Long Live the New!

January 23, 2018 David Mabb

The installation Long Live the New! Morris & Co. Hand Printed Wallpapers and K. Malevich’s Suprematism, Thirty Four Drawings, including covers, addendum and afterword is made from a combination of two books: a Morris & Co. wood block printed wallpaper pattern book from the 1970s containing 45 sample wallpaper designs by William Morris, the 19th Century English wallpaper, textile and book designer, poet, novelist and Communist; and the Russian artist and pioneer of abstraction Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism, Thirty Four Drawings, published in 1920.

Inviting One’s Self Into the Future: Two Exhibitions

January 12, 2018 Georgia Blank

We are born. It should be a start, but it is in fact a non-start; for we almost immediately have our full agency and autonomy as human beings robbed from us. We spend a lifetime trying to grasp it back from beneath a growing pile of rubble.

Rubble is literally at the center of Ilya Kabakov’s Labyrinth (My Mother’s Album). A large installation among many included in the Tate Modern’s exhibition of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s work, it is a spiral of long hallways reminiscent of Soviet era communal apartment buildings.

Your Job is to Tell Your Story

July 28, 2017 Caliban's Revenge

Caryolyn Mims Lawrence, Black Children Keep Your Spirits Free, 1972. — Caryolyn Mims Lawrence, *Black Children Keep Your Spirits Free*, 1972.

In 1968, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King was assassinated. In the immediate aftermath, a wave of riots broke across America. Known as the Holy Week Uprising, this was a largely spontaneous outpouring of rage and sorrow. Far from the Movement collapsing, it marched forward with renewed fury and determination. To paraphrase Stokely Carmichael, what the crowds had started saying was “Black Power”, and they were to keep on saying it. In the midst of this ferment, black artists and activists searched for new answers to the questions that cut across the African-American experience.

West Aleppo

October 24, 2016 Nicholas Avedisian-Cohen

This group of paintings has a non-linear connection to events in Syria. I started using this particular form – oil on large wood panels – when Syria was still a relatively tranquil country. None of the iconography I arrived at through shifting oil and pigment presaged, referenced or interpreted any of the digital images that have found their way to comfortably horrified audiences in the West. Yet after five years of following the Syrian nightmare from afar, I cannot help but see Syrian tropes in all of these paintings...

Mary Perry Stone: Cold War Social Protest Artist

July 29, 2016 Mary Perry Stone

Slaves (Slave Labor then and now), oil 1993 4'4"x 9'. — *Slaves (Slave Labor then and now),* oil 1993 4'4"x 9'.

If you wanted to understand my mother’s commitment to social change, I would start out with her belief, “We don’t become who we are in a vacuum; we are shaped by those around us and our experiences and time.” Born in 1909, Mary Perry Stone grew up in a family of seven in the small town of Jamestown, Rhode Island; she described her childhood as happy and developed a love of art from an early age.

When she was fifteen years old she worked for a summer for a very wealthy family in Newport, Rhode Island who said if she worked for them at their winter home in New York City, she could take art classes at the Art Students League. While the Art Students League experience made her want to continue to study art in New York City, she found the wealthy family shallow and backbiting; the person she admired most was the family’s kind chaperone and cook who had helped her.

Art For the People's Sake

February 25, 2016 Emory Douglas, Patrice K. Armstead, Renee McKenzie, Ewuare X. Osayande, James Dupree and Yvonne King

On January 8th, 9th and 10th, hundreds of activists, scholars, radicals and revolutionaries gathered in Philadelphia for the Black Radical Tradition conference at Temple University. The conference was a success. Featuring Angela Davis, Robin D.G. Kelley, Vijay Prashad, Charlene Carruthers, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Glen Ford, a call-in from Mumia Abu-Jamal, and many others, the conference interjected into the current moment of Black struggle in the United States a particular reminder of the rich and varied interaction between socialist and anti-capitalist ideas and the goal of Black liberation.

Corpocracy: Engaged Art In Practice

January 4, 2016 Paul Mullan

Steve LambertCapitalism Works For Me! True/False (2011)Aluminum and electrical9 x 20 x 7 feet — Steve Lambert
*Capitalism Works For Me! True/False* (2011)
Aluminum and electrical
9 x 20 x 7 feet

"Corpocracy,” currently at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston, provides another opportunity to reexamine important questions of a genuinely militant and engaged art practice. The show features political, mostly contemporary work by artists such as Michael D'Antuono, Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung, Packard Jennings, Eugenio Merino, Yoshua Okón, Stephanie Syjuco, and Judi Werthein. One arts collective is featured as well: the Beehive Design Collective.

Modeled on retro, aluminum signage, with chasing lights that flicker on and off in different patterns, Steve Lambert’s Capitalism Works For Me! True/False (2011) spells out the work’s exclamatory title...