Art Out: Mining the Archive, Kelli Connell, Alanna Fields
Mickalene Thomas, Jet Blue #20, 2021. Color photograph, mixed media paper, acrylic paint, rhinestones, Swarovski crystal fabric, fiberglass mesh, 59 x 46 1/4 inches. © Mickalene Thomas. Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson, New York.
Mining the Archive
Yancey Richardson Gallery: June 5- July 16, 2021
Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present Mining the Archive, a group exhibition featuring new work by nine African American artists using diverse approaches to photo collage and a variety of archives to question ideas around identity, memory, beauty and history. Co-curated with Racquel Chevremont, participating artists include Sadie Barnette, Alanna Fields, Todd Gray, Lyle Ashton Harris, Leslie Hewitt, Dionne Lee, Wardell Milan, Deborah Roberts and Mickalene Thomas.
Throughout these works, the artists examine the relationship between the political, the personal and the material. Vernacular photography, personal archives, iconic photographs, popular magazines, vintage calendars, and the internet are among the myriad of sources from which the artists have drawn their imagery. Through the fragmentation, deconstruction, juxtaposition and layering of these media, the artists transform the familiar into the strange and conjure new meaning from the ordinary. The recombining of individual images and materials undercuts any narrative reading, and draws attention to the fluidity of identity, revealing culture as a web of associative ideas and history as malleable.
Kelli Connell, Hers and Hers, 2015.
Kelli Connell: Double Life, 20 Years
Alice Austen House: June 4- August 31, 2021
The Alice Austen House presents 'Kelli Connell: Double Life, 20 Years,' Lesbian photographer Kelli Connell’s twenty-year project with one model represents an autobiographical questioning of sexuality and gender roles that shape the identity of the self in intimate relationships. The project’s multi year span opens up new dialogues on women and aging and explores polarities of identity such as the masculine and feminine psyche, the irrational and rational self, the exterior and interior self, and the motivated and resigned. By combining multiple photographic negatives of the same model in each image, the dualities of the self are defined by body language and clothing. The importance of these images lies in the representation of interior dilemmas portrayed as an external object: a photograph. Through these images, the audience is presented with “constructed realities.
Double Life, 20 Years is funded by the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Alanna Fields, THRILL ME WITH YOUR MAGIC, 2021. 24 x 36 in. Pigment print mounted on museum board, encaustic on panel.
Alanna Fields, Mirages of Dreams Past (Closing)
Baxter St at Camera Club of NY: May 5, 2021 - June 9, 2021
Mirages of Dreams Past by lens-based mixed media artist, archivist, Alanna Fields, is comprised of a new series of large-scale mixed-media collages exploring the representation of Black queer desire, sensuality, leisure, and memory.
For the works in Mirages of Dreams Past—Fields’s first solo exhibition—the artist draws upon an eclectic range of vernacular photographs of Black queer people dating from the 1960s to the 1970s. Reframing this found archive using a kaleidoscopic technique, Fields repeats and layers a single image to both reconstruct the way we process images and push beyond the constructs of nostalgia and memory. Through the use of wax, she applies different levels of transparency to each figure: they emerge and dissolve, slipping in and out of view, in constant stages of revealing and concealing what can’t be accessed in real time.
The pieces in Mirages of Dreams Past build upon Fields’s acclaimed recent series “Audacity” (2019-20) and “As We Were” (2019), in which wax served as a means to seal and memorialize Black queer life and visually address how it has historically been obscured and concealed. In the new works, however, the wax begins to frame rather than conceal: nature, vibrant interiors, and images of home come into focus.
EVENTS:
Artists Studios Community Series
New York Public Library: Wednesday, June 9, 2021, 2:30 - 4 PM
The Artists Studios Community Series provides a welcoming virtual environment where artists feel comfortable showing and talking about their work, sharing information, and learning how to prepare for a studio visit and artist talk.
Each program accommodates ten virtual studio visits followed by sharing resources on different aspects of being an independent artist. Each artist will be given five minutes to share their work along with five minutes to accept and answer comments and questions from other participants.
Register here.
FILM SCREENING - Hassan Hajjaj's A Day In The Life of Karima: A Henna Girl
Fotografiska: Jun 10 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM, 2021
A Day In The Life of Karima: A Henna Girl is the Marrakesh-set documentary that follows Hajjaj’s favorite ‘Kesh Angel’ character Karima, who is a mother, wife, artist, henna artist, local icon and graduate of what he calls “Jamaa Fena: the university of street life”.
Known for breezing through Marrakesh on her bike with her vibrant veils and textile abayas and djabellas fluttering in her wake, Karima is also a normal woman who works eight or ten hours a day. Though his film Hajjaj paints a more complex vision of contemporary Islamic gender roles.
In support of the Hassan Hajjaj’s exhibition VOGUE: The Arab Issue. Alive with colour and patterns, this immersive exhibition brings together five important series developed over the past three decades. This exhibition is organized by Fotografiska and produced in collaboration with Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris.
Learn more here.
JAMES NACHTWEY + PAUL MOAKLEY: BDC CONVERSATIONS (IN-PERSON)
Bronx Documentary Center: June 12, 2021 | 6PM
This is an in-person socially distanced event. Reservations are required. RSVP here.
BDC Annex, 364 East 151st St, Bronx, NY 10455
The Bronx Documentary Center welcomes photographer James Nachtwey and TIME Magazine Editor Paul Moakley as they discuss their work 'The Opioid Diaries'.
In 2017, Nachtwey and Moakley set out to document the U.S. opioid crisis, an addiction epidemic that kills nearly 64,000 people in America every year. The pair traveled the country gathering stories from users, families, first responders and others at the heart of America’s opioid epidemic. Nachtwey’s images are paired with Moakley’s interviews, short videos, and firsthand accounts from people at the heart of the crisis.
"The Opioid Diaries" is a visual record of the worst addiction epidemic in American history and this national emergency has only worsened since this work was first published in 2018. TIME’s "The Opioid Diaries" can be viewed here.
This event is held in conjunction with our upcoming exhibition The Human Cost: America's Drug Plague on view (in-person) June 6 -July 5, 2021.
