This week, Jared Bowen brings us two museum exhibitions you can visit right now: “Writing the Future: Basquiat at the Hip-Hop Generation” and “Adam Pendleton: Elements of Me.”
“Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation,” on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston through May 16, 2021
Jean-Michel Basquiat has been embraced as one of the supernova art stars of the 1980s — emerging as he did from the gritty, downtown New York scene to reign in the tony gallery world. However, a new Museum of Fine Arts, Boston exhibition presents the case that it was an entire community of artists who, alongside Basquiat, changed the future of art. “Writing the Future: Basquiat at the Hip-Hop Generation” showcases works from the “post-graffiti movement” of the 1980s. The show features Basquiat’s work alongside art by his contemporaries and collaborators including Fab Five Freddy, Lady Pink, Keith Haring, and Rammellzee, to name a few. The exhibition also juxtaposes these works against the fashion and music of the 1980s underground, painting a comprehensive picture of the culture these artists were rooted in as they ascended to superstardom.
“[Basquiat] said, ‘My work is about three things: royalty, heroism and the streets,’” said writer, musician and co-curator Greg Tate. “He was also someone who had gone to all the major galleries and museums and didn't see any Black people represented there. That was part of his mission.”
“Writing the Future: Basquiat at the Hip-Hop Generation” is now on view through May 16, 2021.
“Adam Pendleton: Elements of Me,” on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum through Nov. 15
Former Artist-in-Residence Adam Pendleton returns to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum with a new installation: “Elements of Me.” During his tenure at the museum, Pendleton observed how deliberately and personally Isabella Stewart Gardner displayed her Eurocentric art. Pendleton’s installation, inspired by 20th century minimalism, is almost the polar opposite of the Gardner Museum aesthetic — using geometric shapes and stark, black-and-white color patterns throughout the exhibition space.
“I like to think of the installation at the Gardner as a kind of intervention into the space of the museum,” said Pendleton. “It's arguably very sparse in comparison to all of the other displays that are in the museum … and I've created a kind of three-dimensional drawing, where every surface of the room of the gallery space has been considered.”
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