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  • Kavi Gupta celebrates the indispensable contribution Black artists have made to art history. When it comes to the roll out of a more equitable brand of human culture, representation matters.

     

    We consider it a privilege to represent the work and legacy of influential contemporary Black artists such as AFRICOBRA founders Gerald Williams, Wadsworth Jarrell and Jae Jarrell, Firelei Báez, Sherman Beck, Alisa Sikelianos-Carter, Allana Clarke, Willie Cole, Alfred Conteh, Richard Hunt, James Little, Manuel Mathieu, Michi Meko, Esmaa Mohamoud, Devan Shimoyama, Mary Sibande, Mickalene Thomas, and Kennedy Yanko. The work these artists are doing is crucial not only to the broadening of the definition of contemporary art, but also to the fight to establish anti-racist social structures in which all people have the equal chance to thrive. The manifestation of equity, justice, and true representation hinges on the thoughts we embrace today and the culture we create right now. Happy Black History Month.

  • Gerald Williams, Angela Davis, 1971

    Gerald Williams

    Angela Davis, 1971

    Gerald Williams is an American painter whose work explores culture, place and identity from a global perspective. Williams is one of the original five cofounders of AFRICOBRA, an artist collective formed on the south side of Chicago in 1967, which became the definitive visual expression of the Black Arts

    Movement.

     

    Williams’ work is included in several major collections, including that of the Smart Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the DeYoung Museum, and the DuSable Museum of African American History. Recent exhibitions of Williams' work include Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy, The Met Breuer, NY, USA; AFRICOBRA: Nation Time, 2019 Venice Biennale Official Collateral Event, Venice, IT; AFRICOBRA: Messages to the People, MOCA North Miami, FL, USA; AFRICOBRA 50, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, USA; Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Tate Modern, London, England; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Fayetteville, AR; USA, Brooklyn Museum, NY, USA; The Broad Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA; San Francisco MOMA, CA, USA, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, USA; Gerald Williams, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, USA; The Time is Now! Art Worlds of Chicago’s South Side, 1960-1980, Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, USA. A major profile of Williams appeared in Hyperallergic in 2018, based on an oral history included in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

  • Jae Jarrell, Revolutionary Suit, 1970

    Jae Jarrell

    Revolutionary Suit, 1970

    Jae Jarrell is an American sculptor, painter and fashion designer. She is one of the founding members of AFRICOBRA.

     

    Major exhibitons of Jae Jarrell's work include AFRICOBRA: Nation Time, 2019 Venice Biennale, Official Collateral Event, Venice, IT; AFRICOBRA: Messages to the People, MOCA North Miami, FL, USA; AFRICOBRA 50, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, USA; Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Tate Modern, London, England; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Fayetteville, AR; USA, Brooklyn Museum, NY, USA; The Broad Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA; San Francisco MOMA, CA, USA, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, USA; We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85, ICA Boston, MA, USA and Heritage: Wadsworth and Jae Jarrell, The Cleveland Museum of Art, OH, USA.

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  • Wadsworth Jarrell, Black Family, 1968

    Wadsworth Jarrell

    Black Family, 1968

    Wadsworth Jarrell is a painter and sculptor born in Albany, Georgia. He is one of the five founding members of AFRICOBRA.

     

    Recent exhibitions of Jarrell's work include AFRICOBRA: Nation Time, 2019 Venice Biennale, Official Collateral Event, Venice, IT; Come Saturday Punch, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; AFRICOBRA: Messages to the People, MOCA North Miami, FL, USA; AFRICOBRA 50, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, USA; Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Tate Modern, London, England; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Fayetteville, AR; USA, Brooklyn Museum, NY, USA; The Broad Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA; San Francisco MOMA, CA, USA, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, USA; and Heritage: Wadsworth and Jae Jarrell, The Cleveland Museum of Art, OH, USA. Jarrell’s work is included in the collections of the Worcester Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, the National Museum of Africa American History and Culture, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others.

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  • Firelei Báez, living monuments in historical chapters, 2018

    Firelei Báez

    living monuments in historical chapters, 2018

    Firelei Báez is interested in how culture and identity are shaped by inherited histories. Her work reveals the incomplete nature of our communal stories while constructing more egalitarian social narratives so a more equitable future might emerge.

     

    Major exhibitions of Báez work include Artes Mundi 9, National Museum, Cardiff, Wales; Firelei Báez, Mennello Museum of American Art, Orlando, FL, USA; Firelei Báez, Witte de With Center for Contremporary Art, Rotterdam, NL; Joy Out of Fire, Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, USA; Firelei Báez: Bloodlines, Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), FL, USA; 10th Berlin Biennial, Berlin, DE; Firelei Báez: How To Slip Out Of Your Body Quietly, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; Firelei Báez: Bloodlines, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, USA; and The Modern Window, MoMA, New York, NY, USA. Báez has received numerous awards, including the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts 2020;  Soros Arts Fellowship 2019; United States Artists Fellowship 2019; Institute of Contemporary Art Boston Watershed Artist 2019; College Art Association Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work 2018; Future Generation Art Prize 2017; Chiaro Award 2016; and Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant 2011. Her work belongs to the permanent collections of such institutions as the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; PAMM, Miami, FL; Cleveland Clinic Fine Art Collection, Cleveland, OH; Phillip and Tracey Riese Foundation, New York, NY; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY; Sindika Dokolo Foundation Collection, Luanda, Angola; Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA; and Salomon Foundation for Contemporary Art, Annecy, France.

  • Sherman Beck, Ancestors, 2005

    Sherman Beck

    Ancestors, 2005

    Sherman Beck was one of the original 10 members of AFRICOBRA. About his work, Beck says, “I have studied various schools of painting and admire the passion in Van Gogh’s work. I like Monet, Dali, and especially like Victor Vasarely’s optical illusion. I was influenced by AFRICOBRA’s philosophy of making aesthetic contributions to the Black community and addressing the needs of the community by making affordable reproductions.

     

    A graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Beck pursued further studies at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. He worked as a commercial artist and apprenticed at advertising agencies in display, sign, and filmstrip, and he also worked as a freelance illustrator. For several years, Beck owned and operated Art Directions, an art supply store in Chicago. He returned to his alma mater, Dunbar High School, to teach for twenty-two years, the longest term of a commercial art teacher there.

     

    “Teaching was a big part of my life,” he says, “but the system was layered with bureaucracy that decreased productivity. I am happy to be retired now.”

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  • Alisa Sikelianos-Carter, Listen and Behold. A Story/telling, 2020

    Alisa Sikelianos-Carter

    Listen and Behold. A Story/telling, 2020

    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.

     

    Recent exhibitions of Sikelianos-Carter's work include Realms of Refuge, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; NXTHVN Fellows Group Show, James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY; Wabi-Sabi, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London, UK; Beasts Like Me: Feminism and Fantasy, Bronx Art Space, Bronx, NY; Engage: Artists in Visual Dialogue, Esther Massry Gallery, Saint Rose College, Albany, NY and Never Done: 100 Years of Women in Politics and Beyond, Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY. Sikelianos-Carter was featured in New American Paintings, No. 146, Northeast Issue and recieved the Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant. Sikelianos-Carter has been awarded residencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts, Austerlitz, NY; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY; Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY; and Fountainhead Residency, Miami, FL; and she is a current NXTHVN Studio Fellow in New Haven, CT. She earned her BA and MA from SUNY Albany in Painting and Drawing.

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  • Allana Clarke, And Yet You Don't Forget, 2020

    Allana Clarke

    And Yet You Don't Forget, 2020

    Allana Clarke is a Trinidadian-American artist whose practice is built upon a foundation of uncertainty, curiosity, a will to heal, and an insistence upon freedom. Fluidly moving through video, performance, sculpture, and text, her research-based practice incorporates sociopolitical and art historical texts, to contend with ideas of Blackness, the binding nature of bodily signification, and the possibility to create non-totalizing identifying structures.

     

    Clarke received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Practice from MICA’s Mount Royal School of Art in 2014, and has been an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Vermont Studio Center, Lighthouse Works, and Yaddo. She is currently a 2020 NXTHVN fellow and an assistant professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. Recent exhibitions include Realms of Refuge, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; Wrecked Alphabet, Broodthaers Society of America, Harlem, NY; Indoor Outposts, FRAC des Pays de la Loire, Nantes, France and Spiral/Recoil, Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Wilmington, DE.
  • Willie Cole, Mother and Child, 2020

    Willie Cole

    Mother and Child, 2020

    Willie Cole is a contemporary American sculptor, printer, and conceptual artist. His work uses contexts of postmodern eclecticism, and combines references and appropriation from African and African American imagery. 

     

    Recent exhibitions of Cole's work include To Reclaim, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; New Concepts in Printmaking 2: Willie Cole, MoMA, New York, NY, USA; Reconfiguring an African Icon: Odes to the Mask by Modern and Contemporary Artists from Three Continents, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA; Chicago, Surrealism: The Conjured Life, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, USA; and Afro: Black Identity in America and Brazil, Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, NM, USA. Cole’s work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; MoMA, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Wake Forest University Student Union Collection of Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC; and many others.

  • Alfred Conteh, Jade, 2020

    Alfred Conteh

    Jade, 2020

    Alfred Conteh is a painter and sculptor who was born in Fort Valley, GA. His mother is African American, and his father is from Sierra Leone, West Africa. Conteh explores his identity and personal history from a number of different perspectives. He is concerned with the way African Americans are dealing with disparities that have been affecting their communities for generations, especially in the southern United States.

     

    Recent major exhibitions of Conteh's work include Alfred Conteh: The Sweet Spot, Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Atlanta, GA; Men of Change: Power. Triumph. Truth., Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service; Visions of a Cultural Commentator, curated by Madeline Beck, Cobb Marietta Museum of Art, Marietta, GA; Alfred Conteh, Selected Works, Harriet Tubman Museum, Macon, GA; and 5 Perspectives, Steffan Thomas Museum of Art, Madison, GA. Conteh's work is included in several major collections, including that of the Museum and Memorial Operations Equal Justice Initiative, and the Lauren Rogers Museum.

  • Richard Hunt

    Richard Hunt is one of the most accomplished American metal sculptors of the past century. His work has been exhibited 12 times at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, including a solo retrospective in 1971, when the artist was only 35 years old. Titled The Sculpture of Richard Hunt, March 25–July 9, 1971, this was only the third solo exhibition for a black artist in the history of MoMA. The director of that show referred to it as a “mid-career” exhibition, however Hunt is still active in his studio today at age 83.

     

    Major exhibitions of Hunt's work include Solo Presentation, Frieze Masters 2019, London, England; Exhibited 12 times at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, USA, including 1971 retrospective The Sculpture of Richard Hunt; Richard Hunt: Framed and Extended, The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, USA; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC; Richard Hunt, Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA, USA; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, USA; Art Institute of Chicago, USA; Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN, USA and the Museum of African American History Detroit, MI, USA. Hunt’s work is in the collections of many of the most significant cultural institutions in the United States, including MOMA, the Smithsonian, and many others.

  • James Little, Black Star, 2015

    James Little

    Black Star, 2015

    2022 Whitney Biennial artist James Little is an American abstract artist whose distinctive aesthetic language is rooted in geometric shapes and patterns, flat surfaces, and emotive color relationships.

     

    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, with forthcoming catalogue. Upcoming 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. In 2022, Little will also participate in a historic collaboration for Duke Ellington's conceptual Sacred Concerts series at the Lincoln Center, New York, NY, with the New York Choral Society at the New School for Social Research and the Schomburg Center in New York, NY. 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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  • Manuel Mathieu, Autoportrait 11/21, 2021

    Manuel Mathieu

    Autoportrait 11/21, 2021

    While Manuel Mathieu has developed an aesthetic trajectory that may be easily traced to his Haitian upbringing, his work articulates his positionality from a multitude of realities and perspectives. Reposing on his own multiplicity, the abstractness of his work conveys the abundance in existing at the intersection of racial, geographical, and cultural identities.

     

    Major exhibitions of Mathieu’s work include Manuel Mathieu: World Discovered Under Other Skies, The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada; Manuel Mathieu: Survivance, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montréal, Canada; The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL, USA; Over My Black Body, curated by Eunice Bélidor and Anaïs Castro, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada; Manuel Mathieu: Nobody Is Watching, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; and Manuel Mathieu: Wu Ji, HdM Gallery, Beijing, China. Mathieu has been invited to the artist residency at the Art House in Sonoma, CA, in 2021.

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  • Michi Meko, Wishes: A Promise to Send Us Into Ourselves. Free to Travel, Adrift From Our Pagan Land, 2019

    Michi Meko

    Wishes: A Promise to Send Us Into Ourselves. Free to Travel, Adrift From Our Pagan Land, 2019

    Michi Meko is a multidisciplinary artist whose works engage metaphorically and abstractly with the paradoxes and contradictions that have shaped his personal history and the shared history of Black Americans, particularly in the American South.

     

    Recent exhibitions of Meko's work include 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. Meko is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and the Atlanta Artadia Award, and was a finalist for the 2019 Hudgens Prize.

     

  • Esmaa Mohamoud, The Night That I Looked At You, 2021

    Esmaa Mohamoud

    The Night That I Looked At You, 2021

    African-Canadian artist Esmaa Mohamoud (b. 1992, Canada) 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 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.

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  • Devan Shimoyama, Chakra Chart II, 2021

    Devan Shimoyama

    Chakra Chart II, 2021

    Devan Shimoyama is a visual artist whose work explores depictions of the Black, queer, male body. Shimoyama was awarded the Al Held Fellowship at the Yale School of Art in 2013 and has had a residency at the 2015 Fire Island Artist Residency. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States. His recent exhibition Cry, Baby was presented at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, from October 13, 2018-March 17, 2019. In this exhibition, new and existing works by Shimoyama's work were juxtaposed along with a rotating selection of Warhol's Ladies and Gentlemen paintings from the 1970s. This juxtaposition offers a unique opportunity not only to interrogate the conversation between these two artists' work, but also to consider generational evolutions in the realm of how issues related to gender, sexuality, race and violence are portrayed in contemporary art.

     

    Recent major exhibitions of Shimoyama's work include Untitled (For Tamir) will be shown in a single work exhibition in the Spotlight Gallery at The Rockwell Museum, Corning, NY, USA; Black Gentleman and Midnight Rumination will be shown in a major multi-museum exhibition, 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; All The Rage, Kunstpalais, Erlangen, Germany; Tell Me Your Story, Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands; Devan Shimoyama: Cry, Baby, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, USA; 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; Parallel Lives, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; and Translating Valence: Redefining Black Male Identity, Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids, MI, USA.

  • Mary Sibande, Ascension of the Purple Figure, 2016

    Mary Sibande

    Ascension of the Purple Figure, 2016

    Mary Sibande is a sculptor, painter, and installation artist whose work not only interrogates the current intersections of race, gender, and labor in South Africa, it actively rewrites her own family’s legacy of forced domestic work imposed by the then-Apartheid state. Through photography and sculpture, Sibande employs the human form as a vehicle for a focused critique of stereotypical depictions of women, particularly Black women in South Africa. For Sibande, the body is the site where history is contested and where Sibande’s own fantasies can play out.

     

    Based in Johannesburg, 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; the Frist Art Musuem, Nashville, TN; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; among others. In 2021, Sibande recieved the prestigious Helgaard Steyn Prize for her sculpture In the Midst of Chaos, There Is Opportunity. 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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  • Mickalene Thomas, Jet Blue #9, 2019

    Mickalene Thomas

    Jet Blue #9, 2019

    New York based artist Mickalene Thomas is best known for her elaborate rhinestone, acrylic, and enamel paintings. She introduces a complex vision of what it means to be a woman and expands common definitions of beauty. Her work stems from her long study of art history and the classical genres of portraiture, landscape, and still life.

     

    Major exhibitions of Thomas' work include Mickalene Thomas: Do I Look Like a Lady?, MOCA, Los Angeles, CA; Mickalene Thomas: Femmes Noires, Art Gallery of Ontario, Ontario, Canada; Figuring History: Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Permanent Collection Highlights American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Mickalene Thomas, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA and I Was Born to do Great Things, Kavi Gupta, Chicago.

  • Kennedy Yanko, Module 1, 2021

    Kennedy Yanko

    Module 1, 2021

    Kennedy Yanko is a sculptor and installation artist working in found metal and paint skin. Yanko deploys her materials in ways that explore the limitations of optic vision, underlining the opportunities we miss when looking with eyes alone. Her methods reflect a dual abstract expressionist-surrealist approach that centers the seen and unseen factors that affect, contribute to, and moderate human experience.

     

    Yanko was the Artist in Residence at the Rubell Museum of Art in 2021. She was named Art Forum’s “Critic’s Pick” in 2019 and was featured in 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow, published by Thames & Hudson. Her institutional exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (Parallels and Peripheries, curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah) and University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum (Life During WarTime, curated by Christian Viveros-Faune). Her work is included in notable private museums, namely the Bunker Artspace, West Palm Beach (Beth Rudin DeWoody), Espacio Tacuari, Buenos Aires (Juan Vergez and Patricia Pearson), and the Rubell Museum of Art, Miami (Don and Mera Rubell).

     

  • Our Mission

    Kavi Gupta amplifies voices of diverse and underrepresented artists to expand the canon of art history. Through innovative and ambitious exhibitions, multimedia programming, and rigorous publications, we foster an evolving conversation among international communities about art and ideas. We believe culture is created by communities, and that representation is a step towards inclusivity and justice. Equity in the art field starts with everyone getting a seat at the table, but it does not end there. Our vision is to seek out and offer a platform to artists whose vitality expands and deepens the cultural conversation, especially if theirs is a voice that has been marginalized due to their identity, their social or political perspective, or their aesthetic position.