Latest News in Black Art features updates and developments in the world of art and related culture
ART FAIRS
A new art fair is coming to Atlanta next year. The inaugural edition of the Atlanta Art Fair is Oct. 3-6, 2024, coinciding with Atlanta Art Week. Featuring leading local, regional, and national art galleries and public programming, the Atlanta Art Fair is presented by Art Market Productions and Intersect Art and Design at Pullman Yards. (10/5) | ARTnews
The 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair is underway at Somerset House in London, from Oct. 12-15, 2023. Exhibitors include 62 international galleries (one-third of them from the African continent) showing works by more than 170 artists. 1-54 features a variety of programming and collaborations with Christie’s, which is hosting a pop-up exhibition in its London space (Oct. 10-13), and Artsy, where galleries are showing works online for an extended period beyond the in-person fair (Oct. 12-29). | More
The 14th edition of the LagosPhoto Festival is Oct. 27-Dec. 31, 2023. The international photography festival announced a lineup of 38 artists from Nigeria, elsewhere in Africa, as well as Europe, the United States, and Australia. For the first time, programming will expand beyond Lagos to Benin. | More
Art x Lagos 2023 is coming soon. The eight edition of the international art fair will feature 10 galleries, special projects, and public programming, from Nov. 2-5, at Federal Place in Lagos, Nigeria. | More
Luke Agada. | Courtesy Monique Meloche Gallery
REPRESENTATION
Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago announced its representation of Luke Agada whose abstract paintings explore globalization, migration, and post-colonial cultural dislocation. “Arms, Feet, and Fitful Dreams,” the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, is currently on view through Oct. 28. Born in Lagos, Nigeria-born, Agada earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. (9/28) | More
AWARDS & HONORS
Artist Sherrill Roland is the 2023 winner of the 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art. The prize recognizes artists from the U.S. South, “whose work contributes to a new understanding” of art from the region. The Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, S.C., announced Roland, who was born in Ashville, N.C., will receive a $10,000 prize and be recognized at the Society 1858 Amy P. Coy Forum on Feb. 9, 2024. (10/7) | More
Artist Derrick Adams will be honored at the Performa Biennial 2023 Opening Night Gala on Nov. 1. Gallerist Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn of Salon 94 and Salon 94 Design, and italian architect and designer will also be recognized. Performa Biennial 2023 runs Nov. 1-19 in New York. Adams has participated in three editions of the performing arts biennial. (10/10) | More
FILM
Issa Rae has been named creative director of the 2024 American Black Film Festival (ABFF) presented by Nice Crowd. In the newly created role, Rae will focus on selecting the festival’s film lineup in collaboration with co-founders Nicole and Jeff Friday. The 28th edition of ABFF is June 12-16, 2024, in Miami, Fla. | Variety
MAGAZINES
The October issue of Artforum considers art history in the context of Black studies. The cover features an illustration by Emory Douglas from the April 3, 1971, edition of the Black Panther newspaper. Inside, the magazine published a conversation
led by Huey Copeland with the authors of two new books: Sampada Aranke (“Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power”) and Faye R. Gleisser (“Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967–1987″). The introduction to the exchange titled, Let’s Ride: Art History After Black Studies, posited the following: “Black studies…has grown increasingly central to critical thought in the art world and the academy, with especially urgent implications for art-historical praxis: How do the discipline’s notions of objecthood and objectivity shift in light of transatlantic slavery’s production of persons as property? How must art-historical methods, given their origins in racist, sexist, and colonialist epistemologies, be retooled to engage with complexities of Black life and expression that are designed to evade capture?” | Artforum
GQ published a profile of artist Rashid Johnson, prominently featuring his home in New York City, a renovated 19th century townhouse in Gramercy Park. In the October issue, “The Anxiety and Ecstasy of Rashid Johnson,” by Antwaun Sargent, includes a tour of Johnson’s art collection with works by David Hammons, Louise Bourgeois, Ellen Gallagher, Adolph Gottlieb, Phillip Guston, Simone Leigh, Thomas Houseago, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Henry Taylor, and Bob Thompson, among others, represented. Johnson’s own work and pieces by his wife, artist Sheree Hovsepian, are also displayed in the home. (10/3) | GQ
IMAGE: Above left, Artforum, October 2023. | Detail of EMORY DOUGLAS’s back cover for The Black Panther, April 3, 1971. Bobby Hutton. © Emory Douglas/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
OPPORTUNITIES
The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery announced a call for entries for the next Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Selected portraits will be featured in “The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today” exhibition. The first prize winner receives $25,000 and a commission to make a portrait of a notable living American for the museum’s collection. The competition’s guest jurors are MOCA curator Carla Acevedo-Yates, UPenn history of art professor Huey Copeland, and artists LaToya Ruby Frazier and Daniel Lind-Ramos. In 2016, Amy Sherald won the triennial competition. She was the first woman artist and first Black artist to receive first prize. Submissions are open Oct. 2, 2023-Jan. 26, 2024. | More
CT
The Brooklyn brownstone of Jon Batiste, musician, composer, and former bandleader on Late Night with Stephen Colbert, and Suleika Jaouad, artist, journalist, and book author, features a recycled water bottle chandelier by Willie Cole in the living room, where they exchanged wedding vows in 2022. The couple gave Architectural Digest a tour of their home. (More about Cole’s chandelier works here and here and here). | Video by Architectural Digest
