‘DARK SKY WALK’ (PART 2) – 3 November 2022 Hannelie Coetzee, Fireflies, 2022. Olivedale Corner. Image courtesy of the artist.
Artist Hannelie Coetzee and scientist Bernard WT Coetzee invite you on a dark sky walk on Thursday, 3 November 2022, the second to be hosted by NIROX. During the walk, visitors are encouraged to explore our relationship with darkness, reflecting on dark skies, light pollution, our fear of the dark, and how we can reduce skyglow so as not to interfere with nocturnal ecosystems. Writing about the previous dark sky walk on 4 July, Bronwyn Law-Viljoen wrote:“ Winding our way along the bush path at NIROX at sunset allowed us to forget loadshedding and other woes for a while. It was a perfectly still winter evening, the quiet broken by the gurgle of the stream that we crossed several times before we arrived at the eye of the fountain. Leaving the forest we headed west, up the koppie to the plateau where we gathered in a small knot and watched two dozen Cape Vultures take wing from their perches on the giant electricity pylons, marching in an impressive phalanx from north to south. Not fifty metres from where we stood, a small herd of zebra, barely visible in the gathering dark, studied us. The walk, organised by the artist Hannelie Coetzee and the biologist Bernard WT Coetzee, from the University of Pretoria, was a kind of dusk vigil to draw our attention to the significant effects of ‘sky glow’ on night-time pollinators and other insects. We stood for a while in the gathering dark and then headed home. Walking without artificial light over uneven ground, we allowed our anger at Eskom’s mismanagement of the electricity grid to be softened by a newfound awareness that darkness, for some creatures, is the best place to be.”
PROGRAMME FOR THE DARK SKY WALK ON 3 NOVEMBER (5 – 9PM):5:30PM: Arrive at NIROX Sculpture Park’s Gate 3
5:45PM: Welcome with tea and coffee at the Lawn Pavilion.
6:00PM: 6.5 km Walk from the Lawn Pavilion into the reserve at dusk (please bring sturdy walking shoes, warm clothes, a thermos, and a headlamp or torch. The terrain can be tricky in the dark and there is game. It’s also snake season).
7:30PM: Blind Drawing session with the artist
8PM: Wind down with delicious, vegan-friendly summer soup.TICKETS: R450 pp To purchase tickets; click button below:Tickets
This includes a 6.5km, informative night hike, led by Hannelie and Bernard, light food (vegan friendly), tea and coffee. All ages are welcome. There are limited tickets available for this event, so please book well in advance. Tickets can be purchased here. If you want to extend your experience and avoid the roads, you can book accommodation at Farmhouse58 for the night of 3 November here.
Hi Amy, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself. I come from a line of (underrecognized) women artists on both sides of my family and felt strongly rooted in a creative life from an early age. I majored in art history at Occidental College in Los Angeles and also studied anthropology and studio art. Although I loved having a studio practice, I felt my greater calling was toward advocacy for original voices and exceptional creations by other artists. I founded Morton Fine Art in 2010 and launched *a pop-up project, Morton Fine Art’s trade name, which was a mobile gallery model. After my debut exhibition in DC, I quickly understood I needed to establish a permanent gallery space, also in 2010, and have been exhibiting national and international artists here ever since.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way? I don’t think many creative professions have a lasting smooth road, in fact a career in the arts typically ebbs and flows and has patches of uncertainty. As a gallerist, I have had to innovate continuously to ensure my business is thriving and surviving. I have a flexible mindset so when something isn’t working optimally, I am not fearful of switching things up in hopes of opening new paths for success. Many of the struggles include activating a collector base during times of collective uncertainty and fear, whether it be financial market troubles or a global pandemic.
As you know, we’re big fans of Morton Fine Art. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand? Founded in 2010 in Washington, DC by curator Amy Morton, Morton Fine Art (MFA) is a fine art gallery and curatorial group that collaborates with art collectors and visual artists to inspire fresh ways of acquiring contemporary art. Firmly committed to the belief that art collecting can be cultivated through an educational stance, MFA’s mission is to provide accessibility to museum-quality contemporary art through a combination of substantive exhibitions and a welcoming platform for dialogue and exchange of original voice. Morton Fine Art specializes in a stellar roster of nationally and internationally renowned artists as well as has an additional focus on artwork of the African Diaspora.
Morton Fine Art founded the trademark *a pop-up project in 2010. *a pop-up project is MFA’s mobile gallery component which hosts temporary curated exhibitions nationally.
How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you? I currently work with 28 global artist-partners from the U.S., Puerto Rico, Mozambique, Nigeria, Ethiopia, South African, Kenya, Japan, China, Australia, Germany and Trinidad and Tobago. Many of us have worked together for a decade or more with some new partnerships which were formed during the early days of the pandemic. Feeling connected with so many tremendous artists globally makes for inspiring collaboration, growth and continuous learning. We are grateful to have the support of other artists, collectors and art enthusiasts who value the programming and vision we are putting forward at Morton Fine Art.
The title of Kesha Bruce’s show at Morton Fine Art, “Take Me to the Water,” is an homage to Nina Simone’s performance of that gospel song. Bruce identifies with water, “a force that follows its own paths and forms its own shapes,” according to the gallery’s note. Ironically, the collagist-painter lives in one of the nation’s driest states, Arizona, where she is director of artist programs for the state’s arts commission.
Bruce reports that her palette has gotten sunnier since she moved from the Midwest to the Southwest, yet landscape is vestigial in her work. The artist instinctively assembles scraps of wrinkled fabric that are painted — and sometimes overpainted — to craft patchworks that may suggest but never literally depict the natural world.
A leaflike form dominates the top of “La Sirene,” and the mostly green “Like Florida Water” has a cool rainforest vibe. But for every “Memory of Matala,” whose blue blocks above tan ones evoke sky overhead earth, there are several pictures whose intricate, quilt-like compositions appear purely abstract. The real subject of this artwork is transformation: cutting, painting and pasting pieces of secondhand textiles into arrangements that are unexpected and distinctively Bruce’s own.
NORTH ADAMS, MASS. — MCLA Arts & Culture (MAC) will showcase a new solo exhibition at Gallery 51, “To Know A Veil” by Nathaniel Donnett on October 7.
The opening reception will run from 5 to 7 p.m. and the exhibition will be on display until Jan. 27, 2023.
To Know A Veil consists of wall works, sculptures, an installation, and sounds that investigate concerns about fragmentation, memory, erasure, the self, and interiority. The exhibition borrows its title from W. E. B. Du Bois’s classic book The Souls of Black Folk. In that work, the Veil signifies racism and the accompanying moral perception of Black America. Donnett also draws on Fred Moten’s notion of enclosure—a psychological entrapment caused by social precarity. In the context of this exhibition, Donnett questions how individuals navigate enclosures that frame groups of people as reductive, noncomplex categories instead of plural, complex beings.
During the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts Artist Lab Residency, Donnett invited students from Berkshire County’s Pine Cobble School, Berkshire Arts and Technology Charter Public School, and MCLA to participate in this exhibition. They collaborated on a backpack exchange during which the students were given new backpacks in exchange for their old bags. The students also recorded interviews with Donnett that he then used to create an experimental sound piece.
To Know A Veil communicates the power of imagination as an intermediary, catalyst, and portal that occupies spaces between being and becoming, continuously challenging modern-day ideologies, which stem from our past and impact our future. There is no definitive beginning or end when imagining possibilities, complex positions, or solutions—only human conditions embedded between moments of learning, reflecting, and doing.
Donnett is an interdisciplinary cultural practitioner born in Houston, Texas. His practice holds metaphysical and phenomenological spaces that explore space/time, history, notions of being, the in/exterior, and race. Black aesthetic traditions, music, refusal, fractal theory, incompleteness, and sacred geometry are strategies and systems he uses to challenge conventional timeline narratives and Western frameworks.
Donnett fuses immaterial and material worlds to expand the meaning and understanding around sociopolitical concerns and liminal spaces that impact underrepresented people and overlooked conditions.
Washington, D.C. – Morton Fine Art is pleased to announce Take Me to the Water, a solo exhibition of mixed-media paintings by the artist Kesha Bruce. An intuitive combination of painting, collage and textile art, Bruce’s work represents the culmination of a holistic creative practice developed by the artist over several decades. Her eighth exhibition with the gallery, Take Me to the Water will be on view from September 17 to October 11, 2022 at Morton’s Washington, D.C. space (52 O St NW #302).
Kesha Bruce Waves Singing for the Moon, 2022 40 x 30 in. Mixed-media Textile Collage on canvas Courtesy Morton Fine Art and the artist
The wall works of Kesha Bruce are less discrete executions of a concerted vision than the steady accumulation of a long creative process. Referred to by the artist simply as paintings, these mixed-media compositions are in fact patchworks of painted fabric, individually selected from Bruce’s vast archive and pasted directly onto the canvas in a textile collage that can sometimes resemble a quilt. The result of a slow and perpetual artistic method, each work represents hours of treatment, selection and juxtaposition until the whole becomes manifestly greater than its parts. Bruce’s process ends with her titling of each work: a poetic articulation of what the work is at this point capable of expressing for itself.
Much like water, the routine behind Bruce’s artmaking is cyclical and in service to a greater equilibrium – a pointed contrast to many of the epitomic works that make up much of the traditional art histories of the past several centuries, and which tend to aggressively emphasize rupture, madness and unsustainability as the most fruitful mothers of invention. Bruce’s process is distinctly different, and points to more a promising alternative for artmaking, in which creativity and lived experience are inseparably intertwined. For Bruce, this means that art can be not only a form of self-care but an act of self-discovery. Noting that her color palette has become markedly warmer since she moved to Arizona (where she currently serves as the Director of Artist’s Programs for the state’s Commission on the Arts), the artist delineates her method as a form of strategic openness – making room and taking time to allow the materials to guide her toward their final form, rather than the other way around.
Kesha Bruce She was Born to Water, 2022 60 x 48 in. Mixed-media Textile Collage on canvas Courtesy Morton Fine Art and the artist
The show’s title, Take Me to the Water, alludes to a 1969 rendition of the traditional gospel song by Nina Simone at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Bruce locates something transcendent in the recording of Simone’s performance that encapsulates what any form of artmaking, at its best, can be: a conversation between oneself and the divine. Deftly aware of the elemental power of water as a force that follows its own paths and forms its own shapes, Bruce identifies her artistic process closely with this element, and notes how the transcendental effects which result from it can be as overwhelming and rhythmic as the ocean waves of Big Sur.
As an exhibiting artist for over 25 years, Bruce has steadily oriented her craft toward capturing and encouraging the process of artmaking as an end in its own right – a way both of making something new and taking stock of oneself. As an administrator who oversees the creative programming for the entire state of Arizona, Bruce is intuitively attuned to the reciprocal relationship between transcendent acts of self-expression and the quotidian struggle to survive. In this role, she is a mentor and advocate for hundreds of other artists; the example she sets in her own artistic practice, with its emphasis on personal growth over commercial capitulation, thus becomes a form of potent political praxis.
Kesha Bruce Memory of Matala, 2022 60 x 48 in. Mixed-media Textile Collage on canvas Courtesy Morton Fine Art and the artist
Kesha Bruce (b. 1975, Iowa). Born and raised in Iowa, Bruce completed a BFA from the University of Iowa before earning an MFA in painting from Hunter College in New York City. Bruce has been awarded fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), The Vermont Studio Center, The CAMAC Foundation and the Puffin Foundation. Her work is included in the collections of The Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture (14 pieces), The Amistad Center for Art and Culture, The University of Iowa Women’s Center, The En Foco Photography Collection and MOMA’s Franklin Furnace Artist Book Collection. She has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2011.
In addition to her studio practice, Bruce has been the Artist Programs Manager at the Arizona Commission on the Arts since 2019. She also serves as the Board Chair of Tessera Art Collective, a non-profit organization that supports and elevates the work and practices of BIPOC women artists working in abstraction. Bruce is also co-founder of Blac k Girl Basel – the only event during Miami Art Week intentionally created for Black women artists, creatives, entrepreneurs, activists and cultural change-makers.
Kesha Bruce Gorée Kept Her Secrets, 2022 60 x 48 in. Mixed-media Textile Collage on canvas Courtesy Morton Fine Art and the artist
Morton Fine Art
Founded in 2010 in Washington D.C. by curator Amy Morton, Morton Fine Art (MFA) is a fine art gallery and curatorial group that collaborates with art collectors and visual artists to inspire fresh ways of acquiring contemporary art. Firmly committed to the belief that art collecting can be cultivated through an educational stance, MFA’s mission is to provide accessibility to museum-quality contemporary art through a combination of substantive exhibitions and a welcoming platform for dialogue and exchange of original voice. Morton Fine Art specializes in a stellar roster of nationally and internationally renowned artists as well as has an additional focus on artwork of the African Diaspora.
52 O St NW #302, Washington, DC 20001, United States
Kesha Bruce, Born and raised in Iowa, she completed a BFA from the University of Iowa before earning an MFA in painting from Hunter College in New York City. Kesha Bruce has been awarded fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), The Vermont Studio Center, The CAMAC Foundation and the Puffin Foundation. Her work is included in the collections of The Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture (14 pieces), The Amistad Center for Art and Culture, The University of Iowa Women’s Center, The En Foco Photography Collection and MOMA’s Franklin Furnace Artist Book Collection. She has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2011.
Morton Fine Art is pleased to announce Take Me to the Water, a solo exhibition of mixed-media paintings by artist Kesha Bruce. An intuitive combination of painting, collage and textile art, Bruce’s work represents the culmination of a holistic creative practice developed by the artist over several decades. Her eighth exhibition with the gallery, Take Me to the Water will be on view from September 17 to October 11, 2022 at Morton’s Washington, D.C. space.
The wall works of Kesha Bruce are less discrete executions of a concerted vision than the steady accumulation of a long creative process. Referred to by the artist simply as paintings, these mixed-media compositions are in fact patchworks of painted fabric, individually selected from Bruce’s vast archive and pasted directly onto the canvas in a textile collage that can sometimes resemble a quilt. The result of a slow and perpetual artistic method, each work represents hours of treatment, selection and juxtaposition until the whole becomes manifestly greater than its parts. Bruce’s process ends with her titling of each work: a poetic articulation of what the work is at this point capable of expressing for itself.
Much like water, the routine behind Bruce’s artmaking is cyclical and in service to a greater equilibrium – a pointed contrast to many of the epitomic works that make up much of the traditional art histories of the past several centuries, and which tend to aggressively emphasize rupture, madness and unsustainability as the most fruitful mothers of invention. Bruce’s process is distinctly different, and points to more a promising alternative for artmaking, in which creativity and lived experience are inseparably intertwined. For Bruce, this means that art can be not only a form of self-care but an act of self-discovery. Noting that her color palette has become markedly warmer since she moved to Arizona (where she currently serves as the Director of Artist’s Programs for the state’s Commission on the Arts), the artist delineates her method as a form of strategic openness – making room and taking time to allow the materials to guide her toward their final form, rather than the other way around.
The show’s title, Take Me to the Water, alludes to a 1969 rendition of the traditional gospel song by Nina Simone at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Bruce locates something transcendent in the recording of Simone’s performance that encapsulates what any form of artmaking, at its best, can be: a conversation between oneself and the divine. Deftly aware of the elemental power of water as a force that follows its own paths and forms its own shapes, Bruce identifies her artistic process closely with this element, and notes how the transcendental effects which result from it can be as overwhelming and rhythmic as the ocean waves of Big Sur.
As an exhibiting artist for over 25 years, Bruce has steadily oriented her craft toward capturing and encouraging the process of artmaking as an end in its own right – a way both of making something new and taking stock of oneself. As an administrator who oversees the creative programming for the entire state of Arizona, Bruce is intuitively attuned to the reciprocal relationship between transcendent acts of self-expression and the quotidian struggle to survive. In this role, she is a mentor and advocate for hundreds of other artists; the example she sets in her own artistic practice, with its emphasis on personal growth over commercial capitulation, thus becomes a form of potent political praxis.
The Truth In This Art
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Kesha Bruce, Kesha Bruce Waves Singing for the Moon, 2022 40 x 30 in. Mixed-media Textile Collage on canvas Courtesy Morton Fine Art and the artist.
Morton Fine Art presents “Take Me to the Water,” a solo exhibition of mixed-media paintings by Kesha Bruce. An intuitive combination of painting, collage and textile art, Kesha Bruce paintings represent the culmination of a holistic creative practice developed by the artist over several decades. Her eighth exhibition with the gallery, “Take Me to the Water” will be on view from September 17 to October 11, 2022 at Morton’s Washington, D.C. space (52 O St NW #302).
The wall works of Kesha Bruce are less discrete executions of a concerted vision than the steady accumulation of a long creative process. Referred to by the artist simply as paintings, these mixed-media compositions are in fact patchworks of painted fabric, individually selected from Bruce’s vast archive and pasted directly onto the canvas in a textile collage that can sometimes resemble a quilt. The result of a slow and perpetual artistic method, each work represents hours of treatment, selection and juxtaposition until the whole becomes manifestly greater than its parts.
Bruce’s process ends with her titling of each work: a poetic articulation of what the work is at this point capable of expressing for itself.
Much like water, the routine behind Bruce’s artmaking is cyclical and in service to a greater equilibrium – a pointed contrast to many of the epitomic works that make up much of the traditional art histories of the past several centuries, and which tend to aggressively emphasize rupture, madness and unsustainability as the most fruitful mothers of invention. Bruce’s process is distinctly different, and points to more a promising alternative for artmaking, in which creativity and lived experience are inseparably intertwined. For Bruce, this means that art can be not only a form of self-care but an act of self-discovery.
Noting that her color palette has become markedly warmer since she moved to Arizona (where she currently serves as the Director of Artist’s Programs for the state’s Commission on the Arts), the artist delineates her method as a form of strategic openness – making room and taking time to allow the materials to guide her toward their final form, rather than the other way around.
The show’s title, “Take Me to the Water,” alludes to a 1969 rendition of the traditional gospel song by Nina Simone at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Kesha Bruce locates something transcendent in the recording of Simone’s performance that encapsulates what any form of artmaking, at its best, can be: a conversation between oneself and the divine.
Deftly aware of the elemental power of water as a force that follows its own paths and forms its own shapes, Bruce identifies her artistic process closely with this element, and notes how the transcendental effects which result from it can be as overwhelming and rhythmic as the ocean waves of Big Sur.
As an exhibiting artist for over 25 years, Kesha Bruce has steadily oriented her craft toward capturing and encouraging the process of artmaking as an end in its own right – a way both of making something new and taking stock of oneself. As an administrator who oversees the creative programming for the entire state of Arizona, Bruce is intuitively attuned to the reciprocal relationship between transcendent acts of self-expression and the quotidian struggle to survive. In this role, she is a mentor and advocate for hundreds of other artists; the example she sets in her own artistic practice, with its emphasis on personal growth over commercial capitulation, thus becomes a form of potent political praxis.
Kesha Bruce (b. 1975, Iowa). Born and raised in Iowa, Bruce completed a BFA from the University of Iowa before earning an MFA in painting from Hunter College in New York City. Bruce has been awarded fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), The Vermont Studio Center, The CAMAC Foundation and the Puffin Foundation.
Her work is included in the collections of The Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture (14 pieces), The Amistad Center for Art and Culture, The University of Iowa Women’s Center, The En Foco Photography Collection and MOMA’s Franklin Furnace Artist Book Collection.
She has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2011.
Kesha Bruce is also co-founder of Black Girl Basel – the only event during Miami Art Week intentionally created for Black women artists, creatives, entrepreneurs, activists and cultural change-makers.
Kesha Bruce, Memory of Matala, 2022 60 x 48 in. Mixed-media Textile Collage on canvas Courtesy Morton Fine Art and the artist.
Founded in 2010 in Washington D.C. by curator Amy Morton, Morton Fine Art (MFA) is a fine art gallery and curatorial group that collaborates with art collectors and visual artists to inspire fresh ways of acquiring contemporary art. Firmly committed to the belief that art collecting can be cultivated through an educational stance, MFA’s mission is to provide accessibility to museum-quality contemporary art through a combination of substantive exhibitions and a welcoming platform for dialogue and exchange of original voice.
Morton Fine Art specializes in a stellar roster of nationally and internationally renowned artists as well as has an additional focus on artwork of the African Diaspora.
Morton Fine Art is pleased to announce Take Me to the Water, a solo exhibition of mixed-media paintings by artist Kesha Bruce. An intuitive combination of painting, collage and textile art, Bruce’s work represents the culmination of a holistic creative practice developed by the artist over several decades. Her eighth exhibition with the gallery, Take Me to the Water will be on view from September 17 to October 11, 2022 at Morton’s Washington, DC space.
The wall works of Kesha Bruce are less discrete executions of a concerted vision than the steady accumulation of a long creative process. Referred to by the artist simply as paintings, these mixed-media compositions are in fact patchworks of painted fabric, individually selected from Bruce’s vast archive and pasted directly onto the canvas in a textile collage that can sometimes resemble a quilt. The result of a slow and perpetual artistic method, each work represents hours of treatment, selection and juxtaposition until the whole becomes manifestly greater than its parts. Bruce’s process ends with her titling of each work: a poetic articulation of what the work is at this point capable of expressing for itself.
Much like water, the routine behind Bruce’s artmaking is cyclical and in service to a greater equilibrium – a pointed contrast to many of the epitomic works that make up much of the traditional art histories of the past several centuries, and which tend to aggressively emphasize rupture, madness and unsustainability as the most fruitful mothers of invention. Bruce’s process is distinctly different, and points to more a promising alternative for artmaking, in which creativity and lived experience are inseparably intertwined. For Bruce, this means that art can be not only a form of self-care but an act of self-discovery. Noting that her color palette has become markedly warmer since she moved to Arizona (where she currently serves as the Director of Artist’s Programs for the state’s Commission on the Arts), the artist delineates her method as a form of strategic openness – making room and taking time to allow the materials to guide her toward their final form, rather than the other way around.
The show’s title, Take Me to the Water, alludes to a 1969 rendition of the traditional gospel song by Nina Simone at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Bruce locates something transcendent in the recording of Simone’s performance that encapsulates what any form of artmaking, at its best, can be: a conversation between oneself and the divine. Deftly aware of the elemental power of water as a force that follows its own paths and forms its own shapes, Bruce identifies her artistic process closely with this element, and notes how the transcendental effects which result from it can be as overwhelming and rhythmic as the ocean waves of Big Sur.
As an exhibiting artist for over 25 years, Bruce has steadily oriented her craft toward capturing and encouraging the process of artmaking as an end in its own right – a way both of making something new and taking stock of oneself. As an administrator who oversees the creative programming for the entire state of Arizona, Bruce is intuitively attuned to the reciprocal relationship between transcendent acts of self-expression and the quotidian struggle to survive. In this role, she is a mentor and advocate for hundreds of other artists; the example she sets in her own artistic practice, with its emphasis on personal growth over commercial capitulation, thus becomes a form of potent political praxis.
About Kesha Bruce Kesha Bruce (b. 1975, Iowa) Born and raised in Iowa, she completed a BFA from the University of Iowa before earning an MFA in painting from Hunter College in New York City. Kesha Bruce has been awarded fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), The Vermont Studio Center, The CAMAC Foundation and the Puffin Foundation. Her work is included in the collections of The Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture (14 pieces), The Amistad Center for Art and Culture, The University of Iowa Women’s Center, The En Foco Photography Collection and MOMA’s Franklin Furnace Artist Book Collection. She has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2011.
About Morton Fine Art Founded in 2010 in Washington, DC by curator Amy Morton, Morton Fine Art (MFA) is a fine art gallery and curatorial group that collaborates with art collectors and visual artists to inspire fresh ways of acquiring contemporary art. Firmly committed to the belief that art collecting can be cultivated through an educational stance, MFA’s mission is to provide accessibility to museum-quality contemporary art through a combination of substantive exhibitions and a welcoming platform for dialogue and exchange of original voice. Morton Fine Art specializes in a stellar roster of nationally and internationally renowned artists as well as has an additional focus on artwork of the African Diaspora.
Morton Fine Art founded the trademark *a pop-up project in 2010. *a pop-up project is MFA’s mobile gallery component which hosts temporary curated exhibitions nationally.
“the land at di rosa… changing like the direction of the seasonal smoke, reveals to us that with death comes new life.” -adia millett
Adia Millett: A Force of Nature presents new paintings, textiles and sculptural installations by the Oakland-based artist, created in response to di Rosa’s distinctive landscape. “The land at di Rosa,” Millett writes, “lush with soaring vultures, cracks in the decomposing earth, traces of snakeskin, and endless layers of shadows, arouse our creative minds to remember where we come from. The multitude of colors, changing like the direction of the seasonal smoke, reveals to us that with death comes new life.”
Ranging across diverse media, Millett’s practice is rooted in “taking things apart, removing, replacing, cutting, pasting, sewing and building.” Evoking “the mended shapes of an old quilt, or polygonal segments of a cathedral window,” the works suggest “the importance of renewal and rebuilding, not only through the artistic process, but also through the possibility of transformative change.” Human beings, like earthquakes, forest fires or floods, are also forces of nature.
Millett earned her BFA from UC Berkeley followed by an MFA from CalArts. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Craft and Folk Museum in Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Atlanta; the Santa Monica Museum of Art; and the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans.
related programs
July 23: opening reception
October 29: Artist talk
Adia Millett, Snake in the Fire, 2022.
“The countless creatures I witnessed living on the land, including a baby rattler, became mirrors. We are able to see ourselves in other living beings. As they navigate the land, so do we. I imagine the young snake using its senses to transition from the challenges of one season to another. Here the triangle-shaped painting, not only integrated the shades of red to symbolize fire, but blue, green, yellow, and gold, for the water, air, and earth. Like the snake, we move, shed, and thrive.”
Quilted Ancestor: Earth (unfinished)
The three Quilted Ancestors titled Sun, Moon, and Earth were created to bring the fabric to life. As a viewer, we can begin to imagine a ghost, spirit, or loved one beneath the shrouds. In turn, the titles suggest that we can then image our planet or the moon as an entity, or family member. The quilts are covered with pieces of fabric that reveal the layers and complexity of who we are.
The Collective ( 1 of 10)
The Collective is a series of ten abstract forms, slightly resembling the shape of a figure or mummy. These forms are designed to float amongst the wall, each one unique and still connected to the others. Millett does not see these as body forms, but rather an energetic trace within the body. Like all the work in this exhibition, they are emblematic of transition, elevation, and the many dimensions of who we are.
Grandmother is perhaps the most personal piece in this exhibition. It starts with a piece of an unfinished quilt top from Millett’s grandmother. Adia adds hand-stitching in and around it and moves outward creating a mandala of feathers, most of which were collected from the land at Di Rosa. Earth tones surround what Adia calls a “medicine wheel”. Being the great-grandchild of Indigenous and African American slave foremothers, Adia uses her art to pay homage to the woman who came before her. The vast elements of the earthwork as a connection point to her matriarchal lineage.
di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art 5200 Sonoma Hwy, Napa, CA 94559 | 707-226-5991 | Hours | Contact
I construct speculative objects that echo within a residual future and the reminiscent present. These objects interrupt urban spaces, appearing to be foreign bodies, parts of an unknown whole, or agents of change. – Eto Otitigbe
Washington, D.C. – Morton Fine Art is pleased to present Materiel Remains: Consider this a blueprint, a series of blueprints., a solo exhibition and a new series of works by the multidisciplinary artist Eto Otitigbe. A creator best known for his public art installations and site-specific interventions, Otitigbe’s work revolves around the recovery of lost or repressed historical narratives and their visual possibilities within the public eye. In his first solo exhibition with Morton Fine Art, Otitigbe reflects on the recent history of public art and its institutional deployment. Materiel Remains will be on view from May 28 – June 28, 2022 in MFA’s Washington, D.C. gallery.
Morton Fine Art: curator's notes 