Painting

Chinatown Girl Scouts: Past & Present

Chinatown Girl Scouts: Past & Present involves creating oil portraits of Manhattan’s Chinatown Girl Scouts, an official USA Girl Scout troop (Troop #3197) that has served Chinatown for 100 years. Despite this remarkable history, the troop’s contributions are largely undocumented in Chinatown or American art history. Chen is collaborating with current Girl Scouts, their leaders, and administrators, organizing for these teens to sit for portraits in her studio. During these sessions, they discuss their experiences growing up in Chinatown and their unique perspective as Girl Scouts.

The high schoolers come from diverse Asian backgrounds and live across NYC’s five boroughs but gather weekly in Chinatown for their volunteer work. In recognition of their participation, Chen is also co-designing a Painting Badge for their Girl Scout sashes.

Festejeros

With Festejeros, Ilana Savdie will examine the mixed origins of carnivals in the Americas and Caribbean. At the core of Savdie’s research is a desire to better understand how histories are translated through folklore and how that continues to offer modes of disruption. In her work, Savdie often draws on her experience of the Carnaval de Barranquilla in Colombia, where she grew up; a space in which abundance, inversion, the grotesque and the perverse serve as collective protest to oppressive social and political regimes. Savdie is interested in the way these modes of resistance through spectacle collide with historical retellings, revealing an underlying emotional truth.

Modes of Assembly

The Modes of Assembly paintings aim at capturing alliances through depicting the material conditions of work environments. In what will be Nisenbaum’s most ambitious project to date, and a years-long engagement, this series focuses on the workers of industrial factories in northern Mexico. American companies have begun showing a preference for sources of factory labor from Northern Mexico rather than China. Recent media accounts of “nearshoring” suggest that the intensification of trade between Mexico and the U.S. put even greater pressure on one of the most frequently crossed international boundaries in the world, both in terms of people and material goods. In light of these developments, Nisenbaum has established a relationship with a large metalworking factory in Guadalajara, Jalisco that is willing to open its doors for Nisenbaum to meaningfully engage with their local community of factory workers. The portraits index this witnessing through the cumulative register of time that is needed to put paint to canvas.

Love Language

Rooted in intergenerational knowledge, Dyani White Hawk’s (Sičáŋǧu Lakota, b. 1976) art centers on connection—between one another, past and present, earth and sky. By foregrounding Lakota forms and motifs, she challenges prevailing histories and practices surrounding abstract art. Featuring multimedia paintings, sculpture, video, and more, Love Language gathers 15 years of the artist’s work in this major survey.

The exhibition’s final section, Celebrate, marries traditional techniques with outsize scale, paying homage to small gestures that hold great meaning. Featured here are a new series of glass mosaics, beaded sculptures, and White Hawk’s monumental Wopila | Lineage paintings. Made in collaboration with a skilled team of studio beadworkers, these shimmering expanses of pattern and color invite close inspection of both their material construction and their historical underpinnings.

De-futuring and Wilding Futurisms

De-futuring and Wilding Futurisms aims to make interventions through a reconsideration of how African art and African culture in general has been influential to the dominant notions of aesthetics (Western aesthetics). For example: Peter Kubelka’s use of the African body in his ground film Our Trip to Africa; and Picasso and Matisse’s use of African art in Cubism. This influence is not tangential or an affinity as has been argued in the past, rather African art has been constitutive in many Western aesthetics movements.

By making text-based work, paintings, and creating a photo-novel (colloquially referred to as look-books and popularized in 1960s South Africa), the project will reconsider formal visual elements such as critiquing museum exhibition didactic texts; creating paintings through methods of figuration that the artist developed specifically for representing people that do not have Caucasian skin-tones; and using photography and publications as effective forms outside the narrow scope of the white cube.

Memorial to African American Surfing History and Future

Chase Hall proposes to produce a 10-foot bronze sculpture at Santa Monica’s Bay Street Beach. The site is an important beachfront zone historically accessible to racial minorities during periods of segregation. Chase Hall received the Creative Capital Award in 2024. Chase Hall’s (b. 1993, St. Paul, Minnesota) paintings and sculptures engage personal and material histories to complicate traditional understandings of race, class, mixedness, and geography within historically-charged social landscapes. A central body of paintings, made with drip-brew techniques derived from coffee beans and acrylic pigments on cotton, centers post-victimhood and liberation by portraying Black figures engaged in intense moments of kinship, tension, and self-renewal.

In 2022, Hall was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to produce a large-scale artwork for its opera house in New York. His work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; ICA Miami; Fondation Louis Vuitton; Baltimore Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum; Hammer Museum; High Museum of Art; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Walker Art Center; The Studio Museum in Harlem; and Whitney Museum of American Art.

The Jerome Project

The Jerome Project is an investigation into the criminal justice system through the lens of the common and traditionally African-American name, Jerome—the name of the artist’s father. After conducting a series of interviews with Jeromes, Titus Kaphar will work with local high-school students to create a body of work based on their lives and experiences. The final form of the project is a series of paintings and sculptures, an experimental documentary, and national panel discussions on mass incarceration. Working with cinematographer Horacio Marquinez to create a cinematic collage, Kaphar and his collaborators will attempt to highlight both the similarities and distinctions of the Jerome narrative. His intention is to move this project beyond the white cube of the contemporary art gallery into a relevant programming initiative.

Infinite Anomaly: Tahlequah, Oklahoma

Infinite Anomaly is a series of oil and pigmented silicone paintings and works on paper. These works retain Jeffrey Gibson’s customary use of ”lush and visually intoxicating” environmental landscapes accumulated by brightly colored gestural paint-strokes, glossy transparent pours, and layers of pigmented silicone, while introducing (for the first time in Gibson’s work) human forms, seemly engrossed by their sensual surroundings.

Jeffrey Gibson received his first national grant from Creative Capital in 2005. Nearly two decades later, Gibson became the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2024 (pictured above).

The Liberation of Mammy

For The Liberation of Mammy, Beverly McIver traveled to various locations in the southern U.S. to photograph and videotape African American domestic workers. McIver’s mother is a domestic laborer in this region and accompanied the artist when she traveled. McIver then created photographs of herself in blackface emulating her subjects and made a series of paintings from these images. The documentary approach to this project represents a departure from McIver’s usual working method, and is intended to deepen her ongoing portrayals of contemporary African American women.