Recent News in Black Art features updates and developments in the world of art and related culture
From left, Kim Dacres portrait. | Photo by Antony Artis; KIM DACRES, “Zora,” 2024 (found tires, tire rims wrapped in tire inner tubes, washers, wood and screws mounted on wood pyramid plinth with black paint, felted wool on industrial rug, ground bicycle tire, and screws, 46.5 x 20 x 20 inches). | © Kim Dacres, Courtesy the artist and Charles Moffett Gallery
REPRESENTATION
Kim Dacres Joined Charles Moffett Gallery
Charles Moffett announced its representation of Kim Dacres, who was the subject of a solo exhibition at the New York gallery last year. “Kim Dacres: Measure Me in Rotations” presented 10 new sculptures made with recycled auto, motorcycle, bicycle, and electric skateboard tires. Working with rubber from found tires, Dacres makes sculptural works that “consider the texture of experiences unique to Black People, women, and queer folks,” according to her website. A former New York public school teacher, Dacres is a first-generation American artist of Jamaican descent. She lives in Harlem and works out of a studio in the Bronx. In December, Charles Moffett is participating in Art Basel Miami Beach for the first time and will feature Dacres in its two-artist presentation. (10/10) | More
Co-Curators of 2026 Saint Louis Triennial: From left, Stefanie Hessler, director of Swiss Institute in New York; Nora N. Khan, independent curator based in Los Angeles, Calif.; Jordan Carter, curator and co-department head at Dia Art Foundation; Wanda Nanibush, Anishinaabe independent curator from Beausoleil First Nation, Canada; and Raphael Fonseca, curator of Latin American modern and contemporary art at Denver Art Museum. | Courtesy Counterpublic
APPOINTMENTS
2026 Counterpublic Triennial Will be Co-Curated by Jordan Carter
Jordan Carter is among the five curators organizing the third edition of Counterpublic, the public art triennial in Saint Louis, Mo. The citywide exhibition is planned for Sept. 12-Dec. 12, 2026. In a statement, Carter said: “Having grown up in St. Louis, I am excited to meaningfully contribute to my hometown through reverberating reconsiderations of the intersections of art and place. Within the multisited civic context of Counterpublic, I look forward to working alongside my inspiring co-curators to realize the worldbuilding visions of artists in ways that bridge artistic intent and social impact. Complementing, extending, and collaborating within the city’s vibrant arts ecosystem, I intend to cultivate the possibilities of conceptual and site-sensitive practices, repositioning art from the pedestal to pedestrian space.” (10/3) | More
Inaugural 2025 Sam Gilliam Visiting Artists: vanessa german in her studio. | Photo by Jordan Whitten; Eric N. Mack. | Photo by Daniel King
AWARDS & HONORS
Sam Gilliam Visiting Artist Program Launched at Speed Art Museum
The Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Ky., and the Sam Gilliam Foundation are working together to support new generations of artists. The museum is launching the Gilliam Visiting Artist Program and announced the inaugural 2025 visiting artists are vanessa german (b. 1976) and Eric N. Mack (b. 1987). A new full-time curatorial position to manage the program (Sam Gilliam Assistant Curator of Artist Programs) has also been created. San Gilliam (1933-2022) had deep ties to Louisville. The abstract artist was raised in Kentucky and spent his formative years as an artist in Louisville, where he earned BFA and MFA degrees from the University of Louisville. Gilliam also co-founded the artist collective Gallery Enterprises (1957-1961) in the city. (10/16) | More
2024 Rabkin Prize Winners
Eight recipients of the 2024 Rabkin Prize were announced last month. The $50,000 unrestricted prize recognizes visual arts writers. The winners include Robin Givhan, Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion writer and critic-at-large at The Washington Post; TK Smith, curator, writer, and cultural historian, who recently joined the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University as curator of the Arts of Africa and the African Diaspora; and Siddhartha Mitter, a freelance writer and critic, whose international profiles of artists of African descent appear regularly in The New York Times. Greg Allen, Holland Carter, Thomas Lawson, Cassie Packard, and Emily Watlington also received the prize this year. The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation is an artist-endowed foundation established in Portland, Maine, in 1999, with a bequest from the Estate of Leo Rabkin (1919-2015), a school teacher, art collector and artist. (9/5) | More
2024 National Academicians Include Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi
The National Academy of Design inducted 28 new members. The 2024 academicians include artists Maren Hassinger, Hugh Hayden, Beverly McIver, Senga Nengudi, Amy Sherald, and Sara Caples and Everardo Jefferson of Caples Jefferson Architecture. Founded in 1825, the National Academy of Design is the first artist and architect-led organization in the United States. (9/10) | More
Mabel O. Wilson. | Photo by Dario Calmese
LECTURES
Mabel O. Wilson Will Deliver Mellon Lectures
The annual A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts will be delivered by Mabel O. Wilson, whose scholarship focuses on race and architecture. The four-part lecture series is hosted by the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) in Washington, D.C. A Columbia University professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and professor and chair of the African American and African Diaspora Studies, Wilson will discuss America’s Architecture of Freedom and Unfreedom at the National Gallery every Sunday, from March 9 to March 30, 2025. Wilson co-curated “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America” (2021) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She is also the author of “Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums” and “Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture.” Her Mellon lectures are inspired by the themes of her forthcoming book, “Building Race and Nation: How Slavery and Dispossession Shaped U.S. Civic Architecture.” CASVA Dean Steven Nelson said: “Wilson’s groundbreaking research on our nation’s architecture, including that which surrounds the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, encourages us to relearn and reconstruct our lived environments, providing new insights and reckonings into the past, present, and future.” (9/23) | More
MAGAZINES
The Fall/Winter 2024 issue of Seen is guest edited by filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Ja’Tovia Gary. A journal of film, art, and visual culture, Seen is produced by Blackstar Projects, the organization behind the Blackstar Film Festival in Philadelphia, Pa. Among an array of articles, Issue No. 007 includes a studio visit with artist Robert Pruitt in the Bronx, N.Y., by Amarie Cemone Gipson; Jasmin Hernandez on artist Ambrose Rhapsody Murray; and a conversation with filmmaker Haile Gerima, first published by Blackstar in 2018. In her Letter From the Guest Editor, Gary wrote: “Before we can answer the question of what it means to be seen, we must first address another question: seen by whom? We’ve been counseled in the past to appeal to the hearts and minds of those who might wish us dead. I offer that this mode of thinking privileges a perspective that does not belong to us, because it legitimizes a voraciously rogue entity. Indeed, there have been many campaigns, literary offerings, works of art and cinema, etc., that focus their attention on how the dominant culture sees us. My appeal to the intramural: advance beyond the need to audition and perform for our executioner and turn our gaze and our curiosity on ourselves and on each other.” On Oct. 29, a launch event at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is celebrating the new issue with a conversation between Gary and Bridgett M. Davis, who wrote and directed the film “Naked Acts” (1996). | More
Seen, Issue No. 007: Ja’Tovia Gary. | Cover photo by Gioncarlo Valentine
GALAS
Rashid Johnson Among Honorees at Creative Time Gala
Creative Time commissions and presents ambitious public art projects like “A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby” (2014), Kara Walker’s monumental sugar sphinx; HEARD•NY (2017) at Grand Central Station, Nick Cave’s choreographed parade of 30 dancers wearing colorful, life-sized (Soundsuit-style) horse costumes; and Rashid Johnson‘s Red Stage (2021), a literal red stage in Astor Place, a platform inviting the public to experiment, create, advocate, and perform outdoors. The public arts organization is marking its 50 year anniversary with a gala celebration on Oct. 30, in Brooklyn, N.Y. Johnson is one of the honorees and Linda Goode-Bryant is among the co-hosts. The gala is a fundraiser, supporting Creative Time’s projects which are free and open to the public. | More
Prospect.6 Gala Honoring Nari Ward, V. Joy Simmons Among Others
On Nov. 1, the Prospect.6 gala in New Orleans will honor New Orleans artist Ron Bechet; New York artist Nari Ward; Los Angeles collector and philanthropist V. Joy Simmons; Krista Thompson, professor of art history at Northwestern University; and Arthur Roger, New Orleans gallery owner. The gala celebrates the opening of “Prospect.6: The Future Is Present, The Harbinger Is Home,” the citywide exhibition running Nov. 2, 2024-Feb. 2, 2025, and raises funds to support the triennial event. | More
CT
FILMS | San Quentin, the California prison, hosted its first film festival on Oct. 10. Scott Budnick, film producer and founder of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition said, “My hope for the day is that everyone feels human, right, that the guys in here feel seen. They feel appreciated, that they’re starting to master their craft as filmmakers. They don’t see themselves as inmates, they see themselves as filmmakers, as people that are going to be unbelievable contributors to society.” Attendees included Kerry Washington, Jerry Seinfeld, W. Kamau Bell, and Cord Jefferson, according to The New York Times. | Video by California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
