Gilda Williams

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  print November 2021

  Leilah Babirye

  Leilah Babirye’s ceramic head Nansamba II from the Kuchu Ngabi (Antelope) Clan (all works 2021) is a powerful, astonishing sculpture. With eyes closed, apparently lost in bliss or meditation, the magnificent piece, some four feet tall, patiently allows multiple washes of glossy blue glazes to stream down its huge smooth face. Nansamba II’s elaborate hairstyle is a tall and tangled wonder, rising almost architecturally about one and a half feet above its scalp. Constructed from old bicycle-tire inner tubes, this spectacular bouffant refers to, among other things, the artist’s former employment

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  print October 2021

  Kapwani Kiwanga

  Both meanings of the word plot—a storyline and a parcel of land—overlapped in Kapwani Kiwanga’s complex exhibition “Cache.” Fifty years ago, Jamaican writer Sylvia Wynter brilliantly drew a connection between the two disparate meanings: Both kinds of plots, Wynter observed, were transformed by the founding of a market economy. Small single-family holdings that connected humans to the earth through cultivation, ancestry, and folklore vanished with the rise of vast, single-crop, labor-intensive estates. Around the same time, the novel innovated literary narratives centering on protagonists freed

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  print September 2021

  Matt Bollinger

  The blistering Kansas City sun was a central protagonist in Matt Bollinger’s exhibition “Collective Conscious,” joining a cast of characters that also included Candy, a middle-aged woman alone in her shadow-filled living room in the painting Daytime Soaps, 2020, and Carolyn and James, a mother and son observed in the stop-motion animation Between the Days, 2017, as they go about their soul-numbing daily routines. Toward the beginning of that eighteen-minute-long work, the pearly glare of Midwestern morning sun gently spreads over a car window before James arrives and drives to work, as he does

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  diary June 13, 2021

  Open Season

  THE HARDEST PART of the first-ever London Gallery Weekend wasn’t attempting to visit the 130 official galleries, plus dozens of unlisted events, in a city about twice the area of Berlin or New York. The real challenge was recognizing people you’d not seen in a year only from their eyes, peering above face masks. Resocializing after a year spent cocooned in one’s tiny domestic bubble—relearning to chat with humans unable to finish your every sentence, for example—proved a newfound struggle. And is it safe to hug hello? Or must we perform that weird elbow rub, with its masonic secret-handshake

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  print March 2021

  Umar Rashid (Frohawk Two Feathers)

  The botanical gardens of Kew were founded in 1759—roughly the midpoint of Umar Rashid’s epic, image-and-text fiction about the Frenglish Empire, an imagined colonial superpower that lasted from 1658 through 1880. The canvas whose very long title begins An Occidental Incident at the Oriental Gardens at Kew, 2020, presents rows of warring white and Black soldiers, all dressed in hybrid military costumes combining British redcoat elegance with Napoleonic finery. These stylized armies of nearly identical Black or white men—sometimes repeated like paper-doll cutouts, a few curiously sporting today’s

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  film January 31, 2021

  Continental Grift

  EL PLANETA, billed as “a comedy about eviction” and the first feature film by artist Amalia Ulman, is loosely based on the real-life Spanish mother-daughter petty-crime duo Justina and Ana Belén. Arrested in 2012, the penniless yet elegant pair posed as wealthy ladies and scammed countless restauranteurs and shop-owners—who’d trusted the apparently well-heeled women to eventually settle their bill­—out of thousands of euros. In El Planeta, lead actor Ulman (who also wrote the screenplay) plays fashion student Leonor who, in the aftermath of her father’s death, can no longer afford her London

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  print December 2020

  Tavares Strachan

  Encyclopedia of Invisibility, 2018, is a massive, 2,400-page volume in which Bahamas-born, New York–based artist Tavares Strachan collected extraordinary yet “invisible” histories, often of overlooked people of color. These include North Pole explorer Matthew Henson; NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson; and the first African American astronaut, Robert Henry Lawrence Jr. Henrietta Lacks’s cells have been used in vital laboratory experiments since her untimely death in 1951—her “anonymous” DNA has been on permanent loan to science, without her consent. Alicia Alonso was the Cuban-born star of

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  print October/November 2020

  Khadija Saye

  More than seventy people perished in the Grenfell Tower blaze of June 2017, when a fire began in a fourth-floor apartment and, owing to the building’s treacherously inflammable exterior cladding, rapidly spread to engulf the entire social-housing tower. Among the dead was British Gambian artist Khadija Saye, at home with her mother on the twentieth floor, presumably obeying the firefighters’ advice to stay put until help arrived. Only twenty-four years old when she tragically died, Saye was “on the cusp of something special,” as London Member of Parliament David Lammy said at the momentous

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  print September 2020

  No Martins

  In the mid-twentieth century, Brazil’s multishaded racial democracy may have looked good compared to Jim Crow policies in the United States, but lately, bolstered by the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, the “tropical Trump,” racism in Brazil has violently worsened. In a country where about half the population is nonwhite, three-quarters of the victims of police killings are black.

  This was the grim context for the exhibition “Social Signs,” displaying four of Brazilian artist No Martins’s large, brightly colored figurative paintings. His black-skinned subjects include a defiant-looking mother standing

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  print July/August 2020

  Joey Holder

  By the time female European eels complete their three-thousand-mile, one-to-two-year-long swim from the continent’s rivers back to the Sargasso Sea to spawn, they’ve devoured most of their own skeletons and muscle mass and basically resemble mobile sacks of eggs. Eels are semelparous, meaning they reproduce only once during their lifetime, investing all their energy, body weight, and existential drive (so to speak) in that single journey.

  Although European eels are critically endangered (their population is down by roughly 90 percent since the 1970s in great part due to illegal overfishing), Joey

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  print May/June 2020

  Myra Greene

  Piecework refers to labor paid according to the number of items produced rather than the amount of time spent on the job. Often associated with the ruthless economic exploitation of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, this system saw entire families gathered at home sewing garments or packing fruit, united in the desperate attempt to make ends meet. Piecework is sadly making a comeback—thanks to its versatility in allowing employers to get around minimum-wage and other labor laws—as dramatized recently on-screen by a family of Seoul basement dwellers frantically folding pizza boxes to

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  print April 2020

  Jade Montserrat

  A gallery today is mostly imagined as a three-dimensional space; instead, the artist, activist, and writer Jade Montserrat frequently activates her exhibition sites primarily as a valuable collection of walls, which she loads with messages and reflections about black British bodies—their overlooked history and experiences—alongside an urgent call for a renewed society built on affection, care, and ethics. Her performance/installation No Need for Clothing, 2017, featured the artist naked and hard at work, drawing with charcoal directly on the wall to compose an allover spread of brief enigmatic