Tufts Art Gallery Exhibitions Examine Race Issues
Tufts University Art Gallery’s upcoming exhibitions, Richard Bell: Uz Vs. Them and Ken Gonzales-Day: Profiled, both present issues of race and objectification without holding back. Richard Bell: Uz Vs Them is a mid-career survey of Australian aboriginal artist Richard Bell, whose work humorously challenges the commodification of indigeneity in the western art market and draws attention to the grievances caused by the colonization of Australia. Profiled, is a conceptually driven photographic project by Los Angeles artist Ken Gonzales-Day that considers the impact of Enlightenment ideas on the depiction of the human form in portrait sculpture.
Both exhibitions run September 8 – November 20, with a public opening reception on Thursday September 15th from 5:30-8pm.
A self-taught artist, Richard Bell works in a wide range of media, including painting, performance, and video. He freely borrows styles and motifs from other artists, periods, and cultures. Visual references invoking the dot matrixes and expressionist drips of Aboriginal desert paintings, the Pop art styles of Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein, and the paint drips of Jackson Pollock are juxtaposed with text to create powerful political and social commentary. Politicized at an early age, the artist merged his activism into artmaking in the late ’80s, first making “tourist” art and then art about, as he describes it, “the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of Aboriginal people.” Bell still sees himself as “more an activist than an artist.”
This is the first traveling exhibition in the United States dedicated to the multi-layered work of Aboriginal artist and activist Richard Bell, one of Australia’s leading and most controversial artists.
The exhibition is organized by the American Federation of Arts and supported by the Queensland Government, Australia, through Trade and Investment Queensland’s, Queensland’s Indigenous Arts Marketing and Export Agency (QIAMEA). Additional support has come from the Australian government through the Australia Council for the Arts and the Embassy of Australia, Washington D.C.
Profiled considers the changing meaning of the human form and its representation. In this conceptually driven photographic project, Gonzales-Day looks to the depiction of race and construction of whiteness as points of departure from which to consider the impact of Enlightenment ideas about freedom, class, gender, and even the location of the soul, on the depiction of the human form, and the portrait bust in particular. As a project, Profiled seems to ask what comes after ideologies and their aesthetic manifestations have run their course but it is as much about the body as its inanimate double. Cast, carved, burned, and broken, these lingering shadows of people that once lived in this world, or in the imaginations of their makers, have become illegible for many contemporary viewers. The project seeks to breath life back into some of these motionless forms, representing everything from memorials to Emperors and kings, to Orientalist follies, as a way of tracking changing ideas about race.
– Information from Tufts University Art Gallery