Honoring Black History at Frieze Los Angeles 2023

Galleries, curators and artists at this year's fair pay tribute to the generations of African Americans who struggled with adversity to receive full citizenship in American society. Here we recognise just some of these celebrations of Black culture which can be seen across the fair and Frieze Projects. 

Nicola Vassell Gallery is showing ‘The Things She Knows’, a series of rare and never before seen works by the photographer Ming Smith. While the photographs in this exhibition represent over 50 years of Smith’s practice, each embodies her keen observation of the feminine spirit.  The first Black woman photographer to be included in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection, Smith photographed some of the most celebrated artists of the twentieth century, with a preternatural ability to recognize and capture the complexity, power, and energy of women who chose to live according to their beliefs and express themselves freely—defying the constricting expectations of their time. Smith reflects, “I was always interested in the beauty of Black people regardless of who they are or what status they have. Beauty is beauty. Character is character.” 

A highlight of the Focus section curated by Amanda Hunt and Sonya Tamaddon, Dreamsong gallery presents a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Ta-coumba T. Aiken, whose work is rooted in a deep engagement with Black history and culture. In a recent essay on the artist, Siri Engberg, Senior Curator and Director of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center, notes that ‘Aiken is part of a lineage of Black abstract artists who have employed strategies of abstraction as containers for deep meaning, and as explorations of the personal, the historical, and the social.’ A vessel for the collective memory of his community, the artist begins each painting with intuitive freeform underpaintings which he terms Spirit Writing. Upon these serpentine gestures, Aiken accumulates rhythmic motifs in symphonic visions of his ancestral history.  

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery are staging a solo exhibition on the work of Bob Thompson (1937–1966). Featuring a selection of paintings and works on paper, the presentation complements the traveling retrospective, "Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine," which just recently concluded its nationwide tour at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. As inspired by the improvisational riffs of jazz as he was by the designs of Goya, Poussin, and Tintoretto, Thompson’s viscerally executed compositions are populated by Madonnas and saints, monstrous birds, and silhouetted men in fedoras, conjuring a psychedelic allegory of his own experience. 

Ortuzar Projects and Andrew Kreps Gallery are presenting a joint showing of painter Ernie Barnes, including important paintings and drawings spanning Barnes' career. Rendered in a neo-mannerist style, Barnes infused his figures with a long-limbed, muscular dynamism in order to capture the joy and struggle of Black American life as he experienced it, growing up in the segregated South. 

Akinsanya Kambon, former U.S. Marine, art professor, and Black Panther's raku-fired ceramic sculptures – on view with Jack Shainman Gallery – are the realisation of a collective loss of knowledge, memory and history, through time and colonisation. Kambon’s lifetime of service and his range of experiences, including the Vietnam War, in conjunction with his artistic practice have culminated in a rich body of work dedicated to his Pan-Africanist beliefs.  

David Kordansky Gallery are debuting new paintings by Chase Hall. The artist’s paintings and sculptures respond to generational celebrations and traumas encoded throughout American history. Addressing a variety of social and visual systems—each of which intersects with complex trajectories of race, hybridity, economics, and personal agency—Hall generates images whose materiality is as crucial to their compositional makeup as their indelible approach to representation. 

Art Production Fund's Frieze Projects: Now Playing program features Autumn Breon's Leisure Lives – a public installation that honors Santa Monica's Bay Street Beach and the Black spatial imaginary. Only a few miles from the fair, Bay Street Beach was a seaside haven for Black Californians’ recreation in the early to mid-20th century. A colorful and illuminating gateway to leisure, Leisure Lives monumentalizes the legacy of the Black pioneers that fiercely protected public space dedicated to Black rest. Activated by the artist’s accompanying performance Swag Surf in the Water, Breon imagines this public space as an invitation to claim and reclaim space for relaxation.

Another highlights of the Now Playing public program, Basil Kincaid’s Dancing the Wind Walk, an airplane wrapped in patchwork quilt made from discarded, recycled material gathered in Ghana and St. Louis (where the artist practices), serving as a vehicle for memorial content and a fabric monument. The site of this installation, Santa Monica Airport, speaks to the quilt’s tendency to cross borders and bridge places and spaces; in this context of aviation and flight, Kincaid’s practice of celebrating journeys, shifts, phases, chapters, transitions and metamorphosis is given lift off.  

Frieze are pleased to host the non-profit Gallery 90220, which strives to provide an accessible platform for emerging and underrepresented artists of colour by hosting think tanks, podcasts and promoting collaboration with like-minded trailblazers. Also at the fair is Reparations Club, a Los Angeles-based independently Black-owned and operated bookstore. 

Offsite, Frieze Projects: Against the Edge presents three works by Tony Cokes throughout the historic literary and performance center Beyond Baroque. The musicality and rhythm of Cokes’s work, its connection to vernacular forms of music and spoken word mirror Beyond Baroque’s historical context and thematic values. “So we have to really rethink all these concepts” reads a portion of the piece, Evil. 13.5 (4 OE), part of his post-9/11 series, Evil, which greets visitors at Beyond Baroque’s entrance. The text for the work is drawn from an interview with Okwui Enwezor about African design, serving as an homage to the late Nigerian educator, curator, and former Director of the Munich Haus der Kunst. 

Further Information

Featuring more than 120 galleries and an expansive program of artist projects, Frieze Los Angeles 2023 takes place February 16–19 at the new location of Santa Monica Airport. 

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