Dr. Charles Smith

In his first New York exhibition, Dr. Charles Smith, sculptor and founder of the African-American Heritage Museum and Black Veterans’ Archive, showcases twenty-nine of his recent figurative portraits. His full-body renderings and busts, made of painted textured concrete, present a chorus of Black Americans from history and the artist’s own life. Communally and individually, Smith’s sculptures intimately engage everyday Black life and aspiration, despite the constant violence that aims to suppress, objectify, and make invisible Black American bodies, stories, and imaginaries.

Central to the

Danielle McKinney, Moth, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 18".

picks August 01, 2022

“Uncanny Interiors”

“Uncanny Interiors,” a group exhibition at Nicola Vassell, tackles a genre essential to the evolution of Western painting and the contemporary self. Despite its “traditional” subject matter, the show foregrounds a critical voice: that of Black individuals, for whom the issue of space and interiority has not only been central, but whose avant-gardism in destabilizing space as form is the unsung bedrock of modernism. Taking cues from bell hooks’s 1990 essay “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance,” the presentation reveals homemaking as an act of color, shape, sound, feeling, and ultimately beauty, in