Public Art & New Media Silver Anniversary
Claire Oliver Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by artist Gio Swaby, I Will Blossom Anyway. The exhibition features life-scale textile works including six self-portraits and a grid work of nine silhouettes. This new series explores the concept of dual identities and the cognizance of “other” experienced by immigrants living in a […]
Today, personal narratives are largely communicated, digitally. And a small graduate program at City College in West Harlem impacts these trends by blending movement, photography, printing, spatial mapping, and more to tell meaningful stories across disciplines. A partnership between West Harlem Art Fund and this MFA program makes such stories more accessible. In this way, these […]
1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair announced details of the 2023 annual New York edition, following the notable success of last year’s return to an in-person fair event in Harlem. The 2023 iteration will take place at Malt House in the Manhattanville Factory District, 429 West 127th Street, from Thursday, May 18 through Sunday, May 21, […]
Rose B. Simpson is a mixed-media artist from Santa Clara Pueblo, NM. Her work engages ceramic sculpture, metals, fashion, performance, music, installation, writing, and custom cars. She received an MFA in Ceramics from Rhode Island School of Design in 2011, an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2018, is […]
Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez was born in the small community of Chinchero, Peru. Like many other children, she was responsible for taking care of her family’s flock of sheep. Watching over them in the fields, she spent her time learning to spin and weave with her friends. After becoming the first person from her community to […]
New York, NY… In the exhibition Root of Color, artists showcase the role that color has played in bridging cultures, emotions, and traditions throughout history. For this special show in AHL’s uptown gallery, four artists of Korean and Afro-Latino backgrounds were selected. AHL Foundation, Inc. supports artists of Korean heritage working in the United States […]
In honor of Women’s History Month, we wish to support the women activists that the singer Lizzo honored during the People Choice Award. Tireless advocates that many of us have never heard of but stay true to their mission. We need to get to know them. Amariyanna Copeny, also known as Little Miss Flint: A […]
The New-York Historical Society, the city’s first museum, presents Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated). Walker’s series of 15 prints responds to the two-volume anthology Harper’s Pictorial History of the Great Rebellion first published in 1866. On view February 24 – June 11, 2023 in the Joyce B. Cowin Women’s History Gallery, the acclaimed […]
Kicking off the organization’s 25th anniversary, Savona Bailey-McClain, Executive Director of the West Harlem Art Fund and her organization presented a panel discussion–New Narratives in Museum Collectionsfor Master Drawings New York at the Academy of Arts and Letters on January 22nd. According to Bailey-McClain, “This is our 4th year participating with Master Drawings New York. […]
Taking place across three floors of the museum, this exhibition will encapsulate the full range of Theaster Gates’s artistic activities, featuring artworks produced over the past twenty years and site-specific environments created especially for this presentation. Gates has titled the exhibition “Young Lords and Their Traces” in honor of the radical thinkers who have shaped […]
Albertz Benda is delighted to present Pose, the first New York solo exhibition of work by Brazilian artist Rafael Baron. With this exhibition, Baron will present a new body of large-scale paintings alongside smaller, gouache on paper pieces capturing portraits of people that he comes across on a day-to-day basis in his hometown of Nova […]
New Museum Exhibition — Featuring Contemporary Black Artists In Our Time: Selections from the Singer Collection includes a selection of paintings and works on paper collected by Iris and Adam Singer over the span of 16 years. Anchored by the work of 27 contemporary artists living and working in cities such as London, Beijing, New […]
Rajni Perera was born in Sri Lanka in 1985 and lives and works in Toronto. She explores issues of hybridity, futurity, ancestorship, immigration identity/cultures, monsters and dream worlds. All of these themes marry in a newly objectified realm of mythical symbioses. In her work she seeks to open and reveal the dynamism of the icons […]
For over a decade, Báez has painted transcendent chromatic interplays of abstract gesture and symbolic imagery directly onto found maps and printed materials to disrupt the boundaries they serve to delineate. For her third solo exhibition with the gallery, Báez presents a group of immersive large-scale canvases that continue and deepen her ongoing exploration of […]
Nick Cave (b. 1959, Fulton, Missouri) has become internationally celebrated for his elaborate sculpture and found-object installations, including his iconic Soundsuits, which blend sculpture, fashion, and social performance. Traveling from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Nick Cave: Forothermore is a survey exhibition covering the entire breadth of his career. Featuring sculpture, installation, video, and […]
Cecilia Lamptey-Botchway is a Pan Africanist performance artist, sculptor, textile designer and a painter: Cecilia sees the African metaphysical universe as the inspiration for her paintings. Her art largely reflects her interrogation about Womanhood, Blackness and the Divinity of the African woman! As an active participant at the Ouidah Festivals in the Republic of […]
Foster Sakyiamah (b. 1983, Ghana) is an emerging contemporary artist based in Accra, Ghana. Instantly recognizable for their vibrant color palettes and preponderance of curved linear patterns, Sakyiamah’s paintings are celebrated as exuberant portrayals of the people and culture of Ghana. Sakyiamah’s affinity for patterns comes from his interest in the work of Malian […]
Read a recent article in the New Frame about the artist Chidinma Nnoli. The first paragraph described her work as poetry. And when you view her work, it’s very evident. There’s a quiet beauty to her paintings laced with layers of flowers and layered to provide texture. To see women so dark is very striking. […]
The landmark exhibition Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina opened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on September 9, 2022. Focusing on the work of African American potters in the19th-century American South, in dialogue with contemporary artistic responses, the exhibition presents approximately 50 ceramic objects from Old Edgefield District, South […]
Established as a way to promote textile awareness and encourage creativity, New York Textile Week celebrates its seventh edition this fall. According to Lidewij Edelkoort, founder of New York Textile Month “the world of art and design is confronted with a debilitating lack of knowledge concerning textiles. Architects, artists and industrial designers as well […]
Tunson uses what is in and around him for inspiration: comics, news stories, memories, the natural world, and technology. “The work is just continuous with my life,” he said. But also at his core is a deep reverence for learning and exploration. He taught art at Palmer High School in Colorado Springs for 30 […]
All of the women that Nemakhavhani portrays are bold and defiant—certainly not afraid to occupy a public space. From textile, art direction, illustration and photography, Rendani Nemakhavhani has been stunning us with her sensibility and style. Her illustrations and textiles are remarkable, orginal and punch you with flavor. For years, we have witnessed her portfolio […]
Paper and the pulp-making process is said to have developed in China in the 2nd century A.D. Before that, the Chinese produced ink drawings and paintings on silk. The process of making paper spread from China, through the Middle East, and into Europe by the 13th century. Some of the most beautiful examples of drawing […]
Barbara Jones-Hogu (born Chicago, IL 1938–died Chicago Heights, IL 2017) Painter and printmaker Barbara Jones-Hogu was a founding member of the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists (AfriCOBRA), an artist collective formed in Chicago in 1968. Members of AfriCOBRA visually expressed the central ideas of the Black Power movement—self-determination, unity, and black pride. The group shared […]
Charles Campbell, a visual artist who was born in Jamaica, is the winner of the 2022 Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts VIVA Award, which brings with it a $15,000 grant. Campbell is a painter, sculptor, and performance artist based in Fernwood who has been working in multiple disciplines for some 30 […]
Since the start of the pandemic, only during summer months, the West Harlem Art Fund hosts a residency with artists from NYC and around the country on Governors Island. Visual Muze is a unique storytelling residency and retreat. It provides visual artists, performance artists, multi-media designers, and writers the opportunity to explore narrative forms within […]
Although he produced a number of tapestries and paintings while at Rorke’s Drift, Muafangejo is known almost entirely as a printmaker; his linocuts are also particularly well known. In this respect, Azaria Mbatha (qv.), who favoured the medium, influenced Muafangejo as did many other artists who studied at Rorke’s Drift. In addition, the relative inexpensiveness […]
This new body of work investigates the challenges encountered by Black children as they strive to build their identity. The exhibition brings together paintings featuring both black and white backgrounds, including some of the largest works the artist has ever made. Roberts celebrates the figures’ individuality by placing them in stark monochromatic spaces. Simultaneously powerful […]
Born in Palo Alto California in 1980, Hugo McCloud is one of the most prolific young artists working today. In a career that has now spanned fifteen years, Hugo McCloud’s work has quickly evolved through a process of restless experimentation, bringing inventiveness and fearlessness to the act of making. The artist is engaged in an […]
Barbara Earl Thomas is a Seattle-based award-winning writer and visual artist with a career that spans more than 30 years. Her far-ranging exhibits include The Savannah Contemporary Art Museum and the Seattle and Tacoma Art Museums with solo exhibits at the Meadows Museum in Shreveport, Louisiana and the Evansville Museum of Art and Technology in […]
Johnson Ocheja, born 1994 in Kogi, Nigeria. He currently lives in Cross-River State, Nigeria. He graduated from Kogi State University with a bachelor’s degree in statistics. He is a self-taught artist inspired – as he says – “by my environment, the beautiful and colourful people around me and some of the historical stories I was […]
Berry Campbell is pleased to present its first solo exhibition of work by Nanette Carter (b. 1954) since announcing representation in 2021. Nanette Carter creates collages, constructions, and installations that recall the lineage of African American quilt-making, while drawing on jazz, Japanese prints, Russian Constructivism, Abstract Expressionism, and other sources. She describes herself as […]
Peter Uka: Remembrance is the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York, NY. Born in 1975 in Nigeria’s Benue State and based in Cologne, Germany, Uka paints large-scale portraits and group scenes that draw inspiration from childhood memories, including 70s-era fashion and hairstyles, wallpaper patterns, and dance moves. Elucidating the richness and joyfulness in both […]
Below are the names of Black entertainers that lived in a three block radius in Central Harlem now a historic district. This shows that talent was in abundance in our community. These names are now forgotten. Let’s bring them back by saying their names. It’s quite a list. 1920 Census West 130th Street Brown, Alfred […]
Paula Cooper Gallery is presenting the first all-encompassing exhibition of work by Terry Adkins since announcing representation of the estate in 2021. The exhibition spans three decades of the artist’s career and includes sculpture and video. Beginning in the early 1980s, Adkins produced enigmatic sculpture from salvaged materials imbued with social and historical significance by […]
Quotes by President Ulysses S. Grant “Enfrancishment and equal rights should accompany emancipation”. “Although a soldier by profession, I have never felt any sort of fondness for war, and I have never advocated it, except as a means of peace”. “The great bulk of the legal voters of the South were men who owned no […]
Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art today in conjunction with the US State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs confirms that sculptor Simone Leigh will represent the US at the Fifty-Ninth Venice Biennale, which is to take place April 23–November 27, 2022. Leigh is the first African American woman to receive the honor in the […]
I am examining the relativity of global indigenous geometric patterns, specifically West African Kente schema, as a possible progenitor of modern digital cultures. I see overwhelming similarities in basic constructions and designs of computer processing chips and video games to the geometrical weave of the cloth. The vividly bold colors, precise hard lines, sequential rhythms […]
Last night, a special tour of Faith Ringgold’s retrospective was offered at the New Museum by Artnoir. The works were stunning. Overwhelming at times. Everyone learned something new about Harlem’s Faith Ringgold. We highly recommend that folks see this show. The works inspired by France are worth seeing alone. There are costumes and dolls that were […]
Yesterday was National Quilting Day. And a person that needs a spotlight in the African American community is Harriet Powers. Considered the mother of the African American story quilt tradition, Harriet Powers (1837–1910) was well known when she made these works of art. Born into slavery in Madison County, Georgia, Harriet Powers married her husband Armistead […]
El Museo del Barrio is pleased to present Raphael Montañez Ortiz: A Contextual Retrospective, the first large-scale exhibition since 1988 dedicated to the artist, activist, educator, and founder of El Museo del Barrio. Curated by El […]
On this International Women’s Day, we share that revolutionary artist Noni Olabisi has died. She has created powerful murals in Los Angeles for decades. Noni Olabisi was an artist and muralist with over 25 years experience, receiving many awards in recognition of her talents. Noni was a winner of the coveted California Community Foundation Visual Artist […]
Barkley Hendricks, the late-revolutionary artist known the world over for his bold and captivating portrait paintings, is getting several posthumous exhibitions and a book in the near future. Having started in the 1960s, Hendricks life-size canvases depicted colorful portraits of Black Americans in a way that faithfully reflected the personalities of his subjects. Similar […]
Featuring Annan Affotey, Aplerh-Doku Borlabi, Lord Ohene Okyerebour, Adjei Tawiah and Crystal Yayra Anthony, exhibition 18 (Rising Ghana) is a group presentation of five key emerging contemporary artists. Telling a story of self-expression and community driven support that extends out of Ghanaian domesticity and onto the world stage—the names in this exhibition were brought together in collaboration with […]
Project Backboard is a 501(c)(3) organization whose mission is to renovate public basketball courts and install large scale works of art on the surface in order to strengthen communities, improve park safety, encourage multi-generational play, and inspire people to think more critically and creatively about their environment. St. Nicholas Park, Harlem This basketball court […]
She knew her mind. And what she wanted. Carmen Herrera became very defiant, late in her life. I remembered when I tried to interview her. My Spanish was not that good and she refused to speak to me in English. Only Spanish she told her gallery. I couldn’t believe it. I liked her spirit. My […]
Over a late and brief career, Joseph Elmer Yoakum produced more than 2,000 immersive landscapes that chronicle the terrain of his nomadic youth with bold color and complex detail. Called to art by spiritual means in the last 10 years of his life, Yoakum never formally studied drawing, instead relying on instinct to develop […]
John W. Mosley was a self-taught photojournalist who extensively documented the everyday activities of the African-American community in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for more than 30 years, a period including both World War II and the civil rights movement. His work was published widely in newspapers and magazines including The Philadelphia Tribune, Pittsburgh Courier, and Jet magazine. Mosley […]
This coming Friday, West Harlem Art Fund will moderate a panel discussion on Mexican Muralism and its impact on American art. If you are familiar with the subject, you know that the movement was immortalized by Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Siqueiros. But their reach crossed North America too with several artists of […]
Hugh Hayden’s practice considers the anthropomorphization of the natural world as a visceral lens for exploring the human condition. Hayden transforms familiar objects through a process of selection, carving and juxtaposition to challenge our perceptions of ourselves, others and the environment. Raised in Texas and trained as an architect, his work arises from a […]
WEST HARLEM ART FUND 