Exhibitions

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

Exhibitions

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

Artist

Felandus Thames

Felandus Thames is a conceptual artist living and practicing in the greater New York area. Born in Mississippi, Thames attended the graduate program in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale University where he received his MFA in 2010.



A Mother, Daughter, & Grandmother #2, 2021
76 x 48 x 1 ″
Hairbeads on coated wire on aluminum rod

Artist

Felandus Thames – Statement

Statement

You Can’t Unsee Violence, 2021
variable
Hairbrushes installed directly to the wall
I am interested in our relationship to the ready-made and how they can become surrogates for their user’s ethnology and gender. My 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. I am also interested in the interplay between the personal narrative and the imagined. And I use humor, increasingly important to the work, as it allows the viewer to ease into disconcerting motifs. Because I desire to make objects that have a life beyond that of my initial intent, the work-often probing and unsettling-poses questions rather than answers them. It shifts the beholder’s role from voyeur to participant, and complicates my personal relationship to the work.

Artist

Felandus Thames – Biography

Biography

Photo by © Charles A. Smith 2014
Felandus Thames (b. 1974, Jackson, Mississippi) lives and works in Connecticut. He graduated from Jackson State University with a BA and received many honors, including the Mississippi Arts Commission’s prestigious “Individual Artist Fellowship” for visual arts. Thames received an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2010, and the following year mounted his first New York solo exhibition at Tilton Gallery. He has served as a Visiting Critic to Rhode Island School of Design. His work appears in many notable public collections, including the Mississippi Museum of Art and The Studio Museum of Harlem.

Recent group exhibitions include “Unmasking Masculinity for the 21st Century” at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts and “Resistance in Black and White” at the Cleveland Museum of Art. His work was curated in the 2022 Venice Biennial exhibition “The Afro-Futurist Manifesto: Blackness Reimagined” for the European Cultural Counsel. His work was recently curated in the Virginia Museum of Fine Art’s critically acclaimed traveling exhibition “The Dirty South,” which appeared at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), and Denver Museum of Contemporary Art. His work received critical attention with favorable mentions in Art In America, Artforum, and Hyperallergic. Thames is a 2022 Harpo Foundation individual artist fellow and was recently selected by the US State Department for the “Art in Embassies Program” in Dakar, Senegal.

Renaissance: Noir at UTA Artist Space, Beverly Hills, CA…

UTA Artist Space is pleased to present Renaissance: Noir, a virtual exhibition featuring works by 12 emerging Black artists, live on UTAArtistSpace.com from June 9 – July 3, 2020. Curated by Myrtis Bedolla, Baltimore-based owner of Galerie Myrtis, Renaissance: Noir investigates Blackness on the continuum of the historiographies of Black artists’ narratives that assert, individually and collectively, their state-of-mind and state-of-being Black. The timeliness of the exhibition is particularly significant, as its launch comes amidst a heightened awareness of racial injustice against the Black community, with protests occurring around the world. The show marks UTA Artist Space’s first full virtual exhibition.

view the exhibition

The artists highlighted in Renaissance: Noir are Tawny Chatmon, Wesley Clark, Alfred Conteh, Larry Cook, Morel Doucet, Monica Ikegwu, Ronald Jackson, M. Scott Johnson, Delita Martin, Arvie Smith, Nelson Stevens, and Felandus Thames. Their work collectively captures the existence of “double consciousness,” as coined by W.E.B. DuBois, where one is constantly combating the “isms” —racism, colorism, sexism, capitalism, colonialism, escapism, and criticism through the act of artistic activism.

Exhibitions

Renaissance Noir UTA Artist Space

Renaissance: Noir
UTA Artist Space, Beverly Hills, CA
Curated by Myrtis Bedolla

UTA Artist Space is pleased to present Renaissance: Noir, a virtual exhibition featuring works by 12 emerging Black artists, live on UTAArtistSpace.com from June 9 – July 3, 2020. Curated by Myrtis Bedolla, Baltimore-based owner of Galerie Myrtis, Renaissance: Noir investigates Blackness on the continuum of the historiographies of Black artists’ narratives that assert, individually and collectively, their state-of-mind and state-of-being Black. The timeliness of the exhibition is particularly significant, as its launch comes amidst a heightened awareness of racial injustice against the Black community, with protests occurring around the world. The show marks UTA Artist Space’s first full virtual exhibition.

view the exhibition

The artists highlighted in Renaissance: Noir are Tawny Chatmon, Wesley Clark, Alfred Conteh, Larry Cook, Morel Doucet, Monica Ikegwu, Ronald Jackson, M. Scott Johnson, Delita Martin, Arvie Smith, Nelson Stevens, and Felandus Thames. Their work collectively captures the existence of “double consciousness,” as coined by W.E.B. DuBois, where one is constantly combating the “isms” —racism, colorism, sexism, capitalism, colonialism, escapism, and criticism through the act of artistic activism.

Renaissance: Noir Blackness on the Continuum


by Myrtis Bedolla, Curator

Exhibitions

Blackface Artwork

Blackface: A Reclamation of Beauty, Power and Narrative

April 20 – June 15, 2019

about the exhibition | exhibition essay

Featured artists: Tawny Chatmon, Alfred Conteh, Jerrell Gibbs, Karina Griffith, Jas Knight, Arvie Smith and Felandus Thames.
Exhibition essay by Halima Taha. Curated by Myrtis Bedolla and Jessica Stafford Davis

Artwork

Exhibitions

Black Face: A Reclamation of Beauty, Power and Narrative

Blackface: A Reclamation of Beauty, Power, and Narrative


April 20 – June 15, 2019

Artists’ Talk: June 15th, 6:00 – 8:00 pm

exhibition essay by Halima Taha

Curators: Myrtis Bedolla and Jessica Stafford Davis

Galerie Myrtis and The Agora Culture present Blackface: A Reclamation of Beauty, Power, and Narrative. In asserting the beauty of the black body, affirming its power — and societal and historical place, curators Myrtis Bedolla and Jessica Stafford Davis offer a counter narrative to the racist archetypes that evolved from 18th century minstrelsy, and its negative stereotyping of African Americans that prevails today.

The exhibition explores contemporary notions of black identity through photography by Tawny Chatmon, and painters Alfred Conteh, Jerrell Gibbs, and Jas Knight; and offers an investigation of blackface from a historical perspective presented in paintings by Arvie Smith and multidisciplinary works by Felandus Thames. The addition of a compiling video by filmmaker Karina Griffith captured in Berlin, Germany evokes the maligning of blackness through an international lens.

In addressing the insidious nature of minstrelsy and the appropriation of black culture — to deploy and rationalize the subjugation of African Americans for financial gain, Frederick Douglass described blackface performers as:

“…the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion, denied them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens.”
Lott, Eric (1993). Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press.

Artwork