The idea of communities of inspiration is highlighted in tête-à-tête, an exhibition curated by artist Mickalene Thomas. Serving as a companion exhibition to Muse: Mickalene Thomas Photographs, this mini exhibition within the larger Muse show includes works that have inspired Thomas. Placed consciously in dialogue with her own practice, these artworks contain many of the same themes central to Thomas’ works, such as references to motherhood and family.

The 10 featured artists—from older generations of artists to those who are part of Thomas’s generation or younger—include Derrick Adams, Renée Cox, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lyle Ashton Harris, Deana Lawson, Zanele Muholi, Malick Sidibé, Xaviera Simmons, Hank Willis Thomas, and Carrie Mae Weems.

Together, these exhibitions create a robust visual conversation about representation of the black body in today’s society and provide opportunities for visitors to reflect on how various forms of visual culture help shape their own identities and how they, too, collect and process information.

Both exhibitions acknowledge the art-historical canon and popular visual culture, while simultaneously creating an archive of artworks that stand in opposition to the traditions, reclaiming agency for both the artists and the subjects depicted.

Exhibition is organized by Aperture Foundation, New York.

Highlighting uncertainty and contradiction, Truth or Dare emphasizes the importance of questioning both knowledge and belief by featuring artists that utilize illusion to entice, entertain, and explore the slippery terrain between fact and fiction, presence and absence, and reality and imagination. The suspension of disbelief is invoked in works that simulate games, maps, and tricks of the eye and hand—not to deceive, but to engage and connect. Today, cartography is a relic, replaced with global positioning systems that describe geography through virtual, screen-based information that appears and disappears in a keystroke. If maps have outlived their original use, what truth might they still tell? In contemporary art, maps, along with books and other printed texts, remain potent sources of inspiration for exploring the intersections of knowledge and fantasy, and of experience and imagination.

Facing continuing global strife, political instability, and economic disparity, the artworks featured in Truth or Dare speak truth to power through unconventional, often playful juxtapositions of imagery and materials, asking viewers to look and think—and question—twice. At a time when alternate facts equate to misrepresentations of truth, the alternate fictions of art may speak more honest, deeper truths. The alternative reality of the 21st-century artist’s imaginative universe may offer the ideal arena in which to confront the present and envision the future.

Featured Artists: Slater Bradley, Nick Brandt, Sebastiaan Bremer, Alain Declercq, Adonis Flores, Anthony Goicolea, Luis Gonzalez Palma, Ann Hamilton, Miler Lagos, Yousseff Nabil, Paolo Ventura, Federico Somi

Also on view –  Spotlight: LaToya Ruby Frazier

Dye Transfer: The Eastman Kodak Company ceased production of Pan Matrix Film, which was required to produce a dye transfer print in 1991 and by 1994 the company did away with all other dye transfer materials. Today, the dye transfer process is nearly a lost art. Popularized by famed photographers such as Irving Penn, William Eggleston, and Robert Mapplethorpe, the medium of dye transfer is very different from modern color print processes. Dye transfer is an incredibly detailed and exceptionally difficult process and the degree of skill required to make a successful image is unique to very few photographers working today. Utilizing the exact machine previously-owned and operated by Irving Penn, Tyler Shields uses the dye transfer process to produce an unparalleled colored image that is the absolute finest quality in color printing and attempts to create the largest dye transfer print ever made.

Platinum Palladium: In the late 19^th-century, this printing process used palladium rather than silver as the light sensitive material required to develop an image. Ed Weston, Alfred Stieglitz, and Paul Strand were supporters of the technique, but due to the exorbitant material costs, palladium printing fell out of fashion. Tyler uses the palladium printing process to produce unique works that possess incredible depth and beauty. As with his dye transfer prints, Tyler hopes to create the largest palladium photographs ever made with the medium. Tyler’s ambitious work makes immortal the important processes of photography’s past.

Also on view: Interactive Dark Room Installation.

The ARCHIVE [negative] project includes the work of roughly a dozen regional and/or national photographers selected by Manifest Resident Instructor and Photographer Michael Wilson. Public demonstration days led up to the exhibition allowing the public to observe and interact with Wilson in a laboratory-like collaboration. Wilson worked with the negatives provided by each participating photographer and printed them in the Manifest darkroom.

Featured Artists: Matthew Albritton, Barry Andersen, Gordon Baer, Maureen France, Melvin Grier, Barbara Houghton, Cal Kowal, Guennadi Maslov, Maurice Mattei, Nancy Rexroth, Gregory Rust, Brad Smith, Jane Alden Stevens, Connie Sullivan

BasketShop Gallery presents the work of Chivas Clem. After more than a decade living in New York, where he garnered international esteem as a multi-media artist, Clem moved back to his hometown of Paris, Texas. While documenting a bookstore in the small town, he befriended many of the transient men residing there and started to form an emotional bond with them. He describes them as “…drifting through life on the fringes. They represent a kind of rugged masculinity that is connected to the myths of the American West—but what were once ‘cowboys’ have mutated into ‘rednecks’—used in the pejorative to describe a certain kind of hyper-masculine terror. It connotes racism and homophobia: a scene of jacked-up trucks covered in confederate flags.” Clem says, “I grew up gay in this place—small town, deep south—and these were the kinds of men that made my life miserable. Now they are the only people I relate to, as they are outsiders themselves. I can now reconcile the twin feelings of desire and fear that gave them so much psychic power in my youth.”

Clem’s focus is on documenting the environment around this maligned subgroup of Americans—disenfranchised, heterosexual, white men. Through their own hubris, they have had to sustain a type of social armor from a heritage that is too complex to serve them. Clem’s photography searches beyond the guarding that these men endure and adorns them with an intimate portrayal of their frailties.

Artists Lorena Molina, Gina Osterloh, and Carman Winant form the foundation for this group show that portrays the female experience though photographs, videos, film, and performance.

Capturing and Archiving the Female Experience also includes a reading room with the latest and most respected photography publications, specifically focused on books about photography by and of women that convey the feminine experience in either the past or the present as part of the exhibition. Active programming in the space such as coffee and tea service and artist and student-led discussion groups are important to the exhibition’s impact and meaning. Conversations and connections made in real time are an essential component of the exhibition. At the close of the exhibition, the reading room materials will become part of the permanent collection of the UC DAAP Library, and will be a valuable resource for the faculty, students and community members.

In celebration of the 30th anniversary of Isaac Julien’s landmark 1989 film Looking for Langston, the Columbus Museum of Art presents an installation of the film alongside a selection of related photographic works. Made at the height of the AIDS epidemic in London and New York, Looking for Langston is composed of archival moving images and original footage that reimagines on the life of poet Langston Hughes and a community of gay artists during the Harlem Renaissance. The film collapses both time and geography, mixing the words of Hughes, James Baldwin, and Essex Hemphill and the sounds of blues, jazz, and 1980s house music.

While some photographic works distill the narrative of the film, others reflect upon its own making and artistic lineages. Julien’s sumptuous monochrome images consciously mine the aesthetics of black and queer histories, from James VanDerZee’s funerary and studio portraits of Harlem residents during the 1920s and 1930s, to George Platt Lynes’s male nudes during the 1930s, to Robert Mapplethorpe’s erotized photographs of black men during the 1980s. Foregrounding black, queer experiences within both an American and international context, the work maintains its urgency today.

Isaac Julien: Looking for Langston will be presented in conjunction with I, Too, Sing America, a major survey exhibition of painting, sculpture, photography, literature, music, and film made in Harlem and beyond during the 1920s and 1930s, including 40 photographs by James VanDerZee.

Acclaimed Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari combines the roles of image-maker, archivist, curator, filmmaker, and critical theorist to explore the performative role photography plays in fashioning identity. As one of a handful of young artists who emerged from fifteen years of civil war and a short-lived era of experimentation in Lebanon’s television industry, his work demonstrates an enduring appreciation for amateur, journalistic, and commercial photographic practices. Zaatari is also a co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation (AIF), an organization established in Beirut to preserve, study, and exhibit photographs from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Arab diaspora from the 19th-century to today. Within this endeavor Zaatari discovered the photographs of Hashem El Madani (1928–2017), who recorded the lives of everyday individuals inside and outside his humble Saida studio in the late 1940s and 1950s. These photos are deceptively factual in appearance, sliding between demure documentation and revealing displays of subconscious desire that exceed the capacity of the lens.

In an interdisciplinary practice that thereby positions lens-based media as both specimen and subterfuge, Zaatari participates in the discourse against photography and its complex archival legacy. For this exhibition he positions the seemingly simple fold as a narrative form, a reorganization, an enduring obfuscation, and the memory of material. In his words, “a photograph captures space and folds it into a flat image, turning parts of a scene against others, covering them entirely. Every photograph hides parts to reveal others… What a photograph missed and that was present at the time of exposure will remain inaccessible. In those folds lies a history, many histories.” The work on display will attempt to uncover and imagine these stories, undertaking a provocative archaeology that peers into the fissures, scratches, erosion, and that which archives previously shed. Surveying the fertile interstices, Zaatari explains, “Unfolding is undoing, deconstructing, turning material back to its initial form.”

Download the Akram Zaatari: The Fold – Space, time and the image Gallery Guide as a PDF.

Painters often draw from 
existing visual materials, such as photographs and reproductions of past works of art, to inspire and construct their work. Swedish artist Mamma Andersson (born 1962)—known for her dreamlike, faintly narrative compositions inspired by Nordic painting, folk art, newspaper photographs, and cinema—is no exception.

But Andersson takes this process a step or two further, importing images of stacks of books and stray photographs, clipped from various sources, directly into her painted compositions. With careful observation, Andersson’s dreamy landscapes and interiors (often combined) slowly come to reveal common imagery and accumulated biblio-ephemera filtered through, and sharing space with, the artist’s muted palette, melancholic scenery, and textural paint. Mamma Andersson: Memory Banks focuses on this aspect of Andersson’s painting practice, exploring how her use of appropriated imagery and collaged elements charges her paintings with an eerie, uncanny sense of familiarity while indulging in wholehearted fantasy and suggestive narrative.

Karin Mamma Andersson was born in 1962 in Luleå, Sweden. She studied at the Royal College of Fine Arts in Stockholm, where she continues to live and work. Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, Germany; the Aspen Art Museum; and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. In 2003, she represented the Nordic Pavilion in the 50th Venice Biennale. In addition to Memory Banks, she is the 2018 recipient of the Guerlain Drawing Prize, Paris, and a participant in the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo.

Mamma Andersson: Memory Banks (Damiani) is published on the occasion of the FotoFocus Biennial 2018 and Andersson’s exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati.

Download the Mamma Andersson: Memory Banks Gallery Guide as a PDF.

The Cincinnati Art Museum presents the region’s first major exhibition featuring the British conceptual artist Gillian Wearing, whose work is widely regarded as being among the most significant artistic statements of our time. Since her emergence in the London art scene of the 1990s, Wearing has taken as her subject nothing less than the experience of being human. Her photographs, videos, and sculptures illuminate unspoken dimensions of our most common relationships and acts, shedding light on the ways we inhabit personae and expose or conceal interior thoughts and desires. Life: Gillian Wearing includes a concise selection of the artist’s iconic lens-based works along with three new projects receiving their world premiere in Cincinnati.

Wearing, who won the Turner Prize in 1997 and was appointed O.B.E. in 2011 for services to art, is best known for documenting strangers’ thoughts and confessions through film and photography, as well as re-presenting herself as other artists or family members through the use of masks and elaborate staging. The video installations and still photographs on view at the Museum chart new territory in the artist’s engagement with identity, self-revelation, and contemporary media culture, exploring tensions between public and private life, the drive to tell our own secrets and know the secrets of others, and the blurry line between documentation and a constructed point of view.