RICO GATSON: Three Trips Around the Block

September 30 - November 23, 2011

Opening September 30 / 7-9pm 

 

PUBLIC EVENTS * EXHIBITION SUPPORT

 

 

 

RICO GATSON: Three Trips Around the Block is a 15-year retrospective of work by New York artist Rico Gatson. This exhibition is the third in Exit Art’s SOLO program, aimed at providing public visibility for under-recognized, mid-career artists through one person shows at Exit Art.

Brooklyn-based Gatson was born in 1966 in Augusta, Georgia and raised in Riverside, California. His work generates collective memory through the exploration of symbols and images culled from popular culture and the mass media, questioning issues of identity, racial intolerance, and the status quo.

"Three Trips Around the Block" is a survey of Gatson’s sculpture, painting, video, drawings, and installations, including several new pieces created for the exhibition. The title of the retrospective stems from a powerful experience Gatson had with his brother who, after spending fifteen years in prison, reconnected with the artist by taking a long walk around the block. The conversation that occurred during their “trips around the block” inspired Gatson to creatively explore their own disparate lives – a personal excavation made public in this poignant and provocative exhibition.

In Two Heads in a Box (1994), the earliest work included in the exhibition, Gatson inverts the racial stereotype made popular by the white American singer Al Jolson, who performed in blackface during the 1920s and ‘30s. The artist, in whiteface and adorned with a white smile and cardboard tie, tirelessly sings the lyrics to “Let Me Sing and I’m Happy” until his exhaustion is visible. A compelling and haunting endurance test, Two Heads in a Box marks the beginning of Gatson’s exploration of racial and identity rhetoric.

Merging history, current events, and mass culture, Gatson’s videos, paintings, and sculptures are politically and racially charged commentaries on American culture. His two- and three-dimensional works are as thought provoking as his videos—abstractions in black and white become politically loaded symbols, and sculptures turn to totems of racism and hate. In the newly commissioned work, Gatson creates landscapes that harness the power and energy of the 1965 Watts riots, which spawned the Black Panthers and other social organizations of the 1960s. Critic Ida Panicelli wrote in Artforum: “Gatson works with precision, exploring power symbols as elements of collective imagination and bringing to light their potential for manipulation.”

Rico Gatson received a BA in Studio Art from Bethel College, St. Paul, MN and an MFA from Yale University. His work has been shown at Prospect.1 Biennial, New Orleans, LA; New Museum, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Cheekwood Museum, Nashville, TN; and in two seminal exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY that traveled to The Santa Monica Museum of Art: Black Belt and FREESTYLE. His work is included in numerous public and private collections: the Denver Art Museum, Norton Family Foundation, and The Studio Museum of Harlem, among others. He is represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and New York University.

Organized by Exit Art with Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.

PUBLIC PROGRAMS

Friday, October 14 / 7:30pm
RICO GATSON: Video Works
This one-night only program compiles Rico Gatson’s complete discography of single-channel videos and presents a special single-channel version of Gatson’s important work Spirit, Myth, Ritual and Liberation (2008). A mini-retrospective, the 15-years of videos represented here reflect themes of racial antagonism, social rhetoric, and political commentary.

Invisible (1999)
Fenced In (2000)
Flaming Hood (2000)
Jungle Jungle (2001)
Gunplay (2001)
Celebration (2001)
Arrival (2001)
Departure (2001)
Beef (2003)
If he hollers (2004)
System Failure (2007)
Spirit, Myth, Ritual and Liberation (2008)

Q&A with the artist after the screening.
$5 general admission. Cash bar.

 

Thursday, November 3 / 7pm
RICO GATSON in conversation with
THELMA GOLDEN, Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York

Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, reunites with artist Rico Gatson, who was included in the Museum’s influential exhibitions Black Belt (2003) and FREESTYLE (2001). Using the work in Three Trips Around the Block as a jumping off point, the speakers will engage in a wide-ranging conversation on Gatson’s art, influences, and career.

Q&A after the discussion.
$5 general admission. Cash bar.


Thelma Golden is Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem. Golden began her career at the Studio Museum in 1987 before joining the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1988. In a decade at the Whitney, she organized numerous groundbreaking exhibitions including the 1993 Biennial and “Black Male” and served as Director of the Whitney Museum at Phillip Morris. She returned to the Studio Museum in 2000 as Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs, and was named Director and Chief Curator in 2005. While at the Studio Museum, Golden has organized many notable exhibitions including “Chris Ofili: Afro Muses 1995-2005,” “Black Romantic,” “Freestyle,” “Frequency,” “Glenn Ligon: Stranger,” “Martin Puryear: The Cane Project” and “Isaac Julien: Vagabondia.” Golden holds a B.A. in Art History and African-American Studies from Smith College and honorary doctorates from the City College of New York (2009), San Francisco Art Institute (2008), Smith College (2004), Moore College of Art and Design (2003), and was awarded a Barnard Medal of Distinction from Barnard College in 2010. She is an active guest curator as well as lecturer and panelist speaking at institutions both nationally and internationally about contemporary art and culture.

The next exhibition at The Studio Museum in Harlem is “The Bearden Project,” a group exhibition of new works created to mark the centennial of the birth of artist Romare Bearden. The show is on view November 10, 2011 to March 11, 2012. For more information, please click here.
 

ABOUT SOLO

"Three Trips Around the Block" follows Exit Art’s tradition of presenting mid-career solo retrospectives. This exhibition is the thirs in Exit Art’s SOLO program, aimed at providing public visibility for under-represented, mid-career artists through annual solo exhibitions at Exit Art. The first exhibition in the series, Charles Juhasz-Alvarado: Complicated Stories, presented a ten-year retrospective of the Puerto Rican artist’s large-scale sculptures and installations. The second, Regina José Galindo, was a ten-year survey of work by this Guatemalan performance artist.

EXHIBITION SUPPORT

This exhibition was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust.

General exhibition support provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; Bloomberg LP; Jerome Foundation; Lambent Foundation; Pollock-Krasner Foundation; New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn; and public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts.