Solo Exhibitions

Phoebe Boswell: Here is still on view at New Art Exchange in Nottingham, United Kingdom until December 13, 2020

Boswell’s work explores what it means to belong and to be free. Owing to a personal history rooted in colonial traces and contradictory legacies – upheavals, dualities, geographies, kinships, liberations, silences, and shifts of migration – the artist describes her work as a navigation of the space between, anchored to what she refers to as a “restless state of diasporic consciousness.” Combining draftswomanship and digital technology, she creates immersive installations and bodies of work, which layer drawing, animation, sound, video, and interactivity in an effort to find language. Her work is multifaceted enough to house, centre, and celebrate the nuance and complexity of communities, voices, hearts, and histories, which are often systemically marginalised, simplified, pacified, homogenised, or side-lined as ‘other’.

Sam Gilliam: Existed Existing is still on view at Pace Gallery in New York, United States until December 19, 2020

Sam Gilliam is one the great innovators in postwar American painting. He emerged from the Washington, D.C. scene in the mid 1960s with works that elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of Color School painting. His inaugural exhibition with the gallery, Existed Existing debuts new works and installations that reflect the culmination of his six-decade-long career with color. The show features three new bodies of work that include large-scale paintings, some titled as tributes to influential Black contemporary and historical figures; a series of geometric color-drenched wood objects; and monochromatic paintings on Japanese washi paper. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated monograph that includes a new interview between the artist and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, as well as commissioned essays by art historian and curator Courtney J. Martin and scholar and poet Fred Moten.

Cauleen Smith: Bronze Icebergs is still on view at Kunstverein in Amsterdam, Netherlands until December 23, 2020

Bronze Icebergs marks the Los Angeles-based artist’s first solo exhibition in the Netherlands and brings together a new series of drawings, a film and a flag designed especially for the occasion. Smith’s work, which often takes shape across various forms, is grounded in the imaginary possibilities of the moving image and seeks to propose an alternate future through speculative narratives. And this moment we are living through calls for just that: the healing power of reimagining. In the forty-six drawings on display at Kunstverein, Smith manipulated the official announcement by inserting the names of significant Black female activists and cultural figures as well as moments of insurgent uprisings that are commonly written out of history.

Group Exhibitions

Global(e) Resistance is still on view at Centre Pompidou in Paris, France until January 4, 2021

The exhibition Global(e) Resistance features works from more than 60 artists acquired by the museum over the past decade. With a strong focus on artists from the Global South, it aims to examine ideas and strategies of resistance in the context of contemporary artistic pratices. It also hopes to bring forth various theoretical questions, exploring the connections between aesthetics and politics, and how museums today relate themselves to politics as well as the different art scenes. Visitors are welcomed into the forum by Barthélémy Toguo’s sculpture “Rédemption“, exhibited for the first time since its acquisition. The work depicts the meeting of the North with the South, Panafricanism and the redemption and salvation of peoples. The exhibition is then installed across over 1,500-sq.m space on the fourth floor of the museum.

Art Fairs

Art X Lagos 2020 is opened online at Art X Lagos website from December 2-9, 2020

Under the theme ‘Present States, Shared Futures’, this fifth edition will seek to proffer new ideas on how our global and national communities can move forward, assuredly, despite the challenges in our midst. “With the whirlwind of protests that have swept across Nigeria, the ongoing pandemic being experienced around the world, and the global reckoning with centuries of inequality and violence against black bodies, 2020 has been a year of awakening and feel privileged to be able to present the fifth edition of ART X Lagos”, said Tokini Peterside – founder and CEO of ART X Collective. For the first time, ART X Lagos will be anchored by an online exhibition of 200 artworks from leading galleries across Africa and the Diaspora, who are all united in their commitment to champion African creative expression.