JANUARY 2020 | DIRECTOR'S PICKS
From the entire Wedge team, wishing you all warm and prosperous New Year!
Check out a few exhibitions, both local and international, that have been on our radar in this month’s Director’s Picks. Be sure to click on an image for more details.
Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet The Sun Again | The Broad, Los Angeles
October 19, 2020 - February 16, 2020
Originated by The Broad, Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again is the largest exhibition to date of internationally acclaimed artist Shirin Neshat’s approximately 30-year career. Taking its title from a poem by Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, the exhibition (which presents over 230 photographs and eight immersive video installations works) offers a rare glimpse into the evolution of Neshat’s artistic journey as she explores topics of exile, displacement, and identity with beauty, dynamic formal invention, and poetic grace. Beginning with her early photograph series, Women of Allah, the exhibition also features iconic video works such as Rapture, Turbulent, and Passage, monumental photography installations including The Book of Kings and The Home of My Eyes, and Land of Dreams, a new, ambitious work encompassing a body of photographs and two videos that will make its global debut in the exhibition.
image: Shirin Neshat, Land of Dreams (video still), 2019
Rashid Johnson: The Hikers | Hauser & Wirth, New York
November 12, 2019 - January 25, 2020
Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present The Hikers, an exhibition of recent works by American artist Rashid Johnson. The exhibition brings together ceramic tile mosaics, collaged paintings, and a largescale sculpture that address Johnson’s recurring interest in currents of anxiety and escapism created by the political and social turmoil felt across the United States and around the globe. The exhibition borrows its title from Johnson’s latest film, a centerpiece of the exhibition, shot earlier this year on location in the mountains of Colorado.
‘The Hikers’ unfolds through five rooms on the gallery’s second floor, in a formal arrangement that echoes the fragmentation and accumulation of Johnson’s mosaics and collaged works on display. The viewer is first greeted by three monumental mosaics, each comprised of myriad materials familiar from the artist’s practice: multi-color ceramic and mirror tile, oil stick, black soap, wax, and branded red oak flooring. These works evolved out of Johnson’s Anxious Men and Anxious Audiences (2015 – 2018), earlier series in which frenzied, abstracted faces were rendered in black soap and wax on a grid of white tiles. Here, his images of Broken Men and their fellows explore in a storm of bold hues, errant drips of wax, splashes of paint, and splintered surfaces.
image: Rashid Johnson, The Hikers (still) 2019 © Rashid Johnson. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Noah Davis | David Zwirner, New York
January 16 - February 22, 2020
Organized by Helen Molesworth
David Zwirner is pleased to present work by American artist Noah Davis (1983–2015), organized by Helen Molesworth. On view at the gallery’s 533 West 19th Street location in New York, the exhibition will provide an overview of Davis’s brief but expansive career.
Davis’s work is notable for its seemingly uncomplicated relationship between, on the one hand, his lush, sensual, figurative paintings and, on the other hand, an ambitious social practice project called the Underground Museum, a black-owned-and-operated art space dedicated to the exhibition of museum-quality art in a culturally underserved African American and Latinx neighborhood in Los Angeles. The works on view will highlight both parts of Davis’s oeuvre, featuring more than twenty of his most enduring paintings, as well as models, artworks, and archival materials that tell the story of the Underground Museum. Also included in this section will be the ongoing multimedia installation BLKNWS by Davis’s brother Kahlil Joseph; a sculpture by Karon Davis, the artist’s widow; and furniture made by Shelby George.
Image: Noah Davis, Untitled, 2015 (detail). © The Estate of Noah Davis. Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis
Liz Ikiriko: Flags of Unsung Countries | Art Gallery of Southwestern Monitoba
January 16 - March 14, 2020
Flags of Unsung Countries is a photographic installation exploring new ceremonies, migration and embodied archives. Photographed in Canada and Nigeria, the work functions as a rite of passage. The exhibition charts the process of understanding a father’s struggles as an African immigrant challenged with mental illness living in the Canadian prairies. The layered images intersect geography and memory in a search for a location of belonging. The work asks the questions: How do we reconcile displacement with a sense of rootedness on adopted homelands? What is required of a home - is it a geography, a structure, a memory? Do we choose to belong or does it choose us? Flags of Unsung Countries uses photography as a language and an archive to map a path of the African diaspora. Using the medium of photography, for this exhibition, Liz Ikiriko documents a personal journey to learn more about her father, returning to meet family in Nigeria and places in Canada where she has lived. Her deeply personal and moving work explores memory, family and identity, and reimagines boundaries between past and present
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Image: Liz Ikiriko, Homegoing, 2017. Colour photograph on hahnemuehle, 33.3” x 50”.
Cross Colours: Black Fashion in the 20th Century | California African American Museum, Los Angeles
September 27, 2019 - March 1, 2020
Curated by: Tyree Boyd-Pates and Taylor Bythewood-Porter
In 1990, on the first season of the hit primetime television show The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, lead actor Will Smith wore a series of boldly hued and geometric looks designed by a young Los Angeles–based urban apparel line named Cross Colours. African American-owned, founded by Carl Jones and T.J. Walker, the brand quickly skyrocketed, securing a plethora of orders across the country and breaking color barriers in the field of men’s apparel. The commercial success of Cross Colours, which Jones and Walker created for black youth with the premise of producing “Clothing Without Prejudice,” had a significant influence on the mainstream fashion industry, inspiring it to take notice of the emerging importance of urban streetwear.
Working in the golden age of Hip Hop in the late 1980s and 1990s, Jones and Walker incorporated bright colors and graphic designs that reflected not just trends in fashion, but also a cultural embrace of Afrocentrism in response to unjust Reagan-era policies, rising poverty, police brutality, and substandard educational opportunities. They appealed unapologetically to a black aesthetic, while strategically using product placement, social justice messaging, and community outreach to address these pressing issues. Thirty years later, Cross Colours continues to engage in the socio-political moment and counter negative portrayals of black youth. The first exhibition to examine this groundbreaking brand, Cross Colours: Black Fashion in the 20th Century showcases vintage textiles, media footage, and rare ephemera that illuminate how Cross Colours has permeated popular culture and how fashion can be used to tell history anew.
Image: Detail of Cross Colours advertisement in URB magazine featuring Djimon Hounsou, ca. 1991. Photo by Michael Segal. Courtesy the Cross Colours Archive.
Lina Iris Viktor: Some Are Born To Endless Night — Dark Matter | AUTOGRAPH, London, UK
September 13, 2019 - January 25, 2020
Curated by Renée Mussai
Become immersed in deep lustres of black punctuated with luminous 24-karat gold and opulent ultramarine blue hues in Lina Iris Viktor’s singular artistic universe.
Her photography, painting and sculptural installations are infused with cultural histories of the global African diaspora and preoccupied with multifaceted notions of blackness: as colour, as material and as socio-political consciousness. To Viktor, black is the proverbial materia prima: the source, the dark matter that birthed everything.
This is the British-Liberian artist’s first major solo exhibition in the UK, with more than 60 works on display in two galleries, many seen for the first time.
Image: Lina Iris Viktor, No. XXVI Refuge from the aftermath . . . A Reckoning to come. From the series Dark Continent — Act III: The Wake, 2018 -9. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim Gallery. © Lina Iris Viktor