Glenn Ligon: AMERICA, the artist’s recent mid-career survey, argued that Ligon’s relationship to twentieth-century painting serves as an alternative means of examining the topics of identity, politics, and history that undergird the artist’s oeuvre. The exhibition reveals that the artist’s work leverages the expressionist possibilities of identity, figuration, and history on the abstract legacies of linguistic conceptualism. A continuous examination of representation grounded in the implacably figural substrate of race, gender, sexuality, and history, Ligon’s art highlights successive tiers of social abstraction in contemporary culture as they become visible and embodied in art objects.
Los Angeles artist Susan Silton has created a type of performance practice based on the ethical imperative of reparative witnessing. Orchestrating deeply researched opportunities for participants to engage in elective communities, her art helps individuals see their roles in historic forms of crisis accountably. Several recent pieces reflect not only on global crises perpetuated by neoliberalism and US political fallout, but on a more specific, if tricky crisis: gentrification. Tracing Silton’s own biographical relation to urban change, as well as the modes in which key works select specific sites of change as text or subtext, this article discusses the roles artists play in gentrification, as well as their potential for attending to its reparative aesthetics.
Gentrification is reshaping cities worldwide, resulting in seductive spaces and exclusive communities that aspire to innovation, creativity, sustainability, and technological sophistication. Gentrification is also contributing to growing social-spatial division and urban inequality and precarity. In a time of escalating housing crisis, unaffordable cities, and racial tension, scholars speak of eco-gentrification, techno-gentrification, super-gentrification, and planetary-gentrification to describe the different forms and scales of involuntary displacement occurring in vulnerable communities in response to current patterns of development and the hype-driven discourses of the creative city, smart city, millennial city, and sustainable city. In this context, how do contemporary creative practices in art, architecture, and related fields help to produce or resist gentrification? What does gentrification look and feel like in specific sites and communities around the globe, and how is that appearance or feeling implicated in promoting stylized renewal to a privileged public? In what ways do the aesthetics of gentrification express contested conditions of migration and mobility? Addressing these questions, this book examines the relationship between aesthetics and gentrification in contemporary cities from multiple, comparative, global, and transnational perspectives.
Zwelethu Mthethwa: Inner Views, at the Studio Museum in Harlem from July 15 to October 24, 2010, was the first major US museum exhibition of the South African photographer since 2003. The show drew from three of the artist’s photographic series to focus on the domestic interiors of black subjects in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and New Orleans. With Mthethwa’s customary saturated color, subtle composition, and exacting attention to ephemeral detail, the images depicted the reach of politics in the aesthetics of everyday life. They also revealed the artist’s interest in the longer history of artistic convention and transcultural exchange, drawing on references ranging from seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting to contemporary art. In Mthethwa’s photographs an intense pictorial visuality serves as a starting point for both documentary portraiture and critical inquiry, highlighting both the artist’s stunning images and photography’s capacity to convey both personal expression and the stark facts of social crisis.
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