation, Philosophy of Time Travel, opening April 11, 2007, at The Studio Museum in Harlem. The installation evokes the work of modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), forcefully and dynamically pushing his massive 1938 work, Endless Column, through the Studio Museum’s gallery space. The result is a fictional world in which history comes to life, crashes through the exhibition space, and traverses through histories of art and museums.

“Philosophy of Time Travel harnesses Brancusi’s seminal, classic modernist work to challenge the contemporary, as if the sculpture grew beyond its bounds and appeared, by magic or some cryptic science, in the Studio Museum,” says Christine Y. Kim, Associate Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem. “By being installed here, at a culturally specific art institution, its commentaries on the nature of history and time are also variously applied to the histories and structures of Harlem and African Americans.”

Brancusi’s Endless Column, an outdoor sculpture in Târgu Jiu, Romania, is a 100-foot tall series of cast-iron rhombus shapes, resembling a stylized version of a traditional Romanian funerary pillar. In angling the vertical modules through the Studio Museum’s galleries-four of them penetrate through from floor to ceiling-the artists also recall the imagined flight of Brancusi’s classic Bird in Space series, one of modernism’s great evocations of movement and grace. The installation brings the outside in, the past into the future, and the still into sinuous movement, shattering the walls of the museum space and the present alike.

The installation will also include an introductory video with the innovative music of Sun Ra, who had a “cosmic philosophy” of his own. The five artists involved in the project, Edgar Arceneaux, Vincent Galen Johnson, Olga Koumoundouros, Rodney McMillian and Matthew Sloly, studied together at CalArts and have been involved in a wide range of solo and group exhibitions around the world. They work in different media, from sculpture to photography to digital technology, but often find common ground. In this case, the 2001 cult film Donnie Darko, which features an imaginary book called The Philosophy of Time Travel inspired them to think about how art history bends back on itself.

Organized by Associate Curator Christine Y. Kim, Philosophy of Time Travel will be on display from April 11, 2007 through July 1, 2007 in the Studio Museum’s main and alcove galleries. A DVD and full-color catalogue with approximately 112 pages and three scholarly essays by Lowery Stokes Sims, Hilton Als and Christine Y. Kim will be available in the Museum Store.

About the Artists

Philosophy of Time Travel is the product of collaboration among five artists who have worked together and provided invaluable critiques for one another over the past decade. Their symbiotic intellectual pursuits and creative endeavors are no accident. Edgar Arceneaux and Vincent Galen Johnson met at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in the mid-1990s. An avid student of photography, architecture and theory, Johnson, who is regarded as a mentor in the group, received his MFA in 1997 and moved to Banff, Canada, for an artist-in-residence program, where he met Matthew Sloly. Sloly started traveling to Los Angeles regularly upon Johnson’s encouragement and with his help developed his art practice and relationships with other artists of color engaged in critical theory and science. Arceneaux then entered the MFA program at California Institute of the Arts in 1999, where he met sculptor Olga Koumoundouros in the seminal course on post-colonial theory taught by artist and mentor Charles Gaines. Rodney McMillian came to CalArts the following year and joined the emerging collective of artists and thinkers contemplating the intersections of art, culture and race. In 2001, Sloly moved to Los Angeles and began the MFA program at Art Center, the same year that Johnson’s work was included in Freestyle at the Studio Museum.

This collaboration was conceived in 2003. “We had all worked around and with each other,” says McMillian, who now teaches painting at CalArts, “either independently or in small groups. Eventually we just merged.” They have exhibited their work together at numerous museums and art spaces in Los Angeles, such as the UCLA Hammer Museum, LA ART and REDCAT Gallery. Sloly has since returned to Toronto, while the remaining four still live and work in the Los Angeles area.

Philosophy of Time Travel is funded, in part, by a grant from the Peggy Cooper Cafritz Foundation of The Community Foundation for the National Capital Region, with additional support from the Creative Capital Foundation and Canada Council for the Arts. The Studio Museum is also indebted to several individuals and organizations for their generous in-kind support, including the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena; architects Yeh + Jerrard LLC; structural engineers Gilsanz Murray Steficek LLP; Side Street Projects and Interior Removal Services; and Kurt Foreman.

Kikkerland

The Studio Museum Store appeals to the young, the young-at-heart, the art aficionado and the collector of the charming oddity. Kikkerland’s artfully designed gadgets are tongue-in-cheek in their simplicity and vivacity. The wind-up Critter totters on spindly legs until it teeters over, the keychain-sized Music Box tinkles a familiar melody, the stress-relieving Molecular Massager doubles as an artistic knick-knack, and the sleek and modern Bookend Men designed by Chris Collicott will help keep Museum book purchases tidy. Kikkerland’s Futuro Perpetual Wall Calendar will help you keep track of the Studio Museum’s next opening. So once you get uptown and into the gallery, check out the Museum Store’s collection of Kikkerland products and other great gift items for your favorite museum goer or connoisseur of cute.

Kikkerland Design Inc., a wholesale company that sells its products to museums and retail shops, has followed the spirit of its design philosophy, “Humor, charm, added value and affordability,” to wide-recognition and acclaim in the design world. A wonderfully implemented artistic philosophy and exclusivity of distribution makes their products coveted design pieces. Products from Kikkerland’s six hundred-item catalogue are handpicked for the Studio Museum Store from its distribution center right here in Harlem.

More-in-Store is the Studio Museum’s new collaborative, installation-based project that invites local retailers and artisans to share their creations with visitors to our store. By presenting aesthetic and retail treasures from the Harlem community, More-in-Store gives Museum visitors access to the creativity of our neighborhood. Kikkerland products are featured in the Museum Store this season.

Music for Architecture (Volume 1) by Peter Adjaye

Music for Architecture (Volume 1) by Peter Adjaye

StudioSound invites musicians, producers and musical innovators to create original compositions inspired by the works on view. From Daniel Bernard Roumain’s classically inspired interpretation of Chris Ofili’s watercolors to DJ Scientific’s remix and reinvention of Harlem sounds, this commissioned project activates the Museum’s lobby and adds a parallel dimension to the art and artists on view. For this season of StudioSound, we are proud to feature Music for Architecture (Volume 1) by Peter Adjaye. A composition in four parts, this work is inspired by the architecture designed by his brother, internationally acclaimed British architect David Adjaye. Born out of conversations between Peter and David on the nature and vision of David’s public buildings and art installations, this musical selection presents cinematic soundscapes of spiraling and evolving sounds and textures. It is a work that ties together all of the collaborations between Peter and David thus far, which include sound installations for the Nobel Field in the Nobel Peace Center in Olso (2005) and soundtracks to films featuring David’s buildings.