Artists Year in Review: Where We Go From Here is Onward
By taking time to connect with each other around ideas and work that have meaning, joy and importance, this year we reached a few milestones. Commissioner turned three, and in October, through the support of our partners and of new and returning members—over 150 of them!—we commissioned our 15th artist since launching in fall 2018.
It’s the people, connection and the general baddasserie that has come from building the Commissioner program together that really counts. We asked some of the artists that we’ve collaborated with such as A.G., Adler Guerrier, Jamilah Sabur, Susan Lee-Chun, GeoVanna Gonzalez, misael soto and Kelly Breez about the reality of creating in 2020, and what they’re looking forward to in the new year. Continue to follow their journey, explore the work, introduce yourself and support.
As the quarantine began, multidisciplinary artist A.G. turned to painting as a form of relief from the anxiety and uncertainty of the times. Altering appropriated imagery to create a sort of "coloring book for adults".
A.G. either pulled or assembled images from sources which functioned, mostly from the mid-century, as an early form of show business. Often exposed to us as children, these visuals provided wise and benevolent lessons. Zoomed in on as an adult, they bridge the mind-body connection in the labor of the work. More on this new collection presented by Primary coming soon.
Unveiled in August, Adler Guerrier’s monumental public art installation claimed for living, for love and trouble, commissioned by For Freedoms, is a call to consciousness visible at 40th Street and NE Second Avenue atop the Moore Elastika Building in the Miami Design District.
Here is a place claimed for the purpose of living, fashioned to engender love, fortified to protect its inhabitants and to withstand the spectres of trouble.
We live here.
We live informed by the poetics of immigrant culture, Caribbean tendencies, Black diasporic experience, and strengthened by the forcefulness of radical traditions that prepared us to imagine, and to claim the conditions we need to live with dignity.
Listen and learn more about the work in a talk with Adler and African Diasporic and Caribbean Art Histories expert Erica Moiah James: In Conversation: Adler Guerrier x Dr. Erica Moiah James, presented during Design Miami.
Miami-based artist Susan Lee-Chun was set to reveal her artwork for Commissioner in May. Then COVID-19 happened. We asked her to journal about her artistic practice—one that is constantly examining culture and meaning, particularly in a personal realm, and re-contextualizing how the viewer sees objects. By interrogating subject-object relationships, Susan insists upon the primacy of material culture in the politics of representation. Click here for a visual diary of her reflections during quarantine.
Current exhibitions include:
Blow Up II at Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, AL; on view through January 31, 2021
A Matter of, at Dimensions Variable, Miami, FL; on view through February 24, 2021
Marking Time: Art in the age of Mass Incarceration at MoMA PS1, NY; on view through April 4, 2021
In October, commissioned artist GeoVanna Gonzalez created a large-scale installation, a performance, and a personal-sized sculpture for each and every Collector-level member of Commissioner. Collectors were then asked to consider the performance and ideas behind the work as instructions to assemble their own variations using the pieces constructed by the artist. What would it look like to open every window to their community?
“Sabur loves words. She becomes a cosmic etymologist when she talks about them; she likes the feel of the letters, their shape, the stories they avow.”
Jamilah Sabur’s multidisciplinary work has in the past year has been exhibited at home and around the world and there’s so much more coming:
2020
The Willfulness of Objects at The Bass of Art, Miami, FL
Performa Telethon, broadcast live from Pace Gallery, NY
Mending the Sky at New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA
House to House: Women, Politics, and Place at Frost Art Museum, Miami, FL
Here Be Dragons at Copperfield, London, UK
Observations: Selected Works by Jamilah Saburr at University of Maryland Art Gallery, College Park, MD
TimeShare at Performa, New York, NY
Open Justice at University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
2021
chœur, parle à travers la vie, (film program, part of La machine qui enseignait des airs aux oiseaux) at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Canada
Here Be Dragons, a Reprise at Copperfield, London, UK
Prospect 5 New Orleans in New Orleans, LA
“After a fruitful two month residency at Fountainhead, in July I felt compelled to hit the road. What started as instinctual and somewhat impulsive melded into art practice (or was it art all along?). While in transit I started working on another Fieldwork: Dispatches—the first of which was commissioned by Commissioner back in June. This new episode is to be focused on the country's highway history and the social implications of the now failing infrastructure, what I see as perhaps the most telling of American public works projects.
I’ve also been working with customized road signs, which I've been temporarily placing on sites along the road throughout the country. As of late I’ve been traveling with seven different road signs, each becoming a research tool as they reveal circumstantial truths along the way. Related to this research I had the first portion of a road signs installation installed at Dimensions Variable in Miami, the second part of which will be installed in January 2021.
Midway geographically and chronologically, I had the privilege of taking part in Bemis Center's artist residency program from September to November. During my two months there I was able to settle and sponge the summer of research I had undertaken to that point, cement a plan for the rest of my trip (through the West and Southwest), and recalibrate without having to worry about basic needs. It was an invaluable two months within a difficult and unforgettable year.
— misael soto
Any Major Dude Will Tell You, Kelly Breez's second solo exhibition with Primary, calls to a time on hold, if not entirely lost. Through mixed media works and installation, she memorializes a cast of characters she encountered while tending bar at an old haunt. The exhibition title was borrowed from the name of a song written by Steely Dan and released on their 1974 album Pretzel Logic, with the lyrics describing one friend's attempt to lift another's spirits at a particularly low moment.
This show was inspired during Kelly’s five-week artist residency at Anderson Ranch with Oolite Arts. Coming back with a ton of ideas and then sitting in quarantine for months led her to Any Major Dude Will Tell You—a most explosive, narrative and fully immersive body of work.
I'd say the lasting impact of Commissioner has been being able to stay in touch with such an engaged group of art lovers and collectors. It really is a community within itself, not to mention getting things in the mail like postcards with works on them, and encouraging messages all year that have genuinely kept me happy in shitty times and inspired to continue working through the mess that is 2020.
Thank you for taking this leap with us. Goodbye 2020, the only way forward is onward. ❤️