Afrofuturist utopias and ceramics made from Martian soil

This art week’s picks include an artist’s Afrofuturist vision of utopia; textural paintings that highlight the pandemic-induced emotions; and ceramic forms made from simulated Martian soil.

Cauleen Smith at LACMA

LACMA is still closed due to County COVID-19 restrictions, but the museum recently installed a handful of new shows that I got to get a sneak peek of last week. The highlight was a solo exhibition by Cauleen Smith, “Give it Or Leave It.” The exhibition ruminates on various sites where Smith felt that radical generosity and community-building occurred. A metallic wallpaper collapses these sites into a repeated pictorial pattern: The Watts towers, Alice Coltrane’s ashram, Noah Purifoy’s desert assemblages, and spiritualist Rebecca Cox Jackson’s Shaker community.

“What does a really radically generous community and intentional world building look like,” Smith asks in a short video interview produced by SFMOMA. “We’re generally cynical about ideas around utopia, like ‘oh they never work’...but there have been instances where people have built intentional communities that were really successful.”

During her research of utopian sites, Smith stumbled across photojournalist Billy Ray’s image of a group of Black men lounging casually at the Watts towers. In her piece “Sojourner,” Smith restages this photograph using women of color and sets the photograph inside Noah Purifoy’s installations at his outdoor museum in Joshua Tree. Layered in the film are spoken words lifted from Alice Coltrane lyrics. Smith explains that the text lists all the different ways black women are routinely marginalized and dismissed — “the only people who are going to save us are us.” In the film, the group of women congregate and walk through the outdoor museum at sunrise, modeling a beautiful collectivity. “It is possible to build a better world,” Smith explains. “It’s possible to be generous; it’s possible to build something that’s not only good for yourself but for others; it’s possible to leave something behind. It’s just possible to make a better world — people do it all the time.”

On view: TBD–October 3, 2021

Mike Cloud and Sam Jablon at the Landing

In a new two-person exhibition at the Landing Gallery in West Adams, work by artists Mike Cloud and Sam Jablon explore exciting material innovations while also musing on the turmoil of the last year’s events. Jablon incorporates pertinent text into each of his paintings, playing with overlapping or inverted letters to slow down readability. “Endlessness'' features backward yellow text painted on a rich blue background, spelling out “Endless Endlessness.” Several letters towards the end of the phrase seem to evaporate into yellow mist. Is it a call to the sheer ongoingness of the pandemic, or perhaps a nod to certain air-born particles? Other works like “Don’t Panic” and “Linger Longer” feel almost like notes-to-self, or repressed desires after a year-long quarantine.

On view: February 6 - March 13th, 2021

Sarah Rosalena Brady at Blum & Poe

At Blum & Poe, a solo show by Sarah Rosalena Brady explores the artist’s Huichol and Laguna Pueblo heritage alongside ideas of sci-fi futurism, AI and technology, and post-apocalyptic survival. The exhibition is part of a new gallery initiative called Galleries Curate, and was organized by Mika Yoshitake. A series of Jacquard-woven (a computer-guided loom) tapestries, features satellite imagery which maps climate and water variations on Mars. The warm colors and inviting textures of each tapestry feel at odds with the abstract yet cosmic imagery that each contains. A series of ceramic works, also made with technological aid via 3D printer, explore Indigenous coiling techniques, although their “clay material” is in fact “Enhanced Mojave Mars Simulant 2 (MMS-2)” a chemical material that is produced to mimic Martian soil. By using spiritual and traditional vessel forms and blending them with a synthetic material, Brady points us to the past while cautioning towards the future — she points to the terrors of climate change and the human impulse to ignore ancient wisdom while inventing our way out of the crisis instead of confronting it head-on.

On view: February 10–March 10, 2021