Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates gallery artist Mary Kelly on her inclusion in the 2024 Whitney Biennial curated by Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator, and Meg Onli, Curator at Large, with Min Sun Jeon and Beatriz Cifuentes.

The Whitney Biennal 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing opens March 20, 2024. Featuring 71 artists and collectives, the Whitney Biennal explores the fluidity of identity and form, historical and current land stewardship, and concepts of embodiment, among other urgent throughlines, according to the curators.

Mary Kelly is known for project-based work that deals with questions of sexuality, identity, and historical memory in the form of large-scale narrative installations. The 2024 Whitney Biennial will feature the first part of a new project about the experience of late life. Her exhibitions include the 1991and 2004 Whitney Biennials as well as the 1982 and 2008 Sydney Biennales and Documenta 12, 2007.

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It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Pope.L, who died suddenly on December 23rd at home in Chicago.

One of the foremost conceptual artists of our time, describing himself as a visual and performance-theater artist, as well as an educator, Pope.L fundamentally challenged and changed the last 50 years of visual art in the United States. His longstanding history of provocative and absurdist performances along with his wide-ranging oeuvre of installations, objects, and paintings undermined conventional notions of language, materiality, and meaning. His elegant, indeterminate, and often humorous, yet bitingly poignant criticism of our history has only recently begun to be fully recognized.
In an interview for the monograph, member: Pope.L, published by The Museum of Modern Art in 2019, the artist noted that “the link between language and performance is duration; both exist only via the crucible of time and are continually remade in time.”*

Pope.L’s work is currently featured in a solo exhibition entitled Hospital at the South London Gallery, London, UK.  Other recent solo exhibitions, performances, and projects include Between A Figure and A Letter at Schinkel Pavillion, Berlin (2022); Misconceptions at Portikus, Frankfurt (2021) and Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration, a trio of complementary exhibitions of his work in New York organized by the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and Public Art Fund (2019). Pope.L has had previous solo exhibitions at MOCA Los Angeles, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Cleveland Institute of Art, The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and many other institutions.

His work is represented by Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, Vielmetter Los Angeles, Los Angeles, and Modern Art, London.

Our deepest sympathies are with his family and friends. A memorial is being planned for later this spring.

*Pope.L, “A conversation with Pope.L,” Stuart Comer and Danielle A. Jackson. member: Pope.L. The Museum of Modern Art New York, 2019.

Vielmetter Los Angeles proudly congratulates Stanya Kahn for being named as one of the Anonymous Was A Woman 2023 award recipients!

Anonymous Was A Woman is a celebrated nomination-only grant that has awarded women artists since 1965 for their “accomplishments, artistic growth, originality, and potential.” Stanya Khan is one of 15 artists to receive the $25,000 prize this year.

ARTnews wrote “The list of nearly 300 past recipients is a who’s who of today’s leading artists, many of whom received the award at critical points in their careers. Among them are Carrie Mae Weems (2007), Cecilia Vicuña (1999), Mickalene Thomas (2013), Joan Semmel (2007), Betye Saar (2004), Senga Nengudi (2005), Lynn Hershman Leeson (2014), and the late Laura Aguilar (2000).

“For any artist who’s out there applying for anything, don’t give up—keep trying,” Dindga McCannon said. “Sometimes, it might take us years, but you have to be in it to win it, and don’t get discouraged. I know that happens to myself and a lot of other artists: we apply for things and don’t get them. You constantly get a rejection notices, but you have to see beyond that.”

Stanya Kahn works in film and video, drawing, painting, sculpture and installation, sound, and writing. Using humor as a central device, Kahn often blurs the lines between the fictional and the real to show how language is forged out of collective experiences.

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Vielmetter Los Angeles is delighted to announce the acquisition of Rodney McMillian’s monumental sculptural installation From Asterisks in Dockery by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

From Asterisks in Dockery (2012) is a life-size functional representation of a church constructed in differing shades of red vinyl. The title references the history of the Dockery Farms in Dockery Mississippi, the site of a former 10,000 acre cotton plantation, established in 1895, and often referred to as “the birthplace of the blues” due to the large number of famous musicians that lived and worked there. From Asterisks in Dockery was included in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’s major 2021 traveling exhibition The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver. The exhibition explored early 20th-century Black culture and chronicled the pervasive sonic and visual parallels that shaped the contemporary landscapes of culture, religion, and the Black body.

McMillian often anchors his work through the use of the color red due to the complex associations it evokes. Here, the color red points to the history of violence in the South, and in particular, in Black communities. From Asterisks in Dockery was first presented in the major exhibition Blues for Smoke, curated by Bennett Simpson at MOCA Los Angeles in 2012, which then traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, in 2013.

We are grateful to Valerie Cassel Oliver, the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, for supporting this significant acquisition

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Bari Ziperstein on receiving the 2023/24 City of Los Angeles Independent Master Artist Project grant!

These eleven master artists will each produce a series, set, or singular new artwork with a grant of $10,000 from the City of Los Angeles. The original works will be premiered and promoted by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs in the Spring of 2024 as part of the 27th edition of this annual initiative.

“The COLA-IMAP grants program represents an important recognition of these artists’ outstanding ability and experience with engaging others through their works,” said Daniel Tarica, General Manager of the Department of Cultural Affairs. “The city of Los Angeles has provided this platform for local artists to showcase their creativity to the residents of Los Angeles for 27 years.”

This program represents an important recognition of these artists’ outstanding ability and experience with engaging others through their works.”

Read more about it here: https://culturela.org/programs-and-initiatives/2023-24-cola-imap/

Featuring Megan Fox Kelly, Founder of Megan Fox Kelly Art Advisory; Susanne Vielmetter, Owner and Director of Vielmetter Los Angeles; and Alain Servais, Collector and Founder of Servais Family Collection—moderated by Eileen Kinsella, Senior Market Editor of Artnet News.

Tectonic shifts are being felt across the art market. From the expansion of digital mediums and the movement towards ultra-contemporary art, to new generations of buyers and the ascent of mega-galleries, the arts landscape is undoubtedly undergoing rapid and monumental change. This panel will discuss the future of the art market in broad strokes, considering key forces behind these major movements.

Click link below to listen on Spotify

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Congratulations to Robert Pruitt who was honored on September 13th by the U.S Department of State’s Office of Art in Embassies with the 2023 U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts. The medal was presented by First Lady Dr. Jill Biden at a White House ceremony.

The Medal of Arts award was created by Art in Embassies, in partnership with the Secretary of State, in 2012 to formally acknowledge artists who have played an exemplary role in advancing the U.S. Department of State’s mission to promote cultural diplomacy. Their achievements represent those of thousands of artists who make art diplomacy possible at U.S. embassies around the world. Art serves as a bridge with other nations, encourages discussion and expression, and highlights the communal experience of people from countries, cultures, and backgrounds worldwide.

“This year’s honorees, like those before them, selflessly offer their creative talents to the mission of American cultural diplomacy,” said Megan Beyer, Director of Art in Embassies. “Artworks on display in embassies and residences are potent soft power tools of diplomacy.”

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Vielmetter Los Angeles is deeply saddened to share the news that visual artist and music pioneer Steve Roden passed away on September 6, 2023. Known for his work in painting, sculpture, sound, and video, he created a visionary and idiosyncratic aesthetic language across multiple mediums that was rooted in his interest in translating systems. Roden made connections and meaning by experimenting with visual imagery, music, language, code, translation, listening, and the amassing of various collections of objects and ephemera. Taking a particular interest in the relationship between color and sound, he focused specifically on spectrums of noise which are used to determine frequencies in sound as they relate to color. Roden then transformed this into profoundly beautiful and intellectual visual experiences. His first exhibition at Vielmetter was in 2003, followed by eight other remarkable solo exhibitions over the past eighteen years. The gallery is currently planning to present a survey of Roden’s work in the near future.

Susanne Vielmetter notes that the gallery “has lost a dear friend, a compassionate mentor, and one of the sweetest and humblest artists I have ever worked with. Steve’s kindness and his thoughtfulness were a source of inspiration for all of us.”

Roden attended two of Los Angeles’s premier art schools, Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design where he received his BA in 1986, and Art Center College of Design where he received his MA in 1989. He studied with such influential artists as Mike Kelley, Stephen Prina, Gary Panter, and Emerson Woelffer. Since 1986, Roden consistently exhibited and performed his work across the United States and internationally. His artwork is held in many public and private collections including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and San Diego, and National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece.

The artist is survived by his wife Sari Takahashi Roden, his mother Susan Roden, and a loving community of friends, artists, and extended family.

A celebration of Steve Roden’s life will be announced at a later date.

“I want to make sure I do things where I’m showing a commitment.”

American artist Pope.L. has crawled through Times Square in a suit, eaten the Wall Street Journal, and painted onions in the colours of the American flag. Meet the artists who, in his own words, “make stuff.”

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Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Rodney McMillian on the acquisition of two of his works by the Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina.

Untitled (For Dr. Reagan McDonald-Mosley), 2021 and Twice Painted IV, 2022 are currently on display in the CMA’s collection gallery where they will remain on view through October. The CMA is the first museum in the Carolinas to acquire McMillian’s work. On the occasion of the acquisition McMillian was honored and presented with a key to the city. 

“McMillian is one of the most thoughtful and engaging American artists working today. The paintings acquired by the CMA — one representational and one abstract — exemplify McMillian’s artistic range and the intricacy of his subject matter.” –  said Della Watkins, CMA executive director.

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Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to announce the acquisition of Pope.L’s seminal work entitled “Trinket” by the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.

A monumental work consisting of a 53.5’ long American Flag, “Trinket” was first presented at MOCA in 2015. During the museum’s public hours the flag was blown continuously by four industrial-grade fans creating a powerful air stream within the museum’s architecture which caused the fabric of the flag to fray and disintegrate over the course of the exhibition. The powerful image of the successively unraveling stripes of the flag, wildly gesturing like the arms of an unpredictable hydra, became a potent metaphor for the peril and disintegration of democracy, as much at the time when the work was first conceived during a time of war in 2008, as when it was presented at MOCA in a solo exhibition curated by Bennett Simpson in 2015. Timely and relevant to our current moment, the work is a powerful and urgent metaphor for our active engagement in the democratic process.

“This project is a chance for people to feel the flag,” Pope.L has said. “People need to feel their democracy, not just hear words about it. For me, democracy is active, not passive. With Trinket, I am showing something that’s always been true. The American flag is not a toy. It’s not tame. It’s bright, loud, bristling and alive.”

Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to announce the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles' acquisition of several works by My Barbarian!

The acquisition includes a video installation and three sculptural works which were included in the collective's 2022 survey exhibition that debuted at The Whitney Museum of American Art in 2022 and subsequently traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to announce the acquisition of several works of My Barbarian by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art!

The acquisition includes the collective's episodic video "Double Agency," a multimedia work comprised of four episodes, originally commissioned for the museum's fiftieth anniversary and accompanying series of masks from the "Masks of the World" series which are forgeries from LACMA's collection.

"In a way the “Double Agency” project, from webisodes to masks to live performance, is all television. The title becomes both a pseudonym for My Barbarian and a description of how we work among fields of cultural production. As black-box theatricalists who snuck into the white cube, we are double agents, serving our own idiosyncratic interests even as we collaborate with institutions to serve the “public,” a designation rife with contradictions in the museum context, one which we have designs on exceeding." – My Barbarian

It is with great excitement that Vielmetter Los Angeles welcomes Rebecca McGrew as Senior Director of Institutional Relations to the gallery.

“We are thrilled to welcome Rebecca to our team” said Susanne Vielmetter, owner. “Rebecca’s curatorial vision and her deep commitment to the artists she has worked with has long aligned with our mission at Vielmetter Los Angeles, and we look forward to our future work together.” In the role of Senior Director of Institutional Relations, Rebecca will work closely with our team and with the gallery artists to develop, nurture, and expand institutional relationships and to foster ongoing curatorial conversations with museums.

In her former position as the Senior Curator at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, Rebecca developed an exceptional exhibition program that engaged with some of the most important artists of our time, including Edgar Arceneaux, Mowry Baden, Sadie Barnette, Andrea Bowers, Mark Bradford, Christina Fernandez, Charles Gaines, Marcia Hafif, Frederick Hammersley, June Harwood, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Hayv Kahraman, Todd Gray, Naomi Rincon-Gallardo, Steve Roden, Amanda Ross-Ho, Alison Saar, Barbara T. Smith, and James Turrell, among many others. Rebecca brings with her over two decades of curatorial excellence and innovative contemporary programming, which also includes the award-winning and critically acclaimed It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969–1973 (2011– 12, co-curated with Glenn Phillips).

She is the recipient of the Fellows of Contemporary Art’s 2020 Curator’s Award (for Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe with Irene Georgia Tsatsos), a Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship (2007), and Getty Foundation grants under the Pacific Standard Time initiatives in 2021-24, 2014–17, and 2009–12. She has previously held curatorial positions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics. Rebecca received her B.A. from Pomona College and an M.A. in art history from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

“I am absolutely elated about joining the fantastic team at Vielmetter Los Angeles,” said McGrew. “Our artistic visions have long complemented each other, and I’m beyond excited to be working with all the outstanding artists at the gallery.”

We look forward to welcoming Rebecca on June 30, 2023!

Travellers entering or leaving the Historic Broadway station will do so via an entrance pavilion adorned with text in different colours and languages, a site-specific work by Los Angeles-based artist Andrea Bowers titled The People United (“El pueblo unido jamás será vencido,” Sergio Ortega and Quilapayun; “Brown Beret 13 Point Political Program,” La Causa) (2023). The titular phrases are frequent chants at protests, which often take place nearby as the Historic Broadway station sits near City Hall, county and federal courthouses, the headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department and other civic institutions.

“I seek to reflect the diverse communities that regularly gather downtown to express their voices and their rights,” Bowers said in a statement.

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Nicole Eisenman’s What Happened at the MCA Chicago reviewed in Galerie Magazine by Shelby Black.

“Going deeper into the exhibition, Eisenman’s small and large-scale canvases adorn the museum’s walls, where her trademark whimsical figures are introduced to audiences through environments ranging from bustling pubs to personal bedrooms. A number of the artist’s paintings depict social settings, where crowds typically gather around one central character washed in vivid color. Despite the rowdy atmosphere, feelings of isolation and loneliness practically seep from the canvases, as seen in artworks such as The Drawing Class (2011) and Beer Garden with AK (2009), but in nearly all of Eisenman’s work, there’s something to pull you back into fantasy.

“When you’re looking at a figure, you can feel a sense of distance, but there’s always something else to laugh at because she doesn’t take it too seriously,” says Collingwood. “So even when someone is staring off and with this really kind of despondent gaze, they’re holding a blackberry in their hand. So it kind of pulls you out of that seriousness of the moment.””

By Shelby Black – 29 April 2024

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Arlene Shechet’s solo exhibition Girl Group at Storm King Art Center featured in The New York Times by Nancy Hass.

“Shechet intended for Girl Group to nod to Storm King’s midcentury ethos of muscular hand-hammered minimalism set incongruously amid edenic surroundings, but the sculptures also play with the gender assumptions that often accompany works of such size and materials. “I wanted to fit in but I also wanted to stand out,” she says. They stand as well as a comment on the collection itself, which is, like public sculpture, dominated by men.”

The exhibition will open May 4th and run through November 10th.

By Nancy Hass – 27 April 2024

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Mickalene Thomas and her upcoming solo exhibition Mickalene Thomas: All About Love at The Broad featured in a New York Times article written by Robin Pogrebin. The exhibition opens in Los Angeles on May 25 and will be on view through September 29.

“Well before the current market craze over Black figuration, Thomas was exploring the Black female figure. “It’s difficult to understand from where we are now how radical her work was when I first showed it,” said the Los Angeles gallerist Susanne Vielmetter, who gave Thomas one of her first solo shows in 2007. “I cannot think of a single artist who at that time was making portraiture of female Black figures from a perspective of female desire.”

“The museum’s show features more than 80 works made over the last 20 years and bills itself as the artist’s “first major international tour.” But Thomas did not want to call it a retrospective or a survey.”

“It seems so finite, so definite — closed and fixed,” she said over a shrimp Caesar salad at the Edition hotel. “I like things open-ended. My career is still young.”

By Robin Pogrebin – 26 April 2024

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Hayv Kahraman’s exhibition The Foreign in Us at The Moody Center for the Arts is reviewed in the Brooklyn Rail.

“While The Foreign in Us asks audiences to recognize difference, Kharaman does not assign a narrative. There’s repetition and a clear message behind the exhibition’s crown of symbols—steely, contortionist femmes, grenades, bacteria-ridden torshi, antibodies—but Kahraman refrains from feeding her viewers neat ideology. Stunning yet impenetrable, Kahraman’s army of women engages as much with selfhood as with the other; an ode to, rather than a manual for, living with difference.”

By Rosa Boshier Gonzalez – April 2024

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Nicole Eisenman’s What Happened featured in The Washington Post!

“Eisenman, 59, is our most inventive and irreverent — and often times our most startlingly intimate — contemporary painter. Her style is really several styles, across several media — not just painting but also printmaking, collage and sculpture.”

Her paintings and brilliant sculptural ensembles are totally alive — sometimes almost maniacally so. But they’re also continually collapsing into a stunned stasis. When they emerge again, it’s into states of bafflement as the artist tentatively gropes after community, which she tenderly, gratefully celebrates.”

By Sebastian Smee – 19 April 2024

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Celia Paul is interviewed by Dian Parker for Artnet News!

“When she paints, she moves into a hypnotic state and becomes what she is painting. Whether it is her four sisters, a vase of flowers, or the sea, she is at one with it all. She gets inside the work until canvas and subject merge and even she disappears. Perhaps that is why there is no mistaking a Celia Paul painting: the layers of paint, the muted tones, the Payne’s grey of dreams, the portraits with internal faces.” Writes Dian Parker.

“The sea is a symbol of movement and stillness—the water constantly shifting, always in flux, yet contained, controlled. By thinking about water and waves, my inner weather can find a resonance. My flower paintings are almost always about renewal. My favorites are roses and peonies, the infolding, the lushness combined with discreteness, the heavenly scent. I want to convey their exquisite perfume with my paint-marks.” Says Celia Paul.

By Dian Parker – 06 March 2024

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Whitney Bedford and Andrea Bowers were named in the Association of Professional Art Advisors’ Top 10 Picks from Frieze Los Angeles Viewing Room 2024!

“In Veduta (Vuillard Jardins Publics), Whitney Bedford has taken a classic work of art and melded it into a contemporary work with sensitivity and care. The mood is gentle and serene, just as you experience with a Vuillard. I like the use of color—unexpected and even violent—but it meshes easily with the overall work.” Says Clarice Pecori Giraldi.

“This subtle, detailed, pencil and pastel drawing by artist and activist Andrea Bowers, The Dead Silence of Extinction (Moloka’i Creeper, last confirmed sighting 1963, HI, scientific specimen preserved at Auckland Museum’s Natural History Collection), draws from images of extinct bird specimens from the aforementioned museum’s collection to illustrate the precarious nature of our present world. Having just viewed similar poignant drawings in Bowers’ exhibition “Exist, Flourish, Evolve” at MoCa Cleveland, where the artist tackles environmental concerns head on (Bowers grew up on Lake Erie, OH), I could not help but be inspired and hope for a brighter world. The fragile nature of our ecosystem and the impact on wildlife are a continued throughline in Bowers’ work, beckoning us all to take urgent note and care for our planet.” Joanne Cohen writes.

By Frieze Staff – 26 February 2024

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Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s Nottingham Contemporary exhibition Exposure, featured in Frieze Magazine by Reuben Esien.

“A hand peeks from the upper-left corner of a photograph, holding a dusty black backdrop; at its centre sits a camera on a tripod. The arresting Daylight Studio Mirror (0X5A1511) (2021) is one of many works containing the apparatus of their making in ‘Exposure’, the first European institutional exhibition of Los Angeles-based artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya. The piece is an apt starting point for a show that continuously reveals what is usually unseen in the photographic process: the detritus and scenery of the artist’s studio, his image-making factory.

Sepuya’s practice seemingly inserts itself into a lineage of self-reflective portraiture – including Diego Velazquez’s painting Las Meninas (1656) and Jeff Wall’s photograph Picture for Women (1979) – in which the artists and their instruments appear within the scenes they’re creating. Sepuya’s works seem to subvert Susan Sontag’s description in On Photography (1977) of the dominance of the shooter over their subject and the camera as ‘a predatory weapon’. By turning the camera upon itself (and upon himself), to lay bare the workings of the studio, he appears as much at risk as his sitters from what Sontag described as the ‘camera/gun’.”

By Reuben Esien – 15 February 2024

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Andrea Bowers’s solo exhibition at MoCA Cleveland is featured in Inside Climate News by Katie Surma.

“Exist, Flourish and Evolve provokes visitors to confront philosophical arguments behind the rights of nature movement: principally, that nature is not a thing, or merely human property as conventional law treats it. Rather, Earth and its ecosystems are complex living communities to which humans belong. Modern science confirms this fact and legal systems ought to catch up to that reality, advocates argue.

The exhibition takes place across two locations. The first, a giant red, green and blue neon sculpture installed outside Cleveland’s lakefront Great Lakes Science Center and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame declares: “Lake Erie Has the Right to Exist, Flourish, & Naturally Evolve.”

The second, at MoCa, holds Bowers’ drawings, additional neon light installations, a documentary film and activists’ posters and campaign paraphernalia, including a sign boldly asking the question: “If Corporations Have Rights, Shouldn’t Mother Nature?”

By Katie Surma – 04 February 2024

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Yunhee Min and Tam Van Tran featured in The Brooklyn Rail.

“I like to think of visual abstraction as an invitation. An invitation for a chance experience and as a resistance to meaning or interpretation. I approach abstraction as a relational dynamic, hence always involved in some sense of movement and time. In studio, making abstraction is anything but abstract. This making involves physical and bodily entanglement with materials and processes that evolve over time.” – Yunhee Min

“While my current practice has figurative elements, I am never far from the belief that abstraction is inseparable from selflessness and the sensation of groundlessness.” – Tam Van Tran

The Brooklyn Rail – July 2022

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Celia Paul Life Painting is reviewed in The Observer by Dian Parker.

“The self-portraits in the show are interwoven with seascapes, water paintings, and flowers, all of which were done from memory. “The sea paintings are almost like passages of music, suggesting the passing of time,” Paul said. “The flowers stand for renewal. There are also two paintings of buildings in the exhibition, both 20 by 20 inches. My Father’s House is the house where my father died in 1983 when I was 23. At his death, my father was the Bishop of Bradford. After my father’s death, my mother and my four sisters had to leave the house (it went with the job). I have depicted the young apple trees in the garden in front of the house. They represent my mother, my sisters and me.”

By Dian Parker – 01 February 2024

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Hayv Kahraman’s exhibition Look Me in the Eyes at the ICA SF is featured in Vogue.

“The women are agents of rebellion, standing their ground amid swirling marbled seas. They seem hungry, even angry, desirous of what’s theirs for the taking. Call them women on the verge of getting what they want. In the evocative Love Me Love Me Not (all works are from 2023), three women hover around a flower-like object, plucking off eyeballs as if they were petals. The central figure slurps one into her mouth, a faint trickle of paint running down her chin. In Eyeris, a riveting, stormy scene, one figure appears ready to pop a loose eyeball into her own socket, like a contact.”

By Grace Edquist – 29 January 2024

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Pope.L and his exhibition Hospital at the South London Gallery featured in Ocula by Stephanie Bailey.

“As a Black man in America, Pope.L said he could never experience race as simply personal—a reality that differed from the experience of white people he knew. ‘They don’t see it as a larger political context that you have people who are empowered and people who are not,’ he told The Guardian in 2021.

All of which relates to how Pope.L dealt with race and class throughout his practice. ‘We are born into whiteness,’ he told performance artist Martha Wilson in 1996. ‘On the surface, it seems wholly to construct us, and the degree to which we may counter-construct sometimes seems very limited. But, I believe we can be very imaginative with limitations.'”

By Stephanie Bailey – 25 January 2024

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“William Pope.L was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1955 and spent much of his early career between that area and New York City, attending Montclair State and Rutgers University and participating in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. With a background in theatre, he was most widely known for his durational, public performance-art interventions, including several “crawls”, but his broader practice spanned photography, painting, drawing, installation, found-object assemblage and video.

I interviewed the artist William Pope.L in October before he passed away on December 23, and our conversation delved into his visionary practice, discussing conceptual and physical nuance as well as his current exhibition. Sitting in his studio at the University of Chicago, where he was a professor, I quickly realized that my questions would not be met with direct answers. He responded with open-ended, circuitous thoughts — similar to the ambiguous atmosphere that reverberates throughout his body of work, and in his new show at South London Gallery.

As we continued talking, it became evident that Pope.L was not interested in “showing” his work but in creating an atmosphere for the visitor to negotiate and orient themselves. “It’s really fascinating what people do, and of course it has to do with what you put in the room and where you put it . . . I try to set up a mystery or mysteries for them.””

By Geravis Marsh – 5 January 2024

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Todd Gray’s solo exhibition Rome Work is reviewed by Jody Zellen in Visual Art Source!

“The current exhibition featuring Los Angeles-based photographer Todd Gray is comprised of work made during a 2022-23 residency at the American Academy in Rome. Rome Work features images of iconic architecture, statues and churches in Rome combined with images from previous bodies of work, some shot in Ghana, others a selection of self-portraits, many of which depict the artist’s head covered with swaths of white shaving cream. Gray is a master of juxtaposition and has devised a way to creatively layer his images, encasing each element in its own (glassless), often oval frame so the finished works have dimensionality.

In his Rome series, Gray beautifully brings together photographs of the Eternal City that speak to darker times, wealth and poverty, construction and destruction. While Rome is a city full of ruins, Gray injects new life into his depictions. His images are an attempt to weave a path through different periods in history as a way to suggest that the evils of the past connect to the present. His evocative and thoughtful juxtapositions combine art, architecture with personal imagery to create new Black narratives that expose and explore legacies of colonialism in Africa and beyond.”

By Jody Zellen – 20 December 2023

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Kambui Olujimi’s exhibition All I Got To Give at Vielmetter Los Angeles is reviewed in Hyperallergic by Gregory Volk.

“These marathons have long been a potent theme for Kambui Olujimi, whose eclectic work spans sculpture, installation, performance, painting, and other mediums. The eight engrossing paintings (all watercolor, ink, and graphite on paper) and two ceramic sculptures (all works 2023) in his memorably titled exhibition All I Got to Give — his first with Susanne Vielmetter gallery — turn dancing couples, admission tickets, trophies, and, more implicitly, audiences into complex, extremely pertinent meditations on endurance, fragility, care, resistance, transcendence, and — importantly — race.”

By Gregory Volk – 18 December 2023

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Deborah Roberts’s work is featured in the NY Times article “Piecing Together a Black Identity, and a Whole Black World” by Margaret Renkl on the exhibition Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary Collage currently on view at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville through December 31st. The exhibition also features the work of Genevieve Gaignard, Wangechi Mutu and Mickalene Thomas.

“In her depictions of Black children, for example, the Austin-based artist Deborah Roberts has made use of not just magazine and internet images of Black children but also the eyes of James Baldwin and the fist of Muhammad Ali. In such works, Ms. Roberts is commenting on more than just the “otherness” she discusses in an artist’s statement on her website. She is commenting on more, even, than the failure of the white world to recognize Black beauty and the damage that this failure does to children.”

By Margaret Renkl – 11 December 2023

April Bey is featured in María Elena Ortiz’s highlights from Art Basel Miami Beach for The Art Newspaper.

April Bey is “really interested in the beauty” of the Black figure, “but also traditions of Black culture”, Ortiz says. “Here, she has featured Royal Crown, a product that some Black women use in their hair—and, of course, the title speaks of colonialization”.

By María Elena Ortiz – 08 December 2023

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We are thrilled to present Jared McGriff’s work in our booth at Art Basel Miami Beach. McGriff is featured in the NY Times spotlight on the Miami art scene by Brett Sokol.

“His Instagram handle, @watercolorbrother, perfectly captures the engrossing fugue state his paintings can inspire — ethereal scenes of Black life suck the viewer in, only to reveal deeper layers and troubling narratives. Yet his brushwork remained largely hidden from public view, until 2017 when he finally “pulled the plug” on his old life and moved to Miami.”

Visit us at Booth A16 to see McGriff’s newest work.

By Brett Sokol – 06 Decemeber 2023

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Pope.L interviewed about his recent South London Gallery exhibition, Hospital, featured in The Art Newspaper!

“Pope.L may not call himself one of the most influential performance artists working in the US today, but he has been known to pass out business cards declaring he is “the friendliest Black artist in America”. Known for his provocative and often absurdist works that deal with race, economic systems and language, the Chicago-based artist and educator works across multiple disciplines, from installations and film to painting and writing.”

When asked: “What can absurdity offer as a tool of resistance and liberation? Are not recent political figures (both in the US and the UK) also often branded as absurd, and how might absurdity now be a facet of fascism rather than liberation?”

Pope.L answers saying “The final word of James Joyces’s Ulysses is “yes”. The last words of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is “They do not move”.”

By Margaret Carrigan – 23 November 2023

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Kambui Olujimi interviewed in Black Art and Design by Christopher Okereke-Cox.

The New York based artist talks about his latest exhibition All I Got to Give, at Vielmetter Los Angeles, which takes us on a journey through the enduring spirit of historic dance marathons.

“This exhibition marks Olujimi’s first solo venture in Los Angeles and is the culmination of a decade-long exploration in which the artist immersed himself in the history and cultural impact of the 1920s and ’30s dance marathons. These marathons, emerging during the Great Depression, transcended entertainment to become intense endurance contests where participants, driven by desperation and the lure of prize money in economically hard times, danced for hours, days, or even months on end.

In All I Got to Give, Kambui transcends the boundaries of time and space, creating a mythic realm where the past and present converge. Through his art, he invites viewers to contemplate the complexities of human interactions, the strength found in community, and the enduring power of the human spirit in the face of adversity. This exhibition is not just a display of Olujimi’s artistic prowess but a testament to his profound ability to connect historical events with contemporary themes, making him a significant voice in today’s art world.”

By Christopher Okereke-Cox – 28 November 2023

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Paul Mpagi Sepuya interviewed in Document Journal by Ryan McNamara.

“In the studio photographs that Sepuya has been producing over the past few years, which nod to the format’s rich history, the artist appears alongside friends and lovers whose relationships to him and to the camera never seemed fixed. They’re performing together on a stage of his own making, but one whose improvisatory conditions he doesn’t fully control. That stage has grown more inviting with the addition of black velvet drapes, oversized pillows, an armchair, and other props which may recall the studio of Carl van Vechten, who photographed the artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance nearly a century ago. The mirror is still a frequent presence, as if to suggest that what we’re seeing isn’t intended for an outsider’s gaze.”

Text by Evan Moffitt. Interview by Ryan McNamara – 01 November 2023

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Deborah Roberts’ SITE Santa Fe exhibition Come walk in my shoes reviewed in Hyperallergic by Eric Joyce.

“Roberts centers the beauty and vulnerability of Black children, which is often seized from them at a young age via systemic violence in the United States.

Roberts’s sculpture “trumpet of consciousness” (2019) is an assemblage composed of a wooden box, a metal car jack, and a stack of books. The work, whose title refers to a speech given by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, engages with the history of violence against Black boys by invoking the story of George Stinney, a 14-year-old boy who was wrongfully accused and convicted of murdering two White girls in South Carolina in 1944. Stinney was subsequently sentenced to death by electrocution after a three-day trial. Due to his small frame, the boy’s body did not fit the scale of the electric chair, forcing him to sit on a stack of books. The sculpture itself is situated in the far corner of the gallery, slightly isolated from the figural depictions of the children. The books, four copies of Black Boy by Richard Wright, are squished and seemingly exploding from their spines from the pressure of the car jack. While the two-dimensional works in the show are more nuanced and subtle in their message, “trumpet of consciousness” explicitly confronts the assumed criminality of Black children through structural racism.”

By Eric Joyce – 23 October 2023

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Deborah Roberts’ Come walk in my shoes at SITE Santa Fe reviewed in Culture Type.

“The figurative works by Deborah Roberts focus on Black youth. Roberts assembles the collage works with found images – an eclectic mix of facial features, limbs, and colorful and patterned clothing – finishing the compositions with painted details. The complex, dynamic portraits speak to the individuality of her subjects and ask viewers to consider the societal assumptions thrust upon them. 

Originally, the Austin, Texas-based artist focused exclusively on girls. In recent years, she began portraying boys, too, further exploring preconceived notions around race, gender, beauty, masculinity, and vulnerability when it comes to Black children, and the tenuous innocence all too many of them experience.”

By Victoria L. Valentine – 16 October 2023

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Nicole Eisenman’s What Happened exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery featured in The Art Newspaper.

“Eisenman used humour in a very raucous way at the beginning to make new kinds of representations of lesbian life,” Godfrey says. “They weren’t that common in contemporary art.” Later works, like Morning Studio (2016), show domestic scenes. “You can see her engagement with lesbian life in New York with queer couples throughout the exhibition, in different, simple ways—like how she might present a pair of people relaxing, how she presents romance,” Godfrey says.”

By Catherine Hickley – 10 October 2023

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Featuring Megan Fox Kelly, Founder of Megan Fox Kelly Art Advisory; Susanne Vielmetter, Owner and Director of Vielmetter Los Angeles; and Alain Servais, Collector and Founder of Servais Family Collection—moderated by Eileen Kinsella, Senior Market Editor of Artnet News.

Tectonic shifts are being felt across the art market. From the expansion of digital mediums and the movement towards ultra-contemporary art, to new generations of buyers and the ascent of mega-galleries, the arts landscape is undoubtedly undergoing rapid and monumental change. This panel will discuss the future of the art market in broad strokes, considering key forces behind these major movements.

Click link below to listen on Spotify

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Nicole Eisenman’s current exhibitions featured in The Guardian.

“We’re at Nottingham Contemporary, where Eisenman is co-curating a group show. Just opened, it’s called Ridykeulous: Ridykes’ Cavern of Fine Inverted Wines and Deviant Videos – and it’s as much of a blast as its name suggests. But I’ve come to interview the artist about something even more monumental: her career retrospective at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, which is opening this week.

What Happened covers a momentous 30 years, going from jokey lesbian subversions of cartoons (in one, Wilma and Betty from The Flintstones get it on) to self-portraits, political paintings and public statues. So impressive is her output that, eight years ago, the French-born American was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant” for restoring “cultural significance to the representation of the human form”.”

By Claire Armistead – 09 October 2023

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“I’ve seen many artists whose artistic ventures employ beauty to entice the viewer. Genevieve Gaignard’s work is probably my favorite. A delightful multimedia artist who creates photographs, installations, collages, and other mediums, her artwork tells the story of America’s history of color blindness, and its eager violence upon Black people, women, and everything in between. Pretty pinks and bushy hairdos, florals, and red-lined lips cleverly conspire together, deconstructing the intricacies of race and cultural identity.”

Interview by Shaquille Heath / Portrait by Charlsie Gorski, Juxtapoz FALL 2023 Quarterly

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Nicole Eisenman featured on the cover of October’s Frieze magazine along with a feature article “Nicole Eisenman’s Literary Inclinations,” written by Isabel Waidner.

“Paintings like Beer Garden with A.K. (2009) are populated by New York-based queer and trans contemporaries and friends, in this instance gathered around the artist A.K. Burns. It makes sense that Eisenman’s engagement with literature should not be limited to canonical works but should include, if not centre, contemporary literary communities and live literary production. ‘Eisenman loves literature and writers,’ Myles noted in frieze in relation to the painting Weeks on the Train (2015), in which the writer Laurie Weeks, laptop on lap, is reading and taking up space while travelling.”

By Isabel Waidner – 04 October 2023

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Wangechi Mutu’s solo exhibition Intertwined at the New Museum is reviewed in Artforum by Darla Migan.

“Mutu has embraced the spiritual necessity of splitting her studio practice, like a serpent’s tongue, between New York and Nairobi, Kenya, learning from nature, myriad cultures, and her Pan-Africanist roots. The artist, who also studied anthropology, recognizes and claims the similarities happening between various folk-tale traditions—from Kikuyu lore to the Brothers Grimm and the stories of Br’er Rabbit that move between African-descended peoples of the Caribbean and the American South—and is deeply sensitive to the ways that beliefs about ourselves, our neighbors, and our species underlie all the actions that go into the creation of our world.”

By Darla Migan – October 2023

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Karl Haendel’s “Hand Holding Scribble,” is Artillery Magazine’s “Picture of the Week”!

“And then I was suddenly confronted by “Hand Holding Scribble” in Karl Haendel’s Daily Act of Sustained Empathy, his show of large scale drawings in pencil and ink on paper that opened Saturday afternoon at Vielmetter Los Angeles, and it was as if a mystery of the universe was unfolding before me.

A Karl Haendel Scribble has its own wave or fluid dynamic, geometry, maybe even logic; and this one was of a complexity that took it onto a different plane (okay I’m not talking about the paper), a different sphere or domain, even a different universe.  The universe.”

By Ezrha Jean Black – 30 September 2023

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The monumental immersive painting, titled This is the thing they call life, wraps around sections of the building’s exterior from ground level to its 70-foot-tall central silos and through its interior spaces. A natural extension of Cain’s established practice, which questions the seriousness of art, This is the thing they call life includes both her bold geometrics and fluidly painted marks throughout.

“It was a really great, fluid process,” Cain said, after seeing a shift in the logistics of her practice during the work. “To let go of control and have help was pretty mind-blowing,” she said, adding, “I learned a lot and it was really a dream project.”

The efforts of a team of artists from the community, who will continue to maintain the work, helped bring this yearlong project together.

The public is welcome to visit Cain’s work on the OBM campus at 250 North Hartford Avenue.

By Francesca Aton – 28 September 2023

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Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade’s “interstellar chamber opera” Star Choir will be presented by acclaimed experimental opera company The Industry inside Mt. Wilson’s largest observatory on Sept. 30 and Oct. 1. The opera features six singers and six instrumentalists (horn, harp, synthesizer, cello, contrabass, and percussion). Gaines, the Industry’s co-artistic director, composed the music for Star Choir and Segade wrote the libretto.

“Audiences will embark on a cosmic mission, as a starship crew seeks refuge on the hostile Planet 85K: Aurora. Once there, the colonists encounter intelligent life imperceptible to their all-too-human awareness. As the planet defends itself from their invasive presence, the humans evolve to become a part of the Holobiont, a queerly multi-species organism that covers this world. STAR CHOIR offers a meditation on the challenges and pleasures of mutual coexistence, reimagining humanity as a porous category that must transform to survive.

STAR CHOIR features an ensemble of eight singers, with performances by company members Kelci Hahn, Sarah Beaty, and Jon Lee Keenan. The Industry’s Music Director, Marc Lowenstein, leads an orchestra of six musicians, featuring board and company member Lucy Yates. Choreographer Milka Djordjevich joins the creative team as movement director and the sci-fi video elements are designed by Daniel Leyva.

Through fantasy and critique, STAR CHOIR asks urgent questions facing humanity amid our era’s confluence of natural and political crises, evoking scenes of disaster migration, fugitivity, and colonization as they are entwined with our difficult histories and our best visions of a potential future.”

Gaines and Segade are members of My Barbarian, along with Jade Gordon.

By Catherine Womack – 01 September 2023

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Genevieve Gaignard is featured on the cover of the third issue of Space on Space magazine along with a feature article “Genevieve Gaignard’s Ecosystem of Collecting” by Emily Logan.

On the cover is a new collage by Gaignard “My Funny Valentine | The Magician,” which will be featured in the upcoming group exhibition “Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage” at the Frist Museum opening next month.

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Nicole Eisenman’s solo exhibition “What Happened” at the Museum Brandhorst, Munich is reviewed in ArtReview by Christian Egger! The exhibition is on view in Munich through September 10, 2023 and subsequently travels to the Whitechapel Gallery, London opening October 11, 2023 through January 14, 2024.

Eisenman’s work is currently on view at the gallery in our group exhibition “Perpetual Portrait”  through August 18, 2023.

“What Happened at Museum Brandhorst, Munich, begins with Heading Down River on the USS J-Bone of an Ass (2017). This painting, of a mandible like vessel sailing dangerously close to sending its all-male crew over a waterfall, is an appropriately scabrous starting-point for this show, with its roughly 100 works drawn from three decades of the American artist’s predominantly painterly practice and embedded social commentary. (That said, Eisenman’s latter-day recognition as a significant sculptor is attested to by the presence of Procession, 2019, a multifigure sculpture staging an ambiguous parade or protest, originally shown at that year’s controversy-shadowed Whitney Biennial and, in the present context, a kind of mysterious backdrop.) The paintings, shown across multiple rooms, are loosely organized into categories: ‘Heads’, ‘Being an Artist’, ‘Coping’, ‘Against the Grain’, ‘Protest & Procession’, ‘In Search of Fun and Danger’ and ‘Screens, Sex & Solitude’. This last focuses on Eisenman’s ongoing, decade-long pictorial engagement with present-day communication gadgets: projectors, laptops, drones, iPhones, etc. That viewers are going to photograph the work, and publish it on social media, seems factored into the artist’s reflexive thinking.”

By Christian Egger – 31 July 2023

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Karla Klarin’s exhibition “Big Pink” is reviewed in Artillery by Jody Zellen!

“The works that comprise “Big Pink” explore Klarin’s memories of a pink-hued house that belonged to her neighbor Natalie. In the series’ earliest paintings, Klarin combines architectural precision with broad, washy brushstrokes to depict a typical Los Angeles tract home; a one-story house with an attached garage and low-pitched roof. Klarin’s illustrations appear as arrays of rectangular, textured shapes filled with swirling lines. The house’s particular pink color works as a point of departure for Klarin’s subsequent paintings.

In her later paintings, Klarin delights in abstraction—allowing the planes of architecture to morph into a more expansive landscape of interlocking triangles and trapezoids in shades of gray against a light pink sky. While she creates both small and large paintings, it is the larger works (more than 90 inches across) like Big Pink LA 1 (2017), Big Pink LA 2 (2016), and Big Pink LA 4 (2021) that evoke the sprawl that characterizes the terrain of Los Angeles.”

By Jody Zellen – 21 June 2023

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"Breasts become weapons in less literal ways in other works. The woman in “Boob Gold,” an oil painting on wood from 2018, stares defiantly back at us as she tugs open her dress to expose a coin slot, the kind you might find on a donation box, at the center of her chest. The work addresses what Kahraman sees as the exploitative dimensions of humanitarian aid. “Your body becomes a spectacle,” she says. “But on the other side, she’s exuding this power.” Sexual objectification may be an unavoidable condition of being a woman, especially one seen as exotic by the West, but Kahraman suggests it comes with its own forms of strength."

By Zoe Lescaze – 16 May 2023

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“Drawing on Grimm fairy tales, Haitian Vodou and Catholic ritual practices, and the objectification of women’s bodies in media, each piece and collection of works tells a story. The large scale of many of her mature collages lends itself to a closer reading of all its many aspects.”

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“The characters in the Mutu cinematic universe are a sexually assertive, menacing and athletic bunch. They leap, twist and spring, often backwards and in heels, like Ginger Rogers. The retrospective is titled Intertwined and, sure enough, her figures are constantly putting down roots or bursting free of them, moulting and germinating in a frenzy of tangled growth.”

By Ariella Budick – 15 March 2023

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“Paul Mpagi Sepuya crafts pictures that feel as intimate and warm as they do formal and intellectual. His photos do what art does best: Offer an immediate jolt of both recognition and disorientation, and point toward a singular perspective — a voice, a vision. I’m tempted to say they are arresting images, or captivating, but then the involuntary connotations of those adjectives don’t seem to fit; better to say that Sepuya creates images that hold you. Images that give pause and invite reflection — not so much like looking in a mirror but very much like catching someone else, someone you care for, gazing into the mirror.”

By Justin Torres – 15 March 2023

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“Like Braithwaite, Sepuya, Gaignard, and McMillian work against photography’s extractive legacy, in which white men used their cameras to further harmful stereotypes, expand their colonial prospects, and otherwise reinforce systems of power. Instead­­, they sustain photography’s parallel legacy as a mechanism of collective agency and liberation.”

By Erin O’Leary – March 2023

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“Hybrid creatures populate both the artist’s extravagant collages and startling sculptures, variously merging human and animal (or plant), alien and earthling, and female and male into assertive female-leaning beings. An interest in fusing opposites is suggested in the show’s title, “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined,” taken from a 2003 watercolor collage of two dance club habitués — young, scantily clad women with the heads of wild African dogs on the second floor.”

By Roberta Smith – March 2023

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"This humorously paired presentation includes glazed ceramic sculptures by Arlene Shechet and graphite figurative drawings by Nicola Tyson. Shechet’s gravity-defying sculptures seem to contort, tilt, bend and melt. They appear to be set in motion even while static. Her work embraces the duality of clay which is malleable yet holds still, and fragile yet strong, conveying the humor and pathos of bodily existence. Tyson describes her work as “psycho-figuration” because her misshapen figures have unexpected proportions. These amusingly freakish, androgynous figures are beyond gender identification, yet they have an obstinate individuality even without detailed faces."

By Lita Barrie – February 2023

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““It’s Time” is an exhibition of works by Kwesi Botchway, Genevieve Gaignard, Rodney McMillan, Wangechi Mutu, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya in conversation with works by legendary New York-based photographer Kwame Brathwaite. Anchored by Brathwaite’s influential images, the exhibition creates a cross-generational dialogue that posits an exploration of the photographer’s influence and the continuing investigation of portraiture and representation of the Black body by artists today.”

By Mousse Magazine Staff – 18 February 2023

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