Search results for ""Author Valerie Cassel Oliver""

The work of Jennie C. Jones (born 1968) spans multiple mediums, from paintings, sculptures and works on paper to audio collages and immersive sound installations. Jones employs the visual languages of abstraction and minimalism to draw out the parallels and disjunctions between the history of modernism and the history of African American music, particularly jazz. This volume documenting the artist’s midcareer survey at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston includes many of her best-known works alongside new paintings and a site-specific installation. The book, whose stunning design references the formal qualities of Jones’ work, includes an extensive plate selection alongside essays by Valerie Cassel Oliver, Hilton Als and George Lewis, and an interview between Jones and art historian Huey Copeland.

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Performing and visual artist Ben Patterson (born 1934) was a founding member of Fluxus' participatory, do-it-yourself, anticommercialist avant-garde network. While many Fluxus artists, influenced by John Cage's precedent, employed conceptual techniques borrowed from music (e.g., the event score), Patterson's fusion of art and music was informed by his background as a classically trained double-bassist. His "Variations for Double Bass" (1960), for example, was played with the titular instrument balanced upside down on its scroll. Published for a retrospective at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, this volume includes an anthology of Patterson's scores, edited by Fluxus scholar Jon Hendricks; a chronology of the artist's life and work; a CD compilation of his musical performances from 1961 to 2009, produced by Alga Marghen; and essays by a variety of scholars, assessing the career of one of Fluxus' foremost and wittiest artists.

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Cinema Remixed and Reloaded is a daring, bold, innovative look at black women artists and video art. This historical survey examines an intriguing and unbounded scope of work, including experimental film, projections, and installations. Creative projects by established artists who became interested in time-based media several decades ago, such as Camille Billops, Barbara McCullough, Howardena Pindell, and Adrian Piper, are presented alongside such midcareer artists as Berni Searle, Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems, who continually garner international acclaim. Works by emerging artists, including Elizabeth Axtman, Debra Edgerton, Lauren Kelley, Jessica Ann Peavy, Pamela Sunstrum, and Lauren Woods, are also featured. While exploring personal experiences and dissecting popular visual culture, the artists in Cinema Remixed and Reloaded provide relevant views on several important topics--memory, loss, alienation, racial politics, gender inequities, empowerment, and the pursuit of power.

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Dawoud Bey focuses on the landscape to create a portrait of the early African American presence in the United States.Renowned for his Harlem street scenes and expressive portraits, Dawoud Bey continues his ongoing series on African American history. Elegy brings together Bey’s three landscape series to date—Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017); In This Here Place (2021); and Stony the Road (2023)—elucidating the deep historical memory still embedded in the geography of the United States. Bey takes viewers to the historic Richmond Slave Trail in Virginia, where Africans were marched onto auction blocks; to the plantations of Louisiana, where they labored; and along the last stages of the Underground Railroad in Ohio, where fugitives sought self-emancipation. Essays by the exhibition’s curator, Valerie Cassel Oliver, and scholars LeRonn P. Brooks, Imani Perry, and Christina Sharpe illuminate the work. By interweaving these bodies of work into an elegy in three movements, Bey doesn’t merely evoke history, he retells it through historically grounded images that challenge viewers to go beyond seeing and imagine lived experiences. Copublished by Aperture and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond

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