NEW YORK, NY.- Skoto Gallery is presenting a Group Show of paintings, drawings, sculpture and mixed media work.
This exhibition brings together the works of thirteen artists including Osi Audu. Sokari Douglas Camp. Nanette Carter. Mor Faye. Sam Gilliam. Wadsworth Jarrell. Wosene Worke Kosrof. Al Loving. Andrew Lyght. Allie McGee. Afi Nayo. Owusu-Ankomah. Howardena Pindell.
Despite their varied experiences working across different time periods each of these artists represent a resonant voice that achieves its own distinction and clarity amidst fluxional experiences. Their creative voices are simultaneously reclamatory, instrumental, reconstructive if not interrogative and in some cases seek to retrieve both individual and collective memory.
Sam Gilliam is an innovative color field painter who has advanced the inventions associated with the Washington Color School. A prolific artist with a highly developed experimental approach to making art, he creates work that is unorthodox and persistently innovative. There is a lyrical beauty in his work that belies its surprising seamlessness between the spiritual and physical worlds. Sam Gilliam’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Tate Modern, London.
Born 1943 in Philadelphia, Howardena Pindell studied painting at Boston University and Yale University. After graduating, she accepted a job in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she remained for 12 years (1967-1979). Her work explores texture, color, structures and the process of making art, it is often political, addressing the intersecting issues of racism, feminism, violence, slavery, and exploitation. She is represented in numerous collections including the Brooklyn Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, Denmark and the Studio Museum of Art in Harlem.
As one continues looking at the work of the prominent abstract painter and collage artist Al Loving (1935-2005), one can’t help but make associations with his work to the syncopated and disruptive elements of Jazz specifically Be-bop and Free Jazz. The lines, colors and tonal textures in his work move and mime the sonic dissonance in this uniquely African-American music genre. Al Loving’s work is a play in contrast: light and shadow, call and response, grids and spirals etc. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Whitney and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Art among others.
Nanette Carter uses oil paint, oil sticks and pencils on collaged Mylar to create subtle but intriguing works with rich surfaces imbued with luminosity, density and transparency. In her mind’s eye, she sees herself more as a builder especially when one considers the scale of many of her collages. The act of bringing pieces together to create a substantial work is what fascinates her most as an artist. She is in several private and public collections including the Montclair Museum, New Jersey; The Studio Museum, New York, Newark Museum, NJ and the St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri.
Andrew Lyght draws on a life-long exploration of free-hand drawn lines, plane, volume and color to depict pictorial space. He seeks to find an alternative aesthetics and discursive frame work that mines the microcosm of his culture for symbols that can be universally understood. As stated by Barbara Rose, the esteemed art historian in her essay for the artist’s recent Full Circle retrospective at the Dorsky Museum: Andrew Lyght is an unusual artist in that he experienced both the archaic roots of modernism during his boyhood as well as the way in which modernism found freshness in non-Western and archaic culture.
Wosene Worke Kosrof (b. 1950, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) continues to draw upon an individual reserve of personal and collective memories to activate a meaningful form of engagement that celebrates the richness of Ethiopia’s visual culture. He fuses a vocabulary of signs and symbols drawn from reconfigured Amharic script with a mastery of the nuances of color and composition as well as an open-ended improvisational sensibility to create work that comes alive to convey temporal and spatial dimensions of the written word.
Mor Faye (Dakar Senegal, 1947-1984) was a versatile and complex artist whose ability to express a vivid interior existence while simultaneously opening up to some of the larger issues of our time was reflected consistently in his work throughout his career. As an artist, Mor Faye absorbed and engaged the outside world, drawing from a multitude of sources yet claiming allegiance to none. Since his death in 1984 at the age of 37, Mor Faye’s reputation as a troubled artistic genius has reached mythic proportions. A prolific artist, he lived a short and very productive life, and left behind a rich body of work that will help liberate as well as enrich contemporary thinking in Africa.
Allie McGee often compares his work to jazz improvisation: the shapes and colors are his recurring themes, looping and repeating themselves within a given composition. He explains, “What you can do as an artist, whether it’s painting or music, is create repetition or rhythm so a person can accept it as being something knowledgeable instead of chaos. I’ve even discovered that chaos is not the way we’ve assumed it to be, but it is ordered as well -- that is the element behind creativity that people don’t consider.” His work is in several collections including the Detroit Institute of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Sokari Douglas Camp is a groundbreaking artist whose works combine motion with history, culture and contemporary global politics. Her work is predominantly sculpted in steel and draws inspiration from her Nigerian roots and international issues. Perhaps best known for kinetic life-size welded steel sculptures of Kalabari masquerades, Sokari Douglas Camp sculptural practice defies gender and cultural stereotypes. She was the recipient of a Henry Moore Bursary in 1983, and was selected as a finalist fpr London 4th Plinth in 2003. In 2005, Douglas Camp was honored as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her career in the arts. Her work is held by the American Museum of Natural History, New York, British Museum, Segataya Art Museum, Japan and the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC.
