In a fall preview of the arts, The New York Times‘ Holland Cotter highlighted a slew of shows unfolding across the nation that focus on diversity and inclusion. That’s a demand that Cotter writes has long been called for.
The article — “At 19 Art Shows, From Los Angeles to Manhattan, All Eyes Are on Inclusion” — covers exhibits including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s upcoming Betye Saar The Legends of ‘Black Girl’s Window’, a survey of prints by the 93-year-old L.A. resident that will open Sept. 22 and run through April 5, 2020. There’s also Pope.L: Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration; shared by NYC’s Modern Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art and the Public Art Fund, the show covers the work of Chicago-based William Pope.L, a visual artist and educator known for his performance art — where he does things like eat and throw up an issue of The Wall Street Journal.
Throw downtown’s Contemporary Arts Center’s upcoming Robert Colescott: Art and Race Matters into the mix. (CityBeat included the show in our Fall Arts Preview.) This will mark the first major retrospective of Colescott’s work, often bent with satire and sarcasm. (He died in 2009.) With 85 total works that span over 53 years of his career, it was curated by Lowery Stokes Sims and the CAC’s director, Raphaela Platow, with assistance from Matthew Weseley.
“Given the crises of race relations, political propaganda and image manipulation in the current American landscape, Colescott’s career has never been more relevant,” says Stokes Sims in a release.
Of the exhibition, which opens Sept. 20 and runs through Jan. 12, Cotter writes that Colescott came to international attention in 1997 as a representative for the United States at the Venice Biennale.
“His scorching fantasies of life in his homeland and burlesques of national icons (e.g. “George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware”) blend outrageousness and formal beauty in ways that successive generations of African-American artists — Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker — have learned from,” Cotter writes.
Accompanying the show will be a catalog covering Colescott’s career; published by Rizzoli Electa, it will tour museums across the United States.
As promised in the show’s description, Art and Race Matters will investigate his work both in chronological order and theme, the latter of which includes the “American Dream and assimilation aspirations, mass media imagery, notions of beauty and sexual and gender transgressions.”
More info at contemporaryartscenter.org.
This article appears in Sep 11-18, 2019.
