Curatorial Assistance

Curatorial Assistance is a creative think tank and producer of art projects, new media and touring exhibitions worldwide. We produce traveling exhibitions and publications, and provide art services including exhibition design, fabrication and installation, scanning and printing, framing, crating, fine art storage and transport, and photo conservation and collections management. Our mission is to provide museums, libraries, and other cultural venues worldwide with affordable, high-quality exhibitions in the arts and humanities that educate, engage, and inspire adults and families.

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From the ICP Collections: Carrie Mae Weems, Mirror, Mirror, from the Ain’t Jokin’ series, 1987

[blakegopnik]

THE DAILY PIC:

In the show called “Speaking of People: Ebony, Jet and Contemporary Art”, at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Hank Willis Thomas has wallpapered a room with copies of vintage pinups from Jet, the black-culture magazine. This is a detail of the many hundreds of pictures on view. What’s most interesting about the piece, titled Black is Beautiful (1953-2014), is how the accumulated images strike a perfect and peculiar balance between black empowerment and female subjugation. By presenting a vast range of African-American bodies and faces, the whole notion of attractiveness is opened up. And that was (and is) very important, in an American culture where an aesthetic of blackness was (and is) always sidelined. I wonder if the sheer range of beauties on display might even argue that, from its position on the sidelines, and without the aesthetic authority and traditions of the white overclass, black culture was able to embrace a broader vision of what beauty might be. On the other hand, all the women on view are being reduced to pretty faces and tits and ass, as though their black beauty, and the cultural “work” that it does, exhausts our interest in them.

One smaller detail: Afros and the “natural cut”, an obvious component of black pulchritude, manage to make an appearance for a bare few years in the 70s, during the heyday of the Black Power movement. If afros came back in force today, they’d still have political heft.

The Daily Pic also appears at ArtnetNews.com. For a full survey of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.

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Artist and historian Deb Willis, who curated one of our current traveling exhibitions, "Posing Beauty in African American Culture", worked with Thomas Allen Harris on his docu-film Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People. Inspired by Willis' research, the film uses family photographs of Harris, as well as photographers like Renee Cox and Carrie Mae Weems, to explore the interconnectivity of the personal image and Black history. These familial images are juxtaposed with historical photos creating a more in depth photographic record of Black America. 

Like the exhibition "Posing Beauty", Through A Lens Darkly meditates on the power of the image to represent and to challenge. Black representation and visibility are crucial themes explored in relationship to the larger narrative of American history and culture.  

For more information on Harris’ film and upcoming screenings, please visit: http://1world1family.me/

[bombmagazine]

"The black female body has been violated and revered in very specific ways by the outsider—Europeans, especially. The issues that pertain to race: pathologizing the black mind, exoticizing and fearing of the black body, objectifying the body as a specimen, or a sexual machine, or a work animal, or...

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Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Man and Woman) from the "Kitchen Table" series, 1990, gelatin silver print, 25" x 25"

The work by Carrie Mae Weems above is part of one of our current traveling exhibitions, Posing Beauty in African American Culture, curated by artist and historian Deb Willis. According to the exhibition catalogue, the show, "...explores the contested ways in which African and African American beauty have been represented in historical and contemporary contexts through a diverse range of media including photography, film, video, fashion, advertising, and other forms of popular culture such as music and the internet. Throughout the Western history of art and image-making, the relationship between beauty and art has become increasingly complex within contemporary art and popular culture." Willis selected works by several artists--including Lyle Ashton Harris, Sheila Pree Bright, Leonard Freed, Renee Cox, Anthony Barboza, Mickalene Thomas, and Jeanne Moutousammy-Ashe, among others--who frame aesthetics, race, class, and gender within art, popular culture, and politics. In total, the show includes 84 photographs and 1 video. 

In many respects, this exhibition is an extension of Deb Willis' practice as both a photographer and a photo-historian and educator. Among her many important scholarly texts is Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographs, 1840 to the Present (W.W. Norton, 2000), which renders visible a history of black photography that is often overlooked and ignored by Western photo history. Because of this, the text is widely considered the first comprehensive history of black photographers, outlining a history that includes James VanDerZee, Gordon Parks, Pat Ward Williams, Chris Johnson, Terry Boddie, and Calvin Hicks. With nearly 600 images, the book details the transitions and transformations of the black everyday "...from slavery to the Great Migration to contemporary suburban life, including rare antebellum daguerrotypes, photojournalism of the Civil Rights Era, and multimedia portraits of middle-class families." Many of these themes, and some of these images, made their way into the Posing Beauty exhibition. 

Additionally, Deb Willis worked with Thomas Allen Harris on his docu-film, Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People (2014; travelled to independent theaters in New York, Los Angeles, and St. Louis; on PBS on February 16, 2015). This fantastic film chronicles much of Willis' research, but does so through the personal narrative of Thomas Allen Harris. Harris acts as our narrator, explaining his relationship to the image, his family, and his black history. He discusses his family photo album and explains how he used the image to connect the pieces of a larger history. In the film, other photographers, such as Renee Cox, Carrie Mae Weems, Thomas Allen Harris' brother, Lyle Ashton Harris, and Deb Willis herself, show their family photographs and important works by African American photographers, and discuss their relationships to representation, visibility, and American history. The film is part of a larger project of Harris' called the Digital Diaspora Roadshow. Harris has been traveling the country, and helping people collect their family photographs. Participants present the photographs to the group and discuss their importance; Harris' team then helps them digitize and archive the photographs, to ensure that they will not be erased from history. 

Situated alongside Reflections in Black, Through a Lens Darkly, and a wider history of black American history, Posing Beauty in African American Culture is an exhibition that celebrates and challenges representation. It asks viewers to deepen their understandings of the image, it's necessity, and it's past failures. Deb Willis has collected some iconic photos and placed them alongside some never-before-seen photos, asking the question: what else has been made invisible? And how can we fix this? 

For more information on Curatorial Assistance and Posing Beauty, please visit: http://www.curatorial.com/posing-beauty

For more information on Deb Willis, please visit: http://debwillisphoto.com/home.html

For more information on Harris' film and upcoming screenings, please visit: http://1world1family.me/

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Art of the Day 

Salvador Dali, Spiderwoman, lithograph

Featured in our traveling exhibition, Dusk to Dusk 

This lithograph by Dali belongs to a series of prints by the Surrealist that illustrate Dante's Divine Comedy. In this print, Dali depicts the ancient Greek myth of Arachne, a mortal woman who wrongly boasted of her weaving skill and was subsequently cursed by Athena and transformed into a spider, forced to weave a web for eternity.

Dali's haunting image portrays wild looking hybrid of a woman-spider, her six long limbs splayed across the picture plane and underscored by lines receding to a central vanishing point, as an ambiguously rendered couple watches her unnerving figure in the background.

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Art of the Day 

John Loengard, Imogen Cunningham, Magnolia Blossom, 1925, 1993

This image of two hands lovingly cupping Imogen Cunningham's negative for her 1925 photograph Magnolia Blossom is an emotional highlight of our traveling exhibition John Loengard: Celebrating the Negative. The shape made by these weathered hands echo the petals of the magnolia and pay tribute to their delicate form and beauty. 

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Hoppé Tuesday

 E.O. Hoppé, Maria Corda, actress, UFA Studios, Berlin, 1928

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Art of the Day

Sérésier LouisJuste, Children with Birds, n.d., iron

Featured in our traveling exhibition Restoring the Spirit: Celebrating Haitian Art

LouisJuste’s pulsating, entwining representation of life symbolizes the interconnectivity and all-encompassing holistic nature of the vodou worldview. A central tree dominates much of the composition. Its sprouting branches become the bodies of children and birds, and its roots spread into the body of a floating barge in the bottom third of the composition, which rests above large fish. In vodou culture, trees typically symbolize the deep roots that exist between the living and the dead, while water often references Ginen, the watery home of the lwa and the ancestors.

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Art of the Day 

Yang Shaobin, Untitled, 2001, oil on canvas

Featured in our current traveling exhibition, Dusk to Dusk 

Yang Shaobin's oil painting Untitled, featured in our current traveling exhibition Dusk to Dusk, depicts an agonized figure mired in internal and external pain. Often compared to Francis Bacon, Shaobin's figures seem to be struggling against the smearing and painterly abstraction that threatens to efface their identity. Grimacing with his head tilted back and his physiognomy nearly expunged by paint, the puncture wounds in his torso spill with blood and transform this figure into something that is at once horrifying, Christ-like, and difficult to forget. 

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"The biggest question about truth and lies appear in the best literature [...] The work with which I take part in [Book of Lies] is founded on two different moments of Shakespeare's Tempest. The protagonist (Prospero) lives in an island, separated from the other men, and accomplishes magic events; he has a staff that I visualize in the first part of my page. When Prospero returns back among the other people, he breaks the staff that gave him power, and this act is quoted in the second part of my page. To conquer a relationship with people and with truth we have to give up power."

-Artist Chiara Diamantini in a fax sent from Italy to Eugenia P. Butler, original curator of our current exhibition Book of Lies

Chiara Diamantini, From The Tempest, 1994, collaged wood and text on paper

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Hoppé Tuesday 

E.O. Hoppé, Workers, Cammell Laird Shipyards, Merseyside, 1928

[hyperallergic]

(via Study Confirms What We Already Know About the Importance of Artists’ Authenticity)

For all the studies considering how we relate to artwork and artists that are producing fascinating results, there are others that are duds. “Artist Authenticity: How Artists’ Passion and Commitment Shape Consumers’ Perceptions and Behavioral Intentions across Genders,” published in the journal Psychology & Marketing, proposes to study the effect that an artist’s perceived authenticity has on potential consumers’ evaluation of — and inclination to buy — the artist’s work. It also suggests that women and men evaluate art differently. But its evidence and findings feel thin.

READ MORE

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Art of the Day

Penelope Lee, Untitled, 1993, hand-embroidered cotton mask

Part of our current traveling exhibition, Book of Lies

Contemporary artist Penelope Lee contributed hand-embroidered cotton masks to  Book of Lies. At the time these works were made, she was living in Tokyo, Japan, and all the people there were wearing these masks because of the pollution. Every day she would memorize one woman’s lips, and then go home and embroider them on one of these masks. She created 80 different embroideries, of 80 different women's lips. 

“Imbricated in the fantasy of the look are perceived desires and values, whether of consumption or resistance, and the unconscious subjection of the docile body as an object of power. A corpus of glistening, luscious and provocative mouths pay lip service to a network of oppressive practices. Just who is giving lip here?”- Zara Stanhope, catalog essay in “Ko itten. A Touch of Scarlet”, 1995

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Art of the Day

Artist unidentified, Sen Jak (ceremonial vodou flag), n.d., sequins on cotton fabric

Featured in our current traveling exhibition Restoring the Spirit: Celebrating Haitian Art

Haitian vodou flags (also known as drapo) function as powerful liturgical objects whose presence signifies the active presence of the lwa in various ceremonies and rites. Each flag is usually made of velvet, rayon, or silk and heavily encrusted with beads, sequins, or other embellishments, and each is devoted to a specific lwa and embodies its very essence. Colors and symbols- many of which incorporate both African and European iconography—help identify the subject of the flags. Here, the color pink and the checkered heart are the attributes of Ezili Freda, the lwa of sensuality and love, while the red hue and the warrior on horseback can be identified with the lwa of war— Ogou Feray.

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  Hoppé Tuesday 

The Canal, Manchester, Lancashire, England, 1925 

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Art of the Day 

Bien-Aimé Sylvain, Le Cimetière (The Cemetery), n.d., oil on fiberboard

Featured in our current traveling exhibition Restoring the Spirit: Celebrating Haitian Art

Cemeteries figure prominently in Haitian vodou culture as sites that offer the living access to dead loved ones. People petition their ancestors for assistance in love, health, and other matters, leaving their requests on the tombs in the form of food
or other small gifts. Other common activities at cemeteries involve hiring a pretsavan (bush priest) to officiate prayers to the dead, or staging rituals that safeguard the well-being of the family. One such ritual known as the manje pov (the feeding of the poor) can be seen in Sylvain’s painting: in the middle foreground, a man and two women offer mugs of coffee to a barefoot
man seated near the foot of a cross. This gift serves as an invitation from the family performing the ceremony to visit their home and partake in a feast. Helping the poor and other socially vulnerable groups guarantees the continuing goodwill of the ancestors and the lwa.