Mark Bradford: Tomorrow Is Another Day
Mark Bradford’s exhibition for the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale was born out of his longtime commitment to the inherently social nature of the material world we all inhabit.
Mark Bradford’s exhibition for the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale was born out of his longtime commitment to the inherently social nature of the material world we all inhabit.
This exhibition of dazzling Kuba textiles presented in the BMA’s Cone Collection galleries reveals how a central African kingdom independently developed a form of modernist abstraction in the 20th century. The Kuba kingdom, on the southern edge of the Congolese Rainforest in central Africa, developed one of the greatest civilizations in the history of the continent. Art and design were central to their life. In addition to an elaborate and varied masquerade tradition, Kuba men and women were prolific textile artists, even weaving houses and embroidering currency.
In the fall of 2018, the BMA’s oldest friends group, the Print, Drawing & Photograph Society (PDPS), will celebrate its 50th anniversary by sponsoring an exhibition to highlight a selection of late 19th-century, modern, and contemporary works on paper that PDPS has helped the BMA acquire over the years. Installed in a gallery adjacent to the Cone Collection, this one-gallery exhibition will be organized in two six-month presentations, each including 20–30 prints, drawings, and artists’ books.
Beauty stops us in our tracks. It makes us pause, look, consider. Sometimes it overwhelms us. We are often told art should aspire to this standard and be proportionate, symmetrical, naturalistic, and orderly. But what of work that is designed to revolt and terrify? Across sub-Saharan Africa, artists working across a range of states, societies, and cultures deliberately created artwork that violated conceptions of beauty, symmetry, and grace—both ours and theirs. Subverting Beauty features approximately two dozen works from sub-Saharan African’s colonial period (c. 1880–c.
For more than four decades, New York-based artist Maren Hassinger (b. 1947, Los Angeles, CA) has explored relationships between the industrial and natural worlds in a practice that is both meditative and critical. The BMA’s exhibition represents a broad range of her work with abstract compositions, videos, and documentary photographs. For her abstract compositions, Hassinger has transformed wire rope, newspapers, plastic bags, and other materials into evocations of beauty.
It has been more than 50 years since John Waters (American, b. 1946) filmed his first short, Hag in a Black Leather Jacket. The set was the roof of his parents’ Baltimore home, and the action, shot on stock stolen by a friend, involved an interracial marriage. Over the following decades, Waters’ reputation as an uncompromising cultural force has grown not only in the cinematic field, but also through his visual artwork, writing, and performances.
Artist collaborators, Lizzie Fitch (b. 1981, Bloomington, IN) and Ryan Trecartin (b. 1981, Webster, TX) create frenzied movies and sculptural theaters that immerse viewers in disorienting and fragmented narratives that simulate the short memory of social and entertainment media. Their exhibition at the BMA is comprised of three movies and two sculptural theaters. Mark Trade (2016) is a one-hour movie exhibited in a sculptural theater that resembles a bar.
Ebony G. Patterson (b. 1981, Kingston, Jamaica; lives and works in Jamaica and Lexington, KY) creates opulent tapestries out of dazzling arrays of found and fabricated materials—glitter, sequins, toys, beads, faux flowers, jewelry, and other embellishments. For her exhibition at the BMA, Patterson will create an immersive installation featuring her work …and babies too… (2016) in the Berman Textile Gallery.