Shelley Rice

The young Brazilian filmmaker Julia Murat explains that the original idea for Found Memories came to her in 1999, while she was working on a film being shot in a village with a closed cemetery. The coffins of those who died in the vicinity had to travel seven hours by boat to be buried. This Faulkner-esque quandary intrigued her, and made her wonder what kind of story she could tell about a town where a locked graveyard made it impossible to die.

George Dureau: Black
on view at Higher Pictures Gallery, New York City, May 31-July 13, 2012

In 1978, Marcuse Pfeifer organized an exhibition in her uptown New York City gallery entitled The Male Nude: A Survey in Photography. Hung salon style, overflowing from floor to ceiling with images by Imogen Cunningham, George Platt Lynes, F.H. Day, Baron von Gloeden, Minor White and many others that had been hidden “in the closet,” the show blew the lid off of American homophobia at around the same time that the Robert Samuel Gallery, devoted to a gay clientele and its interests, opened downtown. I wrote the introduction to the exhibition catalog, and because of this involvement I was privileged to spend months discovering both the hidden archive and the issues – formal, political, conceptual, aesthetic – it articulated.

Alexander Gray Associates
April 11- May 25, 2012

Lorraine O’Grady has been around a long time. An active and avid feminist, a conceptual artist, photographer, writer, performer and video artist, she has been at the forefront of discussions about African Americans and their relationships to the multiple pasts of our complex postcolonial society. I first came across her art in New York around 1980, when she pioneered ideas that would resonate with the groundbreaking works of women like Adrian Piper and, later, Carrie Mae Weems, Deb Willis and Lorna Simpson. Juxtaposing two black and white images, the faces of contemporary African American acquaintances next to reproductions of sculptural portraits carved in ancient Egypt, she put forth the evidence of genealogy. Like writer Martin Bernal, the author of the book Black Athena, O’Grady claimed the African heritage of that shining civilization, a pedigree written into the genetic traces of her race and made visible centuries later by the medium of photography.