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Perspectives 167: Jason Villegas

Jason Villegas, Impish Animal installation view #1, 2007
Mixed media
Dimensions vary

Jason Villegas’s interdisciplinary projects often combine wall murals tinged with assemblage and soft sculpture made from found fabric, with video and, more recently, performance. For Perspectives 167: Jason Villegas, the artist combines his ongoing investigation of consumerism and the commercialization of poverty to create a site-specific environment made of wall paintings and soft sculptures. In the past, Villegas’s installations have been humorous, yet searing remarks on the absurdity of consumerism—especially those who are economically disenfranchised and desire to mimic wealth with fake designer goods and other faux luxury items. His work also turns inward to his own desire to place himself within contemporary society as both Mexican and American and the struggles that it entails. This exhibition will be the artist’s first solo museum exhibition.

Jason Villegas was born in Houston, TX (1977) and lives in Brooklyn, NY. He received a BFA from the University of Houston and an MFA from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in 2007. His work has been featured in several group exhibitions including Phantom Sightings, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2008); Young Latino Artists #10, Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin, TX (2005); Artadia@Diverseworks, DiverseWorks (2005), and The Big Show, Lawndale Art Center, Houston, TX (2003). Solo exhibitions include projects at Commerce Street Art Warehouse, Houston, TX; Cactus Bra Space, San Antonio, TX; Plush Gallery, Dallas, TX; Okay Mountain Gallery, Austin, TX; and most recently, Receiver Gallery, San Francisco, CA.

Matthew Day Jackson: The Immeasurable Distance

Matthew Day Jackson, Chariot II—I like America and America Likes Me, 2008
A Skip Nichols (artists cousin) crashed racecar frame, steel, wool felt, leather, stained glass, florescent light tubes, solar panels, fiberglass, and plastic
40 x 80 x 240 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York.

Matthew Day Jackson: The Immeasurable Distance is a solo exhibition that includes works based on Jackson’s artist’s residency at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA. Jackson’s complex research, histories, and hagiographies are manifested in sculptures, constructed paintings, objects, books, and videos. In this exhibition, organized by Bill Arning, Director of the CAMH, Jackson continues his investigations into human consciousness and explores how positive evolutionary developments in human thought and culture occur under physical or mental stress. Other works explore how constructive and destructive technological developments often stem from a similar impetus: to expand human experience despite all odds, proving that progress is possible, whatever the risk. Drag racing, the Apollo space missions, test-pilot culture, the nuclear legacy in terms of both science and culture, commingle with iconic twentieth-century figures like visionary Buckminster Fuller, Big Daddy Don Garlits, Eleanor Roosevelt…even the artist’s mother. Jackson relates these modern myths using his iconic players as mischievous tricksters to question what it means to live at a time when technology has rewritten philosophy and religion.

Born in 1974 in Panorama City, CA, Matthew Day Jackson lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Jackson’s solo exhibitions include Drawings from Tlön, Nicole Klagsbrun, New York, NY (2008); Terranaut, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY (2008); Diptych, Mario Diacono at Ars Libri, Boston, MA (2007); The Lower 48, Perry Rubenstein Gallery, New York, NY (2007); Paradise Now!, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, OR (2006); and By No Means Necessary, The Locker Plant, Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX (2004). Selected group exhibitions include Heartland, Vanabbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (2008); Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, Barbican Gallery, London, UK (2008); The Old, Weird America, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2008); and Greater New York, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, NY (2005).

Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool

Barkley L. Hendricks, Sweet Thang (Lynn Jenkins), 1975–1976
Oil on linen canvas
52 1/2 x 52 3/4 inches
Courtesy of the artist.

Best known for his life-sized portraits of those living within the urban northeastern communities of Connecticut, Barkley L. Hendricks’s bold portrayal of his subject’s attitude and style elevated these common and overlooked persons to celebrity status. Organized by Trevor Schoonmaker, curator of contemporary art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool is the first career retrospective of this renowned American artist. The exhibition is comprised of 57 paintings, including full-figure portraits and lesser-known early works, as well as the artist’s more recent portal-like paintings of the Jamaican landscape, where he returns annually to do outdoor “en pleine air” painting.

Hendricks’s stylistic renderings connect the art movements of American realism and post-modernism while touching upon many of the art movements of the 1960s and 70s—pop art, photorealism, minimalism, even black aesthetic nationalism. His work occupies a space somewhere between portraitists Chuck Close and Alex Katz and pioneering black conceptualists David Hammons and Adrian Piper. Cool, empowering and sometimes confrontational, Hendricks's artistic privileging of a culturally complex black body has paved the way for today's younger generation of artists.

“Hendricks is a sophisticated practitioner who combines impressive references, forms, and techniques in renderings that seem to cut to the core, to reveal his subjects as vulnerable individuals even as they self-consciously pose in displays of hipness,” says Janet Koplos (as reviewed in Art in America, November 2008).

The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is the final touring venue for Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool after stops in New York at the Studio Museum in Harlem; California at the Santa Monica Museum of Art; and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

Barkley L. Hendricks was born in Philadelphia in 1945. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts from Yale University. He is a professor of art at Connecticut College in New London, where he has been teaching since 1972.

Hendricks’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and Europe, and include venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; and Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

The exhibition and related programs are sponsored in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.; National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art; Mary Duke Biddle Foundation; and North Carolina Arts Council with funding from the State of North Carolina.

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Perspectives 169: Odili Donald Odita

Widely recognized for his pulsating hues and meticulously painted wall and canvas works, Odili Donald Odita creates paintings that often function as narratives. Although devoid of any discernable figurative marks, the works tell of the nomadic journey of our ever-shifting global society: shapes and intersecting lines become metaphors for time and place while color evokes mood and impulse. Perspectives 169: Odili Donald Odita features a site-specific environment created from a new body of paintings that echo the unique architectural features of the Museum’s lower gallery space, The Zilkha Gallery. The result is a familiar, yet fantastical immersive landscape. While Odita’s wall works often find corollary references to those of Sol LeWitt, his angular pulsating color fields immediately hint at the artist’s cultural roots—he was born in Enugu, Nigeria and raised in Columbus, Ohio. Odita’s abstract paintings suggest the fractal nature of his own experience as an African émigré and the interweaving of his past and present selves.

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