New Museum of Contemporary Art
Radcliffe Bailey
Bili Bidjocka
Sanford Biggers
Sokari Douglas Camp
Nanga Oly Christophe
Brett Cook-Dizney
Victor Ekpuk
Tim Evans
Jason Smith
Kendell Geers
Barkley Hendricks
Satch Hoyt
Alfredo Jaar
Marcia Kure
Moshekwa Langa
Ghariokwu Lemi
Paul D. Miller
Adia Millet
Wangechi Mutu
Aime' Ntakiyica
Odili Donald Odita
Olu Oguibe
Moyo Ogundipe
Moyo Okediji
Senam Okudzeto
Ouattara
Yinka Shonibare
Pascale Marthine Tayou
Ike' Ude'
Obiora Udechukwu
Roberto Visani
Kara Walker
Klaus Burgel
Fred Wilson
Trevor Schoonmaker
Jose' Antonio Hernandez-Diez, the first major museum exhibition in the United States of works by this acclaimed Venezuelan artist. Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, a group exhibition exploring the cultural impact of the famous Nigerian musician and activist who died in 1997.
JOSÉ ANTONIO HERNÃNDEZ-DIEZ
IN HIS FIRST MAJOR MUSEUM EXHIBITION
The New Museum of Contemporary Art is pleased
to present José Antonio Hernández-Diez, the first major museum exhibition in
the United States of works by this acclaimed Venezuelan artist. Organized by
the New Museum and curated by Senior Curator Dan Cameron and Adjunct Curator
Gerardo Mosquera, the exhibition will be on view from July 11-September 21,
2003. This presentation concludes a national tour that included the Palm
Beach Institute of Contemporary Art and SITE Santa Fe.
One of the most important South American artists to have emerged in the last
decade, Hernández-Diez creates candid, poetic, and at times disturbing and
irreverent multi-media installations inspired by the vernacular culture and
traditions of his home country. Hernández-Diez is part of a new generation
of Venezuelan artists who emerged in the late 1980s -at nearly the same time
that Venezuelans began a public process of searching for a solution to the
economic and social crises in their country-to challenge the aesthetic
traditions that had dominated Venezuelan art since the 1950s. Using unusual
materials culled from urban life-such as skateboards, sneakers, pool tables,
fake nails, and pork skin-Hernández-Diez elevates street and domestic
culture, while commenting on the harsh economic and political realities of
South American life.
The New Museum exhibition will include fourteen works created by
Hernández-Diez between 1991 and 2000, chosen to convey several overlapping
themes that inform his work: technology and the body; marginality and
vernacular culture; myth making; and an intimate, spontaneous, and enigmatic
use of communication and industrial technologies. Examples of works dealing
with each theme are outlined below.
Technology and the Body
A guiding principal of Hernández-Diez's early work is the discomfort of the
human species caught between its animal state and something more exalted. In
a 1991 installation titled San Guinefort [Saint Guinefort], the cadaver of a
dog is locked inside a septic glass container. The viewer is able to reach
his arms inside the glass case through rubber protusions in order to touch
the dog's body. San Guinefort evokes South American Catholic faith and
superstition-the proof of touch is considered a remedy for religious
doubt-while introducing Hernández-Diez's interest in issues of mortality,
which he subsequently explores in such works as Vas p'al cielo y vas
Ilorando [ You Go To Heaven and You Go Crying ] and La Hermandad [ The
Brotherhood ].
Marginality and Vernacular Culture
One of Hernández-Diez's most visceral installations, La Hermandad [The
Brotherhood], 1994, comments upon the uselessness of a common urban pastime
such as skateboarding in a country as troubled as Venezuela. La Hermandad
consists of a room in which the dominant sculptural element is a large metal
drying rack. Attached to the rack are dozens of makeshift skateboards
created by attaching four wheels to a slab of fried pork. The skateboards
are in various stages of decomposition, some dripping fat into troughs
beneath. On three small tables are monitors showing the three stages of the
skateboards' existence: birth (in a frying pan), life (careening through the
street), and death (chewed apart by dogs). To learn that fried pork skin is
a favorite snack among the disenfranchised classes in Venezuela only adds to
the intimations of waste and uselessness.
Myth Making
S & M (Ella Perdió un Dedo) [S & M (She Lost A Nail)] is the title for a
series of current sculptural pieces. The works are gigantic women's
fingernails, installed in different ways, sometimes together with large
pieces of sandpaper. They establish a minimalist inclination in
Hernández-Diez's art that nonetheless carries a wide spectrum of meanings.
The title alludes to a famous Spanish B-movie actress of the 1960s and
relates, both nostalgically and ironically, to stereotypes of mass media
icons in South American culture.
Intimate, Spontaneous, And Enigmatic Use of Communication And Industrial
Technologies
One of the defining factors of Hernández-Diez's work is humor. At times, his
humor is biting and sarcastic; other times, it is the playful and
idiosyncratic humor of a child. For example, Que te Rinda el Dia [Have a
Prodcutive Day] (1995) is an installation of several sets of unpainted
pegboard furniture bearing what appear to be bite marks from a gigantic
human mouth. To achieve this effect, Hernández-Diez employed a mechanical
press adapted to actually bite the furniture. While his previous works were
based mostly on video installation and often juxtaposed medical technology
with religious subject matter, a mechanistic performative quality appears in
this unexpected and playful example of Hernández-Diez's art.
About the Artist
José Antonio Hernández-Diez was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1964.
Currently, he lives and works in Barcelona, Spain. He has had solo
exhibitions in New York, Madrid, Sao Paulo, and Caracas, and is increasingly
represented in international exhibitions and biennials.
Over the last twelve years, José Antonio Hernández-Diez has created a
remarkably diverse yet conceptually consistent body of work. Vernacular
culture and social issues inspire Hernández-Diez's work but his work also
represents a reaction against stereotypical views of South American
identity. He works from within his culture, breaking expectations to address
popular culture and society in a poetic, indirect manner. Many of the works
in the exhibition at the New Museum have never been seen before in the
United States.
M E D I A P R E V I E W
Thursday, July 10, 2003
3-5PM with curators Dan Cameron and Gerardo Mosquera, and José Antonio
Hernández-Diez
July 11-September 21, 2001
Catalogue
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated 96-page catalogue,
featuring essays by curators Dan Cameron and Gerardo Mosquera, and critics
Monica Amor and Jesús Fuenmayor.
The catalogue is made possible by Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros,
Caracas, and the Penny McCall Publication Fund at the New Museum of
Contemporary Art. Donors to the Penny McCall Publication Fund are James C.A.
and Stephania McClennen, Jennifer McSweeney, Arthur and Carol Goldberg,
Dorothy O. Mills, and the Mills Family Fund.
Image: a work by José Antonio Hernández-Diez
Funding
José Antonio Hernández-Diez is made possible by generous grants from the
National Endowment for the Arts, Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation,
Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Caracas, and from Rosa and Carlos de
la Cruz.
Public Programs
Friday, July 11, 2003, 6:30-8PM
Conversation with the Artist
New Museum Senior Cameron talks with artist José Antonio Hernández-Diez.
Tour
José Antonio Hernández-Diez opened at the Palm Beach Institute of
Contemporary Art, Palm Beach, Florida (September 14 - November 17, 2002) and
traveled to SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico (January 25 - April 6,
2003). The New Museum of Contemporary Art is the last venue for this
exhibition.
_____________
BLACK PRESIDENT: THE ART AND LEGACY OF FELA ANIKULAPO-KUTI
A group exhibition on view at the New Museum of Contemporary Art
July 11-September 28, 2003
New York, NY (May 20, 2003) - The New Museum of Contemporary Art announces
Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, a group
exhibition exploring the cultural impact of the famous Nigerian musician and
activist who died in 1997. Thirty-four artists will examine and respond to
this cultural icon through approximately forty works of painting, drawing,
sculpture, photography, mixed media and sound installation, video, film,
computer animation, and music. Guest curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, Black
President will be on view from July 11-September 28, 2003.
Musician and activist Fela Anikulapo-Kuti created Afrobeat, the infectious
fusion of American funk and jazz with traditional Yoruba and highlife music.
Through politically-charged lyrics, electrifying stage performances, and his
counter-culture lifestyle, Fela preached against social injustice and
corruption. Troubled by the political and economic corruption of Nigeria and
the repressive governments of sub-Saharan Africa, Fela built a commune
called the Kalakuta Republic, which he declared immune from Nigerian law,
and created his own political party. At the height of his popularity in the
mid-1970s, Fela took to calling himself the "Black President." Since his
death in 1997 from an AIDS-related illness, Fela's status as a pan-African
icon has continued to grow.
Black President is a critical multimedia exploration of the influence and
artistic legacy of Fela. Artists included in this exhibition are from
countries as diverse as Burundi, Cameroon, Chile, Côte d'Ivoire, England,
Germany, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and the United States. Some,
like album cover artist, Ghariokwu Lemi, and photographer, Femi Osunla, were
part of Fela's artistic retinue in Lagos. Other younger participating
artists were not yet born. Their work speaks to the many sides of
Fela-musical pioneer, political dissident, utopian visionary, consummate
showman, husband to 28 women, and legendary lover.
Artists included in the exhibition are: Radcliffe Bailey, Bili Bidjocka,
Sanford Biggers, Sokari Douglas Camp, Nanga Oly Christophe, Brett
Cook-Dizney, Victor Ekpuk, Tim Evans & Jason Smith, Kendell Geers, Barkley
Hendricks, Satch Hoyt, Alfredo Jaar, Marcia Kure, Moshekwa Langa, Ghariokwu
Lemi, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, Adia Millet, Wangechi Mutu, Aimé
Ntakiyica, Odili Donald Odita, Olu Oguibe, Moyo Ogundipe, Moyo Okediji,
Senam Okudzeto, Ouattara, Yinka Shonibare, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Iké Udé,
Obiora Udechukwu, Roberto Visani, Kara Walker & Klaus Bürgel, and Fred
Wilson.
Several artists are contributing new works specifically for this exhibition.
The following are some examples of these new works:
In The Afronomical Ways, Sanford Biggers (b. 1961 Los Angeles; Lives New
York) creates a new zodiac system that reads as an afro-tantric sexual
guide, complete with twelve sexual positions. Installed in the staircase
leading from the mezzanine level to the second floor of the New Museum, The
Afronomical Ways introduces Fela as a man of both sexual and spiritual
prowess.
In a collaborative work, Golddigger, Klaus Bürgel (b. Radofzell, Germany;
Lives Portland, ME) has transformed drawings by Kara Walker (b. 1969
Stockton, California; Lives New York) of bondage and slavery motifs, such as
handcuffs, collars, and traps, into three-dimensional gold and
jewel-encrusted objects. Tiny and precious, they strike a strange mixture of
traditional West African lost wax casting, Akan gold weights, and today's
objects of bling bling urban abundance.
Satch Hoyt (b. 1957 London; Lives New York) invites the viewer to step into
a time capsule in his installation, The Shrine (The 27 Brides of the Black
President), named after Fela's nightclub in Lagos. The exterior of the
capsule is covered in red fabric that evokes the richness of Fela's
costumes. Inside the capsule, Fela's music mixes with the ambient noises of
African cities and women's voices, and with the smell of marijuana.
Marcia Kure's (b. 1970, Nigeria; Lives Atlanta, GA) History of Africa by
Fela features fifty-nine panels, one for each year of Fela's life, including
his final abbreviated year. Each panel is delicately painted with pigment
from the kola nut, a substance used in Africa as both a dye and a friendship
offering. Featuring distorted humanoid / animal figures, Kure's paintings
suggest that Fela's history, as much as the history of Africa itself, is a
confluence of the mythological and the real.
Adia Millet (b. 1975 Los Angeles; Lives New York) relates Fela's urban
Afrobeat music to the urban hip-hop culture of New York through the visual
medium of graffiti. In Swegbe and Pako, Millet translates the typically
male-dominated graffiti genre into the stereotypically feminized domestic
art of cross-stitching.
Wangechi Mutu (b. 1972 Nairobi, Kenya; Lives New York) provides a feminist
critique of Fela's problematic relationships with women while at the same
time acknowledging a respect and admiration for his courageous politics.
Mutu combines the critical and the humorous in her painting, Yo Mama, which
portrays a woman stabbing a serpent with her spiked heels.
Roberto Visani (b. 1970, Faenza, Italy; Lives New York) sculpts guns out of
discarded materials-crutches, scrap metal, crack vials, and brass
instruments-collected from New York's predominantly black neighborhoods of
Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant, and of the cities and towns in Ghana where
Fela performed. For Visani, the gun carries associations as a tool of
colonial domination, a weapon of contemporary urban destruction, and a unit
of exchange for African slaves.
Fred Wilson (b. 1954 New York; Lives New York) strives to expose underlying
cultural assumptions about race and ethnicity in his work. Because Why O? is
a new piece that combines traditional Nigerian pottery with a sound
installation of Fela's music.
In addition to interpretive works, Black President will provide a cultural
and historical context for Fela's life and legacy through the display of
original album cover art, listening stations, documentary film and video,
photography, and other Fela-related artifacts. A special music room will
provide a thorough examination of Fela's Afrobeat sound. The program will
bring to light Afrobeat's earliest influences, its context within the global
community of the '70s and '80s, focusing on the African Diaspora and other
affected funk, rock and jazz musicians, as well as its legacy in modern
music. In addition to Fela, featured artists will include E.T. Mensah, John
Coltrane, Hugh Masekela, Roy Ayers, Tony Allen, King Sunny Ade, Tom Tom
Club, Femi Kuti, Masters at Work, Common and others.
About Fela Kuti
Born Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti in Nigeria in 1938, Fela studied
classical music at the Trinity College of Music in London. There, in the
early 1960s, he founded his first band, Koola Lobitos. While on a tour of
the United States in 1969, Fela was introduced to the Black Power movement
and to the teachings of such influential thinkers as Malcolm X and Angela
Davis. Inspired by this trip, Fela created Afrobeat, combining a hard-edge
and unyielding political content with a masterful orchestration of African
percussive systems and his signature saxophone sound. When he returned to
his homeland he opened a nightclub, the Shrine, and changed the name of his
band to Africa 70 (and later to Egypt 80).
Fela lived and produced his music under persistent state persecution. His
criticism of state corruption and repression led to several raids on his
commune-the Kalakuta Republic-and to numerous detentions and jail terms. In
1977, soldiers set fire to Kalakuta and viciously attacked the occupants.
Kuti suffered a fractured skull, arm, and leg, while his 82-year-old mother
was thrown out of a window. She died a little over a year later.
Following this incident, Fela went into exile in Ghana, but was deported
back to Lagos the following year. On arrival, to mark the anniversary of the
previous year's pillage of Kalakuta and to reaffirm his embrace of Yoruba
culture, Fela married 27 women simultaneously in a traditional ceremony.
In 1975, Fela replaced the Ransome in his name with Anikulapo, meaning "he
who carries death in his pouch" (or "he who defies death"). In August 1997,
Fela died of heart failure due to AIDS-related complications at the age of
58. During his lifetime, he recorded over 70 albums.
M E D I A P R E V I E W
Thursday, July 10, 2003, 3-5PM, with guest curator Trevor Schoonmaker and
artists Viktor Ekpuk, Barkley L. Hendricks, Satch Hoyt, Ghariokwu Lemi, Aimé
Ntakiyica, Olu Oguibe, Senam Okudzeto, and Roberto Visani
Catalogue
Black President is accompanied by a fully-illustrated 286-page exhibition
catalogue with scholarship about the life and legacy of Fela. Contributions
to the catalogue are by Biyi Bandele (Nigerian/British playwright); Jeff
Chang (writer and music critic); Yomi Durotoye (Professor of Political
Science and African Studies, Wake Forrest University); Vivien Goldman
(writer, music and cultural critic); Olu Oguibe (artist, art historian, and
independent curator); Moyo Okediji (artist and Professor of African and
African-American Studies, University of Colorado); Trevor Schoonmaker (guest
curator); Sharan Strange (poet); and Michael Veal (Fela's biographer and
Assistant Professor, Music Department and African-American Studies, Yale
University).
The catalogue has received support from the Norton Family Foundation. The
catalogue is also made possible by the Penny McCall Publication Fund at the
New Museum. Donors to the Penny McCall Publication Fund are James C. A. and
Stephania McClennen, Jennifer McSweeney, Arthur and Carol Goldberg, Dorothy
O. Mills, and the Mills Family Fund.
Funding
Black President is made possible in part by the Toby Devan Lewis Fund for
Exhibitions of Emerging Artists, and members of the New Group.
Support for the exhibition is also provided by Altoids, The Curiously Strong
Mints.
Public Programs
Thursday, July 17, 2003 6:30-8PM Conversation with the Artists
Conversation between guest curator Trevor Schoonmaker and artists Olu Oguibe
and Senam Okudzeto (Second Floor Gallery)
Thursday September 4, 2003 6:30-8PM Critical Voices Series
Personal perspectives on Fela by panelists Vivien Goldman (music writer),
Barkley Hendricks (artist), Wunmi Olaiya (singer/dancer), and Michael Veal
(Fela biographer).
About the Fela Project
The Fela Project, founded in 1999 by Trevor Schoonmaker, is a multimedia
project exploring Fela's life and legacy. Central to the project is Black
President. Other activities of the Fela Project include a web site,
concerts, documentary film, performances, and publications. A book of essays
about Fela entitled Fela: From West Africa to West Broadway, will be
published by Palgrave Macmillan in June 2003. For more information, visit
http://www.felaproject.net.
About the New Museum of Contemporary Art
The New Museum of Contemporary Art, founded in 1977 and located in the heart
of Soho, is the premier destination for contemporary art in New York City.
With an annual schedule of dynamic exhibitions, the Museum presents the most
innovative and experimental work from around the world. Debate and
discussion about contemporary culture are encouraged through a broad range
of educational programs, publications, performances, and new media
initiatives. The New Museum recently announced plans to build a new, 60,000
square foot facility at 235 Bowery.
Museum Hours Tuesday - Sunday: noon - 6:00PM
Thursday: noon - 8:00PM*
Closed Monday
Store Hours Monday - Sunday: noon - 6:30PM
Thursday: noon - 8:00PM
Admission $6.00 general; $3.00 students/seniors
Free for members; visitors 18 and under free
*Thursday 6:00-8:00PM $3.00
Zenith Media Lounge free
Directions Subway: 6 to Spring Street or Bleecker Street
N/R to Prince Street
C/E to Spring Street
F/S to Broadway Lafayette
Bus: #1/#5/#6/#21 to Houston Street or Broadway
New Museum of Contemporary Art
583 Broadway, New York, NY 10012
(between Houston and Prince Streets in SoHo)
Telephone 212-219-1222
Fax 212-431-5328