The Brooklyn Rail

At the start of her 2021 retrospective at Tate Modern in London, Lubaina Himid (CBE RA. b. 1954, Zanzibar) asked: “We live in clothes, we live in buildings—do they fit us?” It’s the kind of question that expands, with the capacity to tug at the edges of a composition. It’s perhaps one of the driving queries that has led Himid, for over four decades, to defy any one categorization—artist, professor, activist, and curator among them—and to pull unwaveringly at the many unjust borders of social life and art history. And it’s a question that persists in the British artist’s latest exhibition, Make Do and Mend, now on view at FLAG Art Foundation in New York following an initial run at the Contemporary Austin, celebrating the artist’s receipt of the 2024 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize. Centering wisdom both assumed and accumulated, this timely show turns its lens on decision-makers, asking how, and amid what plots, are the structures we live with shaped?

Himid’s ten new “Strategy Paintings” (all 2023) examine decisions made from the confines of meeting rooms, where Black men and women gesture from different sides of tables, locked in conversation and tackling major questions on topics like care, land, the universe, and war. The paintings direct their attention to both sweeping gestures and minor details—to the undercurrents of an interaction as much as to its surfaces—all the while providing a large range of entry points to their central discourses for an audience who completes the picture with their gazes, gaits, and associations.

Tables stretch towards the viewer in each work and, as problems evolve from painting to painting, the furnishings transform. In Cosmic Dentistry, peers inspect large teeth on a surface that could be the north pole of a planet. In Bitter Battles, two people use lemons to consider whether to elevate or protect monuments across a green lawn. Intricate objects arranged on the tables’ surfaces act as lexicon and leverage for the ambitious protagonists surrounding them, marking a dialogue’s progression. Every movement of these objects forms an imperfect calculation, one rendered more complicated by the works’ other inbuilt cues—sideward glances, gloved hands, crossed arms.

The “Strategy Paintings” leave space for interpretation in their form and content as much as in their central questions. All on square canvases, the scenes in the paintings never quite seem to show a full picture. Himid has talked about who is not at the tables, as much as who is. The compositions encourage this kind of interrogation, replete with mysterious entrances, exits, and windows that situate the scenes at some remove from an outside world that is only suggested. In Austin, all ten “Strategy Paintings” hung in one large room together just minutes from Texas’s Capitol Building, surrounding a central table at the Jones Center that was offered to locals for book clubs and department meetings. Now scattered across the labyrinthine spaces of FLAG’s ninth floor in Chelsea, they take on a capitalist slant. Evoking the city’s vertical, parallel meeting rooms—each one an elevator stop away from the next—the artworks feel less aware of one another, presuming singularity while, in the eyes of their viewers, forming one part of a broader multitude.

The central dynamics of the “Strategy Paintings” feel both heightened and richly complimented by the exhibition's other new body of work, Aunties (2023): sixty-four ten-foot-tall plank paintings that are people—women—leaning and hanging out in groups around the foundation’s largest window-lined gallery. This work, inspired by East African funerary objects, centers listening, here to a discourse that has accrued and lived, in the dance of a hand across a pianola, in the leaning of an arm into a doorframe, or in the curl of a ribbon around a gift. On the role of aunties, Himid has said, “They’re the women who wonder why you’re wearing that pair of shoes, why on earth you’re marrying that person. They’re the women who let you eat ice cream in the street when your mother won’t. … They’re the kind of women who occupy many young people’s worlds.” In this installation, part memorial, part convening, women hold one another and chatter, their conversation taking the form of blocks of sunlight on the floor, or the wind’s whistle at the window. Each built from a collection of discarded wood furnishings and wall fixtures, the works speak to the experience of arriving at a certain kind of wisdom, cultivated with time.

In the “Strategy Paintings,” distances chart the path of a conversation’s sway. As objects shift across the tablescape, losses and gains form a pendulum swing of fates, locked in negotiation. In Aunties, distance gives way to a broadening perspective, and a further rootedness. These beloved characters might not be parents or relatives, but their opinions matter and make immediate impacts on younger generations, perhaps precisely because of their interstitial presence. And where the ambiguity in Himid’s other paintings spirals outward, catalyzing a host of considerations well beyond the context of any one canvas’s meeting room, the abstraction in Aunties gravitationally pulls its room towards the present. With a pronounced effect on their surrounding space, the planks harmonize as a powerful collective, creating a topography of belonging along the gallery’s walls. They catalyze a close look at the decision-makers who are embedded in the fabric of a self—those more personal, amassed conversations that have the ability to not just give form to, but also repair, any one circumstance.

It’s this sense of restoration that stands at the core of Make Do and Mend, a generous reflection on power in progress—its movements, slippages, and accruals. In works that exude Himid’s humanism, wit, and conversational prowess, the show’s titular instruction lends its own parting gift to audiences, relevant well beyond the walls of the gallery. Make do, it says, cherish the knowledge that accrues within and around any one interaction: with objects, nature, humans. Mend, it says. Find the edges of a gap, and bridge them carefully towards change.