Sand drifts over the photograph, dusting it lightly in grey. The grey particles float, so softly, to become the hazy sky. Two women face the ocean. A heave and a hold, their hands are raised to the near-imperceptible line of the horizon, while each woman balances on one leg in the soft, wet sand. The women exist within the vast indeterminacies of sea and sky, earth and light. They are Atlas. Their look towards the horizon can be seen to stand-in for that of the photographer, Judy Linn.
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"Histories of Violence" by Angela N. Carroll
Painter and mixed media artist, Peter Williams unpacks troubling histories of white supremacy and systemic oppression to create revelatory collective narratives about the persistence of violence against Black bodies. The devastating trend of unwarranted killings of Black boys and men at the hands of police officers, most of whom escaped federal conviction, catalyzed a departure from Williams’s lighter, more spiritual and reverent figurative abstract-portraiture towards more traumatic motifs. His latest body of work, With So Little To Be Sure Of, interrogates the systems and industries that perpetuate and uphold operational practices, legislation, and ideologies that normalize the dehumanization, subjugation, disenfranchisement and belittlement of African Americans.
Read More"Drawing Memory" by Kate Messinger
Welcome to Robert Davis’s memory. We’re here in between the years of 1975 and 1978 when the artist was between the ages of five and eight years old. He was living in Virginia. He was riding in a truck with his dad and grandfather and a bunch of construction materials. He was obsessed with Planet of the Apes. He was scared of swimming because he saw Jaws. He was hiding inside a futuristic round chair at his aunt’s friend’s house. He was considering a naked woman’s body in a Playboy he stole from his cousin. He was watching Good Times on the shag carpet.
Read More"Anne Neely: Dwelling on Painting" by John A. Tyson
Anne Neely’s art provides ways of exploring ideas and transmitting knowledge. Her prior series have treated mortality (in Leaving: A Meditation on Death, 1998) and the effects of pollution on the world around us (in “Water Stories,” 2014). Although meaning is present in her most recent series, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” it is not totally fixed; this body of paintings does not deal quite so explicitly with worldly issues.
Read More"Stare as Long as You Want" by Shantay Robinson
When Nancy Floyd started the photographic series Weathering Time in 1982, no one could have conceived how smartphones would change our lives. Today, taking selfies has become a daily habit for many. But as recently as 1982, people were still using Polaroid cameras for instant photographs or buying film and developing their pictures at Fotomat. It wasn’t typical of people to document their every move with photographs. But after Floyd received her bachelor’s degree in fine arts photography, she developed the idea of photographing herself every day to document the aging of her body over time.
Read More"Making Noise: Wendy Red Star" by Josephine Zarkovich
This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Wendy Red Star: Um-basax-bilua “Where They Make The Noise," curated by Michelle Grabner, on view at CUE Art Foundation, June 1–July 13, 2017.
In 1851, Chief Sits in the Middle of the Land negotiated with the United States to define the territory of the Apsáalooke (Crow). He stated his aspirations for the future of his people, proclaiming: “Where my four base teepee poles touch the ground, will be my land.”[1] As an undergraduate at Montana State University located in Bozeman, Wendy Red Star’s research found that this treaty had included Bozeman, and by extension all the land held by the university[2]. In response to this history Red Star erected a traveling installation of lodge pole teepees across the campus, disrupting common walking paths and briefly occupying the football field. It was the beginning of a practice that utilizes brash humor, scholarly research, and personal narratives to hold space in a postcolonial world, often reworking clichéd imagery of Native Americans to satirical effect.
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