Tag: history

Kaloki Nyamai at James Cohan Gallery

Nairobi-based artist Kaloki Nyamai’s New York solo debut at James Cohan Gallery introduces an artist who uses acrylic paint, stitching and photo transfer to create complex surfaces that suggest complicated histories.  This painting’s title, ‘The one who stole my heart,’ features a figure leaning back into a man whose outward-looking eyes connect with our gaze.  In contrast to the couple’s intimate, relaxed moment, partially visible figures in the background raise their arms in what could be celebration or protest.  Elsewhere, photo transfers contrast happy moments of communal activity with news articles about political unrest as Nyamai juxtaposes the lives of individuals with larger social happenings.  (On view through May 4th).

Kaloki Nyamai, Ula wosiee ngoo yakwa II (The one who stole my heart), mixed media, acrylic, collage stitching on canvas, 2024.
Kaloki Nyamai, (detail) Ula wosiee ngoo yakwa II (The one who stole my heart), mixed media, acrylic, collage stitching on canvas, 2024.

Tuli Mekondjo at Hales Gallery

Displaced as a child from her native Namibia, Windhoek-based artist Tuli Mekondjo considers her country’s past in textile and photo-based work now on view at Hales Gallery in Chelsea. This piece’s title, ‘Khaxatsus (Gibeon), 1863,’ refers to the original and the colonial names for the hometown of IKhowesin chief Hendrik Witbooi, who is recognized for his military action against German colonizers in the late 19th – early 20thcentury.  Posing in a photograph with his family and surrounded in a frame of lace at the center of this textile piece, Witbooi is pictured as family man as much as national hero.  (On view through March 9th).

Tuli Mekondjo, ‘Khaxatsus (Gibeon), 1863,’ image transfer, silk, linen, sheer fabric, cotton yarn, lace, tracing paper, soil, plants, and rusted enamel cup, 67 ½ x 50 x 2 inches, 2024.

John Dowell at Laurence Miller Gallery

In his photographic images featuring cotton plants now on view at Chelsea’s Laurence Miller Gallery, John Dowell aims to ‘evoke the remembering, feeling and sense of wonder in African American ancestral strategies of survival.’  Dowell inserts cotton fields in photos of Central Park, Wall Street, Trinity Church and other famous New York sites, creating haunting images and recalling injustices inflicted on African American communities at these places and elsewhere.  The show’s centerpiece, ‘Lost in Cotton,’ invites visitors to enter an enclosure of hanging panels that recall the artist’s grandmother’s frightening childhood experience of getting lost among tall cotton plants.  (On view through Jan 25th).

John Dowell, Lost in Cotton, 18 digital prints on taffeta, 10 x 12 x 10 feet, 2017.

Wael Shawky at Lisson Gallery

Egyptian artist Wael Shawky talks of crafting history as a medium, referencing existing texts, historical paintings, poems and more to conjure a new creative product. His latest show at Lisson Gallery takes inspiration from histories of the Arabian peninsula from the 17th century to the present, particularly considering the rapid development of the region’s cities.  Here, a glass structure and a giant palm tree act like beacons atop two hills, situated on a larger blue/green structure alluding to traditional thick-walled Najd architecture in a striking installation alive with opaque allusions.  (On view in Chelsea through Oct 19th).

Wael Shawky, The Gulf Project Camp: Glass Sculpture #1, glass, 29 ½ x 31 ½ x 78 5/8 inches, 2019.

Claudia Martinez Garay in ‘Ilaciones’ at Timothy Taylor Gallery

Young Peruvian artist Claudia Martinez Garay’s paintings on plaster in the form of squash associate identity with the products of the land, personality with nourishment.  Though gourds go through quick cycles of growth and decay relative to humans, this shape appears ancient, taking the mind back through distant human histories tied closely to the land.  (On view at Timothy Taylor Gallery in Chelsea through July 26th).

Claudia Martinez Garay, Untitled (head), plaster and watercolor, 5 7/8 x 5 1/8 x 5 1/8 inches, 2018.