Experience a dynamic exchange of ideas about art and society.

Founded in 1968, The Studio Museum in Harlem is internationally known for its catalytic role in championing the works of artists of African descent. In a unique institutional collaboration, CMOA [Carnegie Museum of Art] and the Studio Museum present a group exhibition with works by 40 artists, 20 from each of the collections. Responding to a tumultuous and deeply divided moment in our nation’s history, the curators have mined these collections to offer a metaphoric picture of America today. Spanning nearly 100 years—from 1920s photographs by James VanDerZee to recent works by Kerry James Marshall, Ellen Gallagher, and Collier Schorr—20/20 provides a critical opportunity to prompt conversations about the necessity of art during times of social and political transformation.

20/20 draws together works from these important collections in dialogue. The exhibition unfolds through a thematic exploration of the foundations of our national condition, ultimately championing the critical role of art in political and individual expression. The first section of the exhibition, titled “A More Perfect Union,” presents a group of works that consider the formation of our democracy and shifting notions of national identity.

The following two sections of the exhibition—“Working Thought” and “American Landscape”—expand on this by mapping contemporary American experience as a product of historical inheritances. “Working Thought” considers the basis of the national economy and the labor needed to sustain it, with works by Melvin Edwards, David Hammons, Kara Walker, Nari Ward, and others.

In turn, “American Landscape” considers the effects of our national economy on lived experience through artworks that document or express the built environment, past and present. The photographs of LaToya Ruby Frazier and Zoe Strauss record the effects of industry and dispossession on marginalized communities, while more abstract works by Mark Bradford, Abigail DeVille, and Kori Newkirk make use of everyday and found materials to reclaim and reinvent our perspective on natural and urban landscapes.

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20/20: The Studio Museum in Harlem and Carnegie Museum of Art
Jul 22–Dec 31, 2017
Carnegie Museum of Art
Heinz Galleries

Courtesy of: Carnegie Museum of Art

LaToya Ruby Frazier and Nari Ward Among 16 Artists Participating in Creative Time’s Political ‘Pledges of Allegiance’

by Victoria Valentine

Flags have proven to be a powerful medium in contemporary art, from David Hammons’s “African American Flag” (1990), which sold at Phillips auction for more than $2 million, to Dread Scott’s “A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday” (2015) displayed last summer at Jack Shainman Gallery, and Nu Barreto’s “Desunited States of Africa” (2010) flag on view last month at the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

The banners are moving works of art and powerful symbols of cultural pride, protest, and resistance. They also serve as vehicles for engagement. A new Creative Time project capitalizes on these attributes. “Pledges of Allegiance” is a series of flags commissioned from 16 contemporary artists, including LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jayson Musson, and Nari Ward.

“We realized we needed a space to resist that was defined not in opposition to a symbol, but in support of one, and so we created a permanent space. The flag seemed an ideal form to build that space around both practically and symbolically,” said Nato Thompson, artistic director of Creative Time.

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Courtesy of: Culture Type