Latest News in Black Art features news updates and developments in the world of art and related culture
 


Veronica Ryan is one of four artists shortlisted for the 2022 Turner Prize. | © Veronica Ryan. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert

 

Awards & Honors

On April 12, Tate Liverpool announced four artists shortlisted for the 2022 Turner Prize, including British artists Veronica Ryan (above) and Ingrid Pollard (left). The prize was inaugurated in 1984 and for the first time the shortlist does not include any male-identifying artists. A group exhibition featuring the work of Ryan, Pollard, Heather Phillipson, and Sin Wai Kin will be on view at Tate Liverpool from Oct. 20, 2022-March 19, 2023. The winner of the most prominent visual art prize in the UK will be announced in December and awarded £25,000 (about $33,000), with the remaining shortlisted artists receiving £10,000 (approximately $13,000) each. | More

Based on a shortlist of seven artists, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery is revealing the winner of 2022 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition on April 29 in conjunction with “The Outwin 2022: American Portraiture Today,” an exhibition of portraits by the finalists opening April 30. More than 2,700 entries were considered and narrowed to 42 finalists, from which the shortlist, including Stuart Robertson, was selected in October. Currently based in New Jersey, Jamaican-born Robertson recently had his first solo exhibition (“A Suh Wi Dweet”) at Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, Va. Held every three years and famously won by Amy Sherald in 2016, the Outwin Portrait Competition’s top prize is $25,000 and a new commission. | More

Three artists including Yvonne Osei received 2022 Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Awards. The awards are open to alumni of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. A multidisciplinary artist, Osei is a German-born Ghanaian who lives and works in St. Louis. Each artist will receive 25,000 USD to advance their studio practice. | More

The American Federation of Arts 2022 Gala & Leadership Awards on May 4 in New York will honor philanthropist, museum trustee, and collector Pamela Joyner and the Romare Bearden Foundation, which is co-directed by Diedra Harris Kelley and Johanne Bryant-Reid. AFA’s touring exhibitions include Romare Bearden: Abstraction and the forthcoming shows “Art and Activism at Tougaloo College,” “African Modernism in America,” and “Whitfield Lovell: Passages.” | More

IMAGE: Above left, Ingrid Pollard. | Photo by Emile Holbar

 


The Now Evening Auction (May 19, 2022, New York): KERRY JAMES MARSHALL, “Beauty Examined,” (acrylic and collage on canvas, 84 5/8 by 99 1/4 inches / 214.9 by 252 cm). | Estimate $8 million-$12 million

 
Auctions

“Beauty Examined” (1993), a major painting by Kerry James Marshall, will be offered for sale on May 19, headlining The Now Evening Auction at Sotheby’s New York. Estimated at $8-12 million, the result could rank the painting among the top three most expensive works by the artist at auction. The auction record for a work by Marshall was set in 2018 when “Past Times” (1997) sold for $21.1 million. According to Sotheby’s, “Beauty Examined” was acquired the same year it was produced by Dr. Charles Sims, a pathologist who gifted the painting to his alma mater Loma Linda University in 2019, where it has been on display since. Proceeds from the sale are earmarked for the university’s Institute for Genetics and Translational Genomics. | More

 


SAM GILLIAM, “X for X,” 2021 (acrylic, tin shot, and copper chop on panel in bevel frame, 48 x 48 x 4 inches / 121.9 x 121.9 x 10.2 cm). | Photo by Jonathan Nesteruk. Copyright © 2022 Sam Gilliam / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 
Exhibitions

“Sam Gilliam: Full Circle” opens at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., on May 25. The exhibition presents a series of tondos made in 2021 in conversation with “Rail” (1977), a monumental 15-foot-long “Black” painting acquired by the museum in 1978. Each of the round, beveled edge paintings measures three to five feet in diameter. To make the new works, Sam Gilliam manipulates “layers of dense, vibrant pigments, their aggregate effect heightened through the addition of thickening agents, sawdust, shimmering metal fragments, wood scraps and other studio debris. Using a stiff metal rake along with more traditional tools, Gilliam then abrades, smears and scrapes the coarse surfaces to reveal a constellation of textures and colors below.” The exhibition is Gilliam’s first solo show at the Hirshhorn and his first in his adopted hometown in 15 years. | More

“Frank Bowling’s Americas” opens Oct. 22 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). The first major survey of the British Guyana-born Frank Bowling in an American museum in more than 40 years, the presentation will feature more than 30 works made during his time in New York, from 1966 to 1975. A new fully illustrated catalog will be published to accompany the exhibition, which will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (May 13–Sept. 10, 2023). | More

A couple of weeks after Karon Davis announced The Underground Museum is closing until further notice, the museum’s co-founder is curating a pair of solo exhibitions at Wilding Cran Gallery in Los Angeles. Featuring local artists, “John Simmons: And then there’s love” and “Mustafa Ali Clayton, VA” opened March 26. A photographer, John Simmons is showing black-and-white images from the 1960s, 70s, and 2014-17 with collages made in 1984 and 2019-20. Mustafa Ali Clayton, a multidisciplinary artist, is presenting new ceramic sculptures made in 2021-22. | More

 


AMY SHERALD, “Breonna Taylor,” 2020 (oil on linen, 137.2 x 109.2 cm / 54 x 43 inches). | © Amy Sherald. Collection of Speed Museum and National Museum of African American History and Culture. Photo by Joseph Hyde

 
More News

Amy Sherald donated $1 million from the sale of her Breonna Taylor portrait to the University of Louisville to fund the Brandeis Law School’s Breonna Taylor Legacy Fellowship and the Breonna Taylor Legacy Scholarship for undergraduates. The painting appeared on the September 2020 cover of Vanity Fair magazine and was acquired jointly by the Speed Museum and Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, making the U of L gift possible. | More

A week before the Venice Biennale opens on April 23, financial backers of the first-ever Namibian Pavilion have withdrawn support because the planned exhibition does not represent the Africa nation’s art scene. Intended to be installed on the island of Certosa and titled “The Lone Stone Men of the Desert,” the presentation features a “land art” project by RENN, a pseudonym for a white Namibian man born in South Africa, a novice artist who is 64. The last-minute upheaval follows a petition published online by Concerned Artists Namibia directed at the National Arts Council Namibia and the Ministry of Education regarding “Concerns regarding the representation of contemporary Namibian visual arts at the Namibian Pavilion at the upcoming 59th Venice Biennale 2022.” At this writing, the petition had nearly 400 signatures. | Artnet News

The Art Dealers Association of America announced 14 new members for 2022, including Peg Alston Fine Arts, a Black woman-owned gallery, and a few others with Black artists on their rosters, CONNERSMITH, Almine Rech, and Two Palms, among them. | More
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