The Beautiful and the Damned

The Beautiful and the Damned
September 17 – November 5, 2022

ARTISTS
Lavett Ballard | Monica Ikegwu | Megan Lewis | view artwork | artist Talk

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 17 – 2:00 ‐ 6:00 pm
Virtual Artist Talk: Wednesday, September 28 – 7:00 – 8:00 pm EDT.

The Beautiful and the Damned asserts beauty as imagined through the lens of three
African American women artists who challenge the historic limiting and unattainable
standards of what is desirable.

Ronald Jackson – Solo Exhibition

Ronald Jackson: Solo Exhibition
June 25th – August 31, 2022

Opening Reception
Saturday, June 25, 2-6 pm

Galerie Myrtis is pleased to announce Ronald Jackson’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. In this show, Jackson, a figurative painter, draws from his vivid and boundless imagination to construct a fantastical world habited by Johnnie Mae King, aka Aunt Johnnie. Known for creating work focused on the Great Migration, the artist leads us down a different path in his new body of work. Here, the narrative focuses on a single character and the notion of a Black woman’s uninhibited existence. For Johnnie, it is a life free of social constraints such as racial discrimination and gender politics.

Jackson depicts Aunt Johnnie in playful figurations and portrayals of acts of defiance. Lush vegetation binds Johnnie’s various exploits offering dramatic surroundings to her stylized couture. Her identity is concealed by the artist’s traditional masking technique or hidden behind whimsical eyeglasses that serve as devices to draw viewers into Aunt Johnnie’s imaginary world, one of fantasy, freedom, and reckless abandonment.

“Johnnie’s imagination allows her to dream uninhibited, free to do what she wants to do and be whatever she wants to be. Much like a time traveler, her mind allows her to explore the possibilities of navigating other places, times, and dimensions.” Ronald Jackson

Ronald Jackson
Untitled, 2022
Oil on canvas
60 x 72 ″

The Afro-Futurist Manifesto: Blackness Reimagined – PRESS

PRESS

Personal Structures, July 2022
The Beauty and Confidence of Blackness

The Afro-Futurist Manifesto: Blackness Reimagined. With this installation, Galerie Myrtis seeks to provide insight into the socio-political concerns of the African-American community and celebrates black culture by paying tribute to the reliance, creativity, ingenuity, and spirituality that has historically sustained Black people, bringing it into a completely new set of Venetian landscapes. full article

Glasstire, June 2022
10 Works from the Venice Biennale that I Wish the Fort Worth Modern Would Acquire by Colette Copeland

[Tawny] Chatmon’s gold-leafed photographic portraits celebrate the beauty of black childhood. Inspired by 15th century Italian artists and artisans, as well as gold-inscribed historical relics, the artist juxtaposes the portraits onto historical landscape paintings as an act of affirmation. full article

New York Public Library, 2022
Tribute to an Afrofuturist Deity: Schomburg Center Artist & Educator M. Scott Johnson Exhibits at 59th Venice Biennale

…The stone chips were flying as M. Scott Johnson, a sculptor and visual arts instructor at the Center’s Junior Scholars Program, began work on the first sculpture of his triptych, The Metamorphosis of High John the Conqueror: Tribute to an Afrofuturist Deity. full article

Artlyst, April 2022
Eight Of The Best Collateral Events – 59th Venice Biennale by Lee Sharrock

Myrtis Bedolla, founding director of Galerie Myrtis in Baltimore MD, has curated a breathtaking group exhibition at the European Cultural Centre in Palazzo Bembo. Titled ‘The Afro-Futurist Manifesto: Blackness Reimagined’, the exhibition groups together 8 artists who are reclaiming the inequality of white art history from the point of view of a black narrative… full article

Pigmment Magazine, 2022
Venice says “BENVENUTO to Galerie Myrtis in 2022

[Galerie Myrtis] is the first Black-owned gallery to be invited to participate in the Biennale-affiliated “Personal Structures: Time Space and existence.” The gallery was invited to the prestigious show by the European Cultural Centre-Italy. full article

Black art in America, April 2022
Galerie Myrtis: Exhibiting Black Art at The Venice Biennale by Shantay Robinson

By invitation of the European Cultural Centre-Italy, Galerie Myrtis is the first black-owned gallery to be invited to participate in the Biennale-affiliated exhibition Personal Structures: Time, Space, and Existence. This historic moment is predated by the 2020 racial reckoning the world experienced. full article

Culture Type, August, 2021
Latest News in Black Art: Guggenheim Hires Diversity Chief, Galerie Myrtis Presenting Exhibition at Venice Biennale, Kehinde Wiley Redesigns MTV Moonperson & More by Victoria L. Valentine

Galerie Myrtis Fine Art & Advisory of Baltimore, Md., was invited to participate in Personal Structures, an affiliate exhibition at the 2022 Venice Biennale. The Black-owned gallery founded by Myrtis Bedolla will present “The Afro-Futurist Manifesto: Blackness Reimagined,” featuring eight artists—Tawny Chatmon, Larry Cook, Morel Doucet, Monica Ikegwu, M. Scott Johnson, Delita Martin, Arvie Smith, and Felandus Thames. full article

The Afro-Futurist Manifesto Blackness Reimagined – Curatorial Statement

Curatorial Statement

Blackness and the possibilities of its future are the impulses that drive the imaginations of African American artists who draw inspiration from Afrofuturism, Black existentialism, spirituality, and futurist thought to construct a Black universe of tomorrow. Imagery rooted in nuances of the Black experience offers counter-narratives that confront fictionalized characterizations of African Americans and cultural Otherness and offers, in place of them, the essence of Black humanity.

In The Afro-Futurist Manifesto: Blackness Reimagined, artists assert agency over narratives of Black life, offer discourse into the socio-political concerns of African Americans, and pay tribute to the resiliency, creativity, and spirituality that have historically sustained Black people.

The concepts of time, space, and existence serve as the framework for exploring Blackness and its speculative future. Time, for Arvie Smith, serves as the metaphor for allegories that reinterpret Greek mythology, presenting Black women as goddesses. Preach It and Cupid and Psyche are testaments to the strength of Black women and battles fought for autonomy over their bodies against iniquitous systems of oppression. M. Scott Johnson turns to African American folklore, Afrofuturism, and Afro-surrealism in The Metamorphosis of High John the Conqueror: Tribute to an Afrofuturist Deity to make tangible the spirit of High John the Conqueror, the time-traveling shapeshifting folk hero manifest in the psyche of the enslaved. Felandus Thames’s Space is the Place and Door of the Cosmos, synthesized in the tradition of Black improvisational music and the futurist philosophy of Sun Ra, explores the spirituality of “Black Interiority divorced of references to the corporal body and its relations to trauma, objectivity, and labor.”

Space leads to Larry Cook’s series The Other Side of Landscape, vernacular photographs that challenge the structure of the U.S. prison industrial complex and its 40 percent Black population. Through digital manipulation, prisoners who once occupied the “yard” are liberated. The barren landscape becomes the “escapist backdrop for a system free of human captivity.” Morel Doucet’s assemblage portraits address environmental racism. In After All That, We Still Stand (When Black Lives Look Blue), colorful silhouettes surrounded by flora and fauna provoke commentary on the displacement of Black people from their homes and communities. Delita Martin’s prints Visionary and Follow Me Little Bird explores Black women’s spirituality and ascent to a higher self. The overlapping of portraits, patterns, colors, and textures form liminal landscapes, “veilspaces,” as portals where the spiritual and waking worlds coexist.

Existence, as portrayed in photographs by Tawny Chatmon, centers Black children in Italian landscapes as a reaction against the historical erasure of Blackness. In Chatmon’s Pastoral Scenes series, Monique in Pastiglia and Ahmad in Pastiglia are influenced by the work of 15th-century Italian artists (such as Vittore Crivelli & Fra Angelico) and the practice of Pastiglia. They are adorned with African symbolism, which celebrates their ancestry and affirms their preciousness and humanity. Interpreting the inherent possibilities of Black youth free of negative stereotypes is the impulse that drives painter Monica Ikegwu. Subjects rendered through the lens of a Black aesthetic represent the next generation of leaders: Chidera, Brandee, and youth featured in We Outside exude confidence as futurists who will fight for societal change.

Myrtis Bedolla, Curator

artwork:
Visionary, 2021
Relief Printing, Charcoal, Pastels, Acrylic 40×60 (unframed) 2021
60 x 40 ″
Delita Martin

The Afro-Futurist Manifesto Blackness Reimagined – Venice Biennial

The Afro-Futurist Manifesto: Blackness Reimagined

2022 Venice Biennial Art Exhibition
April 23 – November 27, 2022
Palazzo Bembo, Venice, Italy

Photo by Matteo Losurdo

In The Afro-Futurist Manifesto: Blackness Reimagined, artists assert agency over narratives of Black life, offer discourse into the socio-political concerns of African Americans, and pay tribute to the resiliency, creativity, and spirituality that have historically sustained Black people.
● Curated by Myrtis Bedolla, Founding Director, Galerie Myrtis

FEATURED ARTISTS
Tawny Chatmon ● Larry Cook ● Morel Doucet ● Monica Ikegwu ● M. Scott Johnson ● Delita Martin ● Arvie Smith ● Felandus Thames

VENUE
Palazzo Bembo
Riva del Carbon # 4793
30124 Venezia, Italy

Galerie Myrtis thanks the following sponsors

Daniel F Bergsvik and Donald N. Hastler
Reginald and Aliya Browne
Ilona Sochynsky
The Tibbles Family Trust

Members of the European Cultural Centre Italy Team talk about the sixth edition of Personal Structures, how the project started years ago and its main aim and values
(Galerie Myrtis feature at 1:46)

Presenting the 2022 ECC Awards

Like every edition, the European Cultural Centre presents the ECC Awards to commemorate the closing of the exhibition and to honour the participants that haven taken part in it

During the Closing Event on Sunday 27th of November, 2022, ECC Italy announced the winners and special mentions of this year’s ECC Awards, which were carefully selected by the European Cultural Centre curatorial team. The winners received the unique award of the artwork “1 meter” by the Dutch artist René Rietmeyer, initiator of the project Personal Structures and of the European Cultural Centre itself. The nominees were selected for the categories of: painting and mixed media, sculpture and installation, photography, video and digital art, and university research projects and lifetime achievement.

see list of other recipients.

The Afro-Futurist Manifesto Blackness Reimagined Myrtis Bedolla Curator Venice…

The Afro‐Futurist Manifesto: Blackness Reimagined

about | artwork | artists & curator | curatorial statement | artist talk

Myrtis Bedolla, Curator

Myrtis Bedolla is the owner and founding director of Galerie Myrtis, an emerging blue-chip gallery and art advisory specializing in twentieth and twenty-first-century American art with a focus on work created by African American artists. Bedolla possesses over 30 years of experience as a curator, gallerist, and art consultant.

Established in 2006, the mission of the gallery is to utilize the visual arts to raise awareness for artists who deserve recognition for their contributions in artistically portraying our cultural, social, historical, and political landscapes; and to recognize art movements that paved the way for freedom of artistic expression.

Bedolla has recently gained national press in the New York Times article “Black Gallerists Press Forward Despite a Market That Holds Them Back” in June 2020 and authored “Why My Blackness is Not a Threat to your Whiteness” in Cultured Magazine in July 2020. Past coverage also includes being voted Best Gallery by the Baltimore Sun in 2017; “Black Art in the Spotlight,” Baltimore Magazine, September 2018; “Living with Art: Myrtis Bedolla Builds a Home and Gallery in Old Goucher,” BMORE Art, Issue 3; “Women in the Arts,” which honored women at the helm of the Baltimore art scene, Baltimore Style Magazine, October 2013.

Bedolla holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration from the University of Maryland, University College, received her curatorial training at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, and earned online certificates in Cultural Theory for Curators and Curatorial Procedures from the Node Center for Curatorial Studies, Berlin, Germany.

Board appointments: Association of Art Museum Curators & AAMC Foundation Trustee; University of Maryland Global Campus, Arts Program Chair; and the Municipal Art Society of Baltimore City Board.

Professional membership: Arttable

Image courtesy photographer Grace Roselli, “Pandora’s BoxX Project”
#graceroselli
#pandorasboxxproject

The Afro-Futurist Manifesto Blackness Reimagined Meet the Artist and…

Pastoral Scenes, Ralisha (detail) by Tawny Chatmon
On The Other Side Of Landscape Series #1 (detail) by Larry Cook
After All That We Still Stand When Black Lives Look Blue no.12 (detail) by Morel Doucet
We Outside (detail) by Monica Ikegwu
Tutnese Incantation, High John the Conquer & Deodate by M. Scott Johnson
Visionary (detail) by Delita Martin
Preach It (detail) by Arvie Smith
Door of the Cosmos by Falandus Thames

Meet the Artist & Curator

Tawny Chatmon, Artist
view resume

Tawny Chatmon (b. 1979, Tokyo, Japan) is a self‐taught, award‐winning artist who has been working in the field of photography for more than 17 years. The primary theme that drives Chatmon’s practice is celebrating the beauty of black childhood. She is currently devoted to creating portraits that are inspired by artworks spanning various periods in Western Art with the intent of bringing to the forefront faces that were often under‐celebrated in this style of work.

Museum Collection:
Minneapolis Institute of Art
Microsoft Corporate Collection
Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art
University of Maryland Global Campus

Larry Cook, Artist
view resume

Larry Cook (b. 1986, Laurel, Maryland) is an award-winning photographer and conceptual artist whose work spans installation, video, and photography. Cook’s work explores the cultural aesthetic of “club” photography to examine how urban culture and incarceration systems become entwined through backdrops. The backdrop is central for its relationship to the formal, social, and cultural aspects of photographic history.

Museum Collections:
Baltimore Museum of Art (promised gift)
Museum of Modern Art
Harvard Art Museums

Morel Doucet, Artist
view resume

Morel Doucet (b. 1990, Pilate, Haiti) is a Miami‐based multidisciplinary artist and arts educator that hails from Haiti. He employs ceramics, illustrations, and prints to examine the realities of climate‐gentrification, migration, and displacement within the Black diaspora communities.

Museum Collections (selected):
Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM)
UK Contemporary Art Society, Plymouth Box Museum
Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art

Monica Ikegwu, Artist
view resume

Monica Ikegwu (b.1998, Baltimore, Maryland) is a figurative painter. She presents her ideas of the figure in a way that is not only captivating, but also unconventional in her use of color, texture, and composition.

Museum Collection:
Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African
American Art

M. Scott Johnson, Artist
view resume

M. Scott Johnson (b. 1968, Inkster, Michigan) is a New York City‐based artist and educator, has carved out a legacy as one of the most stimulating and unique artists of his generation. M. Scott has explored, both in his practice and through his 20‐year visual arts teaching residency at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York, a rich vision of contemporary Afro‐aesthetics.

Museum Collections:
The Hampton University Museum
The Schomburg Center Research in Black Culture
Embassy of Oslo Norway, Arts in Embassies Program

Delita Martin, Artist
view resume

Delita Martin (b. 1972, Conroe, Texas) is a master printmaker, illustrator, and painter based in Huffman, Texas. Through the weaving of history and storytelling, Martin offers a new narrative on the power of women whose stories are not only layered in textures and techniques but also symbolism.

Museum Collections (selected):
Crystal Bridges Museum
Minneapolis Institute of Art
Minnesota Museum of American Art
National Museum of Women in the Arts
Library of Congress
The Studio Museum in Harlem
Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African-American Art

Arvie Smith, Artist
view resume

Arvie Smith (b.1938, Houston, Texas) transforms the history of oppressed and stereotyped segments of the American experience into lyrical two‐dimensional master works.

Museum Collections (selected):
Delaware Museum of Art
Hallie Ford Museum of Art
Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art
Portland Art Museum
Reginald F. Lewis Museum

Felandus Thames, Artist
view resume

Felandus Thames (b. 1974, Jackson, Mississippi) is a conceptual artist living and practicing in the greater New York area. Thames’ work attempts to transcend didacticisms that are typically associated with anachronistic understandings of representation and instead aligns itself with ideas around the taxonomy of human difference.

Museum Collections (selected):
Aspen Museum of Art
Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art
Smith Robertson Museum
Studio Museum of Harlem

Myrtis Bedolla, Curator
about myrtis

Myrtis Bedolla is the owner and founding director of Galerie Myrtis, an emerging blue-chip gallery and art advisory specializing in twentieth and twenty-first-century American art with a focus on work created by African American artists. Bedolla possesses over 30 years of experience as a curator, gallerist, and art consultant.

Established in 2006, the mission of the gallery is to utilize the visual arts to raise awareness for artists who deserve recognition for their contributions in artistically portraying our cultural, social, historical, and political landscapes; and to recognize art movements that paved the way for freedom of artistic expression.

Ontology: Communal Expressions of Being About the Artists

Ontology: Communal Expressions of Being – About the Artists

about the exhibition | view artwork

Lavett Ballard is a mixed media artist who describes her work as a re-imagined visual narrative of African descent people. Ballard’s use of imagery reflects social issues affecting primarily Black women.

Wesley Clark is a conceptual artist whose work challenges and draws parallels between historical and contemporary cultural issues. Clark’s primary focus surrounds blacks in America and the African Diaspora. He examines the young black male psyche and the feeling of being a target.

Alfred Conteh is a painter who presents visual explorations of how people from the African Diaspora societies living in the South are fighting social, economic, educational, and psychological wars from within and without to survive.

Susan Goldman is a printmaker whose “Squaring the Flower” series explores geometry and decorative form. Love of pattern and underlying passion for color and beauty informs playful layering and improvisation. The flower gets stripped away, covered up, and over-printed, yet it always finds a way back in, like a melodious refrain or a cherry blossom in springtime.

Michael Gross is a painter and printmaker whose intensely colorful works are frenetic studies of light and movement. For Gross, every piece attempts to capture a moment of equilibrium, a kind of elegant balance in time and space, and record it permanently.

Michael Gross
The Measure of a Man, 2018
Oil and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 48″

M. Scott Johnson is a photographer and sculptor. As a photographer, Johnson navigates and interprets light, space, and soul in his Landscape Astrophotography series, which represents a yearly pilgrimage to the dark sky of New York’s Adirondack Park, where he captures the rising of the planet Venus in the Northern Hemisphere. As a sculptor, Johnson’s aesthetic and philosophical explorations are shaped by the landscape of his atavistic memories.

Megan Lewis is a painter whose work is a visual series built on her curiosities, experiences, memories, and thought processes. Gathering what she has known to be true becomes the foundation and framework of her artistry. Lewis creates work to express and share her joys.

Delita Martin is a printmaker who portrays Black women as magical beings that possess the power to transcend their black skin and exist in a spiritual form. Through the weaving of history and storytelling, Martin’s work offers narratives on the power of women whose stories are not only layered in textures and techniques but also symbolism.

Arvie Smith is a painter who works transforms the history of oppressed and stereotyped segments of the American experience into lyrical two-dimensional masterworks. Smith’s work is commonly of psychological images revealing deep sympathy for the dispossessed and marginalized members of society in an unrelenting search for beauty, meaning, and equality.

Nelson Stevens is a painter and member of AfriCOBRA (African Commune for Bad Relevant Artists) whose aesthetic is rooted in activism and a commitment to create imagery that rails against racism through positive, powerful, and uplifting imagery.

Felandus Thames is a conceptual artist whose work transcends didacticisms that are typically associated with anachronistic understandings of representation and instead aligns itself with ideas around the taxonomy of human difference. Thames is also interested in the interplay between the personal narrative and the imagined, uses humor to allow the viewer to ease into disconcerting motifs.

Ontology: Communal Expressions of Being

Ontology: Communal Expressions of Being

February 19th – April 30, 2022

FEATURED ARTISTS
Lavett Ballard | Wesley Clark | Alfred Conteh
Susan Goldman | Michael Gross | M. Scott Johnson
Megan Lewis | Delita Martin | Arvie Smith
Nelson Stevens | Felandus Thames

about the artist | view artwork

This group exhibition explores concepts of existence and being, drawing inspiration from the metaphysical theory of ontology, the study of the nature of things, and their reality, identity, and relatedness.

In this exhibit, visual narratives conceived in conceptual work, paintings, prints, photography, and sculpture draw parallels between shared occurrences and belief systems derived from the artists’ personal experiences and convictions. Here the theory of ontology will be tested and either accepted or rejected as truth, as we question, do our human experiences inextricably link us? Discourse on the notion of communal expressions will challenge relatedness. And social constructionism leads the debate on what defines being, reality, and identity.

Megan Lewis
Calm, 2021
Oil and acrylic on canvas
60 x 36 ″

A Passion for Collecting – Exhibition Catalog

Exhibition Catalog:

A Passion for Collecting: The Vision of Louis Allan Ford is a testament to Ford’s cultural pride and the legacy he built through collecting. As a patron of the arts, Louis Ford was a familiar and beloved figure on the Washington metropolitan art scene. His passion for African and African American art is reflected in the collection he amazed of nearly two hundred items. Ford acquired utilitarian and ceremonial objects of West Africa and historically significant works of art created by prominent and emerging contemporary artists. He was also a treasure hunter and was known for discovering rare works at estate sales and auction houses.

view catalog | view artwork

Ford was a graduate of Dunbar High School and Howard University. He was a lifetime member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Incorporated. Ford served in the U.S. Air Force and after a brief stint in the federal government found his niche in real estate, creating opportunities for homeownership for many African American families.

Featured Artists: Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Allan Rohan Crite, David Driskell, Victor Ekpuk, Sam Gilliam, Ronald Jackson, Lois Mailou Jones, Joseph Holston, Charles Sebree, Alma Thomas, James Wells, and many more…

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