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.

The post “Material Potentialities”: Terry Adkins and His Influence appeared first on artcritical.

July 17 to September 13, 2015
50 Orange Street
New Haven, CT, 203 772 2709

This summer marks one year since New York City police choked Eric Garner to death. Since and before then, an uprising of activism and conversation has highlighted systemic racism and its link to criminalization and brutality. Artspace’s “Arresting Patterns,” curated by Sarah Fritchey with Titus Kaphar and Leland Moore, tackles these issues in a group show innovatively framed around seriality.

Titus Kaphar’s The Jerome Project (2011–present) began with the artist discovering a series of other men in the criminal justice system sharing his father’s name. From the project’s Asphalt and Chalk Series, X (2015) overlaps three black men killed by police: Michael Brown, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo; while XVII (2015) stacks three Jeromes on top of each other. The poignant connections made in these pieces through repetition set the tone for the show.

Adrian Piper also explores the connotations of names with Everything #19.3: NYT Portrait of Megan Williams (2007-8). A search for images of a twenty-year-old African American woman named Megan Williams kidnapped by white perpetrators resulted in exclusively white women and men unrelated to the incident. Piper tightly prints the Megans from the image results and repeats the mug shots of the perpetrators.

Andy Warhol was obsessed with how images of death and disaster could be repeated until they became meaningless. His obsession remains pertinent in our contemporary 24-hour news cycles and perpetually refreshed feeds. Warhol’s Birmingham Race Riot (1964) reflects upon the persistent question of police brutality. The piece’s appropriation of a Life magazine image feels immediate in its cold, blurred reproduction.

Connecticut-based Iyaba Ibo Mandingo’s Grave Marker Series (2014) reads with the pop sensibility of Warhol’s protégé Jean-Michel Basquiat and uses bright house paint, oil sticks, and crayon on recycled paper. The pieces commemorate black parents of murdered sons and allude visually and linguistically to African patterns. The language scribbled and repeated on the markers (“Boo!,” “Y do I frighten?,” “I am ur boogie man”) addresses the systemic fear of black bodies.

Language is also central to Jamal Cyrus’s Eroding Witness 7 Series (2014), four pages of laser-cut papyrus reproducing headlines covering the 1970 shooting of organizer Carl Hampton. These works, which include both mainstream and alternative presses from Houston, demonstrate the range of language used to report the event (“Black Militant Slain on Dowling” contrasts with “Exclusive Eyewitness Accounts: Police Fired First”).

“Arresting Patterns” insists on plain and direct confrontation. Dread Scott’s two-channel video Stop (2008) (in collaboration with Joann Kushner) depicts six men of color from New York and London stating how many times they have been stopped by police. Adrian Piper’s Safe (#1-4) (1990) corners the viewer with four images of smiling black families captioned “We are around you,” “You are safe,” “We are among you,” and “We are within you.” The installation, which contemplates questions of assimilation, includes self-aware audio of the artist talking as a white viewer who is having a “really hard time” with the piece.

The works in the show are as much about looking as they are about looking away: Kaphar’s dizzying portraits contain multiple pairs of eyes; Scott’s stopped men stare; Piper’s black families wave. The show is aware of the things that we can’t look at—either because they’re blurred by Google Maps like the unseen jail in the work of Maria Gaspar (Wretches and Paramount (Extreme Landscape Series; Google study of Cook County Jail in Chicago), 2014-5) or because they’re fading and fragile like Jamal Cyrus’s papyrus newspapers. It knows that we’re constantly doing both.

Along with “Arresting Patterns,” Artspace is also showcasing work from The 15th Annual Summer Apprenticeship Program, this year led by Titus Kaphar, Aaron Jafferis, and Dexter Singleton and inspired by The Jerome Project. The New Haven high school apprentices worked closely with visual and performance artists to create work contextualized by a curriculum and field trips. Kaphar discussed processing the heavy experience of visiting a corrections facility with the apprentices and assuring them that there was art to be made about those moments.

The work impressively echoes the ideas of “Arresting Patterns” and shows a range of approaches: from Ruby Gonzalez’s acrylic abstractions (Untitled I) to Emanuel Luck’s realistic white pencil portrait, Don’t Chalk Your Ancestors. In collective collages (Sinque 1, Sinque 2), the apprentices also addressed complex the history of their city, researching New Haven’s cartography and its role in the Amistad trials to inform their art.

The work of Arianna Alamo, entitled Martyrs and The Prophet (MLK), depicts the mug shots of Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, among others. Using tar paper and white chalk (like Kaphar), Alamo frames the figures in a gold Byzantine halo, achieving an almost Warholian allusion to devotion. Most striking was the halo around King: a pop collage composed of gold, consumerist jewelry.

Artspace’s approach to both shows is effectively interdisciplinary. Looking beyond the language of art and the space itself, the works are contextualized not just through wall labels, but also through takeaway cards with statistics relevant to the ideas presented in the show. Further contextualization is provided with the space’s reading room, which includes a timeline of American racial violence and books such as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010).

The conversation about race and criminalization goes beyond the content of this (or any) show. Less explicit in the works displayed are the patterns of policing femininity, queerness, and nationality—which often also intersect with race and with violence.

Still, Artspace’s “Arresting Patterns” and the work from The 15th Annual Summer Apprenticeship Program make important and engaging connections through seriality, language, and confrontation. No matter the age of the work or the artist, the show’s selections feel immediate and challenging.

In continuing the urgent advocacy activism addressing these layered issues, admitting patterns and highlighting repeating acts—of violence, of incarceration, of policing—will remain critical.

Artspace aims to continue the conversation with a free two-day conference on September 12th and 13th at the Yale University Art Gallery. Visit arrestingpatterns.org for registration and more information.

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