The second annual presentation of Studio Sound—a performance series that champions artists and musicians whose work engages new possibilities for sound and music—will feature interdisciplinary artist and writer Sable Elyse Smith. Exploring auditory art forms through both live and recorded performance, this ongoing series suggests an expanded history of art in which sound plays a central role.

Smith’s work draws from the legacy of Conceptual art, using video, sculpture, photography, text, and now sound to confront the mundane and pervasive impacts of systemic oppression. At MoMA, Smith will present a new musical composition and video installation in the form of an opera, with ticketed performances and an installation on view during Museum hours. Part of a larger ongoing project, this work tells a story of queer love between two Black women set in a surreal environment. Unfolding across multiple scenes, the performance explores the political, collective, and dramatic potential of the voice as well as the ways in which language dissolves through sonic expression.

Organized by Martha Joseph, The Phyllis Ann and Walter Borten Assistant Curator of Media and Performance, with May Makki, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance. Performances produced by Lizzie Gorfaine, Associate Director and Producer, with Nora Chellew, Assistant Performance Coordinator, Performance and Live Programs.

Highlighting thirty years of artmaking dedicated to the Black experience in America, Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other is the first comprehensive survey of the communal art-making projects that form the heart of the artist’s pioneering creative practice. Accompanied by a selection of Clark’s photographs, prints, and sculpture, the exhibition will feature five of Clark’s large-scale, collaborative projects, including her barrier-breaking The Hair Craft Project (2014) and the ongoing performance, Unraveling.

Working with a wide range of emotionally resonant materials and everyday objects—from cotton cloth and human hair to school desks and bricks— Clark encourages audiences to confront through material transformation the country’s historical imbalances and racial injustices. At the same time, Clark celebrates the complexities of the Black cultural experience. The uses of traditional craft materials, her applied knowledge of global craft techniques, and the communal collaborations that are integral to the integrity of Clark's art are among the many ways Clark represents and honors the legacies of the African diaspora in Black life.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Sonya Clark is an artist and educator renowned for mixed-media works that address race and visibility, explore Blackness, and redress history. She is the Winifred L. Arms Professor of Art and Humanities at Amherst College in Massachusetts. Previously, Clark was honored as a Distinguished Research Fellow in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she served as chair of the Craft/Material Studies Department for over a decade. Prior to that appointment, she was the Baldwin Bascom Professor of Creative Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she taught fornine years. Clark earned an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and was honored with their Distinguished Alumni Award. She has a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her first college degree is from Amherst College, where she also received an honorary doctorate. In 2021, she was awarded additional honorary doctorates from Franklin and Marshall College and Maine College of Art.

Her work has been exhibited in over 500 museums and galleries in the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe, and Australia. Clark’s artwork is held in the collections of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Museum of Fine Art in Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, among many others. Clark is the recipient of numerous awards, including a United States Artist Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, Rappaport Prize, Art Prize, and Art Matters Grant. She has been selected for residencies at Red Gate in Beijing, China; BAU Camargo in Cassis, France; the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy; a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in Washington, DC; Civitella Ranieri in Umbertide, Italy; Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York; the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts; Indigo Arts in Portland, Maine; an Affiliate Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, Italy; and Black Rock in Dakar, Senegal, among others.

Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other is organized by the Museum of Arts and Design; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Ml; and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

Support for the exhibition and publication Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other was provided by grants from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The exhibition is also supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

With additional support from WayMaker Media.

In February 2024, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present the groundbreaking exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism. Through some 160 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film, and ephemera, it will explore the comprehensive and far-reaching ways in which Black artists portrayed everyday modern life in the new Black cities that took shape in the 1920s–40s in New York City’s Harlem and nationwide in the early decades of the Great Migration when millions of African Americans began to move away from the segregated rural South. The first art museum survey of the subject in New York City since 1987, the exhibition will establish the Harlem Renaissance and its radically new development of the modern Black subject as central to the development of international modern art.

Featured artists include Charles Alston, Aaron Douglas, Meta Warrick Fuller, William H. Johnson, Archibald Motley, Winold Reiss, Augusta Savage, James Van Der Zee, and Laura Wheeler Waring. These artists will be shown in direct juxtaposition with portrayals of international African diasporan subjects by European counterparts ranging from Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, and Pablo Picasso to Germaine Casse, Jacob Epstein, and Ronald Moody.

A significant percentage of the paintings, sculpture, and works on paper on view in the exhibition come from the extensive collections of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), including Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Fisk University Galleries, Hampton University Art Museum, and Howard University Gallery of Art. Other major lenders include the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, with pending loans from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The exhibition will include loans from significant private collections and major European lenders.

The exhibition is made possible by the Ford Foundation, the Barrie A. and Deedee Wigmore Foundation, and Denise Littlefield Sobel.

For Taylor Simmons, painting is a process and a way of processing: a meditative means of moving with and through a composition. He doesn’t always know how a painting will look, or what it will be about, until it emerges of its own accord. This introspective exercise is reflected concurrently in the figures he paints, who are often alone, inert, and seemingly deep in thought. Processing is a biological function—it’s how our brains collect sensory inputs from the world then integrate, direct, and store that information in our bodies. Like the popular cliché, “trust the process,” it can be very difficult to see an end or outcome while you’re still in the middle.

The show’s title—“LIMBO = Living Is My Best Option”—points directly to that place of suspension while also working as an anacronym, à la Young Thug, who in the court proceedings of an ongoing RICO case has likewise revealed the abbreviations behind several of his monikers, such as THUG = Truly Humble Under God. In Christianity, limbo is where the spirit waits between birth and baptism, death and the promise of eternal life.

Simmons paints from reference images, mostly photographs. During a prolonged hospital stay after a biking accident a few summers ago, he became obsessed with social media archive pages and their rarified glimpses into the past; as many are crowdsourced, they’re able to collect pictures and stories otherwise discarded by mainstream documentation. He was particularly captivated by the lost imageries of Black and brown people living in urban America in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s: decades that charted tremendously creative local subcultures, the ascension and explosion of Hip Hop, the crack epidemic, and the war on drugs. This history’s palpable influence has shaped every corner of popular culture and the photos Simmons is drawn to infuse it with the gestures and textures of everyday life, which he carefully transcribes and memorializes in the grand format of the painter’s tableau. His scale and big, bold brushwork mirrors the bodily gesticulating of Abstract Expressionism and the palettes of Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky, except that Simmons is always unapologetically figurative and sometimes specifically referential.

Of the twelve paintings in “LIMBO,” some are based on pictures Simmons saw online and some are based on pictures he took himself. In Pull-A-Part, a gleaming ’80s Chevrolet Monte Carlo stretches across the panels of a triptych. Like Moses from the Mountaintop is a cropped portrait of a softly smiling DJ Screw based on a photo by Ben Tecumseh DeSoto and quickly recognizable from his haircut’s spiraling buzz design. Up First, from a photo Simmons took near where he lives Brooklyn, depicts a man sitting on an overturned yellow newspaper box, looking at his hands.

Born in Atlanta and raised in rural Georgia, Simmons finds a lot to look at in the surrealism of city life, which, if you really pay attention, is full of its own preternatural poetry. He is less holistically detail oriented than he is diligently selective. His portraits express a deep appreciation for style, but not to be confused with fashion: style in the sense of the language of love-for-self; style in the sense of dignity. Most of his subjects are men. When taking his own photos, he points to the neighborhood personalities you can count on running into on particular blocks or park benches. The guys who always say good morning first and whose meticulous daily ensembles trace a candy hue from the brim of their fitted to the tread on their immaculate Air Force 1s—which are probably as old as you and have been lovingly polished and placed in their original box between wears.

Aging men are the loneliest people in our society, he tells me, stifled by the enculturation of patriarchy’s competitive and isolating hierarchies. But these characters, for Simmons, are an understudied archetype deserving of the tender reverence of observation. His art plays out in the acts of witness and reflection. “I see myself in every one of my paintings,” he says. These portraits do more than record likeness—they make myths, too.

Gordon Parks. Jean-Michel Basquiat. Lorna Simpson. Kehinde Wiley. Nina Chanel Abney. These names loom large in the past and present of art—as do many others in the collection of musical and cultural icons Swizz Beatz (Kasseem Dean) and Alicia Keys. Expansive in their collecting habits, the Deans, both born and raised in New York, champion a philosophy of “artists supporting artists.” The first major exhibition of the Dean Collection, Giantsshowcases a focused selection from the couple’s world-class holdings. The Brooklyn Museum’s presentation spotlights works by Black diasporic artists, part of our ongoing efforts to expand the art-historical narrative. 

“Giants” refers to several aspects of the Dean Collection: the renown of legendary artists, the impact of canon-expanding contemporary artists, and the monumental works by such creators as Derrick Adams, Arthur Jafa, and Meleko Mokgosi. Immense pieces—including the largest ever by Mokgosi—are paired with standouts such as Parks’s seminal photographs, Wiley’s revolutionary portraits, and Esther Mahlangu’s globe-bridging canvases. 

The term also evokes the strength of the bonds between the Deans and the artists they support, and among the artists themselves. Along with examining these links and legacies, the exhibition will encourage “giant conversations” inspired by the works on view—critiquing society and celebrating Blackness.

Learn more about our touring exhibitions, and bring this exhibition to your institution by emailing exhibitions@brooklynmuseum.org.

“Long Journey Forward: Black Men in Passage” is a celebration of photography centered around Black Men by an incredible group of image makers.

Featured Photographers

Laylan Amatullan Barrayn, Tau Battice, Rain Bermudez, Brian Branch Price John Brathwaite, Kwame Brath waite, Crystal Wiley Brown, Larry Brown, Spencer Burnett, Howard Cash, Barron Claiborne, Rudy Collins, Christopher Cook, Adger Cowans, *Malik Cumbo, Dee Dwyer Robert Eilets, Don J. Gilmore, Bob Gore, Leroy Henderson, Kay Hickman, Melanie Hill, Raymond Holman Ur, Steven Irby, Debi Jackson, Jesse James, Glenda Jones, Lauri Lyons, Melvin McCray, Lamar T. Metcalf, Elijah Mogoli, Bill Moore, Ace Murray, Mansa Musa, Hakim Mutlaq, Malique Payne, Douglas Pierce, Herb Robinson, Jamel Shabazz, Coreen Simpson, Idris Solomon, Chuck Stewart, Marcia Wilson, and Michael Young

Wilmer Jennings Gallery, New York, NY
January 24 - March 9, 2024

“Beyond the single, immaculate individual expression, I hear an enthralling symphony,” says the acclaimed London-based designer Grace Wales Bonner. For this exhibition, the latest installment of MoMA’s celebrated Artist’s Choice series, Wales Bonner has gathered more than 50 artworks from the Museum’s collection that explore sound, movement, performance, and style in the African diaspora and beyond. She brings together artists from around the world and across generations, including Terry Adkins, Moustapha Dimé, Agnes Martin, Man Ray, Betye Saar, and David Hammons. The works presented are not static objects or images but dynamic entities deeply connected to ritual, devotion, and collective experience. Sculptures seem to tremble with sound; scores evoke ceremonies; drawings trace states of reverie. These intimate and poetic relations inspired Wales Bonner’s title for the exhibition, Spirit Movers.

Wales Bonner has changed the way we see style. Every detail of her interdisciplinary fashion designs, publications, exhibitions, and films is related to histories, archives, and cultural identities across the diasporic world. Spirit Movers creates a deeply personal meditation on Black expression—and reflects Wales Bonner’s commitment to archival research as a form of spirituality and an aesthetic practice.

Organized by Grace Wales Bonner with Michelle Kuo, The Marlene Hess Curator, and Dana Liljegren, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art; and with the collaboration of Nick Murphy, Curatorial Partner, Pantograph, Paris.

Thanks to Liam Sangmuah and Jessica Hamenyimana, Research Associates, Wales Bonner.

Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility presents works of art that feature partially obscured or hidden figures, thus positioning them at the “edge of visibility.” In this art context, the common phrase going dark is understood as a tactic whereby artists visually conceal the body to explore a key tension in contemporary society: the desire to be seen and the desire to be hidden from sight.

Artists in the show articulate going dark by way of formal strategies that may include literal darkening methods like shadowing; rotating the body; novel materials and printing methods; and postproduction tools that blur or brighten. Some of the most recent works that will be on view draw upon digital technology, such as the chroma-key green (or blue) screen. These works move fluidly between figuration and abstraction, and many of the artists inventively manipulate color and light to also obscure optical perception, challenging the very biology of vision.

Occupying the Guggenheim Museum’s iconic rotunda, Going Dark presents more than 100 works by a group of 28 artists, the majority of whom are Black and more than half of whom are women. While most of the works date from the 1980s to the present, a selection of them were created in the 1960s and ’70s by three iconic artists—David Hammons, Faith Ringgold, and Charles White—suggesting that the development of Conceptual art during these decades launched new pathways of expression that laid the groundwork for contemporary artists tackling the “edge of visibility” today.

Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility is organized by Ashley James, Associate Curator, Contemporary Art, with Faith Hunter, Curatorial Assistant.

We’re excited to give you an extra week to catch Spike Lee: Creative Sources. Become a Member to see both this exhibition and Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys for free.

Take a rare glimpse into the world of Spike Lee (born Atlanta, Georgia, 1957; raised in Brooklyn, New York), one of the most influential and prolific American filmmakers and directors. Through an immersive installation of objects drawn from Lee’s personal collection, visitors will discover the sources of inspiration that have fueled his creative output.

Reverberations can be found between items that have been touchpoints for Lee and the topics he explores on-screen. Throughlines of his life and oeuvre—Black history and culture, Brooklyn, sports, music, cinema history, and family—are explored with more than 450 works drawn from his personal collection. Artworks by prominent Black American artists, including Kehinde Wiley, Deborah Roberts, and Michael Ray Charles, are displayed alongside instruments once owned by legendary musicians, as well as historical photographs, sports and movie memorabilia, and more. Together they reveal the connections among the people, places, and ideas that have fueled Lee’s incisive storytelling.