BU Art Galleries Presents Life Altering: Selections from a Kansas City Collection

January 6, 2022 | Boston, MA – Boston University Art Galleries (BUAG) presents the exhibition Life Altering: Selections from a Kansas Metropolis Collection, on view from January 18 through March 1, 2022, at Boston Academy's Faye G., Jo, and James Rock Gallery.

Firelei Báez's Collector of Shouts (April 21) 2016.

Created over the by 12 years, the works in Life Altering: Selections from a Kansas City Collection explore a rich array of meaning relevant to our present time. Artists investigate the global inequity of wealth and ability, social justice, race, slavery, colonialism, the experience of exile and the diaspora, identity, the important role of the body, LGBTQ+ issues, popular civilization, the precarious remainder between progress and technology, climate alter, and the surround. Some artists draw from the traditions of their cultural heritage—African, American, Caribbean area, Indian, Iranian, Iraqi, and Native American. These artists celebrate their heritage past reclaiming ownership of and pride in their cultural origins. Above all, the artists here express hope, courage, resilience, and determination in the service of a better future.

The exhibition features a selection of art from the collection of Bill and Christy Gautreaux, who, for the final 25 years, accept embarked on what Neb calls "a journey of learning and awareness that has been life-altering." Artists who are women, Blackness or people of color, and those working internationally and/or are office of the diaspora are the main focus of their drove. While the names of many artists in the drove are widely recognized today, they were oftentimes emerging or underrepresented when the Gautreauxes acquired their work. According to Bill, "gimmicky art has changed our view of the world and the way that we live."

Beak and Christy are committed supporters of a multifariousness of nonprofit and charitable organizations, with a focus on arts, instruction, and civic leadership in Kansas Urban center and further afield. Through their museum leadership, gifting works to institutions, loaning works for public exhibitions, and providing funding for exhibitions and projects, they are actively engaged and invite opportunities for continued involvement. As related to Kansas City art organizations, they have served on or are on the boards of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the Kemper Museum of Gimmicky Art. Bill is the Chair of the Lath of Trustees of William Jewell College and serves on the boards of the Association of Art Museum Curators and Art21. The Gautreauxes are also members of the Whitney National Committee. ARTnews named the Gautreauxes among the earth's top 200 fine art collectors (2014 to 2018).

© Odili Donald Odita's Great Divide, 2017.

The arts in Kansas Metropolis are flourishing. William Rudolph, Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Nelson-Atkins says, "Beak and Christy's commitment to acquire and share works has enriched the Nelson-Atkins' galleries and helped our goal of increased inclusivity. This spirit dovetails with our commitment as witnessed by 'KC Art Now' and our exhibition 'Testimony: African American Artists Commonage,' a partnership with a local artists' collective. The Gautreauxes have become vital partners helping the museum become a place where the power of art meets the spirit of community." Erin Dziedzic, Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, notes that "Bill and Christy Gautreaux'southward Kansas Metropolis-based private collection is excitingly at the core made upwardly of exceptional works by global women artists and artists of color and is in dialogue with Kemper Museum of Gimmicky Art's program. A selection of over 30 works were exhibited for the first time in Slice by Piece: Building a Collection in 2015 at Kemper Museum. The Gautreauxes' deep appreciation for artists' innovations and personal experiences shines through in the range of media and in the complication of concepts they are dedicated to in their collecting practice."

Leesa Fanning, Independent Curator of the exhibition and former Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Fine art, states, "It has been an accented pleasance to collaborate with Bill and Christy. Their global contemporary art investigates the most pressing concerns of our time, sparking conversation, raising our sensation, and bringing hope for transformation and change."

Most Individual Works of Fine art in the Exhibition

  • Amidst the artists represented is Omar Ba (Senegalese), whose work is nigh the rampant desire for ability and, according to Ba, a "state of emergency" in Africa.
  • Firelei Báez (Dominican Democracy) investigates the structure of identity, especially related to the Afro-Caribbean diaspora through a semi-abstruse work based on her own prototype.
  • Hank Willis Thomas (American) explores the ambivalence of race inspired by a portrait of a belatedly 19th-century African American performer, dressed in a tiptop hat and tuxedo, in which the correct side of the figural class and costume are white, and the left side blackness, creating a abrupt line of vertical demarcation through his torso.
  • McArthur Binion (American), in Dna Study I, combines collage, drawing, and painting to create autobiographical abstractions of minimalist patterns over an underlayer of personal documents, such as his address book from the 1970s.
  • Tunji Adeniyi-Jones' (British, of Nigerian descent) painting, Vivacious Youth, depicts dynamic figural forms moving rhythmically, filling the composition with arable energy. They convey the fluidity of man feel and fuse Western references to the figural grade with African mythology
  • Nick Cave (American) is renowned for his Soundsuits—elaborate sculptures made from sequins, textiles, and other dazzling materials, meant to be worn in performances.
  • In Enrique Martínez Celaya'south (American, born in Cuba) The Bearer, a vulnerable male person is embarking by boat on a mysterious night-time journey. The vessel carries a small-scale open box that emits ruby light. What mysterious thing does he bear? Characteristically, Celaya investigates the philosophical idea of journey and potential transformation through it.
  • Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (Iranian) is best known for her Convertible Series, sculptures made of delicate fragments of mirror bundled into complex compositions that are associated with Sufism and the spiritual significance of numbers within that tradition.
  • Phantom ii, by Asad Faulwell (American), represents his return to abstraction and is inspired past Islamic textiles, architecture, mosaics, and illuminated manuscripts. In Phantom ii, the women'due south faces are represented only every bit small photographs integrated into the larger overall blueprint. The reduced accent on the figural forms conveys the idea that the women "were largely lost in the written history of the disharmonize."
  • Vibha Galhgotra (Indian) is a New Delhi artist who, in Volcano, (Veil), uses pocket-size bells used to create anklets for dancers in Republic of india to abstractly reference climate change and its environmental impact on our earth.
  • Theaster Gates (American) has made a series of shoeshine-like sculptures from recycled found materials. His wooden thrones were modeled after those at Smoothen Male monarch, a Chicago W Side shoeshine business organization where preachers and police sit alongside NBA stars. In 2009, Gates animated such sculptures by inviting wealthy fine art patrons at an art fair to sit in i while he, as an artist, polished their shoes. Gates says he wanted to explore the idea that "certain forms of labor are associated with sure kinds of people—and to blow that up."
  • vanessa german (American) creates sculptures inspired by minkisi from the Democratic Republic of Congo. They are supernatural objects encrusted with nails, fragments of atomic number 26, shells, chaplet, horn, bone, and various kinds of cording. Her Blessing of the Boats is covered with a rich array of hundreds of objects intended to enact its power. Blueish evil-eye beads confer protective ability. The figure yields a hatchet hammer that reinforces its ferocity. This sculpture was role of a grouping of approximately 30 all-female person members of a "Black army" installed in a military formation in an exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum in 2016.
  • Jeffrey Gibson (American) is a multimedia artist of Choctaw-Cherokee heritage who creates art that merges Native American traditions with Western pop civilization. I DO Not WANT WHAT I Oasis'T GOT is a vibrant work with the title painted in geometric letters set within a band of glass beads associated with Native arts. The title refers to an album past Irish singer Sinéad O'Connor and suggests a way to make peace or accept what cannot exist changed.
  • Hayv Kahraman'south piece of work is securely influenced by her personal history as an Iraqi refugee. Kachakchi explores Kahraman'south experience of diasporic loss, of existence a foreigner in exile, attempted assimilation, and continuously coping with an identity in perpetual flux.
  • Zanele Muholi (S African) creates cocky-portraits emphasizing "Blackness" and the experience of being an LGBTQ+ person in a country known for the racial brutality of Apartheid.
  • Ebony Thousand. Patterson'south (Jamaican) vivacious imagery is inspired past Jamaican dancehall culture. It explores social commentary involving grade, gender, and race.
  • Amy Sherald (American) focuses on portraits of everyday Black people because she recognizes the absence of Black people in portraiture and wishes to expand the fine art historical canon. She is famously known for painting Michelle Obama'southward official portrait in 2018.
  • Odili Donald Odita's (American, born in Nigeria) painting Slap-up Divide speaks to his sense of dual identity and his practice of combining African and Western culture.
  • In her series Thunder Up To a higher place, Wendy Crimson Star (Apsáalooke/Crow) creates images that imagine a science-fiction-like hereafter where Native Americans and their knowledge and civilisation continue to thrive in a futuristic planetary landscape.
  • Elias Sime (Ethiopian) repurposes salvaged electronic components in his work to explore the precarious rest between progress that engineering has made possible and its detrimental impact on the global environment. In Tightrope, Familiar Yet Complex 1, electronic components are configured to appear like topographical maps or aeriform perspectives of landscapes, merging what is man-made with nature.
  • Lynette Yiadome-Boakye (of Ghanaian descent) lives and works in London. She paints images of Blackness people that announced to be portraits, even so the figural forms arise from her imagination during the painting process.
BOSTON UNIVERSITY ART GALLERIES

The Boston University Art Galleries is located at 855 Democracy Avenue inside the Higher of Fine Arts. The gallery is located on the Boston University campus (BU W T stop on the "B" Green Line.) Gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday from 11am–5pm, (Closed Sundays, Mondays and Holidays.) For more than information, visit bu.edu/art.

BOSTON University

Founded in 1839, Boston University is an internationally recognized establishment of higher didactics and research. With more 34,000 students, it is the 4th-largest independent university in the United States. BU consists of 17 schools and colleges, forth with a number of multi-disciplinary centers and institutes integral to the University's research and pedagogy mission. In 2012, BU joined the Clan of American Universities (AAU), a consortium of 62 leading research universities in the United States and Canada. Larn more at bu.edu.

BOSTON Academy COLLEGE OF FINE ARTS

Established in 1954, Boston University Higher of Fine Arts (CFA) is a community of artist-scholars and scholar-artists who are passionate near the fine and performing arts, committed to diversity and inclusion, and determined to meliorate the lives of others through art. With programs in Music, Theatre, and Visual Arts, CFA prepares students for a meaningful creative life by developing their intellectual capacity to create art, shift perspective, think broadly, and master relevant 21st century skills. CFA offers a wide array of undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs, as well as a range of online degrees and certificates. Larn more at bu.edu/cfa.

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