August 27 to December 11, 2016
220 South 34th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104

Terry Adkins, a professor of Fine Arts in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania for 14 years, died in 2014 leaving a puissant legacy both in terms of his own works and peers and students influenced. “Darkwater Revival: After Terry Adkins,” at the Arthur Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, required several viewings. Although a modest-sized gallery, the work of twelve artists, as well as Adkins himself, are on display. The show not only celebrates salient works by Adkins that were part of his 2002 multidisciplinary exhibit “Darkwater: A Recital in Four Dominions, Terry Adkins After W.E.B. Du Bois,” but presents the art created by students and colleagues who were close to him.

Adkins was a conceptual artist involved in creating work from discarded material and instruments, as well as a performance artist and musician well versed in jazz and experimental music. He tied his performances to his sculptures and installations, expounding on concepts transcendence, spirituality and blackness. Between 1999 and 2014, he chronicled in his ”material potentialities,” the life and work of such historic figure as W.E.B. DuBois, Ludwig van Beethoven, Jimi Hendrix and the insurrectionary abolitionist John Brown,

At times difficult and obtuse, Adkins has inspired several generations. Having great faith in his vision, I was able to document a myriad of references and directives in his work while researching a 1998 essay for an exhibition of his work at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia. A deep thinker with a booming laugh, he created works that sparked the imagination and offered conundrums about politics, black narrative histories and man’s spiritual quests. “Darkwater Revival” includes six of his artworks. Darkwater Record (2002–08) is a moderate sized “combine,” in contrast to his signature monumental installations. A porcelain bust of Mao Tse-tung rests on top of a collection of Nakamichi 550 cassette tape decks. The needles on the dial of the decks indicate that recordings are supposedly playing Du Bois’s speeches on socialism and the American Negro, but the work was designed to give evidence of sound with no actual audio. (In 2002, a previous version of the work included sealed FBI files on Du Bois.) In this partial presentation, actually hearing Du Bois’s speeches would be desirable, but the silence of the piece again highlights an integral part of Adkins’s intent. Adkins often played with sound and silence , which often represented forgotten or muffled histories.

Sermonesque (2002) is a suspended snare drum within the lattice of a nine-foot-tall wrought-iron cage. Here, the drum, an instrument related to African-American music traditions and African culture, and the wrought-iron frame, suggestive of a principle occupation, smithing, held by blacks during and after slavery, are inherently powerful insignia. Additionally, select works by Adkins relate to musical ideas: two gelatin silver prints of music disks that predate phonographs, possibly of folk music, and a video of wafting smoke that surrounds the crown of a curly coif. To the uninitiated, the prints might appear to be cartographic renditions of the firmament. Du Bois’s concern with southern musical traditions is integral to his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Along with its mystical visuals, the video Harmonic Spheres, 2012, features a score Adkins created with his protégé, Demetrius Oliver. Overall, “Darkwater Revival,” in both of its manifestations, takes a close look through signs and symbols at the life, philosophy and work by W. E. B. Du Bois.

Included in the exhibit are sculptures, videos, mixed media works, prints and photo-based work by Ernel Martinez and Keir Johnston of Amber Arts and Design, and Wilmer Wilson, among others. Of note was a performance Push/Pull The Weight held on Martyrs Day by Martinez and Johnston at the gallery. Their piece paid homage to the abolitionist John Brown another personage that Adkins heralded. Full of symbolism, with flags of gold and black and a central totem Martinez laboriously builds using steel disc brakes that jostled the nerves when they were dropped onto a giant wooden spindle, the performance exemplified struggle and resilience and was accompanied by an improv musical score by June Lopez.

Matt Neff’s sculptures dominate the main floor of the gallery and are a tour de force; having work closely with Adkins in the past as a student and assistant, he has taken to another level Adkins’s approach to making art using found materials. The works transcend the sum of their parts. In Untitled, 2014,Neff uses found aluminum railings and panels of Plexiglas lit by fluorescent lights, flanked by rims from a small truck. This sculpture reads as an elegant structure and belies the materials used. However, Neff states that he is concerned with historical and current negotiations of power and privilege. These issues are not overtly apparent in the work on display as part of “Darkwater Revival” here; rather, his sculptures here are appreciable for their formal qualities and Modernist sensibilities.

Sarah Tortora also embraces lessons from Modernism. Her geometric suspended painted reliefs made of wood have appendages that appear to hover in space. Sean Riley deconstructs pieces of denim to create quasi-geometric shards. Jamal Cyrus ‘sRaisin, 2016, resonates with innumerable references to blackness, including the Lorraine Hansberry play, A Raisin in the Sun and even the comical commercial using animated raisins circa 1990. In this work, Cyrus uses hand dyed burgundy fabrics and collages them in a tight intimate composition.

Of note are two video installations by black women, Tameka Norris and Nsenga Knight, which are as different in context and intent as night and day. Norris creates an absurd, laughable work that addresses stereotypes; titled Purple Painting (2011), Norris, her face painted purple, wantonly eats a banana with abandon while emitting animal like noises. Embedded in the background is another video screen, playing footage of Norris in a coiffed blonde wig, eating a banana with great care and poise. She plays with several tropes related to gender, sexuality, race and humor. At first take, the work is hilarious, while deeper scrutiny of the juxtaposition of the figures and their gestures reveals a layer of commentary that is biting and uncomfortable for some viewers.

Knight, in X Speaks (2014), takes a didactic approach to disseminating the late speeches of Malcolm X. She takes the language of the American political and cultural icon and encourages an assessment of his ideas for blacks in the 21^st century, by having his speeches read by community participants, recording these events. The sessions, broadcast live across the Internet, are made accessible via technological dissemination. Is Knight, a Muslim, proselytizing or merely creating an open forum on race and oppression by using X’s seminal speeches as a point of departure? This project surfaces in the milieu of the Black Lives Matter Movement, Malcolm X’s 50th anniversary, hostility towards assimilation by African-American Muslims and the fight for social justice.

Knight crosses the line drawn between art and education in relationship to socio-political concerns. While many African-American artists obscure or conceptually abstract content, Knight tackles head on subjects related to Black oppression, Islam and the construct of race in America.

Across the board, more than sharing aesthetic commonality, the works by Adkins’s students are very diverse in format, materiality and content. “Darkwater Revival” highlights the questioning minds of the artists presented. The ultimate influence of Adkins is that those whole follow in his wake are engaged in intuitive processes, immersive research and collaboration. These artists, in pursuit of multivalent journeys, credit Adkins as their radix.

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May 16 to August 3, 2015
2025 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy (at North 20th Street)
Philadelphia, PA, 215 278 7200

The Barnes Foundation’s recent exhibit, “The Order of Things,” in their contemporary gallery, is at once dynamic and problematic. Intended to relate to Barnes’s enigmatic approach to exhibition design, fantasy and appropriation abound. Installations by three renowned artists — Mark Dion, Judy Pfaff and Fred Wilson — mine varying aspects of Barnes’s approach to installing artifacts and paintings. His system for exhibiting work was intended to be carried into in perpetuity and is mimicked in the work of the artists selected for this project.

Pfaff created a sprawling installation in the main space of the gallery. Center stage, this work honors Laura Barnes’s arboretum, which she cultivated alongside Albert Barnes and a cluster of specialists. The arboretum is an extensive garden of hundreds of rare trees and flora from around the world, still flourishing at the Foundation’s original museum in Lower Merion. Pfaff’s Scene I: The Garden, Enter Mrs. Barnes (2015) is a dazzling psychedelic display of photos of the arboretum and Henri Rousseau’s paintings gone awry. Perhaps an abject backdrop to Alice in Wonderland, the installation is replete with digital prints on plastic and vinyl, poured pigmented foam, natural wood and steel. Swirling renditions of a simulated pond’s edge and bank are constructed using wood and liquid foam. Repeated in several key locations within the installation, these frothy sea-green islands create a sense of boundaries and depth. Punctuating this expansive landscape are leafy steel structures, painted white.

Incongruent elements abound, with white steel chandeliers overhead and neon lights that are, disappointingly, never illuminated. An installation of plastic wallpaper with distorted floral patterns is strategically placed on the gallery’s southern wall. Plastic floor panels extend across the space and were based on Henri Rousseau’s paintings; they serve as a conceptual bridge between Pfaff’s installation and the collection. Other connections include an area over the eastern wall of the gallery that alludes to the framed lunettes of Henri Matisse’s The Dance (1910).

Laura Barnes was integrally involved in the development of the arboretum at the original Barnes Foundation. She cultivated an expansive array of flora from areas within the states and other countries. Laura Barnes selected blooming plants that were considered difficult to grow in the Pennsylvania’s blistery winters of Pennsylvania such as southern magnolias, etc. Her approach to constructing the Foundation’s gardens paralleled the landscapes found in the work of Calude Monet, Paul Cezanne and other landscape paintings in the collection. Pfaff’s title channels the contribution of Laura Barnes to the development of the Foundation’s botanical gardens.

Fred Wilson’s rooms, located to the right of the entrance, are conglomerates of staged tableaux, some more successful than others. At the entrance three scenes are created in a sparse, modernist fashion, using furniture borrowed from the Merion offices, desks chairs and even an early Dell computer. The interior rooms hold greater intrigue; these spaces represent a sculptural approach to furniture, art objects and glass works from the collection. While visitors walk through these spaces, African drums and chanting waft through the air. Wilson inserts the African presence through sound rather than including it materially in his installation. Perhaps using African art directly would have been too obvious a move for Wilson, based on his past installations at museums throughout America. The soundscape is a compilation tape. Wilson has chosen not to disclose its origin or name the people recorded. Nameless voices surround the viewer — the ubiquitous presence of Africa is in our midst.

In his 1983 book Flash of the Spirit, Robert Farris Thompson uses the metaphor that if aliens descended on earth and sampled the music produced around the world, overridingly the music from Africa and the African Diaspora would be the most prevalent. Wilson has reconstructed this reality for us in Trace. However, it is interesting that he has chosen not to name the African cultural groups represented in his compilation tape. Is this again an example of a Western intervention that includes the artistry of Africa and deciding to render it anonymous?

Mark Dion’s installation is delightful, yet foreboding, in its inclusion of guns, knives and the like; however, would these be included in the collection of a naturalist? These emblems are contrasted with butterfly nets, fishnets, satchels and garden tools. Dion’s The Incomplete Naturalist is a tour de force in symmetry. According to the curator, Dion’s use of symmetry is mimetic of Barnes’s aesthetic. Like an archeologist, he puts everything in order and builds relationships to construct a narrative.

Overall, the Order of Things was a fascinating array of dissonant styles of installation art brought together. Therein lies its intrigue. Each artist serves as an individual conduit into the mind of Albert and Laura Barnes.

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November 7 to December 31, 2014
600 Washington Square
Philadelphia, 215 629 1000

Thomas Chimes, long heralded for grand landscape paintings and canvases laden with Greek and Christian symbols, was shown to different effect in a focused exhibition at Lock Gallery late last year of mid-career, predominantly sculptural works. Alluding to an interior world of secrets, irony and obsession, these fastidiously constructed boxes, dating from 1965 to 1973, articulate the literary impulses and ontological states that animate his better-known later works.

After a decade of working in New York, in the 1950s and ‘60s, in a scene still bearing the imprint of Abstract Expressionism, Chimes retreated to his hometown of Philadelphia, slowly embracing a hermetic existence. It was in 1965 that Chimes decided to abandon his explorations as a colorist and began to craft work informed by his deep love of modernist and symbolist literature, his evolving affinity for Surrealism and the enigmatic philosophies and practices of Marcel Duchamp. And yet, the work in the exhibition reveals how much he also felt the need to remain relevant in a technologically driven world. An influential lecture by Marshall McLuhan at the University of Pennsylvania impacted his shift from painting to sculpture, according to art historian Michael Taylor, as well as his deepening personal association with Antonin Artaud, Alfred Jarry, and Duchamp.

Bouts with depression may also have encouraged him to shun the limelight of New York. He found in the confines of Philadelphia a sense of familiarity and the isolation needed to discover who he was. In doing so he was following the edict of Duchamp, who advised young artists to go underground.

The metal boxes are an amalgam of divergent sources: Art Deco, Pop Art and Minimalism. In some instances, they look like mechanical devices that have specific functions: too large to be hand held they nonetheless feel intimate. At the forefront of modern design directives, Chimes’s boxes infused with sexual, electronic and mathematical motifs, are evidence of his “desire for structure and structuring desire.” In tune with the “Sexual Revolution” of his time, Chimes liberally laces his imagery with female and male genitalia, incorporating an eroticized sense of play into his symbolic lexicon. In elegantly structured works like Cathedra (1970) and Untitled (1969), the viewer can get lost in the fluidity of cut and collaged aluminum forms.

It is curious that Chimes segued so effortlessly from painting to metal construction. Yes (1965), a work that marks this transition, contains vestiges of earlier painterly impulses as well as Matisse-like cutout forms, and a configuration of Artaud’s alter ego, Mômo as a bird, are neatly contained within a composition of rectangular and square forms. This is a work that marked Chimes’s transition to constructions. Also during this year, he was commissioned to design the jacket cover for two books by Bettina L. Knapp on the work of Artaud. It is telling that his esteem of Artaud’s life and work predated his decision to move toward making mixed media metal boxes. Possibly Chimes felt that the box form itself served as a vessel/vehicle to sort through new symbols of mysticism and playfulness that emulated Artaud’s aesthetic.

Some of Chimes boxes open, while many are sealed shut with cut away areas, exposing layers of different materials and markings. Engaging in Pataphysics, the anti-theoretical philosophy coined by Alfred Jarry, Chimes throws together fragments of quasi-scientific elements and mathematical diagrams into a jumble that give mere hints to their origin in meaning. Chimes orders these chaotic insignia with humor and aplomb. Works like Exhibition Calculator (1969) evidence an ironic tone, one that pokes fun at the art world itself.

Chimes’s evolving aesthetic was certainly less than linear and not completely sequential. He appears to be driven by ideas and less by the tendency of the time to stick with a signature style. Maybe he was marking time and secretly coding his life traumas and inner secrets. This show ends with a selection of white paintings of moderate size, some of which were like palimpsests of unintelligible script. The hint of landscape behind the vast whiteness of Untitled Rose Landscape (1980), for instance, is indicative of the type of investigations that consumed Chimes until the end of his marriage in 1984 when he expressed his forlorn state in a poem “Winter is white/ Everything is cold/ Mutterings are distant now.”

In addition to landscapes, he revisits the visage of Albert Jarry, a reoccurring portrait within a whitened vapor, as well as the embossed helmeted head of Artaud. It is notable that between his construction series and white paintings from 1979 to the 1990s, Chimes spent nearly a decade devoted to his obsession with literary figures, by painting portraits of such literary illuminati as Jarry, Artaud, André Breton, James Joyce and Robert Lewis Stevenson.

The overarching themes in the esoteric works presented at Locks may sometimes seem to outweigh their delicate and precise execution. In spite of the rigid materials used, however, it is perhaps the appearance of fragility that Chimes intended to portray, alluding to the vulnerability of the human mind and the ephemeral quality of thoughts translated into plastic form.

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