Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art

I just wanted to note the really wonderful amount of video, sound, and image materials available on the website for the exhibition Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art which recently finished its run in NYC at the Studio Museum in Harlem. As the curatorial/press information for the show states: "Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art is the first exhibition to survey over fifty years of performance art by visual artists of African descent from the United States and the Caribbean. Black performance has generally been associated with music, theater, dance, and popular culture. While the artists in Radical Presence draw on these disciplines, here their work is considered in relation to the visual arts. The show begins with examples dating from Fluxus—a loose international network of artists from the 1960s and ’70s—and Conceptual art of the same period, and continues up to the present day. Featuring live performances as well as objects, Radical Presence includes more than one hundred works by thirty-seven artists." The site features videos, interviews, and documentation of works by artists including: Papo Colo, Coco Fusco, Theaster Gates, David Hammons, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Dave McKenzie, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O'Grady, Benjamin Patterson, Adrian Piper, Pope.L, Dread Scott, Carrie Mae Weems, and many others.

Douglas Stichbury opening at Suite Gallery

Painter Douglas Stichbury has a new exhibition opening at Suite Gallery in Wellington on Thursday April 3 at 5:30 PM entitled The Practice of Leisure which runs through April 26. For more info and to see examples of the artist's previous work, consult http://www.suite.co.nz/artists/douglas-stichbury/

Yoko Ono at Guggenheim Bilbao

The Guardian's Jonathan Jones has written a fine piece on the legendary now 81-year-old artist Yoko Ono's most recent retrospective and her changing critical fortunes (certainly for the better of late). Jones rightly notes how innovative so many of her works that date from 40+ years ago still are, and the importance of her legacy on countless artists. Unfortunately I made the terrible mistake of scrolling through some of the comments below the article and read loads of ignorant and smug screeds attacking Ono in the same old boring, predictable fashion. You encounter (it's not worth it, trust me!) Beatle-fan zealots who "hate her" and seem generally to "hate conceptual art." What truly disappointing stuff.