Eliana Willis

A peculiar object sits on a plinth at the center of Deana Lawson’s new exhibition at the Guggenheim: it’s a hologram of a torus, or a geometric ring formed by a circle rotated around a central axis. Stand in front of it and you might see a bagel, but walk around and it comes alive like something otherworldly—a portal, perhaps, perpetually rotating in on itself. 
A spectral sculpture made from the same technology that brought Tupac to Coachella is perhaps the last thing you’d expect from Lawson, an artist known for her naturalistic portraits of diasporic Black culture that draw on the visual language of documentary and vernacular photography. But there it is, very much at the heart of “Centropy,” the show awarded to the artist along with the 2020 Hugo Boss Prize. 
That was Lawson’s choice, said Katherine Brinson, one of two Guggenheim curators who organized the show. During the installation process, “Deana spoke about how, in relationship to the photographs surrounding it, [the torus] becomes a force that both draws on and reinforces the power and the potential represented in her subjects,” the curator explained.
Installation view, “The Hugo Boss Prize 2020: Deana Lawson, Centropy,” Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, May 7–October 11, 2021. © Deana Lawson. Photo: David Heald.
There’s a lot of power to go around. Lawson’s subjects—all Black people in domestic settings—radiate it.
That has a lot to do with the artist’s careful staging, which recalls the stuff of both family photo albums and art-historical masterpieces, and her eye for light. In a 2018 New York profile—one of the most memorable pieces of photographic writing in recent years, to be sure—author Zadie Smith spoke of how Lawson’s lens liberates her subjects from the earthly constraints of capitalism and colonial histories, turning them into gods.   
“Deana Lawson’s work is prelapsarian—it comes before the Fall. Her people seem to occupy a higher plane, a kingdom of restored glory, in which diaspora gods can be found wherever you look: Brownsville, Kingston, Port-au-Prince, Addis Ababa,” Smith wrote. “Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling. But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.”
Deana Lawson, Barrington and Father (2021). © Deana Lawson. Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.
The torus isn’t the only hologram in the show; you’ll also find them embedded in several large-scale photographs. For those who have followed Lawson’s career, the juxtaposition may come as a surprise. But the two media inform each other, said Ashley James, who curated the exhibition with Brinson. 
“The holography allows us to reflect back on the photographs,” James explained. The former asks us to consider how the latter “can both reflect the real and approximate the superreal. I think that’s a question that guides the work.”
Both holography and photography also require harnessing the power of light, a central concern of the artist—for reasons beyond those that occupy most photographers’ minds. 
Installation view, “The Hugo Boss Prize 2020: Deana Lawson, Centropy,” Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, May 7–October 11, 2021. © Deana Lawson. Photo: David Heald.
Light, for Lawson, is “an index of the divinity of human beings,” Brinson said. In other words, it alerts the viewer to the presence of a spiritual force. “There’s a relationship between what is visible and what is unseen. Although the images might show an everyday environment with the familiar contour of domestic life, there are often what the artist calls portals that indicate the presence of this more spiritual realm.”   
Brinson points to the little halo on the wreath of roses above a woman and her three grandchildren in Young Grandmother (2019), for instance, or the billowing curtains behind a crowned, seated man in Chief (2019).
“When I make a picture, it is about being in communion or trying to access an unseen truth,” Lawson said in a short film produced for the exhibition.  
Deana Lawson, Chief (2019). © Deana Lawson. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.
“Centropy” takes its name from the thermodynamic theory of how particles are stimulated into a system of organization by electricity. It’s how the chaos of matter is codified into life, some say. In Lawson’s world, a similar phenomenon takes place.  
“I think for Deana there’s a metaphoric relevance of centropy in the organizing gaze of the camera as her medium,” Brinson said. It’s also about “bringing renewal to social disorder through the creative act.”
Sure enough, “Centropy” has a powerful energy to it. It’s the energy that’s produced when an artist at the top of their game pushes their practice one step further, into the unknown. 
“The Hugo Boss Prize 2020: Deana Lawson, Centropy” is on view now through October 11, 2021 at the Guggenheim in New York.
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

Last week at around 2 a.m., multidisciplinary artist John C. Sims was awoken by the sound of intruders storming his home. 
Sims quickly grabbed his phone to call 911, jumping into the bathroom of his apartment, one reserved for the artist in residence at the 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, South Carolina. Sims’s solo exhibition, “AfroDixia: A Righteous Confiscation,” was in the adjacent building and features deconstructed, distorted, and reimagined presentations of Confederate symbols—including a lynching of the Confederate flag. 
As an artist showing a body of work in the South centered on a critique of revisionist historical materials, Sims immediately feared that “some white supremacist mob or the KKK had come for my life,” he told me over Zoom this week. “I didn’t want to disappear in some underground torture chamber.” 
When the intruders revealed themselves to be cops, Sims had to switch fear gears. He was taken back to his mother’s and every Black mother’s survival lesson. He prayed that the clanky radiator wouldn’t echo loudly enough to suggest that he had a gun. 
Exhibition view, John Sims’s “AfroDixia: A Righteous Confiscation” at the 701 Center for Contemporary Art. Photo: courtesy of the artist.
After multiple pleas for an explanation, and multiple attempts to identify himself as the artist in residence, he was seized, handcuffed, and detained for nearly eight minutes. “Why are you here?” one officer asked. 
For Sims, this question was particularly gutting. “Black people are always in a defensive stance when we want to take up space. ‘Why are you here?’ they ask you. ‘What gives YOU license to do and say what you do?’”
After the police ran his license, confirmed he was in fact the artist in residence, and released him from handcuffs, he felt the pendulum swing in his favor. He was lucky to be alive when the alternative could have been a death marred by a media narrative suggesting he had asked for trouble by staging a show disrespecting the Confederate flag in South Carolina. 
Before the police drove off, he took a picture of their squad cars through the window. Immediately, he felt called to tap into his creative self—time was of the essence. He needed to translate his experience into art in order to stake a claim to the narrative before his voice got drowned out. 
John Sims, A Near Death Residency: Reflections of a Black Artist/Space (2021). © John Sims
The result is a new body of work that has already begun to take shape under the title “A Near Death Residency: Reflections of a Black Artist/Space, 2021.” So far, it consists of two parts: the only photo he was allowed to take as documentation of what happened on May 17, 2021, and an Artist Report he drafted in response to the police’s official incident report. This account will also provide the basis for a future film, a dramatic reenactment meant to turn the villainizing crime-show format on its head.
Sims’s booming laughter rang through my speakers as we spoke. “The police may beat my ass, but once I’m robbed of the opportunity to tell my story, my trauma of how they beat my ass?” he said. “If you squash people at that level, you don’t have a democracy. You can’t have a democracy. If people don’t have the space to express their own voice, that is evidence of the American sham.” 
***
The police department’s press release recounted a “police-citizen encounter” in which officers “noted an open door at the side of a building which is normally locked.” They entered with firearms drawn, the release stated, and “repeatedly identified themselves” as they pursued footsteps on the second floor of the building, where they placed “the man…in handcuffs to determine why he was in the building.” 
Sims’s answer to the police’s statement, which he drafted hours after the intrusion, reclaims his personhood and respect by replacing the sanitized label of “citizen” with Artist Sims. “I mimic the energy” of the original report, he explained. “I’m saying, ‘You will respect me.’” 
The document is styled like the one released by the authorities, with his “John Sims Projects” artist logo in place of the Columbia police department’s emblem and a case number of 3.14159265 (pi out to eight decimal points), a figure that Sims has been using in his art for years. 
In the official incident report, the Columbia police chief referred to the refusal of the supervising officer to allow Sims to take a photograph of the cops in his home as “the only misstep” committed by law enforcement that night. Sims is determined to transform the police department’s reductive statement of “accountability” into an indelible body of work.
The artist sees a clear line between his show, “AfroDixia,” which is about remixing artifacts of the Confederacy, and his new series, which comes out of a desire to drain law enforcement, which he calls the “cousins” of the KKK, of their power to intimidate, smear, and subjugate Black folks, stripping them of agency. 
John Sims, A Group Hanging. Photo: courtesy of the artist.
“I’m sure there are plenty of people who thought I’d shut up and just be an artist,” Sims said. Instead, he plans to start work on the next chapter: a film that brings together what happened to him, the significance of his art, and the precarious nature of his life as a Black artist. 
“The writing paints the pictures and brings the bullets,” he said. “The film will create heat and drama around the boundaries of our sense of respect and respectability.” 
***
The anniversary of George Floyd’s death has come and gone, along with calls for community reconciliation after John Sims’s encounter with police. Since the incident, the 701 Center has invited the Columbia city mayor, police chief, and city council members to Sims’s “AfroDixia,” which now radiates with heightened significance. 
In a statement released on May 28, the 701 Center noted that “this was not the first occasion in which a resident of… the 701 Whaley Street building encountered a law enforcement officer searching the premises for a possible intruder.” But it was the first time, the statement noted, that “such an encounter led to hostile confrontation, detention, cuffing, and a records check.”
While previous encounters “resulted in courteous apologies from officers,” there was a key difference: “Mr. Sims is a Black man; the other incidents involved a white man.”
John Sims, Drag Flag. Photo: courtesy of the artist.
Earlier this week, while showing the mayor, a Black man, Stephen K. Benjamin, around the gallery space, Sims was assured that he would be able to address the city council directly on Tuesday, June 1. 
At the meeting, Sims will read his Artist Report to both the city council and representatives from community organizations who have pledged their support, including Black Lives Matter South Carolina and the National Action Network. 
The reading will serve as the next phase of the “Near Death Residency” project, continuing the act of blending art with life, an artistic foray that Sims says was brought about by the cosmic combination of “AfroDixia,” his residency, the Southern city with its cotton-mill grounds, and the police—all players in a production for which life set the stage. 
“I couldn’t have planned this,” he said. “The experience is now part of the work.”

Read Sims’s Artist Report in full below.

Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

After a year’s delay, the 17th Venice Biennale of Architecture opened last week with a sprawling series of exhibits, including a central exhibition, 61 national pavilions, and more than a dozen collateral events.
And despite the difficulties of the past 18 months, the show (titled “How Will We Live Together?” and curated by Hashim Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) remains upbeat.
“At this moment, we are tired of dystopias,” Sarkis told Architectural Record. “We were looking for signs of hope and optimism, and we found a lot of it.”
Here is a round up of some of the biennale’s highlights.

Exhibits From the International Exhibition
Studio Other Spaces, “Future Assembly”
Studio Other Spaces, “Future Assembly” at Venice Architecture Biennale. Photo by Andrea Avezzù, courtesy of Atudio Other Spaces.
Studio Other Spaces, founded by artist Olafur Eliasson and architect Sebastian Behmann, has put together an installation with work from 50 participants in the central pavilion in the Giardini. The presentation sits atop a massive carpet woven from recycled ocean plastic, and imagines a “Future World Assembly” where legislation protects the rights of entities beyond human beings, such as trees, fungi, and even rocks.

Aerocene Foundation, “Museo Aero Solar for an Aerocene Era”
Aerocene Foundation, “Museo Aero Solar for an Aerocene Era” in the international exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Photo by Marco Bertorello/AFP via Getty Images.
The Aerocene Foundation is a nonprofit founded by Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno. Its team of 200 spent the past two years stitching together the Museo Aero Solar, an inflatable floating sculpture that can fly without fossil fuels. It’s made from used plastic bags, thousands of which were collected from 30 countries around the world. The project’s hope is to usher in a new epoch free of fossil fuels to follow on the heels of the Anthropocene.

Superflux, “Refuge for Resurgence”
Superflux, “Refuge for Resurgence” at the Sylva Foundation in Didcot, Oxford, ahead of the Venice Architecture Biennale. Photo by Mark Cocksedge.
Superflex welcomes visitors to a post-Anthropocene banquet where plants and animals have a seat at the table (made a massive slab of oak), with chairs made to seat 12 different species, including humans, reptiles, farm animals, birds, insects, and even rats and wasps. It’s part of an imagined future where wildlife has reclaimed our cities.

Tomas Libertiny, “Beehive Architecture”
A visitor views “Beehive Architecture” by Tomas Libertiny at Slovakia’s pavilion, on a press day at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale in Venice on May 20, 2021. Photo by Marco Bertorello/AFP via Getty Images.
“Beehive Architecture” is an exhibition of honeycomb sculptures created by swarms of more than 60,000 honeybees that take the shape of iconic forms, like Nefertiti’s bust, as well as more abstract figures. Tomas Libertiny provided the bees with 3-D printed armatures and let the bees go to town. He calls the process “slow manufacturing,” allowing for minimal intervention to the natural process. Debuting just after World Bee Day on May 20, the works are meant to raise awareness to the threats to the species, an essential pollinator.

National Pavilions
Dutch Pavilion, “Why Is We?”
A visitor views “Why is We” by Afaina de Jong and Debra Solomon at the Dutch pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale in Venice on May 19, 2021. Photo by Marco Bertorello/AFP via Getty Images.
In response to the question posed by this year’s biennale exhibition, “How Will We Live Together?” architect Afaina de Jong and artist Debra Solomon want to know “Who Is We?” The Dutch pavilion, from the Het Nieuwe Instituut, offers a critique of architecture that is created with only a small group of mind, calling for design that is more inclusive of diverse identities.

Swiss Pavilion “oræ – Experiences on the Border”
Swiss Pavilion “oræ – Experiences on the Border” at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Photo by Keystone, Gaetan Bally.
One of the most prescient international issues addressed at the biennale is that of borders: how they are drawn, who they keep in, and who they are meant to keep out. (The title, oræ, is Latin for borders.) In completing the project, the curators of this pavilion traveled to visit those living on the Swiss border, and invited them to construct an imagined or real place. A raft of border restrictions triggered by the global health crisis prompted the organizers to revisit original interview subjects to see how their perceptions had changed.

Spanish Pavilion, “Uncertainty” More

The artist Rafael Pérez Evans, who gained notoriety for dumping 240,000 carrots (plus some potatoes) outside of Goldsmiths College, his alma mater, has just opened his first museum show—and while there’s nary a root vegetable in sight, there are several grain silos and a lake of milk.
Greeting visitors at the entrance of the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds are two full-size grain silos, sourced from a manufacturer in Northern Ireland. The installation, titled Mountain, is inspired by the E.U. practice of stockpiling grain—which can send prices plummeting and threaten farmers’ livelihoods.
“Since the 1970s, [there have been] policies of stocking masses of grain, butter, powdered milk—ridiculous amounts of food. They became known as grain mountains,” Evans told Artnet News.
Rafael Pérez Evans, Mountain (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
“This idea of food security and food protectionism is something that shakes the whole market. When such large quantities of food are stocked, it devalues food products and farmers get very upset,” he said. “I’ve always been very interested in how these fluctuations from the central government cause deep wounds for small-hold farmers.”
Presented empty in the exhibition, “the silos become almost a metal carcass of excess,” Evans said. “It becomes a monument to that unsustainable, postindustrial way of thinking about food production.” (The silos are expected to go to a farm after the exhibition, but the artist will also entertain acquisition offers if there’s interest.)
Rafael Pérez Evans, Handful (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
A tiny pile of grain displayed inside the galleries, titled Handful, stands in stark opposition to the massive scale of both the silos and Evans’s infamous carrot pile.
“During the lockdown, it has been important for me to become aware of what fits in my mouth and my stomach and my hand,” Evans said, and to work in opposition to this monumental, monstrous scale that is the industry of food.”
Evans became an internet sensation with his contribution to Goldsmith’s annual MFA exhibition, which arrived at the school via truck and was unloaded in dramatic fashion: an orange tidal wave of 31 tons of root vegetables dumped on the school courtyard.

[embedded content]

The piece, titled Grounding (2020), was intended as a condemnation of global food waste, using vegetables that had been deemed unfit for human consumption. It mimicked the farmer protests of dumping produce that are common in Spain, where Evans grew up on a farm.
“It produced a lot of different conversations, and that’s a good thing,” Evans said. “That’s what protests are for, to open up conversations and dialogues about things that people don’t necessarily want to look into.”
Now, Evans has again borrowed a popular farmers’ protest action by flooding one of the Henry Moore galleries with about an inch of milk for a work titled Lake. (It’s heavily cut with water and laced with preservatives to keep it from turning sour during the show.)
Rafael Pérez Evans, Lake (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
“The farmers dump milk in roads in city centers, and it it becomes a temporary lake of this white substance,” Evans said. “Small-hold farmers have no voice. So the milk becomes the voice. The dumping becomes the scream. They use produce to disturb the city.”
The effect is somewhat different in a white cube space, where the pooling liquid “is staining the floor, making it white,” Evans added. “It becomes a meditative state.”
The artist plans to bring in farmers from nearby Yorkshire for programming related to the exhibition, allowing them to speak directly to the issues that have inspired his work. “What can we learn from soil workers, from voices outside of the city?” Evans asked.
He hopes to encourage conversations about what food production might look like in the future, such as Spanish writer Jaime Izquierdo Vallina’s notion of an “agripolitan city.”
“It is reimagining a future in which agricultural production is integral to the running of the city,” Evans said. “Having the silos outside the Henry Moore Institute is a bit of a hint toward that imagined future.”
See more photos from the exhibition below.
Rafael Pérez Evans, Mountain (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
Rafael Pérez Evans, Lake (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
Rafael Pérez Evans, Handful (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
Installation view of “Rafael Pérez Evans: Handful” at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
Rafael Pérez Evans, Lake (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
Rafael Pérez Evans, Mountain (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
Rafael Pérez Evans, Mountain (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
Rafael Pérez Evans, Mountain (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
“Rafael Pérez Evans: Handful” is on view at the Henry Moore Institute, 74 The Headrow, Leeds LS1 3AH, May 18–August 29, 2021. 
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More