WHEN:
September 13, 2024 - February 8, 2025
WHERE:
The FLAG Art Foundation
545 W 25 St, 9th Floor
New York
TICKETS:
For more information and tickets visit the FLAG Art Foundation website.
A spokesperson describes the event as follows:
“...Throughout a career spanning four decades, Lubaina Himid, a self described "painter and cultural activist," has expanded the possibilities of storytelling through painting as a means of exploring the legacy of British colonialism and its effects on marginalized peoples. Best known for an innovative approach to painting and social engagement, Himid has actively made space for the expression and recognition of the Black experience and women's creativity playing a pivotal role in the Black British Arts movement in the 1980s and becoming the first Black woman to win the Turner Prize in 2017. Rooted in personal experience, Himid's practice traces childhood memories, such as joining her mother, a textile designer, on trips to clothing and fabric stores. The translation of these experiences is often found in the artist's paintings and in installations woven with cultural heritage and found objects such as plates, discarded furniture, jelly molds, and newspapers. Make Do and Mend debuts two new bodies of work. made for the exhibition. In Himid's Strategy Paintings, Black men and women are depicted around tables featuring different arrangements of objects, such as lemons, teeth, poisonous flora, etc., used to work through and/or resolve a specific problem. By showing both the acts and process of decision making, specifically by a gathering of subjects whose motives remain unknown, the paintings encourage reflection on those in positions of power who make decisions far removed from our daily lives. This conversation is extended through the installation of chairs placed throughout the galleries, which are available for the public to stop and rest, ponder, and meditate. Sixty four plank paintings entitled Aunties build on Himid's previous plank works, which evoke the form of funerarv objects from East Africa. The title of these works references the figure of the "auntie," an interstitial role that is both familial and friend. Constructed from architectural remnants. bits of furniture, floorboards, and travel crates, which are then painted and embellished with a variety of obiects, each plank embodies a unique character, underscoring Himid's ongoing interest in the politics of discarded materials. The choreography of the installation encourages visitors to be conscious of the space, and to consider the inherent, expressive potential of materials bevond their practical application. With these two new bodies of work, Himid intensifies a focus on power relations, material history and social engagement. Her paintings, whether on canvas or wood plank, allow for the development of new strategies for personal comprehension and social connection…"
