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    in Exhibitions

    See Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Boyhood Home, New York Studio, and Unseen Artworks in a Blockbuster Show Curated by His Family

    Since his death at just 27 from a drug overdose in 1988, Jean-Michel Basquiat has become a legendary figure, immortalized in film and commanding more money at auction than any other American artist.
    With his potent blend of fame and critical acclaim, Basquiat is both a pop-culture phenomenon and a major target for art museums in search of the next blockbuster exhibition. But his latest solo exhibition in New York isn’t hosted by one of the city’s temples of arts and culture.
    Instead, it’s being held at the Starrett-Lehigh, a warehouse and office building in Chelsea, in a ground-floor space that has been transformed into a wood-paneled gallery for the occasion by architect David Adjaye and design firm Pentagram.
    The show is “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure,” and it’s the first exhibition organized by the artist’s family. It features more than 200 drawings and paintings from the artist’s estate, including many major works which have not been seen for decades—if ever.

    Installation view of “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure.” Photo: Ivane Katamashvili, courtesy of the Jean-Michel Basquiat Estate.
    Since the death of Gerard Basquiat, the artist’s father, in 2013, the estate has been run by Jean-Michel’s younger sisters, Jeanine Heriveaux and Lisane Basquiat. The two have built a Basquiat branding empire, licensing the artist’s work and image for a wide range of merchandise, from socks to skateboards to seemingly anything in between.
    But “King Pleasure,” which the sisters curated with their stepmother, Nora Fitzpatrick, marks a new chapter for the estate, offering unprecedented insight into Basquiat’s home life and the years before he skyrocketed to art-world stardom.
    The show presents Basquiat as a singular talent, a creative genius driven to create seemingly from the start—childhood drawings are shown alongside his birth announcement (6 pounds, 10 ounces). There are also family photos, home movies, and a wide variety of personal artifacts.
    Lisanne Basquiat, Jean-Michel Basqiat, and Jeanine Heriveaux as children. Courtesy of the estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
    Set to a soundtrack of period music such as Blondie’s “Call Me” and “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” by Diana Ross—the estate has partnered with Spotify on a suite of playlists titled “Listen Like Basquiat“—the show offers a surprisingly intimate portrait.
    It’s the family’s attempt to push back against the dominant narrative of Basquiat’s life, which tends to romanticize his time as a 17-year-old homeless street artist, his issues with addiction, and his string of beautiful girlfriends, which included a young Madonna.
    “This is a way for us to collaborate as a community and fill in the spaces from all of our perspectives on Jean-Michel and his impact on the world,” Lisane Basquiat said in a statement. “We wanted to bring his work and personality forward, in a way only we can, for people to immerse themselves in. We want this to be an experiential and multi-dimensional celebration of Jean-Michel’s life.”
    In some ways, “King Pleasure” follows the playbook set by the recent trend for pop-up museums and immersive exhibitions—take, for instance, its relatively high ticket prices: $35 general admission, or pay $65 to skip the line. But the unlike the craze for animated digital projections of famous artworks, this show has the genuine article: masterpieces that haven’t been seen in decades, safeguarded by the family but locked away from the public.
    Installation view of “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure.” Photo: Ivane Katamashvili, courtesy of the Jean-Michel Basquiat Estate.
    Among the most impressive are the massive canvases Basquiat painted in 1985 for the VIP room at the downtown nightclub Palladium, torn down in 1997 to make way for a New York University dorm. The monumental paintings mark the exhibition’s finale, installed in a lounge-like space that seems tailor-made for hosting after-hours parties and events with even steeper entry fees.
    There are other interesting touches in terms of installation, such as re-creations of rooms from the family’s Boerum Hill home, and a fake façade—complete with bicycle parked outside—of the apartment and studio Basquiat rented from Andy Warhol at 57 Great Jones Street, which serves as a backdrop for animated projections of Basquiat’s handwritten notes. (Don’t expect much in the way of Instagram-ready photo ops, though: the lighting design discourages selfies in front of the art.)
    Installation view of “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure.” Photo: Ivane Katamashvili, courtesy of the Jean-Michel Basquiat Estate.
    Nevertheless, it’s transportive to step into the show’s recreation of the Great Jones Street studio, with paintings leaning against the walls and laid out on the floor amid piles of books and art supplies. There’s even the artist’s trench coat, hung up as if waiting for him to grab it on the way out the door.
    See more photos from the show below.
    Jean-Michel Basqiat, Untitled (100 Yen) (1982). Courtesy of the estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, licensed by Artestar, New York.
    Installation view of “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure.” Photo: Ivane Katamashvili, courtesy of the Jean-Michel Basquiat Estate.
    Installation view of “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure.” Photo: Ivane Katamashvili, courtesy of the Jean-Michel Basquiat Estate.
    Jean-Michel Basqiat, Jailbirds (1983). Courtesy of the estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, licensed by Artestar, New York.
    Installation view of “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure.” Photo: Ivane Katamashvili, courtesy of the Jean-Michel Basquiat Estate.
    Jean-Michel Basqiat, Charles the First (1982). Courtesy of the estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, licensed by Artestar, New York.
    Installation view of “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure.” Photo: Ivane Katamashvili, courtesy of the Jean-Michel Basquiat Estate.
    Installation view of “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure.” Photo: Ivane Katamashvili, courtesy of the Jean-Michel Basquiat Estate.
    Installation view of “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure.” Photo: Ivane Katamashvili, courtesy of the Jean-Michel Basquiat Estate.
    Installation view of “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure.” Photo: Ivane Katamashvili, courtesy of the Jean-Michel Basquiat Estate.
    Jean-Michel Basquiat. Courtesy of the estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
    “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure” is on view at the Starrett-Lehigh Building, 601 West 26th Street, New York, from April 9, 2022.
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    in Street Art

    “Le Gang Des Potelets” by Benjamin Malick in Paris, France

    Multi-disciplinary artist Benjamin Malick shares his project “Le Gang Des Potelets” in Paris, France. Le Gang Des Potelets is a street art concept, aiming to symbolise the society through the embodiment of Parisian poles.Benjamin gives life to his characters thanks to different technics such as scultpure, mosaic, pochoir, etc. Each piece represents different aspect of the man / woman in our society : desire, passion, history, economic and social level, culture, origins, and more.All these figures form a clan, a gang — le Gang des Potelets (The Gang of Bollards).Benjamin Malick is based between Paris, Libreville and Dubai. Born in France to French-Algerian parents, he grew up in Gabon (Africa). Enhanced by his multi-cultural upbringing, he developed a strong passion and curiosity for travels, adventures and social & environmental causes which today inspire most of his artistic work.Using a multi-disciplinary approach, he revisits cultures & traditions and combines his documentary-style photography with sculptures, street art & collage techniques. With a surreal and dreamlike touch, Benjamin Malick aims to uncover social and cultural differences; at times decrypting known stereotypes and highlighting unknown realities.Take a look below for more photos of this project. More

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    in Street Art

    New Mural by Éric Lacan in Hérault, France

    Urban artist Éric Lacan have worked on a new mural in Hérault, France. The mural features his signature black and white portraitures but instead of elegant female subjects this work features a skull with a beautiful floral headpiece.Éric Lacan started to draw attention to himself at the end of the 2000’s with black and white wheatpastes under the nickname Monsieur Qui. Behind his sometimes elegant, sometimes scraggy mysterious female portraits hide a subtle satire of society’s diktat around women. Graphic details like hair entangled in bramble, flowers, and words scratched on the canvas surface, cannot but bewitch passer-byes and imbue his work with a powerful, dark and melancholic romanticism.Check out below for more photo of Monsieur Qui’s  latest work. More

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    in Exhibitions

    ‘The Namibian Art Scene Deserves Better:’ the Underwriters of Namibia’s Venice Biennale Pavilion Have Pulled Out One Week Before the Event

    The first-ever Namibian Pavilion at the upcoming 59th Venice Biennale has been thrown into chaos over allegations that it misrepresents the country’s art scene. The uproar has prompted the pavilion’s art patron, Monica Cembrola, to resign just one week before the opening of the event. Meanwhile, the main sponsor of the show, luxury travel company Abercrombie and Kent, has also yanked its support. 
    The sudden upheaval follows a petition published online in early March, signed by 372 individuals from the Namibian art community. It expressed outrage regarding the proposed Venice show, calling it a “poorly conceptualized and inappropriate debut that takes an antiquated and problematic view of Namibia and Namibian art.”
    The pavilion, to be staged on the island of Certosa, is titled “The Lone Stone Men of the Desert” and features work by a Namibian artist who prefers to be known by the Banksy-like pseudonym RENN. Organizers have called it a “land art project,” which comprises a series of sculptures made of iron rods and desert stones in the likeness of the human form.
    RENN is a 64-year-old white Namibian man born in Johannesburg, South Africa, who is making his artistic debut in Venice. He began his practice in 2013 in the desert of Namibia’s Kunene district.
    RENN, Out of the Sand for the Namibian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale 2022. Photo ©RENN.
    The Venice show also marks the first time that its Italian curator, Marco Furio Ferrario, is organizing an art exhibition. He generally refers to himself as a “strategic consultant,” and has worked since 2014 for companies in Namibia, notably on safari lodges.
    “I saw RENN’s artworks in the Namibian desert and fell in love with them,” Ferrario told Artnet News by phone on April 12, adding that he had begun to think about how to show them internationally during the pandemic, and knew the biennial would put RENN’s work on the biggest global stage. Ferrario pitched the idea to the Namibian ministry of culture—which in 2014 had rejected a Namibian artist’s bid to mount a pavilion on the grounds that its scene was “not ready”—and the government agreed to lend its support.
    Monica Cembrola, who runs a foundation dedicated to art from Africa, and who came on board as a patron of the pavilion in mid-July 2021, negotiated to stage the event on the island of Certosa. “After I came on board, the curator [Ferrario] did not want to share with me the identity of the artist,” she told Artnet News, as she explained her reasons for leaving the project. “I also wasn’t told that he [RENN] wasn’t an artist. The Namibian art scene deserves better. The petition showed me that the artist was not representing Namibia and I want to help emerging artists from Africa. I have decided to pull out for these reasons.”
    Cembrola brought Abercrombie and Kent on board as the pavilion’s lead sponsor. In an official letter obtained by Artnet News, dated April 8, Abercrombie and Kent wrote to Ferrario stating it had given €97,600 to fund Namibia’s debut in Venice but due to the petition and Cembrola’s resignation, it was terminating the sponsorship deal as it would cause “harm” to the A&K brand. The company declined to give a comment to Artnet News.
    RENN, Solo for the Namibian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale 2022. Photo ©RENN.
    The petition criticizing Ferrario’s initiative alleges that RENN is known publicly as a member of the tourism industry and is “largely disconnected from the contemporary art and cultural scene in Namibia.” It also argues that “The Lone Stone Men of the Desert” project invokes racist and colonialist ideas about Indigenous peoples.
    “We feel Namibia is not being represented at the pavilion,” a member of a concerned artist group who signed the petition told Artnet News on condition of anonymity. They added that Ferrario’s team had threatened several people who signed the petition with lawsuits. “The artist is completely unknown to the Namibian art scene and is not representative of Namibia or its artists. No one who organized the pavilion was from Namibia.”
    The pavilion has also been criticized privately for selling RENN’s work as part of its “fundraising goals and packages.” Limited-edition prints are being sold for €15,000 ($16,200), and unique sculptures are going for €50,000 ($54,100). 
    In a March 11 email exchange obtained by Artnet News, a representative for Namibia’s ministry of culture wrote to the organizers of the Venice Biennale stating that they would pull their support from the pavilion, and asked organizers to officially “remove Namibia” from the exhibition and “allow the originators of the idea to continue with their own exhibition, however not as a Namibian Pavilion.” A few days later, on March 16, according to the same correspondence, the Ministry reversed this decision.
    RENN, Far Gone for the Namibian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale 2022. Photo ©RENN.
    After members of the Namibian art community first voiced objections to the pavilion in late January (two months before the public petition), Cembrola reached out to key individuals from the art scene in the capital, Windhoek, to bring on board additional artists for the pavilion, notably “emerging and mid-career Namibian artists,” in an effort to project a more accurate vision of the country’s art scene. However, after additional names were submitted, Ferrario told Cembrola it was too late to add more artists. 
    “The point of this exhibition is that art comes before the artist,” Ferrario told Artnet News, defending the decision. “I did not choose an artist; I chose artworks.”
    The scandal surrounding the Namibian Pavilion is particularly symbolic as it comes at a time when art from Africa is increasingly the focus of the international art world. However, the opportunities this opens up are also full of pitfalls—particularly given the imbalances in power and resources between those abroad and those rooted in countries such as Namibia. 
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    in Street Art

    “Heavy Meal” Series by Biancoshock in Milan, Italy

    Biancoshock is back with a new series of artwork in Milan. The artist’s installations “Heavy Meal” are painted concrete backpacks that criticize the work of food delivery riders and their daily effort.“In a democratic society, job is a basic tool for civil and economic progress. What progress can there be if job’s world does not produce emancipation, growth and gratification? In example, the work of food-delivery riders is dictated by algorithms that extend the functions of control and distribution of numbers to become inaccessible, authoritarian and categorical.”“CO-BRANDING” in Milan, 2022“The algorithm imposes a path, rhythms, distances to be bridged (those between the rider and the consumer) and other unbridgeable ones (those between the rider and the management of the company that produces the algorithm and the goods to be delivered). The need to survive in this system transforms young people, students and the unemployed into ‘new generation slaves’.”“CO-BRANDING” in Milan, 2022 — Transforming the name of the 3 most famous food-delivery brands into a sentence that describes the principles of globalization. The concrete bags represent the daily effort we must make to endure the heavy consequences of the era of “I want everything and I want it now”“Every day they are forced to bear a constant burden caused by the lack of rights, by underpaid and irregular contracts, by the lack of comparison and relationship as well as the total absence of insurance assistance. And every day that backpack will weigh more and more, as if it were filled with concrete.”“JUST NEET” in Milan, 2022 — “Stop being a slave to laziness, just be a slave.”“JUST NEET” in Milan, 2022“SLAVEROO” in Milan, 2021 — “Old stone, new slavery.”“SLAVEROO” in Milan, 2021 More

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    in Exhibitions

    The Turner Prize Jury Has Shortlisted a Group of Women And Non-Binary Artists for the Prestigious Art Award

    Four artists—including three women and one non-binary artist of diverse age ranges, racial and cultural backgrounds—have been shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize, Tate announced on Tuesday morning. It is the first time the prestigious British art prize has featured only women and non-binary artists among the nominees, since the first all-female shortlist in 1997.
    Heather Phillipson, Ingrid Pollard, Veronica Ryan, and Sin Wai Kin, are the four U.K.-based artists shortlisted for the coveted prize, which will be awarded in December. An exhibition of their work will take place at Tate Liverpool from October 20 this year to March 19, 2023. This is the first time the Turner Prize has been held at Tate Liverpool since 2007. The Turner Prize winner will receive £25,000 ($32,500), with £10,000 ($13,010) going to each of the other shortlisted artists.
    Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain and co-chair of the Turner Prize jury, described the shortlist as “excitingly rich and varied.” This year’s award marks a key milestone for the British art scene since it began to reopen in May 2021 following a prolonged period of pandemic lockdown.
    The upcoming exhibition at Tate Liverpool is expected to be “mesmerizing and dynamic,” Helen Legg, director of Tate Liverpool and co-chair of the Turner Prize jury said. “The result is a diverse group of artists, each with a singular vision, who impressed the judges with the intensity of their presentations, while also dealing with important issues facing our society today,” she said.
    THE END by Heather Phillipson on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth. Credit: David Parry/PA Wire
    Born in London in 1978 and raised in Wales, the 43-year-old Phillipson works with a range of media ranging from video, sculpture, installation, music composition, poetry, and digital media. She is nominated for her solo exhibition “RUPTURE NO 1: blowtorching the bitten peach” at Tate Britain, and THE END, her Fourth Plinth commission and the now-iconic piece stationed in London’s Trafalgar Square. The judges said they were impressed by “the audacious and sophisticated way Phillipson splices absurdity, tragedy, and imagination to probe urgent and complex ideas.”
    Ingrid Pollard, Self Evident (detail) 1992 © and courtesy of the artist
    The 69-year-old, Northumberland-based Pollard is a photographer, media artist and researcher, with a social practice anchored in representation and history, focusing on race, and the concept of the other. She is nominated for her solo show “Carbon Slowly Turning” at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes. The jury praised the artist’s rich body of work for uncovering hidden stories and histories. She was born in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1953.
    Veronica Ryan OBE, Custard Apple (Annonaceae), Breadfruit (Moraceae), and Soursop (Annonaceae), 2021. Commissioned by Hackney Council; curated and produced by Create London. Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, and Alison Jacques, London.
    Veronica Ryan, 66, was nominated for her solo presentation “Along a Spectrum” at Spike Island, Bristol, and her Hackney Windrush Art Commission in London. Born in Plymouth, Montserrat, in 1956, Ryan works with a wide range of materials from bronze to plaster and marble, creating sculptural objects and installations with containers and compartments that deals with issues revolving around history, belonging, and human psychology. Judges described her new body of work created during her residency at Spike Island “highly accomplished” as it explores a diverse range of subjects including the psychological impact of the pandemic. Ryan received an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honors List in 2021.
    Sin Wai Kin, A Dream of Wholeness in Parts (still) 2021 © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Chi-Wen Gallery, Taipei and Soft Opening, London. Produced by Chi-Wen Productions, Taipei. Supported by Hayward Gallery Touring for British Art Show 9
    The 31-year-old Sin is the youngest among the four nominees. Born in Toronto, Canada, in 1991, they were nominated for their appearance in the British Art Show 9 and the solo presentation by Blindspot Gallery at Frieze London. Sin’s work often appears in the form of performance, moving image, writing, and print, through which they examine the themes of desire, identification, and consciousness in fictional narratives and storytelling. Judges were particularly impressed by “the boundary-pushing nature of Sin’s work,” citing their 2021 film Dream of Wholeness in Parts. Inspired by the ancient Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu’s famous text Dream of the Butterfly, the film explores contemporary drag, music and poetry, while drawing references from Chinese philosophy and the aesthetics of Chinese opera.
    The winner will be decided by a jury panel comprised of Irene Aristizábal, Head of Curatorial and Public Practice at BALTIC, Christine Eyene, a research fellow at the School of Arts and Media, UCLan, Robert Leckie, director of Spike Island, and Anthony Spira, director of MK Gallery.
    The Turner Prize 2022 is backed by BNP Paribas, with additional support from The John Browne Charitable Trust and The Uggla Family Foundation.
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    in Exhibitions

    A New Show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Shows Just How Relevant Winslow Homer’s Art Is Today

    American artist Winslow Homer is best known for his dramatic seascape paintings of fisherman and rescuers battling harsh maritime elements. But an expansive new show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art aims to delve far deeper into the artist’s rich and varied life, as well as the lesser-known topics and subjects he explored.
    “Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents” aims to reconsider the artist’s work “through the lens of conflict,” according to the museum. It features 88 paintings, including many from the museum’s own collection, along with roughly 65 loans from institutions and private collections.
    Viewers may be surprised to learn in this skillfully organized show that the artist painted many images of the Civil War and Reconstruction, including depictions of its impact on the landscape, soldiers, and formerly enslaved people.
    Winslow Homer, The Cotton Pickers (1876). © 2021 Museum Associates / LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, NY
    “This is an important show of one of the most important American artists,” Met director Max Hollein said at a press preview last week. “Homer not only addressed complex social and political issues, but his work is  also about universal concerns: the fragility of human life and the dominance of nature.
    “By focusing on the theme of conflict in Homer’s art, this exhibition presents a fresh understanding of his deeply thoughtful approach to depicting race, nature, and environment.”
    The centerpiece of the show is The Gulf Stream (1899; reworked by 1906), considered one Homer’s most important works, and one of the first to enter the Met’s collection.
    The painting depicts a lone Black man in a small boat on a turbulent sea threatened by sharks encircling the mast-less boat.
    While some have interpreted it as a rumination on mortality following the death of his father, the painting “also alludes to the legacies of slavery and American imperialism as well as more universal concerns,” according to the museum. 
    Sylvia Yount, who co-organized the show with Stephanie Herdrich, said discussions about the show stretch back to the summer of 2020, which was marked by racial justice protests across the U.S. and the world.
    Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream (1899). Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
    The protests “made our specific approach to Homer that much more relevant as we all reckon with our complex histories and their consequential legacies,” Yount said. “Homer’s deeply humanist art has spoken differently to generations and we feel our examination of the darker undercurrents and tension between sentiment and struggle makes the production decidedly resonant for our viewers today.”
    Yount and Herdrich put an interesting and timely spin on the show with a coda selection of works by contemporary artists including Elizabeth Columba, Hugh Hayden, Kerry James Marshall, and Kara Walker that respond to The Gulf Stream and other Homer works.
    One gallery includes five works on paper from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for Gulf Stream (2003), Marshall’s reimagining of Homer’s canvas.
    Marshall’s image “transforms Homer’s dramatic composition, with its uncertain outcome, into what has been termed an ‘allegory of liberation,’ rejecting Black trauma for Black joy,” the museum said in a statement.
    Kerry James Marshall, Study for Gulf Stream (2003–04). Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Butler Family Fund, 2005. © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
    Brooklyn-based artist Hugh Hayden, whose work Brier Patch was on view earlier this year at Madison Square Park, came to know Homer’s The Gulf Stream though Marshall’s revision.
    Having adapted the subject matter through his own vision, the artist’s three-dimensional sailing vessel has 12 ribs and evokes a sea serpent that reflects both danger and salvation.
    Hugh Hayden, Gulf Stream (skeleton study) (2019).©Hugh Hayden, Image courtesy Lisson Gallery
    Also on view is a major diptych by Walker titled The Crossing (2017), that offers a response to both Homer’s The Gulf Stream and Emmanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware by addressing the realities of a precarious ship of state.
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    in Exhibitions

    Figuration Is the Art of Our Era for a Simple Reason: Because Artists Are Painting ‘What They Love’

    In art history, some decades are defined by a singlular style. In the ‘50s, it was Abstract Expressionism; the 60s, Minimalism; the 70s, Conceptualism.
    Now? 
    “When we look back at this period of the 2010s, we’ll see that this was a moment of figuration,” Ruth Erickson, the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) curator behind a new exhibition dedicated to eight of the genre’s brightest young exemplars, painters Aubrey Levinthal, Arcmanoro Niles, and Celeste Rapone among them.
    On Erickson’s point, it would be hard to disagree. In recent years, artists have reanimated the form with eyes sensitized to art history’s propensity for omitting marginalized communities and recapitulating a colonial gaze. 
    They’ve done so with tremendous success, filling galleries and museums—and auction lots and magazine covers—at dizzying rates. The demand has transformed these artists into merchandisable superstars, and their work into collector-bate—so much so, that discussions about the quality of their output are often discolored with the sickly greenish hue of money.   
    Louis Fratino, Sleeping on your roof in August (2020). Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. © Louis Fratino.
    Erickson had no intention of letting the market enter the chat for her exhibition in Boston, called “A Place for Me: Figurative Painting.” To her, the show’s prompt wasn’t framed around a question of why people are buying this kind of art, but something slightly different: Why is portraiture so prominent right now?
    “I think each of these artists has a different way of answering that question,” Erickson said. The show, she said, is “really about resisting that sense of trying to clump them together and instead trying to highlight them as eight individual voices with a shared interest in a type of art.”
    (Still, the market created some obstacles: in several instances, pieces the curator had earmarked for the exhibition were snatched up by collectors.)
    Erickson organized the show one artist at a time, selecting one based on another, occasionally asking chosen artists who they thought should be included.
    From that process emerged a group of relatively young, emerging talents, rather than established stars, their respective approaches to figuration as varied as their backgrounds. 
    Gisela McDaniel, Created for Such a Time as This (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London. Photo: Clare Gatto. © Gisela McDaniel.
    Only one artist, David Antonio Cruz, was alive before the ‘80s. (He was born in 1974.) Viewers will find in his staged portraits of Black, brown, and queer sitters the show’s most “realistic” approach to figuration, though that’s not to say the artworks don’t leave room for interpretation.
    The artist’s two diptychs in the show each feature overlapping imagery and gaps between the canvases—an acknowledgment, Erickson pointed out, of painting’s inability to truly communicate the human experience. 
    The exhibition’s youngest artist, Gisela McDaniel (born in 1995), similarly points to what’s beyond her canvases. While painting portraits of women and non-binary people of color who have experienced personal or inherited traumas, the artist invites her sitters to record audio statements about their stories. 
    “Many of the people in the paintings have difficult but important stories that other people need to hear. They’ve been erased historically,” McDaniel told Artnet News earlier this year. “With every single person, I ask for permission every step of the way, especially when I’m painting somebody. I can’t expect that back, but I hope when people experience my work, they walk away from it with a kind of awareness to move around people with respect. That’s a big reason I incorporate voice.”
    Doron Langberg,Sleeping 1 (2020). Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, and Victoria Miro, London. © Doron Langberg.
    Elsewhere in the ICA show are Louis Fratino’s (born in 1993) quotidian still lifes and moments of tender queer love, each enlivened with a kind of Cezannian perspectival play. Another artist, Doron Langberg (born in 1985), is drawn to similar scenes, but he finds sensuality through a softer, more Impressionist approach, with details that come in and out of focus like the first moment you crack open an eye in the morning.
    In organizing “A Place for Me,” Erickson asked many of the participating artists why they painted figuratively. “The resounding answer,” she explained, “was because they paint what they love. It was so simple.” 
    “I think it comes from this moment of empathy and humanism and softness that we’re at, where the blinders have been pulled back,” Erickson added. “We know that we should be spending time on the stuff that we love the most.” 
    “A Place for Me: Figurative Painting” is on view now through September 5, 2022 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.   
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