This week I’m posting links to websites of a few Artists, in alphabetical order, whose recent and current works inspire me. I could easily make a much longer list, and I will write future posts to share more artists. Some are people I know, while others are creative people I admire from a less personal distance. Many have won major awards and important solo exhibitions. Some of them have lots of Instagram followers but they still are not known outside of critical circles. I’m hoping we can change that by sharing their works more widely. Links to each artist’s site are available by clicking on their names. Enjoy, and feel free to link me to artists who are inspiring you.
I first saw Natalie Baxter’s drooping, plush rifles, overstuffed gold-lamé flags, and irreverent needlepoints in a number of NYC area group exhibitions in 2017 and 2018. She continues to develop her own smart brand of kitschy political commentary, and recently participated in a group show in the Art Galleries at Allegheny College, a space I used to run which is now expertly helmed by curator and art historian, Paula Burleigh.
Vanessa German, like the work she makes, can’t be reduced to a single category. Her vibrant and richly textured sculptures, paintings, drawings, and performances fill me with joy and reverence, while simultaneously making me weep as I consider the implicit ways in which I’ve benefitted from white supremacy. The objects she “reclaims” to create each figurative amalgamation seem to be fitting metaphors and analogies to the other creative work she does to benefit her community. Her Arthouse initiative and community garden brings hands-on arts education, neighborhood beautification, and opportunities for inner-city children to get their hands dirty while experiencing the joy of making art and growing vegetables. If there’s anything we need more of in the world, it’s people like Vanessa German.
A student brought Pixy Liao to my attention in 2018. I think what drew me to the work was its queerness, and the artist’s ability to take an otherwise banal moment (eating breakfast, doing laundry, etc…) and bending it away from what we might expect. The photo series, Experimental Relationship, somehow feels vulnerable and sincere while obviously being staged and contrived. Maybe it’s her partner’s apparent trust, and her unwaveringly aggressive eye contact, that have held my attention. Liao’s newer works, A Collection of Penises and Soft-Heeled Shoes, direct our gaze at both her boyfriend’s soft member and the pillowy phalluses of his imagination.
Zachari Logan’s incredibly sexy, seductive, and self-aware portraits first caught my eye in 2008. Since then, Zachari has gone on to become one of the most prolific makers I know. His interdisciplinary research and genuine curiosity have allowed him to create an impressive body of works in drawing, painting, and sculpture that reveal intersections between the male form, botany, and iconography. His most recent works — enormous, sumptuously sensual, hand-painted tapestries — are over 30 feet long.
I walked into Shona McAndrew’s bold papier-maché sculpture at the 2019 Spring Break Art Show in New York. The immersive installation, which depicts a woman in bed with her boyfriend while she mindlessly fondles his flaccid penis, hovers somewhere between verisimilitude and illustration. All the details of the room are rendered with masterful accuracy, giving the viewer an opportunity to linger and gawk inside a snapshot of an otherwise intimate moment.
Awilda Rodriguez Lora, and I collaborated in early 2016 to photograph the portrait at the bottom of this post. I’ve since lost the negative, but it is a black and white photo of the topless artist wearing a skirt made from hundreds of bras, and a bouffant made from unspooled VHS tape. She is standing on a pedestal in the apse of a dilapidated church in San Juan, with her arms outstretched toward the ceiling. I had the good fortune to be present at her February 8, 2020 performance La Mujer Maravilla: CUERPA, at Puerto Rico’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Awilda’s “auto-ethnographic” project, Sustento, is a collection of interconnected threads: ongoing explorations of gender, and critical evaluations of female empowerment and self-determination. She publishes aspects of the project online, including the infectiously joyous Bailemos ___/365 #bailartodoslosdias on Instagram, and other social media to, in her words, “evaluate the sustainability of my practice as a choreographer and cultural entrepreneur based in Puerto Rico.” Assuming the danger of contagion is mitigated before fall, Awilda will be an artist-in-residence at the Wexner Center for the Arts in late 2020.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s Darkroom Mirror series is as much about photography — how cameras see, how traditional and contemporary image making processes work, and how depiction is privileged by those doing the looking/picture taking — as it is about revealing hidden desire and queering strategies of representation. The photographs show the artist intimately, if intentionally awkwardly, posed with his friends and lovers while the pictorial plane, point of view, or an intervening printed photograph work to both abstract and complete parts of the figures. The studio backdrop, lighting stands, photographer, and his camera are often visible. Sepuya makes informed decisions about what is seen clearly and what is obfuscated, reinforcing or destabilizing signification. The title of the project is a double entendre positioned to be understood only by those already inclined to be looking for such a thing.
This is a cellphone picture of a framed print (glare and all). Awilda Rodriguez Lora and I collaborated, played, really, to make this photo in 2016. Unfortunately, I’ve lost the 4x5 B&W negative