In this essay, let's unpack whether or not this kind of curation accomplishes what the show claims it does.
Are the Artists Underrepresented?
The best that can be said about this claim is that a few of the artists exhibiting may be new (and just starting) to the Art League of New Britain (ALNB). But many - those holding and exposing the most mature body of work are well known veterans of the Central Connecticut gallery ecosystem. They show and get accepted regularly to the shows they enter. The idea that they are "erased", "invisible", or otherwise marginalized is the by-product of the ineffective politics of the hegemony of exclusively Democratic governance. Non-white voters are conditioned to feel oppressed and they are trained, like Pavlov's Dogs, to pull a single party lever come election time.
As a storied art gallery that is part of the Central CT Arts ecosystem, the ALNB could care less about the identity politics of anybody who pays their money, enters a show, and has anything they claim to be art that isn't a rancid fraud - You'e In! Now that may come as a huge disappointment to race baiters and hustlers who can and do make a pretty penny on selling reverse bigotry as a hot commodity.
But the broader truth of the matter is that all Connecticut artists (tho there are exceptions in the rich New York suburbs and country hideaways) very much are poorly represented, undervalued, and systemically ignored both in exposure and grants funding. For decades and decades I've followed and documented (to the degree that I can) the obscene mistreatment of artists who pay taxes and live in Connecticut and get jack-shit representation from larger arts organizations, government funding operations, and State programs. An audit of all of these organizations is LONG overdue but they are protected by the immutable jackboot of Democratic thugs running the State.
The Art profession has been under assault for almost a half-century with agit-political groups feasting like termites at the foundations of local arts groups. These groups are weak and often imprinted with victim mentalities and sympathies that wholly distort their purpose.
What this show illustrates is that there is no single cultural cohort of people who constitute a coherent set of historical victims, shared common aesthetic consensus, or long term commitment to sustaining and nurturing a more so-called "equitable" arts scene.
This is the first show I have ever attended at the ALNB that has empty wall space. Wall space is everything to artists. Wasting it is an organizational sin. But it also exposes the weakness of the premise of the show's pretense. The color of any artist's skin has nothing to do with the stuff in the gallery or with the idea that there is a volume of work that is being suppressed.
Is There a Hidden Culture Out There?
Well, there may be but does that culture have an artistic veracity to its existence? Galleries like the ALNB are better equipped to organize art shows that might split up the multiple gallery spaces. Why not dedicate a gallery to modern American Urban art regardless of who contributes work? Why not one dedicated to suburbia? Or the Polish influence - Italian - Puerto Rican, and so on?
The idea that artists should be divided by bigotry based criteria is a disservice to all of us. If there is a demographic that represents who we are its called "Talented Individuals". And the individuals who show up are the only ones that matter because the rest of the world doesn't give a shitt about any of us.
Does the Show Succeed
Both of these shows have had some really fine art exhibited and have been well judged respectively.
Both have failed in their socio-political promises. While they do filter by skin color, skin color is a lousy way to describe the Connecticut Arts scene or any Arts scene for that matter. Most of the artists in these shows were far more vanilla American citizens than representatives of the their neighborhood vibe. Artists don't roll that way - well, some do but the by-product is more propaganda than art.
The answer to improving participation in all art shows is *Participate MORE* - that's it. Show up, be there.
And if you have a victim narrative - talk about it. But if you do don't be surprised if the person next to you doesn't say, "Hold my glass of wine." and bends your ear with their own.
This is a wildly eclectic show and a bit of a mixed bag in terms of quality. Add to this the fact that a few of these artists are friends or well known peers. I will do my best to present an objective set of observations.
Darryl Oates, one of this country's finest portrait artists, judged the show and the task was a difficult one. But the unintended consequence of judging leaves the show short any work he might have contributed and that's a shame.
The show featured many portraits or pictures of individuals or advocacy poster designs. All of the prize winning pieces were portraits of one kind or another.
First prize was awarded to a portrait by Stanwyck Cromwell that didn't click for me - an abstract hodgepodge of colorful silhouettes that was pleasant enough with nothing to say and nowhere to go. On the other hand, his other entry, Give Peace a Chance, I thought was far more artistically interesting because of its aesthetic coupling to artistic practice like Rauschenberg's Combine objects.
The Cromwell pieces expose a chronic weakness with all messaging or virtue signaling art and that is that the juvenile imagery and utopian lecturing can bring even well crafted and artistically sound art objects into the realm of American Kitsch which is its own ocean of commercially successful but intellectually questionable material.
Many other artists in the show had similar pieces that broke out into 3 dimensional space using assemblage techniques.
The Second Place winning entry was also a messaging piece by illustrator Jaii Mark Renee whose work is available as posters.:
The Third Prize piece, Jo-Sam by Pedro Valentin is the most compelling of the pieces in the Prize winning category. Valentin is a fine artist who is delivering the goods. The Jo-Sam painting makes use of the canvas, negative space, and gestural and expressive emotion to create a truly moving piece. This is a bit of a Black Swan entry in that there's nothing particularly impressive about style, innovative material application, or the usual aesthetic metrics involving painting. This piece just works, damn.
Valentin's second entry, Harriet, is equally impressive. The use of the aura in both pieces has deep historical roots in religious iconography, pointillism, and Benjamin's modernist theories. Here, it just works. The one curiosity that may be co-incidental are Harriet's hands that look a little too much like an AI glitching hallucination - this a minor observation. The just-off-center positioning of the figure also just works despite coming perilously close to a defacto bullseye perspective.
The Honorable Mention is also a damned fine piece of work. Abel by Christopher Baskerville is an incredibly well-crafted drawing and an uncanny piece of artwork. Baskerville's drawing employs Perlstein's figure cropping technique to constrain the attention on the subject. Abel is looking at you and trying to get a better look. The treatment of the ears is sublime - it's the gaze that's important. And look at those eyes - they are super charged - somehow enhanced to really LOOK-AT-YOU. Study the reflections off the eye. Superb.
Here's where the show gets into the ALNB's Black Mirror territory (it simply goes where it goes).
An outstanding picture for your consideration is Desire for Rebirth by Maurice Robinson Somee. I have a soft spot for the German Expressionists and Somee's picture of a woman's apparition is a blast from that past. This is the stuff that going to art shows is all about. It's a piece that pops and isn't about to get confused as wallpaper. See if you agree.
But Somee's piece is simply a hold-my-beer challenge for Fior Rodriguez whose With Good Intention explores the complex psyche of the individual subject. In full disclosure, I'm becoming a fan of Rodriguez's work, it's strange and exposes video game stacks of questions and riddles. Here, a dream state or cyber state suspension of reality. Her comfort zone is a vacant apartment with a lone picture on an incompletely painted wall. Also, like Valentin, only the useful body parts are illustrated as if Elon Musk's observation that the only important thing about any of us is not the body but the mind.
There is another cohort of artists who are best described as outsider artists. Maurice D. Robertson's contribution to this show, Ocean Beach, is one of the strangest and most inspired photographs I've ever seen him exhibit. Ocean Beach is channeling the late David Lynch here. Robertson who is the ultimate CT arts scene insider is eternally the phantom documentarian of all things happening culturally in New England. An outsider who knows the territory.
The Ocean Beach photograph is different. I mean really different. First, it's a vertical picture of what should be a horizontal landscape scene. And it has an imperceptive quality to the scene - is this real?
The back foot of the boy rushing out of the picture looks as if something from an underworld is attempting to keep him there. Just behind him a white object looking like the top of a skull looks on.
And the horizon line is nothing more than a human wall of nondescript people - people like us but not us. And the sky above them looks mighty unhappy. An ancient Greek looking into those clouds could name you the Gods who are visiting. And is there even one grain of sand that hasn't been moved for human convenience? Something is written on that sand.
Gerald Kilyaw contributed a couple of pieces more along the lines of naive Outsider art. Lumberjacks illustrates an encounter between a black person dressed in perfunctory African colors and some Canadian lumberjacks. One can only guess why that memory is being memorialized here.
The rest of the show featured more material than I can cover in one review. Needless to say there were silkscreen prints, many more portraits, and some wonderful craft items including a carved sitting bench by Ira Halliday.
Check the Art League of New Britain website for further information.
For the second year in a row, the ALNB has sponsored another Artists of Color (AoC) show. I reviewed last year's show in two parts and I'll do that again this year. This year I'll examine the Overview and Importance statement used to justify an exhibition whose eligibility is exclusively having nothing to do with actual art and everything to do with the skin color of the artist. The complete statement is fair use copied at the end of this essay.
The Sizzle
This year's show is billed as " this show centers artists whose voices have historically been marginalized, yet whose work speaks powerfully to the present and future".
This requires a lot of qualification. First, to the best of my knowledge the Art League of New Britain has never (historically speaking) marginalized any art or artist. In fact this is a minor bone of contention among some members.
Personally, I prefer shows that emphasize artistic quality while most often shows are judged to allow novices and outliers to be shown alongside more serious artists. Who the artists is. again to the best of my knowledge, is not a criterion.
Also, none of the artists in this show have likely ever been personally marginalized as artists. Somebody in that group may believe that but I'd need some hard empirical evidence to believe that claim. As far as I can tell, this cohort of artists have been regularly shown, belong to the great middleclass, and have been around the art block many, many times.
The chances that these artists as a group speak "powerfully to the present and future" is hopeful but highly unlikely - we'll see in part two.
Representation Claims
"Connecticut’s cultural institutions have historically underrepresented artists of color."
Actually. No.
The arguments being made in these paragraphs are will fully ignorant of both Art and the people who make art and the people who buy and contribute art.
First, the demographics of the entire population is irrelevant. True artists are born to follow a calling - to make art. They, as a reality, are only a small population in terms of the entire population. All of that identity politics stuff is meaningless.
The percentage of any subgroup is in relation to all visual artists and not the population of the United States or the world. Add to that, the number of collectors who bought and promoted the art they spent their hard earned money to buy. *THAT* is what is represented in cultural institutions until recently. Today the cultural institutions are curated and run by woke administrations that pander to identity politic driven special interest groups who have NO interest in the quality of art and every interest in partisan politic narratives. Today, ALL of these groups are vastly over-represented everywhere to the exclusion of intelligent and tasteful interests.
The "Struggle"
In this climate, BIPOC artists struggle for visibility
What? Define struggle. The NEA, NEFA, Real Art Ways, and the parade of CT galleries and museums are proxy ATMs for the entire woke parade of special interests.
The Social Example
" this is a platform for dialogue and visibility—a space where diversity isn't a theme, but the heartbeat"
There are a number of platitudes listed in the statement.
The Judeo-Christian ethic of "do unto others as you would have done unto you" is missing here. Bigotry is not a virtue and never was. Passing along this idea to future generations is ... what?.. the shared humanity you want to pass along?
Before anyone speaks the word "equity" they need to actually count the number of art pieces or artists actually being represented in relation to who and what was entered.
Secondly, the white-skinned artists being excluded here are largely, Polish, Italian, Jewish, and European sons and daughters of working class immigrants whose grand-parents were dirt poor, discriminated against in their own time, had zero to do with racism, and managed to work their way to practice art. A lot of schooltime is spent learning about the civil war. It would be nice if the schools bothered to teach everyone about the struggles of everybody else. We all have narratives.
Appendix, the original statement and rationale:
Overview and Importance
Artists of color throughout the state of Connecticut are encouraged to submit up to three works of art for ALNB’s second annual Artists of Color Juried Exhibit!
This dynamic group exhibition celebrates the talent, vision, and cultural narratives of artists of color across a spectrum of mediums. From bold contemporary statements to intimate reflections of heritage and identity, this show centers artists whose voices have historically been marginalized, yet whose work speaks powerfully to the present and future.
Connecticut’s cultural institutions have historically underrepresented artists of color. A 2019 Hartford-area arts study found that “people of color are not proportionately represented in Greater Hartford’s art workforce” (hfpg.org), and a follow-up report noted this gap prompted an advisory group to seek ways to “increase opportunities for artists of color” (ctmirror.org). National data reinforce the problem: in 30 major U.S. museums from 2008–2018, only 2.3% of acquisitions and 7.7% of exhibitions were by Black artists (sothebys.com), while African Americans are ~12% of the U.S. population. In CT, even smaller institutions skew white. For example, the Florence Griswold Museum (Old Lyme) reported that of 172 works shown in 2023, just 29 (17%) were by artists of color (florencegriswoldmuseum.org). New Britain is 63% people of color—a majority-demographic city where immigrant and minority communities drive local culture. Yet its arts infrastructure (galleries, museums, schools) has not caught up to this diversity. The Art League of New Britain and the New Britain Museum of American Art operate in a city with one of the lowest median incomes in the state (ctdatahaven.org), suggesting fewer private patrons to support broad programming. Moreover, New Britain’s students and young artists have limited pathways: city schools have had to prioritize core needs (and face $300+ million in funding gaps statewide for high-need districts, schoolstatefinance.org), which often crowds out arts classes and visits to museums.
In this climate, BIPOC artists struggle for visibility. For example, before 2024 the Art League had never mounted an exhibition exclusively for artists of color—reflecting an unintentional oversight, given that well over half of New Britain’s populace is non-white.
Organizing a dedicated show of artists of color directly addresses these inequities. It gives local Black, Latino, Asian-American, Indigenous, and multiracial artists a platform they have historically been denied in Connecticut’s art venues. By centering underrepresented creators, the Art League of New Britain's Artists of Color Show begins to redress the imbalance noted by statewide arts studies (hfpg.org, ctmirror.org). Such a show also has immediate benefits: it can inspire youth from New Britain’s diverse communities by putting role models on the wall; attract a broader audience to the League; and build partnerships with BIPOC-led arts organizations working to diversify CT’s cultural scene.
In short, this exhibition is not just timely—it’s essential for equity. As Connecticut’s arts leaders acknowledge, “when artists [of color] are valued, the whole community wins” (ctmirror.org). The Art League of New Britain's Artists of Color Show helps make that winning scenario a reality for New Britain and beyond.
More than a showcase, this is a platform for dialogue and visibility—a space where diversity isn't a theme, but the heartbeat. Join us in honoring the contributions of artists of color and experiencing the transformative power of art that reflects the depth and breadth of our shared humanity.
For 2024, I've located the results from 12 juried gallery shows held in NYC and CT.
In these shows 551 works by 521 women artists were selected to be exhibited 326 works by 302 men were exhibited
37% of all works selected were by men, 63% by women
37% of artists whose work was selected was by men, 63% by women
The galleries were Lyme art annual at the Slater, WAH, ALNB,CT+6 WHAL, 91st annual Hudson Art, Silvermine A- One, CAFA 113th annual, Faber-Biren Color - Stamford Art, 1st Street Annual National, Blue Mountain summer and winter, Stamford Marine
Three Juried Museum shows had the following results:
160 women's art pieces selected, 49 men's pieces - 23% of all selected artists were men, 775 women
The MixMaster at Mattatuck museum, Noreaster at Museum of American Art, and the Danforth Annual are represented in these numbers.
Pollock Krasner grants were distributed as 45 for men and 31 for women or 59% to men 41% to women.
Joan Mitchell Foundation awarded 10 women and 5 men with fellowships. 66% to 33%
Just prior to this election cycle I received a number of art email updates that included a New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) set of marketing talking points. One of these spoke about voting and linked to the various State and independent programs.
I followed the Connecticut links and a few links later came to the Connecticut Arts Alliance (CAA) - one of the many, seemingly limitless obscure arts organizations that feed from the Connecticut arts funding trough. I suffer from a degree of organizational vertigo when it comes to remembering where in the clusterfuck of Arts organizations the CAA is situated so when I landed on their webpage I poked around a bit. They are funded from a number of Foundations and State Arts and Humanities Funds. I mention this to simply point out that there's nothing partisan about the funding of art and presumably the funds aren't being awarded for partisan purposes.
Next I looked at their latest news and was absolutely fascinated by the following entry.
We are being told that Michelle Obama has founded a "non-partisan" organization called "When We All Vote" that is shaving money away from the sales of prints and original artwork sold under the auspices of Art For Change, an arts advisory business.
The problem is that When We All Vote has a collection of Co-Chairs that may as well have been
the campaign staff of the Harris/Walz election effort. The claim that Michelle Obama, these co-chairs or anyone on their staff were somehow representative of an impartial (e.g. "non-partisan") organization simply dedicated to registering stray voters is absurd. There is not a conservative, Republican, third party, or otherwise interested political individual in sight.
Furthermore, all of the sugar-coated rhetoric about political posters being art cannot disguise the fact that every example of political art advocates a progressive or liberal advocacy. This is subversive to young artists and insulting to everyone who has every right to expect that non-partisan rhetoric and advocacy will fairly represent the broad spectrum of American democracy.
IMO, the When We All Vote organization has a disingenuous, money-laundering profile. The Connecticut Arts Alliance should be ashamed for promoting this kind of material ever but particularly before a national election.
The newly elected federal DOJ should take a long, hard look at this and all non-profits that claim non-partisan status.
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) funds an Office of Research and Analysis that claims to keep and report statistics about the arts ecosystem. It becomes increasingly apparent that arts ecosystem refers to a slew of government agencies that suck the soul and funding intended to advocate arts and artists for themselves.
The agency heavily relies on the usual suspects - "the design and conduct
of studies addressing priority research topics through the social and behavioral sciences" - in other words academia unrelated to, well, the arts.
This paper cites concerns about
health and
wellness for individuals; cognition and learning; and U.S. economic growth and
innovation
healing and revitalization of communities
diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in the arts
adapting and responding to social, economic,
and technological changes and challenges to the sector
These agendas come and go, nothing more than academic ATMs that finance NEA junkets and worthless, disposable research papers, one after another. Burp (cha-ching)!
The research started over a decade ago and this latest batch of DEI infused wisdom is only in its second year of the latest "5 Year Plan".
As usual, my interest is piqued when the discussion has to do with education of artists, MFAs, and the visual arts in general.
Here Joanna Woronkowicz talks about her book, Being an Artist in America: How Artists Build Careers and What Society Can Do to Support Them.
I couldn't help but look her up on Rate My Professor. She apparently is paid to instruct a course on Statistics that she - based on the ratings - doesn't show up to teach and whose teaching assistants are clueless to act as proxies. She also accused some students (who plead innocence) of plagiarism.
Putting that into context already raises suspicions about the quality and veracity of the book (unpublished to date).
In the YouTube documentation of the NEA Meet the Authors event she talks about the unintended consequences of Arts policies over time. Assuming this observation is true and based on fact, why has it taken over twenty years for the NEA to continue to fund and practice the creation and administration of these policies. Why aren't these people being fired and why aren't corrections being made?
When it comes to the mass production of students graduating with MFA degrees and life altering debt, she has this to say, Art School Loans. This is all well known material and if her concern about bang for the educational buck were sincere she might consider performing her own teaching duties - just because $$$.
Most disturbingly are her policy recommendations that include this; Cost and Benefit. I suspect that art students are not the only ones straining government welfare programs.
Given this research, it seems to me that an easy and obvious recommendation might be to fine each and every current employee of the NEA immediately and start fresh.
And part of starting anew must include independent studies of arts and artists in America. Enough of the self-serving academic community whose quality of work is manufactured to be ignored by everyone aside from tenure committees.
This part of the review will examine the art as if it were any other ALNB juried art show.
The ALNB, has previously hosted all women shows that were sponsored by one group or another. In that case the group were private advocates who seemed to think the distinction was important.
When I arrived to view this show, I was greeted by Niles Dookie who was gallery sitting. I asked what the show was intended to represent and he explained that the ALNB simply wanted to expand its footprint in greater New Britain to invite and encourage broader participation from neighborhood clusters that had not yet realized the opportunity art shows represent to everyone.
In fact the show is not [so much] about skin color as a targeted, open membership drive. This is not a typical juried gallery show at all. It includes student art, newbie art, and "Howdy neighbor!" invitational pieces. Nobody should mistake *this* as an affront to professional art practice. Having said that, the title of the show is unfortunate in that it is easily confused with the fraudulent, cash cow, anti-racist vernacular of Kendi and others. It also presumes that New Britain's white neighborhoods are any more aware than anybody else [but okay].
A Survey
This show may feature skin color but the majority of artists seem to have a broad-spectrum of personal cultural heritage. In other words there is no way to assume that the art projects a specific influence unless the piece self-identifies that inspirational source of aesthetic truth. Moving from one artist to another is as eclectic an experience as any other ALNB gallery show.
Almost all of the work submitted to this show is representational with some varying degree of abstraction.
And the largest group of work is represented by portraits. These in some cases are celebrity graphite drawings from photographs and in others paintings or collages of more personal, family individuals. The craftwork is pristine. Spike Lee, Tupac, and numerous jazz luminaries and others are wonderfully rendered.
A few colorful, life-experience landscapes from Africa and India offer variety.
Esmeilyn Tejeda
I was lucky enough to attend the show when Esmeilyn was also sitting the show. Her painting is one of the most striking in the show and I asked how, as a critic, I should interpret what I'm looking at. I asked her what her cultural heritage consisted of and she quickly listed a dozen different and quite unique family roots. It would be impossible to attribute a single or even primary source of cultural projection.
Her explanation of the piece is much more interesting than I could have guessed at. She said that the piece was in fact *about* skin and how skin comes in any color and any color can be applied to skin. The portrait is a human, nothing more, nothing less with color applied.
A very impressive and compelling piece.
Maurice Livingston
The sheer simplicity of work like this (ink/crayon) is so refreshing. Comparisons to the German Expressionists and Edvard Munch are inevitable. Livingston has a ways to go before joining that heady company but his pieces really hit the spot. Noticeably he does not color within the lines.
The background is interesting in that it emulates the phenomenon art critic Walter Benjamin identified as "aura". To a lesser extent, Tejeda's piece also employs that mysterious effect and so these pieces hung in such proximity to each other really gives a visitor an opportunity to compare and contrast with lots of other portraits in the galleries.
Also worth examination are the gaze each of the portraits evoke.
Black-Flat-Time Artists
Two pieces - one in the show and one that I was privileged to view because the artist was there, also sitting the show. One branch of Black Aesthetic Time is called Flat Time. And Flat Time refers to black artists and writers whose work is suspended in a social assumption that "nothing has changed". In other words, the definition of lived experience [for blacks] starts and ends with the slavery narrative. Feminists have their own, sometimes overlapping, corollary version of Flat Time having to do with women's social conditions.
By definition, the artistic by-products of artists exercising this state of navigating reality produce works that *can be* thought provoking but often are indistinguishable from political campaign material.
Cecil Gresham
This piece is a digital print that illustrates a person of color juxtaposed against a screw lodged in his brain. The eyes expose a vacant human container devoid of personal agency. The imagery is straight out of George Orwell's 1984.
"The voice from the telescreen was still pouring forth its tale of prisoners and booty and slaughter, but the shouting outside had died down a little. The waiters were turning back to their work. One of them approached with the gin bottle. Winston, sitting in a blissful dream, paid no attention as his glass was filled up. He was not running or cheering any longer. He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back. The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain.
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."
Tho the piece is a digital print, the imagery closely imitates Gerhard Richter's photo paintings of the Holocaust and German political action groups.
AndeJa Johnson
This photograph is a cropped and not very good presentation of this piece. My apologies.
Decades after WWII was over, Japanese soldiers were still being discovered in the South Pacific who had no idea the war was over. Our popular culture and subverted public school history lessons are creating generations of young artists who are imprinted with a worldview that corresponds to Flat Time (e.g. victimhood).
Slavery and social deviants are still abundantly active in the world but its a rare edge condition in the United States. Work such as this has a literal dependency - a cluster of platitudes or virtuous declarations that leave no doubt what the artist is for and what they are against. Entering work like this into local gallery shows is important but what becomes obvious is that every artist participating in the ALNB or any other gallery is on your side. It's important information. Work like this sings to the choir.
Which brings me to the problem with the Flat Time paradigm. The weight of the world over time doesn't belong to any artist. You can't have it and you can't solve it. And, it is nothing more than a personally constructed speculative fiction. There's nothing wrong with that but there's nothing compelling either.
In terms of style and technique, this is a complex, interesting imagery.
AndeJa and I shared a long discussion about art and artists and she is deeply intelligent, more articulate about art than many ALNB members, and she gets after it - teaching art to youngsters.
When I asked whether it was wise to waste time with teaching art to at risk children who need to read, write and do arithmetic she smiled and said none of them could do the art without some wholesome reading and personalized instruction. Say WHAT!
Just like that some faith in the future of humanity glimmered in the corners of the gallery.
The Afropolitans
There is a growing class of writers and artists who no longer identify themselves with national borders. the term Afropolitan refers to individuals who, in a very postModern sense, create art from a broad spectrum of cultural sources with no particular desire to be pigeon-holed as AfroAmerican, black, this, that, or another thing. I don't know if this is true of the following artists but their submissions sure look that way.
Frankie Baez
Baez's work is brightly colored and contemporary. The patterns are high African fashion and the ground borrows from Kehinde Wiley - floral patterns. The female figure has agency and a plentiful self-confidence. Compare and contrast his work to these Senegalese Afripedia artists. The similarities are stunning.
Gwendolyn Quezaire-Presutti
GQP's collage piece closely emulates Nigerian tunic designs (Yoruba Atlantic art). The title of this piece, IMO, is a distraction from the imagery and even spirituality that the work can convey viewed through a more cultural lens. In Flash of the Spirit, there is a chapter called "Black Saints Go Marching In" and this piece is uncannily similar to a number of the traditional African designs exhibited there.
In Conclusion
There is a wealth of very nice artwork in this show. I recommend taking advantage of the opportunity to see it. My review simply covers a sampling of work that caught my eye. There's lots more, all of it good.
I cannot imagine that any of the artwork, aside from student work, would not be taken seriously in any given juried art show. This show consisting of only non-white artists is no less diverse than one which was not segregated this way. The organizers need to recalibrate 'calls' like this.
The world doesn't need to keep racism alive and the arts professions are, generally speaking, not a cohort of bigots tho special interest groups do their damnedest to corrupt them. The video in this footer is a cautionary tale. White boys are committing suicide at alarming rates. The next such show needs to solicit newcomers of all kinds.
It's 2024 and an art show called "Artists of Color" juried exhibit is being hosted at the Art League of New Britain in New Britain, CT. it is juried by Andre Rochester. The shows duration is July 7,2024 to July 28, 2024. It is described as a show of African, Asian, Latin, and other artists of color.
Usually, art show criticisms focus exclusively on the artwork or artist(s). But the unusual framework of this show deserves to be unpacked independently and I think its important to do so.
Part one will examine the conceptual basis for the show and a critique of the art in the show will follow. And right up front I want to uncouple any criticism of part one from part two. These will be separate ruminations on separate topics - the participating artists are not responsible for the foibles of the show's architecture.
The Show's Pretense
The call for art for this show was constrained to "Artists of Color". In other words, artists whose skin tone isn't 'white' were asked to submit work and they did. This eliminated individuals who were the birth offspring of a white father and mother but not necessarily adopted children of two white parents. It's unclear to me if white artists who are burn victims qualify as artists of color but i'm assuming the messaging implies no.
As a longtime, sometime member - always supporter of the ALNB, this is just another experimental show. As such, in the sandbox of curatorial speculation, let's break down the logic and consequences, and aesthetic shrapnel any show based on these premises needs to resolve.
The Difference With a Muddled Distinction
Given the skin color constraint, what is gained and what is lost? As far as I can tell the only difference between this ALNB juried show and any other show is that artists with white skin did not have the opportunity to submit their work to this particular show which is little more than a trivial inconvenience, so not much loss for white-skinned artists - area juried art shows and opportunities abound.
For the "artists of color" the skin color constraint simply offers a smaller juried pool from which art work will get selected - woo hoo! And while this has its advantages, it can also be seen as an infantilizing of the artists-of-color cohort.
When the profession of art qualifies any artist as assuming an identity different from, say, "a creator of art", the art becomes unimportant or secondary to the role of the artists as an actor in a social narrative.
In this case, skin color has nothing to do with the creation of art at all. All artists live in this Judeo-Christian nation, participate in capitalistic commerce, consume and get consumed by volumes of Western Civilization's comforts, and so on. For practical intents and purposes, we all share and incubate "WHITE" culture. Its impossible to wiggle out of that self-evident truth.
So what was the point of not inviting people with white skin? After all, what do African, Asian, Latin, and other artists of color have any more in common showing together that artists with white skin don't? The answer is 'nothing'. It is magical thinking to believe that an Asian and a Jamaican and an Eskimo share an aesthetic narrative exclusive to their skin color.
In other words, to understand any given piece of artwork that is exclusive to the identity profile of the artist requires an a priori familiarity with the nuances of that identity's aesthetic ecosystem. Art is a door to perception, not personal or tribal allegiance.
Shows such as this, by definition, will be every bit as eclectic as any other juried show. They will also straddle a Schrodinger's Cat enigma of either being either a Utopia or Dystopia where white skinned people no longer exist. Can the entries live up to that challenge? Or will the pieces subliminally reference white skinned people?
The Value of Color
I think another presumption that shows such as these can test is the idea that with any two pieces of art, one piece may be more 'privileged' than another. Bluntly, will a art piece by an artist with one skin color be more desirable than an art piece by somebody with a different skin color?
When I'm performing art criticism, all I'm interested in is the work. Buyers and curators have different considerations. And all of this *should be* implicit about enjoying an art show.
Galleries such as ALNB, to the best of my knowledge, have never discriminated against any artist submitting their work (and I know of no other gallery that has either) so I was a bit surprised by this show. I look forward to seeing it in person. That review will follow shortly.
Artistic practice in the Zenthetic are not the same as aesthetic practice. In other words, the concept of defining *beauty* and beauty itself are co-incidental by-products of the practice and not a primary or motivating factor in the creation of the art.
In my study of MetaModernism, it has become obvious to me that the duality and incestuous relationship of illusionism and abstraction is insufficient both conceptually and in terms of their limited vernacular in rationalizing their existential artistic hegemony. The territory of illusionism illustrates the agreed upon world and the projections of mankind's dreams, myths, and man's imagination of existence itself into conversational consciousness. Illusionism is, by definition and by craft, abstract. And (formal) Abstraction is the recognition that in a creative composing and decomposing of the elementary aspects of illusionism, an aesthetically pleasing or conceptually plausible argument can be made that these objects define a push-and-pull/binary aesthetic canon.
Artists anticipate art, not reality or abstractions. Yet everything is shoe-horned into the insatiable black hole of the philosophy of aesthetics.
So the question is, can art exist outside of aesthetic consideration and absorption. This being a quantum existential space that successfully repels the aesthetic appetite for the next want-to-be exception to the rule? I think it can.
Just as chaos theory informs us that multiple infinities exist - opportunity cracks in mathematics - so too are there artistic orphans whose intellectual parents have no aesthetic DNA, they slip the ties that bind. The art material defined by Propositional Zenthetics are construction of an artistic proposition, this AND that, this OR that - not yet in time, not yet formed, just maybe -may BE. They are instantiated as worldly objects, yes - but in substance a suspended, wrapping material for a dance of cosmic possibility like a vision of universal dust so far away in time and space that the image is not real - a snapshot of unformed vision - so what is it?
These are not pictures nor objects but a gaze into a visually transcendent abyss, a desolation angel's scribble. The abyss does not gaze back, it has swallowed a fraction of your existence for its own. The agency of Proposition Zenthetic material is to flush the mind's attention of aesthetic considerations and pose a memory hole of ambiguity for *what if* . When someone sees or observes such material, it is the unrecognizable, zen stillness of thought - peering into artistic desolation - a trajectory without beginning or end - a suspended fall away from traditional aesthetic notions of craft or importance that is a glimpse of god's proximate tinkering with a view of eternity.
I recently saw this Facebook posting that i found interesting.
"Art Access: New Britain
CALL FOR ART
[Link in bio]
One of the primary means emerging artists have to build their exhibition resume and gain the attention of curators is to participate in juried art shows. Not only is substantial time and effort involved in the process of creating art and applying for juried shows, but most require a fee for application. For many artists with extraordinary work, their opportunity for significant exposure is limited by their financial ability to apply for more publicized shows involving known jurors. An application fee can be a significant amount to artists with lower incomes and often many cannot take the chance that a juror may not even select their work for display.
Most juried shows charge these entry fees to support the organizations they are part of and those fees are often integral to their budgets and operations; however these fees are keeping out a subset of the artist population. With generous support from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, Art Access: New Britain is a juried art show focusing on artists living in households with income at or below the approximate state definition of “lower income” ($80,000). This juried show will collect no fee for application, involves a well established juror connected to a prominent museum, offers assistance to those who cannot afford to transport their artwork to the show, and involves juried prize awards.
This exhibition will be held at Gallery 66 in New Britain from August 12 to October 11, featuring an opening event and artist discussion, in addition to regularly held events at Gallery 66 such as monthly artist discussions and regular open mics."
What caught my eye here is the fact that that the Connecticut Office of the Arts has read the premise for this show and has decided its worth sponsoring. It's worth unpacking the assumptions being asserted here because nobody seems to have put an ounce of critical thinking into what problem this is going to solve or whether there are better ways of staging juried art shows.
Presumably the intent of constraining the household income of the artist to less than or equal to $80,000 will somehow limit participation to lower income artists. But this makes little sense. A single person and a married artist or an artist with kids or legal obligations makes hard capping an income profoundly unfair and could preclude true need and include individuals with no real hardship. In other words, its pointless.
And need isn't always an absolute condition. For the immediate few months I may be dead broke but in a few months that fiscal condition will change. Opportunity cost is often conditional.
The logical argument being made about juried shows is also flawed. Income has nothing to do with getting accepted or rejected from a juried art show. Ideally, the quality of the work is what gets a piece accepted or rejected. And the quality of the juror (e.g. de facto curator) is key. In either case, the artist's work IS "exposed" to the juror.
Any show that decides the identity of the artist is more compelling than the quality of that artist's work is playing with fire. The criteria of judging this show becomes the evaluation of the financial status of the individual rather than the work itself. Is the curation of the show intended to lower expectations based on something other than artistic merit? The point of juried shows to begin with is the assumption that your best work belongs in a show of selected best works.
And because the framing of shows like these emphasize identity politics, the chances of the work being taken seriously is eroded. It's one thing for a patron or juror to find a diamond in the rough at any gallery show and its completely another to find that unique talent in a blizzard of artwork from an identified class of "victims". Do the prizes go to the most needy, the most politically compelling or sympathetic, or to the identity artist of the month? Its unclear if participation will elevate or stigmatize the participating artists.
A far better way to help artists in need is for the CT Office on the Arts to support local Art Galleries all over the State by subsidizing gallery memberships for needy local artists - full stop. They all sponsor juried member shows. Such sponsorship might involve the basic membership fee and an additional group stipend for occasional transportation assistance. This promotes fiscally sound galleries, community goodwill, and transparent artistic participation.
