Nydia Blas, Pamela Ramos, Renée Cox
Nydia Blas, The Negation (Dequan, Sahanna, and Giannis Calloway), 2022. Inkjet print. Courtesy of the artist.
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art | Nydia Blas: Love, You Came from Greatness, August 19, 2023 - January 7, 2024
“In 2021, the Johnson Museum commissioned artist Nydia Blas to create a new body of work in response to a collection of eighteen family albums held by the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. The albums were created by Black families from the 1860s to 1980s; they document everyday events and special occasions in the lives of the people pictured…
“Over two summers, Blas photographed Black families in Ithaca, making her own contribution to a theoretical album of Black American family life. Specifics of the Ithaca context, missing from the Cornell Library’s albums, are continually present here: nature in abundance, revelry in glorious summer, signs of local Black history, realities of life in a mostly white town. As is typical of her practice, Blas worked with families known to her, beginning with her own. Her loving portrayals of her subjects draw from the visual conventions and personal and community functions of the photographs in the Library albums but are suffused with poetry, even the otherworldly—for Blas, necessary tools of healing and resistance. Images that might be everyday become mythic, as the familiar family snapshot is subsumed into the enigmatic, ennobling, and singular work of art.”
For more information visit Johnson Museum of Art.
All images courtesy of the artist and New Low. Photographs by Evan Walsh Photography.
New Low | Pamela Ramos, July 30 - September 2, 2023
“Pamela Ramos’ photos encapsulate the perspective shift which distance often creates, presenting memory as fantasy and an existence which relies on absence. Our individual and collective pasts linger like ghosts and often only pull into focus once deserted. There is also a finality to this, once left the perspective cannot be reset. Large structures function in a similar way; to see the external form one must leave, dispelling any sorcery contained within. This is not a longing for the past, but more a longing for the prior vantage, knowing things will never be the same because you have grown up, but this feels less like a coming of age story and more a condensation of her previous work, a portal forward and inward, inviting you deeper into her emotional qualia.
“It is an invocation of memory, not implicit, unconscious memory, nor explicit, conscious memory, but rather a numinous presence, childlike and urgent, rife with fantasy, desire, and playfulness. The images are twisted, but light, yielding a marinade of yearning and levity, her visual language pithy and adhesive.”
For more information visit New Low.
Renée Cox, Cousins at Pussy Pond, 2001. Archival digital c-print on aluminum. 120 x 144 inches. Renée Cox: A Proof of Being, Guild Hall, 2023. Photo: Gary Mamay
Guild Hall | Renée Cox: A Proof of Being, July 2 - September 4, 2023
“Renee Cox: A Proof of Being is comprised of selections from the artist’s most recognizable bodies of work, including her groundbreaking Yo Mama series and her iconic photographs devoted to Jamaican national hero Queen Nanny. The exhibition will also feature the New York premiere of a recent work, an immersive video installation, Soul Culture (Courtesy of the artist and the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh)…
“Renee Cox (b. 1960, Colgate, Jamaica) is a visual artist, working foremost in photography and video. Her work arises at this intersection of history, race theory, and sexuality. In her practice, Cox works to deconstruct stereotypes, engage the viewer, and challenge their preconceived ideas about gender and race. She explores the possibilities of new and affirming self-representations for Black diasporic peoples as a visual corrective to both art history and history writ large—transforming dispossession into self-possession. By deconstructing the Black female body, she reveals the myths behind it.”
For more information visit Guild Hall.
