
Yinka Shonibare
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
June 26–September 20, 2009
Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia
140 George Street
The Rocks
September 24, 2008–February 1, 2009
Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
Capital Gallery
600 Maryland Avenue SW
Suite 7001
November 11, 2009–March 7, 2010
Curated by Rachel Kent
In traditional folktales, the trickster serves to reveal cultural complexities, and as critic Jean Fisher has noted, this character has “a global reach,” popping up in narratives everywhere, subverting rules, and confusing codes. So, too, Member of the British Empire Yinka Shonibare, whose multireferential sculptures, installations, paintings, videos, and photographs have reverse-colonized the art world, peopling it with a cast of color-saturated, quasi-surreal masqueraders (often headless and usually engaged in extravagantly absurd pursuits). Featuring twenty works from the past twelve years, this major midcareer survey will highlight Shonibare’s newest output—and promises a carnival of both visual and postcolonial complexity.
— Rachel Withers