Winter Salon Part II

Jenkins Johnson Gallery is pleased to announce Winter Salon Part II, a showcase of recent selections from leading artists currently showing with the gallery. Following Winter Salon Part I, Jenkins Johnson mounts this exhibition as a portend of what is to come for the gallery's program in 2020. Many of the artists in the exhibition, like Enrico Riley and Ming Smith, have been integral to Jenkins Johnson’s programming, while others, like Rashaad Newsome, and Amani Lewis, represent new avenues toward the expansion of the leading edge of contemporary representational works.

The gallery is excited to be working with multidisciplinary artist, Rashaad Newsome. Newsome pulls from the worlds of advertising, the Internet, Black and Queer culture to produce counter-hegemonic works that use the diasporic traditions of improvisation and collage, to craft compositions that walk the tightrope between intersectionality, social practice, and abstraction. The West Coast debut of Newsome’s To Be Real is currently on view at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture through February 23. To Be Real is an exhibition environment of collage, sculpture and the interactive A.I. Being. The exhibition presents a series of neo-Cubist portraits in expressive frames, threading an ornamental glamour through figures reflecting on human agency, Blackness, and the radical futurity of emerging identities. Coinciding with our show, Newsome is showing at the Museum of the African Diaspora in a solo exhibition titled STOP PLAYING IN MY FACE! And ICON.

Linked together with Newsome through their respective approaches using geometric forms, and the reverence with which they center the poetics and musicality of the Black experience, New York-based visual artist Rico Gatson has become celebrated for his confrontational and politically astute artworks, often based on significant moments in Black history. Last Spring, the artist won a glowing review from Artforum when he exhibited at Jenkins Johnson’s New York project space. He has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, including a mid-career survey at Exit Art in 2011, and a ten-year survey of his works on paper at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2017.  He has exhibited at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Santa Monica Museum of Art, and Denver Art Museum.

A strong anchor in Jenkins Johnson’s programming, Enrico Riley uses paint to investigate of themes of historical and contemporary violence, martyrdom, grief, and the Middle Passage within a specific and directed spatial domain. The artist uses formal techniques to expose the limitations of any linear narrative, including fractured bodies, hidden figures, ambiguous environments, and cropped frames. In 2019, Riley’s solo exhibition at Jenkins Johnson Projects was reviewed by the New York Times. Riley is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Rome Prize in Visual Arts, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize in Painting, the George Frederick Jewitt Professorship in Art at Dartmouth College and a Jacobus Family Fellowship through Dartmouth College. Recently, he was featured in Black Bodies on the Cross at The Hood Museum along with Romare Bearden and Kara Walker. Upcoming exhibitions include State of the Art 2020 at The Momentary and Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, and a solo exhibition at the Museum of Art at the University of New Hampshire. His work is in collections including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Dean Collection, the Columbus Museum in Georgia, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Nasher Sculpture Center. 

In juxtaposition to Riley’s tightly directed explorations, Margaret Bowland’s expansive and expressive photorealistic paintings explore deeply personal images that call into question our societal expectations of gender, race, and beauty. Bowland is a faculty member at the New York Academy of Art. She recently had a solo exhibition, Painting the Roses Red at the Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh curated by Dexter Wimberly with an accompanying catalogue.

Similarly exploring realism, gallery stalwart Scott Fraser mixes classical approach to painting with contemporary objects and innovative compositions. Fraser experiments with cause and effect as well as sleight of hand, putting his own unique stamp on the subject matter. His newest works acknowledge the changing dynamics of the art world in the era of face-swap apps and virtual reality. Scott Fraser’s work is in major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the De Young Museum in San Francisco; the Denver Art Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa. His work has been reviewed in publications such as The San Francisco Chronicle, ARTnews, Art Daily, and The Denver Post, among others. Fraser lives and works in Longmont, Colorado.

Ming Smith too documents everyday moments through ethereal and transcendent imagemaking. Smith’s photographic practice is instantly recognizeable through her style of combining a deliberate blur with experimental post-production techniques to amplify the works’ dream-like qualities. Smith was the first black female photographer acquired by the Museum of Modern Art and the first female member of the influential photography collective, Kamoinge. Her works respond to the struggles of city living, while also celebrating the community and pride produced by it. The J. Paul Getty Museum recently acquired five iconic works from Smith’s August Wilson Series. Ming Smith is featured prominently alongside Dawoud Bey and other contemporaries in the monumental touring exhibition Soul of a Nation, currently on view at the de Young Museum, after presentations at the Tate Modern, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Broad.

Multidisiplinary artist Dewey Crumpler’s evocative abstract tableaus are also featured in the Soul of Nation. The artist’s current works examine issues of globalization and cultural commodification through the integration of digital imagery, video and traditional painting techniques. Dewey’s works are available in the permanent collections in the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, Triton Museum of Art Los Angeles and the Oakland Museum Of California. Dewey Crumpler is an Associate Professor of Painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught Kehinde Wiley and Deborah Roberts.

Also featured in Soul of a Nation, Wadsworth Jarrell is a founding member of AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists). AfriCOBRA was founded on the South Side of Chicago in 1968 by a collective of young Black artists, whose interest in transnational Black Aesthetics led them to create one of the most distinctive visual languages in 20th Century American art.  The characteristics of the classic AfriCOBRA look are vibrant “Kool-Aid” colors, bold text and positive images of Black people, essential to everyday life in the community from which the movement emerged. The founders’ vision has its roots in the streets, classrooms, studios, and living rooms of the South Side of Chicago, yet its impact has extended around the world, influencing artists such as Kerry James Marshall and a host of emerging artists. Throughout his long and storied career, Wadsworth has celebrated the struggles, strengths and beauty of African Americans. Jenkins Johnson Gallery will present a solo exhibition of Jae and Wadsworth Jarrell’s work in May 2020 along with an installtion in the atrium at Minnesota Street Projects. On May 16, they will be in conversation with an art world dignitary and there will be a book signing for Wadsworth Jarrell new book.

Jenkins Johnson is committed to representing intergenerational perspectives, and accordingly will present works by emerging artists Dominic Chambers, Khalil Robert Irving, Amani Lewis and Cameron Welch who each offer a fresh take on the representations of the Black figure. Dominic Chambers creates drawings and large scale color field paintings that reference literary narratives cited in books, various mythologies, and African-American history. His current work is invested in exploring moments of contemplation and meditation through reading and leisure. Chambers received his BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 2016 and an MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 2019. Jenkins Johnson Projects will present a solo exhibition of Chambers’s work in Fall.

Kahlil Robert Irving’s practice grapples with the perception of space as an experiential engagement of the physical and of the body. Irving activates the viewers’ body through installations incorporating sculpture, photograph, and collage. Jenkins Johnson Gallery will present a solo exhibition of Irving’s work in March along with an installation in the atrium at Minnesota Street Project.

Amani Lewis’s works aim to shift the dominant narrative of Baltimore to hold the people and the complexity of their stories at the forefront to deepen the subject’s perspective of themselves, their power and their relationship to the city. In 2016, they graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art with a BFA in General Fine Arts and Illustration. Jenkins Johnson Gallery will present a solo exhibition of Lewis’s work in 2020.

Cameron Welch’s mosaics reference mythology, Black identity and modern society, combining found artifacts from the recent past including CDs, brooms, mirrors, and drums. The surface of each work is crafted out of tiles pieced together from larger block which form individual lines throughout the work. These labored surfaces are then collaged and painted atop of in a frenetic manner that pushes against the precious nature of the mosaic process. This past Fall, Welch participated in Then & Now: Chase Hall and Cameron Welch curated by Antwaun Sargent at Jenkins Johnson Projects, Brooklyn.

For more information on this exhibition please contact

Director of Curatorial Affairs, Niama Safia Sandy at 212.629.0707 or sf@jenkinsjohnsongallery.com.