His mother told him to pass it on. And he did. He passed it on to his students who became teachers, and they passed it on to their students. He passed it on to other artists, who passed it on to their colleagues. And they’ve gathered in the Louisiana Art & Science Museum on this particular night to share memories of John T. Scott, a friend and mentor who died in 2005 in Houston. Yet it seemed as if somehow he’s still in the world, even walking with them through the Louisiana Art & Science Museum’s main galleries as Mora Beauchamp-Byrd guided them through Rhythm & Improvisation: John T. Scott & His Enduring Legacy. That’s the title of the museum’s exhibit of Scott’s work shaped by African, Caribbean and New Orleans musical traditions. The work has been described as “optical jazz” or “visual blues.” The show runs through Sunday, July 14.

Read More

A zebra leg, a copy of Mein Kampf, slave shackles—discrete objects laden with meaning and chosen for their obvious aura—are precisely the kind of curiosities one might find in collections housed at institutions such as The Museum of Jurassic Technology, The Griot Museum of Black History, or the Mütter Museum. Contextualized alongside other anonymously created or found works, some humorous, some horrific, Blame It On Vegas – Collecting Meta Modern functions as a Wunderkammer, a collection that inspires infinite interpretations. The title is both a response to Robert Venturi’s controversial book Learning from Las Vegas and a rejection of postmodernism in favor of a new romanticism or what has come to be known as metamodernism. This slightly nebulous curatorial approach is, in a sense, a “metagesture,” where objects and ideas are abstracted and obscured. Oscillating between modernist vocabularies and postmodern strategies, but relying on neither, there is a rigor and a sense of purpose that unites this collection, though the precise meaning may not be, or may never be, fully realized.

Read More

About ten years ago American Legacy featured an artist named Whitfield Lovell in an article titled “Whispers from the Walls.” The Bronx-born Lovell, whose three-dimensional tableaux—life-size charcoal portraits on pine board, punctuated with everyday (and not so everyday) objects found in flea markets and antique malls, tel the life stories of ancestors, family, and once anonymous individuals from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Read More