Weekly Happenings: August 10–17, 2021

Each week, we create a list of exhibitions, screenings, events, and news featuring Creative Capital Awardees of all disciplines. This list can include shows that have recently opened, shows about to close, and noteworthy headlines and interviews that profile artists and their work.

Check out Edgar Arceneaux’s new series of silver-nitrate based abstract paintings in Los Angeles, listen to Miguel Gutierrez’s new podcast about the ethical entanglements between money and art-making, and celebrate Brooklyn at BRIC’s in-person festival with headliner, Vijay Iyer.

Events, Exhibitions, & Screenings

Cannupa Hanska Luger
“Each/Other”

Denver Art Museum
In-person exhibition
Through August 22, 2021

This exhibition features work by Creative Capital Awardee Cannupa Hanska Luger and Marie Watt, two leading Indigenous contemporary artists whose processes focus on collaborative artmaking. Luger and Watt’s work is divided into two sections that explore the artists’ engagement with community, materials and the land. A new collaborative piece is featured where the two artists’ works converge within the gallery.

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Edgar Arceneaux
Skinning the Mirror

Vielmetter Gallery in Los Angeles
In-person exhibition
Through August 21, 2021

In this new series of material-based abstractions, Creative Capital Board Member and Awardee Edgar Arceneaux has pioneered the utilization of silver nitrate — used in the fabrication of mirrors — into a painting medium. As in the act of skinning, the artist’s entire body becomes part of the process; his labor, sweat, and blood contribute to determining the outcome of each work.

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Garrett Bradley
Naomi Osaka

Netflix
Three-part docuseries

Garrett Bradley directed this intimate docuseries following Naomi Osaka as she explores her cultural roots and navigates her multifaceted identity as a tennis champ and rising leader.

Watch Now


Guadalupe Maravilla
Guadalupe Maravilla & The Sound of Healing

Art21
Online film

Art21 premieres their moving short documentary film, which provides an intimate look into Guadalupe Maravilla’s process for and activation of his Planeta Abuelx solo exhibition currently on view at Socrates Sculpture Park.

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“Hiding in Plain Sight”
Pace Gallery in New York City
In-person exhibition
Through August 20, 2021

This group exhibition brings together 18 international artists who use the language of Minimalism and abstraction to distill complex subjects into forms that reveal new frameworks of meaning, revelation, and resistance for the here and now. Creative Capital Awardee Jessica Vaughn and National Advisory Council Co-Chair Fred Wilson are among the artists with work on view.

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Jillian Mayer
TIMESHARE

Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC
In-person exhibition
Through September 26, 2021

In this exhibition, Jillian Mayer’s fiberglass sculptures, ceramic forms, and paintings explore how art can become functional during times of disaster or when the planet becomes uninhabitable.

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Kyle Abraham
REQUIEM: FIRE IN THE AIR OF THE EARTH

Kampnagel in Hamburg, Germany
In-person performance
Starting August 20, 2021

With a formal coolness and vital perspective, Creative Capital Awardee Kyle Abraham creates contemporary dance and ballet worldwide – and is now creating a post-pandemic requiem for the big stage to a Mozart re-composition by Jlin, electronic music pioneer.

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Lynn Hershman Leeson
Twisted

New Museum in New York City
In-person exhibition
Through October 3, 2021

This exhibition brings together a selection of Lynn Hershman Leeson’s work in drawing, sculpture, video, and photography, along with interactive and net-based works, focusing on themes of transmutation, identity construction, and the evolution of the cyborg.

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Mariam Ghani
What We Left Unfinished

Dekanalog
Film screenings, in-person and online
Starting August 6, 2021

Mariam Ghani’s Creative Capital Project, What We Left Unfinished, looks closely at the era of state-funded Afghan filmmaking during the country’s Communist era, bringing together dozens of writers, actors, and filmmakers to discuss five unfinished, unedited projects produced between 1978 and 1991. The film will be released in physical and virtual theaters in the US on August 6, with Q&A events scheduled.

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Michelle Handelman
“These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves”

Madison Museum of Contemporary Art
In-person exhibition with online videos
Through August 15, 2021

A multimedia and performance artist, Michelle Handelman creates film installations that draw on her life experiences and those of her performers to confront life and death, pain and pleasure. “These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves” includes the artist’s new video trilogy, The Pandemic Series and two of the artist’s earlier film installations, Irma Vep, The Last Breath, and Candyland.

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Michelle Handelman
BLOODSISTERS: LEATHER, DYKES & SADOMASOCHISM

Kino Lorber
Online streaming

During the early 1990s, San Francisco was the epicenter of body modification and gender nonconformity, with transgender pioneers like Patrick Califia and Tala Brandeis fighting for visibility, alongside the voice of a bold S/M community. Michelle Handelman’s provocative and pioneering documentary BLOODSISTERS captures these queer outlaws in their zeitgeist moment, shot on digital video with an unfiltered rawness that mirrors the activism of the era.

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Miguel Gutierrez
Are You For Sale?

Podcast

Miguel Gutierrez just launched a podcast examining dance-making, philanthropy, and ethics. Looking to visual art for its tradition of Institutional Critique and protests regarding “toxic” philanthropy, Gutierrez asks – Why don’t we see comparable action in the dance and performance world? Are we too afraid of losing what little we have? What effects has a scarcity mentality bred? Is the entire system changeable?

Listen Now


“New Grit: Art & Philly Now”
Philadelphia Museum of Art
In-person exhibition
Through August 22, 2021

This group exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art includes two quilt works by Jesse Krimes. He uses fragments of personal clothing collected from currently and formerly incarcerated people to address the personal and communal impacts of mass incarceration.

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“OMNISCIENT: Queer Documentation in an Image Culture”
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York City
In-person exhibition
Through January, 2022

Creative Capital Director of Artist Initiatives Aliza Shvarts and Awardees Anna Sew Hoy and Carrie Moyer have work in this group exhibition looking at the history of queer iconographies in popular visual culture.

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Pope.L
Notations, Holes and Humour

Modern Art in London
In-person exhibition
Through August 28, 2021

Modern Art presents Pope.L’s first solo show in London in more than a decade. The exhibition centers on his ongoing project, Skin Set, a constantly growing and shifting group of text-inflected works that consider the construction of language, identity, and stereotype as notation, hole, and absurdity and humor.

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Samora Pinderhughes
Grief
Little Island in New York City
Free in-person performance
Saturday, August 14, 2021 at 7pm ET

Samora Pinderhughes performs his collection of songs that call out the sufferings caused by racial capitalism, policing and prison systems, and oppressive ideologies. The concert is free, however you must register in advance for admission to the island.

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Sanford Biggers
Codeswitch
California American American Museum in Los Angeles
In-person exhibition
Through January 23, 2022

For more than two decades, Los Angeles native Sanford Biggers has been developing a singular body of work that is deeply informed by African American history and traditions. Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch, the first survey of quilt-based works by the New York-based interdisciplinary artist, features nearly fifty pieces that seamlessly weave together references to contemporary art, urban culture, sacred geometry, and more.

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Vijay Iyer
BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn Festival
Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn, New York
In-person concert
Saturday, August 14 at 6pm ET

BRIC has commissioned local artists to create new works meant to honor their beloved fellow musicians we lost to the pandemic. Creative Capital Awardee Vijay Iyer headlines this free concert, with sets by vibes innovator Joel Ross, the singer and multi-instrumentalist Melanie Charles, and the renowned poet, author and educator Mahogany Browne.

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Will Rawls
Everlasting Stranger
Henry Art Gallery in Seattle
In-person exhibition and performances
Through August 15, 2021

In this exhibition, Will Rawls activates relationships between language, dance, and image through the fragmentary medium of stop-motion animation. Performances will also take place on Saturdays from 12-3pm ET.

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Wu Tsang
Anthem
Guggenheim Museum of Art in New York City
In-person exhibition
Through September 6, 2021

Wu Tsang’s new commission, Anthem (2021), was conceived in collaboration with the legendary singer, composer, and transgender activist Beverly Glenn-Copeland. This site-specific installation revolves around an immense, eighty-four-foot curtain sculpture suspended from the oculus with a projected “film-portrait” of Glenn-Copeland improvising and singing passages of his music.

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Xenobia Bailey
Mothership and Hallowed Be Their Names
Brookfield Place in New York City
In-person exhibition
Through September 17, 2021

Brookfield Place presents two commissioned hand-crochet works by Xenobia Bailey in their Winter Garden Gallery. Mothership, pays homage to the African American homemaker, caregiver, and domestic worker and Hallowed Be Their Names is an installation to celebrate and uplift communities affected by loss.

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In the News

“How Garrett Bradley Got Inside Naomi Osaka’s Head”
Vanity Fair
July 15, 2021

Garrett Bradley talks to Vanity Fair about her new Netflix docuseries on tennis star Naomi Osaka. “I really wanted it to feel like we were journeying with her. “It wasn’t a recap of things that we’d already read in the press, or something that you could read in Wikipedia,” says Bradley. “But, how do we really understand Naomi? And how can I make sure that viewers walk away from this actually feeling a deep human connection?”

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“‘I’m not Jeff Koons!’ – the endurance crawls, weird texts and guerrilla brilliance of Pope.L”
The Guardian
July 18, 2021

The Guardian interviews Pope.L and looks at his life and career as an artist. They even mention his Creative Capital Project, The Black Factory, in which the artist toured America, asking people to donate items that they associated with Blackness.

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“White Male Artist Wants To Know If You’ll Buy His $HT NFTs.”
Forbes
July 19, 2021

“An exclusive interview with the anonymous figure known only as White Male Artist, behind one of the most provocative NFT art projects to date.” White Male Artist was later revealed to be Creative Capital Awardee Cassils.

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“If Something Gives Me the Chills, or If I Ever Think, ‘Is This Too Much?’, Then I Know I Have to Use It”: Michelle Handelman on the 25th Anniversary Rerelease of BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes And Sadomasochism
Filmmaker Magazine
July 21, 2021

Michelle Handelman talks to Filmmaker Magazine about the process of creating her groundbreaking film, BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes And Sadomasochism, celebrating its 25th anniversary this year: “When BloodSisters was first released no one in the US would broadcast it. It was too controversial… I always wanted this film to be a historical document of this radical group of leather women who were on the frontlines fighting for sexual freedom, and you can directly trace the de-pathologizing and mainstream visibility back to their activist activities. But unfortunately history’s trajectory is usually two steps step forward, one step back.”

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“Meet the Anonymous Artist Who’s Auctioning Off Cans of Their Own Poop Based on the Diets of Major Market Stars at Phillips”
Artnet
July 22, 2021

Five tins containing excrement based on the diets of famous artists—such as Banksy, Jeff Koons, and Matthew Barney—will be going on sale at Phillips on 7/29, along with 3D renderings of the cans made into NFTs. The project, aptly known as $HT COIN, is the work (and excrement) of an artist going under the guise of “White Male Artist.” Artnet revealed them to be none other than Creative Capital Awardee Cassils.

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“Inside My Collection: Schwanda Rountree”
Artsy
July 23, 2021

Creative Capital National Advisory Council Member Schwanda Rountree her ever-growing collection, her support for artists throughout their careers, and her work with fellow collectors as an advisor.

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“A24 Lands Rights To Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Parable Of The Sower’, Setting ‘Time’ Director Garrett Bradley To Helm”
Deadline
July 26, 2021

Garrett Bradley is set to direct Octavia Butler’s science fiction odyssey Parable Of The Sower. “The project would mark Bradley’s first feature film at a major studio following a run of critically acclaimed documentaries including the Oscar-nominated Time from Amazon Studios.”

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“Frieze Impact Prize Winners Announced”
Frieze
July 27, 2021

Maria Gaspar and Dread Scott are the winners of the inaugural Frieze Impact Prize, in partnership with the Art for Justice Fund and Endeavor Impact. The award recognizes artists contributing to the movement to end mass incarceration in the US and those directly impacted by the system.

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“Sanford Biggers Returns to California with a Homespun Medium”
Cultured
July 29, 2021

Cultured talks to Sanford Biggers about his homecoming solo show of quilt-based works that opens at the California African American Museum on July 28.

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“Lighter than Air”
Departures
August 1, 2021

Departures interviews the members of disability arts company, Kinetic Light, about collaboration and kinship. Kinetic Light includes Creative Capital Awardee Alice Sheppard, artistic director, choreographer, and dancer; Michael Maag, lighting designer; Laurel Lawson, dancer and choreographic collaborator, costume/makeup designer, software engineer; and Jerron Herman, dancer and choreographic collaborator.

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“Review: Do you see the smile? Why Sanford Biggers’ painting will put one on your face”
Los Angeles Times
August 10, 2021

The Los Angeles Times review Sanford Biggers’s exhibition Codeswitch at the California African American Museum: “Biggers approaches these antique quilts as tangible objects with authentic if anonymous histories, not simply as immaterial pictorial images. He builds from there. Sometimes the result is a painting that becomes a wall relief.”

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Kenny Fries
Stumbling over History

Craft Literary
Essay

Moving in and out of historical research, travel writing, and memoir in his essay Stumbling over History, Kenny Fries investigates the “euthanasia” of people with disabilities in Nazi Germany and how it continues to resonate.

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More News & Stories