GREEN FAMILY ART FOUNDATION

Rupture & Connection
Curated by Christopher Y. Lew

June 8 – September 22, 2024

The Green Family Art Foundation is pleased to present Rupture & Connection, curated by Christopher Y. Lew, opening June 8, 2024, and remaining on view until September 22, 2024. Please join the Green Family Art Foundation for the opening reception of Rupture & Connection on Saturday, June 8, from 5 to 8 pm at 2111 Flora Street, Suite 110, Dallas, TX 75201. The opening reception is free and open to the public, no RSVP required. Complimentary valet parking and refreshments will be provided.

Rupture & Connection brings together an intergenerational group of artists to examine the overlapping concerns of place, emigration, and legacy. With works drawn primarily from the Green Family Collection, the exhibition is inspired by the work of Martinique-born philosopher, poet, and writer Édouard Glissant. Articulating a system of relations that acknowledges the opacity of the individual and the multiplicity of identity, Glissant wrote of an “aesthetics of rupture and connection” uncircumscribed by geopolitical boundaries and filiation. He argues that identity is relational, ever in flux and unfixed.

The exhibition centers Glissant’s ideas by presenting Manthia Diawara’s fifty-minute film Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation (2010), for which the filmmaker and writer interviewed Glissant while traveling aboard the Queen Mary II as the ocean liner crossed the Atlantic for New York. The philosopher speaks about many of the concepts he developed over his lifetime regarding identity, creolization, the relationship between self and other, history, and the so-called “New World.” Glissant’s fresh view of humanism and a form of globalism separate from neoliberalism provides a rich context for the work of Frank Bowling and David Diao, who are both central the exhibition. As two artists who arrived to New York in the wake of Abstract Expressionism, both investigated the legacy of Modernist painting and the diasporic condition. For both painters, the specificity of place and history is as important as preventing personal biography from overdetermining their practices.

The remainder of the exhibition draws out related themes primarily through a younger generation of artists. The notion of home and its memory is reflected in paintings and sculptures by artists such as Etel Adnan, El Anatsui, and Kevin Beasley. Works by Matthew Angelo Harrison, Simone Leigh, Ilana Savdie, Carlos Villa, and others suggest new legacies, inheritances, and creative dialogues-connecting not just individual artists across time but entangling diverse practices to comprise an expanded artistic canon. As a whole, the exhibition sets movement and belonging into productive tension in which one does not preclude the other.

Featured artists: Pacita Abad, Etel Adnan, Alia Ahmad, El Anatsui, Kevin Beasley, Frank Bowling, Mark Bradford, Beauford Delaney, David Diao, Manthia Diawara, Ficre Ghebreyesus, Lauren Halsey, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Simone Leigh, Chris Ofili, Eamon Ore-Giron, Daisy Parris, Kikuo Saito, Ilana Savdie, Alma Thomas, Carlos Villa.

Rupture & Connection is organized by Christopher Y. Lew.

About Christopher Y. Lew

Christopher Y. Lew is founder of C/O: Curatorial Office, a curatorial consulting firm. Lew has over fifteen years of experience working at American museums and arts nonprofits. He was the founding Chief Artistic Director at Horizon Art Foundation and Outland Art and is a former curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he oversaw the emerging artist program and co-curated the 2017 Whitney Biennial. At the Whitney, he organized numerous exhibitions including Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century (2023), Salman Toor: How Will I Know (2020), Pope.L: Choir (2019), Kevin Beasley: A view of a landscape (2018), Eckhaus Latta: Possessed (2018), and the first US solo exhibitions for Sophia Al-Maria, Rachel Rose, and Jared Madere. Prior to joining the Whitney, he served as assistant curator at MoMA PS1 and organized many exhibitions there. Lew has contributed to several publications including ArtAsiaPacific, Art in America, Art Journal, Bomb, and Mousse.