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…

A Passion for Collecting-The Vision of Louis Allan Ford

A Passion for Collecting: The Vision of Louis Allan Ford (1942-2020)

October 30 – January 29, 2022
by appt. only

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…

view artwork | view 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.

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.


Audio excerpts: In 2010 Louis Ford took part in the Art of the Collectors II discussion at Galerie Myrtis.

Louis comments about his art collection.
Audio Player

Somethin To Say – About the Artists


Isiah (The Boxer, The Bouncer), acrylic and atomized, bronze dust on canvas, 60 x 60 x 2.5 in., 2021, by Alfred Conteh

About the Artists
view artwork | read curatorial statement

Alfred Conteh

Alfred Conteh (b. 1975, Warner Robins, Georgia) is a classically trained artist, who has practiced his craft for more than 20 years. After earning a Bachelor Degree in Fine Arts from Hampton University, Conteh continued his formal education at Georgia Southern University; earning a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts. As an African American artist, Conteh sheds light on the current realities of African American people; by bringing their stories and experiences to the forefront. Conteh’s creative techniques range from paintings to drawings and sculptures to assemblage works. His artwork can be found in public and private collections throughout the world.

In 2018, Conteh was commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) to create a portrait of film director, producer, and screenwriter Ryan Coogler. The portrait titled Home Team is featured in the traveling exhibit Men of Change: Power. Triumph. Truth. The exhibit pays tribute to African American changemakers for their outstanding legacy and contributions.

Conteh’s work in the permanent collections of the Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AR; Bajeel Art Foundation, Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Museum of Arts and Sciences Permanent Collection, Macon, GA; Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, Ashbury, NJ; Tubman Museum Permanent Collection, Macon, GA; Georgia Southern University Permanent Collection, Statesboro, GA; Georgia Southwestern University Permanent Collection, Swainsboro, GA; Hammonds House Museum Permanent Collection, Atlanta, GA; United Talent Agency, Beverly Hills, CA; and United Way Corporate Collection, Atlanta, GA

Larry Cook

Cook has exhibited his work nationally at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (2019), National Gallery of Art (2017), and the Baltimore Museum of Art (2016), and internationally during the 13th Havana Biennial. Among Cook’s recent prestigious awards is the Trawick Prize (2020). He was a finalist for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. (2019), and a two-time Janet and Walter Sondheim finalist in (2013 and 2016).

Cook’s photography was featured as a large-scale public installation Ceremonies of Dark Men, part of the 5 X 5 Project, organized by the D.C. Commission on the Arts curated by AM Weaver (2014). As the recipient of several artist-in-residency and fellowship programs, Cook has participated in the Nicholson Project Artist-in-Residency, (2020) Savage-Lewis Residency, Art on the Vine in Martha’s Vineyard (2018), and Washington Project for the Arts Residency (2017). He completed a fellowship at the Hamiltonian Gallery (2013-2015). Cook is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography at Howard University.

T.J. Dedeaux-Norris

T.J. Dedeaux-Norris fka Tameka Jenean Norris was born in Guam and received their undergraduate degree at the University of California, Los Angeles before graduating with an MFA from Yale University School of Art. Dedeaux-Norris has recently participated in numerous exhibitions and festivals including at Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; Yerba Buena Museum, San Francisco, CA; Prospect.3 Biennial, New Orleans, LA; The Walker Museum, Minneapolis, MN; Performa 13; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX; The Studio Museum, Harlem, NY; Rotterdam Film Festival, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Sundance Film Festival, New York, NY; Mission Creek Festival, Iowa City, IA among many others. Dedeaux-Norris has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Fountainhead Residency, Grant Wood Colony Fellowship, The MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. They are the 2017 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a 2019-2020 Pollock-Krasner Foundation grantee, and is currently tenure track Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa.

Nathaniel Donnett

Nathaniel Donnett is a cultural practitioner who lives and works in Houston, Texas. Donnett received his BA in Fine Arts from Texas Southern University and his MFA from Yale University School of Art. Donnett is a recipient of a 2020 Dean’s Critical Practice Research Grant, 2020 Art and Social Justice Initiative Grant, and the 2020-2021 Helen Frankenthaler Scholarship. Donnett has been awarded a 2017 Houston Arts Alliance Individual Artist Grant, a 2014 Harpo Foundation Grant, a 2015 Idea Fund/Andy Warhol Foundation Grant, and a 2010 Artadia Award. His work has been shown at The Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, VA, The Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, VA, The Mennello Museum, Orlando FL, The Ulrich Museum, Wichita, KS, The McColl Center, Charlotte, NC, The American Museum, Washington, DC, The Kemper Contemporary Arts Museum, Kansas City, MO, Harvey B Gantt Art Center for African American Arts and Culture, Charlotte, NC, The Community Artist’s Collective, Houston, TX, The Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury CT, The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX, Project Row Houses, Houston, TX, The University Museum, Houston, TX, and The New Museum, New York, NY.

Yashua Klos

Yashua Klos (b.1977, Chicago) is an artist best known for his large-scale collage works which address issues of identity, race, memory and community.

Influenced by his upbringing in Chicago’s South Side, Klos challenges the construction and conventions of African-American identity. Notions of marginalization, masculinity, and urban mythology are unpacked through examining behaviors within communities. He uses portraiture to highlight narratives of suppression, denial, and pain associated with the vulnerability experienced in black communities; and pins this against stoic performances of adaptation and thriving.

Klos finished his Master of Fine Arts at Hunter College in New York in 2009, after studying  his undergraduate degree at Northern Illinois University.  He has been awarded residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan; The Vermont Studio Center, Johnson and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha. He is the recipient of a 2014 Joan Mitchell Fellowship and a 2015 NYFA Grant.

Michi Meko

In the summer of 2015, I almost drowned. Inviting this life-changing event’s influence into my studio practice, my recent paintings and sculptures focus on the African American experience of navigating public spaces while remaining buoyant within them. This work contributes to an important conversation, as African Americans in public space are consistently threatened, now more visibly and openly with the evidence and sharing offered by social media. This barrage of images simulates an experience of drowning under the heavyweight of ten thousand pounds of pressure while being held to the ocean’s floor.

The work incorporates the visual language of naval flags and nautical wayfinding, combined with romanticized objects of the American South as a means to communicate the psychological and the physical. These references signal the warning of a threat or the possibility of safe passage. Working beyond the physical image of the body, objects of buoyancy and navigation become metaphors for selfhood, resilience, and the sanity required in the turbulent oceans of contemporary America.

The use of navigation is one of the skills required for any journey. At a youthful age, this knowledge is taught through oral history and becomes the framework for understanding past and a present mobility. It is the necessary visual device for future expeditions and one’s survival.

Lester Julian Merriweather

Lester Julian Merriweather (b.1978) is a Memphis-based visual artist. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. He holds an MFA from Memphis College of Art and a BA from Jackson State University. Merriweather has exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. at various venues such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC, TOPS Gallery, CrosstownArts and Powerhouse Memphis, Diverseworks in Houston, Stella Jones Gallery in New Orleans, and the Atlanta Contemporary. He has also exhibited abroad at the Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw, Poland. Merriweather served as the first Curatorial Director of the Jones Gallery & the Martha & Robert Fogelman Galleries of Contemporary Art at the University of Memphis from 2010-2015. He worked on the Board of Directors for Number, Inc. independent journal where he created the Art of the South Exhibition Series. He is a founding member of the ArtsMemphis Artist Advisory Council and the artsAccelerator Grant Panel.

Merriweather is currently Emeritus for the Advisory Panel of TONE Memphis. He served as the first Curatorial Consultant for the PPF Contemporary Art Collection in Memphis, Tennessee.

Vitus Shell

Vitus Shell (b. 1978, Monroe, LA) is a mixed-media collage painter born in Monroe, LA, where he lives and works. His work is geared toward the black experience, giving agency to people from this community through powerful images deconstructing, sampling, and remixing identity, civil rights, and contemporary black culture. He received a BFA from Memphis College of Art, 2000 and an MFA from the University of Mississippi, 2008.

Slim Crow
My current works are geared toward the black experience, giving agency to people from this community through powerful images deconstructing, sampling, and remixing identity, civil rights, and contemporary black culture. In my work, I strive to bridge the gap between the older and younger generations by exploring and uncovering factors that contributed to the unfortunate relationship breakdown between the two. Moreover, my layered, mixed media paintings examine parallels between present-day behaviors and attitudes that date back to African roots. With this work, I continue experimenting with portraiture, acrylic paint, oversized photocopies of early 20th-century vintage advertisements, and the incorporation of a foam-cut printing technique. My artistic goal is to exude the hip-hop lifestyle with a southern vernacular.

Through the use of the vintage, advertisements allow me to create narrative-based environments, which comment on stereotyping, bigotry, and oppression. The foam cut printing method provides me with the added layers to include text and icons, such as the minstrel images. Having spent much time researching graffiti art, I incorporate a variety of its characteristics, techniques, and unique aesthetics into my work such as paste-ups, stamps, and stencils. Using graffiti techniques allows me to challenge the viewer’s perceptions of what is considered low art or high art, which also addresses classism.

Felandus Thames

Felandus Thames (b. 1974, Jackson, Mississippi) is a conceptual artist living and practicing in the greater New York area.  Thames attended the graduate program in Painting and Printmaking at Yale University where he received his MFA in 2010. Thames’s work has been featured in exhibitions at the African American Museum of Philadelphia, Columbia University, Delaware Art Museum, Charles H. Wright Museum, International Center for Printmaking New York, USF Contemporary Art Museum,  Mississippi Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Wesleyan University, Texas Contemporary, and Yale University.

Gallery exhibitions and art fair participation include Galerie Myrtis, Kravets Wehby Gallery, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, Tilton Gallery, Heather James Gallery, UTA Artist Space, and Art Hamptons, Art LA, and Art Basel Miami Beach. 

Cullen Washington Jr

Cullen Washington Jr. is a native of Louisiana and received his BA from Louisiana State University and his MFA from Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Washington has exhibited his work in group and solo shows nationally and internationally including: The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; The Studio Museum in Harlem; The deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Massachusetts;  The University of Michigan Museum of Art and the Saatchi Gallery, London. In addition, Washington has been an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Yaddo, and Amherst College. He was the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Residency in New Orleans. Reviews and critical essays of his work appear in Nka, The New York Times, The International Review of African American Art, and The Boston Globe. Cullen’s work can be found in the collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem,  the Joyner / Giuffrida Collection, the Charles Saatchi Gallery, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Cullen is currently a Professor at Pratt Institute and Parsons the New School.

UTA Artist Space – Literary Muse

UTA Artist Space in collaboration with Galerie Myrtis presents
Literary Muse curated by Myrtis Bedolla

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 4, 2-5PM
UTA Artist Space
403 Foothill Rd. Beverly Hills, CA 90210

utaartistspace.com


UTA Artist Space presents Literary Muse, a new group exhibition inspired by Black literary novelists, poets, and scholars, curated by Baltimore-based Myrtis Bedolla of Galerie Myrtis. On view from September 4 through September 25, 2021, the powerful presentation brings together paintings, photographs, prints, and sculptures by twelve contemporary artists working across the United States: Lavett Ballard, Tawny Chatmon, Wesley Clark, Alfred Conteh, Larry Cook, Morel Doucet, Monica Ikegwu, Ronald Jackson, M. Scott Johnson, Delita Martin, Arvie Smith, and Felandus Thames.

The incisive writings of Black scholars, poets, and authors of fiction bear the weight of a complicated history, at times celebrated and at others, bemoaned. In Literary Muse, their words are the interpretive impulse for imagery that defines the architecture of the Black ethos. The result is a visual vernacular constructed in paintings, photographs, prints, sculptures, and conceptual works composed in hair beads and wood that interrogates the inherent complexities of race.

Steeped in the writings of authors such as Ta-Nahisi Coates, bell hooks, Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, Charles Sowell, Alice Walker, and Isabel Wilkerson, these artists draw from a lexicon of Black narratives. They create visual illustrations that probe the connection between the past and present, challenge the inequalities of structural racism, honor the traditions of the Black family’s devoted fathers and mothers, encourage Black economic empowerment and selfhood, and give symbolic meaning to poetry and fiction through visual tropes that explore Black plight.

Looking for inspiration beyond the prose of philosophers, economists, theorists, psychologists, sociologists, and historians, artists turn to the lyrics of Black composers and vocalists elucidating a truth—a gospel truth—bound-up in ancestry and spirituality rooted in the polyrhythms of Africa. Here, they find their muse in rhythms first laid down in African American spirituals which influenced the gospel, jazz, R&B, hip-hop, and rap music of today. These are the sounds that permeate the artists’ studios, consciously and subconsciously inspiring works that touch the depths of our souls.

Through the confluence of literature and artistry, Literary Muse contextualizes the Black experience through a non-Western lens. The notion of Blackness, its history, ancestry, and culture are presented as written and interpreted by its people. Scholars and composers who might otherwise remain obscure are placed at the forefront, as their words influence profound works that offer critical discourse on that which affirms and defines what it means to be Black.

— Myrtis Bedolla

“Myrtis Bedolla has a sharp eye for extraordinary artists. To wield their art and animate the words of these great Black authors and poets—to bring their narratives to life visually—is a phenomenal talent,” says Arthur Lewis, UTA Fine Arts, and UTA Artist Space Creative Director.

image
Oluma x Chimdi x Anwi by Monica Ikegwu, Oil on Canvas, 36″ in x 48″ in, 2021,
Literary Muse: Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?
Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Myrtis

Somethin to Say – Curatorial Statement

Somethin’ to Say

Alfred Conteh, Isiah (The Boxer, The Bouncer), acrylic and atomized
bronze dust on canvas, 60 x 60 x 2.5 in., 2021
September 11 – October 16, 2021
by appt. only

“Art is where and how we speak to each other in tongues audible when ‘official’ language fails… [it is] a metaphysical space beyond the black public every day toward power and wild imagination…”

Dr. Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior

Curatorial Statement | about the exhibition

Co-curated by artist, Felandus Thames, and art historian and curator, Key Jo Lee, Somethin’ to Say discloses the formal, conceptual, intellectual, and visceral links to “The South” in the work of ten Black artists. While each artist is deeply connected by birth or residence to particular southern states – Chicago to Georgia – “The South” is more than a geographical location. Rather it is a repository for memory, hallowed ground for Black people, and a cornerstone for cultural transmission in the West.

In this exhibition, “The South” isn’t relegated to the past. Instead of relics, each artist, deploying divergent aesthetic strategies, has produced works that mark intersections of materiality, ritual, memory, music, and spirituality, then muddle them to produce experimental forms. They simultaneously cater to and defy expected notions of Southern blackness by providing vistas redolent with what Elizabeth Alexander describes as “Black Interiority” or that which envisions “…complex black selves, real and enactable black power, rampant and unfetishized black beauty” (Alexander, x).

Somethin’ to Say epitomizes creativity produced in “the breaks,” or in and among the purposeful and incidental gaps in American historical narratives. But the poetic irony of this gathering of artists is that they aren’t making work specific to Hip Hop culture. Instead, as the artists mined southern Black cultural production as means to broaden the understanding and the geography of the “New South”, Hip Hop and its longue durée, revealed itself as a cardinal point for the resultant artworks. Hip Hop emerged as Nixon’s “War on Drugs,” broad patterns of urban deindustrialization, and the rampant defunding of public schools stifled black social, political, and economic mobility. With its roots in call-and-response and indebtedness to traditions of Black oratory virtuosity, Hip Hop provided a new formal expression of the beauty that effervesces in forced subsistence.

Co-authors, Felandus Thames, Artist
Key Jo Lee, Director of Academic Affairs and Associate Curator of Special Projects, The Cleveland Museum of Art

Something to Say

September 11 – October 16, 2021

FEATURED ARTISTS
Alfred Conteh
Larry Cook
T.J. Dedeaux-Norris
Nathaniel Donnett
Yashua Klos
Michi Meko
Lester Julian Merriweather
Vitus Shell
Felandus Thames
Cullen Washington

about the artists

view artwork

Felandus Thames, Curator – Key Jo Lee, Co-curator and Catalogue Essayist
read curatorial statement




Isiah (The Boxer, The Bouncer)
acrylic and atomized, bronze dust on canvas, 60 x 60 x 2.5 in., 2021
by Alfred

Tawny Chatmon – If I’m no longer here I…

If I’m no longer here, I wanted you to Know…

Solo Exhibition featuring Tawny Chatmon
May 15 – July 10, 2021 – by appt. only
about the exhibition

Tawny Chatmon – If I’m no longer here I…

If I’m no longer here, I wanted you to Know…

Solo Exhibition featuring Tawny Chatmon
May 15 – July 10, 2021
by appt. only

view artwork | videos

Galerie Myrtis is pleased to present its first solo exhibition with Tawny Chatmon, If I’m no longer here, I wanted you to Know… The show will be on view May 15-July 2021 and offer eighteen new photographs Chatmon developed featuring intimate portraits of family members and friends imbued with sentiments of love, personal ruminations, and lessons she wants to instill in her three children.

In, If I’m no longer here, I wanted you to Know… Chatmon expands her oeuvre beyond materiality of the gilded imagery and the influence of Klimt, which she has come to be known. Drawing inspiration from the Byzantine period, Chatmon adorns black bodies with semi-precious stones meticulously placed to construct a narrative on black children and dignity through cultural memory.

Chatmon’s imagery rewards the viewer who looks beyond the nuanced surface of the photographs and contours of her subjects. A deeper examination reveals allegory and iconology steeped in metaphors protesting racial and social injustice. Chatmon’s cultural and political discourse also extends to the titles of her work. In your Hoodie or White Tee sends a clear message that black boys, regardless of the clothes they wear, are human beings whose lives should be respected, preserved, and valued by society.

Chatmon’s photos emotively and melodically speak to the legacy she seeks to leave behind. She has transformed the visual to lyrical through undulating figures that sway with the rhythm of a lullaby—a mother’s love song to her children filled with memories she wants them to hold on to and life lessons to pass down through generations.

Chatmon is an award-winning photographer; among them is the People Photographer of the Year, International Photo Awards 2018 and First Place, International Photo Awards 2018.

view artwork | videos

An exhibition catalogue will be available: $45.00 (hardcover)
Catalogue Essayist: Tanisha Jackson, Ph.D., Executive Director of CFAC and Professor of Practice in African American Studies, Syracuse University

And Then She Said “I Never Asked You To Worship Me”, 2020
24k gold leaf, 12k gold leaf, acrylic, mixed media on archival pigment print
Framed: Approx 36” x 50”, Unframed: 26” x 40” w/5cm border

Black and Blue – Prints in the Time of…

Black and Blue: Prints in the Time of COVID

March 3 – April 17, 2021
by appt. only

view artwork

Galerie Myrtis collaborates with master printmaker Susan J. Goldman, owner of Lily Press in presenting “Black & Blue: Prints in the Time of COVID.” Curated by Goldman, the exhibition features prints by artists expressing through the use of colors black and blue, their response to the individual and universal crisis our culture is experiencing during the political revolution and the plague of the 21st century. Black & Blue’s title refers to being beaten up and bruised by the constant barrage of the terrifying events and news of the day. Artists find solace and security in the safety of their studios, creating works of art that record, protest, protect, grieve, soothe, offering hope and beauty for humanity.

Featured Artist
Jermaine Ashman | Victor Ekpuk | Susan J. Goldman
Michael Gross | Keiko Hara | Jun Lee | Preston Sampson
Jonpaul Smith | Eve Stockton | Renee Stout

view artwork

Lily Press®, LLC is an independently owned studio that provides a variety of services to artists for the production of original, limited edition, hand-printed work.

Susan J. Goldman
Blue Oculus II, 2020
Monotype, Woodcut on Handmade Kozo
22″ diameter
Edition: Unique