It’s Time
Kwame Brathwaite, Kwesi Botchway, Genevieve Gaignard, Rodney McMillian, Wangechi Mutu, Paul Mpagi Sepuya
Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present “It’s Time,” an exhibition of works by Kwesi Botchway, Genevieve Gaignard, Rodney McMillan, Wangechi Mutu, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya in conversation with works by legendary New York-based photographer Kwame Brathwaite (b. 1938, Brooklyn NY). Anchored by Brathwaite’s influential images, the exhibition creates a cross-generational dialogue that posits an exploration of the photographer's influence and the continuing investigation of portraiture and representation of the Black body by artists today.
The exhibition title, "It’s Time,” refers to the landmark 1962 album released by drummer Max Roach, featuring singer Abbey Lincoln. Composed of six songs in six meters, the album “It’s Time” is in some sense a metaphorical parallel to the construction of the exhibition itself, with each artist finding their own “meter.” “It’s Time” also refers to the Civil Rights Movement, in which friends and peers from the Black Arts Movement Brathwaite, Roach, and Lincoln were all actively involved. Just as artist and media theorist Brathwaite worked tirelessly in his six-plus decades of art and practice to promote “Black is Beautiful”, one of the most important American ideas of the 20th and 21st centuries, the artists included in the exhibition, in their respective practices, work to craft images that ask us to think about who we are today, what we want our society to be, and affirm that change now is possible.
Working within the tradition of portraiture, Ghanaian artist Kwesi Botchway reworks the storied legacy of portrait painting within Western art by centering the long-absent and ignored Black figure. Blending styles of French Impressionism and African Realism, Botchway transforms his portraits into studies, not of a fixed identity, but of becoming and possibility.
Genevieve Gaignard’s multidisciplinary practice employs a language of nostalgia by reinterpreting thoughtfully sourced vintage materials. In these two new works, Gaignard celebrates Kwame Brathwaite’s jazz-like spirit of improvisation through varied techniques and glamorous composition. Gaignard highlights the essence of Black expression, which informs and shapes popular culture. Each piece demands a requisite reverence of Black beauty for its intuit self-expression.
Rodney McMillian's 2006 work Untitled (Unknown) is a series of unique photographic prints of a plaster bust of an unknown man that the artist purchased in an antique store. Shot using a tripod, the number of prints is limited only by the number of exposures made by the artist. The work is a conceptual portrait that troubles the categories of identity, value, and image as they relate to the art market and individual people. Alongside these unknown portraits, we are exhibiting three works from McMillian's 2016 series from the installation, pod: frequencies to a manifestationing, 2016. Composed of wooden shelves with a selection of black glass vases arranged on each shelf, these sculptures suggest the presence of a receptive, listening audience. In both works, McMillian's approach to the portrait could be described as metaphorical and oblique, expanding our definition of the genre.
Wangechi Mutu’s collage “Chinrest with Cut-eye” was culled from a body of work in which the artist explored her experience of the Diaspora before she relocated from New York to her home in Kenya. Trying to create a space for an alternate experience outside of any place, Mutu’s collages are imaginary tales of female characters – hybrid beings fused together from elements of Western and African cultures and molded from body and machine parts, ancient sculptures, jewelry and animal limbs - and thus subverting traditional notions of a singular place of origin. Her characters, always powerful and aware of the role they are playing in generating desire, are part of a larger and horrific narrative in which conflicting cultural and historical projections are played out on the female body.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya is known for his studio-based photography. In his portraits, Sepuya explores the positions that queer, racialized bodies occupy within the intimate dynamics staged by studio spaces where friends oscillate between subjects of portraiture and stylized model studies. By drawing out these associations and modes of relation, Sepuya entangles the pleasure of exhibitionism and leisure with histories of labor and objectification that can be glimpsed within the archive. The two works on view in It's Time reflect the artist's re-assesment of his own recent work in the context of Brathwaite's legacy. For example, Daylight Studio Model Study (0X5A2297), 2021 was an outtake from a collaboration between Sepuya and the British fashion designer, Grace Wales Bonner. This work, which features garments from Wales Bonner's 2022 collection, calls to mind Brathwaite's iconic "Black is Beautiful" portraits and Wales Bonner's own research-based collections call to mind the archive of Brathwaite's work drawn upon for this exhibition.