2018 has been a landmark year for AFRICOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), which was founded in Chicago in 1968 and defined the aesthetic of the Black Arts Movement. The group is featured prominently in Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, currently at the Brooklyn Museum, and recently concluded AFRICOBRA 50, a retrospective at Kavi Gupta in Chicago. AFRICOBRA: Messages to the People is opening during art week at MOCA North Miami. And AFRICOBRA also promises to be the star attraction at Art Basel Miami Beach, as we are featuring new and historic works by founding members Gerald Williams, Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, and Sherman Beck.
In addition, our booth will feature works by Young-Il Ahn, the subject of a recent retrospective at LACMA; Beverly Fishman, on the heels of her successful solo exhibition in Chelsea; Glenn Kaino, whose current solo exhibition With Drawn Arms at the High Museum in Atlanta was recently featured on CBS Sunday Morning; Jessica Stockholder, whose Relational Aesthetics installation is on view through March 2019 at The Contemporary Austin; Richard Hunt, whose solo retrospective Synthesis recently opened at the Georgia Museum of Art; Jeffrey Gibson, currently featured in the solo exhibition This is the Day at the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art; Manish Nai, whose work was recently profiled in Architectural Digest; and Firelei Báez, whose solo exhibition Joy Out of Fire recently concluded at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and whose work was featured in documenta 14.
We are also thrilled to be offering works by Michael Joo, Tony Tassett, Alfred Conteh, Claire Rojas, Scott Reeder, Inka Essenhigh, Patrick Chamberlain, Irena Haiduk, Claire Sherman, José Lerma, Roxy Paine, Angel Otero, and Manuel Mathieu. New to our ABMB presentation will be works by Devan Shimoyama, a rising start whose portraits celebrating the queer, black male form were acclaimed by collectors and in the press when we debuted them earlier this year at EXPO Chicago and Frieze London, and new works by Kennedy Yanko, whose rugged sculptural assemblages repurpose discarded materials, transforming them into complex, esoteric, contemporary totems.
Kabinett: Roger Brown
Born in the South and living much of his adult life in Chicago, multidisciplinary artist Roger Brown (b. 1946 – d. 1997) turned his sights westward in his final years. Inspired by the landscape and culture of the Southwest, Brown built a new home in La Conchita, California which he deemed his “Temple of Painting.”
This presentation features multiple facet’s of Brown’s late career developments, examining the formal relationships between Brown’s iconic painting practice, innovative “Virtual Still Life” sculpture/paintings, and his assemblage arrangements all created during his time in La Conchita. Brown’s interest in repetition and architectural gridding was manifest throughout his entire career as a painter. The ordered geometry of Brown’s paintings extended to his self-made environments. An active collector and supporter of folk arts and crafts, Brown’s accumulation of objects became its own creative outlet, as groupings of objects became curated assemblage, sharing language with his paintings. Brown previously introduced painted sculpture into his career, but it was during the La Conchita period that he developed his innovative “Virtual Still Life” series, which arranged specific objects along a shelf in front of a landscape painting. This late series became one of his most elusive and enigmatic of his storied career.
