Collection

Kalup Linzy: If it Don’t Fit was the first museum survey of the artist’s work, and included over twenty videos made over the last seven years, a drawing suite and a one-night acoustic performance. From his original take on the soap opera and sketch comedy genres to his music videos and filmic shorts, this compilation tracks the artist’s clever and complex approach to questions of race, gender, class, sexuality and national identity. The title, If it Don’t Fit, is appropriated from a song Linzy used in a recent video. With innuendo and double entendre, this blues lyric speaks to both the disappointments and hopes of attempting to belong to aesthetic genres, social categories and intimate relationships.

Linzy first presented his cast of comedic and dramatic characters at the Studio Museum in African Queen (2005), and then again in Frequency (2005), a group exhibition of emerging artists. Since then, he has continued to work as a writer-director-actor and singer-songwriter. His work draws on a variety of American pop- and counter-culture genres, including early video and performance art, gay drag performance, reality television competitions and YouTube videos.

The video component of If it Don’t Fit is organized into three hour-long programs, which were on view throughout the duration of the exhibition. Each highlights a recurring theme in Linzy’s work. Taking its point of departure from the artist’s ongoing negotiation of love, longing and loss, The Pursuit of Happyness features both narrative and music videos. Da Churen brings together works from the artist’s iconic “Churen” (2003-05) series, which traces a set of family archetypes, narrated over a series of phone calls. Finally, Ride to Da (Art) Club juxtaposes videos that self-reflexively take on issues of ambition and belonging in the contemporary art world as well as the pop music and club scene.
 

Born 1987, Columbia, MD
Lives and works in New York, NY
2014 MFA, Yale University, New Haven, CT
2010 BFA, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, NY

For more than a decade, Rodney McMillian has been exploring the domain of home as part of a larger examination of the intersection of race, class, gender and socioeconomic policy. Rodney McMillian: Views of Main Street is the first exhibition to reveal the full trajectory of this major aspect of the artist’s complex and varied practice in painting, sculpture, video and performance. Organized by guest curator Naima J. Keith, Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Programs at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition brings together more than twenty key works made from 2003 to the present that use symbols of domesticity to scrutinize the political and economic biases within the myth of a universal, middle-class “Main Street.”

In works such as Couch (2012)—a sateen sofa sawed in half and then cemented back together—McMillian uses post-consumer objects including discarded mattresses, carpets, chairs and bedsheets as both the material and the subject matter of his art, as he evokes the physical, psychological and economic distress of communities hit by loan defaults, home foreclosures and unemployment. McMillian juxtaposes these sculptures with works such as Untitled (The Supreme Court Painting) (2004-06) that challenge the terms that government and the media use to discuss justice, democracy and the rights of citizens in their private space, especially as these political ideals are experienced by African Americans.

"As the title suggests, I hope this exhibition will bring out the complexities of the conversations that happen on different Main Streets, with their disparities of race, class and economics,” Rodney McMillian said. “Perhaps more important, I hope to question what ‘Main Street’ means. When I’ve heard that expression, I have never believed it referred to me or other African Americans, regardless of our economic station." 

Rodney McMillian (b. 1969, Columbia, SC) received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2002. He is also an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been featured in past exhibitions at the Studio Museum, including When the Stars Begin to Fall (2014), The Bearden Project (2012), Philosophy of Time Travel (2007) and Frequency (2005). His works are in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Orange County Museum of Art; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Visitors have the opportunity to view more of Rodney McMillian’s work in the exhibitions Rodney McMillian: The Black Show, on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (February 3–August 14, 2016) and Rodney McMillian: Landscape Paintings, on view at MoMA PS1 (April 3–August 29, 2016).

Rodney McMillian: The Black Show forms an extended meditation on the United States in patterns cut by class, economic status, culture, race, gender, and history. It brings together a tightly focused selection of new and recent work that offers Blackness as subject, form, process, emotion, and politics. Accompanying Views of Main Street and The Black Show will be will be a full-color scholarly publication titled Rodney McMillian, co-edited by Naima J. Keith and Anthony Elms, Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. In addition to its contributions by Keith and Elms, the book will feature newly commissioned essays and responses by leading figures including Charles Gaines, artist; Rita Gonzalez, Curator of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Dave McKenzie, artist; and Steven Nelson, Professor of African and African American Art History, University of California, Los Angeles. Thelma Golden will offer the introduction and Amy Sadao, Director of the ICA Philadelphia, will provide the foreword.

Rodney McMillian: Landscape Paintings is comprised of a suite of paintings on found bed sheets and a video that provoke questions about history and identity by engaging the tradition of landscape representation.

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 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 included more than forty works on paper based on photographs Milan took throughout Harlem. Some works are loosely drawn, while others display 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.

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Zwelethu Mthethwa: Inner Views brings together three series by South African photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa (b. 1960). “Interiors” and “Empty Beds” document the domestic lives of migrant workers around Johannesburg, South Africa, while “Common Ground” focuses on the shared experience of natural disasters in urban areas, featuring houses in New Orleans, Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina and on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa, after wildfires.

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Zwelethu Mthethwa: Inner Views is made possible thanks to the generous support of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation and South African Tourism

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Senga Nengudi's "RSVP" series was originally made in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Made of pantyhose and attached to the wall, the works were originally activated by Nengudi and artist Maren Hassinger who moved through the composition and explored the materiality of this flexible yet restrictive material. Highlighting ideas of transference and memory, this new work in the series is activated by Rashaun Mitchell and Marýa Wethers, who participated in an intensive workshop with Nengudi and Hassinger to build the work. 

This program is a part of Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art. Organized by Thomas J. Lax, Assistant Curator and Edwin Ramoran, Manager of Public Programs and Community Engagement with Monique Long, Curatorial Fellow.

For additional information on upcoming events related to this exhibition, please visit radicalpresenceny.org.

Additional performances
March 9, 2014, 2pm: Activation by Rashaun Mitchell, Regina Rocke and Marýa Wethers

Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art is supported by generous grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the patrons, benefactors, and donors to CAMH’s Major Exhibition Fund. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition is made possible by a grant from The Brown Foundation, Inc. Funding for the presentation at the Grey Art Gallery is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts; Tisch School of the Arts, NYU; the New York University Arts Council; Susan and Steven Jacobson; Jane Wesman and Don Savelson; the Department of Art and Art Professions, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, NYU; the Grey’s Director’s Circle, Inter/National Council, and Friends; and the Abby Weed Grey Trust. Generous in-kind support has also been received from The Wall Street Journal and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Funding for Radical Presence at The Studio Museum in Harlem is generously provided by Lambent Foundation. The Studio Museum in Harlem’s exhibitions are supported with public funds from the following government agencies and elected representatives: The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; The City of New York; and Council Member Inez E. Dickens, 9th Council District, Speaker Christine Quinn and the New York City Council. Additional funding is provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Los Angeles-based artist Kori Newkirk transforms everyday images and objects into lyrical expressions of life. Born in the Bronx in 1970 and raised in Cortland, New York, he fuses his formal art education with childhood memories, social and political commentary, and popular culture. His works in sculpture, photography, video and mixed-media explore issues of race, gender, masculinity, alienation and place.

Newkirk’s formal training as a painter—he received his MFA from the University of California in Irvine—is evident in his command of composition, color and form. His approaches to subjectivity and objectivity, as well as his use of found materials, exemplify his innovative art practice. From his signature landscape works composed of plastic hair beads to the insertion of his body in social spaces and natural environments, his work reminds viewers of the isolation experienced by urban youth, the over-consumption of popular culture and the prevalence of racial stereotyping, as well as the beauty and experiences of African-American culture and life.

Curated by Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, Kori Newkirk: 1997–2007 is the most extensive presentation of this artist’s work to date, and illuminates how the varied yet interrelated strands of Newkirk’s practice have converged and developed over time. The Studio Museum featured Newkirk’s work in Freestyle, the seminal 2001 group exhibition of emerging talent. Newkirk has also been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

Kori Newkirk: 1997–2007 is initiated and sponsored by the Fellows of Contemporary Art. This exhibition is also made possible with major support from Altria Group Inc. and The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation.
 

Rashaad Newsome: THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO SEE spotlights multimedia artist Rashaad Newsome’s work about the dance form known as Vogue. For over a decade, Newsome has worked with members of the Vogue community, which developed in New York City’s queer ballroom scene of the 1970s. With a particular interest in critiquing the popular appropriation of Vogue in the early 1990s, and with the aim to bring these queer communities of color from the Vogue scene into the institutional space, Newsome creates work that reframes how performers are represented, and highlights their enormous talent for style and bodily movement. The title of the exhibition draws from an emcee’s refrain, while simultaneously pointing to the desire of wanting queer bodies of color represented within the institutional space. Featuring video and collage works made between 2008 to 2014, THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO SEE explores the beauty, agency and complexities of Vogue and performance art.

Rashaad Newsome: THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO SEE is organized by Amanda Hunt, Assistant Curator.

Over the course of more than three decades, artist and cultural critic Lorraine O’Grady has won acclaim for her installations, performances and texts addressing the subjects of diaspora, hybridity and Black female subjectivity. Born in Boston in 1934 and trained at Wellesley College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as an economist, literary critic and fiction writer, O’Grady had careers as a U.S. government intelligence analyst, a translator and a rock music critic before turning her attention to the art world in 1980.

In her landmark performance Art Is…, O’Grady entered her own float in the September 1983 African-American Day Parade, riding up Harlem’s Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard (Seventh Avenue) with fifteen collaborators dressed in white. Displayed on top of the float was an enormous, ornate gilded frame, while the words “Art Is…” were emblazoned on the float’s decorative skirt. At various points along the route, O’Grady and her collaborators jumped off the float and held up empty, gilded picture frames, inviting people to pose in them. The joyful responses turned parade onlookers into participants, affirmed the readiness of Harlem’s residents to see themselves as works of art, and created an irreplaceable record of the people and places of Harlem some thirty years ago. These color slides were taken by various people who witnessed the performance, and were later collected by O’Grady to compose the series. The forty images on view capture the energy and spirit of the original performance.

Lorraine O'Grady: Art Is... is organized by Amanda Hunt, Assistant Curator.

This site-specific mural inaugurates the new Project Space at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Equalizer, by artist Odili Donald Odita (b. 1966), tells of two moments of migration from the African continent to the Americas. The first is the transatlantic slave trade, of the early 1500s to almost 1900, which remains the largest forced migration in world history. The second, and more recent, is the contemporary relocation and emigration of Africans in search of political and economic stability.

Though abstract and without discernable figures or direct narrative references, Equalizer is what Odita calls a “conceptual journey” in which the interactions of shape and color become metaphors for land and sea, movement and settling, challenges and hope. The explosive image on the red wall illustrates movement out of Africa. The adjacent wall to the right, strong blues and mauve predominates, representing the Atlantic ocean which Odita describes as “all tooth and treachery.” The next wall, where faint pastels blend to form somber gray tones that then give way to bright, prismatic earth tones on the right, represents potential and possibility. On the final wall, the patterns move from more horizontal orientation to smaller, animated fractals that are a metaphor for both the difficulties of immigrant life and the possibility that the African émigré, whether historical or contemporary, may find a new place to call “home.”

Odili Donald Odita was born in Enugu, Nigeria; raised in Columbus, Ohio and received an MFA from Vermont’s Bennington College in 1990. Since then, Odita has been included in exhibitions in Africa, North America and Europe, such as DAK’ART 2004, the Dakar Biennial of Contemporary Art and the 52nd International Art Exhibition at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Odita is currently Associate Professor of Painting at Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia.

The Project Space is a dynamic new location dedicated to a new series of site-specific works and projects at the Studio Museum. This recent addition to the exhibition program continues the Museum’s commitment to activating multiple architectural sites throughout the building—such as the lobby, atrium and façade—that provide artists with laboratories for innovative, contemporary art projects.
 

Afro Muses presents 181 watercolors created over the last ten years by artist Chris Ofili. A part of his prodigious output of works on paper, this selection of watercolors has never been exhibited before. Organized by the artist and Thelma Golden, chief curator, this exhibition includes images of men and women with a few birds and flowers, arranged as individual works, couples and groups.

Some of Ofili’s watercolors have become the starting point for larger paintings; these are created as fully realized works. Ofili describes making these works as both pleasurable and challenging. Deriving from a meditative exercise, this presentation represents the evolution of his particular studio practice. Upon first viewing, the images can easily be perceived as portraits of individuals. These ancient visages are oddly reminiscent of someone, somewhere at some moment in time. However, they are not actual representations, but rather figurative expressions. Like the characters that populate Ofili’s larger paintings, these intimate figures derive from impressions and references from everyday life, memory and the history of art.

Chris Ofili: Afro Muses 1995–2005 is presented with the generous support of The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation 2004–2005 Exhibition Fund, Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond Learsy and The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation
 

Born 1984, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Lives and works in New York, NY
2012 MFA, Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT
2007 BFA, Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 

Gordon Parks: A Harlem Family 1967 honors the legacy and the work of late iconic artist and photojournalist Gordon Parks, who would have turned 100 on November 30, 2012. The exhibition, organized by Director and Chief Curator Thelma Golden and Assistant Curator Lauren Haynes, will feature approximately thirty Black and white photographs of the Fontenelle family, whose lives Parks documented as part of a 1968 Life magazine photo essay. A searing portrait of poverty in the United States, the Fontenelle photographs provide a view of Harlem through the narrative of a specific family at a particular moment in time. This intimate exhibition will include all images from the original essay as well as several unpublished images—some which have never been displayed publicly.

The Studio Museum in Harlem and The Gordon Parks Foundation, a division of the Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation are together creating an exhibition catalogue for Gordon Parks: A Harlem Family 1967, complementing the five-volume set German publisher Steidl is planning to publish in honor of Parks’s centenary.

Gordon Parks: A Harlem Family 1967 is supported by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.
Support for the exhibition catalogue provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Special thanks to the Gordon Parks Foundation, who provided essential support and assistance in organizing Gordon Parks: A Harlem Family 1967

Co-presented by The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Goethe-Institut New York for Performa 13.

Founding Fluxus member Benjamin Patterson performs the first-ever retrospective concert of his “action as composition” works. The retrospective will include his innovative Fluxus scores from the 1960s and other early works such as Duo for Voice, 1961 as well as the artist’s newest work.

For tickets, please click here. Please note: this event is NOT hosted at The Studio Museum in Harlem.

A part of Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at the Grey Art Gallery, NYU (September 10–December 7, 2013) and The Studio Museum in Harlem (November 14, 2013–March 9, 2014).

For additional information on upcoming events related to this exhibition, please visit radicalpresenceny.org.

Born 1985 in Hamburg, Germany

Iconic performance artist Pope.L’s (formerly known as William Pope.L) Cage Unrequited is a marathon reading of John Cage’s edited anthology, Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961) by over eighty invited collaborators. The performance functions as a refuge, proposing a relationship between the earlier artist’s ideas of indeterminacy, mysticism and chance and the work of contemporary Black artists.

This event is free to the public. Please note: this event is NOT hosted at The Studio Museum in Harlem.

A part of Three Duets, Seven Variations, a special series for the Performa 13 biennial, pairing six intergenerational artists for seven programs. This program is organized by Adrienne Edwards, Performa, and Thomas J. Lax, The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Also a part of Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at the Grey Art Gallery, NYU (September 10–December 7, 2013) and The Studio Museum in Harlem (November 14, 2013–March 9, 2014).

For additional information on upcoming events related to this exhibition, please visit radicalpresenceny.org.

Co-organized by the Grey Art Gallery, NYU; The Studio Museum in Harlem; and Performa.

Celebrated by his contemporaries as one of the most skilled still-life painters, Charles Ethan Porter (1847/49 – 1923) is best known for his stylistic range that merges meticulous realism and rich colors with fluid brushwork and sophisticated spatial effects. The Studio Museum in Harlem proudly presents Charles Ethan Porter: African-American Master of Still Life. This traveling exhibition, organized by New Britain Museum of American Art and curated by Hildegard Cummings, is the first museum exhibition of works by the artist. Presenting over forty works of Porter’s still-life paintings of flowers, insects, fruit, landscapes and portraits, this landmark exhibition and its accompanying catalogue introduces audiences to Porter’s timeless skills.

From his use of rich palettes and meticulous attention to detail, Porter’s paintings can be seen as methodical and often theatrical studies of his immediate world. His native state, Connecticut, proved to be his most powerful muse, from his mother’s lustrous garden to the fields and woodlands of Connecticut. Porter’s fascination with nature’s vegetation and topography provided endless inspiration throughout his career.

About the Artist

Charles Ethan Porter was born in the late 1840s in Rockville, Connecticut. In 1869 he was accepted into the prestigious National Academy of Design and began a four-year study in New York City. Porter taught art lessons to support himself through school, then completed his studies in 1873 and opened a small studio in New York City. In 1878, upon returning to Connecticut, Porter found the familiar landscape of New England altered by industrialization. Soon after, he left for Paris, France, where he continued his training and spent time painting in the French countryside. Branching away from his still lifes, Porter began to explore the landscape genre and incorporate elements of Impressionism into his work. In 1884, Porter moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where he introduced his impressionist-inspired new work, which defied the “established aesthetics” of the day. Porter returned to his hometown Rockville, Connecticut in 1897 where he continued to work until his death in 1923.
 

Following its installation at The Studio Museum in Harlem, the exhibition traveled to the North Carolina Central University of Art Museum, Durham (August 3 through October 7, 2008).
 

Elliot Reed is an internationally exhibited performance artist based in New York. Elliot is a 2019 danceWEB scholar, 2019-20 Artist In Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and recipient of the 2019 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. Recent exhibitions include a commission with JACK Quartet (2020), MoMA PS1 (2020), The Getty Museum (2018), The Hammer Museum (2016), The Dorthy Chandler Pavilion (2018) The Broad (2017), University of Southern California (2016), and performances at MoonStep Tokyo (2017), MNSKTM Osaka (2017), VFD London (2017), and MOOI Collective Mexico City (2017).

Born in 1984 in Les Cayes, Haiti

Please join Studio Museum curators Connie H. Choi and Hallie Ringle for a tour of Fictions at 6 pm and a performance by artist Sherrill Roland of The Jumpsuit Project from 7 to 9 pm.

In The Jumpsuit Project, an ongoing performance work, Roland seeks to challenge ideas around mass incarceration and create a safe space for discussion. While a graduate student, he was wrongfully convicted and spent nineteen months in prison due to a case of mistaken identity. Although eventually exonerated, Roland’s experiences with the justice system had a lasting effect on both his life and artistic practice. During his performance he will wear an orange jumpsuit—a reminder of his prison uniform—and invite visitors into his “cell,” a space that is roughly the size of the cell from his time in prison. Visitors are encouraged to engage in conversation with Roland during the course of his performance.

Sherrill Roland’s The Jumpsuit Project is presented as part of Fictions, an exhibition on view at The Studio Museum in Harlem from September 14, 2017 to January 7, 2018.

This event is free and open to the public, though pre-registration is encouraged.

Lead sponsor of Fictions

Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem are made possible thanks in part to support from The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Council. Additional support is generously provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Jacolby Satterwhite (b.1986 in Columbia, South Carolina; currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY ) is known for a conceptual practice addressing crucial themes of labor, consumption, carnality, and fantasy through immersive installations, virtual reality, and digital media. He uses a range of software to produce intricately detailed animations and live action films of real and imagined worlds populated by the avatars of artists and friends. These animations serve as stages on which the artist synthesizes the multiple disciplines that encompass his practice. Satterwhite draws from an extensive set of references, guided by queer theory, modernism, and video game language to challenge conventions of Western art through a personal and political lens. He received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Arts, Baltimore and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Satterwhite’s work has been presented in numerous exhibitions both in the United States and in Europe, including most recently at Fabric Workshop & Museum, Philadelphia (2019); Pioneer Works, New York (2019); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019); the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2019); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2018); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2018); New Museum, New York (2017); Public Art Fund, New York (2017); San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco (2017);  the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2017); and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2013). He was awarded the United States Artist Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellowship in 2016. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. In 2019, Satterwhite collaborated with Solange Knowles on her visual album, “When I Get Home."

Tschabalala Self (b. 1990, Harlem) makes syncretic use of painting, printmaking, and assemblage to explore ideas surrounding the Black female body. Constructed with a combination of sewn, printed, and painted materials, Self’s exaggerated depictions of bodies traverse a variety of artistic and craft traditions. The physiological and psychological characteristics of her figures also reflect Self’s personal desire to articulate cultural attitudes and realities as they relate to race and gender. She writes, “The fantasies and attitudes surrounding the Black female body are both accepted and rejected within my practice, and through this disorientation, new possibilities arise.” Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at Tramway in Glasgow, the New Museum, and Art + Practice, among others. Self received her BA from Bard College and her MFA from Yale University. A 2017 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, she lives and works in New York and New Haven.

Jamel Shabazz (b. 1960, Brooklyn, NY) attended John Jay College of Criminal Justice before devoting himself full-time to photography. His street portraits are evidence of meaningful conversations and exchanges, visual documents that reveal the beauty of the everyday person.

Shabazz’s practice follows a long tradition of photographers, from James Van Der Zee to Dawoud Bey, who shaped the visual legacy of Harlem. His photographs seek to correct predominant negative depictions of African Americans, using sites such as Harlem and other communities throughout New York as symbols for a larger Black experience. Through his work, he creates open-ended narratives that transcend the moments they depict, offering powerful allegories for the present.

The visual cacophony of the street and subways shape the formal and narrative elements of Shabazz’s photographs. Colors, textures, patterns, and signage are among the devices he employs to accentuate his subject’s character. By capturing the omnipresent force of street fashion in Harlem, he makes visible the self-expression and bonds that unite the Harlem community. Shabazz’s practice uses the power of the photograph to preserve collective memory and celebrate Black achievement.

His work has been featured in several exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, including his 2017 solo presentation Jamel Shabazz: Crossing 125th. He has been included in solo and group exhibitions at the Central Library branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, the Nasher Museum at Duke University, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Shabazz maintains a commitment to social responsibility and young people’s access to photography, and has served as a teaching artist for the Studio Museum’s Expanding the Walls program, Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation, the Bronx Museum’s Teen Council youth program, the International Center of Photography, Friends of Island Academy, and the Mural Arts program in Germantown, Pennsylvania, among others.

Rudy Shepherd invites you to Induction Ceremony, a performance inaugurating inHarlem: Rudy Shepherd, currently on view in Jackie Robinson Park through July 25, 2017. The most recent in the series of sculptures that Shepherd began in 2006, Black Rock Negative Energy Absorber aims to dispel feelings of racial prejudice, violence or ordinary disdain by encouraging compassion. Leading a group of musical collaborators including Brian Alfred, Elia Einhorn, Christof Knoche and Ethan Meyer, Shepherd will activate his sculpture, expunging negative energy from the surrounding audience through a cathartic performance.

Rudy Shepherd (born 1975, Baltimore, Maryland; lives and works in New York, New York, and State College, Pennsylvania) received a BS in Biology and Studio Art from Wake Forest University and an MFA in Sculpture from the School of Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been shown in exhibitions at institutions including MoMA PS1, Bronx Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Socrates Sculpture Park, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art and Regina Miller Gallery of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. His work was recently seen in the Studio Museum exhibitions When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South (2014) and Black: Color, Material, Concept (2015).

Xaviera Simmons (b. 1974, New York, NY)

Lives and works in New York, NY

2005    Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York, NY

            Maggie Flanigan Studio, 2-Year Actor Training Conservatory, New York, NY

2004    BFA, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

Lorna Simpson (b. 1960, Brooklyn, NY) examines notions of representation using techniques as varied as the juxtaposition of text and staged photography, to collage using imagery from Jet and Ebony magazines on paper. Early in her practice, Simpson committed to examining the role and possibilities of photography in the articulations of identity, culture, gender, and race, with an awareness of photography’s history. Simpson has built a multidisciplinary practice—including film, video, painting, drawing, collage, and sculpture—to expand her conceptual concerns.

Simpson received her BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1983, and an MFA in visual arts from the University of California, San Diego in 1985. During the 1980s, she developed a visual strategy grounded in Conceptualism. She created large-scale photographic works with spare, staged images of Black figures, seen from behind or in fragments, on neutral studio backgrounds with incisive accompanying text. From the 1990s onwards, Simpson has looked to printing photographs on felt while also exploring the capacity of film and video to expand on the core themes of her practice—desire and isolation. Simpson consistently explores other avenues for her visual investigations and has also incorporated collage and painting into her practice.

The artist has exhibited widely with solo presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago; Haus der Kunst, Munich; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among many others. She has been awarded several prizes, including a J. Paul Getty Medal in 2019.

Her work has been included in several exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem since the late 1980s, including the solo presentation Lorna Simpson: Duet (2007). She was the inaugural recipient of The Studio Museum’s Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize in 2006. The Museum’s collection includes works that demonstrate the breadth of Simpson’s career.

Sable Elyse Smith (b. 1986, Los Angeles) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator whose practice considers memory and trauma, working from the archive of her own body to mark the difference between witnessing and watching. “To see,” she writes, “is unbearable.” Her work has been presented at institutions including MoMA PS1, the New Museum, and Recess Assembly. It has also been seen through Artist Television Access in San Francisco and at Birkbeck Cinema in collaboration with the Serpentine Galleries. Sable Elyse Smith: Ordinary Violence is on view at the Queens Museum through February 18, 2018. Her writing has been published in Radical Teacher, Selfish Magazine, Studio, and Affidavit, and she is currently working on her first book. Smith has received awards from Creative Capital, Fine Arts Work Center, the Queens Museum, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and Art Matters. She recently served as a visiting critic at Columbia University and is currently a visiting artist in at Virginia Commonwealth University. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

Multimedia artist, Shinique Smith, activated the Studio Museum Project Space with Like it Like that, an installation designed specially for the gallery. A Frequency alum known for her practice spanning sculptures made of clothing, collage on walls and paper, painting and drawing, Smith creates colorful works that tread the lines between accumulation and loss, containment and scatter, legibility and scribble.

Created by Smith like an improvisational dance, Like it Like that joins the explosive energy of graffiti writing with the spontaneity of Abstract Expressionist painting. Though evoking an urban street scene from afar, upon closer inspection one realizes the mural is saturated with personal effects, especially from the artist’s youth. Thus, the gallery reflected less a public space and more an intimate retreat from authority and a shrine to all things “cool” that obsess modern youth. Accessible through the Main Gallery and adjacent to the new auditorium, the Project Space is a dynamic gallery dedicated to site-specific works and other projects and installations.

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 features 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 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.

Henry Taylor: Sis and Bra was organized by Christine Y. Kim former Associate Curator.

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.
 

Born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1891, Alma Thomas moved with her family to Washington, DC, in 1907. She was the first graduate of the newly formed art department at Howard University in 1924 and earned a master’s degree in education from Columbia University a decade later. After nearly forty years as an art teacher in the DC public school system, Thomas retired in 1960 and began to paint seriously for the first time in her career. Initially representational in her approach, she spent several years after her retirement developing what would become her signature abstract style.

Color formed the basis of Thomas’s work. She applied bright paints onto often raw canvases to create lattice-like compositions where patterns appear from negative space. Thomas’s lifelong study of color theory and her gestural, staccato brushstrokes suggesting movement across the canvas expanded upon the work of the contemporaneous Washington Color School and the Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s and 1950s. She cited natural elements as inspiration and often titled her works with allusions to flowers, sun, and wind.

The 1969 moon landing prompted a series of paintings exploring Thomas’s interest in space, a new extension of the natural world around her. Although best known for large-scale acrylic paintings, Thomas also painted watercolors throughout her career. These watercolors, several of which are in The Studio Museum in Harlem’s permanent collection, continued her experimentations with color, line, and pattern.

Thomas achieved considerable success in the last decade of her life. She was the first female African-American artist to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1972. The Studio Museum mounted solo exhibitions of Thomas’s work in 1983, five years after her death, and in 2016.

James Van Der Zee (1886–1983), whose career spanned over eighty years, is one of the most renowned photographers of the Harlem Renaissance. His comprehensive practice documents a wide spectrum of life in twentieth-century Harlem, from the everyday to the aspirational.  

In 1900, at age fourteen, Van Der Zee purchased his first camera, and his earliest work documents his extended family at their home in Lenox, Massachusetts. Once in Harlem, Van Der Zee worked out of a commercial photography studio, where he carefully crafted his portraits of Black subjects, often manipulating photo negatives to achieve a distinctive, soft-edged effect. Due to the economic strain of the 1930s and the increasing popularity of the personal camera, Van Der Zee adopted photo restoration and incorporated passport and funerary photography into his practice, along with other miscellaneous commercial and editorial projects, to supplement his income. Throughout his career, Van Der Zee photographed many prominent artists and historical figures, including Muhammad Ali, Benny Andrews, Jean Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden, Countee Cullen, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Marcus Garvey and his United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. 

Following The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s controversial 1969 exhibition Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968, in which Van Der Zee’s work received significant attention, the photographer generously donated sixty-six works to and was made a “Fellow for Life” at The Met. He received the Pierre Toussaint Award from the Archdiocese of New York in 1978 and the Living Legacy Award from President Jimmy Carter at the White House in 1979.

With four honorary doctorate degrees, numerous awards, and an extensive archive of works, Van Der Zee died in 1983 at the age of ninety-six. His work remains an important touchstone in the history of photography, Black visual culture, and Harlem. 

In the brochure for The Studio Museum in Harlem’s 1982 exhibition Harlem Heyday: The Photography of James VanDerZee, art historian Deborah Willis wrote that Van Der Zee’s “artistry comes from his ability to combine his many elements as a painter, studio and journalistic photographer, but above all, his natural curiosity about people. This aspect of his works enabled him to make photographs which synthesized the elements of design and composition.”

For over forty years, Mrs. Donna Van Der Zee, widow of James Van Der Zee, and The Studio Museum in Harlem maintained James Van Der Zee's archive. In December 2021, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with the Studio Museum and Mrs. Van Der Zee, announced a historic collaboration: The Met would assume stewardship of Van Der Zee’s archive, while working alongside the Studio Museum and Mrs. Van Der Zee to conserve, digitize, and provide public access to the photographer’s entire catalogue.

Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953, Portland, OR) began her career studying modern dance at Anna Halprin’s studio workshop in San Francisco. She earned a BA at the California Institute of the Arts in 1981 and an MFA at the University of California, San Diego in 1984. Early on, she lived bicoastally between the Bay Area and New York City, where she took a photography class taught by Dawoud Bey at The Studio Museum in Harlem in 1976. Weems moved to New York permanently in 1994, where she found community with photographers such as Coreen Simpson and Roy DeCarava, who were invested in documenting the Black experience. 

Over the course of four decades, Weems has developed a complex oeuvre that integrates photography, text, fabric, audio, digital images, and installation to innovate new strategies of image-making. Her practice explores race, family relationships, cultural identity, sexism, and class politics. Through her work, Weems frequently interrogates who or what might be absent within visual culture and attempts to fill in these gaps with a critical sensibility. Weems often places herself within the work using multiple images, overlaid text, and performance to draw attention to her presence as a means of action.

Her landmark Kitchen Table Series (1990) repositions and reimagines the Black female protagonist. Set at a kitchen table, the series features Weems by herself or with others, engaging in various, seemingly common, roles within an intimate domestic setting. The constructed images and associated text panels interrogate notions of tradition, gender, family, and relationships, reflecting the multifaceted subjectivities of Black women.  

Weems has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international museums and is represented in public and private collections around the world, including The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Tate Modern. In 2013 Weems received the MacArthur Genius Grant.

The Studio Museum in Harlem is proud to present Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange, the first New York City solo museum exhibition of the work of a painter (born Philadelphia, 1946) whose intensely color-based abstractions have won steadily mounting recognition since the mid-1990s. The exhibition will feature twenty-eight paintings and works on paper created between 2008 and 2015, including the 2013 title work. Following time spent in Italy and then later in Egypt in the mid-1990s, Whitney developed the weighty, almost architectural approach that has now become his signature style. Rhythmic and lyrical, with a combination of pre-ordained structure and improvisation inspired in part by his love of jazz, the square-format paintings arrange rectangles of vivid, single colors in a deliberately irregular grid, with the close-fitting, many-hued “bricks” or “tiles” stacked vertically and arrayed in horizontal bands.

Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange is organized for the Studio Museum by Lauren Haynes, Associate Curator, Permanent Collection.

A full-color catalogue will accompany the exhibition, featuring contributions by Lauren Haynes, Robert Storr, Lowery Stokes Sims and Stanley Whitney, with a foreword by Thelma Golden.

Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange is made possible thanks to support from the following government agencies: The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; and the New York City Council.

Additional funding is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Born in 1954 in the Bronx, Fred Wilson obtained a BFA from State University of New York at Purchase in 1976. Before establishing himself as a practicing artist, Wilson worked as a freelance educator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Museum of Natural History, and the American Craft Museum (now Museum of Arts and Design), and also served as the first director of the Longwood Arts Project in the Bronx.

Wilson’s practice spans several media, including installation, sculpture, photography, and printmaking. He initially zeroed in on the relationship between objects and museums, exploring how categorization, collecting rationales, and display tactics illustrate the ideologies and relationships of power imbedded in institutions. In his formative project Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson (1992–93) at the Maryland Historical Society in collaboration with The Contemporary in Baltimore, Wilson installed hundreds of museum objects in confrontational juxtapositions, such as polished repoussé silverware next to a rusty pair of slave shackles. The installation highlighted both Maryland’s history of racial violence and the Historical Society’s selective omission of that history. The artist has continued to explore these ideas through more object-based work.

Wilson has been represented at institutions and in biennials around the world, including Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Center for Art Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore; and the 50th Venice Biennale. Among his many accolades include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant (1999).

The artist has been featured in a number of exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, including two solo shows. The Museum’s permanent collection includes works that extend across three decades of his career.

Hale Woodruff worked in both abstraction and figural representation for most of his nearly six-decade career. Born in Cairo, Illinois, and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, Woodruff traveled broadly, studying art in Indianapolis, Chicago; Paris; and Mexico, among other locations. A painter, draftsman, and printmaker, he is best known for his scenes depicting the struggles and triumphs of Black life. His works incorporate influences as varied as African art, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, and Mexican Muralism, speaking to his capacious understanding of art history.

A noted educator, Woodruff spent decades advocating for artists of African descent. He taught at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University) from 1931 to 1946, chairing the fine art department for a number of years. He also established the Atlanta University Art Annuals (1942–70) to counter the lack of exhibition opportunities for many African-American artists. Woodruff taught art at New York University from 1947 until his retirement in 1968. In New York City, he was active in the movements for racial justice and equity, particularly in the art world. Along with Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, and Norman Lewis, Woodruff founded Spiral, an African-American art collective originally formed in response to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963.

The Studio Museum in Harlem’s collection includes dozens of paintings and works on paper by Woodruff that span more than four decades of Woodruff’s career. His work was first exhibited at the Museum in 1968, its inaugural year. Since then, the Museum has featured Woodruff’s work in numerous exhibitions, including a 1979 retrospective.

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Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Any Number of Preoccupations, organized by Associate Curator Naomi Beckwith, will be British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s very first solo museum exhibition. Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977, London) was recently included in the Studio Museum’s Flow (Spring 2008), an acclaimed exhibition of new work by emerging African artists from across the world. On view from November 11, 2010—March 13, 2011, Any Number of Preoccupations will feature works created between 2003—when the artist completed her postgraduate work at the Royal Academy Schools—and 2010. The twenty-four works on view are a mix of her larger and smaller canvases of fictional portraits, primarily oil-on-canvas. Similar to a novelist, Yiadom-Boakye creates characters that have lively back stories; yet she leaves it up to the viewer’s imagination to fill in the details of these fictional lives. She works quickly, embracing the physicality and technicality of painting, and often destroys unsuccessful work—a strategy she says helps her maintain “freshness and urgency.” Language is a strong influence on Yiadom-Boakye; in addition to painting she is a prolific writer of fiction, poetry and essays. The catalogue for the exhibition features essays by Beckwith and renowned critic and curator Okwui Enwezor, a short story by Yiadom-Boakye, and a foreword by Studio Museum Director and Chief Curator Thelma Golden.

Below, hear Lynette Yiadom-Boakye speak about her painting practice, exclusive to studiomuseum.org!

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