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1 week ago | 
hyperallergic.com | Seph Rodney
KATONAH, New York — In calamity and in commotion — that’s where I begin when I visit Ali Banisadr: The Alchemist at the Katonah Museum. The show includes paintings that are almost 7 by 10 feet and much smaller ones, such as “Black” (2007), which, at 28 by 24 inches, still manages to stagger me.
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3 weeks ago | 
hyperallergic.com | Seph Rodney |Julie Schneider |Danielle Wu |Imani Wiliford
The exhibitions this week show us how we shape ourselves in history’s image, and the other way around. Lotus L. Kang’s assemblages at 52 Walker draw from diasporic memory, yet her draped film sculptures form an ongoing document of the exhibition’s idiosyncrasies of light and movement. Meanwhile, Rashid Johnson’s survey at the Guggenheim Museum draws from a dense network of Black intellectual thought, offering in turn a contemporary visual vernacular.
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4 weeks ago | 
hyperallergic.com | Seph Rodney
Once, when I was in my 20s and too much feeling the weight of being a Black man in the United States — someone onto whom most people I encountered would project their assumptions — I had the idea to create a t-shirt that would say, “Your space for projection here.” I feel this phrase could caption much of the work featured in Rashid Johnson’s retrospective exhibition A Poem for Deep Thinkersat the Guggenheim Museum.
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1 month ago | 
hyperallergic.com | Seph Rodney
America’s Cultural Treasures: This article is part of a series sponsored by the Ford Foundation highlighting the work of museums and organizations that have made a significant impact on the cultural landscape of the United States. Our motivation is enhancing visibility for the AAPI community to show our complexity through the storytelling that happens on our stages, and how we exist in community outside of the stage experiences.
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1 month ago | 
hyperallergic.com | Seph Rodney
America’s Cultural Treasures: This article is part of a series sponsored by the Ford Foundation highlighting the work of museums and organizations that have made a significant impact on the cultural landscape of the United States. Our youth are so hungry — you can see it in the way they show up for work. You can see it in the way they show up for dance practices. Any type of cultural or educational program that we offer here at the Center is usually full.
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1 month ago | 
hyperallergic.com | Seph Rodney
America’s Cultural Treasures: This article is part of a series sponsored by the Ford Foundation highlighting the work of museums and organizations that have made a significant impact on the cultural landscape of the United States. The work is to really dig into and continue to deepen our understanding of what racial healing means.
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1 month ago | 
hyperallergic.com | Seph Rodney
America’s Cultural Treasures: This article is part of a series sponsored by the Ford Foundation highlighting the work of museums and organizations that have made a significant impact on the cultural landscape of the United States. This institution, like others of its kind, engages and elevates our collective voice. That has been part of Carlos [Tortolero]’s vision, that we need to be telling our own story. He said, “We need to be here.
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1 month ago | 
nytimes.com | Seph Rodney
A critic's pick of galleries from Africa and the Caribbean offer exciting and haunting work. Among the plethora of art fairs this week in New York City, there is still only one dedicated to contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. The 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair was founded in 2013 by Touria El Glaoui, a former telecom salesperson raised in Morocco by an artist father and a French mother, who noticed a gap in the market where local artists were being ignored by the mainstream.
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1 month ago | 
artforum.com | Seph Rodney
Curated by Sophie Landres, “Landmines”—a four-person exhibition presenting the work of Dawoud Bey, Christina Fernandez, Richard Mosse, and Rick Silva—identifies particularly large historical targets to blow up or destabilize. Foremost among them is the bicentennial of the 1825 trip up New York’s Hudson River taken by artist Thomas Cole, an excursion widely credited with launching the Hudson River School.
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1 month ago | 
hyperallergic.com | Seph Rodney
America’s Cultural Treasures: This article is part of a series sponsored by the Ford Foundation highlighting the work of museums and organizations that have made a significant impact on the cultural landscape of the United States. Some of my very favorite [teaching] units that I’ve facilitated with artworks have been here at MoCNA, being able to talk about the things that we need to talk about as humans right now: social justice, the environment, identity, stuff that young people are hungry for.
