Art21 Partners with EXPO CHICAGO 2024
Chicago, Illinois – Art21 is thrilled to announce a partnership with EXPO CHICAGO, the city’s premier showcase of contemporary and modern art galleries. Returning April 11-14, 2024, to Navy Pier's Festival Hall, EXPO CHICAGO 2024: “A Fusion of Art, Dialogue, and Inspiration” is a dynamic convergence of artistic expression, thought-provoking discussions, and interactive initiatives celebrating the city's rich cultural heritage while spotlighting the vibrant contemporary arts community.
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Hannah DeGarmo
Senior Manager of Communications
hannah@art21.org
Art21 Partners with EXPO CHICAGO 2024
Chicago, Illinois – Art21 is thrilled to announce a partnership with EXPO CHICAGO, the city’s premier showcase of contemporary and modern art galleries. Returning April 11-14, 2024, to Navy Pier's Festival Hall, EXPO CHICAGO 2024: “A Fusion of Art, Dialogue, and Inspiration” is a dynamic convergence of artistic expression, thought-provoking discussions, and interactive initiatives celebrating the city's rich cultural heritage while spotlighting the vibrant contemporary arts community.
Art21 will present two programs featuring several award-winning films as part of EXPO CHICAGO’s /Dialogues program as well as a public program at Gene Siskel Film Center featuring the artist Michael Rakowitz. Hosted in collaboration with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), /Dialogues offers engaging panel discussions featuring leading curators, artists, and arts professionals. From exploring the artist's civic responsibilities to addressing the role of art in times of crisis, this year's lineup will delve into pressing topics shaping the contemporary art landscape. Attendees can also look forward to the Soho House Snug, a designated space within the /Dialogues area, where they can connect with fellow art enthusiasts and enjoy stimulating discussions, book signings, and video presentations by Art21.
"Art21 is proud to partner with EXPO CHICAGO in bringing our films to the city, Art21’s largest audience in the Midwest,” says Tina Kukielski, Susan Sollins Executive Director and Chief Curator. “We’re also excited that celebrated artist Michael Rakowitz will be joining us in Chicago for a special screening of his Art21 film.”
Art21’s /Dialogues program at EXPO CHICAGO include:
“Award-Winning Art21 Films”
Friday, April 12th, Noon-1pm
Soho House Snug, EXPO's /Dialogues area
Experience a curated selection of acclaimed Art21 films from 2023, featuring artists such as Miranda July, Christine Sun Kim, and Kerry James Marshall. Jurrell Lewis, Art21 Assistant Curator, will lead a Q&A session following the screening.
“Art21 Presents Artists in Chicago”
Friday, April 12th, Noon-1pm
Soho House Snug, EXPO's /Dialogues area
Discover the creative voices shaping Chicago's artistic landscape through films showcasing artists like Nick Cave, Theaster Gates, and Jessica Stockholder. Emma Nordin, Art21 Director of Education, will host a post-screening Q&A session.
Art21 is also offering a public program at Gene Siskel Film Center:
“Art21 Presents Artist Michael Rakowitz in Conversation”
Saturday, April 13th, 1-2pm
Gene Siskel Film Center
Delve into the artistic journey of Michael Rakowitz with a screening of the Art21 Extended Play film "Michael Rakowitz: Haunting the West," followed by an insightful conversation with the artist. Tickets to this event are available to the general public (ie, guests don’t need a pass to EXPO CHICAGO to attend).
EXPO CHICAGO showcases leading contemporary and modern art galleries each April at Navy Pier’s Festival Hall, alongside a diverse and inventive program of talks, on-site installations, and public art initiatives. Inaugurated in 2012, EXPO CHICAGO draws upon the city’s rich history as a vibrant international cultural destination, while highlighting the region’s contemporary arts community. In 2023, EXPO CHICAGO was acquired by Frieze, the world’s leading platform for modern and contemporary art. Learn more at www.expochicago.com.
Art21 is the world’s leading source to learn directly from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, the mission of Art21 is to educate and expand access to contemporary art, producing documentary films, resources, and public programs. Learn more at Art21.org.
IMAGE: Michael Rakowitz in the New York Close Up film, “Michael Rakowitz: Haunting the West.” © Art21, 2021.
Art21 is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization; all donations are tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law. Donations to Art21 support the production of Art21's films, education initiatives, digital resources, film archive, and other Art21 projects.
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New York, NY 10001-5484
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+234Art Fair Holds First Edition In Lagos
There is a brand-new Nigerian art fair dedicated to supporting emerging artists that is coming up in Lagos from 22nd to 31st March, 2024. +234Art Fair is dedicated to nurturing and uplifting the burgeoning art industry in Nigeria by providing a platform that supports emerging artists and encourages art acquisition.
+234Art Fair is dedicated to nurturing and uplifting the burgeoning art industry
There is a brand-new Nigerian art fair dedicated to supporting emerging artists that is coming up in Lagos. It’s called the +234 Art Fair and will run from 22nd to 31st March, 2024.
+234Art Fair is dedicated to nurturing and uplifting the burgeoning art industry in Nigeria by providing a platform that supports emerging artists and encourages increased interest in art acquisition, thereby contributing to the growth and prosperity of the local art sector as well as its international recognition.
The 2024 theme for the +234 Art Fair is “Heritage”, aimed at young artists to explore ways in which they can build practices that tie to the past but also create new futures. The fair seeks to explore the development of young artists in order to give inspiration and insight on how the creation of an indigenous style contributes to global reach and success.
The Venue for the Fair is the new Ecobank Pan-African Centre, Ozumba Mbadiwe Avenue, Victoria Island, Lagos. The programme of events include Masterclasses that will treat subjects such as African Art in the Global Art Market, The Business of Photography, Bridging Time: Connecting Heritage and Modernity in Nigerian Art, How to Navigate the International Art Scene as a Local Artist, Artistic Research, Grant Writing, Navigating Biennales and Museums in Contemporary Art
Panelists include Florence Lynch, a New York-based art dealer, Alain Ngann a photographer artist, Kelechi Amadi-Obi, a Nigerian creative photographer, Oluwatoyin Sogbesan an architect, a cultural historian, Jess Castellote, the Director of the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art; and many more
The exhibition’s title, “+234Art,” cleverly merges Nigeria’s country calling code (+234) with the encompassing term “Art,” serving as an all-encompassing representation of the contemporary Nigerian art scene and its interconnectedness with the broader African and global art community. This free-entry fair offers an immersive showcase of painting, photography, and sculpture, providing the public with an upclose look at the latest creative endeavours of emerging artists and photographers in Nigeria.
For more info on +234 Art Fair
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RITES OF PASSAGE - GAGOSIAN BRITANNIA STREET, OPENING 16 MARCH 2023
Gagosian presents Rites of Passage at the Britannia Street gallery. Curated by Péjú Oshin, this exhibition features work by eighteen contemporary artists who share a history of migration.
by AFRICA-RELATED, NEW YORK
RITES OF PASSAGE
A group exhibition of contemporary artists with a shared history of migration
Opening 16 March 2023 – Gagosian Britannia Street
Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Àsìkò, Phoebe Boswell, Adelaide Damoah, Femi Dawkins, Victor Ehikhamenor, Mary Evans, Ayesha Feisal, Enam Gbewonyo, Elsa James, Julianknxx, Sahara Longe, Manyaku Mashilo, Emily Moore, Nengi Omuku,
Patrick Quarm, Alexandria Smith, Sharon Walters,
Michaela Yearwood-Dan
Àsìkò, Pillars at the Port, 2022, giclée print on baryta paper, 63 × 42 1/8 inches (160 × 107 cm), edition of 5 + 2 AP © Àsìkò
Gagosian is pleased to present Rites of Passage at the Britannia Street gallery. Curated by Péjú Oshin, this exhibition features work by eighteen contemporary artists who share a history of migration.
Rites of Passage explores the idea of “liminal space,” a coinage of anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (1873–1957). In his 1909 book, after which the exhibition is titled, Van Gennep was among the first to observe that the transitional events of birth, puberty, marriage, and death are marked by ceremonies with a ritual function that transcends cultural boundaries. Highlighting this phenomenon in physical, mental, and spiritual arenas, Oshin’s exhibition challenges linear narratives through works in a variety of mediums, which fill Gagosian’s expansive Britannia Street gallery.
Rites of Passage is structured in correspondence with liminality’s three stages: separation, transition, and return. Each of these phases addresses the act of movement, not only through individual experience, but also in the broader context of community. The exhibition examines the status of postcolonial Black identity, specifically the “triple consciousness” experienced by members of the African diaspora when encountering counterparts who identify with local majority populations. The artists in the exhibition are further grouped together according to themes of tradition, spirituality, and place.
Welcoming viewers to the gallery is Elsa James’s Ode to David Lammy MP (2022). The work’s black neon text reads I AM HERE BECAUSE YOU WERE THERE, a powerful affirmation of placemaking that originates in a 2018 speech made by the MP in response to the Windrush scandal, in which British subjects—many of whom had arrived in the country from Caribbean nations decades earlier— were wrongly detained or threatened with deportation. The experiences of the Windrush generation also inform the work of Enam Gbewonyo, who investigates cultural history through the manufacture and manipulation of textiles. Patrick Quarm, too, identifies significance in fabric, uncovering the cultural reflectivity that lingers within batik material despite its highly commodified status. And Adelaide Damoah, for her part, explores colonial history by transposing texts and maps onto photo collages of herself and her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother, thereby contesting outdated ideologies imposed on her familial narrative.
The exhibition’s spiritual theme emerges in works from Manyaku Mashilo’s Celestial Cartographies (2020–), a series of paintings in which imaginary characters move through abstracted cosmological landscapes that refer to African faiths and identities. In his tapestry, Victor Ehikhamenor stitches thousands of rosary beads to canvas and lace, cutting across history, memory, and belief to explore the role of religion and spirituality as tools for both survival and oppression. Àsìkò, in his photographs, recombines and extends various masquerade traditions rooted in Yoruba history and culture to explore how the representation of ancestral communities might inflect contemporary diasporic identities, while Julianknxx’s film installation considers the integration of liminality into Krio traditions as a waypoint between and construction of both local and global perspectives.
Finally, in the works of many artists in the exhibition, such ideas intersect with perspectives on the complex and consistent influence of place. Phoebe Boswell considers bodies of water as repositories of both painful historical experience and hope for the future—natural loci of healing, reclamation, and possibility—while Mary Evans employs pop-cultural imagery to examine the relationship between contemporary Britain and its imperial past through the lens of her own childhood.
Featured artists: Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Àsìkò, Phoebe Boswell, Adelaide Damoah, Femi Dawkins, Victor Ehikhamenor, Mary Evans, Ayesha Feisal, Enam Gbewonyo, Elsa James, Julianknxx, Sahara Longe, Manyaku Mashilo, Emily Moore, Nengi Omuku, Patrick Quarm, Alexandria Smith, Sharon Walters, and Michaela Yearwood-Dan.
RITES OF PASSAGE
Opening reception: Thursday, March 16, 6–8pm
March 16–April 29, 2023
6–24 Britannia Street, London
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VIRTUES ON DISPLAY - Amarachi Okafor Announces ‘Beauty, Mercy, Kindness and Love’
For Amarachi Okafor, an Abuja-based visual artist, curator, cultural producer, author and founder of ORIE STUDIO, the last two decades of experimentation have culminated in an interesting array of mediums, materials and techniques.
By Oyiza Adaba | Africa-Related New York
“‘Announcing Beauty, Mercy, Kindness and Love’, is a metaphor and a call for human connection, building up, garnering that strength, which is almost only found in unity.”
AMARACHI OKAFOR/Photo credit: Red Door Gallery, Lagos
Our world today could certainly do with a few doses of these indelible qualities.
For Amarachi Okafor, an Abuja-based visual artist, curator, cultural producer, author and founder of ORIE STUDIO, the last two decades of experimentation have culminated in an interesting array of mediums, materials and techniques. With a BA in Painting, a Masters in Sculpture and also in Curatorial Practice, some of these techniques came to life at Red Door Gallery Lagos, where her 20th anniversary retrospective themed ‘Announcing Beauty, Mercy, Kindness and Love’ is currently holding.
A recipient of numerous awards, prizes and scholarships, including the 2007 UNESCO Aschberg Artist Award and the Commonwealth Connections Artists Award in 2009, Amarachi has worked as a senior curator at the National Gallery of Art, Nigeria, and has also served as a juror in several regional and national competitions including Life In My City Art Festival (LIMCAF).
Her worldview and wide range experience at Universal Studios, Aina Onabolu Studios and New Afrika Studios have propelled Okafor’s works to explore related topics such as environment, unity, nation building, hunger, education etc. With a variety of media, objects, words and events that includes painting, plastic bags, textiles, installations, performance art etc, she continues to promote these global themes that sometimes require audience participation.
In her words, “It has been a very rewarding journey locating methods for pursuing research, audience-participation and collaboration as part of my processes for making art; whilst studying and embedding tangible and visual notions of structure, design and architecture.”
This 20th anniversary retrospective exhibition is a ‘cultural production’ that gives visitors a glimpse at the evolution of Amarachi Okofor’s practice through the years. She has a renewed focus on opening up the conversation about her creative process - from conceptual to creating, curating, research, documenting and archiving - masterful skill sets she continues to build on and share with beauty, mercy, kindness and love.
Video Credit: Orie Studio/CKG Media
PHOTOS OF THE EXHIBITION /Photo credit: Red Door Gallery , Lagos
If you are in Lagos, the exhibition runs from October 29 to November 19, 2022 at the Red Door Gallery, Lagos.
Original Quote
“To announce beauty, mercy, kindness and love is the act of flying over limits. However tiny they may be. The act of erasing bricks and doors. The way to let the words that make us more beautiful flow.”
Additional links to works by Amarachi Okafor
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CALABAR GALLERY NYC: Wants Female Artists
Calabar Gallery seeks female artists
By Africa-Related New York
The call is out for female artists around the globe to participate in the Calabar Gallery New York’s search for Africa Women Artists who are ready to EXPLORE in an Online Exhibition.
APPLICATION DEADLINE:
August 31, 2022
See flyer above for more information.