New Museum Summer Exhibitions Feature David Goldblatt, Emory Douglas, Dorothy Iannone, and Rigo 23
235 Bowery
New York, New York
212-219-1222
7/15/09 – 10/11/09
For South African photographer David Goldblatt’s first major New York exhibition in over a decade, the New Museum brings together 114 images taken over the past fifty years. The exhibition features a selection of photographs titled Intersections Intersected, that look at the relationship between the past and present by pairing Goldblatt’s older black-and-white images with his more recent color work, as well as selections from other series. “Intersections Intersected: The Photography of David Goldblatt” will span the third-and fourth-floor galleries.
Recipient of the 2009 Henri Cartier-Bresson Award and the prestigious Hasselblad Photography Award, and one of the great documentary photographers of our time, Goldblatt began photographing professionally in the early 1960s, focusing on the imagery and effects of apartheid. The son of Jewish Lithuanian parents who fled to South Africa to escape religious persecution, used the camera to document apartheid’s horrifying realities and injustices; the resulting photographs reveal a complex portrait of the intricacies and banalities of daily life in a divided society. As an almost forensic witness to history, the exhibition commingles past, present, and future in a narrative that persistently turns away from spectacle in its constant search for the human.
Emory Douglas: Black Panther
7/22/09 – 10/18/09
The New Museum presents a major survey of works by Emory Douglas made while Douglas was the Revolutionary Artist of the Black Panther Party and subsequently, its Minister of Culture. Douglas created the overall design of the Black Panther, the Party’s weekly newspaper, and oversaw its layout and production from 1967 until it ceased publication in 1979. Douglas created a straightforward graphic style and a vocabulary of images that would become synonymous with the Party and the issues it fought for. Selected by the Los Angeles artist Sam Durant, whose work often deals with political and cultural subjects in American history, the exhibition includes more than 155 posters, newspapers, and prints dating from 1966 to 1977, as well as a small-scale mural that reprises one of Douglas’s vintage images. In Durant’s opinion, this exhibition is not only a retrospective of Douglas’s artistic achievement; it is a primer on how art can encourage political consciousness and function within an activist context. Douglas will give an artist talk, introduced by Rigo 23, on July 23 at 7 p.m. in the New Museum theater.
Rigo 23: The Deeper They Bury Me, The Louder My Voice Becomes
7/15/09 – 10/11/09
For nearly 20 years, Rigo 23 has created murals, paintings, drawings, and performances, conducted interventions, and published zines advocating for social and political change. His site-specific installation for the New Museum is the newest in a series of works that take as their subject political prisoners such as Leonard Peltier, Geronimo ji-Jaga (Elmer Pratt), Mumia Abu-Jamal (Wesley Cook), and the Angola 3. Entitled The Deeper They Bury Me, The Louder My Voice Becomes, the work is inspired by the words of Herman Wallace, a member of the Angola 3.
Dorothy Iannone: Lioness
7/22/09 – 10/18/09
Boston-born, Berlin-based artist Dorothy Iannone, now, at the age of seventy five, presents her first solo show in a US institution at the New Museum. This long-overdue exhibition features Iannone’s signature early work, made between 1966 and 1986, including sculptures, paintings, drawings, and a video box. Since the 1960s, Iannone has continued to portray the female sexual experience as one of transcendence, union, and spirituality. Iannone works from the first-person perspective, charting her life and lovemaking onto wood, canvas, paper, and cloth, as well as through video and sound. Iannone’s stylized, intricate, and colorful depictions of herself and her longtime lover, artist Dieter Roth, synthesize elements of Egyptian frescoes, Byzantine mosaics, and ancient fertility statues. Inverting the gender paradigm of artistic inspiration, Iannone often painted Roth, her self-declared muse, depicting both him and herself as active lovers, comfortable with their desire and pleasure. “Lioness,” the title of this exhibition, is borrowed from Dieter Roth’s pet name for the artist.
