Laila Pedro

LAILA PEDRO is a former Managing Editor of the Brooklyn Rail. She is a scholar and translator, and holds a PhD in French from the Graduate Center, CUNY.

I went to school on 96th Street and 5th Avenue, which is right across the street. The real experience, the more subconscious thing, would be the Studio Museum. It originally was in Harlem and my father had been going there. Because of that experience, it’s always something that’s there and accessible.
Portrait of Franklin Sirmans. Pencil on paper by Phong Bui.
Heide Hatry is an artist who grew up on a pig farm in the south of Germany and studied art history at the University of Heidelberg. She has shown her work in galleries and museums in the United States, Germany, and Spain; curated numerous exhibitions; produced over 200 artist’s books; and spent seventeen years running a rare-books store in Heidelberg.
Heide Hatry, Evelyn Marranca, 2016. Mixed media (loose ash particles, pulverized birch coal, white marble dust, beeswax). 14 x 11 inches. Courtesy the artist and Ubu Gallery, New York.
The roving art space We Buy Gold, which Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels opened in Bed-Stuy in March, is successfully managing a tricky balancing act: it is seriously and coherently embedded in its space and moment, even as it resists barricading itself into a particular corner.
Renee Gladman, Untitled Cities, 2016. Ink, pencil, and goauche on paper. 24 x 36 inches. Photo: Darryl Richardson. Courtesy We Buy Gold.
The roving art space We Buy Gold, which Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels opened in Bed Stuy in March, is successfully managing a tricky balancing act: it is seriously and coherently embedded in its space and moment, even as it resists barricading itself into a particular corner.
Installation View: ONE. We Buy Gold. March 19 - May 1, 2017. Courtesy We Buy Gold.
Yoan Capote is a Cuban artist living in Havana who brings a powerful conceptual focus, a profound grounding in art history, and a multilayered, tactile execution to a body of work that spans installation, sculpture, and painting. Cerebral and deeply psychological, Capote’s work displays a compelling individual vocabulary of materials and themes that is as distinctively situated in a contemporary Cuban vernacular as it is universally evocative.
Yoan Capote, Isla (Mas allá), 2016. Oil, nails, and fish hooks on linen mounted on panel. 38 1/8 × 40 1/8 × 3 1/2 inches. © Yoan Capote. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery.
In some ways, we all need a poetical shelter to stay within ourselves and protect our own silence. It’s a very loud time. We never know if our words are from us, or just the echo of somebody else.
Installation view: Silence, Galerie Lelong, New York, February 2 – March 11, 2017. © Jaume Plensa. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.
The Indian-born artist Prabhavathi Meppayil creates nuanced, rigorous paintings that reveal their structural and chromatic complexities only upon close examination and after long observation.
Prabhavathi Meppayil, Detail of eight/fifteen, 2015. Gold wire embedded in gesso panel. 36 × 36 × 1 1/2 inches. © Prabhavathi Meppayil, Courtesy Pace Gallery. Photo: Damian Griffiths.
Although she started out as an abstract painter, Joan Semmel’s career has come to be understood primarily in terms of the radical figurative paintings she has been creating since the 1970s.
Portrait of Joan Semmel. Pencil on paper by Phong Bui. From a photo by Elfie Semotan.
The American sculptor Andrea Zittel has spent over three decades developing, refining, and expanding a multifaceted practice grounded in the details and actions of how life is lived.
Portrait of Andrea Zittel. Pencil on paper by Phong Bui. From a photo by Elena Ray.
In recent years, Carmen Herrera (b. 1915) has become as renowned for her elegant, geometric abstract paintings as for her unflagging productivity during the decades in which the works were overlooked.
Portrait of Carmen Herrera. Pencil on paper by Phong Bui. From a photo by Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu.
For years, Rashaad Newsome has engaged with Vogue as a dance form and a community. As a participant, producer, and documenter of this complex and vitally important tradition, his work has encompassed video, collage, and dance. Newsome has also spoken frequently and eloquently about the complexities of autonomy, authority, and appropriation around voguing and other modes of cultural production by people of color.
Rashaad Newsome, Untitled (video still), 2008. Single-channel video, silent, TRT 00:08:07. Courtesy the artist.
In 1975, Robert Motherwell bought a chair from a young sculptor and designer named John E. Scofield. The two developed a friendship and Scofield became Motherwell’s studio assistant.
JOHN E. SCOFIELD with Laila Pedro
Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible,the Met’s inaugural exhibition at its new space in the Breuer-designed building the Whitney occupied before its move downtown, sprawls by design.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), The Flaying of Marsyas, probably 1570s. Oil on canvas. 86 /8 x 80 1/4 inches. Archdiocese Olomouc, Archiepiscopal Palace, Picture Gallery, Kromĕříž. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Curator Ingrid Elliott collaborated with Galerie Lelong on Diálogos constructivistas en la vanguardia cubana [Constructivist Dialogues in the Cuban Vanguard], an exhibition that offers an alternative take on modern art in Cuba.
Amelia Peláez, Bandeja con frutas (Sandía) [Tray with Fruit (Watermelon)], 1941. Oil on canvas in original frame. 28 x 35 inches. Private Collection, Miami. Photo: Sid Hoeltzell. © Amelia Peláez Foundation. Miami. Courtesy Tresart, Miami.
Since the 1960s, Barkley L. Hendricks has been creating powerful images of intense formal sophistication. Engaging and reworking conventions of portraiture, fashion, and iconography, Hendricks’s work reveals an intense visual focus and a concern with the tactile, technical, and chemical effects of of paint, pigment, and surface.
Portrait of Barkley Hendricks. Pencil on paper by Phong Bui. Reference photo courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery.
For the past several years, the relentlessly multi-tasking, reinventing, genre-blending House of Ladosha has drawn on a seemingly endless lineage of references and influences to produce immersive nightlife, performance, and installation experiences. Working across and beyond intersections of gender, race, humor and politics, House of Ladosha has created a world of meaning and connection that is fully embodied by its members even as it transcends its own social context.
Installation View: House of Ladosha: THIS IS UR BRAIN. January 15 - February 28, 2016. FUG Gallery at BHFQU. Photo: Taylor Dafoe.
Over the course of a prolific and inventive career, Yoko Ono has continually challenged the meaning, structure, and limits of art. Since the 1950s, she has been a pioneer of avant-garde and experimental culture, with a multimedia practice that encompasses music, performance, instructions, writing, and film.
Portrait of the artist. Pencil on paper by Phong Bui. From a photo by Matthu Placek.
“For most of my life,” writes José Parlá, “I have experienced being in transition and migration.” As he moves through a layered world of multiple cultures and geographies, Parlá’s intensively textured works move between spaces and mediums: they encompass painting and sculpture, wall fragments brought inside gallery spaces or installed in public, and the polymorphous influence of the underground art scene of the 1980s.
José Parlá, El Camino de Neptuno (2015). Acrylic, ink, plaster, and enamel on wood. 7 × 9 feet. Photo: Farzad Owrang. Courtesy the artist.
Over the course of a prolific and inventive career, Yoko Ono has continually challenged the meaning, structure, and limits of art. Since the 1950s, she has been a pioneer of avant-garde and experimental culture, with a multimedia practice that encompasses music, performance, instructions, writing, and film. By turns playful and visceral, violent and witty, Ono’s highly conceptual works are also informed by a profound commitment to peace activism.
Installation view: Yoko Ono, Stone Piece, 2015/2016. Local riverbed rocks. Dimensions variable. Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. (C) Yoko Ono. Photo: Pierre Le Hors
Cuban-American artist and scholar Coco Fusco has explored the dynamics of art, bodies, and culture for more than thirty years. She has performed displayed in a cage as an invented primitive character (The Year of the White Bear and Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992 – 1994)) and as Dr. Zira, Planet of the Apes’s“ animal psychologist” (Observations of Predation in Humans: A Lecture by Dr. Zira, Animal Psychologist (2013)), and undertook training in military interrogation techniques to create A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America (2006).
Portrait of the artist. Pencil on paper by Phong Bui. From a photo by Taylor Dafoe.
The Pérez Art Museum in Miami’s (PAMM) current exhibition, Poetics of Relation, is ambitiously conceived. “Inspired by the writings of author and philosopher Édouard Glissant, [it] responds to Miami as a site defined culturally by its diasporic communities and it looks to place these local dynamics in dialogue with more distant contexts that share similar histories.”1
Tony Capellán, Mar Caribe, 1996. Plastic and rubber sandals with barbed wire. Collection Museo de Arte Moderno de la República Dominicana. Installation view: Pérez Art Museum Miami. Photo: Oriol Tarridas.

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