Kehinde Wiley

New York–based artist Kehinde Wiley is currently preparing for solo shows this year at Conner Contemporary Art in Washington, DC, and Deitch Projects in New York. His exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, “Passing/Posing: The Paintings of Kehinde Wiley,” closed February 5.

1. BRADLEY MCCALLUM AND JACQUELINE TARRY
   There seem to be a lot of artist collaborative teams lately. My favorite is married, Brooklyn-based duo Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry, whose installations confront issues of social justice. Their first effort, Witness: Perspectives on Police Violence, 1998–2000, displayed testimony from victims and perpetrators of police brutality. In their latest project they wrestle each other, continuing to engage questions of race and equality with their particular method of performative sculpture: husband versus wife, black woman versus white man, artist versus artist.

   Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry, Screen Test: Circus of Power, 2005, color photograph, 40 x 50".

2. CHI CHIZ
   New York gay bars can be scary, but a jewel glitters in their midst. Chi Chiz is a cavelike little space on Christopher Street with great music, food, and drink. It’s also one of the only black gay bars in the West Village. Buffalo wings and mac ’n’ cheese every night, drag acts and homo-thug strippers on Saturdays.

3. SUNTEK CHUNG
   Chung’s photographs are graced with a candor and longing informed by the absence of viable images of Asian-American men. In one picture, Chung dresses up like a cricket player and strikes a martial-arts pose in front of a wallpapered Shinto arch (Kung Fu Cricket, 2002). In another, he’s a good ol’ boy holding a beer and sitting on a porch decorated with a combo South Korean–Confederate flag. (The South/the South, 2002). Constructed on radiant stage sets reminiscent of the white cube, Chung’s dreamlike works (to be included in an exhibition this summer at the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum in Duisberg, Germany) succeed in merging signifiers of taste, race, class, and masculinity—an improvement over the usual “just add water” postmodern recipe.

4. ELAINE STRITCH AT LIBERTY
   (HBO) Stritch’s 2004 Emmy-winning, one-woman musical memoir is at once painful reenactment and self-deprecating iteration of Broadway standards. In a performance that covers her sensational private life—the booze, the men, the stage fright-—and dishes the Hollywood dirt, Stritch personalizes the artist’s struggle and gives form to the invisible structures of stardom, all without taking herself too seriously. Stritch turned eighty on February 2. A standing ovation for this trouper.

5. WOLE SOYINKA, THE INTERPRETERS (1965)
   A 1986 Nobel laureate, Soyinka was a political prisoner for 22 months during Nigeria’s civil war in the ’60s. In this novel, his first, he tells the story of six Nigerian intellectuals in Lagos who discuss and “interpret” their experiences in a time of ethnic and social upheaval. Often compared to Joyce and Faulkner for its complex narrative, The Interpreters examines the interplay between national and personal identity—a topic of particular relevance in political and creative circles today.

6. MARC SWANSON
   After following this guy’s work for a few years, I realize its rhetorical strength comes from its ability to code-switch. Swanson’s sculptures (featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial) look like taxidermic deer-hunter trophies, but his antlered bucks are fabricated from foam and encrusted with dazzling crystals. He calls the deer his “surrogates.”

   Marc Swanson, Untitled, 2004, crystals, polyurethane foam, and adhesive, 36 x 18 x 18".

7. DAVID ALTMEJD
   Like Swanson, Altmejd uses the dazzle, flicker, and play of light to allude to the promise of glamour. The difference: Altmejd’s far-more-pointed focus on the grotesque. His sculptures usually depict the rotting heads or body parts of monsters and werewolves; even the fur seems to be in a state of decay. It’s as though these creatures are so grotesque they fold beneath their own weight, emerging on the other side as something delicate, crystalline, heroic yet pathetic. Adding to the magic is Altmejd’s use of mirrored glass display cases that give his work a high-end-luxury-goods feeling, like retail at Gucci.

8. MICKALENE THOMAS
   This Brooklyn-based artist makes glittery paintings and large-scale photographs of black women that cancel out any hope of an essentialist view of “type.” She might depict her mother in a crocheted bikini, or Grace Jones in a tiger suit, or herself as Mary J. Blige, wearing a tattered, nappy blonde wig like some Caribbean prostitute off to turn a trick. What excites me most about these works is their ability to convey the sadness that surrounds failed glamour, as though her images exist in contrast to an artist’s desire for success, recognition, and visibility. Look for Thomas’s work in “Greater New York,” which opened in March at P.S. 1.

   Mickalene Thomas, Negress #1, 2001/2005, color photograph, 30 x 24".

9. JOHAN GRIMONPREZ, DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997.
   Though it’s been around for awhile, this video work offers a fresh index to current psychosocial realities. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y gives a chronology of airplane hijackings in what amounts to an eerie foreshadowing of 9/11. We meet the terrorists of the ’60s and ’70s, characters who by the ’90s are replaced by nameless suitcase bombs. Grimonprez examines the politics that motivated this change and, at the same time, reveals our own complicit appetite for disaster.

   Johan Grimonprez, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997, still from a color digital video, 68 minutes.

10. RON & RON DELICE On a recent trip to London I took a break from gallery hopping to check out Saville Row, a thrilling and educational detour. Back in the States, I decided to find a real tailor and, through a friend, met Ronald and Rony, Haitian twins known for their impeccable detailing, innovative use of color and texture, and dapper clientele (Justin Timberlake, Andre 3000). They made me a fabulous suit.