In the sometime satin and velvet lined world of the visual arts, the impact of the socio-political affairs transmit messages against war, poverty, racism, injustice and imbalance. Some mimic, "art for art sake" in avoidance. Others charge in. Few peal bell-like in a charming and challenging fashion. When that happens, it's a peculiar and alive sort of thing. Such art and artists manifest themselves in a triumphant sort of way, performance like, providing quite the ride...or walk.
With the Christmas holiday rapidly approaching, a limited audience gathered at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art at Harvard University for a riveting performance of a work challenging issues of race, gender, violence and indefensible doings by segments of the law enforcement community.
A good story can recast the familiar and reveal something new. Artist Carrie Mae Weems tells a good story. With text, photographs and videos, she recasts the familiar into new stories in which people excluded from power claim their ground.
For decades, Carrie Mae Weems’s staged photographs and videos have served as aids for processing the legacies of slavery, racism, and sexism in the United States. The elegant solutions in Weems’s compositions, their gravitas and narrative content, appear to operate as historical analyses, reflecting the past more than the present. If there is a call-to-action latent in Weems’s images, I was deaf to it until visiting the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: I once knew a girl… at The Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African-American Art at Harvard University. During the run of the exhibition, a... Read more about Big Red & Shiny: 'Art and Accountability: Carrie Mae Weems and Dell Hamilton Share Space at Harvard '
A Zeus, a Jesus, a jester… or is it an evil clown? Actually, it’s President Barack Obama (yes, we can still call him that for a few more precious days)—seen through the lens (literally) of artist Carrie Mae Weems. “The Obama Project” (2016, video installation), on view at The Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African... Read more about Big Red & Shiny: 'See It Before It’s Gone: Carrie Mae Weems'
Dell M. Hamilton’s work draws on not only the historical conventions of photography and performance art but also on the history of black theater, the written and oral traditions of black & Latina women writers as well as the contradiction & exuberance of drag performance. In this interview, we spoke about her practice, our current socio-political landscape, and her recent photo series: Fallen Angels: Making Sense Out of Nothing, which investigates the relationship between persona, performance, and photography through the conflation of characters inspired by Central American folklore,... Read more about Big Red & Shiny: 'STAND UP, Silvi Naci in Conversation with Dell M. Hamilton'
“Carrie Mae Weems: I once knew a girl . . .” comes in three parts: “Beauty,” “Legacies,” and “Landscapes.” Each is a variation on an inexhaustible theme: the tangled past and no less tangled present of race and gender. The show runs through Jan. 7 at Harvard’s Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art.
At a recent reception, an eager crowd followed MacArthur “genius” and 2015 W.E.B. Du Bois Medalist Carrie Mae Weems as she wound her way through the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, stopping frequently to explain the thinking or inspiration behind her work. Many posed for pictures with the artist standing next to her images.
There’s a line out the Cooper Gallery’s doors, wrapping back around Peet’s. We’re queuing between those old-style red-velvet aisle markers, printed tickets in hand. When we finally make it inside, they make it worth our while: I sample some kind of fritter that seems to involve crab and wasabi, and a spear of asparagus wrapped in bacon. “How old are you?” the caterer asks as I pluck a glass of wine from his tray. “Twenty-one,” I say, which is true, and he gives me a look of disinterested incredulity but doesn’t ask for ID. I’m probably the only one he had to ask: the crowd in the atrium-like... Read more about Harvard Magazine: “Getting Out of the Way of the Work”
On Election Day, it may be worth taking a second look at Carrie Mae Weems’s “The Power of Your Vote,” a video a little over three minutes long intended to galvanize voters.
"We are pleased to announce that the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery’s inaugural exhibition will comprise selections from the Jean Pigozzi Collection of Contemporary African Art (CAAC). David Adjaye, the renowned British-Ghanaian architect and the designer of the Cooper Gallery and the Hutchins Center façade, also serves as co-curator of this first exhibit, along with Mariane Ibrahim-Lenhardt.
ate 2014 and we are in a space of reflection, the subject of which is everyday life in the African metropolis, that cultural ‘elsewhere’ which the discipline of art history usually shrouds in mystery and myth.
We see a giant bicycle, fashioned out of ropes and wood; a miniature...
A few weeks before the revamped Harvard Art Museums reopened here, a new university-affiliated art space, the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, made its debut in modest quarters, two former storefront offices off Harvard Square, filling a slot that other local institutions left all but empty. The raw spaces were unpromising, to say the least, but the architect David Adjaye has done miracles in linking them and carving out eight nichelike galleries for the first show, "Luminós/C/ity.Ordinary Joy: From the Pigozzi Contemporary African Art Collection,” for which he... Read more about New York Times: 'A New Destination for African Art'
It was only three years ago that Mariane Lenhardt opened her first art gallery, on Second Avenue in Seattle, called M.I.A. Gallery—and today, she's the co-curator of the big inaugural exhibition at the first African and African American art center at a major university anywhere in America.
The Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art opened in late October 2014 in Cambridge, Mass., its exterior walls serving as both real and metaphoric grounding for the Hutchins Center for African and American Research at Harvard University (of which The Root’s editor-in-chief, Henry Louis Gates Jr., is director).
