Eliana Willis

exhibitionIn 1969, tired of the lack of exhibition opportunities for Black artists, Romare Bearden, Ernest Crichlow, and Norman Lewis took matters into their own hands and opened Cinque Gallery, a nonprofit exhibition space on Astor Place in New York’s East Village.
Cinque—named for Joseph Cinque, who led the 1839 revolt on the Amistad slave ship after being kidnapped in Sierra Leone—quickly became a thriving community of young and mid-career artists.
Over its 35-year existence at various spaces across the city, the organization showcased the work of some 450 artists of color, including Emma Amos, Dawoud Bey, Sam Gilliam, and Whitfield Lovell—all of whom are featured in the first-ever exhibition celebrating the legacy of Cinque Gallery at the Art Students League of New York.
“This is unprecedented,” Susan Stedman, the exhibition’s guest curator, told Artnet News.
An art administrator and close friend of the gallery’s founders, she was closely associated with Cinque throughout its history, and since 2017 has been working on an oral history of the gallery, building on the records held by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
The show at the league grew out of a 2019 event at the Harlem School of the Arts organized by the Romare Bearden Foundation to mark the gallery’s 50th anniversary. Stedman was a panelist, along with Nanette Carter, who became Cinque’s first artist in residence.
Norman Lewis and students at the Art Students League of New York. Photo courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Among those in attendance that night was Genevieve Martin, then the league’s director of external affairs. The discussion caught her attention because many Cinque Gallery artists studied, and, in some cases, taught, at the league. At the end of the night, Martin approached Stedman and Carter and proposed putting on a show about Cinque and its ties to the Art Students League.
The first African American teacher at the league was Charles Alston, who joined the faculty in 1950 and later showed at Cinque. The school also employed Cinque artists Richard Mayhew, Jacob Lawrence, Al Loving, and Hughie Lee-Smith, as well as all three gallery founders. Bearden had also previously taken classes at the Art Students League, as did many Cinque artists including Elizabeth Catlett, Ed Clark, Mavis Pusey, and Charles White.
Highlighting those connections is a thread that runs through the show, but Stedman did not limit herself to league artists.
“I also wanted to seek out some of the elders, such Otto Neal, Frank Wimberley, and Bill Hudson, who are still working today, as well as women like Cynthia Hawkins, Debra Priestly, and Robin Holder,” she said. “Bill Hudson makes a point of saying he has only had two solo shows in New York—both at Cinque. His work should be more widely known. I wanted to have a mix of those who are still under-recognized with those who are now well known.”
“We want people to know about this space and how Cinque was instrumental in a lot of artists’ careers,” Carter, the guest programming curator for the show, told Artnet News.
Carter had first visited Cinque in the early 1980s after hearing about it from other African American artists. She was immediately blown away. “I thought, ‘wow, this is fantastic,’” Carter said. “They exhibited artists of color, including Asian artists and Hispanic artists, at a time when there were very few places showing our work. Artists from near and far would try and be selected.”
Bill Hudson, Ten Series #10 (1991). Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Her residency took place when she was still fresh out of grad school, offering her a stipend that made it possible to focus full-time on her studio practice. But Cinque afforded similar opportunities to artists who had been pursuing their career for much longer.
“Cinque was supposed to be a gallery for emerging artists, but back in the 1960s and ’70s, you could be 50 or 60 and still be ’emerging,’” Carter said. “Many of these African American artists had been working all their lives but had not exhibited.”
And although Cinque provided an invaluable platform for artists of color, it still took years before many of them were widely recognized for their work.
Romare Bearden, Culture: Hartford Mural (1980). Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
“I use the term cultural apartheid to describe the extent to which mainstream institutions and most dealers resisted any attention to these artists,” Stedman said. “Cinque didn’t have a dramatic or visible impact on the world of museums and galleries at the time.”
The exhibition is largely drawn from the league’s collection, with loans from various private collections.
“I deliberately did not include museums among the lenders, because museums have been overlooking and ignoring the work of Black Americans too long,” Stedman said. “This neglect continued for years and years and years, and it’s still a problem. I wanted to demonstrate that there are these other significant sources—Black collectors specifically—that are and were supportive of African American artists.”
“I’m hoping that on the heels of this show, people will think about doing further research about Cinque,” Carter said. “Someone could put together a mammoth museum show.”
See more works from the exhibtion below.
Norman Lewis, Untitled (1976). Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Robert Blackburn, Youth (1944). Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Robin Holder, No Toy Guns (1998). Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Nanette Carter, Cantilevered #39. Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Otto Neals, Young General Moses (1984). Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Mavis Pusey, Decaying Construction. Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Otto Neals, Young General Moses (1984). Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Charles White, Mother (Awaiting His Return), 1945. Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Ernest Crichlow, The Strengths of Black Families (ca. 1970–73). Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.

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For years, the Tate has held a trove of artworks by 20th-century British artist Eileen Agar without even necessarily knowing it.
“Interestingly, [her assemblages are] in their archive, not in their collection of artworks,” says Laura Smith, the Whitechapel Gallery curator who organized an Agar retrospective opening this May. “But she made them as artworks.”
Eileen Agar wearing a “Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse.” The picture was taken in 1936. © The estate of Eileen Agar.
This misplacement isn’t entirely the Tate’s fault. Agar’s assemblages are hard to define and full of natural curios, like a shell calcified to the top of a sea urchin or small vertebrae glued to string.
They’ve been at the Tate archive along with Agar’s unpublished stories and around 1,000 photographs that she took from the mid-1930s onwards. Few of her photographs of fellow artists or sculptural rock formations in Brittany have ever been publicly seen.
Eileen Agar’s photograph of “Bum and thumb rock” in Ploumanac’h (1936). © Tate Images.
“The majority of her photographic archive exists as negatives, rather than prints,” exhibition co-curator Grace Storey wrote in the show’s catalogue. Around 50 of these negatives have been printed for the first time for “Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy,” the artist’s retrospective at Whitechapel Gallery, and are, like her unseen assemblages and the rest of her obscure work, slowly coming to light.
“Angel of Anarchy,” which coincides with the release of a brief Agar biography published by Eiderdown Books, is the largest exhibition of Agar’s work to date, and is named after two sculptures she made in the 1930s by shrouding plaster busts with silk blindfolds, burlap, beads, and turquoise feathers.
Eileen Agar, Angel of Anarchy (1936–40). © Tate Images.
“It’s a description of Eileen as much as it is a title for the show,” Smith said. Frustrated by how Surrealists liked to peg women artists as their muses, the unconventional Agar wanted to flip that stereotype with these heads, which were molded after the face of her partner, Joseph.
Though Agar didn’t quite change the gender imbalance outside her Kensington studio, her retrospective and a simultaneous Whitechapel Gallery show devoted to British women of Surrealism fall within a wave of exhibitions attempting to correct that movement’s art-historical record.
Last year, “Fantastic Women: Surreal Worlds from Meret Oppenheim to Frida Kahlo” at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt exhibited a group of 34 female Surrealists, and in 2019 the Tate Modern hosted solo shows for photographer Dora Maar and painter Dorothea Tanning. In 2015, a solo exhibition was dedicated to painter Leonora Carrington at Tate Liverpool.
Dorothea Tanning, Voltage (1942). Collection Ulla und Heiner Pietzsch, Berlin. © The Estate of Dorothea Tanning/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020. Photo: Jochen Littkemann, Berlin
Agar isn’t as big a name as some of her peers, partly because she remained in England after World War II, unlike other Surrealists who moved on to places like Spain, Mexico, and Paris.
But the bigger issue is that her work is tricky to pin down. “The way that she brought abstraction and Surrealism together, with this approach to color and nature and joy, it creates a very unique style that doesn’t exist anywhere,” Smith said. “She didn’t waver or change what she was doing to fit into any particular tendency, which, historically has probably been difficult.”
Agar’s work is an idiosyncratic combination of painting, photography, collage, and sculpture—fused in original configurations and using bizarre materials.
Photograph of “Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse.” 1936. © The estate of Eileen Agar.
“I surround myself with fantastic bric-a-brac in order to trigger my imagination,” Agar wrote in her autobiography, A Look at My Life (1988), of the fossils, textiles, leaves, and bones that she found and brought home. Collage was a central part of her practice that she described as “a displacement of the banal by the fertile invention of chance or coincidence.” 
Agar also liked mixing non-figurative elements with the playful irrationality of Surrealism, and by 1939 was showing regularly at international Surrealist exhibitions.
In her Erotic Landscape, a collage from 1942, for example, Agar combined abstract patterns with recognizable images of fish and a nude woman. A cut-out piece of red paper could be a tendrilled bit of seaweed, or a purely abstract shape.
Eileen Agar, Erotic Landscape (1942). © The Estate of Eileen Agar. Photograph courtesy Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. © Doug Atfield.
“I see nothing incompatible in that,” Agar said. “Indeed we walk on two legs, and for me, one is abstract, the other surreal—it is point and counterpoint.” 
Agar always marched away from convention, and towards the mysterious. “Above all she wished to avoid the banal,” critic and curator Andrew Lambirth wrote in the exhibition catalogue, based on his weekly visits to Agar’s studio during the last six years of her life. (She died in 1991.)
“Agar leads us to a new place, not quite on this earth though very much of it, a world of wonder, play, and glory. She gives us access to the kingdom of the imagination.”
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An ambitious new exhibition in Bern, Switzerland, has brought together artists from the bitterly divided nations of North and South Korea, which have long prevented artistic exchange.
In “Border Crossings: North and South Korean Art from the Sigg Collection,” 90 works by 30 artists made between the 1970s to the 2010s hang side by side the divergent histories of the two nations, which have been divided by a hard border since 1953.
The show, at Kunstmusem Bern, primarily hinges on the collection of Uli Sigg, who was the former Swiss ambassador to China and North Korea. He loaned 75 pieces that he acquired during the late 1990s when he was posted in the region, as well as works from South Korea and China that he began to acquire afterward.
It is a rare opportunity to see North Korean art, which rarely exits the country. The works on view from the country are all done in the Socialist Realist style and are largely propagandist paintings. There is a large painting by North Korean artist Pak Yong Chol called The Missiles depicting Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il jubilantly looking on as rockets shoot off.
Pak Yong Chol, The Missiles, (1994-2004). Photo: Sigg Collection. Mauensee © the artist.
The exhibition’s curator, Kathleen Bühler, said she strived to not make “hasty judgements” about the North Korean works, and to see them “against the background of the conditions under which they were made.” As a result, works on view are not grouped by nation but by theme.
“The accusation that North Korean art is mere propaganda explains only one part of these works,” Bühler said in a statement. “Because all art is always also an expression of the ideology of its time, and directly or indirectly conveys something of its living environment.”
Other works in the show come from the collection of Swiss activist Katharina Zellweger, who was a humanitarian in North Korea in the 1990s. She loaned the museum a selection of North Korean stamps and posters.
The exhibition also includes Chinese perspectives from artists who grew up on the border with North Korea. In He Xiangyu’s video The Yellow Swim Caps, the artist swims across the North Korea-Chinese border river Yalu to imagine what defectors might experience illegally trying to cross into China.
Other works show the moments of permeability that can exist along the 155-mile border. With the help of Chinese middlemen, South Korean artist Kyungah Ham managed to smuggle her embroidery designs into the northern nation where they were reworked by North Korean embroiders in a transgressive collaboration.
The show also reminds viewers of Kim Jong Un’s own curious relationship to border crossings: The current leader of North Korea lived in Bern for 11 years as a child, disguised as a family member of the North Korean embassy staff.

Border Crossings: North And South Korean Art From the Sigg Collection is on view at Kunstmuseum Bern from April 30 through September 5.
See works on view at the museum below.

Feng Mengbo Two Great White Sharks (2014). Photo: Sigg Collection, Mauensee © the artist.
Sea Hyun Lee, Between Red33 (2007). Photo: Sigg Collection, Mauensee © the artist.
Kyungah Ham, Chandelier (2012-13). Photo: Sigg Collection, Mauensee © the artist.
North Korea Collective, The Sea (2008). Photo: Sigg Collection, Mauensee. © the artist
Inbai Kim Deller hon Dainy (3 Portraits) (2007). Photo: Sigg Collection, Mauensee © The artist.
Unkyung Hur Scopic, Image 3 (2014). Photo: Sigg Collection, Mauensee © the artist.
Kyungah Ham, Sweet-Sweet & Bling-Bling (2009-10). Photo: Sigg Collection, Mauensee © the artist.
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Now in its third edition, Desert X, the outdoor exhibition in the Coachella Valley of California, features 12 site-specific projects by international artists addressing themes of mass immigration, human rights, environmental catastrophe, and more.
The show, which is on view through May 16 and is curated by Neville Wakefield and César García-Alvarez, is free to the public (though some works require free timed tickets, which are available through the Desert X website).
Below, we rounded up five standout works from the exhibition.

Alicja KwadeParaPivot (sempiternal clouds)
Alicja Kwade ParaPivot (sempiternal clouds). Photo courtesy of Lance Gerber, Alicja Kwade, and Desert X.
Sitting atop a hill that’s accessible only after a steep 15-minute climb is Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade’s ParaPivot (sempiternal clouds), a work made of interlocking metal frames that appear to support large hunks of white marble that look like parts of broken glacier.
Viewers are encouraged to move in and out of the installation and observe how the marble appears to shift (and even wobble precariously) from certain angles. The work is Kwade’s comment on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (which asserts that “the position and the velocity of an object cannot both be measured exactly, at the same time, even in theory”) and how it applies to the instability of perception and the state of the environment.

Eduardo SarabiaThe Passenger
Eduardo Sarabia’s The Passenger. Photo courtesy of Lance Gerber, Eduardo Sarabia and Desert X.
Sarabia, the Guadalajara-based artist who has long explored the history of cultural exchange between Mexico and the United States, investigates the theme of intergenerational journeys in The Passenger, a maze shaped like an arrowhead that’s crafted from 350 joined “petates,” or sleeping mats woven from palm fibres.
The work comments on ancient Biblical migrations as well as present-day displacement, highlighting the journeys of immigrants looking for better lives. Viewers are encouraged to walk through the triangular labyrinth and reflect on these ideas. When they eventually reach the center, which features an open clearing, “I’m hoping they’re willing to contemplate their situation and have a little bit of perspective on somebody else’s situation,” Sarabia notes in a video on Desert X’s website.

Nicholas GalaninNever Forget
Nicholas Galanin’s Never Forget. Photo courtesy of Lance Gerber, Nicholas Galanin, and Desert X.
Galanin, a Tlingit and Unangax artist based in Sitka, Alaska, provides a critical look at the history of California and the Coachella Valley with his work Never Forget, which spells out “INDIAN LAND” in lettering that mimics the Hollywood sign, which was originally an advertisement for whites-only housing.
The work is a stark reminder that the land on which it sits originally belonged to the Cahuilla peoples. According to Galanin, it is also a call to present-day landowners to join the landback movement to return ancestral land to Native Americans. Galanin has also started a GoFundMe campaign to purchase a plot of land near the sign, which he hopes to return to the Cahuilla community.

 Zahrah AlghamdiWhat Lies Behind the Walls
Zahra Alghamdi’s What Lies Behind the Walls. Photo courtesy of Lance Gerber, Zahra Alghamdi, and Desert X.
Saudi Arabian artist Zahrah Alghamdi’s work is often made of tightly packed layers of various organic materials representing the way memories take form and eventually coalesce into a life’s worth of experience. Her Desert X work, What Lies Behind the Walls, is a lifesize wall-like sculpture that joins together Saudi Arabian and Coachella Valley architectural forms in stacked foamy layers filled with cement, soil, and dye from both regions, suggesting how landscapes constantly change over time.
The work also comment on walls in general, and asks viewers not to view them as immovable blockages, but as invitations to peer over them to the other side. “My idea is that we should not always put up barriers,” Alghamdi notes. “We shouldn’t build walls between us.”

Serge Attukwei ClotteyThe Wishing Well
Serge Attukwei Clottey’s The Wishing Well. Photo courtesy of Lance Gerber, Serge Attukwei Clottey, and Desert X.
Artist Serge Attukwei Clottey’s The Wishing Well consists of two large-scale cubes made up of cut sheets of yellow plastic from gallon containers used to transport water in the artist’s native Ghana. The gallons were originally introduced to Ghanians by Europeans to transport cooking oil, standing in as visual symbols of colonialism and its long-term ramifications.
The title of the work references the wells to which people around the world trek to access clean drinking water. Additionally, with its placement in the Coachella Valley, it also underscores water supply issues in California and beyond, hinting at current and looming environmental challenges.
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