What to See in New York and Los Angeles this August

‘Till They Listen: Bill Gunn Directs America’

Artists Space, New York

5 June – 21 August 

Organized by Hilton Als and Jake Perlin, in collaboration with Nicholas Forster, Ishmael Reed, Chiz Schultz, Awoye Timpo and Sam Waymon, ‘Till They Listen: Bill Gunn Directs America’ looks at the illustrious career of the novelist and filmmaker. Through a series of public programs and an in-depth collection of archival materials, the exhibition illustrates Gunn’s struggles of being a Black artist working in New York and Los Angeles during the 1970s and ’80s. You can read Beatrice Loayza’s review of Awoye Timpo’s 2021 adaptation of Gunn’s play The Black Picture Show (1975) here.

Esteban Jefferson

Tanya Leighton

17 July – 14 August

At Tanya Leighton, New York-based artist Esteban Jefferson presents a selection of works from his series ‘Petit Palais’ (2019–ongoing) – beautifully rendered compositions that depict the reception area inside the Beaux-Arts rotunda of the Petit Palais Museum in Paris. Marked by two sculptural busts of Black subjects located behind the reception desk in the entrance – as if only tangentially part of the museum’s collection – the scene is meticulously re-created by Jefferson, who brings into focus these peripheral works while blurring out the surroundings: museum attendants, visitors, counters, computers, etc. In this recent iteration, however, Jefferson forgoes his use of paint and canvas, drafting a selection of works on paper that sees these busts rendered in deep black and their environment faintly drawn in pencil – a ghost image of the space itself. — Terence Trouillot

Corita Kent

Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

8 July – 13 August

On 14 August 1965, the front page of Los Angeles Times declared: ‘EIGHT MEN SLAIN; GUARD MOVES IN’. The reference is to Watts, an area of south Los Angeles, during a period of civil unrest sparked by the arrest of Marquette Frye, a young Black man, earlier that week. The paper also featured an editorial that day – sans byline, so presumably serving as the Times’s own statement on the matter – titled ‘Anarchy Must End’, which claimed: ‘Terrorism is spreading.’ Corita Kent’s screenprint my people (1965) – a loaded opening salvo to a rare and exquisite show at Andrews Kreps Gallery, New York – reproduces that exact page in black, but turns it on its side. Running across is a swath of scarlet on which quotes from priest and civil-rights activist Maurice Ouellet break through as white lines of hand-lettered text. Though Kent was a white Catholic nun in the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary for 32 years, she understood that being Christ-like can mean going against the establishment. — Paige K. Bradley

Wade Guyton

Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles 

22 May – 14 August

Wade Guyton is, by now, a household name in the art world. In Los Angeles, however, he has received very little exposure. For anyone, like myself, who has only encountered his work in group exhibitions, and who automatically aligns him with the tradition of monochrome painting via his signature practice (begun in 2007) of passing lengths of canvas through an inkjet printer programmed to reproduce a jet-black JPEG, his recent outing at Matthew Marks, ‘The Undoing’, was eye-opening. — Jan Tumlir

Cauleen Smith

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

1 April – 31 October 

'Give It or Leave It’, Cauleen Smith’s immersive, kaleidoscopic solo exhibition at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, begins with the proposition to give instead of take. A revision of the saying ‘take it or leave it’, the title signals what Smith describes in the exhibition catalogue as an act of ‘radical generosity’ and the show – which encompasses film, video, installation and sculpture – certainly exudes generosity in its visual exuberance and celebration of utopian worldbuilding. Yet, the travelling exhibition – organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania – also recognizes that the habit of taking is not easily overcome. — Natalie Haddad