Siddhartha Mitter

On a recent afternoon, friends and strangers wandered into the Moroccan-born British photographer’s shop in the Shoreditch district here, clustering amid the joyous mess. There were stacks of multicolored T-shirts, racks of sweatshirts and djellabas, and piles of slippers with mock sports-brand insignia.

Grocery-store cans and boxes marked in Arabic script served as decoration and furniture. Crowding the walls were vintage advertising posters — and of course Hajjaj’s own photographs. In his instantly recognizable style of portraiture, he styles his subjects in a kind of faux-Orientalist swag, using items like the ones in the shop as props.

In fact, he makes portraits right here, on the street, taping onto the brick wall his flamboyant backdrops, and shooting in full view of passersby.

“There are two kinds of artist,” Hajjaj said in the shop’s back area, with its banquettes made of Moroccan Coca-Cola crates topped with flower-print cushions. “There’s the artist that needs space, to be on their own to work, and there’s somebody like myself.” He scanned the scene. “There’s always an ambience.”

This fall, Hajjaj has brought the vibes to Paris, where a retrospective of his work is taking over the entire Maison Européenne de la Photographie, the photography museum. The city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, attended the opening, which included Moroccan Gnawa musicians performing with Yasiin Bey, the rapper once known as Mos Def.

Hajjaj, who spent childhood in Larache, a fishing town, and now has a riad in Marrakech as well as a home in London, has become Morocco’s most visible artist. He shoots his friends, many of them working-class, such as the “henna girls” who adorn tourists in the Jemaa el Fna square in Marrakech. He hires tailors and artisans to run up outfits for his subjects. And recently, he organized a salon there, where he showed works by less well known Moroccan photographers.

But he is even more a creature of London. Hajjaj arrived here in 1973 at age 12, with his mother and siblings, joining his father, a laborer who could not read or write. After dropping out of high school, he landed in the precarious economy of the early Thatcher years.

Selling flowers in Camden Market, then clothes, while also promoting underground club nights and working on film shoots and fashion shows, Hajjaj became a utility player in the emerging London bohemia of immigrants’ children, fed on reggae and pirate radio, that produced bands like Young Disciples and Soul II Soul. His clothing label, R.A.P., sold streetwear before that was a fashion category. His Covent Garden shop was a central-city hangout and haven from the ambient racism and class hierarchies of the time.

“In the ’80s you have to remember that London was just starting to blend,” Hajjaj said, in the North London accent he acquired on arrival. “We all came from different backgrounds. We had to create something to find our space.”

Simon Baker, the director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie — and a former Londoner himself, previously curator of photography at Tate Modern — said that Hajjaj was a quintessential Black British artist, in the expansive usage of that time. The retrospective, Baker said, “tells the story of someone with London street knowledge, network, and background, but who is also very passionate about where he came from.”

Yet it took many years for Hajjaj to think of himself as an artist.

“I didn’t think I was worthy,” he said. “I had all these friends who studied art, music, fashion, who prepared themselves, who were technically very good. I just took pictures. It was more to hang out with people, to listen to music and create a mood.”

By the time he started showing his photography, in the mid-1990s, he had reconnected with Morocco, following a trip in 1993 to take his daughter to meet her relatives. Even among the London set, Morocco evoked tedious stereotypes — “caftans, hashish, camels,” Hajjaj said — that irritated him. What he found was the place he remembered, at once ordinary, with its canned goods and fast fashions, and vibrant according to its own cultural mélange.

“I wanted to show my friends that we have something cool,” he said. “And that I suppose is what started me entering the art world.”

The Paris exhibition presents Hajjaj’s work organized in six series of large-format prints, many in custom frames, inset with items like cans of tomato sauce or motor oil, or children’s building blocks marked with Arabic letters. The galleries are decorated with wallpaper he has designed, and seating areas have been converted with his furnishings. Several video works are on view.

One photo series is his famous “Kesh Angels,” in which women in gowns and face veils pose on motorbikes. They are glammed up, yet authentic. These are workers in Marrakesh tourist economy whom Hajjaj has known and photographed for years, and who use the bikes to get around town.

Hajjaj’s stylings — mixing camouflage, polka-dot, or animal prints with traditional fabrics from the souk; adding cheap plastic sunglasses shaped like hearts; printing Louis Vuitton logos onto the motorbike body — bring a sense of play that melds Moroccan heritage with a patchwork hip-hop swagger.

Rather than launch a polemic against the tourist gaze that fetishizes veiled women on motorbikes, Hajjaj drowns it out with maximalist compositions that mash up references, disorganize expectations, and seize control.

“It’s about taking this orientalism vibe and saying, ‘OK, let’s take ownership of it,’” Hajjaj said. “Me being Moroccan, you being a Moroccan subject, let’s take that kind of thing, and do it in our way.”

The same method applies to other series by Hajjaj: “Gnawi Riders,” a male counterpart to “Kesh Angels,” with Gnawa musicians; the “Dakka Marrakchia” headshots of women; and “Vogue: The Arab Issue,” styled like fashion spreads. All use clothes and accessories sourced from the local market, to reclaim control: not just cultural, but also economic, and ultimately, psychological.

Hajjaj’s work gets linked to pop art, with comparisons to Andy Warhol that he subverts in his clothing line “Andy Wahloo,” which translates to “I have nothing” in Arabic. But he is equally inspired by photography studios of small-town 1960s Morocco, where families went for special occasions. The classic studio work of Seydou Keïta, Sory Sanlé and Malick Sidibé — one of his idols — is another clear reference.

“I always think that Hassan’s work looks as if someone electrocuted with color an African studio,” Baker said, alluding to that tradition. “Which of course would have been full of color, but the pictures we have from them are black-and-white.” One room in the show presents, for the first time, Hajjaj’s own black-and-whites. “That’s to show the journey, and my love of photography,” Hajjaj said.

But Hajjaj’s biggest love is for his subjects. It shines in the ease that pervades his portraits, even when the staging is ornate. He mostly photographs people he has formed a connection with — friends, friends of friends, colleagues — and the affinity shows.

“He loves the people around him, and that is a very endearing thing about Hassan,” said Touria El Glaoui, founder of the 1-54 African Contemporary Art fair, who organized Hajjaj’s last major solo show, at Somerset House in London, in 2017. “He has built this community and kept it over the years. And what’s amazing is that he hasn’t changed a bit.”

The ongoing series “My Rock Stars” is Hajjaj’s homage to his cosmopolitan crowd. (A sampler: American artist Hank Willis Thomas; Moroccan filmmaker Meryem Benm’Barek; French-Algerian musician Rachid Taha, who died last year.) Some are famous, but styled by Hajjaj, seen through his lens, they would be special regardless.

In the Shoreditch shop, the grime emcee Afrikan Boy, the Gnawa drummer Simo Lagnawi and the soul singer Bumi drifted in to rehearse. Hajjaj was developing a multimedia stage show, “My Rock Stars Experimental,” with video projections and live performance by musicians styled in his outfits. (It premieres on Oct. 11 in Los Angeles.)

He put on a fresh pot of coffee and said to stick around.

“I’ve got my friends hanging with me on the wall,” he said. “They’re traveling with me. So there’s this protection, there’s a comfort for me.”

Exhibit Information:

Through Nov. 17 at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris; mep-fr.org.

This article originally appeared in

Hassan Hajjaj Turns Moroccan Clichés Into London Cool

LONDON — Hassan Hajjaj was in his element.

Elsewhere, a group watches, from a short distance, someone sleeping on a narrow cot. People stare into peeling walls or out grimy windows. Figures come together tableau-like, as in silent chorus, and hold their pose.

Gestures do the talking in “Mirror/Echo/Tilt,” the video installation that filmmaker Melanie Crean, visual artist Sable Elyse Smith, and performance artist Shaun Leonardo have on view at the New Museum — an unusually intimate meeting of art, education and social action.

Majestic and eerie, the 18-minute video features 22 participants in white Tyvek jumpsuits and, for some, carnival-like masks adorned with mirrored tiles. They enact scenes derived from their experiences with the police, courts, or jail, conveyed in a silent theatrical language where emotions hold sway.

Smaller screens around the gallery confront visitors with outtakes of this material. A resource room has a seminar table and a small library of books — mostly on incarceration, as well as Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero With a Thousand Faces,” and “Don Quixote.”

And beyond the museum, the artists have used the methods honed in the performance project to design a diversion program — an alternative to jail time that young people facing misdemeanor charges in Brooklyn Criminal Court can complete to have their record sealed.

“Mirror/Echo/Tilt” joins a growing wave of art contending with the about 2.2 million adults held in America’s prisons and jails. In 2016, Andrea Fraser wired the empty fifth floor of the Whitney Museum with speakers that played ambient sound recorded at prisons. In recent months, Cameron Rowland’s project “D37,” at MOCA Los Angeles, laid out objects in a room that connected chattel slavery with today’s police practice of asset forfeiture; “The Pencil Is the Key,” opening this fall at the Drawing Center, will join works by artists around the world who were once prisoners.

“Mirror/Echo/Tilt” has its roots in a literary epiphany. In the summer of 2014, when Michael Brown died at the hands of a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri — three weeks after Eric Garner met a similar fate on Staten Island — Crean was reading “Don Quixote.”

In the furor over Brown’s depiction in the news media — including a New York Times profile that labeled the unarmed teenager “no angel” — Crean, who teaches at Parsons School of Design, heard a resonance of Cervantes’ classic novel and its absurdist plot. In the second half of the two-part epic, the characters Quixote encounters have read the first volume, along with a bogus “sequel,” and they judge him on that basis.

“The character was defamed as being crazy,” Crean said. “Don Quixote would show up in a town, his reputation would precede him, and he would have to confront it.”

The lesson: Society narrates us into roles that can overwhelm us even when we struggle to break free. The stakes are especially high for people in the grip of the justice system, and neighborhoods subject to surveillance and overpolicing.

“Mass incarceration is a type of performance,” Smith said. “There’s posturing, there’s labeling, all this theatricality, in the way that people either label demographics or play out the theater of oppression.”

The three artists in “Mirror/Echo/Tilt” brought together deep, if unorthodox, expertise. Crean’s past projects have built on social practice work with various groups in the city, for instance with spoken-word artists in the Bronx or young Muslim women in Queens.

The fast-rising Smith — she was a 2018-19 artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem — mixes film, text and sculptural installation in her art, but has kept her focus on the culture of incarceration.

Leonardo explores race, gender and power through performance. In 2015 he developed “I Can’t Breathe,” a hybrid performance and self-defense class where participants learned the chokehold used on Eric Garner — and how hard it is to defend against.

“I was interested in the principles of embodied performance,” Leonardo said of taking part in “Mirror/Echo/Tilt.” “How we can take information that would otherwise simply live in our minds and dislodge it and move it somewhere else.”

Creating “Mirror/Echo/Tilt” was a gradual process. For several months in 2015, the three held weekly sessions with young people at a Bronx nonprofit, the Point. The next year, assisted by one of the Bronx participants, DeVante Lewis, they worked with a group returning from incarceration through the re-entry support organization Fortune Society.

The beginning was loose — conversation, developing comfort with one another, sharing meals. Eventually a method emerged, as they considered emotions raised by incarceration.

The decision to go wordless in “Mirror/Echo/Tilt” followed naturally. “After just existing together, with personal narratives emerging, in order to organize ourselves around these stories we actually had to remove language,” Leonardo said.

The locales where they filmed are pungent with history: They include the long-abandoned Bronx borough courthouse; the former Fulton Correctional Facility, also in the Bronx, a minimum-security prison closed in 2011; a long-sealed theater in the former Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, now a city homeless shelter and intake center.

The buildings, like the performers, express a kind of identity in flux — edifices emerging from carceral or related uses, if not yet stably dedicated to something else.

Four years in the making, “Mirror/Echo/Tilt” is complete as an art project, in the sense that it has produced a museum show. Outside, however, the work has only begun. Since late 2016 the three collaborators have worked with the artist nonprofit Recess and its partner, Brooklyn Justice Initiatives, on a diversion program for “court-involved” youth.

They have trained facilitators and written a curriculum that others can adapt. “Having an open-source receptacle for this information became a goal,” Smith said.

Lewis, the participant from the Point who stayed for the rest of the project, shared that he grew up with family members “constantly going back and forth between prison and home” — experiences that he avoided scrutinizing or talking about.

He had a background in acting, but this wordless method unlocked something new, he said. “It allowed me to present my full self, I guess.” He added: “The best thing I could take away from it is that the body remembers.”

Now working full time for an alternatives-to-incarceration program, Lewis is turning his attention to the impact of the court and prison system on young women — the gender roles and the demands on their emotional labor — and plans to work toward a syllabus.

“Mirror/Echo/Tilt” has taken shape in an ambiguous time. High-profile deaths of black men following encounters with police, which first prompted the project, have hardly abated. Yet alternative justice programs are spreading, reformers have won election in some cities as district attorneys, and prison abolition is no longer laughed away.

Crean cast the collaboration not as a work of protest, but rather of imagination.

“If there is a problem — a system — and one has to demonstrate how another way of being is possible, that’s what artists and educators can do,” she said.

The piece, she said, was at once art, education, a social intervention. “It can be accessed from any of those points,” she said. “But for us it’s all of those things.”

‘Mirror/Echo/Tilt’: Through Oct. 6 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, Manhattan; 212-219-1222, newmuseum.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/arts/design/mirror-echo-tilt-new-museum.html" id="75444009-7185-3410-a87f-bdffc7c59863">The New York Times</a>.

Silence Speaking Volumes: Artists Confront the Culture of Incarceration

NEW YORK — Two men sit across the table in a barren visiting room. One is straight-backed and impassive, the other slumped and absent. A third man comes in, raises the slouching one up, places the pair’s hands into a clasp and angles their heads so they look at each other. Then he gently moves away.

In the Basquiat canon, it was “a not very good scrap of painting,” The New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl recently wrote. It was almost not a discrete work of art at all. Basquiat painted it directly onto Keith Haring’s studio wall; it would have been lost had Haring not cut it out and set it like a masterpiece in the ornate frame it still inhabits. (It was over Haring’s bed at the time of his death.)

But “Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart)” is also, as far as LaBouvier or anyone else has determined, the only work in Basquiat’s vast oeuvre that addresses a current event of his time — a gruesome tragedy that took the life of a young black artist and shook the Lower East Side art community.

“This was a form of evidence, in a sense,” LaBouvier said.

Her show, “Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: The Untold Story,” centers on this piece as it develops a picture of the death of the 25-year-old man grievously injured in transit police custody and its effect on other artists. The exhibition argues for a fresh look at the effect of the racial tension of the 1980s on Basquiat and his peers. In so doing it uncovers new material, including several works that important artists made in response to the incident that have never been shown before. And it presents, for the first time, some of the artwork that Stewart had been making.

Exactly what happened when police apprehended Stewart, a Pratt Institute student, at the First Avenue subway station in the early hours of Sept. 15, 1983, remains unsettled, many years after a grand jury’s decision not to indict several officers, and a subsequent settlement awarded to the Stewart family. What is known is that police brought him, hogtied and badly injured, to Bellevue Hospital, where he died after two weeks in a coma.

Basquiat’s piece shows two red-faced police in blue uniform, one baring pointy teeth, with batons raised over an all-black silhouette. The word “¿DEFACEMENT©?” is printed above them in the familiar Basquiat scrawl.

The piece was never sold (its owner is Nina Clemente, Haring’s goddaughter) and has seldom been shown. Its most recent appearance was in a one-work exhibition and discussion program LaBouvier organized at the Williams College Museum of Art in 2016.

The current exhibition puts it in a double artistic context. Eight classic Basquiat works from 1982-83, are shown in the same room, including, pointedly, two pieces that present racialized police figures, “La Hara” and “Irony of a Negro Policeman.”

They attest to his awareness of the constant menace of policing to young black men like him, and the psychic burden that came with it.

“I think there are critics who have underestimated the centrality of that threat,” LaBouvier said. “You can almost feel the heat from the paintings.”

Walk past a blown-up Haring photograph of his studio wall, with the Basquiat piece cut out, into the exhibition’s second room, and second layer of context, and you will find works by Haring, Andy Warhol, David Hammons, Eric Drooker, George Condo, David Wojnarowicz (whose unsigned protest flyer clearly inspired Basquiat’s painting), and Lyle Ashton Harris. All respond, whether in the heat of the moment or years later, to Stewart’s beating and death.

Some have never been shown — including Condo’s “Portrait of Michael Stewart,” which he made while Stewart was still in the hospital and stashed away in storage.

There are also pieces of ephemera that testify to the community’s mobilization, including issues of alternative magazine East Village Eye and programs for nightclub benefit events for the Stewart family. Crucially, Stewart’s small paintings and drawings, lent to LaBouvier by his family, are an emotional anchor. Often described as a graffiti artist — in the police version, he was caught tagging the station — he was in fact a painter with an abstract sensibility, who was planning his first exhibition.

“This is someone becoming — finding themselves, finding their voice, finding their practice,” LaBouvier said. “I didn’t want to make him into a myth or make him into a sort of trauma-porn story either. And I thought the best way to do that was to take a step back and let him speak for himself.”

Jeffrey Deitch, a gallerist and curator who was close to the artists of the era, said that for all Basquiat’s celebrity and his soaring prices (a Japanese collector paid $110.5 million in 2017 for his painting of a skull, “Untitled”) the scholarship remains thin, and important aspects of New York art culture of the early 1980s are yet to be addressed.

“The story of Michael Stewart galvanized the downtown art community,” Deitch said, agreeing with LaBouvier. “It was the subject of a lot of anger and activism for some years, not just the few months after the incident. The reaction prompted some very powerful works of art.”

Of LaBouvier’s approach, he said: “I told her that in our field we’ve been waiting for someone like her to emerge for 40 years — a young woman who can look at this period in art history from a fresh perspective.”

Though her formal specialty is film — her graduate degree from UCLA is in screenwriting — LaBouvier’s fascination with Basquiat goes back to her childhood in Texas, where her parents owned a pair of the artist’s drawings. She first saw an image of “Defacement” in 2003, while in college at Williams in Massachusetts.

When she returned to her alma mater with the actual painting, she held public programs around it that focused on police use of force and the Black Lives Matter movement. Her own brother, Clinton Allen, who was unarmed, was killed in a confrontation with a Dallas police officer in 2013, but she cautioned strongly that her research should stand on its own merits.

“Biography is not and never has been scholarship, whether it’s mine or someone else’s,” she said. “I think that insistence on inserting my biography not only flattens me and my work but is informed by this social expectation that black women are broken.”

The Guggenheim exhibition emerged from conversations with Nancy Spector, the museum’s chief curator. LaBouvier said that assembling the show, however, exposed fault lines that she attributed to the Guggenheim’s inexperience with black curators and their perspectives, especially with regard to nuances of black life and identity.

“I think it will be better for the black curators coming after me,” she added. “For instance, if I didn’t review something, that meant that no person of color looked at that document or process. And certainly it felt at times that there was an expectation that I would just be grateful to be in the room.”

She is proud of the exhibition but alluded to editorial frictions: For instance, she said, the museum did not produce extended captions that would explain each work and the reason she chose it, an omission that she said shortchanges her research. “My hands were somewhat tied with that,” she said.

In its 80-year history, the Guggenheim has never had a black staff curator. Independent Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor was one of several organizers of a show on African photography in 1996. Artists Carrie Mae Weems and Julie Mehretu are among six artist-curators in the current exhibition “Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection.” The museum also noted it has hosted nonexhibition programs convened by Weems (2014) and Simone Leigh (2019).

In a phone interview, Richard Armstrong, the Guggenheim’s director, acknowledged that the museum has been “slightly off-tempo” with respect to hiring African American curators and that efforts are underway to address this. “I want to reaffirm that we are in the midst of a concerted effort to broaden our curatorial staff,” Armstrong said.

In an email responding to questions, Sarah Eaton, a spokeswoman for the Guggenheim praised LaBouvier’s original research and said she had participated in a “rigorous editorial process” with input from staff.

LaBouvier’s essay in the catalog suggests the forensic research involved in making the show. She also interviewed 23 artists, gallerists and others in Basquiat’s orbit, along with Michael Stewart’s mother, Carrie, and even a member of the initial grand jury.

For Condo, the painter, the project brought back heavy memories. He had been out with Stewart earlier on that fateful evening. There had been a party at Haring’s, but the two men were not let in. “We weren’t cool enough, or whatever,” Condo said. Instead they went to the Pyramid Club on Avenue A before parting ways.

After the news spread, Condo painted his portrait of Stewart — an eerie image of a figure hooked up to a satellite-dishlike device, a reference to the young man in the hospital. He had no intention of showing it.

“I just went home and cried and made a painting,” he said.

LaBouvier’s inquiries prompted him to dig out the work.

“This exhibition was necessary,” he said. “Putting a real microscope onto that particular period leaves a real impression on you as to what people were feeling, as a result of what happened to this man.”

LaBouvier said that Stewart’s story, his own art and the art that his death prompted, in anger and mourning, deserved consideration from a scholarly perspective.

“I am very clear that this is restorative justice in an art-historical way,” she said. “There are a lot of stories that we need to reexamine, reclaim, re-treat. This is one chapter among many.”

Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: TheUntold Story

Through Nov. 6, the Guggenheim Museum, Manhattan, 212-423-3500; guggenheim.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/arts/design/basquiat-defacement-guggenheim-curator.html" id="b8f8295e-fe3c-3af3-a32f-c9087f5651d7">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — On a recent day in the top-floor gallery of the Guggenheim Museum, Chaédria LaBouvier, a 34-year-old independent curator and the first black woman to organize a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim, contemplated the small, ostensibly minor painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat that drove her to years of fervent research.

Behind Basquiat's 'Defacement': Reframing a Tragedy

On one hand McClodden, 37, was coming off well-received film and performance projects in New York that had explored black queer culture in the 1980s. But the work had run its course. “I was having this chaotic meltdown,” she said.

Selection in the Whitney Biennial instantly marks an artist as a figure at the forefront of American contemporary art. For young selectees like McClodden — three quarters of this year’s roster of 75 artists are under 40 — it is a surefire résumé and market builder. By the same token, it exposes them to inevitable political stakes and heightened scrutiny.

The Biennial is sometimes provocative by design: The 1993 edition famously landed in the midst of the culture wars with a barrage of in-your-face art asserting race, gender and sexual identities. Other years have sparked more specific confrontations, as the last one did, in 2017, over a rendering by the painter Dana Schutz of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955.

This year, not only is the national political climate tense, but so too are institutional debates around the Whitney itself. The group Decolonize This Place has convened performancelike protests in the museum’s lobby. They demand the institution remove its vice chairman of the board, Warren B. Kanders, who is the chief executive of Safariland, a company that makes law-enforcement products like tear gas.

Although just one invited artist, Michael Rakowitz, withdrew from the Biennial in response to the activists’ initial request, nearly 50 participants in the show have added their names to an open letter calling for Kanders’ removal.

And some participants may charge the issues head-on. The art and research group Forensic Architecture, for instance, has signaled that its work will address the Kanders controversy directly.

Still, recent visits with eight of the first-time participants in the Biennial — six studio visits, in three cities, and two by video — found them completing work that made its social points subtly, without polemics. They were well aware of the debates swirling around the show, which opens May 17. But their work channeled other energies: research, technique, play, ritual. If anything, the artists we met seemed to seek areas of calm — for the viewer, for themselves.

McClodden, who is black, lesbian and grew up in South Carolina, has had little patience for the recent protests, which she sees as parochial. Her new work, which draws deeply on African-rooted spiritual practices, lays down a different gauntlet. “This is a chance to comment on what the range of American art can be,” she said. “This is art that challenges the limitations of the building that it’s in.”

It is far from a scientific sample but auguries point to a 2019 Whitney Biennial that has the potential to show creative ways forward, for the culture — and maybe even the country.

The curators, Rujeko Hockley and Jane Panetta, acknowledged that organizing the show in the current social climate and following the last edition’s blowup was a challenging task. “We took our responsibility very seriously in light of previous Biennials,” Panetta said. “It felt a little daunting at first.”

In visiting artists over 14 weeks, traveling around the country, they found more optimism than they expected. “Over time you have to start thinking about creative possibilities, and we saw that in a lot of artists we met,” Panetta said.

The exhibition’s effect will be clear only once it is up, of course. But here is a preview of what we saw as eight artists’ sketches, models and images — their dreams — came to life.

Tiona Nekkia McClodden

Six rough-hewed wood objects shaped like axes and arrows rested on the table in McClodden’s studio in North Philadelphia. Each was about a foot long. They exuded a warm cedar glow, and an ancient aspect.

“I’m making Shango’s tools,” she said.

McClodden is initiated in Santería, the Afro-Cuban religion with roots in the Yoruba culture of present-day Nigeria. Soon after her Biennial invitation, her instructor in Santería advised her to orient her work toward Shango, the orisha, or deity, of power and bravery.

Her anxiety dissolved, she said, as she saw an opportunity to reconnect her art with her spiritual practice.

In August, on an artist’s residency at the Skowhegan School in Maine, she cut down a tree. She bathed the wood there, sculpted the objects in Philadelphia, sanded them in Cuba, in a spiritually correct way. In March, she made a trip to Nigeria to present the tools to the divinity in a particular shrine.

Beside the wood pieces, a cassette recorder and a motorcycle helmet sat on the table — the helmet is her witness, she said, and she keeps it near her wherever she goes. On her computer, she pulled up footage that documents the entire process in what she calls “auto-ethnography.” Her installation in the Biennial combines Shango’s tools with three channels of video and a separate audio narration.

This is more interior work than McClodden’s last projects, which engaged history and public culture. But there is a shared concern with research and rigor.

“At the foot of it, I’m a knowledge seeker forever,” she said.

Meriem Bennani

In her apartment in Brooklyn, Meriem Bennani was working through footage from a two-week shoot in Rabat, Morocco, where she grew up.

She had embedded in the lives of six young women, seniors at her former high school, a French establishment that draws students from Morocco’s elite. Now she was cutting the film in the manner of a reality TV show, and adding animation, representing herself in the form of a cartoon donkey making occasional comments.

“I need to work from a place of having fun,” Bennani, 31, said. Her projects are documentary, but absurdist. In her installation at MoMA PS1 in 2016, viewers flitted around Morocco guided by an animated fruit fly.

For the Biennial, Bennani has the use of the Whitney’s fifth-floor terrace — a challenge for film, but an opportunity to design cabanaike viewing stations in pastel colors, with actual palm trees, creating a beachike vibe.

Bennani first studied art in Paris, but moved to New York in 2010, to attend the Cooper Union. She said she had found more space in the United States to work critically. Behind the fun in her new work lurks a study of the country’s upper middle class, with its lingering colonial mentality.

It is the same milieu that she comes from, and she expects ruffled feathers. “It’s the first time that I do a project that I know for a fact will make some people angry,” she said.

Maia Ruth Lee

Eighty pieces of scrap metal lay on the floor of Maia Ruth Lee’s studio in Brooklyn. She had obtained them from the Gowanus scrap yards, remnants from windows and gates, and welded them into runelike shapes.

They were symbols, Lee, 36, explained, with meanings of her invention, to be installed on a large wall in the Biennial. A handout chart would help viewers “read” them.

“As humans, we’re always yearning for a sign,” she said.

Born in South Korea, Lee grew up in Nepal, where her missionary parents translated the New Testament into the Sherpa language — a decadeslong project that involved first creating a written alphabet for the previously spoken-only tongue.

“I was surrounded by language and lexicography, and quite enamored by it,” Lee, who is not religious herself, said.

Returning to Korea, Lee studied painting at an art school with a conservative curriculum. She moved to New York in 2010. Her practice has grown eclectic — drawing, publishing zines, sculpture — since she put down roots.

But she keeps coming back to ideas of displacement and being in two different worlds. Her second installation in the Biennial involves luggage made of burlap bags — the kind that Nepali and other migrant workers commonly use. She brought the materials back from Kathmandu, where her parents still live.

“The tarp, the rope, the rice bags,” she said. “These objects all contain a story.”

Nicholas Galanin

Nicholas Galanin stepped outside his house on the hill and aimed his phone camera toward the bay. An artist of Tlingit descent, he lives in Sitka, Alaska, making a video visit more convenient.

“There’s a herring fishery here, managed by the state,” Galanin, 39, said. He explained how overfishing had depleted the stock despite years of warnings by elders. Native knowledge was overlooked in arts as well, he said. Ethnography presented it as static, when in fact it adapts.

Galanin is a craftsman who recently led the carving of a 40-foot totem pole near Juneau. He is also adept at contemporary techniques like video and installation.

His work will greet Biennial visitors in the form of a large ink and gold-leaf monoprint of a female shaman in the museum lobby. A textile piece, combining imagery of a prayer rug and a television screen flickering white fuzz, is also in the show.

By refusing to stay bounded, Galanin said he could connect with other artists and communities, and help Native culture evolve on its own terms. “People who want to fetishize us are going to have to wait and see what we do next,” he said.

Galanin is a veteran of museum shows, including a midcareer retrospective at the Heard Museum in Phoenix. He welcomed the Biennial curators’ decision to feature several Native artists. “It’s empowering to have voice in these spaces,” he said.

Still, he tempered his expectations of dramatic change. “All these institutions come with politics,” he said.

Sofía Gallisá Muriente

For three years in the 1950s, Felisa Rincón de Gautier, a popular mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, imported a planeload of fresh snow from the mainland at the Christmas season. People wore their festive best for the batalla de nieve — the snow fight.

Mud and mayhem ensued. The tradition was discontinued.

“Throughout our history, we’ve constantly looked to assimilate,” Sofía Gallisá Muriente, the Puerto Rican filmmaker and activist, who is 32, said on a video call from San Juan. “But something about the context rebels.”

She found newsreel of the snow fights by chance, while doing unrelated research at the National Archives in Maryland. The footage served as the base of a two-channel video installation that she is re-editing for the Biennial.

No one she knew had seen images of the event before. “I think about the impermanence of records,” she said. “What is accessible to us is just the remains.”

Gallisá Muriente is co-director of Beta-Local, an artist nonprofit. After Hurricane María devastated the island in 2017, the group organized an emergency fund for culture workers, disbursing $400,000 in small grants.

This year, five artists based on the island are showing in the Biennial. It attests to vitality under duress: “There are amazing examples of self-sufficiency,” she said. Networks of solidarity that have formed on the island are helping artists not just survive, she said, but also to “rehearse freedom.”

Calvin Marcus

Eight-foot-tall canvases lined the walls in Calvin Marcus’ studio in Los Angeles, with another in progress on the floor.

Each composition hinted at some self-contained allegory. A wrinkled, old man lifted weights in the gym as a younger face hovered — clearly a musing on age. Other were more cryptic: a group of donkeys silhouetted in the night; a cartoonlike space alien, flipping a quarter.

“If there’s any story, it’s all happening within the picture,” said Marcus, 30. Previously he painted in series, giving each work a number instead of a title. The new pieces, made in watercolor, stood alone. “In a way it feels more difficult,” he said.

Marcus earned his MFA at UCLA, and was in the process of closing down his studio before moving from gentrifying Montecito Heights into central Los Angeles. Some of the vignettes that inspired his new paintings came from observations around LA, he said.

Others were pure flights of fancy. The common trait was a sense of the uncanny, of absurd possibilities lurking within ordinary moments.

“It’s not so much social as personal,” he said. “I’m usually just discovering as I make it.”

Still, he ventured: “So many things feel unchangeable because of history, or politics. I try to get people to question their daily surroundings, and hope that art helps recalibrate.”

Tomashi Jackson

For a painter, Tomashi Jackson is something of a policy nerd.

“I have a compulsion to address issues of public concern,” she said. In her studio in the Brooklyn Army Terminal, there were history books and images of people who lost their homes in New York — some in the 19th century, when Seneca Village was razed to become part of Central Park; some recently, under a controversial policy known as third-party transfer.

Jackson’s paintings in progress integrated these images and built them into installations using Mylar, PVC strips, and a bodegalike awning. Two will be in the Biennial; others are now in a solo show at the Tilton Gallery in New York.

Raised in South Los Angeles, Jackson, 39, was a muralist in the Bay Area before attending the Cooper Union and the Yale School of Art. In between, she did a design-oriented master’s degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that led her to Harvard policy classes. The methods helped her grasp, for instance, why generations of women in her family were domestic workers.

“This dry, distant research could help fill in narratives that implicate me,” she said.

Recently, Jackson has made paintings inspired by court rulings on school desegregation. She is partly in search of a visual language to convey law and policy, she said. But she is also processing legacies of oppression through technique.

“The comfort I find is in making the work,” she said, “and what it shows me through its material evolution.”

Todd Gray

When the Biennial curators asked to visit, Todd Gray said he fought back tears. “It’s so late in my life, and I’ve been making work for so long,” Gray, a photographer, said.

A youthful 64, Gray is a lifelong Angeleno, with a studio in Leimert Park. He attended CalArts in the late 1970s, and a decade later for his MFA. But he lived from commercial work.

Notably, he was Michael Jackson’s photographer in the early 1980s. He preferred not to comment on Jackson’s private behavior. “He’s part of the culture,” he said.

Each of his works in the Biennial — and in a solo show now at David Lewis Gallery in New York — juxtaposes photos on disparate themes, set in vintage frames, creating a puzzle of ovals, rectangles, and allusions.

His Jackson trove provides some of the material. There are also images of European formal gardens, signifying imperial power and wealth; photographs from rural Ghana, where he lives half the year. Pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope add an interstellar dimension. “It tells us we’re all stardust,” he said.

Gray began making these combination works five years ago at a time of growing disconnection between his career in the black American music industry and his new understandings from living in Africa. He invoked the British-Jamaican thinker Stuart Hall, who argued that cultural identity evolves in response to power.

“The act of resistance is to keep changing,” Gray said.

This article originally appeared in <a id="c9c46ed9-d4e5-375c-a195-42d61720e94d" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/arts/design/whitney-museum-biennial-artists.html">The New York Times</a>.

Rising to the Challenge of the Whitney Biennial

NEW YORK — When Tiona Nekkia McClodden, a Philadelphia-based filmmaker and installation artist, was invited to take part in this year’s Whitney Biennial, she felt satisfaction, but also crippling panic.

Rising to the challenge of the Whitney Biennial

“Death doesn’t have to be a morbid thing,” Diamond Stingily said.

A sculptor and installation artist whose star is rapidly rising, Stingily is enacting her demise — again. Her first exhibition, in Chicago five years ago, was staged as a funeral, complete with flower arrangement and obituary. Her new show at Queer Thoughts, in Tribeca, opening May 4, will include sleek metal-coated death masks, made from a mold of her face that friends helped her take.

“It’s a self-portrait in a way,” she said. “Because I can’t paint.”

It’s more than that, of course. When she senses an imminent life change, Stingily, who is also a poet and has kept journals since childhood, takes control of her story. Her “funeral” was her farewell to her home city when she knew it was time for fresh horizons; soon after, she came to New York, invited by artist Martine Syms to participate in a video work, and stuck around with $300 to her name.

Now Stingily, who is 29 and based in Brooklyn, feels another page turning as she embarks on her 30s. “Where I come from most people have kids by now,” she said. “I'm at a time when a lot of things are changing, and my career is going in a way I never thought it would.”

A college dropout and veteran of countless retail and service jobs, Stingily has only recently been making her art full time, working from a small Bushwick studio. After appearances in two major shows at the New Museum — the Triennial (2018) and “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” (2017), her first museum solo exhibition took place last year, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Titled “Life in My Pocket,” it gathered objects reminiscent of her childhood on Chicago’s West Side and in suburban Romeoville.

A rusting basketball hoop, police surveillance lights, Little Hug fruit juices, Stingily’s improved Double-Dutch jump ropes made of braided telephone cords — the items, supplemented by video, distilled private memories into a kind of visual tone that Stingily said people like her, who are black and working-class, might recognize.

“I think the work that I make is relatable,” she said. “People can see themselves, family members, or just issues and topics.”

Stingily is a creature of community. Her father, the singer and producer Byron Stingily, led Ten City, an important group in Chicago’s pioneering house music scene. Her mother is a hair stylist, and Stingily grew up around the salon. For a recent commission by the fashion brand Balenciaga, Stingily made a video work full of relatives and familiar locations — a warm, rough-hewed tribute.

For the new show, Stingily is making pieces from synthetic hair, a medium she had set aside for a time, tired of having to explain it to nonblack people. “Those questions are microaggressions,” she said. But her draw to the material and its private meaning for her ended up prevailing. It’s her journey, after all. “I love making hair pieces,” she said. “It’s very meditative to me, and the result is pretty.”

— Diamond Stingily, May 4 through June 16, Queer Thoughts, 373 Broadway No. C9, Manhattan; 212-680-0116, queerthoughts.com.

When the riots consumed South Los Angeles, Delano Dunn was 13 years old. Today, those five days in 1992 are often called an uprising, to denote the eruption of community frustration after a jury acquitted four Los Angeles police officers of assault charges in the infamous beating of Rodney King. But what Dunn saw from the family house off Central Avenue was, in fact, a riot.

“I sat on the porch and watched the neighborhood burn,” said Dunn, a painter and collagist who confronts these memories in new mixed-media works at the Lesley Heller Gallery on the Lower East Side. He recalls sounds: fights, sirens, gunshots. Looting was real. “I remember seeing a guy pushing a shopping cart with a safe in it down the alley. My grandfather owned two shops, and he was on the roof with his shotgun.”

On the last day, Dunn saw National Guard armored vehicles coming down his block. When he returned to school, in Santa Monica, he got odd looks. “My white friends asked me what I looted, what did I get,” he said. “I thought, this is what it means to be black and from a poor neighborhood. This is it.”

(Spring Gallery Guide): NEW YORK — Is the New York art gallery scene thriving or dying? It may be doing both, depending on where you look. Take the four artists profiled below. They are fearless, and their works are among the season’s exciting shows. Drawing on memories and research, they propose new ways to live with our histories.

Siddhartha Mitter

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