Arthur Jafa: detail from one of the notebooks that inspired the Apex video.
The Essentials #4 - Black History and Contemporary Art
January 30th - February 10th, 2023
A playlist exhibition displayed in the gallery and on our Atkinson Gallery YouTube Channel curated by Gallery Director John Connelly to celebrate the launch of Black History Month 2023. This is the fourth in a series of curated playlist exhibitions featured on the Atkinson Gallery YouTube Channel highlighting important and historical art video, films, and movements. Featuring interviews and documentary footage with Arthur Jafa, Kerry James Marshall and Lorna Simpson.
Arthur Jafa
Arthur Jafa: APEX | ARTIST STORIES. The Museum of Modern Art [4.01]
Mickey Mouse, Tupac, a baby, planets, injured and dead bodies, Miles Davis. These are some of the 841 images that appear in rapid sequence in Arthur Jafa’s APEX, a video set to a pulsing techno beat and the beeping of a heart monitor. For several decades Jafa has collected hundreds of images from newspapers, magazines, books, and films, saving them in notebooks. Before he began downloading and organizing images digitally, these notebooks often provided inspiration for his cinematography, and he is known for bringing them out to share with friends.
Arthur Jafa at Glenstone Museum. Glenstone Museum [5.25]
Perhaps best known for his films incorporating powerful montages of found images and videos that reference the “power, alienation, and beauty” inherent in Black American life, Arthur Jafa’s presentation in Room 6 of the Pavilions at Glenstone Museum brings together a variety of modes and mediums central to the artist’s practice, including film, sculpture, and photography. In this video, Jafa discusses his art, his relationship to images, and what he thinks about when he makes a new work. Arthur Jafa’s presentation at Glenstone opened in September of 2021.
“As peoples of African descent, we powerfully embody who we are. Not just a thing that’s as beautiful as we are, but a thing that’s as troubled as we are, that’s as under pressure as we are—I’m trying to make things that do that. That have the qualities that those things have. I mean, that’s the bar for me.” - Arthur Jafa
Kerry James Marshall
Kerry James Marshall. San Francisco Museum of Art [4.21]
Watch as Kerry James Marshall speaks about the ways his paintings have centered Black people throughout his career. In this restored archival interview from 2008, the artist reveals the messages behind his artworks and their relationship to history. Marshall builds on the language of art history, recognizing unsung heroes of America’s past, while expanding the discourse around representation in America’s future.
Kerry James Marshall: Mastry. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago [7.34]
This video featuring Kerry James Marshall talking about his practice and the ideas driving it accompanied the exhibition Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2016/2017.
“I don't believe in hope. I believe in action, if I'm an apostle of anything: There are always going to be complications, but to a large degree, everything is in your hands. When you go to an art museum, the thing you're least likely to encounter is a picture of a black person.” - Kerry James Marshall
Lorna Simpson
Lorna Simpson – 'Everything I Do Comes from the Same Desire' | TateShots [3.36]
Old sports photographs and hair commercials provide inspiration for American artist Lorna Simpson. The artist uses combinations of image and text to examine the processes through which meaning and understanding take place. Here Simpson shows us how she arrived at this methodology and why her surroundings are so important to her work.
Lorna Simpson: In the Studio [3.56]
Simpson came to prominence in the 1980s through her pioneering approach to conceptual photography, which featured striking juxtapositions of text and staged images and raised questions about the nature of representation, identity, gender, race and history. These concerns are reflected in the artist’s expanding and increasingly multi-disciplinary practice today. Here, Lorna Simpson talks to Frieze about her life and work in her Brooklyn studio on the occasion of ‘Unanswerable’, her inaugural exhibition at Hauser & Wirth London, featuring new paintings, photographic collage and sculpture, 1 March – 28 April 2018.
On Artist Lorna Simpson, Recipient of the 2019 Getty Medal [3:53]
Lorna Simpson has been a pioneering artist for 30 years. She is a leading voice in a generation of American artists questioning constructed historical narratives and the performative crafting of identity. She is one of three J. Paul Getty Medal recipients in 2019, along with painter, photographer, and bookmaker Ed Ruscha and classics professor and author Mary Beard.
"I started to concentrate more upon how the viewer looks at photographs... I would insert my own text or my own specific reading of the image to give the viewer something they might not interpret or surmise, due to their educated way of looking at images, and reading them for their emotional, psychological, and/or sociological values. So I would start to interject these things that the photograph would not speak of and that I felt needed to be revealed, but that couldn't be revealed from just looking at an image." - Lorna Simpson
January 30th - February 10th, 2023
A playlist exhibition displayed in the gallery and on our Atkinson Gallery YouTube Channel curated by Gallery Director John Connelly to celebrate the launch of Black History Month 2023. This is the fourth in a series of curated playlist exhibitions featured on the Atkinson Gallery YouTube Channel highlighting important and historical art video, films, and movements. Featuring interviews and documentary footage with Arthur Jafa, Kerry James Marshall and Lorna Simpson.
Arthur Jafa
Arthur Jafa: APEX | ARTIST STORIES. The Museum of Modern Art [4.01]
Mickey Mouse, Tupac, a baby, planets, injured and dead bodies, Miles Davis. These are some of the 841 images that appear in rapid sequence in Arthur Jafa’s APEX, a video set to a pulsing techno beat and the beeping of a heart monitor. For several decades Jafa has collected hundreds of images from newspapers, magazines, books, and films, saving them in notebooks. Before he began downloading and organizing images digitally, these notebooks often provided inspiration for his cinematography, and he is known for bringing them out to share with friends.
Arthur Jafa at Glenstone Museum. Glenstone Museum [5.25]
Perhaps best known for his films incorporating powerful montages of found images and videos that reference the “power, alienation, and beauty” inherent in Black American life, Arthur Jafa’s presentation in Room 6 of the Pavilions at Glenstone Museum brings together a variety of modes and mediums central to the artist’s practice, including film, sculpture, and photography. In this video, Jafa discusses his art, his relationship to images, and what he thinks about when he makes a new work. Arthur Jafa’s presentation at Glenstone opened in September of 2021.
“As peoples of African descent, we powerfully embody who we are. Not just a thing that’s as beautiful as we are, but a thing that’s as troubled as we are, that’s as under pressure as we are—I’m trying to make things that do that. That have the qualities that those things have. I mean, that’s the bar for me.” - Arthur Jafa
Kerry James Marshall
Kerry James Marshall. San Francisco Museum of Art [4.21]
Watch as Kerry James Marshall speaks about the ways his paintings have centered Black people throughout his career. In this restored archival interview from 2008, the artist reveals the messages behind his artworks and their relationship to history. Marshall builds on the language of art history, recognizing unsung heroes of America’s past, while expanding the discourse around representation in America’s future.
Kerry James Marshall: Mastry. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago [7.34]
This video featuring Kerry James Marshall talking about his practice and the ideas driving it accompanied the exhibition Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2016/2017.
“I don't believe in hope. I believe in action, if I'm an apostle of anything: There are always going to be complications, but to a large degree, everything is in your hands. When you go to an art museum, the thing you're least likely to encounter is a picture of a black person.” - Kerry James Marshall
Lorna Simpson
Lorna Simpson – 'Everything I Do Comes from the Same Desire' | TateShots [3.36]
Old sports photographs and hair commercials provide inspiration for American artist Lorna Simpson. The artist uses combinations of image and text to examine the processes through which meaning and understanding take place. Here Simpson shows us how she arrived at this methodology and why her surroundings are so important to her work.
Lorna Simpson: In the Studio [3.56]
Simpson came to prominence in the 1980s through her pioneering approach to conceptual photography, which featured striking juxtapositions of text and staged images and raised questions about the nature of representation, identity, gender, race and history. These concerns are reflected in the artist’s expanding and increasingly multi-disciplinary practice today. Here, Lorna Simpson talks to Frieze about her life and work in her Brooklyn studio on the occasion of ‘Unanswerable’, her inaugural exhibition at Hauser & Wirth London, featuring new paintings, photographic collage and sculpture, 1 March – 28 April 2018.
On Artist Lorna Simpson, Recipient of the 2019 Getty Medal [3:53]
Lorna Simpson has been a pioneering artist for 30 years. She is a leading voice in a generation of American artists questioning constructed historical narratives and the performative crafting of identity. She is one of three J. Paul Getty Medal recipients in 2019, along with painter, photographer, and bookmaker Ed Ruscha and classics professor and author Mary Beard.
"I started to concentrate more upon how the viewer looks at photographs... I would insert my own text or my own specific reading of the image to give the viewer something they might not interpret or surmise, due to their educated way of looking at images, and reading them for their emotional, psychological, and/or sociological values. So I would start to interject these things that the photograph would not speak of and that I felt needed to be revealed, but that couldn't be revealed from just looking at an image." - Lorna Simpson