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[Working Title] Young, Gifted and Black / Curated by Hank Willis Thomas / 2015

26 September - 11 November 2015
Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

NINA CHANEL ABNEY | DERRICK ADAMS | SADIE BARNETTE | ZOE BUCKMAN | BETHANY COLLINS | NOLAN OSWALD DENNIS | OMAR VICTOR DIOP | TITUS KAPHAR | KILUANJI KIA HENDA | YASHUA KLOS | GERALD MACHONA | TOYIN OJIH ODUTOLA | EBONY G PATTERSON | ADAM PENDLETON | JODY PAULSEN | TABITA REZAIRE | JACOLBY SATTERWHITE | SHINIQUE SMITH

In keeping with our mission to investigate critical moments in the interconnected histories of global black life, Goodman Gallery is pleased to present To Be Young, Gifted, and Black the next edition of the ongoing series Working Title, an exhibition curated by one of our most thoughtful and provocative artists, Hank Willis Thomas.

Taking inspiration from Nina Simone’s iconic song To Be Young, Gifted, and Black (1969), written in memory of playwright Lorraine Hansberry, the author of Raisin in the Sun (1959) who died in 1964 at the age of 34, To Be Young, Gifted, and Black is about our moment, looking back at theirs. What lies between their Civil Rights and our #BlackLivesMatter? All over the world we cry out ever more fervently that our lives matter, even as evidence mounts supposedly to the contrary. However, we ourselves have never been in doubt of this truth, as Simone’s powerful words attest. She shares other great truths, singing that When you’re young, gifted, and black / Your soul’s intact, and, To be young, gifted, and black / Is where it’s at.

Artworks

Pink Pearl eraser and American Masters paper
Spray paint, paper collage on wood panel
Unavailable
Installation with a small framed newspaper article
Toner and graphite on American Masters paper
Silkscreen ink on mirror polished stainless steel
Unavailable
Ink and woodblock prints collaged on archival paper
Silkscreen ink on plexiglass and mirror
Unavailable
Silkscreen ink on canvas
Unavailable
Embroidery on vintage lingerie
Embroidery on vintage lingerie
Clothing, fabric, accessories, ribbon, rope and wood
HD video , Ipad, amethyst geode
5 minutes 39 seconds
Embroidery on vintage lingerie
Embroidery on vintage lingerie
Unavailable
Pen ink, gel ink and pencil on paper
Unavailable
Embroidery on vintage lingerie
Pen ink and pencil on paper
Unavailable
Embroidery on vintage lingerie
Embroidery on vintage lingerie
Digital print in pigment inks on cotton rag paper
Unavailable
Digital print in pigment inks on cotton rag paper
Unavailable
Tar and oil on canvas
Unavailable
Lightjet print on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper with gold gilded frame
Unavailable
Pigment ink jet printing on Hahnemuhle paper by Harman, courtesy of Magnin-A
Unavailable
Pigment ink jet printing on Hahnemuhle paper by Harman, courtesy of Magnin-A
Unavailable
Mixed media jacquard tapestry with Papier Mache balls, 2 music 'boxes', 1 embellished tricycle, 25 knitted blue flowers, 1 plastic gold crown, 1 silver wand, 1 baby doll, 1 pink and white skipping rope, 1 pair of gold baby booties, 1 pair of white patent leather girl shoes, 20 alphabet magnet pieces, 1 blue rubber frog
Acrylic, ink, fabric and paper collage on canvas over wood panel

About

Gerald Machona image

Gerald Machona

Gerald Machona is a Zimbabwean born Visual artist with a Master’s Degree in Fine Art from Rhodes University and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Cape Town, completed at the Michaelis School of fine art. Machona’s work has been included on several prominent international exhibitions, which include the South African Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in Italy, All the World’s Futures and at the 20th Biennale of Sydney, The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed. Machona’s work has also appearedin exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum in New York and at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town.

Machona works with sculpture, performance, new media, photography and film. The most notable aspect of his work is his innovative use of currency—particularly decommissioned Zimbabwean dollars—as an aesthetic material. Machona’s current work engages with issues of migration, transnationalism, social interaction and xenophobia in Africa.

In 2013, Machona featured in Mail and Guardian’s 200 Young South African’s supplemental and was selected by Business Day and the Johannesburg Art Fair in 2011 as one of the top ten young African artists practicing in South Africa. In 2019 Machona was included on the group exhibition Still Here Tomorrow to High Five You Yesterday at Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town.

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Kiluanji Kia Henda image

Kiluanji Kia Henda

Kiluanji Kia Henda (b. 1979, Luanda, Angola) employs a surprising sense of humour in his work, which often homes in on themes of identity, politics, and perceptions of post-colonialism and modernism in Africa. Kia Henda brings a critical edge to his multidisciplinary practice, which incorporates photography, video, and performance. Informed by a background surrounded by photography enthusiasts, Kia Henda’s conceptual-based work has further been sharpened by exposure to music, avant-garde theatre, and collaborations with a collective of emerging artists in Luanda’s art scene. Much of Kia Henda’s work draws on history through the appropriation and manipulation of public spaces and structures, and the different representations that form part of collective memory, in order to produce complex, yet powerful imagery.

Kia Henda has had solo exhibitions in galleries and institutions around the world. His work has featured on biennales in Venice, Dakar, São Paulo and Gwangju as well as major travelling exhibitions such as Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design and The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Hell, Purgatory revisited by Contemporary African Artists. In 2019, Kia Henda’s work was acquired by Tate Modern in London, and he was selected to participate on the Unlimited sector at Art Basel. In 2020, Kia Kenda exhibited at the MAN Museo d’Arte Provincia di Nuoro in Italy, marking his first solo exhibition in a major European museum.

Kia Henda currently lives and works between Luanda and Lisbon.

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Tabita Rezaire image

Tabita Rezaire

Tabita Rezaire (b.1989, Paris, France) is infinity incarnated into an agent of healing, who uses art as a means to unfold the soul. Her cross-dimensional practices envision network sciences – organic, electronic and spiritual – as healing technologies to serve the shift towards heart consciousness. Navigating digital, corporeal and ancestral memory as sites of resilience, she digs into scientific imaginaries to tackle the pervasive matrix of coloniality and the protocols of energetic misalignments that affect the songs of our body-mind-spirits. Inspired by quantum and cosmic mechanics, Tabita’s work is rooted in time-spaces where technology and spirituality intersect as fertile ground to nourish visions of connection and emancipation. Through screen interfaces and collective offerings, she reminds us to open our inner data centers to bypass western authority and download directly from source.

Tabita is based in Cayenne, French Guyana. She has a Bachelor in Economics (Fr) and a Master of Research in Artist Moving Image from Central Saint Martins (Uk). Tabita is a founding member of the artist group NTU, half of the duo Malaxa, and the mother of the energy house SENEB.

Tabita has shown her work internationally – Centre Pompidou, Paris; Serpentine London; MoMa NY; New Museum NY; MASP, Sao Paulo; Gropius Bau Berlin; MMOMA Moscow, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; ICA London; V&A London; National Gallery Denmark; The Broad LA; MoCADA NY; Tate Modern London; Museum of Modern Art Paris – and contributed to several Biennales such as the Guangzhou Triennial, Athens Biennale, Kochi Biennale (2018); Performa (2017); and Berlin Biennale (2016).

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Nolan Oswald Dennis image

Nolan Oswald Dennis

Nolan Oswald Dennis (b. 1988, Zambia) is a para-disciplinary artist from Johannesburg, South Africa. Their practice explores what they call ‘a black consciousness of space’: the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization.

Dennis’ work questions the politics of space (and time) through a system-specific, rather than site-specific approach. They are concerned with the hidden structures that pre-determine the limits of our social and political imagination. Through a language of diagrams, drawings and models they explore a hidden landscape of systematic and structural conditions that organise our political sub-terrain. This sub-space is framed by systems which transverse multiple realms (technical, spiritual economic, psychological, etc) and therefore Dennis’ work can be seen as an attempt to stitch these, sometime opposed, sometimes complimentary, systems together. To read technological systems alongside spiritual systems, to combine political fictions with science fiction.

Dennis’ is the 2016 winner of the FNB Arts Prize, and has exhibited in various solo and group shows, including the 9th Berlin Biennale (2016), the Young Congo Biennale (2019), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Architekturmuseum der TU München, Palais de Tokyo (Paris) and ARoS Aarhus (Denmark). They were the 2020 artist in residence at NTUCCA (Singapore) and the 2021 artist in residence at the Delfina Foundation (London).

Dennis’ work featured at the Liverpool Biennale with their installation, ‘no conciliation is possible (working diagram)’ in 2023, as well as Kunsthalle Bern and Van Abbe Museum. Dennis also participated in the 12th edition of the Seoul Mediacity Biennale as well as the ‘back wall project’ at the Kunsthalle Basel.

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Hank  Willis Thomas image

Hank Willis Thomas

Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976, New Jersey, United States) is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture.

Thomas has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad including the International Center of Photography, New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain; Musée du quai Branly, Paris; Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong, and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Netherlands.

Thomas’ work is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth), Writing on the Wall, and the artist-run initiative for art and civic engagement For Freedoms, which in 2017 was awarded the ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform. Thomas is also the recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2019), the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2018), Art for Justice Grant (2018), AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), and is a member of the New York City Public Design Commission. Thomas holds a B.F.A. from New York University (1998) and an M.A./M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts (2004). In 2017, he received honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute of Art and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.

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