Nicci Yin
Posts written by Nicci Yin
With his photographs, videos, and installations, Hank Willis Thomas explores the rich terrain of the past and present. He collaborates with his peers and encourages non-artists to build projects that focus on the diversity of humanity, including the western media’s images of blackness.
Ernesto Neto’s sculpture is reminiscent of a childhood ball pit, requiring you to cling, for balance, to crocheted nets suggestive of jungle gyms.
Creative Time’s Living as Form exhibition in New York opened up a dialogue that is now being taken to a global scale. Living as Form (The Nomadic Version) is co-organized by Creative Time, Independent Curators International, and art venues around the world. Its first stop is curated by Christina Linden at the San Francisco branch of Kadist, an art foundation that is also based in Paris.
Featured prominently in both the Whitney Biennial and the New Museum Triennial, Wu Tsang is currently one of the most visible artists in New York City. Although Tsang can be easily pigeonholed as a mixed-race/trans artist of color, these identities provide a hotbed of common misconceptions for his performance work to challenge and problematize.
Few artists have used mapping as an artistic practice to the effect that Mark Bradford has, weaving the visual and social landscapes of urban societies into the layers of his collage paintings. These paintings, along with works in sculpture and video, will be displayed at a joint exhibition held by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts beginning February 18. This exhibition is a traveling survey of Bradford’s work organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts.
Recent exhibitions are revealing a seeming divergence in what art is intended for. On the one hand, there are Damien Hirst spot paintings scattered throughout Larry Gagosian’s global franchise in a spectacular staging of world domination through art—a show/ploy that sits tentatively on the fine line between art and pure marketing. On the other, smaller arts organizations like the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts zeroes in on socially relevant issues and promotes art as activism through programs and exhibitions, such as their current Sound of Silence: Art During Dictatorship (on view January 27 through March 10). It then came as a pleasant surprise to discover what MoMA has in store for the next few months.
