From the entire Wedge team, wishing you all warm and prosperous New Year!
Check out a few exhibitions, both local and international, that have been on our radar in this month’s Director’s Picks. Be sure to click on an image for more details.
Read MoreCheck out a few exhibitions, both local and international, that have been on our radar in this month’s Director’s Picks.
Read MoreCheck out a few exhibitions, both local and international, that have been on our radar in this month’s Director’s Picks
Read MoreCheck out a few exhibitions, both local and international, that have been on our radar in this month’s Director’s Picks.
Read MoreBrooklyn is where it all started for Russian Ghanaian artist Liz Johnson Artur (b. 1964). While visiting in 1986, she stayed with a Russian family in a predominantly Black neighborhood and began experimenting with her first camera. Having grown up in Bulgaria, Germany, and Russia, she was inspired by her visit to use photography as a way to connect with other people of African descent. Since moving to London in 1991, she has employed photography not only to make a living—publishing work in magazines such as i-D and The Face—but also to document the multiplicity of everyday life in Africa, Europe, North America, and the Caribbean.
Read MoreThe artwork Some Black Parisians consists of 12 large scale neons which highlight the names of some of the models, performers and writers who appear in important French works of art from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
While some of these figures are well known to the general public (Josephine Baker and Alexandre Dumas père, for example) some, such as Laure, who posed as a maid for Édouard Manet’s painting Olympia, remain relatively obscure.
Campbell House Museum
160 Queen St W, Toronto
Wedge Curatorial Projects is pleased to showcase Fissure, a solo presentation of work by Ayana V. Jackson, and a Primary Exhibition of CONTACT Photography Festival. Employing her own body, Jackson deconstructs racial and gender stereotypes to create contemporary portraits laced with historical allusions. Deeply influenced by her own fluid identity and her transcontinental practice Jackson’s images crystallize African and diasporic realities while challenging a fraught legacy of pictorial representation.
Read MoreThe trilogy of exhibitions in the gallery's inaugural year offer varied interpretations on the theme of Utopian Imagination. The exhibitions bring together a diverse group of international artists who draw on craft, activism, data visualization, and agitprop to point the way to a more just future.
Read MoreThe New Museum presents the first museum survey in New York of the work of Nari Ward (b. 1963, St. Andrew, Jamaica).
Nari Ward: We the People features over thirty sculptures, paintings, videos, and large-scale installations from throughout Ward’s twenty-five-year career, highlighting his status as one of the most important and influential sculptors working today. Since the early 1990s, Ward has produced his works by accumulating staggering amounts of humble materials and repurposing them in consistently surprising ways. His approach evokes a variety of folk traditions and creative acts of recycling from Jamaica, where he was born, as well as the material textures of Harlem, where he has lived and worked for the past twenty-five years.
Read MoreOpening Reception: Thursday, April 4, 6-9 p.m.
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 12-5 p.m.
Note: The gallery will be closed for private events on April 10 and April 25.
Circuit Gallery presents an exhibition of work by Chicago-based Nigerian-Trinidadian artist and writer Jamilah Malika Abu-Bakare and Toronto-based Nigerian artist Abraham Oghobase.
Read MoreThe DIA welcomes Souvenir II by Kerry James Marshall as a Guest of Honor, on loan from the Addison Gallery of American Art in Boston. This piece is heavily associated with the Civil Rights Movement, and features a prominent Michigan connection.
Souvenir II takes place in one of Marshall’s relative’s living room, setting the scene for a memorial, which hangs above the couch. The memorial reads “In Memory of” and features President John F. Kennedy, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and centered between the Kennedys is Martin Luther King, Jr. In clouds floating above, Marshall depicts individuals in the form of angels, both black and white, associated with the Civil Rights Movement, who were violently killed between 1959–1970.
Read MoreSoul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power shines a bright light on the vital contribution of Black artists made over two revolutionary decades in American history, beginning in 1963 at the height of the civil rights movement. The exhibition examines the influences, from the civil rights and Black Power movements to Minimalism and developments in abstraction, on artists such as Romare Bearden, Barkley Hendricks, Noah Purifoy, Martin Puryear, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Alma Thomas, Charles White, and William T. Williams.
Read MoreEssay by: Nehal El-Hadi
In Token | Contemporary Ongoing, Sandra Brewster re-presents objects selected and transported from various Caribbean geographies and temporalities, projecting them beyond the private and intimate spaces of their belonging. These objects are belongings, possessions. The deliberate and deliberated presence of these object-images bears witness to our movements through time and space. The objects themselves function as reminders of where we come from, their value increasing in significance through their transportability, material durability, and sheer and sometimes irrational or inexplicable nostalgia.
Read MoreMickalene Thomas: Femmes Noires upends and overturns familiar representations and monolithic notions of black women today.
This exhibition, developed in a creative partnership between the AGO and the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans, presents a bold collection of Thomas’s vibrant and politically charged paintings, silkscreens, photographs, time-based media and site-specific installations exploring how black women are represented in art and popular culture.
Read MoreOpening Reception and Book Signing November 24, 2-5pm
Guided Tour of the Exhibition with Dawoud Bey November 24, 3pm
Stephen Bulger Gallery presents Places in History, their first solo exhibition of work by Dawoud Bey, presented in conjunction with the release of his most recent monograph Seeing Deeply, published by University of Texas Press, 2018.
Read MoreFor MOCA’s international opening exhibition, BELIEVE explores the beliefs and systems that shape values and behaviours, touching upon some of the fundamental issues of our times. In all, 16 artists from around the world present more than 20 works providing perspectives on how we believe and perceive through a variety of media, materials and disciplines, including sculpture, video, installation, film, collage, printmaking, painting, photography, animation and performance.
Read MoreOctober 5 - March 17, 2019
Curated by Crystal Mowry
I’ll Be Your Mirror brings the work of the work of contemporary artists who enlist their parents in their practice. Stephanie Comilang, Erika DeFreitas, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Neil Goldberg, Milutin Gubash, and Vivek Shraya work across various lens-based strategies to revisit and reinvent found images as each artist proposes multiple ways of understanding familial intimacy.
Read MoreSeptember 12 – December 9, 2018
Main Gallery, Ryerson Image Centre
Co-curators: Paul Roth and Amanda Maddox
This exhibition explores a seminal photo essay by pioneering African-American photographer Gordon Parks, and the extraordinary chain of events it prompted. Published in Lifemagazine in June 1961, “Freedom’s Fearful Foe: Poverty” profiled the da Silva family, living in a hillside favela near a wealthy enclave of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Read MoreSeptember 14, 2018–February 3, 2019
Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing, 4th and 5th Floors
Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power shines light on a broad spectrum of Black artistic practice from 1963 to 1983, one of the most politically, socially, and aesthetically revolutionary periods in American history. Black artists across the country worked in communities, in collectives, and individually to create a range of art responsive to the moment—including figurative and abstract painting, prints, and photography; assemblage and sculpture; and performance.
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