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EAST COAST ..l.. JUN - DEC.

DMV (DC MD VA) SUMMER 2016

Kehinde Wiley: NEW REPUBLIC comes to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts June 11th!

RICHMOND. Following its' 2015 debut at the Brooklyn Museum, the first museum survey if Kehinde Wiley's prolific career, comes to the VA Museum of Fine Arts!

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Colonel Platoff on His Charger, 2007–8. Oil on canvas, 122 x 122 in. (309.9 x 309.9 cm). Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Gift of the Director’s Council and Museum purchase, 2008. © Kehinde Wiley

Family, Union Temple Baptist Church, Washington, DC, 30’ X 11’ in., Akili Ron Anderson, 1992, Leaded Stained Glass

AKILI RON ANDERSON: A Fifty Year Retrospective of Black Art and Life comes to the Hampton University Museum July 9th!

HAMPTON. A lifetime resident of Washington, D.C., artist Akili Ron Anderson is known for his amazing craftmanship that is aesthetically beautiful, and culturally strong. Anderson designs, fabricates and installs stained glass windows, sculptural forms, fine art paintings and theater sets for cultural, religious and public institutions. This summer, the Hampton University Museum will present a survey of his life’s work.  Akili Ron Anderson: A 50 Year Retrospective of Black Art and Life, will be on view July 9 - November 18, 2016. The exhibition will span 50 years of art-making and examine the artist's ability to effectively communicate his understanding and love of Black Art and Black Culture.

Since 1979, Anderson has been an active member of AfriCOBRA - the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists. The collective, which grew out of the Black Arts Movement of the 60s and 70s. Also well versed in still photography, cinematography and special effects, he attended the Corcoran School of Art and Howard University School of Arts and Science, Division of Fine Arts (1965-1969) and (2005 -2008). He obtained his BFA and MFA from Howard University in 2008. He was the first chairperson of the Visual Arts Department at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, co-founder of Nation House Organization (Watoto School) and has held many other honors. He is currently teaching full time in the department of Art at Howard University.

Also on view in VA this FALL

Gordon Parks & Willie Cole

QUESTION BRIDGE: BLACK MALES now on view at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum

BALTIMORE. Something great happens when artists collaborate! The ground-breaking, award-winning multimedia project, “Question Bridge: Black Males,” is the result of a collaboration between artists, Hank Willis Thomas, Bayeté Ross Smith, Sinclair Lewis and Chris Johnson. You can now catch it at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum for African American Art & Culture through September 30, 2016.

Through the traveling exhibit and companion website, Black men offer deep insights regarding a variety of more than 150 questions and answer videos. Males from all walks of life, from teenagers to actors, Delroy Lindo and Jesse Williams, who both served as executive producers, to civil rights icon, Andrew Young, to policemen and pastors, chime in on topics of identity and black manhood.

Question Bridge became a book in 2015 and received the ICP Infinity Award in 'New Media.' It was an Official Selection of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, and garnered Special Mention for the Sheffield Doc/Fest Innovation Award 2012.

Martin Puryear: Multiple Dimensions now on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

DC. Over the past half century, Martin Puryear has established a unique sculptural practice, handmaking modernist abstract works inspired by nature and various cultures. His public art installations include the Ronald Reagan Building in DC and Madison Square Park in NYC.

Widely celebrated for his elegant but playful sculptures and his devotion to craft, his drawings and prints are less well known. But they are equally essential to the artist’s studio practice.  Martin Puryear: Multiple Dimensions is the first exhibition unveiling his inspirations, methods, and transformative process.

Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Puryear earned a bachelor’s degree in fine art from Catholic University. He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Sierra Leone from 1964 to 1966. Several drawings are from these formative years, where he was inspired by the region.

Vessel; eastern white pine, mesh, tar; 181 1/2 x 83 7/8 x 67 3/4
Martin Puryear, 1997-2002 © Martin Puryear, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Martin Puryear: Multiple Dimensions, on view through September 5, 2016, includes seventy-two objects, including fourteen sculptures, spanning Puryear’s career from his college days to the present. The exhibition is a 360-degree view of the creative process of a contemporary master.

MaXhosa Installation view of "Beauty - Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial." Photo by Matt Flynn © 2016 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Colorful, Installation view of "Beauty - Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial." Photo by Matt Flynn © 2016 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

The fifth installment of the museum’s popular contemporary design exhibition series, Beauty celebrates design as a creative endeavor that engages the mind, body, and senses. With a focus on aesthetic innovation, the exhibition features more than 250 works by 63 designers from around the globe, and is organized around seven themes: extravagant, intricate, ethereal, transgressive, emergent, elemental, and transformative. With projects ranging from experimental prototypes and interactive games to fashion ensembles and architectural interventions, Beauty presents works of astonishing form and surprising function from the most outstanding voices of the global design scene.

BEAUTY: Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial

now on view through August 21, 2016

See more BEAUTY images

Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou
Untitled, 2011

Disguise: Masks and Global African Art  

Disguise: Masks and Global African Art  connects the work of twenty-five contemporary artists with historical African masquerade in an immersive and lively installation of video, digital, sound, installation art, photography and sculpture.  Now on view through September 18. Disguise preview by the Brooklyn Museum.

CHICAGO

Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Painter), 2009. Acrylic on PVC; 44 5/8 x 43 1/8 x 3 7/8 in. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, gift of Katherine S. Schamberg by exchange, 2009.15. © 2009 Kerry James Marshall Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago

Kerry James Marshall: Mastry

A major museum survey of one of America’s greatest living artists is now on view through September, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The exhibition focuses primarily on Marshall’s paintings made over the last 35 years, from his seminal inaugural statement Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) to his most recent explorations of African American history.

Modern Heroics: 75 Years of African American Expressionism at the Newark Museum

Mickalene Thomas (American, b.1971), Landscape with Camouflage, 2012. Rhinestone, acrylic paint and oil enamel on wood panel, 274.3 x 365.8 x 5.1 cm. Courtesy of the Artist, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York.

Heroic themes in modern and contemporary art are the focus of this exhibition of 37 works by African American artists. The selection of artwork from the Newark Museum's collection, include Norman Lewis, Mickalene Thomas, Bob Thompson and sculptures by Chakaia Booker and Thornton Dial Sr.

30 Americans makes West Coast Debut in September

After a critically acclaimed tour of the East Coast, the exhibition featuring 30 African American artists, crossing several generations, subjects, genres and mediums will make a West Coast debut this fall. 30 Americans: Masterpieces of Contemporary African-American Art, opens at the Tacoma Art Museum in September.

(right) King Kata #4: resist, iona rozeal brown, 2007, Mixed media on framed panel, 51 1/2 x 62 in.

DC FALL/WINTER 2016

The Smithsonian American Art Museum celebrates NMAAHC opening with 2 major exhibitions

William H. Johnson, Café, about 1939-40, oil on paperboard. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation

#1 Artworks by African Americans in the Permanent Collection

DC. The Smithsonian American Art Museum has an amazing treasure trove of artworks by African Americans. A collecting initiative that began in the 1960s, has grown to more than 2,000 artworks by more than 200 artists. Right now, 48 objects have been added to those currently on view, for a massive show of 184 works, spanning four centuries and various media, all in celebration of the Nat'l Museum of African American History & Culture grand opening.

Visitor favorites by William H. Johnson and Lois Mailou Jones; abstractions by Washington’s own Sam Gilliam, Felrath Hines and Alma Thomas; contemporary works by Mark Bradford, Faith Ringgold and Mickalene Thomas; key pieces by self-taught artists such as Clementine Hunter and Purvis Young; and influential works by John Biggers, Sargent Johnson, Augusta Savage and Henry Ossawa Tanner are on view. A selection from the museum’s in-depth collections of works by William H. Johnson and Tanner are on display in its Luce Foundation Center and in the galleries.

The featured artists powerfully evoke themes both universal and specific to the African American experience. Many mirror the tremendous social and political change occurring from the early Republic to the rise of industry, the Jazz Age and Harlem Renaissance, the post-war years and the civil rights movement into present day. Arranged chronologically and thematically throughout the permanent collection galleries, the show runs through Feb. 28, 2017.

All Photos

Carl Van Vechten, born Cedar Rapids, IA 1880 and died in New York City, 1964

Transfers from the National Endowment for the Arts, Photograph © Van Vechten
Trust; Compilation/Publication © Eakins Press Foundation. From 'O, Write My
Name': American Portraits, Harlem Heroes (Eakins, 2015)

Joe Louis

Joe Louis, from the portfolio O Write My Name: American Portraits, Harlem
Heroes; 1941, printed 1983; photogravure

Ella Fitzgerald

Ella Fitzgerald, from the unrealized portfolio Noble Black Women: The
Harlem Renaissance and After
1940, printed 1983; photogravure

Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes, from the portfolio O Write My Name: American Portraits,
Harlem Heroes; 1939; 1983; photogravure

More from The Smithsonian American Art Museum's permanent collection - many of these photographs are on view for the first time since they were acquired. Author and social commentator Carl Van Vechten, (1880–1964) began taking photographs in 1932. For the next three decades, he made portraits of writers, musicians, athletes, politicians and others, many of them central figures in the Harlem Renaissance, whose accomplishments transformed American culture throughout the 20th century. These groundbreaking men and women included James Baldwin, Ossie Davis, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ella Fitzgerald, Althea Gibson, Langston Hughes, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Bessie Smith and others. Some of the portraits capture their subjects on the cusp of success as they were full of ambition but before they became famous; others depict men and women looking back on long and varied careers. On view through March, 19, 2017, this installation features 39 images, spanning more than 30 years, documenting a vital aspect of the American Century.

SOUTHERN ACCENT:

DURHAM, NC. Four years in the making - 125 works by 60 artists, brought together by two curators across two states - to explore this complex and contested space known as the American South. Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art, is now on view at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. The work of some of the biggest names in contemporary art - Theaster Gates, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, Carrie Mae Weems,  Kerry James Marshall, Gordon Parks, Ebony G. Patterson, Fahamu Pecou and Xaviera Simmons, appears alongside local artists to create a composite portrait of southern identity. The art, covering a wide range of perspectives, reflects upon the dynamic nature of the South’s social, political and cultural landscape.

Co-curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, Chief Curator and Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and Miranda Lash, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, Southern Accent is on view through Jan. 8, 2017. MORE.

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