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The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is pleased to
present Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, the
first comprehensive survey of performance art by black artists working from
the perspective of the visual arts. While black performance has been
largely contextualized as an extension of theater, visual artists have
integrated performance into their work for over five decades, generating a
repository of performance work that has gone largely unrecognized until
now. Radical Presence provides a critical framework to discuss the
history of black performance traditions within the visual arts beginning
with the "happenings" of the early 1960s, throughout the 1980s, and into
the contemporary practices of a new generation of artists.
The
exhibition will feature work by three generations of artists including
Terry Adkins, Papo Colo, Jean-Ulrick Désert, Theaster Gates, Sherman
Fleming, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Maren Hassinger, Wayne Hodge, Satch Hoyt,
Shaun El C. Leonardo, Kalup Linzy, Dave McKenzie, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine
O'Grady, Clifford Owens, Tameka Norris, Benjamin Patterson, Adrian Piper,
William Pope.L, Rammellzee, Sur Rodney (Sur), Dread Scott, Xaviera Simmons,
Danny Tisdale, Hennessy Youngman, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others.
Radical Presence will feature video and photo documentation of
performances, performance installations, ephemera and objects created
through actions. In addition, the exhibition will feature live performances
scheduled throughout the run of the exhibition including performances by
Hassinger, Linzy, Pope.L, Leonardo, Nengudi, Norris, and Owens, among many
others.
The history of performance art as a manifestation of
radical shifts in social thought and artistic practice is well documented
in publications like Performance: Live Art Since 1960 (1998) by
Roselee Goldberg, and her seminal book from 1979, Performance: Live Art
1909 to the Present. Performance art practices in Latin America were
also eloquently documented in the 2008 exhibition Arte ≠ Vida:
Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960-2000 at El Museo del Barrio,
New York. Ironically, given the rich history of performance and its
prevalence in black artistic practices since the 1960s, this tradition has
largely gone unexamined save for a handful of publications including the
exhibition catalogue Art as a Verb (1988) by Leslie King Hammond and
Lowery Stokes Sims.
To date, little scholarship exists that
chronicles the rise and persistence of black performance traditions
emerging from the framework of the visual arts. While the works created by
these artists have previously been contextualized in terms of associations
and movements ranging from Fluxus to Conceptual Art to the blanketed arena
of contemporary art practice, in Radical Presence they will be
presented along a trajectory providing general audiences and scholars
alike, a critical understanding of the significance and persistence of
black performance as a stand-alone practice. Radical Presence is
curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, Senior Curator at CAMH.
Publication
The fully illustrated catalogue that accompanies
the exhibition Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art
reflects the breadth and scope of the contributions of black artists to
the field of performance art practice over the last 50+ years. The
publication includes an essay by exhibition curator Valerie Cassel Oliver,
as well as contributions by Franklin Sirmans, Department Head and Curator
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Naomi Beckwith,
Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Yona Backer, Founding
Partner, Third Streaming, New York; Tavia Nyong'o, Associate Professor of
Performance Studies, New York University; and photographer/performance
artist Clifford Owens. The catalogue also inlcudes a chronology of black
performance art since 1960, an exhibition checklist, color reproductions of
featured works, and artists' biographies and bibliographies.
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