This Week in Black Art and Culture is sponsored by The Children’s Trust
The concept and title of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale have been revealed. The Queen of England has knighted filmmaker Isaac Julien. The International African American Museum has set an opening date. Odili Donald Odita has joined the David Kordansky Gallery. Read more in this week’s Black Art and Culture.
Laboratory of the Future Comes to Venice, Italy
The president of La Biennale di Venezia, Roberto Cicutto and the curator of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, Lesley Lokko, have announced “The Laboratory of the Future” as the title of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition.
“New technologies continuously appear and disappear,” said Lesley Lokko in a statement from La Biennale di Venezia, “giving us unfiltered glimpses of life in parts of the globe we will likely never visit, much less understand. But to see both near and far simultaneously is also, as Du Bois and Fanon famously put it, a form of ‘double consciousness,’ the internal conflict of all subordinated or colonized groups, which describes the majority of the world, not only ‘there,’ in the so-called Developing-, Third-, and Arab Worlds, but ‘here’ too, in the metropoles and landscapes of the global North.
“In Europe we speak of minorities and diversity, but the truth is that the West’s minorities are the global majority’s diversity is our norm. There is one place on this planet where all these questions of equity, race, hope and fear converge and coalesce. Africa. At an anthropological level, we are all African. And what happens in Africa happens to us all.”
The board of directors designated Lokko as the artistic director of the Architecture Department in December of last year. The exhibition will be shown at the Giardini, the Arsenale, and different locations across Venice from May 20-Nov. 26, 2023 (pre-opening May 18 and 19).
“We envisage our exhibition as a kind of workshop, a laboratory where architects and practitioners across an expanded field of creative disciplines draw out examples from their contemporary practices that chart a path for the audience — participants and visitors alike — to weave through, imagining for themselves what the future can hold,” Lokko said. The 18th International Architecture Show also will include, as is customary, National Participations, with each country displaying its own exhibition at the Giardini and Arsenale Pavilions, as well as in the historical center of Venice. This season will feature a variety of collateral events organized by worldwide organizations, each of which will host its own exhibits and projects in Venice.
President Roberto Cicutto also shared, “You will understand how her approach looks very much like the proposal for a pact between the visitors of La Biennale, the world of architecture and of culture in general. This is an Exhibition that, based on very practical premises and very specific points of view, will look straight into the eyes of the representatives of participating countries, and all those who will crowd the Giardini, the Arsenale and the city of Venice. All in order to speak to the world, which is the real reason why a curator takes on the responsibility of organizing an International Exhibition of La Biennale.”
Queen of England Knights Isaac Julien
The Queen unveiled her 2022 Birthday Honors list on June 2, when it was announced that Isaac Julien, filmmaker and distinguished professor of arts at University of California Santa Cruz, was knighted. His work bridges the gap between creative disciplines, drawing from and commenting on cinema, dance, photography, music, theater, painting and sculpture, combining them to create dramatic visual tales via multi-screen film installations. In his films and multi-screen installations, he investigates people’s migration across many temporalities and locations in order to give voice to the stories of marginalized, frequently black, and queer narratives.
His installations have been shown at prominent museums and galleries all over the globe, including TATE, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the MAXXI Museum in Rome, and many more. He received the Royal Academy of Arts’ Charles Wollaston Award in 2017 and the Goslarer Kaiserring award in 2022, Germany’s most prestigious art honor.
“Getting the knighthood at this particular time is a great honor, and I hope it shines a light on the importance of questions of diversity and inclusion for the arts,” says Julien. “The visual arts have led the way around these questions, and my work as a professor and educator at Santa Cruz is a central aspect of my practice. It is, therefore, essential that the arts maintain their pivotal role at universities globally in light of the current impediments they are facing. We can only hope that those who want to lead change in education will recognize the importance of the arts in this crucial moment of social transformation.”
International African American Museum Slated to Open in Early 2023
On June 1, the International African American Museum, being built in Charleston, South Carolina, announced that it will finally open on Jan. 21, 2023. The museum has around 150,000 square feet of display, learning, and interpretative space. Also featured will be The Center for Family History, a revolutionary resource for the study and development of African American genealogy, with linkages to Africa and the African diaspora. Staff will help novice and experienced genealogists discover more about their ancestors by utilizing the Center’s unique collection of primary materials, documents, and texts.
And The African Ancestors Memorial Garden will honor the heritage and plights of the Africans brought to the Americas. It will be a place to reflect and experience botanic gardens, artistic installations, a huge infinity fountain on the edge of the original wharf, a soundscape that explores diverse African languages, performances, programs and more. Landscape architect Walter Hood, a 2019 MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” winner, created the design. The museum initially was revealed two decades ago, when then Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. unveiled the plans in 2000 on the former site of Gadsden’s Wharf—one of the nation’s most active slave-trading ports.
“I am proud to have worked with our incredible team to get this museum to opening day,” said Dr. Tonya Matthews, president and CEO of the International African American Museum. This museum will be a must-see space of courageous curiosity and authentic engagement with our nation’s history—with African American history.”
Artist Odili Donald Odita Joins the David Kordansky Gallery
Odili Donald Odita, a Philadelphia-based artist, will be represented by David Kordansky Gallery in partnership with Jack Shainman Gallery. Odita’s art is greatly influenced by a sense of dual identity, merging characteristics of Western modernism with African culture. He was born in Nigeria and reared in the American Midwest. His work reflects a clash of civilizations and a yearning to build something new from disparate components. His paintings, like a stitched or quilted garment, are weavings from diverse locales, eras, and temperaments that portray the complexities of culture, identity, and existence.
Odita’s work appears in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, Perez Museum, Miami; Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Odita lives and works in Philadelphia. Odita will continue to be represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York and Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town. He will have his first show at Kordansky next year and will feature in the gallery`s booth at Art Basel in Switzerland this month.
– Sumaiyah E.Wade
