Interview: Artist Kenturah Davis On Liminal Space, Language & Her Time At Palm Heights
Following the bustle of this year’s Art Basel Miami, Davis finds herself resident at the sumptuous Grand Cayman estate and cultural centre, Palm Heights, where she sat down with some of the curators for an interview.
Kenturah Davis. Stacked books at Palm Heights’ library, 2021. Courtesy the artist.
Alice Smith, left, and Kenturah Davis in Joshua Tree.
LA Times Issue 8: Deserted
Kenturah interviews Grammy nominated singer Alice Smith in Joshua Tree for the cover story of Image Magazine’s December 2021 issue. This story is part of Image issue 8, “Deserted,” a supercharged experience of becoming and spiritual renewal. Enjoy the trip! (Wink, wink.) See the full package here.
Photography by Samanta Helou Hernandez
Editor in Chief: Ian Blair
Contending with Contingency VI, 2021
November 29–December 5, 2021
Moore Building, Miami
Curated by Melahn Frierson and A.J. Girard
Artists
Diana Yesenia Alvarado, Mario Ayala, Tyler D. Ballon, Tyler Cala, Calvin Clausell Jr., Ariel Dannielle, Kenturah Davis, Bernadette Despujols, Johnson Eziefula, Fabian Guerrero, Uber Lopez Enamorado, rafa esparza, Delfin Finley, Kohshin Finleym Bryant Giles, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., Jewel Ham, Kezia Harrell, Jammie Holmes, Khari Johnson-Ricks, Clifford Prince King, Yashua Klos, YoYo Lander, Amani Lewis, Gerald Lovell, Shaina McCoy, Murjoni Merriweather, Jaime Munoz, Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, No Sesso, The Perez Bros, Bony Ramirez, Adrienne Raquel, Davin Raynolds, Jacob Rochester, Gabriela Ruiz, Gabriel Sanchez, Gabriella Sanchez, Manuela Sota Sosa, Alake Shilling, Thelonious, Michael Vasquez, Raelis Vasquez, Fulton Leroy Washington (Mr. Wash), Rikki Wright
Shattered Glass, the acclaimed exhibition of new art by emerging artists of color that was shown at Jeffrey Deitch Los Angeles last spring, will be presented in an expanded version in the Moore Building in the Miami Design District.
The painting, sculpture and photographic works in the exhibition are all figurative. The subject matter is often the artists’ family and friends. Their primary subject is their own life and their community. Many of the works also display extraordinary technical skill and mastery of traditional painting techniques. A number of the artists also apply industrial techniques such as air brush and use unexpected materials like adobe, glitter and synthetic hair.
The participating artists are strongly socially engaged. Several of the artists donate part of their sale proceeds to the people portrayed in their works. Many of the works have a powerful social message. There is also an emphasis on the strength of family and community ties. In a story on the exhibition in The New York Times, Robin Pogrebin wrote: “There is a joyfulness in the work, one that attests to the resilience of the artists and the people they depict.”
Mondays at Beinecke:”Conditions of Contingency - a Convening” with Kenturah Davis
November 22, 2021
Kenturah will discuss her artist book, “Conditions of Contingency - a Convening” (2021) with the Yale Beinecke Library curators.
The artist states: “This new object is an effort to consider how language produces conditions of contingency that we move through, blurring the personal and the political. The book consists of the transcript of the 1865 Senate debates leading to the passing of the 13th Amendment. Unlike the actual amendment, which is just a few short lines, the debates overflow with numerous presuppositions that are antithetical to a concept of equality and liberation. The resulting law is burdened with this language in ways that drift in and out of view. The body of text is impressed into the paper, producing a low relief. The legibility of the text is contingent on its shadows. A compartment within the cavity of the book holds a piece of cast charcoal. The viewer is invited to rub their hands across the charcoal and apply it to the text. The more opaque the application of charcoal, the more the text is illuminated and rendered more legibly.”
Book Description:
Unbound, debossed and die-cut paper. Cast charcoal. Custom clam shell box. Edition of 25 + 5 Artist Proofs. Yale Library’s Haas Arts Library Collections holds copy no. 6/25. This is a signed and numbered artist book edition, hand-printed by Kenturah Davis on a Vandercook letterpress, each with a unique charcoal rubbing by the artist.
APROPOS OF AIR
new drawings, editions and works in glass
November 13, 2021 - December 18, 2021
Opening Reception November 13, 2021 6PM - 8PM
Matthew Brown
712 N La Brea Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90036
In this new body of work, the artist expands the landscape where language and the figure intersect. The show is framed by two new works in glass: custom stained-glass windows made in collaboration with Judson Studios. A grid of colored light filter into the gallery, intra-acting with the space inside. The color continues into the works on paper, introducing the artist’s experiments with color which integrate writings about conditions that are at the horizon of our understanding (such as the ancient knowledge systems and the physics of color, space and time). As the texts drift in and out of legibility, the figures embody how the perception of ourselves shift so swiftly with every nuanced change in our environment. Nothing exists in isolation, but rather in a contingent relationship with its context. The figures in the stamp drawings echo the phrase The Bodily Effect of a Color, against a ground of pixelated hues. The newest series, planar vessels, bear washes of ink produced using a photographic process where an image is made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface and exposing it to sunlight. They are then embedded with text, leaving a low relief that allow for a dynamic relationship with the blurred figures that are rendered on its surface. Several of these drawings are accompanied with paper thread weavings. The artist begins this process by writing a text on paper, then slices and twists the paper into thread. For these latest weavings, she worked with Kente weaver, Bob Dennis Ahiagble, who wove her threads into a graphic and coded pattern. Together, the portrait and text(tile) embody the ways language flows around and through us in invisible ways. The 2-d plane of the paper and fabric is reconfigured as a vessel, full of meaning, a container of information. For the first time, the artist also presents an arrangement of chine collé photographs that reveal the significant role of photography in her practice. These long-exposure images note the poetics of the durational experience the artist has with her community of friends/sitters.
Apropos of Air Install
Apropos of Air Install
[DETAIL] Planar Vessel I, 2021
Apropos of Air Install
Apropos of Air Install
Apropos of Air Install
LACMA
5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles
Curated by Liz Andrews and Christine Y. Kim
November 7, 2021 - January 2, 2022
From the moment of their unveiling at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in February 2018, the museum’s official portraits of President Barack Obama and Mrs. Michelle Obama have become iconic. Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of President Obama and Amy Sherald’s portrait of the former First Lady have inspired unprecedented responses from the public.
This five-city tour will travel to the Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Museum, LACMA, High Art Museum, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from June 2021 through May 2022 and is expected to reach millions of people who might not otherwise have an opportunity to view these remarkable paintings. In addition to the artworks themselves, the LACMA presentation of The Obama Portraits Tour will feature teacher workshops, curatorial tours, and a richly illustrated book. This special presentation will enhance the conversations surrounding the power of portraiture and its potential to engage communities.
November 7, 2021 - April 17, 2022
To complement the presentation of The Obama Portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald on tour from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG), LACMA presents Black American Portraits. Remembering Two Centuries of Black American Art, guest curated by David Driskell at LACMA 45 years ago, this exhibition reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, sitters, and spaces. Spanning over two centuries from c. 1800 to the present day, this selection of approximately 150 works draws primarily from LACMA’s permanent collection and highlights emancipation and early studio photography, scenes from the Harlem Renaissance, portraits from the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, and multiculturalism of the 1990s. Black American Portraits chronicles the ways in which Black Americans have used portraiture to envision themselves in their own eyes. Countering a visual culture that often demonizes Blackness and fetishizes the spectacle of Black pain, these images center love, abundance, family, community, and exuberance.
PARABLE 003
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions
September 8, 2021
Curated by Alex Jones and Kevin Bernard Moultrie-Daye
Featured Artists
Kenturah Davis, Huntrezz, Alima Lee, Josiah Mackey, Chris Martin, Umar Rashid, Boima Tucker, Hana Ward, and Andrew Wilson.
PARABLE 003 was an exhibition of black visual and conceptual contemporary art rooted in the liberatory possibilities of black community, settlement, and creative expression. Artists’ work incorporates visual, material, and cultural aspects of a new free black state through video, sculpture, textile, sound, and digital media.
Part ode and part elegy to Octavia Butler’s unfinished Parable trilogy, this exhibition investigates the vanishing point of an idea. It is a
blueprint for the near future of black sovereignty where California’s histories of migration, radical participation, and experimental living converge into a foundation for the future of Blackness.
Gagosian is pleased to present Social Works, a group exhibition curated by Antwaun Sargentwith participating artists David Adjaye, Zalika Azim, Allana Clarke, Kenturah Davis, Theaster Gates, Linda Goode Bryant, Lauren Halsey, Titus Kaphar, Rick Lowe, Christie Neptune, Alexandria Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems.
Social Works considers the relationship between space—personal, public, institutional, and psychic—and Black social practice. With a wide range of material and theoretical approaches, the work on view is united by a conscious engagement with today’s cultural moment, in which numerous social factors have converged to produce a heightened urgency for Black artists to utilize space as a community-building tool and a means of empowerment.
“Dance writing” is the literal translation of the Greek word choreography. This is how Kenturah Davis explains her unique approach to her new drawings. Her work fuses language, figuration and performance. She describes her latest series as follows:
This project began with a very open-ended question about how the apparatus of language might function as a kind of choreography for how we exist and move through the world. I initially began with identifying pragmatic ways that language structures our movements. In the way that architecture can guide how one moves through space, or the placement of a handle on a cup suggests how to pick it up, language that constructs the fabric of a given society similarly tries to choreograph our activities. Embedded in this is my interest in thinking about how we, as actors in a society, negotiate that choreography (conforming, resisting and improvising) to pursue freedom. This new work is an effort to consider how language produces conditions of contingency, blurring the personal and the political. Large-scale drawings show figures shifting and drifting against a backdrop of texts embedded in the paper. They suggest that the structures that shape our experience in the world extend from the ways we use language. The implications of this language are activated through our bodies.
Davis’s new series of drawings includes the debates that took place during the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment of the US Constitution. The transcripts of the Senate debates are impressed into the multiple panels that make up each image. Davis writes that “the amendment itself, in just a few lines, purports a concept of freedom by virtue of abolishing slavery on the condition that one is not a criminal. The debate exemplifies a framework that, on the one hand facilitates freedom, and simultaneously facilitates confinement. This range of outcomes is suggested in the drifting, shifting, and blurring of the figures in the drawings as they intersect the text.”
While immersed in making the first group of drawings in the series, Davis realized that she needed a counterpoint to consider other philosophical frameworks that might conceive freedom differently. She turned to non-western traditions, highlighting those that developed in Sub-Saharan Africa that counter western binary systems. Her drawings deliver a kaleidoscope of texts that embrace liminal space and the contingent nature of meaning, reconfiguring how we conceive of freedom.
In this new body of work, I am trying to reconcile presence and possibility. The structures that shape our experience in the world extend from the ways we use language. By acknowledging that language is not immutable but rather generates conditions of contingency, then its current failure to produce abiding freedom does not need to be a permanent condition. It can compose other conditions for us to move through.
Kenturah Davis lives and works between Los Angeles and Accra, Ghana. The artist earned her BA from Occidental College, Los Angeles, and MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2018. Her work was included in Punch, curated by Nina Chanel Abney at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, in 2019. The Savannah College of Art and Design presented Everything That Cannot Be Known, a solo exhibition of her work, in 2020. Public projects include a major commission by the Los Angeles Metro Rail to create large-scale, site specific work that will be permanently installed on the new Crenshaw/LAX rail line, opening in 2021, and Four Women, a commissioned mural by Alliance Francaise to commemorate International Women’s Day, in Accra, Ghana. (a)Float, (a)Fall, (a)Dance, (a)Death is Kenturah Davis’s first solo exhibition in New York. The exhibition is presented in collaboration with Matthew Brown, Los Angeles.
Matthew Brown Los Angeles and SCAD University Press proudly present Kenturah Davis: Everything that Cannot be Known, the artist’s debut monograph commemorating her first solo exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art in 2020. Featuring an insightful preface by Diane Von Furstenberg and an oeuvre-defining essay by curator Humberto Moro, the catalog also includes a conversation between Davis and BOMB Magazine’s Stephanie E. Goodalle and poems by Jayy Dodd.
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