EVENTS
The below is a curated list of international events recommended by the Open Color community. We look for for art installations, music showcases, speaking engagements and more—to submit your own suggestions, please email kate@weareopencolor.com
April 25–November 1, 2020: Future Histories: Theaster Gates and Cauleen Smith @ SFMOMA
San Francisco, CA: Bringing together the work of two interdisciplinary artists, this presentation centers on video projections that each take archival magazine photography as a departure point. Gates’s Do you hear me calling? Mama Mamama or What Is Black Power? (2018) pays homage to the power of women by exploring the idea of the Black Madonna through reworking three decades of images drawn from the Chicago-based Johnson Publishing Company archives, including Ebony and Jet magazines. A U.S. premiere, this two-channel installation interweaves scenes of musicians and singers, amplifying a performative approach to cultural legacies.Smith’s Sojourner (2018) culminates with a feminist reimagining of an unpublished photograph from a 1966 Life assignment. Throughout the work, women performers take banners sewn with phrases by jazz musician Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda to different sites associated with community organizing, spiritual or artistic vision. On May 21, 2020, Smith will present Black Utopia LP (2012) in the Phyllis Wattis Theater; the Los Angeles-based artist will update her ever-evolving audiovisual performance on Afrofuturism and the jazz composer Sun Ra with materials drawn from Bay Area archives.
May 7-Sept 7, 2020: About Time: Fashion and Duration @ THE MET
NYC: The Costume Institute's spring 2020 exhibition will trace more than a century and a half of fashion—from 1870 to the present—along a disruptive timeline, as part of The Met's 150th anniversary celebration. Employing Henri Bergson's concept of la durée (duration), it will explore how clothes generate temporal associations that conflate past, present, and future. Virginia Woolf will serve as the "ghost narrator" of the exhibition.A linear chronology of fashion comprised of black ensembles will run through the exhibition reflecting the progressive timescale of modernity, and bringing into focus the fast, fleeting rhythm of fashion. Interrupting this timeline will be a series of counter-chronologies composed of white ensembles that predate or postdate those in black, but relate to one another through shape, motif, material, pattern, technique, or decoration. For example, a black princess-line dress from the late 1870s will be paired with an Alexander McQueen "Bumster" skirt from 1995, and a black bustle ensemble from the mid-1880s will be juxtaposed with a Comme des Garçons "Body Meets Dress—Dress Meets Body" dress from 1997.The exhibition will conclude with a section on the future of fashion, linking the concept of duration to debates about longevity and sustainability.
May 22-24, 2020: Bottlerock
Napa Valley, CA: BottleRock is a multi-genre music festival taking place in California's Napa Valley. A classic three day weekender, the festival features the world’s top musicians on five music stages, plus its famed BottleRock Culinary Stage which showcases one-of-a-kind culinary and celebrity mashups. Of course anchored by its musical programming, attendees also get access to extraordinary wine, food and hospitality for an authentic wine country experience. Heading into its eighth year, BottleRock is the region's original major music festival and has successfully melded the musical and wine worlds. Beyond the three day main event, the festival will host a slew of pre and after parties in surrounding cities soundtracked by artists on the lineup.
March 21 – July 26: Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving @ the De Young
San Francisco, CA: At the time of Frida Kahlo’s death in 1954, a treasure trove of the artist's highly personal items—including jewelry, clothing, and prosthetics—were locked away. 50 years later, these belongings were unsealed—now they’re on view for the first time on the West Coast. Discover what these objects reveal about their now iconic owner in Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving..
Made the cut: Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes (1611-12) is among the 35 works to be included in the “very selective” presentation
© The National Gallery, London
April 4-July 26, 2020: Artemisia @ National Gallery
London: The first UK exhibition on Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1654) will focus on her singular position as a successful female painter in 17th-century Europe and how she turned it to her advantage. The show’s curator, Letizia Treves, says that the “very selective” presentation of 35 works at London’s National Gallery—including 29 paintings firmly attributed to Gentileschi—will invite visitors to consider “Artemisia in the round”, as a talented artist, storyteller, entrepreneur and “determined woman of wit and passion”.
The broad chronology ranges across the Italian painter’s 40-year career, “drawing attention to her adaptability to different markets and tastes in the cities where she worked”, Treves says. Trained in the Roman studio of her father Orazio Gentileschi, Artemisia established herself as an artist in Florence and returned to Rome in the 1620s before settling for the last 25 years of her life in Naples.
The museum’s recently acquired Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (1615-17), which was unknown until it was discovered by a French auctioneer, will appear for the first time in context with star loans such as Susannah and the Elders (1610), Artemisia’s first signed work, and the unflinchingly bloody Judith Beheading Holofernes (1611-12). One room of the exhibition will explore images of the female hero, underscoring how Artemisia “brought an unprecedented female perspective to traditional subject matter”, Treves says.
Stanley Tigerman. The Titanic, 1978