THE WEEK’S TOP NEWS COVERAGE from around the web featuring artists Nick Cave, Gordon Parks, Noah Purifoy, Mark Bradford, Mickalene Thomas and designer Duro Olowu.
Nick Cave: Soundsuit Invasion, Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead. | Photo by PD Rearick, Courtesy of Cranbrook Art Museum via T Magaine
Nick Cave
T MAGAZINE talks to Chicago-based artist Nick Cave about “Here Hear,” his first solo exhibition in Michigan at the Cranbrook Art Museum. An alumni of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, which is outside of Detroit, Cave has been staging pop-up performances around the city since April. In “Nick Cave Revisits Detroit, Soundsuits in Tow,” the artist says: “Thank God for the city. I got here and I was the sole black person, so Detroit saved my life. I became connected to this circle of creative people.” READ MORE
Gordon Parks
CBS NEWS reports on Gordon Parks‘s “Segregation Series,” documenting Jim Crow Alabama in the 1950s. Years after the Life photographer’s death, the previously unpublished color images were uncovered in a small wood box at The Gordon Parks Foundation in Pleasantville, N.Y., and are now on view at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta through this weekend (June 21, 2015). READ MORE
Noah Purifoy, “No Contest (bicycles)” (1991), assemblage sculpture. | Photo by Matt Stromberg via Hyperalleric
Noah Purifoy
HYPERALLERGIC explores the work of Noah Purifoy, the Southern California assemblage artist who died unde-rrecognized more than a decade ago. Co-curated by Franklin Sirmans, “Noah Purify: Junk Dada,” the late artist’s first major museum retrospective, opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art earlier this month. “[Purifoy] had such a heavy influence on artists like David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, Mel Edwards — artists that I knew of and I was trying to make sense of — and it always led back to him,” says Sirmans.
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Artist Mark Bradford in his Los Angeles Studio. | Regen Projects, Photo by Catherine Opie via The New Yorker
Mark Bradford
THE NEW YORKER profiles Los Angeles-based artist Mark Bradford in advance of his “Scorched Earth” exhibition at the Hammer Museum (June 20- Sept. 27, 2015). In “What Else Can Art Do?” by Calvin Thompkins, Bradford says “I don’t want to say the show is about AIDS, but it’s about the body, and about my relationship to the nineteen-eighties, when all that stuff hit. It’s my using a particular moment and abstracting it.” The artist, who gets most of his art supplies from Home Depot, describes his art as abstract with a social and political context. READ MORE
At the end of her trip, Mickalene Thomas visited ‘ReSignifications’ at Museo Bardini, Fondazione Biagiotti Progetto Arte and Villa La Pietra in Florence, where two of her favorite works were by the Moroccan artist Hassan Hajjaj (left) and her friend Carrie Mae Weems (below right). | Photo by Mickalene Thomas via T Magazine
Mickalene Thomas
T MAGAZINE publishes Mickalene Thomas’s travel diary, photographs documenting her first trip to the Venice Biennale, which coincided with her participation in the NYU-sponsored conference “Black Portraiture{s} II: Imaging the Black Body and Re-Staging Histories” in Florence. In “Mickalene Thomas’s Adventure in Italy,” the Brooklyn-based artist shares her sojourn to four cities in 10 days with the New York Times publication. “Since it was going to be my first time in Italy… it seemed like a great time for me to travel all over Italy and see what was happening in the art world in what, to a New Yorker, can feel like a different part of the universe,” Thomas says. “I wanted to experience firsthand all of the things I’d been hearing about Italy for years: the architecture, the food, the people, the energy, the language. I got a taste of all of that.” READ MORE
Fashion designer Duro Olowu was raised in Lagos by his Nigerian father and Jamaican mother in Nigeria. | Photo by Rory van Millingen via T Magazine
Duro Olowu
T MAGAZINE features fashion designer Duro Olowu, who splits his time between London and New York. Married to Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, the former lawyer is a master of mixed prints. In “Duro Olowu, Inspired by the World,” an image-driven story, he says “I don’t follow trends” and artists “have inspired me to design with sincerity and emotion.” READ MORE
