ARTE: LAKWENA TALKS WITH DESIGN INDABA

Lakwena Maciver will open her solo exhibition next month, January 17th.  Get to know the artist a little more in this interview done by Design Indaba.

London-based artist Lakwena Maciver’s huge outdoor murals may be influenced by the exuberant scale of neon signs in Las Vegas but her most recent work, commissioned for the Africa Calling exhibition at London’s Southbank, drew on her African heritage.

Maciver visited family’s home in Uganda for the first time as an adult and her installation for the exhibition is bred out of this experience. During her trip she snapped photos of patterned minibus taxis and the intricate grille work on building facades.

For Africa Calling – curated by Kathy Shenoy of ethical online store Shake the Dust and Liezel Strauss of Subject Matter Art and the My Japan photographic project – she presented three small wooden-panel paintings. Emblazoned with the words “karibu” (“welcome” in Swahili) and “paco” (“home” in the Ugandan dialect of Acoli), they are rendered in striking colours and graphic patterns.

“These pieces are a way of processing what I experienced there and the idea of ‘home’. They’re about understanding who I am and where I come from.”

Her body of work centres on signage, language and social phrases. “Language is really important in what I do,” she told Design Indaba in this interview in London. “Words, typography and language – the meaning and the actual visual look of words.”

She creates work in multiple media that lives inside galleries, on the street and sometimes on apparel and products for brands such as Adidas, Converse, Diesel, Palladium Boots, Red Bull and Toms.

Maciver’s street murals are titanic and painted in brilliant colours reminiscent of early Technicolor films. The first one she ever painted, saying “I Remember Paradise” on a wall in Miami, has lettering that is taller than her.

The London-based designer grew up predominantly in England but she is preoccupied with things that reference her African roots.

Her aesthetic is made up of bold graphics, geometric fields, text and bright colours: “This is influenced by what I saw growing up and what appealed to me – which were the things that referenced my African heritage.”

ARTE: Samuel Levi Jones artist talk

Here is the live recorded artist talk that happened 12/14/14

ARTE: BLACKOUT BLACK FRIDAY

Terence Nance new short film #BlackoutBlackFriday

Blackout for Human Rights (Blackout) is a network of concerned artists, activists, and citizens who committed their energy and resources to immediately address the staggering level of human rights violations against fellow Americans throughout the United States. We have witnessed enough. An affront to any citizen’s human rights threatens the liberty of all. So, we participate in one of the most time honored American traditions: dissent. We demand an immediate end to the brutal treatment and inhumane killings of our loved ones; the lives of our friends, our parents and our children have value and should be treated with respect. Our right to life is secured not only by our humanity, but is protected by law both federally and internationally by the Constitution of the United States of America and the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

http://www.blackoutforhumanrights.com

Watch another film by Nance and other filmmakers in this #BlackoutBlackFriday playlist

ARTE: DEAR WHITE PEOPLE

ARTE: Kenturah's Artist Talk

Here is the live recorded video of Kenturah's art talk that took place during Leimert Park Artwalk on Sunday.  Shawanna Davis is the moderator.

ARTE: Hala Matar x Fruits de Mer

Hala Matar's short film!

ARTE: Animated history of Architecture

LOVING THIS!

ARTE: Narratives and Meditations

Kenturah's next solo exhibit opens this upcoming Saturday August 30th at 6pm...looking forward to seeing you all there!

ARTE: TOUCHING THE ART

Our new art world boo is Casey Jane Ellison!  We are happy to be a part of Touching the Art - Episode 2 - Postmodernism, post-Net & The Art Market on Ovation!

ARTE: Reading Rainbow

Reading Rainbow has a kickstarter that began a month ago and I was one of the early contributors that pledged with in the first 24 hours.  When the campaign launched the goal to reach was 1 million.  After the campaign went live they surpassed the million dollar mark in just a few hours. By day 2 they had surpassed the 2 mill mark and by day 3 they surpassed the 3 mill mark.  The raised their goal to 5 million and are just half a million shy. At just over 91,000 backers it is the largest crowd sourced campaign in history.  I gave because Reading Rainbow was one of the television shows that I was most excited by when I was a child.  The way they used art, music, dance and theater to make reading seem cool are one of the main reasons why I love reading and the arts!

They have a little under 47 hours left so get to it!

READING RAINBOW KICKSTARTER LINK

ARTE: SOCAL Connected

This originally aired last night.  But you can watch it again on channel 28 KCET tomorrow night at 8pm and again over the weekend.  Check us out in the segment about the future of Leimert Park.

ARTE: MADE IN LA 2014

LA's Biennial is coming! I see you Danielle Dean...

Danielle was one of the artists in our inagural group exhibition O P E N, we had "Baby Girl" featured in our Video Room.

ARTE: Kentrifican Museum of Culture

Inter-disciplinary artist Kenyatta AC Hinkle has something special going on with the Kentrifican project.  Watch the video and click the link!

ARTE: 4 WOMEN

Kenturah Davis was commissioned to do her first public art project. Watch her awesome time lapse of making the hand written mural drawings.

Commissioned by Alliance Francaise d'Accra, 2014.
Drawn by writing this Audre Lorde quote in repetition:
"I AM DELIBERATE AND AFRAID OF NOTHING."

Background:
I arrived in Ghana November, 2013. I found myself listening to a lot of Nina Simone, so when the opportunity came to propose a mural for International Women's Day, I immediately thought of Simone's "Four Women." The emotion of this song intensified my experiences as I traveled throughout the country, visiting the slave castles in and grappling with the history of the African diaspora. The theme Alliance Francaise selected for the mural, "Women of the World", encouraged me to consider subjects of today. Using Simone's song as a point of departure, I identified four African women who live in Accra and were doing interesting work that contributes to the community. It was important that they not be "famous"; rather, i tried to find a balance between anonymity and admirability.Ultimately, I wanted to create a work of art that portrayed accomplished women with very different personal stories and are tied to the strength and resiliency that Nina Simone conveys in her lyrical narratives. They are symbols of the many more amazing women I've encountered in Ghana.

Integral to the process of making the drawing, I had to also identify a text that I would use to render the four women. I finally selected one suggested by a friend; a quote by feminist, Audre Lorde: "I AM DELIBERATE AND AFRAID OF NOTHING." This simple, yet potent phrase served the dual purpose of declaring their sense of purpose and functioning as a meditation by which i could absorb its meaning for my own benefit. The process of writing a text in repetition to compose the portrait was a metaphor for the way that we acquire and inhabit language. It extended the work into the realm of a performative act, in which the process of making it is as important as the finished piece.Understanding that the advent of the written word arrived as the capacity of human memory deteriorated situates the portraits as a kind of documentation that might extend the reach of collective memory and historical consciousness.

Acknowledgements:

Alliance Francaise d'Accra
Osei-Duro
Shawanna Davis
Bright Kpoha
Keni and Mildred Davis
Papillion Art

Four Women:
Lila Macqueen Djaba
Akosua Adoma Owusu
Nana Oforiatta Ayim
Martina Odonkor

ARTE: Nzuji de Magalhaes

Meeting Nzuji for the first time is quite the fun experience. She is warm, very friendly and is eager & excited to speak about her work.  I caught up with her at her show at LA Artcore Brewery where she has a few paintings and a video installation on view now.  But I fell in love with her work at the Made in LA show at the Hammer last year.

Nzuji is from Angola and is a painter, sculptor and composer.  She recently won the commission of doing a permanent public art install at the soon to open Bundy train stop on the Expo metro line!

Her installation of piano cities at the Hammer Museum

ARTE: Andrea Chung

Andrea's artist statement:

My work examines cultures created under the influence of colonial and post-colonial regimes and their relationship to The Land. I mine foodstuffs, recipes and archival materials such as photographs and tourist publications, in order to reconstruct and create a new series of narratives, which I juxtapose against the stories told by the colony to sell romantic notions about nature and labor.

Through sculpture and painting I use food items and recipes to explore migration patterns, both voluntary and involuntary, and how cultures have been created through the influence of multiple mother cultures and the conditions of The Land. By manipulating photographs and tourism imagery, I investigate how The Land has been sold through picturesque fantasy and fantastic copy.

I ask the viewer to question the “real,” the seen and unseen in order to navigate these conflicting narratives.

http://andreachungart.com

Bato Disik, 2012 made of sugarSink & Swim, 2013 made of sugar and wire

From "Thongs: experience the luxury included" series 2010

Come back to Jamaica, video animation 2009

ARTE: Mother of George

This film comes out in LA tomorrow. The trailer is beautiful and some of our favorites worked on the film, Bradford Young is the DP, Mobalji Dawodu was the costume designer and Andrew Dosunmu helms the director role! Check it out.

Synopsis:

Adenike and Ayodele (The Walking Dead's Danai Guira and veteran actor Isaach De Bankole) are a Nigerian couple living in Brooklyn.  Following the joyous celebration of their wedding, complications arise our of their inability to conceive a child - a problem that devastates their family and defies cultural expectations, leading Adenike to make a shocking decision that could either save her family or destroy it.  Acclaimed director Andrew Dosumnu (Restless City) captures the nuances of this unique and fascinating culture by creating a beautiful, vibrant and moving portrait of a couple whose joys and struggles are at once intimate and universal.

The films website has all the details about show times and theaters.

ARTE: Silkscreen How To

Love this from the Bruces!

ARTE: STWTS

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh is an artist we have worked with in the past and have featured many times on ARTE: Her project Stop Telling Women To Smile is kick starting!  Check it out and pledge to get some really rad things :-)

ARTE: Roy Lichtenstein

Had the pleasure of checking out the Roy Lichtenstein retrospect at Centre Pompidou in Paris.  This video from My Art Agenda sums up the exhibition experience perfectly!