Intersections

exploring what i find interesting from abstract art to manufacturing

[mercyemelike]

Yes, Black Women Made Abstract Art Too, as a Resounding New Show Makes Clear | artnet News

“Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today” focuses on artists who are black, female, and work with abstraction.

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How to Embed a Shout: A New Generation of Black Artists Contends with Abstraction

A new wave of black abstract artists are exploring ways to push the language of abstraction and still retaining their cultural specificity. And they're not doing it alone.

i’m so happy i read this. 

[whitneymuseum]

The whole thing of art is, how do you organize chaos?

Romare Bearden, born on this day in 1911.  (via whitneymuseum)

[moma]

MoMA | Tag: Black Lives Matter

Thanks to all of you who read and shared associate curator Thomas Lax’s recent blog post “How Do Black Lives Matter in MoMA’s Collection?” Read two new blog posts from associate director Kathy Halbreich and chief of archives Michelle Elligott in response to Thomas’s post. 

[Faith Ringgold. American People Series #20: Die. 1967. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2016 Faith Ringgold/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]

(via MoMA | Tag: Black Lives Matter)

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W. E. B. Du Bois’s Modernist Data Visualizations of Black Life

For the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, African American activist and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois led the creation of over 60 charts, graphs, and maps that visualized data on the state of bl…

this is it.

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Howardena Pindell, Untitled(#7)

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Mavis Pusey, Within Manhattan

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Norman Lewis, Untitled, 1957

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"When I was a child I was with my father in southern Ohio or northern Kentucky, and we went to a root beer stand and they gave us mugs with red circles on the bottom to designate that the glass was to be used by a person of color. I see the reason I have been obsessed with the circle, using it in a way that would be positive instead of negative."

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thoughts on abstract art

”systems don't have to be rigid”

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The Beauty of Howardena Pindell’s Rage

As much as Howardena Pindell’s unstretched paintings and drawings share something with the Pattern and Decoration movement, or with monochromatic abstraction, color field painting, all-over paintin…

[mercyemelike]

I love a lot of abstract art because its not necessarily “about” anything. But it communicates so viscerally. 

[euliss]

“Just do your work. And if the world needs your work it will come and get you. And if it doesn’t, do your work anyway. You can have fantasies about having control over the world, but I know I can barely control my kitchen sink. That is the grace I’m given. Because when one can control things, one is limited to one’s own vision.” — Kiki Smith

[whitneymuseum]

“They’re really two sides of the coin of social inequality. Museums increasingly are warehouses of wealth, capturing surplus in the form of artworks that are no longer financially productive. Prisons are institutions that warehouse surplus labour and populations that have been economically excluded from the labour market.” Andrea Fraser talks to The Guardian about her new site-specific work, Down the River, on view through March 13. 

Index II, 2014, graph. Photograph by Andrea Fraser

[mahakami-blog]

Like Every Day by Shadi Ghadirian

Shadi Ghadirian (born 1974) is an Iranian woman photographer who continues to live and work in Tehran. Born shortly after the Iranian revolution, she was one of the first to graduate in photography from the University of Azad (in Tehran). After finishing her B. A., Ghadirian began her professional career as a photographer. She says that “quite by accident”, the subjects of her first two series were “women”. Her work is intimately linked to her identity as a Muslim woman living in Iran. Nonetheless, her art also deals with issues relevant to women living in other parts of the world. She questions the role of women in society and explores ideas of censorship, religion, modernity, and the status of women.

Her ‘Like Every Day’ Series was made after her marriage to fellow photographer, Peyman Hooshmand-zadeh. In this body of work, Ghadirian comments upon the daily repetitive routine to which many women find themselves consigned and by which many women are defined. Each of these color photographs depicts a figure draped in patterned fabric in place of the typical Iranian chador. However, instead of a face, each figure has a common household item such as an iron, a tea cup, a broom, a pot or a pan.

In one her interviews, while talking about her ‘Like Everyday’ Series she says “In my photos you see women wearing flowery chadors. It’s a kind of chador that women always wear inside the houses, they are colorful. In these photos you cannot see their faces. You can see, for example, a cup or things related to the household, things instead of their face”. While commenting on the life of women encumbered by domesticity, she says “I travel a lot and I see many many women around the world and I realize that it’s the woman, it’s the mother that’s always worried what should the baby eat. And if they are doctor, if they are teacher, if they are photographer, if they are housewife it doesn’t matter. In their mind they are always thinking about these things. It’s a part of the women’s life I think.”

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I recently saw both Odili Donald Odita’s The Velocity of Change at Jack Shainman, and Frank Stella’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum.

Frank Stella’s work over a lifetime is stylistically varied and unpredictable. However, comparing Stella’s minimalist years to the work shown at Odita’s current solo exhibition is an obvious connection for me given that Stella’s and Odita’s work share several characteristics: expert balance of color, precision, geometric abstraction, and organization around strong diagonals.

In spite of the similarities, these artists have unmistakable, stylistic signatures. Odita’s work shifting, sliding, and always in motion; Stella’s systematic, almost mechanical, slow.  Beyond these differences, Stella and Odita seem to have different conceptual projects as well.

Perhaps more accurately, Stella does not claim any conceptual project in his minimalist works. He insists on form and, famously, that “what you see is what you see.” On the other hand, Odita describes his project as striving to make his paintings as a space that exists before language and that escape the limit of language. He states that color has the “intrinsic power” to do this.

Stella’s insistence on form and Odita’s reference to the intrinsic power of color resonant at the same frequency for me. In a way, Stella and Odita are noting the failure of language to explain the experience of engaging with their work. Sitting in front of Odita’s work, the colors and their arrangement create an experience that happens before words. It's entirely visual/visceral and “what you see is what you see.” Sitting in front of Stella’s work, you get the sensation that his work, also, is communicating in that place before words described by Odita, and what you see is still just what you see.