Blues for Smoke at the Wex this fall

Columbus, OH—April 30, 2013 (Updated September 10, 2013)—This fall, the Wexner Center will devote the entirety of its gallery space to present Blues for Smoke, a major interdisciplinary exhibition exploring a wide range of contemporary art through the lens of the blues and “blues aesthetics.”  The exhibition, on view September 21–December 29, 2013, features works from more than 40 artists from the 1950s to the present, as well as materials from music and popular entertainment. Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where it was on view at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA from October 21, 2012–January 7, 2013, the exhibition completed a run at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York on Sunday, April 28, 2013.

Curated by MOCA’s Bennett Simpson in close consultation with artist Glenn Ligon, Blues for Smoke explores the blues not simply as a musical category but as a field of artistic sensibilities and cultural idioms. Throughout the past century, writers and thinkers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Amiri Baraka, and Cornel West have posited the key role of the blues both in regards to American music (in its legacy and influence on jazz, R&B, rock, and hip-hop) and to developments in literature, film, and visual art. In all its diversity, the blues has been hailed as one of America’s greatest cultural achievements and, along with jazz, has even been called America’s classical music. Inspired by other cross-genre experimentation, the exhibition title, Blues for Smoke, pays tribute to a 1960 solo album by virtuoso jazz pianist Jaki Byard, for whom the blues served as a foundation for avant-garde exploration.

Notes Wex Director Sherri Geldin, “Blues for Smoke is powerful in scope, ambition, and experience. Given the deep-seated history of blues and jazz in the Columbus community, it is sure to resonate with our patrons. And its multidisciplinary nature makes it a perfect fit with the center’s overall mission and program.” Among other exhibition-related offerings, the center will present a workshop and concert by artist and musician Lonnie Holley in October.

Rather than retelling the origin of blues in the African American culture of the Mississippi Delta around the turn of the twentieth century (a group of people for whom slavery was a recent memory, and basic civil rights far off into the future), Blues for Smoke proposes that certain topics in contemporary art might be understood through and animated by a blues lens. Moreover, in the “Age of Obama,” a moment often called “post-identity” or “post-black,” this exhibition argues for the vitality and innovation at the core of the blues tradition, and for the forms and aesthetics of African American culture more generally, as major catalysts of experimentation within modern and contemporary art.

The exhibition includes artworks in a wide variety of mediums, including photography, video, painting, drawing, sculpture, and multimedia installations. Some works directly connect to the history and aesthetics of the blues, such as Romare Bearden’s collages of musicians and Roy DeCarava’s atmospheric photographs, while other works communicate blues ideas without explicitly naming them as such, as in the emphasis on cultural interpretation and memory in Reneé Green’s installation Import-Export Funk Office (1992-93) and Stan Douglas’s video installation Hors-champs (1992). In binding together artists and art worlds that are often kept apart—within and across lines of generation, race, and canon—Blues for Smoke presents an uncommon heterogeneity of subject matter, art historical contexts, formal and conceptual inclinations, genres, and disciplines that collectively resist a single story or category in favor of a multiplicity of narratives.

In addition to artworks with music or audio components, the exhibition includes listening posts and video viewing stations. Highlights include: Azealia Banks, Bad Brains, Jaki Byard, Death Grips, Duke Ellington, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Henry Flynt, Joseph Jarman, Jeanne Lee, Alan Lomax, Minor Threat, Shabazz Palaces, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Big Mama Thornton, and Othar Turner and The Afrossippi Allstars.

Artforum says of the show, “…Blues for Smoke bends the notes of time, allowing both the art objects and their viewers to exist in the liminal space between laughter and tears, between confusion and comprehension, between pleasure and discord, between roots and experimentation, between making art and listening to it.”

ARTISTS

Artists featured in Blues for Smoke include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden, Gregg Bordowitz, Mark Bradford, Roy DeCarava, Beauford Delaney, Jeff Donaldson, Stan Douglas, Jimmie Durham, Melvin Edwards, William Eggleston, Charles Gaines, Renée Green, David Hammons, Kira Lynn Harris, Rachel Harrison, Barkley L. Hendricks, Leslie Hewitt, Martin Kippenberger, Jutta Koether, Liz Larner, Zoe Leonard, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Rodney McMillian, Dave McKenzie, Mark Morrisroe, Matt Mullican, Senga Nengudi, Kori Newkirk, Lorraine O’Grady, John Outterbridge, William Pope.L, Jeff Preiss, Amy Sillman, Lorna Simpson, Henry Taylor, Alma Thomas, Bob Thompson, Wu Tsang, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Jack Whitten, William T. Williams, and Martin Wong.

CATALOGUE

Blues for Smoke is accompanied by a fully illustrated color catalogue copublished by MOCA and Prestel/DelMonico. In addition to an introductory overview by MOCA curator Bennett Simpson and an artist statement by Jack Whitten, the publication includes essays and writings by artist Glenn Ligon (on HBO’s The Wire and the “blues imagination”), poet Fred Moten, musician and historian George E. Lewis (on blues in relation to avant-gardism and improvisation), author Harryette Mullen, poet Wanda Coleman (whose seminal “My Blues Love Affair,” reprinted in the catalog, is an essay meditation on growing up black in Los Angeles in the midcentury), filmmaker Gregg Bordowitz, and author Nathaniel Mackey.