Star-Studded Opening for Gagosian’s LA Basquiat Show
Almost 42 years after Jean-Michel Basquiat’s first exhibition in Los Angeles, at Gagosian, the gallery is staging a new exhibition, Made on Market Street, featuring work that Basquiat produced in Los Angeles. The Beverly Hills exhibition, which is on view through June 1, brings together roughly thirty paintings celebrating the New York artist’s stint in Venice, California between November 1982 and May 1984. This includes Hollywood Africans (pictured above), Horn Players, Museum Security (Hollywood Meltdown), Luna Park, and Year of the Boar. It’s the first time these works have been reunited since the original show from 1982, and given the timing of the March 7 opening, just a couple of days before the Oscars, the gallery was packed with Oscar-goers. Academy-award nominee Jeffrey Wright (who played Basquiat in Julian Schnabel’s biopic Basquiat) made an appearance, in addition to Melanie Griffith, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jane Fonda, and Chris Rock.
Keith Piper’s Commission at Tate Britain Unveiled
Tate Britain has installed a new video work by artist Keith Piper in the room which once housed the museum’s upscale restaurant. The 22-minute piece was commissioned in response to outcry over a 55-foot mural painted onto the room’s walls in 1927. The work in question, “The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats," by Rex Whistler, illustrates a hunting party and depicts the kidnapping and enslavement of a child. Rather than cover up the work, the founder of Blk Art Group settled on a different route when it came to the two-screen exhibit entitled “Vice Voce, ”telling The New York Times, “by leaving it up, it becomes an important witness to history, and by countering it, we learn things and we hear things, that we may not have heard before,” and that “that’s the important role of the arts.”
