GALLERY NEWS

Hyperallergic reviews gallery artist Lavar Munroe's first US museum show, "Journey Elsewhere: Musings from a Boundless Zoo" at the SCAD Museum and the Gutsein Gallery in Savannah, Georgia.

Museum show "She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World," including gallery artist Lalla Essaydi, currently on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, written up in The Washington Post.

'We All We Go't screening at the Santa Fe International New Media Festival, June 12 - 28, 2015.

Gallery artist Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle has just been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and will take her Kentifrica Project to Nigeria where she will collaborate with the University of Lagos to produce a lectures series and a diasporic museum that will travel throughout Lagos.

Her work is currently in a show at the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft.

She was also recently on the cover of Art Ltd.

Lalla Essaydi: "Photographs"
by James Chute, March 29, 2015

San Diego Museum of Art Exhibition Explores Issues Surrounding Role of Women in Arab Culture
by Marissa Cabrera, Peggy Pico, Alison St. John, March 26, 2015

ReOrient yourself
by Miguel Bustamante, March 25, 2015

Armory Week of Art Fairs: Smartest Art I Found
by Douglas Turner, March 13, 2015

A powerful comment on race at Art on Paper's inaugural fair
by Peter Wright, March 12, 2015

Art on Paper Join the Armory Week Fold
by Allison Meier, March 6, 2015

Lalla Essaydi Museum Acquisition

Carol Prusa Museum Acquisition

Young Women Explore the Future at Women's History Event
April 1-7, 2015

The Veiled Feminism Of Moroccan-Born Photographer Lalla Essaydi
By Maillika Rao, February 11, 2015

Still Life as Story: An American master, Scott Fraser brings new meaning to an old tradition
By Rosemary Carstens, December - January, 2015

Scott Fraser

Scott Fraser

Annie Kevans

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle upcoming solo shows

Museum of Art, University of New Hampshire 
September, 2015

Coming to Cantor Arts Center: 12 Artists Dynamically Explore Identity, Narrative, and War in Daily Life
ONLY West Coast venue for the highly acclaimed "She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World." By Susan C. Schena, January 20, 2015

A major new exhibition at the Cantor Arts Center, She Who Tells a Story, presents the pioneering work of 12 leading women photographers from Iran and the Arab world. The artists explore identity, narrative, representation, and war in daily life, inviting a broader understanding of the Middle East than what Westerners glean through media reports.

Moroccan-born Lalla Essaydi, a former painter, uses iconography from 19th-century Orientalist paintings as inspiration to explore her own cultural identity. In the triptych Bullets Revisited #3 (2012), the most expansive work in the exhibition at 5 1/2 x 12 1/2 feet, Essaydi uses calligraphy (a typically male art form) to suggest the complexity of gender roles within Islamic culture. In the triptych, silver and gold bullet casings evoke symbolic violence, referencing her fear about the growing restrictions on women in a new post-revolutionary era that followed demonstrations and protests in the Arab world that began in 2010. Read More

Sneak preview: Upcoming exhibitions at Cantor Arts Center
By Eric Huang, January 21, 2015

“She Who Tells a Story,” on view until May 4, showcases the work of 12 female photographers hailing from Iran and the Arab world; the exhibit intends to provide an alternative view on the issue of representation and identity in the Middle East. There are clear political undertones in the photographers’ work. The range of pieces on display seeks to reconcile the rigidity of Middle Eastern social class structure with the artists’ personal desire to assert their respective identities.

'A Long Hungry Look': Forgotten Gordon Parks Photos Document Segregation
By Randy Kennedy, December 24, 2014

In 1950, Gordon Parks was the only African-American photographer working for Life magazine, a rising star who was gaining the power to call his own shots, and he proposed a cover story both highly political and deeply personal: to return to Fort Scott, Kan., the prairie town where he had grown up, to find his 11 classmates in a segregated middle school. 

The magazine agreed, and in the spring Parks drove back into his hometown for the first time in 23 years, taking, as he wrote later, “a long hungry look” at the red brick school where he had been educated, a school still segregated in 1950. “None of us understood why the first years of our education were separated from those of the white; nor did we bother to ask,” Parks wrote. “The situation existed when we were born. We waded in normal at the tender age of 6 and swam out maladjusted and complexed nine years later.”  
Read More

Fall Arts 2014: Visual Art

"Annie Kevans: Women and the History of Art"

By Jonathan Curiel, September 2, 2014
In the late 1800s, Suzanne Valadon modeled for Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir (she's the focus of Renoir's celebrated Dance at Bougival) and became close to other acclaimed French artists. Although Valadon herself became a well-regarded painter, popular history has generally marginalized her artistic triumphs. British painter Annie Kevans has dug out a long line of female artists who've gotten short shrift, including American painters like Alma Thomas, and given them a reason to be rediscovered in a series that is also a thoughtful feminist critique of art history.

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle’s ‘Say It Isn’t So…” at the Jenkins Johnson Gallery, Feb 20 – April 5, New York

By Saron Obuobi, March 17, 2014
Presented by the Jenkins Johnson Gallery, New York, ‘Say It Isn’t So…’ features the work of contemporary artist Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle. ‘Say It Isn’t So…’ is woven from historical and contemporary narratives that raise questions concerning the collective encounters with the black female body and its relationship to what is perceived exotic. The exhibition features a variety of media, including drawings, paintings, text-based work, audio, and video. These pieces explore personal narratives from the artist intermingled with known and unknown historical figures in relationship to notions and constructions of the black female body as a prototype for both exotic beauty and repulsion. Read More

Essaydi Arrives

By Kenneth Baker, March 15, 2014
Moroccan-born Lalla Essaydi presents an example of someone doing the right stuff at the right time to make her art seem historically inevitable. Her highly produced photographs at Jenkins Johnson revisit with theatrical flair 19th century (male) European painters' Orientalist visions of harems and female submissiveness in the Arab world. Essaydi knows both Arab and Western societies from the inside.

Viewers familiar with Orientalist painting will recognize the barbed pastiche of a sumptuous photograph such as "Bullets Revisited #8" (2012). A closer look discovers disquieting details: All the jewelry the two women in the picture wear and handle, and all the golden tesserae of the mosaics blanketing walls and floor, are shell casings. Essaydi turns the lascivious male gaze once solicited by painted images such as this into a ballistic one, a bitter reproach to Western imperialist incursion and even curiosity. Further, Essaydi has covered the exposed skin of her models - with henna calligraphic script, appropriating an artistic practice traditionally reserved to men. The theatricality of Essaydi's pictures does not count against them because they entail preparations as elaborate as many stage plays.  

Haunted Geographies: The Living Work of Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle

By Nikki Darling, March 12, 2014
Sometimes other people pack your baggage. Artist Kenyatta A.C Hinkle unpacks it. She was the youngest artist included in the 2012 Hammer biennial, Made in LA, and whose practice runs the gamut from performance and video, to writing, painting, and collage.

The Kentifrica Project was an example of this intersect. The work presented at the Hammer was possibly the artist's largest ongoing project where Hinkle's many inter-disciplinary skills came into play, creating a multi-layered project of engagement, bringing in outsiders -- not just as viewers -- but collaborators and participants. Read More.

Investigating Female Identity

The work of the Moroccan contemporary artist Lalla Essaydi (born 1956) can be described as a visual examination of female Muslim identity, an undertaking closely related to her own biography and prior experiences. Especially during her long stay in Saudi Arabia, she came in close touch with traditional Islamic life. Over the course of the past decade, Essaydi acquired international renown for her unique artistic method of covering her models, and sometimes the garments and walls, in layers of hand-painted henna calligraphy, subverting traditional Muslim gender stereotypes by adding the written word.  Read More

By Bonny Zanardi, February 21, 2014
Large-scale photographs by internationally acclaimed artist Lalla Essaydi are on view at Jenkins Johnson Gallery in San Francisco. Read More

Lalla Essaydi’s installation brings sense of female progression to contemporary art world

By Addy Bhasin, February 22, 2014
The storefronts on Sutter Street in San Francisco reflect Western society so well it is almost striking — a cheesy Americana diner, some vaguely neo-impressionist work of the Eiffel Tower in a gallery off of Powell Street, a Starbucks connected to the Sir Francis Drake Hotel. Located just across from the Starbucks and a couple doors down is a gallery with an unusual mounted photograph in its window.

The photograph is of a woman lying on her side in an odalisque position. Her cascading, dark hair frames her tattooed face, and she boldly looks out at the viewer. She is enveloped in what look like gold sequins, glittering in beautiful Near Eastern mosaic-esque patterns like an exquisite kaleidoscope. If strolling down Sutter Street, this would be the window that would attract the pedestrian, forcing him or her to stop walking altogether, glancing into the gallery with curiosity and intrigue.  Read More

Solo Show Pick: Lalla Essaydi: New Beauty

By Danica Willard Sachs, February 24, 2014
Lalla Essaydi’s highly staged tableaux employ the domestic spaces of her native Morocco to challenge the Orientalist imaging of Arab women. New Beauty at Jenkins Johnson Gallery brings together sixteen photographs from the artist’s two most recent series, Harem Revisited and Bullets Revisited, which expand her investigation of the harem as an architectural and social structure of confinement for women in Islamic culture.

Essaydi’s large-format chromogenic prints, all shot in the isolated space of the harem in palaces and homes around Marrakech, are visually alluring. The pictured women glint with gold clothing and jewelry made from bullet casings, or are swathed in intricately adorned fabrics in saturated hues. For the models’ poses and groupings, the artist references an art-historical lineage that includes 19th-century painters Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Jean-Léon Gérôme, and Eugène Delacroix, twisting familiar imagery into disconcerting scenes. Read More

Carrie Mae Weems gives eloquent speech to accept her BET Honors Visual Arts Award

Watch Carrie Mae Weems' lens on life: The visual artist's journey is worth a thousand words.
(click here)

I just want to be remembered as being fair, being honest, being able to tell the truth. That would be enough. 
--Carrie Mae Weems

Dressed for Revolt: A Photographer's Moroccan Portraits Reinstate Women at the Forefront of the Arab Spring

By Jonathan Curiel, February 12, 2014
For followers of women's rights in the Arab world, the headlines of the past few months have been bitterly disappointing. "Women Among the Biggest Losers in Arab Spring," announced one recent news story, while another shouted, "Why does the world ignore violence against Arab women in public spaces?" The question is vexing because of the prominent role that women played in the Arab Spring revolutions that transformed the Middle East. Lalla Essaydi sees those headlines and recoils, but as a prominent artist from the Arab world who now lives in the United States, she can make photos that seem an emphatic antidote to the news from Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen.

The women in Essaydi's panoramas are safe and well-off. No men are ever seen. No violence is ever apparent. But in Essaydi's newest work, on display at San Francisco's Jenkins Johnson Gallery, bullet casings are everywhere. On the walls. On the beds. Even in the clothing the women wear. At first glance, the shells resemble gold and bronze jewels that form beautiful, glistening sheaths. But of course, the shells were made to be fired, to kill. On these women, the shells become a metaphor for an odd new reality in Arab countries. 
Read More

Congratulations to Carrie Mae Weems!

2014 BET Visual Arts Award Honoree

Artist, activist, and 2013 MacArthur Genius Grant winner Carrie Mae Weems is honored by BET for her provocative art, which tackles complex issues of race, gender, and class through video and photography. Along with Weems, this Black History Month, BET also celebrates Nelson Mandela, Aretha Franklin, Berry Gordy, Ice Cube, and Kenneth Chenault. The BET Honors air Monday, February 24 at 9 pm. 

Carrie's work is also on view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, through May 14, and at the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum Series, through June 29. 

Along with the BET Visual Arts Award, she is a recent recipient of: MacArthur Fellowship Award; Lifetime Achievement Award from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation; Gordon Parks Foundation Award; Medal of Arts, USA Department of State; and Keeper of the Flame Award, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. 

Trends: Julia Fullerton-Batten's Korea Series

By Séverine Morel, February 12, 2014
Korea is the latest series of Julia Fullerton-Batten. She became interested in the contrasts and tensions that dominate the country, expressing them through staged portraits of Korean women wearing traditional dress in the heart of their modern, spare cities. It’s a wonderful contrast which the photographer illustrates with formalism and poetry to tell the story of this country and the lives of its delicate citizens in a strict environment. Read More

Karen Jenkins-Johnson showcases artists pushing boundaries of gender and color

By Vicki Larson, February 13, 2014
As her San Francisco gallery marks its 17th year (her New York gallery opened in 2005), Jenkins-Johnson is committed to showcasing female artists who are making cultural statements or who are offering informative views on relevant topics, such as the current show featuring Essaydi's works, "New Beauty." Read More