Weekly Happenings: August 17–24, 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.

Lead Pencil Studio’s new virtual exhibition opens at ‘T’ Space this weekend, Marc Anthony Richardson releases his new book Messiahs, Elissa Washuta asks ‘why do we write?’ in a new essay. Plus, don’t miss several exhibitions closing this week—including Cannupa Hanska Luger’s show with Marie Watts at the Denver Art Museum, Edgar Arceneaux’s mirror paintings at Vielmetter Gallery in Los Angeles, and Jesse Krimes’s quilts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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.

Learn More


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.

Learn More


Elissa Washuta
“Why Though”

Noyo Review
Essay
August 2021

In this essay, Elissa Washuta ponders the question, why do we write?, drawing from her own journey as a writer. “I want to tell you that I cannot answer a question like, Why do we write? I can’t even answer the question, Why do I write? Nobody ever asks me why I think. When people ask me why I write, I sometimes say, at first it was to become famous, and now it’s because it makes me my money.  These things aren’t lies, but they’re incomplete.”

Learn More


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.

Learn More


“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.

Learn More


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.

Learn More


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.

Learn More


Lead Pencil Studio
Suspended Collapse

’T’ Space
Virtual exhibition opening
August 21, 2021 at 3pm ET

‘T’ Space hosts a virtual opening celebration for an exhibition by architects and Creative Capital Awardees Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo of Lead Pencil Studio. The event will feature a guided walk-through, a poetry reading by Lisa Robertson, and a musical performance by Lester St. Louis. Annie Han is also Creative Capital’s Board Chair.

Learn More


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.

Learn More


Marc Anthony Richardson
Messiahs

University of Alabama Press
Book release
August 24, 2021

A new novel by Marc Anthony Richardson will be released August 24. Messiahs centers on two nameless lovers, a woman of east Asian descent and a former state prisoner, a black man who volunteered incarceration on behalf of his falsely convicted nephew, yet was “exonerated” after more than two years on death row. In this dystopian America, one can assume a relative’s capital sentence as an act of holy reform—“the proxy initiative,” patterned after the Passion.

Order it Now


Marc Anthony Richardson
Virtual Event: Marc Anthony Richardson and Carolina de Robertis

Green Apple Books
Book talk
August 25, 2021 at 9pm ET

Marc Anthony Richardson talks to Carolina de Robertis about his new book, Messiahs, in this free virtual event.

Learn More


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.

Watch Now


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.

Learn More


“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.

Learn More


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.

Learn More


Stephanie Dinkins
On Love & Data

Stamps Gallery in Ann Arbor Michigan
In-person exhibition
Opens August 27, 2021

Stamps Gallery presents the first sur­vey of trans­me­dia artist Stephanie Dink­ins. In this exhibition, Dinkins devel­ops a dia­logue with the audi­ence on the hier­ar­chies embed­ded within machine learn­ing and AI archi­tec­ture and one’s indi­vid­ual agency in trans­form­ing the algo­rithms within it. 

Learn More


Stephen Vitiello
Land Buoy Bells

Pier 62 in Seattle
Public art

Stephen Vitiello was commissioned by Waterfront Seattle to create a site-specific, environmentally driven sound installation on the floating dock at Pier 62. Land Buoy Bells uses industrial materials – steel tank ends – and transforms them into a set of 5 instruments. The bell-like objects are struck at various moments as energy is stored up in an engineered device driven by the rise and fall of the waters that encompass the floating dock.

Learn More


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.

Learn More


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.

Learn More


In the News

“‘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.

Read More


“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.”

Read More


“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.

Read More


“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.”

Read Now


“2021 Bessie Nominations”
The Bessie Awards
August 2021

Creative Capital Awards Kyle Abraham, Sean McElroy, and Tei Blow are among the nominees for the 2021 Bessie Awards. The Bessies is the premier dance award honoring outstanding creative work in the field. A virtual ceremony will be livestreamed on Monday, October 11, 2021, at 7:30PM ET. 

Read Now


“Artists and Elders”
The Point Magazine
August 15, 2021

The Point Magazine examines an iteration of Erika Chong Shuch’s Creative Capital Project For You, Artist and Elders, during the pandemic. The project connects an artist and a senior, with creative collaboration as the end goal.

Read Now


“Emerging from the Cave”
Sundance Institute
August 2021

This survey conducted by Jesse Cameron Alick, commissioned by the Sundance Institute, an effort to understand the most urgent needs and priorities of the theater and performing arts community during this time. Alick interviewed over 70 artists and thought leaders—including Creative Capital Awardees Larissa FastHorse, Lars Jan, Daniel Alexander Jones, Raja Feather Kelly, and Legacy Russell—about their observations and suggestions on how to create a healthier space for artists. “There is a deep desire for change. And while this report does not give us answers about how to get there, it does ground us in where we actually are, which is key to getting us to where we want to go.”

Read Now


More News & Stories