TAFETA will present a multimedia collection from Amber Robles-Gordon, Enam Gbewonyo and Marielle Plaisir at this year’s Untitled Art Miami Beach, during Art Basel Miami week 2022.
The three artists mixed media work in textiles, paintings and site-specific installations draw inspiration from their personal connections to the USA, United Kingdom and the Caribbean, interlinking shared musings on humanity, the body, and the impact of societal constructs on people of colour.
exhibit
The David C. Driskell Center is proud to present its fall 2022 exhibition, Telling Our Story: Community Conversations with Our Artists, on view September 9 through December 2, 2022.
More than forty works were selected for the exhibition representing the art of thirty-one artists from the David C. Driskell Center’s Permanent Collection. The works are on display along with accompanying letters both handwritten and typed. Emma Amos (1937-2020)
Phoebe Beasley, Robert Blackburn, Lillian Thomas Burwell, Milton Bowens, Elizabeth Catlett, EKO, Ed Clark, Allan Rohan Crite, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Kevin Cole, Louis Delsarte, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Herbert Gentry, Robin Holder, Manuel Hughes, Jacob Lawrence, Samella Lewis, Delita Martin, Arcmanoro Niles, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Gordon Parks, Jefferson Pinder, Amber Robles-Gordon, Alison Saar, Augusta Savage, Frank Stewart, Renee Stout, Walter H. Williams, Richard Wyatt,
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Amber Robles-Gordon’s Polemic Quilts Balance Form and Content
Even the title of Amber Robles-Gordon’s Tinney Contemporary exhibition — SoveREIGNty: Acts, Forms, and Measures of Protest and Resistance — expresses an activist message. And it’s emblematic of a display of large-scale, mixed-media quilts brimming with signals and symbolism interrogating U.S. policy toward — and governance of — its populated territories and the District of Columbia.
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Tinney Contemporary Presents
This exhibition features Amber Robles-Gordon’s large-scale, mixed-media quilts–assemblages incorporating paint, textiles and hand-stitching–in an interrogation of U.S. policy towards–and governance of–its populated territories and the District of Columbia.
Read MoreMillenium Arts Salon & AU Museum: A Conversation between Amber Robles-Gordon & Dr. Tuliza Fleming
On November 13, 2021 the Millennium Arts Salon provided a salon talk featuring Artist Amber Robles-Gordon in an interview with Interim Chief Curator of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Dr. Tuliza Fleming, at the American University Museum.
Black Portraitures VII
marking territory in the void
Date: February 17, 2022
Time: 2:00 pm—3:30 pm
Location: Paul Robeson Gallery Workshop B
Speakers
Sarah Stefana Smith – Mount Holyoke College
Moderator
Alex Callendar
This panel is devised around the work of Carribeanist scholars and thinkers, Edouard Glissant and Sylvia Wynter. Both articulate a desire to conceive of other worlds through a reconsideration of diasporic time, space and territory, and the opacities of history. Or, as artists we ask through their theoretical frames; how do you mark a territory to something that is a void, or an abyss, or unspeakable, or mistaken as a thing? Through studio practices, which include mixed-media, drawing, time-based works and performance, we consider in an open sense, historical recovery as sites of intervention, provisionality, and play, holding space for the language of transparency and opacity emergent in Black aesthetics.
The roundtable puts to use this year’s convening of Black Portraiture and the capaciousness of play. Play then, to use the words of Stuart Hall, becomes a mode to consider Black diaspora being, refusal and resistance with no guarantee. Hall notes on play with no guarantee,
“Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past, they are subject to the continuous “play” of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in mere “recovery” of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past” (Hall 2000, 23).
Thus, we conceive of this roundtable on play with no guarantee in manifold ways. Some negotiate historical counternarratives through the afterlife of the archive, while others meditate on materiality and matter as psychic scaffolding and memory work.
Bios
Alex Callender’s practice uses methods of drawing, painting, and installation to trace and remap historical materials as a means to explore with both criticality and care, how we might disentangle the interwoven relations of race, gender, and capitalism. Callender is an Assistant Professor of Art at Smith College.
Amber Robles-Gordon, is a mixed media visual artist. Her creations are visual representations of her hybridism: a fusion of her gender, ethnicity, cultural, and social experiences. Known for recontextualizing non-traditional materials, her assemblages, sculptures, installations emphasize the essentialness of spirituality and temporality within life. Robles-Gordon, received a Bachelor of Science, Business Administration from Trinity University, and a MFA from Howard University.
Nyugen E. Smith (USA, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago) is a first-generation Caribbean-American interdisciplinary artist based in Jersey City, NJ. Through performance, found object sculpture, mixed media drawing, painting, video, photo and writing, Nyugen deepens his knowledge of historical and present-day conditions of Black African descendants in the diaspora. He holds a BA, Fine Art from Seton Hall University and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Sarah Stefana Smith is an interdisciplinary scholar and visual artist. Their sculpture and installation work explores the intersection of repair and disrepair. Their research communicates between the fields of Black art and culture, queer theory and affect studies, visuality and aesthetics. Smith is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College.
https://www.blackportraitures.info/bp7/event/marking-territory-in-the-void/
Derek Eller Gallery Presents a Solo Exhibition of Mixed-Media Works by Amber Robles-Gordon
Derek Eller Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of mixed media works on canvas by Amber Robles-Gordon. With an array of materials including acrylic paint, fabric, beads, magazine images, photographs, and ink drawings, Robles-Gordon assembles patchwork compositions which interweave her personal narrative within the fraught political, socioeconomic, and environmental threads that define the colonialist relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico.
Read MoreMuseums Review In the galleries: Artist’s works criss-cross the paths of U.S. colonialism
Residents of D.C. are used to seeing the place as an almost-state, much like Maryland or Wyoming, yet not quite. Amber Robles-Gordon, a longtime Washingtonian who was born in Puerto Rico, has a different take. Her American University Museum show, “Successions: Traversing U.S. Colonialism,” groups D.C. with her birthplace and four other inhabited territories: Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands. She represents these disenfranchised territories on two-sided quilted banners, one face for “political” and the other for “spiritual.”
Read MoreExamining Black Existentialism through the Curatorial Lens
Join our panelists as they journey through texts by Octavia Butler and bell Hooks, Parable of the Sower and Salvation: Black People and Love. They will explore and discuss parallels and intersections between themes posited in these seminal texts and their own individual curatorial/artistic practices.
Read MoreWeaving Identity: A Conversation on Textile Practice in the 21 st Century
This panel explores the power of contemporary visual art through the practices of the Diaspora’s most preeminent artists who innovate through the use of textiles. The panel will also share how their works are impacted by black existential thought. Followed by Cocktails and Light Bites Vranken Pommery and Red Rooster.
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Successions: Traversing US Colonialism Listed on BmoreArt’s Picks: November 2-8
This Week: John Oliver’s hand-picked AVAM exhibition, A Passion for Collecting: The Vision of Louis Allan Ford at Galerie Myrtis, Zoë Charlton in conversation presented by Cade Gallery, Bridget Z. Sullivan at Hamilton Gallery, Jonna McKone/Keep A-Knockin’/Noah Breuer/Solo Lab 5 opening at VisArts, Amber Robles-Gordon at the Katzen Art Center, Katie Pumphrey: Night Swim at Project 1628, The Guardians presented by the Peale at Carroll Mansion, and more … plus Maryland Art Place UNDER $500 2021 and other featured calls for entry.
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Trinity Talks with Artist Amber Robles-Gordon
Join the Office of Alumnae/i Relations for Trinity Talks with Amber Robles-Gordon ’05, Cultivating Inner Voice, Connective Tissues and Threading Visions, the Artwork of Amber Robles-Gordon on Tuesday, November 16, 2021 at 6:00 pm ET via Zoom.
Join Amber for an artist talk that focuses on following and cultivating a relationship with one’s inner voice and how that has directed her path thus far. She will highlight projects that exemplify this premise and how that lead to her first solo exhibit featured at American University.
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Of the Place, An American University, MFA Studio Art Program Sponsored Conversation
The MFA Studio Art program at American University is pleased to present
Of the Place, a series of conversations that center the artists, art organizations, art activators, and culture producers who have deep connections to their locale.
The theme reflects the times that we are living in – many of us have had to stay in place over the last year. The global pandemic, politics, and the cultural circumstances of our contemporary world have necessitated a change in our social and work patterns. We are looking within our own communities to share resources and support.
Read MoreGallery Talk: "Successions: Traversing US Colonialism"
C Artist Amber Robles-Gordon talks "Successions: Traversing US Colonialism" with curator Larry Ossei-Mensah. . "Successions" is a conceptual juxtaposition that celebrates abstraction as an art form while leveraging it as a tool to interrogate past and current US policies within its federal district (Washington, DC) and territories (including Guam, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands) that it controls. . On view through December 12, 2021. Learn more and plan your visit:
https://www.american.edu/cas/museum/2021/successions.cfm
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American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center opens fall exhibitions
Successions: Traversing U.S. Colonialism is a solo exhibition by Amber Robles-Gordon, a conceptual juxtaposition celebrating abstraction as an art form. Robles-Gordon interrogates past and current U.S. policies within Washington, D.C. and the territories (Guam, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands) that it controls…
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From California to Chicago, Tennessee to Maine, 15 of Summer’s Best Museum Exhibitions Remain on View This Fall
A BROAD SELECTION of exhibitions opened at art museums throughout the United States over the summer months. A great number of these shows remain on view, some through September, others further into the fall and beyond. Major traveling exhibitions of Bob Thompson, Joseph Yoakum, and Alma Thomas are underway. The first solo museum exhibitions of Caroline Kent and Simphiwe Ndzube are debuting in Chicago and Denver, while the first survey exhibitions of Jamal Cyrus and Jacolby Satterwhite are on view in Houston and Pittsburgh. Jennifer Packer and Cauline Smith have shows, too. In Nashville, a major retrospective of legendary sculptor William Edmondson is being staged, the first such presentation in two decades:
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Gallery Talk for Successions: Traversing US Colonialism
Gallery Talk: "Successions"
DC mixed-media artist Amber Robles-Gordon talks "Successions" with curator Larry Ossei-Mensah.
About this Event:
Successions is a conceptual juxtaposition that celebrates abstraction as an art form while leveraging it as a tool to interrogate past and current US policies within its federal district (Washington, DC) and territories (including Guam, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands) that it controls.
This event will be held virtually. Please register to receive the Zoom link via email. Learn more about the exhibition.
OrganizerAmerican University Museum At The Katzen Arts Center
Organizer of Gallery Talk: "Successions"
Housed in the dynamic and multidisciplinary Katzen Arts Center, the American University Museum builds its programming on the strengths of a great college and great university. We focus on international art because American University has a global commitment. We show political art because the university is committed to human rights, social justice, and political engagement. We support the artists in our community because the university takes an active and responsible role in the formation of our contemporary art and culture.
We present exhibitions that mirror American University’s aspiration to be the premier Washington-based, global university. Our programming puts the best art of our region in a national and international context. Our collections enable us to present the art history of Washington, while our Kunsthalle attitude brings the most provocative art of our time to our place.
You may also like the following events from American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center:
Next month, 12th October, 06:00 pm, Gallery Talk: "Seeing Climate Change"
Next month, 14th October, 06:00 pm, Gallery Talk: "Reveal" in Online
This November, 17th November, 06:00 pm, Gallery Talk: “In the Light of Memory” in Online
Also check out other Arts Events in Online,Exhibitions in Online.
Ticket Information: RSVP
Tickets for Gallery Talk: "Successions" can be booked below.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/gallery-talk-successions-tickets-163405503259
Ticket Price: Free
Image: Amber Robles-Gordon, y mi bandera vuela mas alto que la tuya (detail), 2020. Mixed media collage on canvas, 18 x 24 in. Courtesy of the artist.
Successions: Traversing US Colonialism Amber Robles-Gordon
August 28–December 12, 2021
American University Museum Curated by
at the Katzen Arts Center Larry Ossei-Mensah
Amber Robles-Gordon presents Successions: Traversing US Colonial- ism, a solo exhibition on view at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in fall 2021. Successions is a conceptual juxta- position that celebrates abstraction as an art form while leveraging it as a tool to interrogate past and current US policies within its federal district (Washington, DC) and territories (including Guam, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands) that it controls. By highlighting nuances relat- ed to US governance in its federal districts and territories, Robles-Gor- don seeks to question who has access to resources, citizenship, and the right to sovereignty.
y mi bandera vuela mas alto que la tuya., Mixed Media Collage on Canvas, 18 x 24 in., 2020
Robles-Gordon creates artwork imbued with a layered visual language replete with cultural signifiers and abstract gestures. Successions is a celebration of abstraction as an artistic expression. Robles-Gordon uti- lizes iconic artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Alma Thomas, Romare Bearden, and members of the Washington Color School as vivid refer- ence points for her own dynamic use of color, form, and material within the works she created for the exhibition. These explorations will provide insights into a number of inquiries that undergird the construction of the exhibition. Successions creates a pathway towards discursive crit- icism around issues impacting marginalized communities oppressed by the United States’ hegemonic domestic and foreign policies. The exhibition features a new body of colorful abstract paintings, collages, and quilts created in 2020 and 2021 between San Juan, Puerto Rico (Robles-Gordon’s birthplace) and Washington, DC (where she current- ly lives).
USVI Political, Detail, Front, Mixed Media on Quilt, 86 in. x 90 in., in., 2021
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Robles-Gordon’s creative strategies were directly impacted as a result of sheltering in place in San Juan. The lack of access to materials and arduous circumstances she was confronted with in Puerto Rico and upon returning to Washington, DC catalyzed Robles-Gordon to impro- vise her approach to making works for the exhibition. Moreover, the ex- perience heightened her awareness of how communities on the margin are adversely treated during mo- ments of crisis.
Robles-Gordon’s also uses works featured in Successions to mine the stories, personal narratives, and aesthetics of the women of the Caribbean, particularly of African de- scent, in an effort to investigate the political, socio-economic, and envi- ronmental implications of placemaking, contemporary colonial policy, and notions of citizenship on these social groups. The debate over DC statehood, similar to Puerto Rico, has been a prevalent point of con- tention in the District but rarely featured in the national conversation. Robles-Gordon seeks to use her “backyard” as a metaphor that would
expand our understanding of notions of freedom, liberty, and justice.
A fully illustrated catalog with essays by Ossei-Mensah and Noel Anderson and in-person and virtual programs will accompany the exhibi- tion, enriching the viewer’s experience.