During our spring 2009 exhibition season, The Studio Museum in Harlem presented Collected. Propositions on the Permanent Collection. Collected offered multiple takes on the Museum’s collection and included over two hundred works of art by over a hundred artists. Inspired by our fortieth anniversary, this unique look allowed us to view the collection with fresh eyes. During this process, countless themes emerged. This season, we are thrilled for two of these themes—Color Consciousness: Black and Color Consciousness: Blue—to remain on view.

Founded in 1968, the Studio Museum began with a mission to present the work of African-American artists and artifacts of the African diaspora. In the early history of the Museum, the mandate to collect works of art was strong. Guided by the transformative vision of its founding directors and curators, the Museum began its permanent collection through the generosity of artists and donors. Today, the collection contains over 1,600 works of art, including paintings, drawings, sculpture, photography, video and mixed-media installations. It traces the evolution of the Museum from its inception through the growth of the collection and the expansion of the exhibition and Artist-in-Residence programs. Today, the Studio Museum continues to build the collection through the stewardship of its Acquisition Committee and through gifts.

Organized by the Curatorial Team, Collected continues to give us an opportunity to reflect on the great treasures in our care, and we hope it will continue to prompt wonderful discussions about art made now and the past as seen through these works. Throughout the Museum’s history we have proudly shown the collection and have been honored to loan works around the country and the world. We are excited that at this moment we can continue to highlight our collection and encourage a new era of exploration and presentation.

Clifford Owens, Text Piece (video stills), 2008, Courtesy the artist and On Stellar Rays Gallery, New York, NY

The Studio Museum in Harlem will open the fall/winter season with a major exhibition entitled 30 Seconds off an Inch. This survey will bring together contemporary artworks by a group of artists who, having absorbed the lessons of U.S.-based Conceptual art and identity politics, imbue their respective practices with a critical sense of play and irreverence adopted from Fluxus, Arte Povera, Gutai and Neoconcretism, among other international movements. 30 Seconds takes the singular practices and conceptual methods of black artists active on the West Coast in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a starting point—work that inspired a bodily engagement in conceptual practice.

Presenting approximately one hundred works by dozens of artists, the exhibition will provide an overview of a generation of artists who use a variety of media, including photography, video, large-scale sculpture, figurative painting and site-specific installations. 30 Seconds aims to show how this group of artists engages with the body and race in clever, subtle and astute ways.

30 Seconds off an Inch has been generously supported by a grant from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust and with additional support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

This season, the Studio Museum continues to explore and engage its permanent collection with the exhibition A Delicate Touch: Watercolors from the Permanent Collection. Presenting eighteen works on paper, A Delicate Touch brings together works dating from the late 1940s to 2007 that share the same medium.

Watercolor is quick, lightweight and portable. Successfully painting with watercolors requires dexterity, a soft touch and a delicate hand. The medium has an extensive history that dates back to European Paleolithic cave paintings. Scribes used watercolor to decorate illuminated manuscripts in the Middle Ages and European Renaissance. Eventually, watercolor became the technique of choice for artists to make sketches, copies and small-scale versions of larger works. Watercolor’s portability may account for why it was, and still is in many instances, the preferred painting style for depicting nature, wildlife and nautical themes.

The artists in this exhibition use the medium in a variety of ways. John Dowell, whose work Delicate Touch (1977) provides the inspiration for the title of the exhibition, uses watercolor to create meditations on jazz. Other mid-twentieth-century artists, including Romare Bearden, Beauford Delaney and Norman Lewis, chose watercolor for landscapes and nature scenes. Meanwhile, contemporary artists, including John Bankston, Wangechi Mutu and Otobong Nkanga, use the medium to capture forms and figures.

Organized by Curatorial Assistant Lauren Haynes, A Delicate Touch examines the Studio Museum’s collection through a well-known artistic medium and is an exciting opportunity to see works that have never been presented at the Museum before, as well as pieces that are fragile and not often shown. This exhibition gives us the chance to reflect on the treasures in our care while creating and facilitating conversations about them.

As the inaugural StudioSound artist in 2004, Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR) created DBR@SMH Volume I: Black Man Singing, a classically inspired original composition based on the exhibition Chris Ofili: Afro-Muses 1995–2005. For the fifth anniversary of StudioSound, we have invited DBR back to Harlem to compose a new work that captures the energy, spirit and vibrancy of the neighborhood. The new composition, DBR@SMH Volume II: Portraiture, is inspired by the works in Wardell Milan: Drawings of Harlem and the conceptual ideas of 30 Seconds off an Inch.

Incorporating the actual voices of many Studio Museum artists, DBR@SMH Volume II: Portraiture is a sonic venture into the Harlem landscape.

“For this second volume, I will continue to sample the sounds from my Harlem neighborhood, but this time I am more concerned and consumed with the work that hangs on the walls of the Museum, and the voices of the artists themselves,” says DBR. “All artists have voices and ideas that we hope to understand and interpret. Through Portraiture I seek to connect the literal timbre and tones of the artists’ speaking voices with their work as it is displayed in the galleries. I hope to achieve a broader, parallel understanding their works and their perspectives.”

A world-renowned composer, performer, violinist and band leader, Haitian-American artist DBR melds his classical music roots with his own cultural references and vibrant musical imagination. A native of Margate, Florida, DBR studied music as an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music, where he currently serves as a visiting professor of composition, and completed his graduate work at the University of Michigan under the tutelage of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer William Bolcom. Well-known for his stylistically diverse compositions, ranging from orchestral scores to musical direction for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, DBR has performed in a variety of venues from Carnegie Hall to the stage of FOX’s American Idol.

Throughout the twentieth century, Harlem has been regarded as a beacon of African-American history and culture. Sites such as the Apollo Theater, Abyssinian Baptist Church, and Malcolm X Corner at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue serve as popular postcard images that represent significant places and moments in this community. Today, Harlem continues to evolve as a center of history and culture. Everyday, changes are witnessed by its residents and experienced by tourists and visitors from all over the world. Harlem Postcards, an ongoing project, invites contemporary artists of diverse backgrounds to reflect on Harlem as a site of cultural activity, political vitality, visual stimuli, artistic contemplation and creative production. Representing intimate and dynamic perspectives of Harlem, the images reflect each artist’s oeuvre with an idiosyncratic snapshot taken in, orrepresenting, this historic locale. Each photograph has been reproduced as a limited-edition postcard available free to visitors.

Saya Woolfalk, No Place: A Ritual of the Empathics, Saturday November 14, 2009, 4 PM & 6 PM, Theatre

No Place: A Ritual of the Empathics (2009), is a continuation of artist Saya Woolfalk’s investigation into a fictional future called No Place. Last summer, Woolfalk introduced us to the part plant part human people of No Place in a multi media video installation developed as an Artist in Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem. With A Ritual of the Empathics, Woolfalk expands the narrative of No Place to include a group of women in 2009 called the Empathics, who believe No Place is a future worth inhabiting and through performance, attempt to conjure utopian No Place into the present.

Performance by Saya Woolfalk
Dancers and Co-Choreographers: Lauren Palmieri, Hilary Freeland, Brittany Sprung, Krista Scimeca and Sara Senecal
Music by Kevin McFadden

Performa 09: No Place: A Ritual of the Empathics is $7 for the general public and $5 for seniors, students and Museum members. Admission is payable at the door on the date of the event.

“Night Jasmine” from Dreaming in Sound.

A city within a city, Harlem is in a constant state of flux. It is hardedged. It is immediate. It is fantastical. It is real, hyper-real and hyperrealized. In counterbalance to this reality, Wardell Milan: Drawings of Harlem offers a new physical possibility for experiencing this space. The works in the exhibition illustrate, in panoramic scope, the people, places, storefronts, churches, iconic fixtures and moments in time that are the essence of this cosmopolitan neighborhood. Commissioned and organized by Studio Museum PR Manager and Editor in Chief Ali Evans, this exhibition originated from Milan’s 2008 sketches of Harlem created for the pages of Studio magazine, following his year as an artist in residence. Upon his completing the sketches, the Museum invited him to continue drawing throughout the following year for this project. A merger of the artist’s photographic eye and impressionistic hand, the exhibition includes more than forty works on paper based on photographs Milan took throughout Harlem. Some works are loosely drawn, while others display a close attention to detail. Some have color, though most are black and white. Representing moments experienced as fleeting, the works in Drawings of Harlem bring together contemporary photography and the fundamental artistic practice of drawing.

“Shuffle Mode” the title track off his latest album.

“Fabulousity (Keeping It Cute)” from the forthcoming album titled Sampled and LeftOva
“Chewing Gum (Remix)” from the limited edition If it Don’t Fit extended EP