Emann Odufu
Emann Odufu is a writer, curator, cultural critic, and filmmaker hailing from Newark, New Jersey. His writing and film work have been featured in the New York Times, Document Journal, Hyperallergic, and other leading publications.
By Emann Odufu
For this exhibition, Draw Them In, Paint Them Out at the Jewish Museum, Trenton Doyle Hancock’s artworks are paired with those of Philip Guston, a significant influence on Hancock’s practice. Guston demonstrated a radical empathy, using art to confront America’s racial and historical contradictions.
Declaring KAWS as the present-day version of Andy Warhol might be too grand a gesture. Still, the current show pairing the two artists together at Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum makes it clear that they share many similarities.
Emanoel Araújo was a Brazilian virtuoso abstractionist, a juggernaut of all forms of creativity, and a cultural icon for championing and centering African and Afro-Brazilian traditions, customs, and artists at the forefront of modern culture.
Contemporary Senegalese artist Omar Ba has made a mark on the art world in Africa and Europe, and now he is doing the same in the US. Ba spent 2020 in New York City, and that pandemic experience became his crash course in American culture. During this time the artist came to see similarities amongst the issues that affect people back in his home of Dakar, Senegal and in the United States. This became the impetus for his exhibition at Galerie Templon in New York, Right of Soil – Right to Dream, and his US museum debut at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Political Animals.
Guyanese British artist Hew Locke is at a pivotal moment in his thirty-plus year career as a fine artist. Most recently, Locke received the Tate Commission and created a sprawling installation composed of 140 human-sized figures and five horses in the Duveen Galleries of Tate Britain. This installation, on view until January 2023, has been his most ambitious and significant artistic endeavor to date and has received much critical acclaim. In September, Locke will be having another milestone moment as he will be installing a new series of work for the Met Museum’s Fifth Avenue facade niches. I sat down with Hew in his Brixton studio a few weeks after the opening of The Procession.




