Yxta Maya Murray

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  picks June 27, 2019

  Adee Roberson

  In her paintings and built environments, Adee Roberson cathartically deploys colors to clear the air of white supremacy’s curses. But in “Tamarind,” her exhibition of sacralized portraits of black figures at the Women’s Center for Creative Work, she seeks more to fashion a place for remembrance.

  Within the small gallery, the walls pulsate with pink and teal paint. One wall is papered over with screen-printed menus offering items such as cucumber juice and cow foot stew; although the restaurant is unidentified, the tessellation of its offerings implies the artist’s intimacy with its dishes.

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  picks May 10, 2019

  “Unraveling Collective Forms”

  The ancient Inca people used quipus, systems of knotted strings, to record precious data. When the Spanish conquerors arrived, many quipus were burned and, with them, the ciphers’ keys. Today, scholars are still working to translate this language. Our imaginations must fill in the blanks.

  “Unravelling Collective Forms” at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions brings together women artists and artists of color engaging with the form and history of the quipu to process and reimagine the impact of colonialism, patriarchy, and Western imperialism. Mercedes Dorame’s The Wind Is Speaking – Ahniiken

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  print May 2019

  OPENINGS: IMANI JACQUELINE BROWN

  MORE THAN A DECADE after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is still far from having recovered. Many survivors of the 2005 disaster could not afford the liens accumulating against their water-damaged properties and today find themselves displaced from their ancestral homes. Households and shops remain gutted. Legal forfeitures have been normalized, and officials have resold lost homes to whiter, wealthier people. In 2014, to bring attention to the dispossession of lower-income communities of color, Imani Jacqueline Brown and her compatriots in the collective Blights Out (Mariama Eversley, Bryan C.