Front Reflection and Side Reflection by Seitu Ken Jones

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Front Reflection and Side Reflection

Seitu Ken Jones, 2025

Lithograph on Rives BFK White paper

Edition of 7

Image: 33 ½ x 25 ½ inches

Paper: 40 ½ x 32 inches

Click here for availability or Email our Gallery Director Alex Blaisdell alex@highpointprintmaking.org

Highpoint Editions is pleased to release Front Reflection and Side Reflection, two new lithographs by Minnesota-based artist Seitu Ken Jones. Inspired by the Zealy Daguerreotypes, these prints are Jones’s first with Highpoint Editions and exemplify a fierce dignity and resilience in response to a troubled history and continued adversity.

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About Front Reflection and Side Reflection

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Source imagery including an image of one of the Zealy Daguerreotypes and an image of the artist’s Great Grandfather.

In 1976, a set of photographs from 1850 was discovered in a Harvard University storeroom. The daguerreotypes were commissioned by Harvard Professor Louis Agassiz, who was an adherent of “scientific racism”, to prove the inferiority of Black people. The photographs were taken by Joseph T. Zealy and are now known as the Zealy Daguerreotypes. The seven subjects of the photographs were enslaved Africans who lived in South Carolina, and were posed in both clothed and nude positions.

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For the last 10 years, Seitu Ken Jones has painted and created a series of self-portraits that recall the experiences of African American men over the last 400 years. Inspired by the Zealy Daguerreotypes, Seitu’s prints mirror the degrading and disturbing images captured by the photographer. “Each daguerreotype reveals an individual, deeply dignified and expressive. Their hurt, contempt, fatigue, utter refusal are unequivocal,” says Parul Sehgal of the original images.¹ In each of Seitu’s self-portraits, he reveals himself in the most dignified and resilient manner of those whom he honors. Jones places himself as the subject and the documentarian, recontextualizing the images as a symbol of humanity, history, and a continued fight for freedom and liberty.

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Detail of Front Reflection

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Assistant Printer Brian Wagner preparing the stone for Side Reflection

Each layer of the 7-run lithograph calls attention to the process. The outer borders mimic the irregular edges of the lithographic stones the artist drew on to create the portraits. While the coloring of the background can also be viewed as referencing the sepia tones of an aged daguerreotype, each layer is an homage to the materials used in processing lithographic stones. The layers of brown were matched to both the liquid asphaltum used before inking the stone, and the color of the stone after a thin layer of gum arabic has been buffed in to preserve the image. The transparent grey layer that makes up the background echoes the cool grey of the lithographic stone. The black of the lithographic crayon drawing is also iconic to the lithographic process and legacy; furthering these prints’ place as a contemporary reflection of historical statements and processes.

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Lead Printer-in-Residence Judith Baumann and Assistant Printer Brian Wagner printing one of the layers of Front Reflection.

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Earlier proofs of Front Reflection and Side Reflection in the studio.

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Seitu Ken Jones signing Side Reflection on May 6th, 2025

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Seitu Ken Jones (b. 1951) is a Saint Paul, Minnesota based artist whose interdisciplinary practice works to restore our Beloved communities by blending art, food, conversation and beauty. Working on his own or in collaboration, Jones has created over 40 large-scale public art works. He's been awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship, a McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, a Bush Artist Fellowship, a Bush Leadership Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts - Theater Communication Group Designer Fellowship. Seitu was awarded a Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and was the Artist-in-Residence in the Harvard Ceramics Program. He was Millennium Artist-in-Residence for 651 Arts in Brooklyn, NY, and was the first Artist-in-Residence for the City of Minneapolis. In 2014, he integrated artwork into three key stations for the Greenline Light Rail Transit in the Twin Cities.

A 2013 Joyce Award, from Chicago's Joyce Foundation allowed Seitu to develop CREATE: the Community Meal, a dinner for 2,000 people at a table a half a mile long. The project focused on access to healthy food and community conversation. Beyond art making, Seitu worked with members of his neighborhood to create Frogtown Farm, a 5-acre farm in the heart of the City of Saint Paul. He is the recipient of the 2017 Distinguished Artist Award from the McKnight Foundation. His 2017 HeARTside Community Meal in Grand Rapids, MI was awarded the Grand Juried Prize for ArtPrize Nine. A retired faculty member of Goddard College in Port Townsend, WA. Seitu has a BS in Landscape Design and an MLS in Environmental History from the University of Minnesota.

For availability and to purchase Front Reflection and Side Reflection, email our Gallery Director Alex Blaisdell alex@highpointprintmaking.org

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 1.The First Photos of Enslaved People Raise Many Questions About the Ethics of Viewing - New York Times

Highpoint Editions Heads to IFPDA Print Fair 2025

Join us from March 27 through March 30 at the Park Avenue Armory for the 2025 IFPSDA Print Fair! Highpoint Editions is delighted to present a selection of new editions by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Julie Mehretu, Andrea Carlson, Leslie Barlow, and Seitu Ken Jones.

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IFPDA Print Fair 2025

LOCATION

Park Avenue Armory 643 Park Avenue, New York, NY

VIP PREVIEW

Thursday, March 27, 5-9 pm

PUBLIC HOURS

Friday, March 28, 11 am - 7 pm

Saturday, March 29, 11 am - 7 pm

Sunday, March 30, 11 am - 5 pm

MORE INFORMATION

FineArtPrintFair.org

Images of IFPDA Fair by Annie Forrest

Rolling Head by Andrea Carlson

Rolling Head

Andrea Carlson, 2025

22-run screenprint on Coventry Rag paper

Edition of 20

36 ¼ x 48 ½ in.

Click here for availability or Email our Gallery Director Alex Blaisdell alex@highpointprintmaking.org

Highpoint Editions is pleased to release Rolling Head, a new screenprint by Minnesota-based artist Andrea Carlson. This 22-run screenprint is Carlson’s third print with Highpoint Editions and touches on stories of misogyny and its pervasiveness within indigenous narratives, art history, and mythology.

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About Rolling Head

Andrea Carlson unmoors images to confront and reframe history as a battle for land and the ways it is imagined. In her densely layered prints, visual referents move across turbulent landscapes organized by the consistent horizon line of Lake Superior. Imagery, including mica hand and talon forms from ancient Woodland earthworks, horses and cowboys, masks from the 1962 film Mondo Cane, bent land marker trees, Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks project, and more fills these prints to draw attention to histories of erasure and dispossession.

Andrea Carlson’s other prints with Highpoint Editions - Anti-Retro (2018) and Exit (2019)

Her new print, Rolling Head, references a common figure in Woodlands and Plains narratives, “Rolling Head,” said to be the roving head of a woman decapitated by her husband for infidelity in one of the first acts of domestic violence on Turtle Island. Her head continues to roll through the world, chasing her children, either out of a cannibalistic hunger to consume them or, in some tellings, to be with them in an act of endless love. Carlson places two headless female forms—the Niké of Samothrace and the blue imprint of a woman’s nude body from Yves Klein’s Anthropométries series (1960)—in front of a roiling lake waters, and two woodpeckers, the bird that in the version of the story recounted to Carlson was the adulterous partner of Rolling Head, fly forth as if emerging from their necks. The textual reference to Orion at the center of the print, another mythical perpetrator of sexual violence against women nonetheless heroized in the stars, notes that even the sky is full of imagined misogynists and that the origins of such narratives of violence against women can be located anywhere, even as they endlessly follow Indigenous communities into the present.

–Statement by Christopher T. Green, adapted from the exhibition “The sky loves to hear me sing: Woodland Art in Transmotion” on view September 12 – October 29, 2024, The List Gallery at Swarthmore College. An early trial proof of Rolling Head was on display in the exhibition. Read the larger statement from Christopher T. Green here.

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Andrea Carlson painting a film over a test print.

Since her first print with Highpoint Editions in 2018, Andrea Carlson has taken to the process of screenprinting naturally. The artist hand-painted each large film separation prior to handing them off to the printers to expose onto screens and painstakingly chose each color to infuse the composition with energetic tension and brilliant intensity. Carlson and the Highpoint Editions team evaluated each layer’s color to ensure the finished print communicated her vision as she intended.

Like her paintings, Carlson’s prints are densely layered with reference and pattern –commenting on the tactics of colonialism as well as her family and peers, Ojibwe culture, and Indigenous sovereignty. Rolling Head creates a whirlpool of dialogue amongst vivid hues and stunning line-work.

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Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe/European descent, b. 1979) is a visual artist working in northern Minnesota. Carlson works primarily on paper, creating painted and drawn surfaces with many mediums. Her work addresses land and institutional spaces, decolonization narratives, and assimilation metaphors in film. Her work has been acquired by institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Walker Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The British Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada.

Carlson has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including those awarded by the Carolyn Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, The LeRoy Neiman and Janet Byrne Neiman Foundation, the United States Artists Fellowship, and the McKnight Foundation. Carlson has exhibited in Canada and has had solo exhibitions at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, La Centrale at the Powerhouse (Montreal, QC), and the Plains Art Museum (Fargo, ND), among others. In addition to the many reviews and articles on her work, Carlson has worked as a writer and curator, and is an accomplished lecturer.

For availability and to purchase Rolling Head, email our Gallery Director Alex Blaisdell alex@highpointprintmaking.org

On Rolling Head, Essay by Christopher T. Green

Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe/European descent, b. 1979) recontextualizes images to confront and reframe history as a battle for land and the ways it is imagined. Her paintings and prints reproduce seemingly disparate images, objects, and textual references across recurring horizons and shorelines. Her referents meander through these visual territories as roving characters inquiring into the tension between forced colonial absence and the deeply etched presence of a land base.

In densely layered prints, such as Exit (2018) and Anti-Retro (2018) pictured above, visual referents move across these turbulent landscapes. Diverse images—including mica hand and talon forms disinterred from ancient Woodland earthworks; horses and cowboys; masks from the 1962 exploitive documentary film, Mondo Cane; shells such as miigis; bent land-marker trees; and Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks project—fill these prints to draw attention to histories of erasure and dispossession. Many of the objects and references evoke the movements of stories and migrations across ancestral territories; others recall the violence against Indigenous communities inherent in Western films, as in Anti-Retro, or the destruction to Indigenous monuments and earthworks through the construction of highways like I-94, as in Exit. Throughout, Carlson examines the settler impulse to erase past histories in order to make long-inhabited land appear otherwise unoccupied when taken over, redeveloped, and consumed.

Carlson’s works are frequently organized around a consistent horizon line. Some of these landscapes are based on the Lake Superior shoreline and her home in northern Minnesota, Gichi Bitobig, or “Great Double Bay,” in Ojibwemowin, also known as Grand Marais. Other landscapes are imaginary. Her play of shifting, layered imagery unfolds to the viewer over time. She builds her compositions gradually through multiple layers, evoking temporal and geological strata. “Land changes, it has to change,” Carlson declares, and her prints contain not only symmetries but also resplendent variety, shifting “like the wake behind a boat or waves on a lake.” ¹ The prints organize space but also break up static and stereotypical depictions of land, peoples, and cultures. The shining mica hands in Exit, for example, printed with a pigment that contains mica silicate dust, are held up as if to indicate “STOP.” Pictorially, they interrupt the linear recession into the horizon line and deny the viewer easy entry into the visual space, suggesting these layered landscapes require permission, or at least contemplation, to access.

For Carlson, printmaking is a medium that can be responsive to the fear of the loss of land, life, and livelihood that undergirds Indigenous communities. In their seriality and multiplicity, prints are resilient to loss and counteract historic attempts at dispossession and erasure. ² As she recently described for the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, “I use the iteration to give it some movement, to give it a multiple existence in the same space. You can't hold it all in your head at the same time. You are forced to make decisions with what you are looking at in a way where you are not able to possess it all at once.” ³ Her landscapes are thus what scholar Kate Morris describes as “anti-invitational”—layered with imagery that is neither easily digestible nor accessible to occupation by the viewer. ⁴ Indeed, not only do the prints unfold over time, but Carlson sometimes embeds private communal meanings within her work, intended only for insiders.

In her new print Rolling Head (2025), Carlson references a figure common to Woodlands and Plains narratives, a woman from the early history of the world known as “Rolling Head,” who was one of the first victims of domestic violence on Turtle Island. After being discovered committing infidelities with a snake or, in the Ojibwe version of the story that Carlson knows, a woodpecker, the woman is decapitated by her husband. Her head continues to roll through the world, chasing her children, either to be with them in an act of endless love or, in some tellings, out of a cannibalistic hunger to consume them.

Two headless female forms fill the center of the print in front of turbulent lake waters: the Niké of Samothrace and the blue imprint of a woman’s nude body from Yves Klein’s Anthropométries series (1960), a “living paintbrush.” The bodies frame the name “ROLLING HEAD” and the words “Orion just outside my window” at the center of the print. The textual reference to the Orion constellation, named another mythical perpetrator of sexual violence against women nonetheless heroized in the stars, notes that even the sky is full of imagined misogynists. ⁵ Carlson thus deploys varied imagery to show that the origins of such narratives of violence against women can be located anywhere, even as they follow Indigenous communities into the present. Yet two woodpeckers also fly forth from the bodies as if emerging from their necks. Ecologically, woodpeckers are known as healers for their ability to quickly and efficiently clear invasive insects from stands of trees. Here, their wings echo those of Niké and the out-flung arms of the headless blue Anthropométrie, suggesting the possibility of freedom or an escape from such cycles of violence.

In prints like Rolling Head, Carlson is thus engaged in a form of storytelling that takes place across narrative and temporal space, moving through cultural referents to find a shared language. Her approach to visual space and itinerant art historical motifs match pictorial and narrative movement. As Vizenor notes, “Carlson creates great layers of conceptual scenes, silhouettes of cultural absence and presence, and converted landscapes of time, space, and course of memories.” ⁶ Images are redeployed to new memorial functions as their place in such narratives shift conceptual positions. Thus, the shifting nature of Carlson’s visual treatment of images and their layers are, as she describes, "alive and ever-changing or ever shimmering.”⁷

–Excerpt from Christopher T. Green, “Woodland Native Art in Transmotion,” in The sky loves to hear me sing: Woodland Art in Transmotion, Christopher T. Green, ed., exhibition catalog produced in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name on view September 12 – October 29, 2024 at The List Gallery at Swarthmore College. Courtesy of the author. An early trial proof of Rolling Head was on display in this exhibition.

 1. Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, “Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons,” 2024, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 4:57, https://vimeo.com/994132402.

2. Andrea Carlson, communication with the author, November 29, 2023.

3. Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, “Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons.”

4. Kate Morris, Shifting Ground: Landscape in Contemporary Native Art (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019).

 5. Andrea Carlson, communication with the author, August 9, 2024.

6. Vizenor, “Native Art and Visionary Motion: Rock Art Shamans, Cubism, and Expressionism,” in Christopher T. Green, ed., The sky loves to hear me sing: Woodland Art in Transmotion (Swarthmore, PA: The List Gallery, Swarthmore College, 2024), 27.

7. Noah Berlatsky, “How Artist Andrea Carlson Heals Landscapes By Dismantling and Reassembling Them,” Observer, August 13, 2024, https://observer.com/2024/08/interview-artist-andrea-carlson-shimmer-on-horizon-mca-chicago/.

Christopher T. Green is a writer and scholar whose research, curating, and teaching focus on modern and contemporary art, Native North American art and material culture, and the interrelation of Indigeneity, primitivism, and Euro-American art within global histories of modernism. He recently curated “Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art” (Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, April 13-September 30 2024) and “The sky loves to hear me sing: Woodland Art in Transmotion” (List Gallery, Swarthmore College, September 12-October 29 2024). He received his PhD in Art History from the CUNY Graduate Center, and currently serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History and Environmental Studies at Swarthmore College.

Rolling Head

Andrea Carlson, 2025

22-run screenprint on Coventry Rag paper

Edition of 20

36 ¼ x 48 ½ in.

Click here for availability or Email our Gallery Director Alex Blaisdell alex@highpointprintmaking.org

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Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe/European descent, b. 1979) is a visual artist working in northern Minnesota. Carlson works primarily on paper, creating painted and drawn surfaces with many mediums. Her work addresses land and institutional spaces, decolonization narratives, and assimilation metaphors in film. Her work has been acquired by institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Walker Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The British Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada.

Carlson has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including those awarded by the Carolyn Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, The LeRoy Neiman and Janet Byrne Neiman Foundation, the United States Artists Fellowship, and the McKnight Foundation. Carlson has exhibited in Canada and has had solo exhibitions at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, La Centrale at the Powerhouse (Montreal, QC), and the Plains Art Museum (Fargo, ND), among others. In addition to the many reviews and articles on her work, Carlson has worked as a writer and curator, and is an accomplished lecturer.

For availability and to purchase Rolling Head, email our Gallery Director Alex Blaisdell alex@highpointprintmaking.org

Record of a Rolling Garden, New Print by Leslie Barlow

Record of a Rolling Garden

Leslie Barlow, 2024

14-run lithograph on White Somerset Satin

Edition of 20

Paper: 26 ¾ x 21 ⅜ in.

Image: 22 ½ x 18 in. (approximate)

Click here for availability or Email our Gallery Director Alex Blaisdell alex@highpointprintmaking.org

Highpoint Editions is proud to release Record of a Rolling Garden, a new lithograph by Minnesota artist Leslie Barlow. This 14-run lithograph is Barlow’s first print with Highpoint Editions and features two of the artist’s friends at the now-closed Roller Garden roller rink in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. With this print, Barlow explores nostalgia, belonging, resilience, and how the vibrant and complicated history of roller skating has unified the Black community. Barlow’s style of storytelling with colorful and nuanced portraiture shines through in this richly layered lithograph.

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From the Artist

Through my time working with Highpoint Editions, I fell in love with the photo lithography process. The image this print is based off is from a photo taken on my birthday in 2020. Depicted are two of my friends posing at the St. Louis Park roller rink, the Roller Garden, at a time when they were closed to the public but renting the whole place on an hourly basis to small masked-up groups. There was birthday cake, we got to play our own music, and everyone showed up in style.

I began rollerskating with some frequency back in 2017, but in 2020 the recreation took on a whole new meaning for me. "When the reality of racial injustice became too taxing, skating was the revolutionary way to reclaim their joy," said Amanda Alcantara in the article How Black and Brown Women are Reclaiming Rollerskating Culture. Skating was not only a safer activity to do in the height of Covid, but it allowed for a physical release of the built up anger, anxiety, and pressure.

Some of my favorite childhood memories include school field trips to the Roller Garden. I returned to that beloved rink over the years with different friend groups, and at different points in my life. It always had that same smell, same greasy food, same dinosaur and mural that greeted you in the entryway. It was one of those places that you could lose time, and lose yourself.

After that October 2020 birthday, I only got to skate at the Roller Garden a couple more times. Like many businesses, they struggled to stay afloat during the pandemic, and after 52 years in operation by the Johnston/Sahly family, the Roller Garden closed its doors in May 2021. The place wasn't perfect, and had a complicated history, but it was heartbreaking to see it go. Skaters poured out their memories and desires to save it on social media, but in the end we all came to the realization we'd have to forge other spaces. As the 2018 documentary United Skates says, "You can take the goddamn building, but you can't take the spirit." — Leslie Barlow

Leslie working on a film for one of the 14 lithographic plates used to print Record of a Rolling Garden.

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Leslie Barlow (b. 1989) is a visual artist, educator, and cultural worker from Minneapolis, MN. Barlow believes art and art making is both healing and liberatory, through the power of representation, witnessing and storytelling. Her life-sized oil paintings are inspired by community and personal experiences, and serve as both monuments to community members and explorations into how race entangles the intimate sphere of love, family, and friendship.

Barlow is a recipient of the 2021 Jerome Hill Fellowship, 2019 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, the 20/20 Springboard Fellowship, and five MN State Arts Board grants between 2016 and 2023. Her work can be viewed in collections around Minnesota including at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota Historical Society, Weisman Art Museum, Minnesota Museum of American Art, and US Bank Stadium. Barlow earned her BFA in 2011 from the University of Wisconsin-Stout and her MFA in 2016 from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. In addition to her studio practice, Barlow has taught at the University of Minnesota, Metro State University, and Carleton College. Barlow also supports emerging artists at Public Functionary as Director of PF Studios, is a member of the Creatives After Curfew mural collective, and is the creator/producer of ConFluence, an arts and science fiction convention.

Barlow is represented by Bockley Gallery in Minneapolis, MN.

For availability and to purchase Record of a Rolling Garden, email our Gallery Director Alex Blaisdell alex@highpointprintmaking.org

Andrea Carlson to Exhibit at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Andrea Carlson will be presenting an exhibition titled Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago from August 3, 2024 through February 2, 2025. Andrea Carlson is the 26th artist to participate in Chicago Works, a solo exhibition series at the MCA that features artists who are shaping contemporary art in the city and beyond. The exhibition is presented in the MCA’s Turner Gallery, on the museum’s fourth floor.

Andrea Carlson (b. 1979, Ojibwe/European descent; based in northern Minnesota and Chicago, IL) considers how landscapes are shaped by history, relationships, and power. Her artworks imagine places that are “everywhere and nowhere,” visualizing these shifting yet ever-present dynamics. Grounded in Anishinaabe understandings of space and time, the works in this exhibition reflect on how land holds memories of colonial expansion and violence, Indigenous presence and resistance.

Across painting, video, and sculpture, Carlson organizes imagined landscapes around one constant: the horizon. This line is reminiscent of her homelands on Lake Superior. It is also a significant art historical trope that artists have employed to depict territories as vast and vacant, ripe for the taking. Carlson’s prismatic works are not empty: they are densely layered with an abundance of motifs, making reference to the tactics of colonialism as well as her family and peers, Ojibwe culture, and Indigenous sovereignty. Confronting histories of erasure and dispossession, Carlson proposes that what appears to be lost can be remade, reimagined, or otherwise regained.

Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons is curated by Iris Colburn, Curatorial Associate.

Learn more about the exhibition here!

Tate Announces Solo Exhibition for Do Ho Suh in 2025

Do Ho Suh, Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home 2013-2022

Installation view at Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, Australia. Photography by Jessica Maurer. © Do Ho Suh

The Tate Modern has announced that Do Ho Suh will receive a solo exhibition in 2025 titled The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh. The exhibition will be on view in London from May 1 through October 26, 2025.

“Korean-born, London-based artist Do Ho Suh invites visitors to explore his large-scale installations, sculptures, videos and drawings in this major survey exhibition.

Is home a place, a feeling, or an idea? Suh asks timely questions about the enigma of home, identity and how we move through and inhabit the world around us.

With immersive artworks exploring belonging, collectivity and individuality, connection and disconnection, Suh examines the intricate relationship between architecture, space, the body, and the memories and the moments that make us who we are.

Wander through the passages and thresholds of Suh's renowned fabric architectures. Discover his early installations delicate works on paper and videos. Move across Seoul, New York and London through his life-sized replicas of past and present homes. Encounter sculptures that explore the tradition of monuments.

Experience the breadth and depth of Suh’s inventive and unique practice over the last three decades, including new and site-specific works on display for the first time.

The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh in partnership with Genesis

Co-curated by Nabila Abdel Nabi, Senior Curator, International Art, (Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational) and Dina Akhmadeeva, Assistant Curator, International Art, Tate Modern “

Learn more about the exhibition here!

Gatson's Portrait of Shuttlesworth Finds Permanent Home at Birmingham Airport

Highpoint Editions artist Rico Gatson’s portrait of Civil Rights Icon Fred L. Shuttlesworth is now on permanent display at the Birmingham Airport. Originally created for the Birmingham Museum of Art’s Wall to Wall series. the mural is nearly 13 feet high and 66 feet wide and features a portrait of Shuttlesworth with surrounded by a sunburst array of colors.

On Thursday May 23, officials with the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport unveiled a new mural honoring The Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth in Concourse B. The airport was renamed in his honor in 2008.

Dozens of area leaders, activists and residents gathered for the unveiling which was attended by members of the Shuttlesworth family, including daughters, Dr. Ruby Shuttlesworth Bester and Patricia Shuttlesworth Massengill.

Ruby Shuttlesworth Bester, daughter of the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, addresses crowd after the mural unveiling. (Marika N. Johnson, For The Birmingham Times)

In addition to the Shuttlesworth family, those in attendance included former Mayor Richard Arrington; The Rev. Thomas Wilder, Senior Pastor, Bethel Baptist Church, Shuttlesworth’s former church; Bishop Calvin Woods, former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Alabama poet laureate Ashley Jones; Birmingham City Councilor Crystal Smitherman, DeJuana Thompson, CEO, Birmingham Civil Rights Institute; former gov. Don Siegelman; activist Helen Rivas; and many others.

Daughters of The Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, from left, Ruby Shuttlesworth Bester and Patricia Shuttlesworth Massengill with artist Rico Gaston (Marika N. Johnson, For The Birmingham Times)

Learn more about the mural here!

20th BMW Art Car with Julie Mehretu Debuts in Paris

The 20th BMW Art Car was presented to the public for the first time on May 21st, 2024 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Designed by renowned New York-based contemporary artist Julie Mehretu, the project transforms the BMW M Hybrid V8 race car into a performative work of art, continuing a longstanding tradition of BMW Art Cars and competitive racing. Just a few weeks after its World Premiere in the French capital, the newest edition in the storied BMW Art Car collection will compete in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

“The whole BMW Art Car project is about invention, about imagination, about pushing limits of what can be possible. I don’t think of this car as something you would exhibit. I am thinking of it as something that will race in Le Mans. It’s a performative painting. My BMW Art Car was created in close collaboration with motorsport and engineering teams,” says Julie Mehretu. “The BMW Art Car is only completed once the race is over.”

Learn more about the BMW Art Car here!

Keepsakes Featured at College of Wooster Art Museum

Delita Martin’s series with Highpoint Editions titled Keepsakes will be on display during the College of Wooster Art Museum’s exhibition COLLECT: New Acquisitions from January 30th through April 30th, 2024.

COLLECT: New Acquisitions celebrates the generous contributions of donors to the Art Museum over the past five years. From the earliest years of the College, alumni and affiliates have supported its teaching and learning mission with gifts of art, artifacts, and funds. Donations comprise the greatest part of the Art Museum’s collection; each tells a story about the collectors, their interests, and their relationships to the college.

Update: On March 26th a talk was held to discuss Keepsakes led by Dr. Brittney S. Miles followed by an opportunity for attendees and students to take part in the acquisition decision for the College to purchase one the the seven portraits.

“At the end of the talk, sticky notes were distributed, and guests were encouraged to place their note on the wall beside the portrait that they liked the most. These votes would help with the College’s decision of which piece to purchase. It was difficult to choose, as each of the seven faces perfectly represented its own facet of childhood that would be worth adding to a permanent display. One girl was thoughtful and quiet. Another wore a playful smirk. Still another portrait smiled a toothy grin, eyebrows raised and eyes widened in that familiar expression of pure, youthful excitement. I would be happy to see any one of the pieces become a part of The College of Wooster Art Museum. Some will see the chosen print as a beautiful piece of art with stunning embroidery detail. For others it may serve as a mirror, reflecting the complex and funny and innocent memories of youth — the keepsakes of Black girlhood.” -Amanda Crouse in her article Reclaiming Black Girlhood and Innocence Through Art

Read more about the exhibition and the College of Wooster Art Museum here.

Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum at Baltimore Museum of Art

Works by Dyani White Hawk and Julie Buffalohead are featured in a recent intiative by the Baltimore Museum of Art titled Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum.

The artwork, perspectives, and histories of Native artists, scholars, and community members are at the center of Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum, a major BMA initiative. The wide-reaching project seeks to begin addressing the historical erasure of Indigenous culture by arts institutions while creating new practices for museums.

The expansive Preoccupied project extends into the galleries and beyond with public programs, nine exhibitions, staff training, and new interpretive texts for artworks throughout the Museum. The curatorial team worked closely with Native artists, curators, and Baltimore-region residents on a community advisory panel to frame the questions this project would ask. In the earliest stages of the initiative, all Preoccupied project participants were invited to an “unconference,” a weekend-long retreat with the exhibitions’ curators, where they discussed Native visibility in the face of colonial oppression.

Dyani White Hawk’s work is on display in Dyani White Hawk: Bodies of Water. Dyani White Hawk presents one new and two existing sculptural works from her Carry series. Each Carry piece, composed of a large copper bucket and ladle adorned with glass beads, bears extravagantly long fringe whose draping emulates arboreal root structures. Alongside the artist’s works, White Hawk selected historic Lakota belongings from the BMA’s collection. Through these works, White Hawk insists upon an interdependence between art and function—and by extension art and life—effectively calling into question art history’s tendency to devalue craft. These works operate as physical metaphors for the carrying of history, cosmology, generational teaching, and deep thought.

Julie Buffalohead’s work is on diplay in Illustrating Agency. This installation highlights the ways in which Native artists have increasingly asserted agency—the exertion of one’s own power—over representations of their communities and identities over time. In the early 20th century, white arts educators encouraged Native artists to create “authentic” art—as defined by settlers—that embraced traditional subject matter while often neglecting present realities. In the decades that followed, generations of artists have shrugged off settler expectations by depicting their community on their own terms. Such work illustrates the modern Native experience, problematizes harmful stereotypes, and pointedly challenges outsider understandings of Indigenous identity.

Learn more about the larger initiative and exhibitions and installations on display here!

Dyani White Hawk Named 2024 Guggenheim Fellow

The Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced their appointment of 188 Guggenheim Fellowships to a distinguished and diverse group of culture-creators working across 52 disciplines. Chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of almost 3,000 applicants, the Class of 2024 Guggenheim Fellows was tapped on the basis of prior career achievement and exceptional promise. As established in 1925 by founder Senator Simon Guggenheim, each fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.”

White Hawk is one of three Minnesotan artists who received the honor, alongside author David Mura and painter Lamar Peterson.

The annual fellowship dates back to 1925 and is one of the most prestigious awards given to scholars and artists who are citizens and permanent residents of the United States and Canada.

Winners are chosen from a pool of approximately 3,000 applicants with about 175 fellowships awarded annually. The fellowship is accompanied by a grant to help fund a specific project. The amount varies from project to project, but past grants have averaged between $40,000 and $55,000.

Read more about the fellowship here!

Willie Cole: Lyrical Reconstructions at Country Music Hall of Fame

Willie Cole: Lyrical Reconstructions, features new and recent works by the critically acclaimed American sculptor and printmaker, opening Thursday, March 28 and on view through May 16, 2024.

Cole’s creative process blends familiar consumer objects with references to the appropriation of African and African American images, resulting in sophisticated hybrids. His most recent bodies of work repurpose discarded water bottles or musical instruments, such as his 2022 commission, “Ornithology,” for the Kansas City International Airport, a work comprised of twelve larger-than-life birds made entirely from alto saxophones with an accompanying soundscape in honor of jazz legend Charlie “Yardbird” Parker.

This exhibit is guest-curated by Paul Barrett.

Read more about the exhibition here!

Do Ho Suh's "Some/One" featured in Mia's The Shape of Time: Korean Art After 1989

Do Ho Suh’s “Some/One” (2001) is featured in a new exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art titled The Shape of Time: Korean Art After 1989.

This exhibition features the first generation of artists of Korean descent to experience the new freedoms and rapid changes ushered in by democracy. Born between 1960 and 1986, they came of age in a time of transition, their work filtered through the collective memory of authoritarian rule in South Korea. Here, they reflect on social and political tensions, economic and cultural shifts. In often monumental works, they bring viewers to the border with North Korea, illuminate the ironies of globalization, and suggest what has been gained and lost in South Korea’s ascendance.

Organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, this is the first major showing of Korean contemporary art in the United States since 2009. Many of the artists are well known in South Korea or have an international following; others may be less familiar, especially in American museums. They mold the medium to their message, whether photography or painting, ceramics or video. They honor some traditions and resist others. They bend time and place, addressing the past, present and future to make sense of their complex experiences.

Learn more about the exhibition here!

Julie Mehretu Unveils 'Ensemble' at Palazzo Grassi in Venice

“From March 17th, 2024, to January 6th, 2025, Palazzo Grassi in Venice hosts Ensemble, Europe’s most extensive exhibition of Julie Mehretu’s art to date. Curated by Caroline Bourgeois, the Pinault Collection’s Chief Curator, in collaboration with Mehretu herself, the exhibit showcases over fifty pieces spanning 25 years, encompassing paintings and prints, including her latest works from 2021-2024. Spanning two floors, the show features 17 pieces from the Pinault Collection alongside loans from global museums and private collectors.

Interspersed throughout the exhibition are pieces by Mehretu’s closest artist friends, with whom she shares a profound connection cultivated over the years through collaboration and exchange. The exhibition, designed around visual resonance, offers a non-linear exploration of Mehretu’s oeuvre. designboom had the privilege of experiencing the exhibition firsthand, delving into Mehretu’s artistic journey to understand how it came into being and is constantly renewed.”

Read more about the exhibition on Designboom here!

Images by Marco Cappelletti © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection

National Museum of Asian Art Announces “Do Ho Suh: Public Figures”

First New Sculpture To Be Displayed Outside the Museum in Three Decades, Ushering in Museum’s Second Century

“The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art presents “Do Ho Suh: Public Figures,” a sculpture by contemporary Korean artist Do Ho Suh commissioned to celebrate the museum’s 100th anniversary. The monumental plinth will be unveiled April 27 and installed on the museum’s Freer Plaza for five years, facing the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

First presented as part of Public Art Fund’s 1998 exhibition “Beyond the Monument” (Brooklyn, New York), “Public Figures” challenges the notion of heroic individualism and the stability of national narratives. For the work, Suh created a plinth for a monument; however, its imposing form is not a base to support a heroic figure or to mark a particular historic event, but rather a massive weight held aloft by many small, individualized figures caught in mid-stride. Prominently placed in the center of the United States capital where it will be visible to some of the 25 million visitors to the National Mall each year, the commission dovetails with the global movement to rethink the role of the monument.

The unveiling of “Public Figures” marks the culmination of the National Museum of Asian Art’s centennial celebrations. In 2023, the museum honored its 100th anniversary with a yearlong series of events and programs that deepened public understanding of Asian art and cultures and their intersections with America. Ushering in the museum’s second century, this will be the first new sculpture to be displayed in front of the building in over three decades.”

Read more about the exhibition here!

Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul and London.

Akunyili Crosby featured in National Gallery Exhibition

The exhibition titled The Time is Always Now - Artists Reframe the Black Figure curated by writer Ekow Eshun, showcases the work of contemporary artists from the African diaspora, including Michael Armitage, Lubaina Himid, Kerry James Marshall, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, and Amy Sherald, and highlights the use of figures to illuminate the richness and complexity of Black life. As well as surveying the presence of the Black figure in Western art history, we examine its absence – and the story of representation told through these works, as well as the social, psychological and cultural contexts in which they were produced.

The exhibition features the work of leading artists including Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Hurvin Anderson, Michael Armitage, Jordan Casteel, Noah Davis, Godfried Donkor, Kimathi Donkor, Denzil Forrester, Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Titus Kaphar, Kerry James Marshall, Wangechi Mutu, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Chris Ofili, Jennifer Packer, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Thomas J Price, Amy Sherald, Lorna Simpson, Henry Taylor and Barbara Walker.

The Time is Always Now - Artists Reframe the Black Figure is on view at the National Portrait Gallery in London from February 22 - May19, 2024.

Read more about the exhibition here!

Dyani White Hawk in Coversation at the Denver Art Museum

As part of the Logan Lecture Series, Rory Padeken, Vicki and Kent Logan Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Denver Art Museum, engages with Dyani White Hawk about her dynamic practice of bringing Indigenous traditions of abstraction into a contemporary context.

This lecture is presented jointly by the departments of Modern and Contemporary Art and Native Arts and will take place on February 27th, 2024 from 6-7pm at the Denver Art Museum.

View the recorded lecture here!

Willie Cole's Five Beauties featured in National Academy of Design Sites of Impermanence

The National Academy of Design exhibition Sites of Impermanence is an exhibition of art and architectural works by the recently elected 2023 National Academicians Alice Adams, Sanford Biggers, Willie Cole, Torkwase Dyson, Richard Gluckman, Carlos Jiménez, Mel Kendrick, and Sarah Oppenheimer.

Although disparate in their approaches to material and subject matter, the artists and architects featured in Sites of Impermanence form a vivid cross-section of responses to urgent contemporary conditions and the underlying histories that have shaped them. From site-specific projects to sculpture, drawing, architecture, textile, and interactive installation, the selection of works in the exhibition reflects on a bounty of ideas (critical environmental challenges, the ongoing effects of slavery, the blurred lines between human and machine), to chart pathways towards transformation and liberation. Sites of Impermanence is co-curated by Sara Reisman, Chief Curator, and Natalia Viera Salgado, Associate Curator.

Sites of Impermanence is on view at the National Academy of Design in NY from February 8, 2024 - May 11, 2024.

Read more about the exhibition here!

Delita Martin Retrospective at U of Texas at San Antonio

This solo exhibition titled, Delita Martin: Her Temple of Everyday Familiars, A Retrospective, features the work of Delita Martin, a world-renowned master printmaker known for creating representations of black women in complex and luxuriant narrative portraits. These images draw in viewers to experience unexpected and evocative perspectives and the majesty in the often-hidden spirits of the everyday. This exhibition features a retrospective of the artist’s career including works produced in her adolescence, an interactive installation, and recent work.

Curated by Aissatou Sidime-Blanton .

The exhibition is on view at the Russell Hill Rogers Galleries at the University of Texas at San Antonio from January 26 - March 22, 2024.

Read more about the exhibition here!

Images by Patrick Buckner Photography.