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For the 2022 Armory Show in New York, Kavi Gupta presents a selection of new and historically important works by a diverse, intergenerational group of artists, including James Little, Tomokazu Matsuyama, Mary Sibande, Devan Shimoyama, Suchitra Mattai, Beverly Fishman, Esmaa Mohamoud, Allana Clarke, Deborah Kass, Kour Pour, José Lerma, Jaime Muñoz, Alisa Sikelianos-Carter, Miya Ando, Su Su, Michi Meko, and Sherman Beck
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TOMOKAZU MATSUYAMA
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A first-generation Japanese American who lives and works in New York City, Tomokazu Matsuyama has developed a singular aesthetic grounded in an elegant expression of what he refers to as “the struggle of reckoning the familiar local with the familiar global.” As a bi-cultural visual artist, he is keenly aware of the nomadic diaspora, a community of wandering people who seek to understand their place in a world full of contrasting visual and cultural dialects.Though he manages a dynamic, wide ranging, and truly global practice that includes painting, sculpture, and large-scale public works, Matsuyama notably remains dedicated to furthering the most personal and intimate aspects of his aesthetic evolution. Each painting that leaves his studio is the fulfillment of hundreds of hours of work, as intensive research into source imagery converges with the application of innumerable layers of custom blended paint. The astoundingly vivid surfaces of his paintings project an almost digital brilliance, yet, upon close inspection, a painterly reality becomes clear, as hand-made brush strokes intermingle with delicately drawn figures, gestural splotches and drips, and meticulously spray-gunned backgrounds.
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Tomokazu Matsuyama
Dancer, 2021Stainless steel
132 x 156 x 156 in
335.3 x 396.2 x 396.2 cm
Edition of 3 + 1 AP -
In conjunction with The Armory Show’s renowned public art program, Armory Off-Site, Kavi Gupta is proud to debut Tomokazu Matsuyama’s ambitious public sculpture Dancer, premiering during the fair in Manhattan’s iconic Flatiron Plaza. Dancer’s sinuous, mirrored-steel limbs undulate in joyous abandonment while reflecting a glittering jungle of whirling colors and forms. The sculpture by long-time New York-based artist Tomokazu Matsuyama (“Matsu” to friends) freezes an enraptured figure in a moment of radical freedom familiar to anyone who has ever cut loose and boogied, sambaed, waltzed, tangoed, Geta'd, rhumbaed, fancy-danced, kwassa kwassa'd or hustled. Matsu’s artworks express the “global us,” a multitudinous reality reflective of today's nomadic diaspora. He hopes we will all recognize ourselves in his uncanny visual language, if not from our memories then from our aspirations or dreams.
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Matsuyama received his MFA in Communications Design from the Pratt Institute, New York. Recent exhibitions include Realms of Refuge, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; Tomokazu Matsuyama: Accountable Nature, Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai, China; Tomokazu Matsuyama: No Place Like Home, Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery, Luxembourg; Tomokazu Matsuyama: Oh Magic Night, Hong Kong Contemporary Art (HOCA) Foundation, Repulse Bay, Hong Kong; Edo Pop: The Graphic Impact of Japanese Prints, Japan Society, New York, NY, USA; Tomokazu Matsuyama: Palimpsest, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA; Thousand Regards, Katzen Arts Center at American University Museum, Washington, DC, USA; and Made in 17 hours, Museum of Contemporary Art Museum, Sydney, Australia, among others.
Public displays of Matsuyama's work include a monumental, permanent sculptural installation, activating Shinjuku Station East Square, Tokyo, Japan, one of the busiest urban train stations in the world, as well as acclaimed, large-scale public commissions in Beverly Hills, CA, and in the Bowery neighborhood of Manhattan, mobilizing Matsuyama's signature examinations of bi-cultralism and pop culture.
Matsuyama’s works are in the permanent collections of the Long Museum, Shanghai, China; Powerlong Art Museum, Shanghai, China; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA, USA; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA, USA; the Royal Family of Dubai; Dean Collection (Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys), USA; the institutional collections of Microsoft, Toyota Automobile, Bank of Sharjah, NIKE Japan, and Levi’sStrauss and Co. Japan; the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, CA, USA; Pt. Leo Estate Sculpture Park, Melbourne, Australia; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; and Xiao Museum, Suzhou, China; among others.
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JAMES LITTLE
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James Little's upcoming solo exhibition,
Black Stars & White Paintings
at Kavi Gupta | Elizabeth St. Fl. 1
OPENING ON November 12, 2022.
James Little is a master in the field of contemporary American abstract painting. In an age that frequently trades durability and patience for ephemerality and instant gratification, Little might be seen as an outlier. A careful, precise, disciplined perfectionist who emphasizes personal improvement over outside recognition, Little offers an alternative definition of influencer to a culture obsessed with quick returns and fame for fame's sake.The restraint of his pictures belies the startling complexity of their making—Little makes his own binders and grinds his own pigments, and paints a majority of his works using what is the most complex and difficult-to-master method ever devised: blending handmade pigments with hot beeswax, similar to the encaustic painting technique developed by ancient Egyptian and Greek artists. Properly cared for, his wax paintings will look as vibrant and luminous a thousand years from now as they do today.
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James Little
Thespian Stories, 2022Oil on linen
39 x 46 in framed
99.1 x 116.8 cm framed -
Little holds a BFA from the Memphis Academy of Art and an MFA from Syracuse University. He is a 2009 recipient of the Joan Mitchel Foundation Award for Painting. In addition to being featured prominently in the 2022 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY, his work has been exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions around the world, including at MoMA P.S.1, New York, NY; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; and the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC.
His work has been included in The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA, curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver and traveling to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR. Solo exhibitions include Homecoming: Bittersweet, at Dixon Gallery & Gardens: Art Museum, Memphis, TN, with an accompanying catalogue, and at Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, in 2022. His paintings are represented in the collections of numerous public and private collections, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; DeMenil Collection in Houston; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Maatschappij Arti Et Amicitiae, Amsterdam, Holland; Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton; Tennessee State Museum, Nashville; Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; and Newark Museum, Newark.
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MARY SIBANDE
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Mary Sibande is a South African sculptor, painter, and installation artist whose work interrogates the intersections of race, gender, and labor in South Africa, while actively rewriting her own family’s legacy of forced domestic work under the Apartheid state.Sibande employs the human form as a vehicle for her focused critiques of stereotypical depictions of Black women in South Africa. Understanding the body as a site where history is contested and where an artist’s fantasies can play out, Sibande constructs counter-historical narratives in which her alter-ego, a persona by the name of Sophie, is the central protagonist.Sibande creates sculptural depictions of Sophie dressed in various uniforms that signify the cultural roles she is taking on. Her outfits mobilize color as a vehicle for meaning and context. In Sophie’s “Blue Phase,” she is seen in blue and white outfits typical of those worn by domestic workers in South Africa. In her “Purple Phase”—inspired by South Africa’s notorious Purple Rain Protest—Sophie is dressed in elegant, Victorian garments suggestive of power and influence. In her “Red Phase,” Sophie’s outfits take on a warrior countenance, as she has now entered a stage of evolution defined by righteous anger.
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Mary Sibande
Ascension of the Purple Figure, 2016Fiberglass, resin, fabric, and steel on painted wood plinth
111 3/4 x 39 3/4 x 39 3/4 in
284 x 101 x 101 cm -
The 2022 iteration of The Armory Show will feature Mary Sibande's Ascension of the Purple Figure, as part of the 2022 Platform section—a branch of the fair that has been running since 2016 and is dedicated to large-scale, site-specific works.Organized by Tobias Ostrander, the curator of Latin American Art at the Tate in London, this year’s edition of Platform titled Monumental Change, examines how recent revisionist practices, which are part of dramatic cultural shifts occurring throughout the world, are influencing artists’ engagement with sculptural form.
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Mary Sibande
They Don’t Make Them Like They Used To, 2008Archival Digital Print
41 1/8 x 27 3/8 in
104.5 x 69.5 cm
Edition of 10 plus 1 artist's proof -
Based in Johannesburg, Mary Sibande has taken part in the 2011 Venice Biennale as the representative of South Africa; Lyon Biennial; Dakar Biennial; and Havana Biennial, among others. She has exhibited internationally in leading museums, including the Met Breuer, New York, USA; British Museum, London, UK; Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa; JAG (Johannesburg Art Gallery), Johannesburg, South Africa; Boston Museum of Fine Art, Boston, USA; Musée d’art Contemporain de Lyon, France; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa; Museum of Contemporary Art, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Kiasma Museum for Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; Museum Beelden aan Zee, Hague, Netherlands; and Somerset House, London, UK, among others. Sibande’s works are included in prominent collections internationally, such as the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC, USA; Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, USA; Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, USA; UMMA (University of Michigan Museum of Art), Ann Arbor, USA; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, USA; Zeitz MOCCA, Cape Town, South Africa; Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne, France; and Iziko South African Museums, Cape Town, South Africa. Forthcoming exhibitions include Mary Sibande: Blue Red Purple at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, USA, and her work is currently on view at Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA in Bordeaux, France.
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MIYA ANDO
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Miya Ando's upcoming solo exhibition,
Kumoji (Cloud Path/ A Road Traversed By Birds And The Moon),
at Kavi Gupta | Washington Blvd. Fl. 2
OPENING on September 24, 2022.
Miya Ando is a multidisciplinary abstract artist whose works reference the ephemerality of nature and the transitory nature of existence.Ando's images and forms reference such fleeting stuff as clouds, moonlight, tides, and the seasons. Her materials—such as steel, glass, and aluminum—convey a sense of durability and strength. Transformed by Ando, materials related to permanence become embodiments of impermanence.Ando presents the titles of her works in Japanese and English. During her time living in Japan, she researched literary and historical texts, compiling poetic Japanese descriptions of natural phenomena. Present in the Japanese descriptions are nuanced layers of thought often lacking in the English translation. These bi-lingual titles convey the sense of duality Ando experiences living between two cultures. -
Miya Ando
Kumoriyo (A Night When The Sky Is Thick With Clouds And No Moon Or Stars Can Be Seen) April 26 9:49 PM Tokyo, 2022Ink on aluminum composite
39 7/8 x 39 7/8 x 1/8 in
101.3 x 101.3 x 0.3 cm -
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Ando’s work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at The Asia Society Museum, Houston; The Noguchi Museum, New York; Savannah College Of Art and Design Museum, Savannah; The Nassau County Museum, Roslyn Harbor; and The American University Museum, Washington DC. Her work has also been included in recent group exhibitions at The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Haus Der Kunst, Munich; The Bronx Museum; and The Queens Museum of Art, NY. Ando’s work is included in the public collections of LACMA; The Nassau County Museum; The Corning Museum of Glass; The Detroit Institute of Arts; The Luft Museum; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; The Santa Barbara Museum of Art; The Museum of Art and History; among other public institutions as well as in numerous private collections. Ando has been the recipient of several grants and awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant Award, and has produced numerous public commissions, most notably a thirty-foot-tall sculpture built from World Trade Center steel installed in Olympic Park in London to mark the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, for which she was nominated for a DARC Award in Best Light Art Installation. Ando was also commissioned to create artwork for the historic Philip Johnson Glass House, New Canaan, CT. The artist holds a bachelor’s degree in East Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, studied East Asian Studies at Yale University and Stanford University, and apprenticed with a Master Metalsmith in Japan.
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SUCHITRA MATTAI
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Suchitra Mattai's upcoming solo exhibition,
Osmosis, at Kavi Gupta | Elizabeth St. Fl. 2
OPENING on November 12, 2022.
Suchitra Mattai is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work tells visual stories that touch on her Indo-Caribbean lineage. Blending painting, sculpture and installation with methods suggestive of domestic labor which she learned from her grandmother, such as sewing, embroidery and crocheting, the work addresses such topics as the legacy of colonialism, and relationships between culture and gender roles.Mattai has lived in Guyana, Canada, the United States, India, and Europe. Her work addresses the disorientation of not really having a single home—a feeling that informs much of how Mattai thinks about identity. Found objects, as well as craft-based processes and materials, play an essential role in her practice, in part because of the potentialities that arise from materials with forgotten or erased histories.
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Suchitra Mattai
An Origin Story, 2022Saris, fabric, and rope net
75 x 68 in
190.5 x 172.7 cm -
Among Mattai’s most illustrative bodies of work are her vibrant, kaleidoscopic sari tapestries. The process of their creation involves traditional domestic labor techniques such as sewing, embroidery, and crocheting, which Mattai learned from her grandmothers. Expressive of her own multi-layered identity, they are made from a mixture of everyday found materials such as feather boas, fabric, beads, and rope, and legacy materials such as ghungroo bells, prayer Dupattas, and her mother’s vintage saris, which possess embedded cultural and familial meanings. Though they are fundamentally abstract, Mattai mobilizes the materials and methods involved in these works to address such topics as the legacy of colonialism, and contemporary issues surrounding gender, labor, and family.
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Suchitra Mattaia cup of tea a bit of war , 2020Acrylic, embroidery floss, found needlepoint, and gouache26 x 26 in
66 x 66 cmView more details -
Suchitra MattaiTeam Spirit, 2022Vintage saris and fabric39 x 40 in
99.1 x 101.6 cmView more details -
Suchitra Mattaistories of the sea, 2020Embroidery floss, found objects, part of the artist's Mother's sari, appliques, and fabric42 x 46 in
106.7 x 116.8 cmView more details
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Mattai received an MFA in painting and drawing and an MA in South Asian art from the University of Pennsylvania, PA. Her work is in the collections of Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Bentonville, AR, USA; Jorge Pérez; Olivia Walton; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO, USA; Kiran Nader Museum of Art, Delhi, India; Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL, USA; TIA Collection, Santa Fe, NM, USA; and Taylor Art Collection, Denver, CO, USA; among many others.
Current and forthcoming exhibitions include Osmosis, at Kavi Gupta, Chicgao, IL; In the Adjacent Possible at John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI, USA; Form Forecast at MCA Chicago, IL, USA; The Depth of Identity: Art as Memory and Archive, curated by Rosie Gordon-Wallace and supported by the Green Foundation; Reorient at the Wing Luke Museum, Seattle, WA, USA; and Breathe into the Past: Cross Currents in the Caribbean, at the Colorado Fine Arts Center, Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO. Recent exhibitions include Suchitra Mattai: Breathing Room, Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID, USA; State of the Art 2020, Crystal Bridges Museum/the Momentary, Bentonville, AR, USA; Sharjah Biennial 14, Sharjah, UAE; and Realms of Refuge, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; as well as exhibitions at the Center for Visual Arts, Metropolitan State University of Denver, CO, USA and the San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX, USA.
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SU SU
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Su Su's upcoming solo exhibition,
From Your Special Friend,
at Kavi Gupta | Washington Blvd Fl. 1
OPENING on September 24, 2022.
Chinese-born, Pittsburgh-based artist Su Su creates fantastical, dreamlike paintings that offer a new and unique understanding of intercultural exchange—a jittery, beautiful hybrid of mass media, pop culture, history, and memory with the capacity to shape our understanding of our interconnected world.
Su Su’s practice revolves around two distinctive but distinct bodies of work—both of which employ oil paint, though in radically different ways: Su Su’s masterful, traditional oil paintings on canvas; and her more experimental Bombyx paintings, made by injecting streams of oil paint through silk, using a sui generis technique of Susu’s invention.
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Su Su
Be Your Mirror, 2022Oil on silk
41 3/4 x 51 1/2 in
106 x 130.8 cm -
Su Su's Bombyx paintings are so-called for their relationship to the silk moth. The name refers simultaneously to the silk substrate Su Su utilizes for the paintings, and to the enchanting, cilia-like appearance of the paint strands Su Su injects through the silk, which recall the hirsute mane of the Bombyx moth.
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Su Su
Praying Hands, 2022Oil on canvas
48 x 36 in
121.9 x 91.4 cm -
Su Su’s more traditional oil paintings convey the weight and seriousness with which she approaches her craft, while also embodying the lightness and humor with which she confronts the big questions she faces as an bi-cultural female artist. The delicate and intricately composed compositions demand the attention of the viewer, while the glint in Su Su’s eye, the informality of her pose, and the whimsy of the melting Bambis, impish dragons, and voluptuous peaches belie a childlike sense of wonder at a world still full of odd mystery.In most of the works in the exhibition, Su Su utilizes her own body and face as a narrative point of contact between artist and viewer.“I think a lot of these paintings reflect how I see myself as a female artist,” she says. “There is a feminist voice behind all of these works. I want to highlight female power, and female power in art and culture. There is also something about me sexualizing myself as an Asian woman, in my way, rather than letting others sexualize me as an Asian woman. I think all of the paintings in this show tell some story of that.”
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Recent exhibitions of Su Su’s work include Wonder Women, inspired by Genny Lim’s eponymous poem and featuring thirty Asian American and diasporic women and non-binary artists responding to themes of wonder, self, and identity through figuration, curated by Kathy Huang for Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles, CA; State of the Art 2020, The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, traveled to the Sarasota Art Museum, Sarasota, FL; The 25th Aniversary Show, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; There Is Always One Direction, the Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz Private Museum, Miami, FL; Counterpressures, The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Rising Voices 2: The Bennett Prize, Muskegon Museum of Art, Muskegon, MI; and On Common Ground, Chautauqua Institution of Art, Chautauqua, NY.Works by Su Su are held in the permanent collections of the Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz Private Museum and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, among many others. Su Su received an artist scholarship to attend graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University, where she completed her MFA in 2015 and worked as a guest professor at the School of Drama from 2015-2020.
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KOUR POUR
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Kour Pour is a British-Iranian-American artist whose visual language is informed by longstanding, global traditions of intercultural exchange. By intersecting a wide range of material and aesthetic conventions that are connected to various geographic, cultural, and national heritages, Pour allows for a remapping of the standard understanding of “Eastern/Western” cultural exchange.
Pour was born in Exeter, England. His father owned a small carpet shop, and Pour would spend time there as a child. He also often traveled to Los Angeles to visit family on his father’s side, and he ultimately attended Otis College of Art and Design (BFA, 2010). In Los Angeles, he was exposed to hip-hop and became interested in the idea of sampling as it is practiced in music production, and how he might apply a similar practice in his artwork.
Pour’s works encompass diverse subject matter and culturally specific references, ranging from Persian carpets to ukiyo-e prints, and Western abstraction to Eastern landscape painting. These references are used as starting points for his paintings, in which a source image is often cropped, abstracted, or adjusted in palette to create vivid, intricate, and layered painting surfaces.
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Kour Pour
Little Qermez, 2022Acrylic on canvas over panel
9 x 7 x 1.5 in
22.9 x 17.8 x 3.8 cm -
Kour Pour’s renowned Persian carpet paintings evoke his Iranian heritage. By blending iconography from throughout Asia and Europe they address the intercultural fostering of images, materials, and techniques across time and space. The erasures and additions within Pour’s process echo the nature of intercultural transformation inherent in the visual language of Persian carpets.
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Kour Pour
Little Sabz, 2022Acrylic on canvas over panel
9 x 7 x 1.5 in
22.9 x 17.8 x 3.8 cm -
Solo exhibitions of Pour’s work is forthcoming at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran, Iran. Other recent major exhibitions include A Boundless Drop to a Boundless Ocean, Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL, USA; Kour Pour: Familiar Spirits, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; Returnee, The Club, Tokyo, Japan; Manzareh/Keshiki/Landscape, Ever Gold [Projects], San Francisco, CA, USA; Polypainting, Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong, and GNYP Gallery, Berlin; Gold Standard: Ten Year Anniversary Exhibition at Ever Gold [Projects]; Decoration Never Dies, Anyway, Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Museum, Tokyo, Japan; and Labyrinth(s), Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong.
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SHERMAN BECK
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Sherman Beck is a Chicago-based painter who was among the original ten members of AFRICOBRA, a foundational Black arts collective formed on the South Side of Chicago in 1967.Beck’s aesthetic vision is rooted in positive portrayals of Black family, a central tenet of AFRICOBRA’s philosophy. Reveling in the mystery and mysticism of everyday life, Beck extends the definition of family through space and time to include humanity’s kinship with nature and the metaphysical world.Consistent throughout Beck’s oeuvre is a sense of technical mastery and aesthetic clarity, projected by an artist defined by both humility and erudition. Exalting the enduring power of the medium of painting to spark moments of intrigue for viewers, Beck perceives his paintings less as definitive statements about subject matter, and more as pliable visual examinations of the space where ideas and intuition meet.
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Sherman Beck
Immersed, 2022Acrylic on canvas
32 x 42 in
81.3 x 106.7 cm -
Wielding portraiture as an instrument of remembrance and nobility, Beck lovingly venerates historical African American ancestral heroes in a series of memorial portraits that includes luminaries such as President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama, depicted by Beck as Fourth Dynasty Egyptian prince Rahotep and his wife Nofret; Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress; Frederick Douglass, national abolitionist leader, orator, writer, and social reformer; Lewis Howard Latimer, an inventor who worked alongside both Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell; Biddy Mason, California real estate mogul, nurse, and philanthropist born into slavery; and Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist known for her prescient declaration, "Righteousness exalts a nation. Hate just makes people miserable.”
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Beck (b. 1942, USA) is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago and completed further studies at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. His work was included in the authoritative early exhibitions AFRICOBRA I & II at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and has been included in multiple other influential exhibitions of AFRICOBRA’s work, including AFRICOBRA 50, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; Africobra and Beyond, DuSable Museum of African American History, Chicago, IL, USA; AFRICOBRA: Messages to the People, MOCA North Miami, Miami, FL, USA; I Am Somebody, at the Peninsula Hotel, Chicago, IL, USA; Images of the Past: Collection of Artwork from the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s, South Side Community Art Center, Chicago, IL, USA; Maleness to Manhood: Reclamation of the Young Black Male, South Side Community Art Center, Chicago, IL, USA; and Contemporary Black Art, atRoosevelt University, Chicago, IL, USA; as well as in the solo exhibition Sherman Beck: Realms & Abstractions, African American Cultural Center, University of Illinois, Chicago, IL, USA. Beck is the former owner and operator of the Art Directions art supply store in Chicago, and taught commercial art for twenty-two years at his alma mater, Dunbar High School, in the Bronzeville neighborhood of south Chicago.
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DEVAN SHIMOYAMA
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Devan Shimoyama’s visually scintillating artworks stop people in their tracks. Clad in such finery as fur, feathers, glitter, rhinestones, and sequins, his paintings and sculptures emit a magical and joyous aura. Viewers easily enchanted by beautiful things might get lost in the shimmering artistry of Shimoyama’s expertly crafted cosmetic veils. Those whose eyes and minds are willing to travel beyond the surface subterfuge of glitter, flowers, and jewels gain precious entry into a complex world of mystery, introspection, rhapsody, and desire.Shimoyama’s painting practice is rooted in explorations of his personal identity and experiences. Mobilizing mythology, spiritual traditions, and the compositional strategies of classical painters such as Francisco Goya and Caravaggio, he crafts heroic and sanguine depictions of the Black, queer, male body. Many of the men in Shimoyama's paintings literally have jewels in their eyes, endowing them with a tearful, mystified expression suggesting internal suffering.
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Devan Shimoyama
Sustheno, 2022Oil, colored pencil, silk flowers, jewelry, collage, Flashe, acrylic and embellishments on canvas
72 x 60 x 2 in
182.9 x 152.4 x 5.1 cm -
Devan Shimoyama
Spotlight, 2021Colored pencil, glitter, collage and rhinestones on paper in walnut frame with museum glass
52 1/2 x 42 3/4 x 1 5/8 in
133.3 x 108.5 x 4 cm -
Shimoyama’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States. His solo exhibition Cry, Baby was presented at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh in 2018. Forthcoming exhibitions of Shimoyama’s work include When We See Us, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa.Other major current and recent exhibitions include Devan Shimoyama in Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows, at FRONT International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH, USA; The Regional, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, USA; All the Rage, at Kunstpalais, Erlangen, Germany, Shimoyama’s debut European solo museum exhibition; A Counterfeit Gift Wrapped in Fire, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; Untitled (For Tamir), a single work exhibition in the Spotlight Gallery at The Rockwell Museum, Corning, NY, USA; Black Gentleman and Midnight Rumination, a major multi-museum exhibition at The Regional, co-organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH, USA and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, USA; Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art, Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY, USA; Realms of Refuge, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; Tell Me Your Story, Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands; Getting to Know You, Cleveland Institute of Art, OH, USA; We Named Her Gladys, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; The Barbershop Project, CulturalDC, Washington, DC, USA; Fictions, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, USA; and Translating Valence: Redefining Black Male Identity, Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids, MI, USA. Shimoyama was awarded the Al Held Fellowship at the Yale School of Art in 2013.
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ALLANA CLARKE
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Courtesy of the artist.
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Allana Clarke is a Trinidadian-American artist whose multidisciplinary studio practice is rooted in concepts crucial to contemporary discourse around interpersonal and intercultural empathy, such as curiosity, a will to heal, and an insistence upon freedom. Fluidly moving through video, performance, sculpture, and text, her research-based practice contends with ideas of Blackness, the binding nature of bodily signification, and the possibility to create non-totalizing identifying structures.
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Allana Clarke
The Tongue is a Muscle, 2022Salon Pro 30 Sec. Super Hair Bond Glue (rubber latex, black carbon dye, Ammonium Hydroxide)
81 x 54 x 4 in
205.7 x 137.2 x 10.2 cm -
Clarke begins her sculptural process by pouring hair bonding glue—a liquid latex commonly used to adhere hair extensions onto a person’s scalp—onto panels made of window screen. As the glue begins curing, Clarke manipulates it by scraping, pulling, twisting, and pushing into it with her entire body. This performative process results in a sculptural relic that recalls Clarke’s first interactions with hair bonding glue as a child. She refers to those early experiences as “rituals indoctrinating me into a world that is anti-black.”Says Clarke, “I of course have a complicated relationship with this material as these are rituals that were given to me by the matriarchs in my family and rituals that I thought to be normative and adopted them into my beautification practices. As I grew older I came to understand these processes aim to be removing me from notions of and proximity to Blackness, Black hair being something that is political and ‘radical.’ It is though not possible to extract my body from the narrative of Blackness, nor should that be a desire. That is the legacy that was passed down to me.”
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Clarke earned her BFA in photography from New Jersey City University in 2011 and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Practice from MICA’s Mount Royal School of Art in 2014. She has been an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Vermont Studio Center, Lighthouse Works, and Yaddo, and has received several grants, including the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship, Franklin Furnace Fund, and a Puffin Foundation Grant. Her work has been screened and performed at Gibney Dance in New York, Invisible-Exports in New York, New School’s Glass Box Theater in New York, FRAC in Nantes, France, and SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, and was featured in the Bauhaus Centennial edition Bauhaus Now: Is Modernity an Attitude. She recently completed a 2020-21 NXTHVN fellowship and is an assistant professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. Clarke’s work was recently included in the 2022 iteration of the FRONT Triennial and the group exhibition Realms of Refuge at Kavi Gupta | Elizabeth St.
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DEBORAH KASS
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Deborah Kass is a living legend whose multi-faceted visual arts practice is rooted in unflinching honesty, scintillating wit, and a tireless compulsion to scrutinize American sensitivities. Among her most pressing concerns is the ways in which aesthetic culture affects and informs the construction of self.Kass is a fan of popular culture and a rigorous student of art history. She has said that if the canonized giants of Pop Art and Minimalism were still alive, her work might kill them. As much as anything else, those artists defined themselves by their diametric opposition to each other. Pop Art could be anything; Minimalism was everything Pop Art wasn’t. However, as a young artist, Kass saw things differently. Pop and Minimalism were both cool. Her dual admiration, along with her commitment to examining the political climate of today, expresses itself abundantly throughout her various bodies of work.
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Deborah Kass
OY/YO, 2013Brushed aluminum on polished aluminum base
10 1/2 x 20 x 6 in
26.7 x 50.8 x 15.2 cm
Edition 21 of 24 -
OY YO evolved from a series of paintings Kass began exploring in 2009, in which she painted the words OY and YO in yellow on a blue background—an appropriation of Ed Ruscha’s famous painting <i>OOF</i> (1962). Large-scale, public versions of OY/YO are currently in the permanent collections of museums on opposite coasts: the Brooklyn Museum in New York and the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA.Kass’s work has been shown nationally and internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, the Istanbul Biennale, and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. In 2012, The Andy Warhol Museum presented Deborah Kass, Before and Happily Ever After, Mid-Career Retrospective, with a catalogue published by Rizzoli. Other recent major exhibitions include Orange Disaster (Linda Nochlin), Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; Deborah Kass: Day After Day, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; Deborah Kass: Painting and Sculpture, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; About Face: Stonewall Revolt and the New Queer, Wrightwood 659, Chicago, IL; and My Andy: a retrospective, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Kansas City, MO.Work by Kass is in the collections of dozens of the most influential public and private collections in the world, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; the Jewish Museum, NY; the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA; the Cincinnati Museum, OH; the New Orleans Museum, LA; the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; and many others. Kass is a graduate of Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA; the Whitney Museum Independent Studies Program, New York, NY; and the Art Students League, New York, NY; and is the recipient of an honorary Doctorate of Arts from Oregon College of Art and Craft, Portland, OR.
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JOSÉ LERMA
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José Lerma’s practice is formally rooted in an investigation of painting in the expanded field. His exhibitions often include elaborate installations that incorporate such everyday items as office materials, musical instruments, and home furnishings. Conceptually, Lerma attempts to collapse the historical with the autobiographical, making works that are part art history and part personal mythology. Several of Lerma’s recurring themes deal with the tension between the heroic and the pathetic, as well as the rise and fall of great figures. His research examines the vast network of sociological, political, and economic forces that have shaped, and continue to shape, contemporary culture.
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José Lerma
Rosas Grises (Pink), 2016Acrylic and pigmented silicone on polypropylene sheets on canvas
84 x 60 in
213.4 x 152.4 cm
Unframed
+ $1,500 to frame -
José Lerma was born in Spain and grew up in Puerto Rico. His work has been in solo exhibitions at the Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de San Juan, Puerto Rico, among others; as well as in group exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Museum, WI; Institute Valecia d’art Modern, Spain; Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico; Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece; Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; and Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX, among others.
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JAIME MUÑOZ
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Jaime Muñoz is a Pomona, California-based painter whose works emblamatize the abiding struggle between humans, technology, and labor. His glimmering, pictographic compositions convey a masterful blend of representational precision and allegorical motif, suggesting a charmed space where everyday life is nurtured by magic and myth.Muñoz carefully plans his compositions using a mixture of analog and digital drawing, and many of the texts in his paintings are rendered in a font he created. The superabundant presence of his paintings’ richly textured surfaces is the result of a slow, deliberate process of building multiple layers of acrylic paint, glitter, texture paste, and paper. As aesthetic objects, his paintings carry an identity that both informs the narrative of labor and humanity that is present in the work, and is informed by it.
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Jaime Muñoz
Diagram Drawing-05, 2022Sumi ink on paper
28 x 23 x 2 in
71.1 x 58.4 x 5.1 cm -
Motifs such as horses and work trucks appear frequently in Muñoz’s work. Rather than direct figurative references, they are part of a symbolic visual language Muñoz deploys to invite viewers into a world of post-capitalist iconolatry informed by centuries of colonialism and commodification.Drawing serves various functions within Muñoz’s studio practice. They provide him with a break from the process of painting. They also offer him an opportunity to experiment with new images and concepts. Says Muñoz, “Usually, in between bodies of work, I break away from the paintings to explore visual ideas in diagram drawings. Hence, another function of the drawings is to give myself space to investigate and consider imagery and the conceptual, intuitive ideas that may foreshadow subjects of the paintings. As I juxtapose different images together, I am able to sort through and examine the relationships of various images. In this way, the diagram is a space for my internal process of discovering associations."
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Jaime Muñoz
Diagram Drawing-04, 2022Sumi ink on paper
28 x 23 x 2 in
71.1 x 58.4 x 5.1 cm -
Muñoz earned his BA in Fine Art from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Recent exhibitions include Beyond The Streets On Paper, Southampton Arts Center, Southampton, New York, USA; Evocations: Celebrating the Museum's Collection, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas, USA; 4 Threads, Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, California, USA; and How to Read El Pato Pascual: Disney’s Latin America and Latin America’s Disney, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, CA. His work has also been featured in the LA Times, Hyperallergic, JUXTAPOZ, Artillery Magazine, and Pacific Standard Time, among others.
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ALISA SIKELIANOS-CARTER
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Alisa Sikelianos-Carter is a mixed-media painter from upstate New York. Her work asserts that Black features are a manifestation of a sacred and divine technology that has served as a means of survival, both physically and metaphysically. She envisions a cosmically bountiful world that celebrates and pays homage to ancestral majesty, power, and aesthetics.Inspired by traditionally Black hairstyles, Sikelianos-Carter uses web and catalogue-sourced images to construct new archetypes. Through her exploration of opulent, luminescent materials she is creating a mythology that is centered on Black resistance and utilizes the body as a sight of alchemy and divinity.
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Alisa Sikelianos-Carter
Africosmos of Sun and Sea #1, 2022Unique archival print hand embellished with glitter
50 7/8 x 86 3/4 in
129.2 x 220.3 cm -
“I want to live in a world in which every micro-aggression, attack on humanity, and doubt of divinity aimed at Black people is destroyed by future-sent deities,” says Sikelianos-Carter. “These Godx are completely enveloped and adorned by magnificent cornrows, dreadlocks, and twists. The hairstyles act as armor and weapon, protecting and repelling wearers from white supremacy and misogyny. These are the beings I create. My wildest dreams realized; a marriage between the spectral beings we (as Black people) can and will transform into as a result of the culture we currently live in with the majesty, magic, and tradition of our ancestors.”Sikelianos-Carter earned her BA and MA in Painting and Drawing from SUNY Albany. She is a recent NXTHVN Fellow, and in 2021 was awarded the inaugural fellowship at Foreland, a six month studio residency in the Catskills conferred biennially on an outstanding artist of color. Recent exhibitions of her work include Stars Are Born In Darkness, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; Realms of Refuge, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; NXTHVN Fellows Group Show, New York, NY; Beasts Like Me: Feminism and Fantasy, Bronx Art Space, Bronx, NY; and Never Done: 100 Years of Women in Politics and Beyond, Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY.
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MICHI MEKO
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Michi Meko is a multidisciplinary artist whose rigorous studio practice is grounded in a material, metaphorical, and philosophical examination of what he calls “the African American experience of navigating public spaces, particularly in the American South, while remaining buoyant within them.”Incorporating romanticized found objects as well as the visual language of mapping, flags, and wayfinding into his work, Meko constructs transcendent aesthetic spaces into which the viewer’s psyche is free to wander.“These references signal the warning of a threat or the possibility of safe passage,” Meko says. “Working beyond the physical image of the body, objects of buoyancy and navigation become metaphors for selfhood, resilience, and the sanity required in the turbulent oceans of contemporary America.”
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Michi Meko
A Fugitive GPS, 2022Acrylic, aerosol, oil pastel, gold leaf, aerosol hologram glitter, white colored pencil, india ink, gouache on canvas
72 x 48 in
182.9 x 121.9 cm -
Meko is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and the Atlanta Artadia Award, and was a finalist for the 2019 Hudgens Prize. Recent exhibitions of Meko's work include Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground, Kavi Gupta. Chicago, IL; The Dirty South, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, VA; Realms of Refuge, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; Michi Meko: Black and Blur, Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Atlanta GA; Michi Meko: It Doesn’t Prepare You for Arrival, Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA), Atlanta, GA; Michi Meko: Before We Blast off: The Journey of Divine Forces, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA and Abstraction Today, MOCA GA, Atlanta, GA. His work is held in the collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; King & Spalding, Atlanta, GA; Scion (Toyota Motor Corporation), Los Angeles, CA; MetroPark USA Inc., Atlanta, GA; and CW Network, Atlanta, GA, among others.
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BEVERLY FISHMAN
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Beverly Fishman is a leading protagonist in the field of politically activated abstract art. An Anonymous Was A Woman Award Winner, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, and National Endowment for the Arts Grantee, Fishman dedicates her studio practice to an aesthetic examination of people’s relationship with the business, politics and chemistry of healing.For decades, Fishman's research has focused on the visual vocabulary that pharmaceutical designers deploy in their calculated efforts to market antidepressants, anxiolytics, amphetamines, anti-inflammatories, beta blockers, opioids, and other chemicals to the masses. Morphed and elevated by Fishman in her studio, these medicinal motifs become the building blocks for ecstatic, abstract visual cocktails that open doors to the aesthetic sublime.
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Beverly Fishman
Untitled (Pain, Pain, Anxiety, Pain, GERD), 2022Urethane paint on wood
48 x 96 x 2 in
121.9 x 243.8 x 5.1 cm -
This painting by Beverly Fishman is the central piece of FEELS LIKE LOVE, Fishman's 2022 solo exhibition at Kavi Gupta. Measuring eight feet long, this multi-form contains five geometric elements, each belonging to Fishman’s personal visual alphabet of abstracted pharmaceutical forms.
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Recent major exhibitions of Fishman's work include FEELS LIKE LOVE, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; Recovery, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI, USA; I Dream of Sleep, Miles McEnery, New York, NY, USA; Future Perfect, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; Double Edged: Geometric Abstraction Then and Now, curated by Dr. Emily Stamey, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, USA; DOSE, curated by Nick Cave, CUE Art Foundation, New York, NY, USA; Pill Spill, Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, MI, USA; and Beverly Fishman: In Sickness and in Health, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, USA.Work by Fishman is included in the collections of the MacArthur Foundation, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Chrysler Museum of Art, and many others. Fishman served as the head of painting and as artist-in-residence at the Cranbrook Academy of Art for twenty-seven years.
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ESMAA MOHAMOUD
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African-Canadian artist Esmaa Mohamoud is a multi-disciplinary conceptual artist who describes her studio practice as an examination of “the monolithic versus the multitude.” Her work is a visually stunning and profound examination of the gap between contemporary culture's oversimplification and diminishment of Black people, compared to the complexity, richness, and diversity of their actual lived experiences.
Mohamoud’s critically acclaimed solo exhibition Esmaa Mohamoud: To Play in the Face of Certain Defeat, which toured the National Galleries of Canada, looks specifically at how the Black body is reduced within the vernacular of athleticism. Sculptures such as Glorious Bones critique depictions of the Black body as being disposable, while the photographic series One of the Boys examines the vulnerability of Black masculinity within the guise of professional sports.
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Esmaa Mohamoud
One of The Boys (White), 2019Archival pigment print
61 x 41 x 2 in
154.9 x 104.1 x 5.1 cm
Edition 4 of 5 plus 1 artist's proof -
Mohamoud’s practice manifests across multiple mediums—including sculpture, photography, textiles, video, and large-scale public installations—and incorporates a broad range of materials and methods, including concrete, textiles, metal, and found objects. She describes her aesthetic as “soft industrial.”Darkness Doesn't Rise To The Sun, But We Do, on view at Arsenal Contemporary earlier this year, was Mohamoud's first large-scale in-gallery immersive installation consisting of 500 matte-black metal dandelions, arranged in large and meandering groupings that take over the exhibition floor. As though birthed from the concrete, this massive groundswell of metal flora is softened and balanced by transcendent, luminescent orange gradient that warmly suffuses the atmosphere.
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Mohamoud is a 2021 Artist-in-Residence in Kehinde Wiley’s renowned Black Rock Senegal residency program in Dakar, Senegal. Her critically acclaimed solo exhibition To Play in the Face of Certain Defeat (originated at Museum London in Ontario) is currently on view at the Art Gallery of Hamilton (Ontario), and will travel in 2022 to the Art Gallery of Ottawa and the Art Gallery of Winnipeg, concluding at the Art Gallery of Alberta in 2023. In 2022, Mohamoud’s work will be included in the exhibition Garmenting: Costume and Contemporary Art, Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY, USA. Her work has previously been exhibited at the Royal Ontario Museum; Museum of Fine Arts Montreal; and Weatherspoon Art Museum, UNCG, Greensboro, NC, USA, among others. Works by Mohamoud are in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada; Art Gallery of Ontario; Weatherspoon Museum; Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan; Museum London; and University of Victoria Legacy Art Galleries, among others.
Kavi Gupta, The Armory Show 2022: The Javits Center | Booth 214
Past viewing_room
