Among the recent works by John Outterbridge on view at Art + Practice in Los Angeles are two very different series of modestly-scaled, wall-mounted assemblages, each of which evokes aspects of the African-American experience. One is sculptural in nature, the works being made with a wide assortment of castoff objects; the other is aligned with painting, the pieces consisting both of flat and "stuffed" (puffy) pieces of fabric painted in bright colors. Both series consist of works that appear to have been constructed in a most casual and offhand manner. Although contemplation reveals that formal and conceptual clarity underlies these works, their literal scrappiness and wholly unpretentious (almost Outsider Art) nature is fundamental to … [Read more...]
Njideka Akunyili Crosby on the Rise
If you haven't yet heard the name Njideka Akunyili Crosby, then you haven't been paying attention, as she is a young (32-year-old) Los Angeles-based artist on a meteoric rise and her work is phenomenal--the most jaw-droppingly wonderful and accomplished work I have encountered in an age. That said, I walked right by it at the New Museum's 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience, where both her two paintings on view and I were overwhelmed by the hubbub. Akunyili Crosby has since gone on to have simultaneous solo exhibitions at L.A.'s Hammer Museum and Art + Practice and to win the Studio Museum in Harlem's Wein Prize. As of November 23, 2015, a billboard entitled Before Now After (Mama, Mummy and Manna), which reproduces one of her paintings, … [Read more...]
Mark Bradford: Scorched Earth at the Hammer Museum
In the way that Noah Purifoy's assemblage-based art had its source in the Watts Rebellion of 1965, Mark Bradford's artistic practice can be understood to have had its roots in the backlash after the Rodney King beatings in 1992, which Bradford experienced as a young man working in his mother's beauty shop in South L.A. For a gay, black youth, the police brutality and resulting race riots, which came at a time when he saw the AIDS epidemic running rampant around him, exerted an indelible formative influence. Since 2001, when Bradford emerged as a fully mature artist, his art has addressed injustice to African Americans, gays and women in an extension of the "Identity Politics" of the art of the late '80s and early '90s, but which … [Read more...]