Posts Tagged ‘portfolio’
Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Why is Self Portrait in Homage to Barkley Hendricks not included in the MCA’s current Rashid Johnson retrospective, Message to Our Folks? The photographic work is included in the exhibition catalogue, and MCA curator Julie Rodriguez Widholm writes that it is perhaps Johnson’s “most understood work.” The work is an illustrative example of both Johnson’s “dialogue with black American creative and intellectual figures whose impact has transcended race” and his “dialogue with modern and contemporary art history, specifically abstraction and appropriation.” Both these quotes are from the curatorial statement on the MCA’s website. True, other self portraits (some of which engage in appropriation and cultural and intellectual figures) are in the exhibition, but they don’t compare in my opinion to the stark and confrontational Self Portrait in Homage to Barkley Hendricks.
Written by exhibitioninquisition
May 22, 2012 at 2:41 PM
Posted in Chicago, Contemporary, Donors, Inquisition, MCA
Tagged with 1980s, appropriation, archive, Barkley Hendricks, Birth of Cool, Black Book, black penis, Brilliantly Endowed, catalogue, Chicago, collectors, Culture Wars, curator, exhibition, galleries, Getty Research Institute, Homage, Joyce Foundation, Julie Rodriguez Widholm, LACMA, Man in a Polyester Suit, MCA, Message to Our Folks, Museum of Contemporary Art, National Endowment for the Arts, NEA, obscenity, portfolio, public funding, Rashid Johnson, retrospective, Robert Mapplethorpe, Santa Monica Museum of Art, self portrait, shelve, sponsors, This Will Have Been, XYZ