On January 10, at 1:30 PM at the Newark Museum, Gallery Aferro studio residency alumn Kenseth Armstead will give a talk, “manifest mysticism,” while standing between two paintings by Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church. The talk focuses on the two Hudson River school painters, Freemason culture and manifest destiny. Kenseth Armstead is a multimedia installation artist whose works have been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Brooklyn Museum; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Armstead’s recent work explores the African-American experience inside the American Revolution. His most recent series, Farther Land, symbolically reflects on 10 years of the artist’s research on the true story of slave turned double-agent spy James Armistead Lafayette. The founders’ high ideals and the penalty for deviation from them are both reshaped as objects that relate this point of view. The series responds to the age of revolution and the founders’ declaration that “all men are created equal” with irony and suggestive material content.
Gallery Aferro will also present a major solo show by New Jersey-based painter Jo-El Lopez. Born in Juncos, Puerto Rico and raised in Paterson, New Jersey, Lopez uses the visual storytelling of traditional realism to convey complex commentary on the intersection of faith and modernity, race, gender, class and sexuality, the strength of family, and the multidimensional contemporary urban experience in his very first solo show. The decades the artist spent under the Pentecostal doctrine, a bold color palette informed by both abstract painting as well as older traditions of icon-making, all meld to create Lopez’s kaleidoscopic worldview. The collection of artworks on view reveal a restless, deeply engaged spirit closely observing not only his immediate environment, but the larger historic trajectory of national news.
Woodley White (b. 1983) creates artwork that shows a keen eye for detail and a passion for his subject matter. It is not uncommon for Woodley to draw the same subject hundreds of times across all media and on various surfaces. Each aspect of Woodley’s work is deeply considered, from the placement on the page to the intense line quality. The repetitive nature of his work conveys the Woodley’s passion for his subject matter and the focus of his observation. White’s work has recently begun to include portraits of people found in books and magazines. White has shown his work throughout Philadelphia, including exhibitions at AIRspace and the InLiquid exhibition space at Crane Arts.This exhibit is in collaboration with Outside the Frame Studios, a program of Community Integrated Services, Philadelphia, PA, that provides professional support to working artists with disabilities.
