About the Exhibition
Intersections Intersected: The Photography of David Goldblatt
Over the last fifty years, David Goldblatt has documented the complexities and contradictions of South African society. His photographs capture the social and moral value systems that governed the tumultuous history of his country’s segregationist policies and continue to influence its changing political landscape. Goldblatt began photographing professionally in the early 1960s, focusing on the effects of the National Party’s legislation of apartheid. The son of Jewish Lithuanian parents who fled to South Africa to escape religious persecution, Goldblatt was forced into a peculiar situation, being at once a white man in a racially segregated society and a member of a religious minority with a sense of otherness. He used the camera to capture the true face of apartheid as his way of coping with horrifying realities and making his voice heard. Goldblatt did not try to capture iconic images, nor did he use the camera as a tool to entice revolution through propaganda. Instead, he reveals a much more complex portrait, including the intricacies and banalities of daily life in all aspects of society. Whether showing the plight of black communities, the culture of the Afrikaner nationalists, the comfort of white suburbanites, or the architectural landscape, Goldblatt’s photographs are an intimate portrayal of a culture plagued by injustice.
Rigo 23: The Deeper They Bury Me, The Louder My Voice Becomes
For nearly 20 years, Rigo 23 has created murals, paintings, drawings, and performances, conducted interventions and published zines advocating for social and political change. His site-specific installation for the New Museum is the newest in a series of works that take as their subject political prisoners such as Leonard Peltier, Geronimo ji-Jaga [Elmer Pratt], Mumia Abu-Jamal [Wesley Cook], and the Angola 3. Entitled The Deeper They Bury Me, The Louder My Voice Becomes, the work is inspired by the words of Herman Wallace, a member of the Angola 3. Wallace, together with Albert Woodfox, began the first prison chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1971 at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola. Robert H. King joined them when he was transferred to the prison after being falsely accused of a crime in 1972. The Angola 3 fought for prison reform from within the prison system by a variety of methods. They staged hunger strikes to assure that prisoners were handed their meals (rather than having them served on the floor), they protected young prisoners from sexual predators, and perhaps most importantly, they insisted upon equal rights for all prisoners.
Emory Douglas: Black Panther
Some of Emory Douglas’s images are nearly forty years old, but they are still as powerful as when Douglas first created them. They are dangerous pictures, and they were meant to change the world.
Emory Douglas was the Revolutionary Artist of the Black Panther Party and subsequently became its Minister of Culture, part of the national leadership. He created the overall design of the Black Panther, the Party’s weekly newspaper, and oversaw its layout and production until the Black Panthers disbanded in 1979–80. Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, Douglas made countless artworks, illustrations, and cartoons, which were reproduced in the paper and distributed as prints, posters, cards, and even sculptures. All of them utilized a straightforward graphic style and a vocabulary of images that would become synonymous with the Party and the issues it fought for.
Emory Douglas: Black Panther includes a wide variety of Douglas’s work done while a member of the Black Panther Party. Curated by the Los Angeles artist Sam Durant, whose work often deals with political and cultural subjects in American history, the show includes approximately 165 posters, newspapers, and prints dating from 1967 to '76. Durant met Emory Douglas in 2002 and began working on a book of Douglas’s work, which resulted in a monograph published in 2007. Two years later Durant curated Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which serves as a model for the exhibition at the New Museum.
Dorothy Ionnone: Lioness
American-born, Berlin-based artist Dorothy Iannone, now at the age of seventy-five, will have her first solo show in a US institution at the New Museum this summer. This long-overdue exhibition will feature Iannone’s signature early work, made between 1965 and 1978, including sculptures, paintings, drawings, and a video box. Since the 1960s, Iannone has continued to portray the female sexual experience as one of transcendence, union, and spirituality. Iannone works from the first-person perspective, charting her life and lovemaking onto wood, canvas, paper, and cloth, and through video and sound. Iannone’s stylized, intricate, and colorful depictions of herself and her longtime lover Dieter Roth synthesize elements of Egyptian frescoes, Byzantine mosaics, and ancient fertility statues. Inverting the gender paradigm of artistic inspiration, Iannone often painted Roth, her self-declared muse, depicting both him and herself as active lovers, comfortable with their desires and pleasure. By removing self-consciousness from her work, she dispels the taboo that so often surrounds sexuality, elevating it to an act of both bodily and spiritual union.
Since she started painting in 1959, Iannone has challenged contemporary culture through her singular artistic voice as well as her radical sensibility. In 1961, Iannone attempted to bring Henry Miller’s sexually explicit book Tropic of Cancer to the United States. After it was confiscated at the airport, she filed suit against the government, which concluded with the US raising their ban on Miller’s books. In another incident, Iannone was to be featured in a group exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern in 1969. Before it opened, the director demanded that the genitals in Iannone’s paintings be covered; in protest, Dieter Roth removed his work from the show and curator Harald Szeemann resigned from his position. Lioness, the title of this exhibition, is taken from Roth’s pet name for Iannone.
About the Artist
Elizabeth Peyton was born in Connecticut in 1965. She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 1987. She lives and works in New York. Peyton’s work has been exhibited worldwide and is represented in the collections of the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg; the Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Seattle Art Museum; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others. |
