New York City’s 125th Street, Harlem’s unofficial “Main Street”, once served as a de facto showcase of African-American culture, lined with iconic institutions such as the Apollo Theatre. The city’s construction craze has edged out most of these haunts, rendering Harlem's Studio Museum a rarity. In the last four decades, the museum has become known for offering one of the city's most coveted artist-in-residence programmes.
Designed for emerging artists of African or Latin descent, this programme awards a $20,000 fellowship to three emerging artists, a materials budget of approximately $1,000 and, most precious of all, a spacious, centrally located studio for one year. The curators, who look for artists at a critical turning point in their careers, seem to have a knack for spotting talent. Previous grantees include Chakaia Booker, David Hammons, Kerry James Marshall, Wangechi Mutu, Nadine Robinson and Kehinde Wiley, many of whom have gone on to make names for themselves in the art world.
Each residency culminates in a show of work developed during the programme. This year’s, called
ENCODINGS and organised by
Naomi Beckwith, an assistant curator, presents the work of
Khalif Kelly,
Adam Pendleton and
Dawit L. Petros. Though distinct, their pieces all seem to pare meaning down to its constituent bits, which they then reassemble into artwork.
Of the three fellows, Kelly’s work is the most overtly narrative. Kelly paints huge, intensely hued oil paintings of child-like figures. In his earlier works his subjects seemed
inspired by cartoons, but now Kelly draws from folklore and low-fidelity computer graphics (as pictured above). His works consider the way myth and electronic media tease at our reality.
Dawit L. Petros, a photographer, performs a similar alchemical feat, sorting and distilling the vibrant colours of Harlem. At a glance his photos seem little more than beautifully coloured reductions, but a longer look at his sumptuous images reveals considerable complexity. By leaving in just enough texture or cultural information to snag the imagination, Petros takes his viewers far beyond what a simple exercise in abstraction would reveal.
Adam Pendleton's work is the most conceptual, ambitious, and also problematic. His exhibit is some distance from the other two installations, lining the walls of a passageway and the black-painted walls of a separate room. His vinyl-printed “code poems” and “System of Display” series of small silk-screened images stretched across a mirror, inset within small black boxes (pictured above right) are so densely packed with references–Dada, post-structuralism, race-relations–that they defy easy interpretation and blur into nothingness.
But a treat awaits visitors inside the inner chamber: a landscape translated into a cluster of glossy ceramic cubes of such a peculiar and pleasing size and scale that they slip Pendleton’s somewhat hazy message-making and correspond in another code: unadulterated abstraction. Pendleton is clearly one to watch.
Picture credits: "Ascent to the BigTop, 2009" (top), courtesy Khalif Kelly and Thierry Goldberg Projects, New York; "System of Display, 2008-09", courtesy Adam Pendleton
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Your article peaked my
August 2, 2009 - 12:12 — Jillian (not verified)Your article peaked my interest and I saw the show. Kelly's work was by far my favorite although I am biased being a painter myself. Thanks for bringing this wonderful little space to life for me! Now I can add another stop to make on my gallery/museum runs. Best, Jillian