Disney-Britton

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory Disney-Britton Gregory Disney-Britton, sitting in his living room in Indianapolis, holds over his face a signed print by Enrique Martínez Celaya. On the 6th Day of Christmas , my true love gave to me, a signed, limited-edition print by Enrique Martínez Celaya . Born in Cuba in 1964, Celaya uses landscapes and figures to explore a metaphysical world. We became acquainted with his work during a 2010 visit to see NYC's Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine plus the Museum of Biblical Art. His work can be found in the public collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art , and many others. Today's Christmas  gift was created during his 2014 artist residency at the Tamarind Institute.

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS Nick Cave's ”Untitled" (2015) from the 18-piece Exquisite Series from the Tamarind Institute. There are  many collectors  around the world. Our twenty-three 2019 acquisitions were:  Anila Quayyum Agha's  " Walk in My Shade 2 " (2019);  Josh Betsey's  "SNoël, SNoël," (2019); and  Alicia Zanoni's  " The Opposite of Hesitant " (2019). Limited edition acquisitions included  Enrique Martínez Celaya's  " Untitled " (2014) and  Nick Cave's  ” Untitled " (2015) from the 18-piece  Exquisite Series  from the Tamarind Institute. Finally, the project also acquired two ceramic plates:  Kehinde Wiley's  ” Mara Mbaye II " (2014), a porcelain open edition; and  Hank Thomas Willis's  " Plate " (2019), a ceramic limited edition.

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS To: Michael Wright From: Ernest Disney-Britton “Back to Eden: Contemporary Artists Wander the Garden” (June 27 - Sept. 28, 2014) at the Museum of Biblical Art,  formerly at 1865 Broadway, at 61st Street; 212-408-1500, mobia.org. As we come to the final hours of this decade, I'm responding to your challenge to identify the decade-defining art installations that contributed the most to religious and spiritual dialogue. In contrast to exhibitions, an art installation transforms the space so entirely that you feel like you are inside the work itself. This list is a reflection of the art installations of the 2010s that generated intense media buzz for their immersive effect, plus a nod to our favorite exhibition (with installations), " Back to Eden " at the Museum of Biblical Art which closed in 2015 .

RETABLOARTS.COM ELIXIR DEORUM (detail-central panel) Oil on triptych canvas 60 x 30 inches. Private Collection. This has been a very productive year and now that it is coming to an end, I'd like to express my deep appreciation and gratefulness for your support! I can't believe It's already been 20 years since I started painting professionally. It all started in 1999 and the journey hasn't stopped even once. This is why I decided to prepare a 'retrospective video' looking back in time and sharing exemplary paintings throughout the years, to show the evolution and direction of my work. To see this video click on my Youtube Channel . Thank you very much for taking the time to read this and joining me in this exciting creative journey! [ More ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory Disney-Britton Toyin Ojih Odutola Untitled, 2014 (14-321) Single-color lithograph Paper Size: 8 1/2 x 11 1/8 inches Paper Type: Grey Pescia Collaborating Printer: Justin Andrews Edition 29 of 45 On the 6th Day of Christmas , my true love gave to me, a limited-edition print by  Toyin Ojih Odutola . Born in Nigeria in 1985, she creates "black portraiture with ballpoint pen ink" and uses  "Skin as geography." Represented by Jack Shainman Gallery of NYC, her work is in the home of Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean and Alicia Keys, as well as the public collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Today's gift is from a suite of eighteen lithographs by visiting artists at the Tamarind Institute .

AMERICAN MAGAZINE By Wendy Beckett Janet McKenzie's "The Holy Family." The painting hangs in the chapel of Loyola School, a co-educational high school in New York City. It is impossible to paint the Holy Family realistically. We do not know what they looked like.Artists, though, are forced to imagine for us the appearance of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, and over the centuries they have done so with great enthusiasm. The jolt many will feel when they look at Janet McKenzie’s painting “The Holy Family” forces us to recognize the vast stretches of time and culture that lie between us. The whole painting is a marvelous interplay of realism and symbolism. We are compelled to think again and to look twice. [ More ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton Nick Cave's "Untitled" (15-303) 2015; Single-color lithograph, dusted with photostatic toner; Paper Size: 8 1/2 x 11 inches; Paper Type: White Somerset satin; Collaborating Printer: Bill Lagattuta; Edition 29 of 45 Each year, we celebrate the 12 Days of Christmas with gift-giving from December 25 (Christmas) and ending on January 6 ( Three Kings Day ), and this year it includes a lithograph purchased to mark the 2019 birth of our grandson "Tru." The image is of one of Nick Cave's Soundsuits "meant to empower the person wearing them through concealing their race and gender." As a 2015  visiting artist  at the Tamarind Institute , he created a lithograph now included in a suite with 17 other artists. Tru's birth makes Nick Cave's "Untitled" our art of Christmas week .

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory Disney-Britton Gregory Disney-Britton head's out for church after opening his gift of Suzi Davidoff's "Untitled," 2000; Edition of 45 On the  5th Day of Christmas , my true love gave to me, a limited-edition print by Suzi Davidoff . Born in El Paso, Texas in 1952, Davidoff uses found organic materials to explore themes of structure, sustainability, and perception of the natural world. Davidoff's work is available at Octavia Art Gallery in New Orleans, and included in the museum collections of two favorites, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Library. Today's gift is from  Exquisite Corpse,  a suite of eighteen lithographs by visiting artists at the Tamarind Institute.

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory Disney-Britton Gregory Disney-Britton in his Indianapolis living room holding up Yoshimi Hayashi's "Untitled" 2002; Edition of 45 On the  4th Day of Christmas ,   my true love gave to me, a limited-edition print by Yoshimi Hayashi .  Born in Japan in 1971, today, he is an installation and performance artist. As a teen, he returned to Japan to study ceramics and apprenticed with world-class ceramic sculptor Hiroshi Ikehata. He earned an MFA from The University of New Mexico and joined the Art Department at MiraCosta College in 2001 to teach ceramics and sculpture. Today's gift is from  Exquisite Corpse,  a suite of eighteen lithographs by visiting artists at the  Tamarind Institute .

THE NEW YORK TIMES  By Esau McCaulley “The Massacre of the Innocents,” an 1824 painting by Léon Cogniet . Léon Cogniet/Musée des Beaux-Arts, via Alamy The song “The 12 Days of Christmas” paints a whimsical picture of the stretch of time between Christmas Day and Epiphany. In reality, this song has nothing to do with the way that Christians are called to celebrate the season. Within the narrative of the Christian calendar, the birth of Christ is followed not by leaping lords and milkmaids but by a massacre of children. The Feast of the Holy Innocents, observed on Dec. 28 by Western churches and on Dec. 29 by Orthodox churches, speaks a particularly powerful word to this cultural moment. A “furious” Herod then orders the killing of all the boys 2 years and under in Bethlehem. [ More ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton Gregory Disney-Britton hold's today's third day of Christmas gift a limited edition print by Osmeivy Ortega Pacheco On the  3rd Day of Christmas , my true-love gave to me, a limited-edition print by Osmeivy Ortega Pacheco . Born in Havana, Cuba in 1980, he is one of the island's great emerging printmakers. These highly detailed black-and-white linocuts remind us of the anatomical drawings of Michelangelo , printed on the cotton fabric used to mop floors in Cuba. Ortega is represented by Childs Gallery in Boston and Gallery on Greene in Key West . Today's gift is from  Exquisite Corpse,  a suite of eighteen lithographs by visiting artists at the  Tamarind Institute .

THE NEW YORK TIMES Show Us Your Walls By Audrey Hoffer Olusanya Ojikutu at his house in Bowie, Md., with, left, a detail of one of his own paintings, “Labyrinth of Imagination” (2015), and right, a painting on a wood pallet by Dapo Ojoade. Emma Howells for The New York Times. BOWIE, Md. — The white living room in Olusanya Ojikutu’s home, with its soaring cathedral ceiling, is a temple to his traditional and contemporary African art. Sculptures bookend the sofa, paintings and prints decorate the walls and the overall atmosphere is one of beauty, historic grandeur and repose. Most of Ojikutu’s sculptures are at least a century old, created for performances or rituals. “They served as intermediaries between the local people and their ancestors’ spirits to make their lives better and protect them from evil forces in this world and beyond,” he said. "I try to show that expanse of art forms and visual cultures in my collection.”[ More ]

THE NEW YORKER By Kriston Capps Kehinde Wiley’s “Rumors of War,” which was recently installed in Richmond, Virginia, mimics Confederate monuments that were erected in the city during the rise of Jim Crow. Photograph by Steve Helber / AP / Shutterstoc k In a rainy morning in December, Kehinde Wiley climbed onto a grandstand set up outside the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in Richmond, to unveil a statue. Wiley, an African-American artist, who is forty-two and short, wore black Converse sneakers and a suit patterned like stained glass, which set him apart from the local officials who preceded him onstage. “I think we all have to do a big bow and a ‘thank you’ to whatever powers brought us here today,” he said. The plaza of the museum, where the ceremony took place, faces the headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. [ More ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton Greg holds his 2nd day of Christmas gift: Larry Brown's "Untitled" (2001) from the Exquisite Corpse series. (Note: Is this the face of someone enjoying their 12 Days of Christmas?) On the 2nd Day of Christmas , my true-love gave to me, a limited-edition print by  Larry Brown. Born in Brunswick, NJ in 1942, he is a highly regarded NYC painter who works in oil on canvas and tempera paints on paper and deals with themes of science and universality. In recent years, he has focused on climate change. Larry Brown's work is included in the collections at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and The Newark Museum of Art to name only two. Today's gift is from a suite of 18 lithographs by visiting artists at the  Tamarind Institute .

THE NEW YORK TIMES Show Us Your Walls By Hilarie M. Sheets Candace Carmel Barasch at home with, from left, “Alex Israel, Self Portrait (Multiples),” 2017 and, on table, his “Syz’s Frozen Yogurt,” 2017. “I hope you don’t have a seizure,” Candace Carmel Barasch playfully warned a visitor entering her Park Avenue apartment, where many of the vibrantly hued artworks blink and buzz on the walls. Alex Da Corte’s theatrical tableau of a candle in a window is outlined in neon tubing so intensely colored it almost hurts the eyes. Cory Arcangel’s portrait of Miley Cyrus on a flat-screen TV uses obsolete technology to create a rippling lake effect that could induce wistfulness — and a touch of seasickness. Recalling her renovation of the apartment 15 years ago, Ms. Barasch, a Manhattan native, said, “I should have put a plug at every single station.” The bold, contemporary works all refer to Hollywood in some way. [ More ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton Greg at home with his special poster created by Nick Cave for Expo Chicago 2019 On the  1st Day of Christmas , my true love gave to me, a limited-edition print by  Nick Cave . Born in Fulton, Missouri in 1959, his “Soundsuits” act as costumes, made in reaction to the police beating of Rodney King in 1992, meant to empower the person wearing them through concealing their race and gender. His works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the  Indianapolis Museum of Art , among others. Today's "Untitled" is from  Exquisite Corpse,  a suite of eighteen lithographs by artists at the  Tamarind Institute .

TIME By N.T. Wright Nativity, painting by Johann Rottenhammer (1564-1625). I stood at the back of the Cathedral at 1:30 on Christmas morning, shaking hands with the midnight worshippers on their way home. I had been preaching about God coming into our lives at Christmastime, especially in the form of the weak, the vulnerable and the homeless. Most of the congregation were happy, but one man had something to get off his chest. “You should stick to the script!” he said to me. “Christmas has nothing to do with asylum-seekers!” And off he marched before I could splutter out the obvious reply: The Christmas story in Luke’s gospel climaxes with Jesus in a feeding-trough because everywhere else was full. Matthew’s version ends with Joseph and Mary whisking the baby off to a foreign country because the authorities wanted to kill him. Putting these together, the heart of the story is precisely Jesus the homeless asylum seeker. [ More ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES  By Nancy Coleman Kanye West (third from left) takes a bow after performing his opera “Mary” at David Geffen Hall, joined by the director, Vanessa Beecroft (second from left), and members of the cast. Credit...The New York Times David Geffen Hall was nearly full on Sunday evening for Kanye West’s “ Mary, ” the hip-hop star’s second venture into what he calls opera. But no one there seemed more enthralled with the performance than West himself. Sitting downstage, bathed in golden light, he bopped his head and swayed in his seat as his Sunday Service choir sang his hits and a handful of Christmas classics, all given the full gospel treatment for this 50-minute rendition of the Nativity story. But between the most stirring numbers, it was easy to get confused, caught in the chasm between a classical performance at Lincoln Center and an arena show. Was this a Kanye concert? A traditional opera? [ More ]

THE HYPEBEAST By Rebecca Kim Wissam Salsaa, the manager of the Walled-Off Hotel, pictured with Banksy’s Scar of Bethlehem. Photograph: Ahmad Gharabli/AFP via Getty Images. Courtsey of The Guardian   With Christmas just around the corner, Banksy has unveiled his newest artwork which reinterprets the traditional nativity scene. Scar of Bethlehem sees Mary and Joseph gathered around baby Jesus on the floor of a barn, as a large concrete wall is placed as the main backdrop. Strewn with bullet marks and graffiti with the words “Love” and “Paix” (peace), a shell explosion in four directions leaves a large opening emulating the Star of Bethlehem as it shines onto the family. The artwork is located inside Banksy’s Walled Off Hotel in the West Bank of Bethlehem and emphasizes the concrete walls that separate the area from Israel. [ More ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES  By Nicholas Kristof A detail of the 16th-century “Martinengo Altarpiece,” by Lorenzo Lotto, on the high altar of the church of San Bartolomeo. Antonio Quattrone/Electa — Mondadori Portfolio, via Getty Images Welcome to the latest in my occasional series of conversations about Christianity. Here’s my interview, edited for space, with Philip Yancey, an evangelical Christian writer who has more than 15 million books in print in more than 50 languages. Merry Christmas! And let me start by asking about that first Christmas. Do you believe in the Virgin Birth? "A hundred years ago, the Virgin Birth was considered so important that it made the list of five “fundamentals of the Christian faith,” said Yancey. "Nowadays, with in vitro fertilization, virgin births are old news. For me, the issue centers not on the mechanics of reproduction but rather the nature of Jesus. In the Incarnation, God’s own self came to earth as a human. I wouldn’t pretend to guess ho...

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton Kent Monkman's "Reconciliation Etching" (2018); Copper Plate Etching on Acid Free Paper; Size: 8” x 11”; Edition: 21/100; Reconciliation etching is hand signed and numbered We'd not heard of Kent Monkman until last week, but all it took was seeing one of his polemics to know we'd love to bring one of his realistic, grim but humor-filled landscapes back-home with us to  " Mike Pence's Indiana ." Born in Canada in 1965, Monkman is a Cree artist who uses his gender-fluid alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle in superheroic roles to challenge accepted notions of religion, sexuality, and race. This week, The Metropolitan Museum of Art unveiled his commission " Wooden Boat People ," and that makes Kent Monkman , our artist of the week.

APOLLO MAGAZINE By Sameer Rahim ‘The Prophet Muhammad encounters the angel of half-fire and half-snow’, miniature from a copy of al-Sarai’s Nahj al-Faradis (c. 1465), Herat. Courtesy David Collection, Copenhagen Warrior, king, celestial adventurer and Sufi – these are just four popular Muhammads. Nowadays you are most likely to see abstract representations such as an imprint of his sandal or a rose. These depictions, we should note, are no less meaningful for being non-figural. One curator of Islamic art at a private collection in London, who wants to remain anonymous, tells me that the framing of Gruber’s project to ‘restore to Islam its rich artistic heritage’, as the blurb to The Praiseworthy One has it, is problematic. ‘Everyone knows how crucial Muhammad is to Muslims […] and Islam doesn’t need its culture restored to it.’ Gruber acknowledges the objections. ‘It’s about restoring the proper discourse around images in a way that is free from other kinds of agendas.’ [ More ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES Show Us Your Walls By Shivani Vora Olivier Widmaier Picasso, left, and his partner, Matthew Drushel, in their Miami Beach apartment with a Gilles Bensimon photograph “Flowers in the Water” (2011). MIAMI BEACH — Olivier Widmaier Picasso, a television producer, author and grandson of Pablo Picasso , says the Paris apartment he lives in with his partner, Matthew Drushel, is full of modern works by artists from around the world. In contrast, their Miami Beach apartment, purchased two years ago, is a canvas for French artists and designers. “The idea was to have a home in the U.S. that has the opposite art sensibility of what’s in Paris,” Mr. Picasso said, as he stood in the living room of the long, open space, with a wraparound balcony offering panoramic views of South Beach and Downtown Miami. Mr. Picasso, 58 — his grandmother, Marie-Thérèse Walter, was the artist’s muse and eventual lover — is the author of the biography “Picasso: An Intimate Portrait.” [ More ]...

QUARTZ INDIA By Harish Pullanoor Breathing life into existence. Dancing before a corpse wasn’t a new idea to me. Discovering a god in it is what left me stunned. Decades of watching movies in multiple south Indian languages had not prepared me for it. Neither had tripping on koothu, the dance form popular among cinema-lovers in that part of the country. Yet, here I was one September day in 2018, searching for hints of lord Nataraja, the fountainhead of most Indian dance forms, in this most unruly of performances, Saavukoothu—“death dance.” A street dance practiced by some Tamils when they accompany the departed to the final resting place, Saavukoothu doesn’t demand any of the refinement of the more evolved classical traditions like Bharatanatyam or Kathak. There is only one rule: Let go completely. [ More ]

THE  NEW YORK TIMES By Holland Cotter A detail from Kent Monkman’s “Resurgence of the People” updates Delacroix’s pessimistic image by depicting a healthy baby in the arms of a same-sex Indigenous couple. NEW YORK---Coonskin caps for Christmas! I was a kid in mid-20th-century America. The biggest cultural event I can remember from early childhood was Walt Disney’s gigantically popular “ Davy Crockett: Indian Fighte r” on TV. All this came back to mind when I saw “ The Great Hall Commission: Kent Monkman, mistikosiwak (Wooden Boat People) ” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The paintings are pretty stupendous. “I want to make the contemporary feel historic and the historic feel contemporary,” Mr. Monkman said in a 2017 interview for the Toronto Globe and Mail. That’s an excellent goal for the Met to shoot for too. [ More ]

THE GLOBE AND MAIL By Kate Taylor Kent Monkman, (Canadian, b. 1965). Welcoming the Newcomers, 2019. The Cree artist Kent Monkman stood under the soaring ceiling of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Great Hall this week wielding a laser pointer. With its beam, he indicated historical characters on the huge canvas behind him, stopping briefly on the figure of a beaver with an olive branch in its mouth as he decoded his latest painting for the assembled media. Europeans came to this continent seeking beaver pelts, he reminded them. Toronto-resident Monkman, a member of Manitoba’s Fisher River Band, is one of a trio of international artists given an unusual assignment by America’s pre-eminent museum: The Met has asked them to address its encyclopedic collection by creating new art for its most prominent spaces. [ More ]

CBC NEWS By Jessica Wong Cree artist Kent Monkman discusses his two monumental new paintings installed in the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on Tuesday. (Sean Conaboy/CBC) A bold commentary on North American history is one of the first things visitors to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art will see for the next few months — and it comes courtesy of renowned Cree artist Kent Monkman . Monkman, a member of the Fisher River First Nation in Manitoba, was in Manhattan Tuesday to help unveil two massive new paintings in the Met's main entrance. Commissioned by the New York museum, the artworks are part of a series which invites contemporary artists to create new pieces inspired by art in the Met's collection. Monkman is the inaugural artist to be featured in the Great Hall. [ More ]

THE OBSERVER  By RM Vaughan Kent Monkman with one of the paintings included in his current exhibition, “Shame and Prejudice.” Kent Monkman is having a big year. A very big year. The Canadian multimedia artist, who is of Cree First Nations heritage, is still crisscrossing North America with his touring show of paintings, “Shame and Prejudice,” a journey which will continue well into 2020, and his new works are appearing in group shows from Duke University to Des Moines. But his next project catapults Monkman into monument-maker status: think Picasso’s Guernica monumental, or Tate Turbine Hall scale. On December 19, the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art will unveil mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People), a massive diptych (both 22 feet long) that will fill the Met’s Great Hall. [ More ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES  By Jesse Green Debbie Grossman’s “Jessie Evans-Whinery, Homesteader, With Her Wife Edith Evans-Whinery and Their Baby” (2010), from her “My Pie Town” series. Inkjet print, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, purchase, Charina Foundation Inc., gift © Debbie Grossman, courtesy of Julie Saul Projects, N.Y. On the whole, queer art, which fully emerged from the closet in the 1960s and 1970s — around the same time people in great numbers did — has mostly concerned itself with its own moment, as if to say, “Here I am.” That approach continues because, after all, each new microgeneration of gay people born to straight parents in a straight world must create itself and its aesthetics from scratch. Yet with works like “My Pie Town,” another approach has been emerging in tandem. You can see it in the American playwright Matthew Lopez’s two-part drama, “The Inheritance” (which opened on Broadway last month); and in art by Glenn Ligon , Catherine Opie , and McDermott &...

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Elizabeth A. Harris Treasury officials say that Nazem Said Ahmad, a diamond dealer shown here in his Beirut apartment, used his art collection as a tool to shelter money used to finance Hezbollah.  U.S. Treasury Department The Treasury Department announced sanctions Friday against a diamond dealer who the government said has used an art gallery in Beirut, Lebanon, and an extensive personal collection, sprinkled with names like Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol, to shelter and launder money. American officials described the diamond dealer, Nazem Said Ahmad, who lives in Beirut, as one of the “top donors” to Hezbollah, a political movement based in Lebanon that is considered a terrorist group by the United States. The Trump Administration said that Mr. Ahmad, born into a wealthy family with a diamond business, was involved in “blood diamond” smuggling. [ More ]

ARTDAILY Louise Nevelson: Chapel of the Good Shepherd (1977). Photo Credit: Thomas Magno. ROCKLAND, ME.- A trio of dramatic sculptures by Louise Nevelson, called the Trinity Columns, have been installed at the Farnsworth Art Museum while on temporary loan from Saint Peter’s Church in Manhattan, which houses the renowned Chapel of the Good Shepherd, at Lexington Avenue and 54th St. The loan of the columns, which were removed while Nevelson Chapel undergoes extensive restoration work and installed at the Farnsworth last winter, is now being extended through spring of 2020. [ More ]

Dr. Stanton Thomas, Curator of Collections and Exhibits for the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, inspects a newly acquired painting by world-renowned artist Kehinde Wiley entitled Leviathan Zodiac (The World Stage: Israel).  The painting a 2011, oil and gold enamel on canvas, will be presented for public display in January, 2020. More evidence that Tampa Bay’s art game is leveling up comes with the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg acquisition of an important work by Los Angeles-born contemporary artist Kehinde Wiley . Leviathan Zodiac is part of the Nigerian-American artist’s large-scale portraiture series The World Stage: Israel. Wiley is best known for his official portrait of President Barack Obama in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. He paints people of color dressed in street wear, in traditional poses typically held by white men throughout art history. He sandwiches realistically painted figures between incredibly intricate and colorful design motifs. [ ...

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS "Study for Celestial Beings" ( 2018), Acrylic on canvas16” x 20” Kent Monkman’s gender-fluid alter ego  Miss Chief Eagle Testickle  often appears in his work as a time-traveling, shape-shifting, supernatural being who reverses the colonial gaze to challenge received notions of history and Indigenous peoples. On December 19, two large-scale commissions by Kent Monkman's will hang in the Great Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Born in Canada in 1965, Monkman is a Cree artist who explores themes of colonization, sexuality, loss, and resilience—the complexities of historic and contemporary Indigenous experiences—across a variety of mediums, including painting, film/video, performance, and installation.

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton Anila Quayyum Agha in Studio. Photo by Esther Boston for No Mean City. We're bringing home another piece by Anila Quayyum Agha this week, the third in our small collection of 121 pieces. As an interdisciplinary artist, Agha creates artwork that explores the barriers of race, religion, and gender.  In the last year, she's been our artist of the week thrice, because of the news she generates, including this week's story about the " Transcendent Spirituality " exhibit in Vermont. This week you too can also find a tiny 5"x5" painting by Agha at the Arts Council of Indianapolis , and that's why Anila Quayyum Agha is our artist of the week.

SEVEN DAYS By Amy Lilly "Hidden Diamond-Saffron" by Anila Quayyam Agha In 2016, shortly after Heather Ferrell became curator and director of exhibitions at the BCA Center , Seven Days asked her whether she found it important to bring in outside artists. Having spent the previous four years consulting for two major art museums in Doha, Qatar, Ferrell said, "I think we have a responsibility to look locally as well as internationally, while always keeping ourselves grounded in our community." The Burlington gallery's current exhibition, "Transcendent: Spirituality in Contemporary Art," cocurated by Ferrell and Shelley Warren, fulfills that promise impressively. Of the seven artists included, four are internationally prominent; the rest have national reputations, including two locals. [ More ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES Show Us Your Walls By Brett Sokol Rachel Kushner in her living room in Los Angeles. On wall, clockwise from left, are “C,” by Chris Williams (2010); “Untitled,” by Anon (Richard Prince), 2015; “Tit Print,” by Brigid Berlin (1995); “After Ono” by James Benning (2014); “One Month Ago (Special Edition)” by Wade Guyton (2014); and on piano, “Fruits and Nuts” by Laura Owens (2011). LOS ANGELES — Few of Rachel Kushner’s artworks were purchased outright. While her Angelino Heights Craftsman-style home, where she lives with her husband, Jason Smith, and their son, Remy, may be an intimately scaled who’s who of contemporary art — including West Coast painters like James Hayward and Laura Owens and New Yorkers like Seth Price and Richard Prince — most of these pieces were received in exchange for her writing. When she came to New York from San Francisco in 1996, at 27, she became friends with the painter Alex Brown and subsequently took a deep dive into the downtown art...

SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE By Susannah Gardiner The Confirmation by Julie Buffalohead (Ponca), 2009 (NMAI)  Museums are beginning to rewrite the story they tell about American art, and this time, they’re including the original Americans. Traditionally, Native American art and artifacts have been exhibited alongside African and Pacific Islands art, or in an anthropology department, or even in a natural history wing. But that has begun to change in recent years. Paul Chaat Smith, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) is one of the curators of “Stretching the Canvas: Eight Decades of Native Painting,” a new exhibition at the NMAI’s George Gustav Heye Center in New York City. The show pushes to the foreground questions of where Native American art—and Native American artists—truly belong. [ More ]@SmithsonianMag

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Jose A. Del Real and Adeel Hassan Unusual nativity scene features Jesus, Mary and Joseph separated, and in jails. Image courtesy of The Indian Express CLAREMONT, Calif. — The Mylar blanket glitters like tinsel, but wrapped around the figure of the baby Jesus, it looks hostile and stark. His parents, Mary and Joseph, look on from their own chain-link cages. Barbed wire hovers overhead. This is no typical Nativity scene. Over the weekend,  Claremont United Methodist Church , 30 miles east of Los Angeles, erected the display in protest of the treatment of migrants and refugees in the United States. The church’s leaders say they hope it will spark conversation about compassion and the tenets of Christian faith. “This is a sacred family to us,” the Rev. Karen Clark Ristine said on Monday, speaking in front of the cages. [ More ]

CBS NEWS A new statue of a black man on horseback now sits a few blocks from a famous row of Confederate monuments in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy. It was inspired by one of the Confederate monuments, a statue of General Jeb Stuart on horseback, but it sends a very different message. "CBS This Morning" co-host Anthony Mason spoke exclusively with the new monument's artist, Kehinde Wiley, about how he wants to create a new narrative. A few years ago, Wiley, of California, came face-to-face for the first time with the statues of Stuart, as well as Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson along Richmond's Monument Avenue. "There's a type of ceremony that surrounds the valorization of these guys," Wiley said. [ More ]

TWITTER H onour DanceKent Monkman2019Acrylic on canvas36" x 56.5"

RICHMOND-POST GAZETTE By Colleen Curran See a comparison of Kehinde Wiley's "Rumors of War" and the Gen. J.E.B. Stuart statue on Monument Avenue. Nearly a century after the last Confederate statue was erected on Monument Avenue, a crowd massed Tuesday beneath gray skies and drizzle at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for New York-based artist Kehinde Wiley's response: a muscular, triumphant African American astride a horse, looking defiantly toward the sky. "Rumors of War" is modeled after the monument to Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart on Monument Avenue, which Wiley saw when he was visiting Richmond three years ago for his career retrospective, "Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic," at VMFA. Wiley's version depicts an African American wearing ripped jeans and Nike high-top sneakers. [ More ] [ More ]

Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara (Gwaneum) from Korea, Goryeo dynasty, ca. 1220–1285. One of the Buddhist masterworks at the Smithsonian’s Freer|Sackler galleries. Mark your calendar. From a revamped MoMA and the fearless Pope.L to Renaissance sculptors and female modernists, here are more than 100 shows that define the new season. SACRED DEDICATION: A KOREAN BUDDHIST MASTERPIECE A thousand-year-old gilded wood statue of the Korean bodhisattva of compassion makes a timely visit to our nation’s capital. Sept. 21-March 22; Freer Sackler Smithsonian, Washington, D.C., freersackler.si.edu. [ More ]

THE ART NEWSPAPER BY Victoria Stapley-Brown Kent Monkman has been selected to create two monumental paintings for The Met's Great Hall. Monkman, born in Canada in 1965, is a Cree artist widely known for his provocative interventions into Western European and American art history. Nine months since he took over as director, Max Hollein is indeed making his mark at the New York institution. Hollein’s commitment to integrating Modern and contemporary art at the Met’s Fifth Avenue building is evident in the upcoming exhibition program, most notably, the fulfillment of his promise of new annual commissions for two public spaces. The Cree Canadian artist Kent Monkman , whose practice is “a new idea of modern history painting”, Hollein said, will make monumental paintings for the Great Hall ( 19 December-12 February 2020 ). And the Kenya-born artist Wangechi Mutu , who makes pieces with “fantastic otherworldly narratives”, Hollein said, has been chosen for the first-ever pro...

GIARTS BLOG By Carmen Graciela Díaz In the midst of philanthropy's self-examination and taking steps toward change, that shift is best exemplified by Ford Foundation President Darren Walker’s new book From Generosity to Justice: A New Gospel of Wealth , writes Jeff Raikes, cofounder of the Raikes Foundation, in his review of this publication. In it, Walker takes what was once the foundational document of the philanthropic sector, The Gospel of Wealth, written by Andrew Carnegie in 1899 and turns it on its head, Raikes points out. "Reading Carnegie’s words through a modern lens," says Raikes, "is shocking in places." What Walker calls for is advancing justice – economic, racial, social, and political justice....What Carnegie advocated for in terms of philanthropic acts of generosity – funding a bed in a shelter for example – though valuable and good – isn’t enough, Walker argues. [ More]

DER FREITAG DIGITAL By Timo Feldhaus Kent Monkman: The Deluge (2019); Courtesy Private Collection, Canada Nun beginnen sehr bald „unsere“ 20er Jahre, deren Vorgänger aus dem letzten Jahrhundert sich als so berühmt und berüchtigt und exzessiv und erschütternd eingeprägt haben, in denen in Deutschland die Saat gelegt wurde, welche, als sie aufging, dann Republik und Demokratie zerbröselte und vor deren Wiederholung heute einige im Spiegelbild der Zeitgeschichte erneut warnen. Denn es begann ja damit, dass eine kleine, rechtsradikale Splitterpartei von München aus Antisemitismus und Fremdenhass schürte und plötzlich massiv Wahlen gewann, es endete im Nationalsozialismus und mit 80 Millionen Toten. Was bedeutet es, wenn am Ende der nun beginnenden 20er Jahre des 21. [ More ]

VULTURE MAGAZINE  By Jarrett Earnest There are two paintings. In the first, we see settlers arriving on the shores of North America and being welcomed by the First People. Miss Chief is there, helping people ashore. For the second painting, Miss Chief is in a boat, posed like Washington Crossing the Delaware, along with a variety of indigenous people piloting this boat through a stormy sea. Isn’t a time-traveling, gender-fluid, indigenous sex goddess exactly what art needs right about now? The Met seems to think so and has commissioned the Canadian Cree artist Kent Monkman , whose work often features his alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle , to produce a pair of 11-by-22-foot paintings titled mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People) for its Great Hall (opens December 19). Monkman, 54, gave up abstraction to communicate ideas about the history of colonial settlement in North America to a more mainstream audience, and somehow, as a result, he has become “about as famous as a liv...

THE BOSTON GLOBE By Cate McQuaid John Biggers's "Band of Angels: Weaving the Seventh Word" from 1992-93.COURTESY JOHN T. BIGGERS ESTATE/VAGA AT ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY HARTFORD — “Afrocosmologies: American Reflections" sits like a beating heart at the juncture of several major historical arteries: religion, art, and American history. The sweeping exhibition on three floors of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art revolves around African-American spirituality. It’s a giant theme. Cosmologies make sense of the world, and African-American belief systems contend with the kidnapping and enslavement of Africans brought to America as chattel, followed by generations of oppression. Making some sense of that senselessness requires grief, community, and a muscular faith. [ More ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton Alicia Zanoni in her artist studio at the Harrison Center for the Arts in 2017 I am a bigger fan of landscapes than Ernest, but we are both huge fans of the ethereal weather paintings of Indianapolis-based artist Alicia Zanoni . By painting elements of weather, she invites us on a spiritual journey. We first became fans of her crashing ocean blue waves in 2017-2018 during her Arts Council of Indianapolis fellowship . Today, those same spirit-filled brush-strokes are blended into landscapes with orange, green, and yellow. We brought home her “The Opposite of Hesitant” on Friday, and that makes Alicia Zanoni our artist of the week.