Technique mirrors content: The collage, composed of various individual pieces, has enjoyed great popularity among Black American artists for decades. The Phillips Collection Museum is dedicating a major exhibition to this object: Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage can be seen in Washington, D.C. from July 6.
Collage has been established as an art form for many decades, but large museum exhibitions about it are rare. At The Phillips Collection museum, the exemplary presentation, which focuses on collages by Black American artists, can now be seen in a modified version. Earlier this year, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston exhibited the artworks. The departure from classical painting or screen printing with found materials of all kinds, which form something new in a unique way, reflects the search for identity and the cultural fragmentation of Black Americans. Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, featuring some 60 exhibits, will be on view in Washington, D.C. from June 6 through September 22. The Phillips Collection was founded in 1921 and is the oldest museum for modern art in the USA.
Unlike the exhibition in Houston, this version focuses even more on emerging and established contemporary artists. Included are Mark Bradford, M. Florine Démosthène, Lauren Halsey, Rashid Johnson, Kerry James Marshall, Wangechi Mutu, Jamea Richmond-Edwards, Deborah Roberts, Tschabalala Self, Lorna Simpson, Devan Shimoyama, Mickalene Thomas, and Kara Walker. They express the infinite possibilities of Black constructed narratives in a fragmented society.
She is a national heroine in Finland, but has only become known internationally in recent years: Helene Schjerfbeck fascinates with her original, simple style. For the first time, a major museum in the USA is presenting her work: Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck opens on December 5 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
From November 13 to 30, the Fremantle Biennale took place in Australia near Perth, focusing on site-specific contemporary art. Among the exhibiting artists was Raki Nikahetiya with a sensory installation about the intertwining of identity, displacement, and home.
