Sana Musasama @ Eric Firestone Gallery, NYC - "Raised Earth" Exhibition

Sana Musasama: Raised Earth

Eric Firestone Gallery, New York

September 5 – October 18, 2025

Sana Musasama in her studio, 2023

Photograph by Grace Roselli, Pandora’s BoxX Project

Sana Musasama

House Series #17, 2023

Glazed earthenware, 25 x 16 x 11 in.

© Sana Musasama, courtesy Eric Firestone Gallery

Eric Firestone Gallery presents its first solo exhibition of the internationally recognized ceramic artist Sana Musasama. The exhibition is a dynamic installation of Musasama’s formative House series: vertically stacked ceramic sculptures, like abstracted small-scale temples, exploring multicultural connections to home and community. The work is inspired by the artist’s time living in adobe houses in West Africa in the mid-1970s, her recurrent travel to Cambodia, and time spent in the American West.

The slab-formed ceramics are multi-planar, touched and textured structures with deep color areas and repeated oval shapes that can be read variously as eyes, leaves, or vaginal forms. They are etched with intricate sgraffito marks suggesting body adornment, weavings, flora, and fauna. Elements extend from the planes: rings suggesting jewelry and grids like open baskets or seed pods. In her House series, Sana Musasama uses both earthenware and stoneware and accomplishes her vivid colors through various ceramic glazes, often finishing her works with salt or soda firing to create exquisite surfaces that contrast with the red-brown clay she prefers.

Sana Musasama

Tuscarona (House Series #4), 1983-1984

Glazed earthenware, 64 x 14 x 10 in.

© Sana Musasama, courtesy Eric Firestone Gallery

Sana Musasama first began her House series in the late 1970s, and they were the subject of a 1985 exhibition at the Studio Museum, following her 1983–84 residency with the museum. She decided to revisit these works 45 years later, creating what she called “siblings” to the original works in response to the isolation of 2020. Over the past two years, the artist has worked across the globe to create about twenty significant new House sculptures. This will be the first time work from the two periods are joined into a solo, survey exhibition.

Sana Musasama (b. 1951, New York, NY) is a Black activist feminist artist and global citizen, whose time spent living with women and girls in village societies in Cambodia, South America, Asia, and West Africa has shaped her artwork, developed alongside her humanitarian work. She defines her practice through the motto "Inspire, Commit, Act."

Sana Musasama grew up in St. Albans, Queens, and continues to live and work in her childhood home. She received her BA from City College, City University of New York in 1974, and her MFA from Alfred University in 1987. Musasama’s first formative trip was to Sierra Leone in the 1970s, where she lived amongst the Mende people. Musasama notes that traveling around the world centered and grounded her, making her understand the differences between what she grew up with, and how others around the world grew up and lived.

During her travels, which often involved living in village societies, she would first get to know people and the culture by going to markets, which were dominated by women. Sana Musasama came to understand how women look out for other women. Young girls—the daughters of these women—often became her guides, as she learned the language, how to shop, prepare food, and use tools.

She also came to appreciate how clay is everywhere, and that “it comes in as many different colors as we do.” The landscape and the decorative arts were inspirations for her work. The patterns of rice paddies in Vietnam found their way onto the surfaces of her ceramics, as did the sgraffito lines of the temples of Burma. She understood that baskets—which were often lined with clay or mud—were the origins of pottery, and incorporated the patterns of their weaving. Cinnamon plants sold on the side of the road informed leaf patterns. The sight of rows of cabbages inspired her to experiment with walls of clay conveying compression. Abstract signs and symbols were everywhere: in adornment practices, markings of identity, and clothing that signified specific societies. Sana Musasama combined these visual forms with her expertise in ceramics.

Sana Musasama recognized that her travels were joyous but also could be uncomfortable, scary, and dangerous, and these feelings were embedded into the forms. Her small-scale temples explore healing from multi-generational trauma through the touch of clay.

Through an article in Glamour in 2006, Sana Musasama learned about the Somaly Mam Foundation, which rescued teenage girls and young women who were victims of sex trafficking. She traveled to Cambodia to volunteer for a program that used artmaking and craftwork as a healing modality from this trauma. After her first experience, she knew that she would spend the rest of her life working with these Cambodian girls on beading and textiles. She developed the entrepreneurial “Apron Project” to give girls who lacked education an extra way to make income through their creations. On her first trip to Cambodia, Sana Musasama was dismayed to realize she had never been taught about the Cambodian genocide. She began to make ceramic work reflecting the images and remains she saw.

Musasama’s self-stated goal is to create art “for us,” centering her experience as a Black woman, to tell cultural and historical stories which are often suppressed. Her work often moves past its racist, historical narrative. They speak of cultural pride and self love. From early in her career, Sana Musasama has been committed to spaces that highlight Black artists and celebrate multiculturalism within New York. In addition to the Studio Museum, she had a residency and exhibitions at the Jamaica Arts Center (where she has taught since 2008), and showed at Cinque Gallery in the 1980s.

Sana Musasama is the recipient of an Anonymous Was a Woman Grant (2002) and the Outstanding Achievement Award (2018) from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) for her years of teaching and her humanitarian work with victims of sex trafficking in Cambodia. In 2024 she was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY, and became the first recipient of the NCECA Innovator Award. Musasama's work is held in the collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH; the Museum of Art and Design, New York; Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; Mint Museum of Craft and Design, Charlotte, NC; the European Ceramic Center in Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands; the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York.

Eric Firestone Gallery began working with Sana Musasama in 2022, presenting an in-depth solo installation of her work at the 2023 New York edition of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair. Over the past two years, Sana Musasama has participated in a series of residency programs: the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Edgecomb, ME; Township10, Marshall, NC; The New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, NY; Penland School of Craft, Mitchell County, NC; the Archie Bray Foundation, Helena, MT; and most recently the Shangyu Celadon Modern International Ceramic Center in Zhejiang Province, China.

Her work will be included in the exhibitions Re-Union: Syd Carpenter, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Judy Moonelis, Sana Musasama, and Winnie Owens Hart at the Frances M. Maguire Art Museum and Clay Has Memory: Generational Knowledge from Africa at the Princeton University Art Museum, both opening in 2026.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Patricia Spears Jones.

ERIC FIRESTONE GALLERY

40 Great Jones Street, New York, NY 10012

www.ericfirestonegallery.com

Yero Adugna Eticha: BLACK IN BERLIN @ f3 – freiraum für fotografie, Berlin

Yero Adugna Eticha

BLACK IN BERLIN

f³ – freiraum für fotografie, Berlin

February 23 – March 10, 2024

YERO ADUGNA ETICHA

AYENACHEW SARAH KLAMANDT & JIREGNA TADESE

© Yero Adugna Eticha

YERO ADUGNA ETICHA

VERTEL JACKSON

© Yero Adugna Eticha

YERO ADUGNA ETICHA

ARSENE TSOKENG

© Yero Adugna Eticha

YERO ADUGNA ETICHA

HANNAH MARC 

© Yero Adugna Eticha

For photographer Yero Adugna Eticha, it all began with the protests against the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement that grew out of them in 2020. People around the world showed solidarity and demonstrated against racism and discrimination. Yero Adugna Eticha decided to take action himself. On the streets of Berlin, he distributed flyers to Black people asking them to have their picture taken with him. Over the years, he took 500 portraits of Afro-Black Germans and the diaspora in Berlin. During the encounters, he learned everyday and moving details from their lives, which he recorded. Yero Adugna Eticha works transdisciplinary on the levels of image and sound. BLACK IN BERLIN is a unique archive that provides an insight into the multifaceted realities of Black people's lives in a white majority society.

At the center of the portrait work is Yero Adugna Eticha’s examination of the culture and history of colonialism. 

"Who we are: An integral part of this city, people of different professions and backgrounds, different dreams, embodiments of Black identity. I dream of a Berlin in which the facet of every Black face is celebrated." – Yero Adugna Eticha

On the occasion of Black History Month, f³ – freiraum für fotografie presents BLACK IN BERLIN, the first solo exhibition by the Ethiopian-born Yero Adugna Eticha, who lives and works as a photographer in Berlin. At the same time, the photo book BLACK IN BERLIN is published by Distanz Verlag.

Yero Adugna Eticha

BLACK IN BERLIN

Edited by Matthias Kliefoth. 

German/English, 2024, 152 pages,

120 b/w illustrations, hardcover 24 x 29 cm

Distanz Verlag, 1924

YERO ADUGNA ETICHA is a photographer from Oromia/Ethiopia who lives in Berlin and dedicates his work to the stories, perspectives and visions of Afro- and Black Germans. Since graduating from the Ostkreuz School of Photography, he has worked on various photography projects, including "Atmospheres in the Urban Anthropocene" (2019) as well as "The Ethiopian Project" (2020) and "Black in Berlin Project". His work was part of the Boros Foundation group exhibition in the "Studio Berlin" (Berghain). Yero Adugna Eticha teaches at the Ale School of Fine Arts Addis Ababa and has been a member of the BLACK DADS GERMANY initiative since 2021.

The exhibition was curated by Miriam Zlobinski.

Upcoming exhibition at f³ – freiraum für fotografie, Berlin : A DAY OFF. An Exhibition of the F.C. Gundlach Foundation, March 15 – June 2, 2024

f³ – freiraum für fotografie 

Waldemarstraße 17 | 10179 Berlin

fhochdrei.org

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 

February 25 – July 28, 2024 

William Henry Johnson (American, 1901–1970) 

Woman in Blue, c. 1943 

Oil on burlap. Framed: 35 × 27 in. (88.9 × 68.6 cm) 

Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, 

Permanent Loan from the National Collection of Fine Art, 1969.013. 

Courtesy Clark Atlanta University Art Museum 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents the groundbreaking exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism. Through some 160 works, it explores the comprehensive and far-reaching ways in which Black artists portrayed everyday modern life in the new Black cities that took shape in the 1920s–40s in New York City’s Harlem and Chicago’s South Side and nationwide in the early decades of the Great Migration when millions of African Americans began to move away from the segregated rural South. The first survey of the subject in New York City since 1987, the exhibition establishes the Harlem Renaissance as the first African American–led movement of international modern art and situates Black artists and their radically new portrayals of the modern Black subject as central to our understanding of international modern art and modern life.   

A significant percentage of the paintings, sculpture, and works on paper on view in the exhibition come from the extensive collections of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), including Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Fisk University Galleries, Hampton University Art Museum, and Howard University Gallery of Art. Other major lenders include the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. The exhibition also includes loans from significant private collections and European museums.

“This landmark exhibition reframes the Harlem Renaissance, cementing its place as the first African American–led movement of international modern art,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and CEO. “Through compelling portraits, vibrant city scenes, history paintings, depictions of early mass protests and activism, and dynamic portrayals of night life created by leading artists of the time, the exhibition boldly underscores the movement’s pivotal role in shaping the portrayal of the modern Black subject—and indeed the very fabric of early 20th-century modern art.”

“We are very pleased to present this wide-ranging exhibition that establishes the New Negro cohort of African American artists and their allies—now known as the Harlem Renaissance—at the vanguard of the portrayal of modern Black life and culture in Harlem and other new Black cities nationwide at a time of rapid expansion in the first decades of the Great Migration,” added Denise Murrell, The Met’s Merryl H. and James S. Tisch Curator at Large. “Many New Negro artists spent extended periods abroad and joined the multiethnic artistic circles in Paris, London, and Northern Europe that shaped the development of international modern art. The exhibition underscores the essential role of the Harlem Renaissance and its radically new modes of portraying the modern Black subject as central to the development of transatlantic modern art.”

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism opens with galleries that explore the cultural philosophy that gave shape to the New Negro movement of art and literature, as the period was known at inception, using a term defined and popularized by the movement’s founding philosopher, Howard University professor Alain Locke, in dialogue and debate with W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles S. Johnson, and influential literary and music figures including Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and James Weldon Johnson. At the core of the exhibition are the artists who shared a commitment to depicting the modern Black subject in a radically modern way and to refusing the prevailing racist stereotypes. 

Although united in their shared objective to portray all aspects of modern Black life and culture, individual New Negro artists developed widely varied representational styles, ranging from an engagement with African and Egyptian aesthetics and European avant-garde pictorial strategies to a commitment to classicized academic tradition. Featured artists include Charles Alston, Aaron Douglas, Meta Warrick Fuller, Palmer Hayden, Bert Hurley, William H. Johnson, Archibald Motley, Jr., Winold Reiss, Augusta Savage, James Van Der Zee, and Laura Wheeler Waring.  

The exhibition continues with galleries devoted to genre scenes and portraiture that capture all aspects of Black city life in the 1920s–40s as seen in vibrant paintings, sculpture, and film projections as well as photography from The Met’s recently acquired James Van Der Zee Archive and artists’ cover illustrations for books and periodicals, including the NAACP’s Crisis and the National Urban League’s Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. Monumentally scaled allegorical history paintings and portraits of luminaries will provide compelling vista views.

Galleries featuring paintings by New Negro artists who lived and worked in Europe during extended periods of expatriation will present their work in direct juxtaposition with portrayals of the international African diaspora by Black and white European artists including Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, and Pablo Picasso, as well as Germaine Casse, Kees van Dongen, Jacob Epstein, and Ronald Moody.

The New Negro era’s fraught approach to social issues including queer identity, colorism and class tensions, and interracial relations will be the subject of a gallery featuring paintings, ephemera, and photography animated by film clips. The exhibition concludes with an artist-as-activist gallery spotlighting artists’ treatment of social justice issues as the New Negro era comes to a close on the cusp of the 1950s civil rights movement. A coda features Romare Bearden’s 15-foot-wide series of collages, The Block (1970), from The Met collection, which evokes a town house row in mid-century Harlem and that sustains the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance.

In preparation for the exhibition, The Met undertook extensive archival research, original photography, technical imaging, and conservation treatment of important but seldom seen works of art. For example, archival research by the curatorial team resulted in the first-ever dating of two Laura Wheeler Waring portraits from her family’s collections: Girl with Pomegranate (ca. 1940) and Girl in Pink Dress (ca. 1927). 

The Met has an extended history of collecting and displaying works by artists active during the Harlem Renaissance. In the 1940s, the Museum acquired several early works by gift from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), such as Jacob Lawrence’s Pool Parlor (1942) and Samuel Joseph Brown, Jr.’s Self-Portrait (ca. 1941). In 1969, the Museum presented the exhibition “Harlem on My Mind”: The Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968, which was met with great controversy for excluding works of painting and sculpture by Black artists and instead presenting a social narrative of Harlem told through reproductions of newspaper clippings and photographs of prominent leaders and anonymous Harlem residents—in large-scale dioramas more similar to ethnographic or natural history museum displays than to art museum galleries. For the nearly 50 years since that exhibition, The Met has expanded its holdings of works produced during the Harlem Renaissance—notably in 2021 with the establishment of the James Van Der Zee Archive in partnership with the Studio Museum in Harlem—and through the acquisition of paintings including by Aaron Douglas, Elizabeth Catlett, and Charles Alston it continues to be an area of focus. The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism will provide an art and artist centered celebration and investigation into the Harlem Renaissance as a trailblazing, pivotal period within the art of the 20th century. 

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism is organized by The Met’s Denise Murrell, PhD, Merryl H. and James S. Tisch Curator at Large, Office of the Director, in consultation with an advisory committee of leading scholars.

A fully illustrated scholarly catalogue on the vibrant history of the Harlem Renaissance accompanies the exhibition. It features essays that explore how the flow of ideas through Black artistic communities on both sides of the Atlantic contributed to international conversations around art, race, and identity while helping to define our notion of modernism. The catalogue is published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press. 

The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 999

www.metmuseum.org

Amy Sherald @ Hauser & Wirth London - The World We Make

Amy Sherald. The World We Make

Hauser & Wirth London

12 October - 23 December 2022

Amy Sherald

For love, and for country, 2022

Oil on linen, 312.4 × 236.2 cm / 123 × 93 in

© Amy Sherald

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Joseph Hyde

Amy Sherald, one of the defining contemporary portraitists in the United States, unveils a suite of new paintings in a major exhibition at Hauser & Wirth London, marking the artist’s first solo show in Europe. Featuring a range of small-scale and monumental portraits across both the gallery’s London spaces this presentation is the artist’s largest to date with Hauser & Wirth. Amy Sherald is acclaimed for her paintings of Black Americans that have become landmarks in the grand tradition of social portraiture – a tradition that for too long excluded the Black men, women, families and artists whose lives have been inextricable from public and politicised narratives. As Amy Sherald says, ‘sharing these paintings in Europe is an opportunity for me to reflect on how the tradition of portraiture finds continuity as one of several lineages alive in my work.’ 

Amy Sherald humanises the Black experience by depicting her subjects in both historically recognisable and everyday settings, at once immortalising them and reinserting them into the art historical canon. In this new body of work, she continues this practice while confronting the Western canon through allusions to significant historic works or images. This includes the painting ‘For love, and for country’ (2022), a recreation of the iconic photograph ‘V-J Day in Times Square’ (1945) by Alfred Eisenstaedt showing a US Navy sailor kissing a woman in Times Square, New York City as Imperial Japan surrendered in the Second World War. The work deals with the rejection of queer rights to equal participation in public space, as Amy Sherald replaces the white heterosexual couple with a Black male couple in sailor-esque clothing, reminding us of the discrimination against nonheterosexual people within the US military in recent history. The photograph prompted Amy Sherald to think of the Black soldiers who returned from the war, still facing persistent inequities, and what it would mean to broach the iconic pose through another understanding of masculinity. Amy Sherald hopes to offer the viewer a reflection of themselves and the complexities of their interior lives, void of the constructs of race, gender, religion and preconceived notions.

This approach is also exemplified in the painting ‘As soft as she is…’ (2022) which references Giorgio de Chirico’s ‘Lady in Leopard Coat’ (1940), a painting of his wife, Isobella, who is positioned in a three-quarter pose and looks submissively at the viewer. Instead, Amy Sherald challenges de Chirico’s male gaze by depicting a Black female figure in a frontal and confident stance, wearing a similar animal skin coat and looking just beyond the viewer’s gaze, unwatched. A monumental work entitled ‘A God Blessed Land (Empire of Dirt)’ (2022) depicts a man proudly atop his tractor and references traditional farm paintings from the 19th Century which reinforced notions of American identity. Here, Amy Sherald reflects on the history of agriculture in art as well as ideas around land ownership and systematic land loss. 

In this exhibition, Amy Sherald plays with traditional American symbology through the portrayal of vehicles such as motorbikes and tractors to engage with the currents of masculinity that underlie the work. As Amy Sherald says, ‘The tractor and motorbike paintings explore different expressions of self-sovereignty in our communities, and how these expressions might carry into the future. Vehicles become a literal metaphor here for forward momentum, for movement and potential movement’. In line with this sentiment, Amy Sherald is interested in the idea articulated by artist Alice Neel that ‘art is two things: a search for a road and a search for freedom’. In a large-scale diptych over 3-metres tall entitled ‘Deliverance’ (2022), inspired by the bike culture that is local to Baltimore in Maryland where Amy Sherald has lived, the artist reflects on the sense of freedom that is part of riding. This work shows two bikers in mid-air, as if suspended in time, in a space free from oppression. For Amy Sherald, the imminent danger of riding and anticipation of death contained in this moment offers a reflection on the ultimate source of temporality. 

Amy Sherald

To tell her story you must walk in her shoes, 2022

Oil on linen, 137.2 × 109.2 cm / 54 × 43 in

© Amy Sherald

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Joseph Hyde

Amy Sherald’s portraits are large in scale but intimate in effect, capturing the ordinary likeness and extraordinary essence of all her subjects while simultaneously detaching them from everyday reality with their bold block colour backgrounds. Despite varying contexts, clothing, expression and positions, the individuals portrayed maintain a persistent sense of privacy and mystery. Perfectly encapsulating Amy Sherald’s desire to draw the viewers’ attention to the sitters’ interior life, hopes and dreams, ‘To tell her story, you must walk in her shoes’ (2022) depicts a female figure against a rich purple background with knitted legs in motion. While her subjects are always African-American, Amy Sherald continues to render their skin-tone exclusively in grisaille – an absence of colour that directly challenges perceptions of Black identity.

Amy Sherald

Kingdom, 2022

Oil on linen, 297.2 × 233.7 cm / 117 × 92 in

© Amy Sherald

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Joseph Hyde

Amy Sherald foregrounds the idea that Black life and identity are not solely tethered to grappling publicly with social issues and that resistance also lies in an expressive vision of self-sovereignty in the world. Amy Sherald says, ‘the works reflect a desire to record life as I see it and as I feel it. My eyes search for people who are and who have the kind of light that provides the present and the future with hope.’ The painting ‘Kingdom’ (2022), showing a young child at the top of a slide, both asks us to look positively at future generations whilst reminding us of the transient nature of childhood and the vulnerabilities inherent to it. The title of the exhibition, ‘The World We Make’, is a meditation on, as Amy Sherald says, the fact that ‘as we walk beyond what we have been living through, we have a world to remake’, a message that at once contains hope, while suggesting there is work to be done.

Amy Sherald

The World We Make

Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 2022

The first widely available monograph on Amy Sherald accompanies this exhibition, published by Hauser & Wirth Publishers. Newly commissioned texts include an art historical analysis of Amy Sherald’s work by Jenni Sorkin, a meditation on the poetics of the Black ordinary by cultural scholar Kevin Quashie and a conversation between Amy Sherald and author Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Amy Sherald has recently invested $1 million to the University of Louisville to fund the Brandeis Law School’s Breonna Taylor Legacy Fellowship and the Breonna Taylor Legacy Scholarship for undergraduates, a gift made possible by the sale of Amy Sherald’s portrait of Breonna Taylor made in 2020 to the Ford Foundation and the Hearthland Foundation. This donation will allow the trust to run this scholarship programme indefinitely. 

HAUSER & WIRTH

23 Savile Row, London W1S 2ET

www.hauserwirth.com

Related Post:

Amy Sherald: The Great American Fact , Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles , 20 March – 6 June 2021

The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion @ Saatchi Gallery, London - Curated by Antwaun Sargent

The New Black Vanguard: 

Photography between Art and Fashion

Curated by Antwaun Sargent

Saatchi Gallery, London

28 October 2022 – 22 January 2023

TYLER MITCHELL

Untitled (Hijab Couture), New York, 2019

From The New Black Vanguard (Aperture, 2019)

© Tyler Mitchell

DANA SCRUGGS

Fire on the Beach, 2019

From The New Black Vanguard (Aperture, 2019)

© Dana Scruggs

JAMAL NXEDLANA

Johannesburg, 2019

From The New Black Vanguard (Aperture, 2019)

© Jamal Nxedlana

Saatchi Gallery presents The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion, a ground breaking exhibition featuring 15 international Black photographers contributing to a new vision of the Black figure and reframing representation in art and fashion. This exhibition is a celebration of Black creativity both in-front of and behind the camera. Featured works include Black stylists, models, make-up artists and creative directors who are bringing a radical new set of references and experiences to image making. This exhibition is organized by Aperture.

The New Black Vanguard is curated by American writer and critic Antwaun Sargent who explores a new aesthetic of Black portraiture while examining the cross-pollination between art, fashion, and culture in the making of images.

Antwaun Sargent adds, "This exhibition is an exploration of this generation's Black image makers who are bringing fresh perspective to photography. Image by image, they have created a loose global network around their art that powerfully centres identity, community and desire. The artists in this show profoundly reanimate the possibilities of contemporary photography."

Featured Photographers: Campbell Addy, Quil Lemons, Daniel Obasi, Arielle Bobb-Willis, Namsa Leuba, Ruth Ossai, Micaiah Carter, Renell Medrano, Adrienne Raquel, Awol Erizku, Tyler Mitchell, Dana Scruggs, Nadine Ijewere, Jamal Nxedlana, Stephen Tayo.

NADINE IJEWERE

Untitled, 2018

From The New Black Vanguard (Aperture, 2019)

© Nadine Ijewere, for Garage magazine

“The New Black Vanguard means a lot to me. It’s an important milestone in history where the work of young black artists have been curated beautifully and published in a book. It’s a dream for this show to be exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery in London. This represents progress and more boundaries being removed. London is my home, I still remember school trips to the Saatchi! Now we are here, together, telling our stories!”– Nadine Ijewere, Photographer

CAMPBELL ADDY

Adut Akech, 2019

From The New Black Vanguard (Aperture, 2019)

© Campbell Addy

“Many moons ago, as a newly graduated student, Antwaun Sargent came to me to talk about the experiences in the industry and what's needed. Speaking about the book he hopes to create - I implored him and said "if only I had seen a book like that when I was younger, a project of profound joy and happiness, that showcased Blackness in its variety in visual media. Maybe then it wouldn't have been such a struggle for me to just imagine myself as one of those artists." Now seeing what The New Black Vanguard has done, and it's evolution through many cities, brings me so much happiness. As I know there is a young creative from a similar background to that of the exhibiting artists that is going to feel seen and feel acknowledged. Who may also feel challenged to create work! So it brings me profound joy and immense pride, that it is also going to be in London – in the same city that Antwaun and I met to talk about said book – many, many years ago. This moment in itself feels incredibly full circle.” – Campbell Addy, Photographer

The New Black Vanguard presents artists whose vibrant portraits and conceptual images fuse the genres of art and fashion photography in ways that break down long-established boundaries. Their work has been widely presented in traditional lifestyle magazines, ad campaigns, and museums, as well as on thier individual social media channels; infusing the contemporary visual vocabulary around beauty and the body with new vitality and substance.

The images open up conversations around the representation of the Black body and Black lives as subject matter. Collectively, the works celebrate Black creativity. Seeking to challenge the idea that Blackness is homogenous, the works serve as a form of visual activism delivered by emerging talents who are creating photography in vastly different contexts — be it in New York or Johannesburg, Lagos or London. The results — often made in collaboration with Black stylists and fashion designers — present new perspectives on the medium of photography and the notions of race, beauty, gender and power.

This exhibition includes selected works from these ground breaking contemporary photographers, as well as a salon wall presentation of images created by other young Black photographers contributing to this movement. Vitrines of publications, past and present, contextualise these images and chart the history of inclusion, and exclusion, in the creation of the Black commercial image. The exhibition proposes a brilliantly re-envisioned future.

SAATCHI GALLERY

Duke of York's HQ, King's Rd, Chelsea, London SW3 4RY

www.saatchigallery.com

Deana Lawson @ High Museum of Art, Atlanta

Deana Lawson

High Museum of Art, Atlanta

October 7, 2022 — February 19, 2023

Deana Lawson (American, born 1979)

Hair Advertisement, 2005

Pigment print

Courtesy the artist; Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; 

and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

© Deana Lawson

Deana Lawson (American, born 1979)

Coulson Family, 2008

Pigment print

Courtesy the artist; Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; 

and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

© Deana Lawson

The High Museum of Art presents the first museum survey dedicated to DEANA LAWSON, who is known for investigating and challenging conventional representations of Black identities and bodies through her photographs. Co-organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston and MoMA PS1, “Deana Lawson” features nearly 60 works made over the past two decades that evoke a range of histories and photographic styles, including family albums, studio portraiture and staged tableaux, and employ documentary pictures and appropriated images.

“Lawson’s works, which are complex not only in their composition but also in the emotions they evoke, challenge us to think critically about Black representation and confront our perceptions of Black identity,” said Rand Suffolk, Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr., director of the High. “Her photographs open important dialogues, and we look forward to bringing them to Atlanta and sharing them with our audience.”

In Deana Lawson’s highly staged tableaux, individuals, couples and families are pictured in intimate domestic spaces and public settings. As they depict these intimate scenes, they also channel broader ideas about individual and social histories, sexuality and spiritual beliefs. Lawson’s practice is global in scope, as she creates her images throughout the African diaspora in locations as varied as Brooklyn, Haiti, Jamaica, Ethiopia, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Southern United States. This broad geographical range points to the artist’s interest in a collective memory of shared experiences and various cultural histories of the past.

Deana Lawson also uses photography to challenge assumptions about the facts the medium purports to deliver. She carefully composes each scene but does not always disclose details about how she has created them, or even where the photographs were taken. In some cases, she works with found images that depict people she does not know. Her tableaux tend to be composed of people she encounters on her travels rather than family, friends or acquaintances. Despite what certain pictures may suggest, some of the artist’s subjects may not have met before the shoot.

Deana Lawson (American, born 1979)

Nation, 2018

Pigment print and collaged photograph

Courtesy the artist; Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; 

and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

© Deana Lawson

Deana Lawson (American, born 1979)

Black Gold (“Earth turns to gold, in the hands of the wise,” Rumi), 2021

Pigment print with embedded hologram

Courtesy the artist; Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; 

and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

© Deana Lawson

“Lawson is a singular voice in contemporary photography who causes us to question our assumptions about the medium’s relationship to the real,” said Gregory Harris, the High’s Donald and Marilyn Keough Family curator of photography. “Though her photographs appear to be drawn from the happenstance of everyday life, they are rigorously orchestrated portals to a world of Deana’s creation that nevertheless offers deep insight into the lived experience of people across the diaspora.”

The exhibition is arranged chronologically according to when the photographs were created, with themes of familial bonds, the female figure and the allure of popular media images recurring throughout.

DEANA LAWSON (American, born 1979) lives and works in New York and Los Angeles. She received her B.F.A. from Pennsylvania State University (2001) and her M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design (2004). She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2013), an Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship Grant (2008-2009), and a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant (2006), among others. In 2020, she was selected for the Hugo Boss Prize, the first photographer to receive the award in recognition of achievement in contemporary art. She is also the inaugural Dorothy Krauklis ’78 Professor of Visual Arts at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts.

Exhibition Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by the first scholarly publication on the artist, surveying 15 years of her photography. Featuring the voices and perspectives of a variety of scholars, historians and writers, the catalogue includes essays by exhibition curators Peter Eleey and Eva Respini, Kimberly Juanita Brown, Tina M. Campt, Alexander Nemerov and Greg Tate, and a conversation between the artist and Deborah Willis.

HIGH MUSEUM OF ART

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