WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2022
I visited the Whitney to view "Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept". Among the artists works I most enjoyed works were by Duane Linklater, a Cree living in Ontario who makes paintings, pictured above right, with teepee covers patterns. In his work, he leaves the materials outside to accumulate imprints of the land and then uses organic matter—from sumac dye to flowers to realize his color palettes. It reminds me of various indigenous Australian painters I have seen via documentary dragging their un-stretched or loose canvas on the naked earth to a spot where they sit and paint. And the loose, draped on rods, suspended from the ceiling presentation paintings also call to mind Washington Color School Sam Gilliam's work.
Awilda Sterling-Duprey, works pictured above back-center, a Puerto Rican artist-performer's large scale dance-drawings are inspired by Afro Cuban religious dance traditions, composer John Cage's work, and John Coltrane's music. She blindfolded herself and responded to jazz music to make intense jittery, abstract marks on paper and walls. She has explained: “... Abstraction gives me that openness and that freedom; from there, I can go further, be riskier in how I work. I have been forcing my brain to push ideas for so long that I don’t need to see what I am doing. To me, this is what is most abstract. Precisely because this information is encapsulated in my body, I don’t have to see what I am building on. I just have to feel it first.”
Denyse Thomasos’s complex black and white abstracted linear perspectival paintings which are inspired by slave ship containers that were effectively prisons and burial sites. She stated that they were also a memorial to her deceased father.
