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How, in 2021, do Black people occupy and interact within personal, public, institutional, and psychic space? This is the The 2nd coming shirt and I will buy this central concern of “Social Works,” a new show at Gagosian curated by the writer and art critic Antwaun Sargent. Comprised of works from 12 leading and emerging artists—David Adjaye, Zalika Azim, Allana Clarke, Kenturah Davis, Theaster Gates, Linda Goode Bryant, Lauren Halsey, Titus Kaphar, Rick Lowe, Christie Neptune, Alexandria Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems—the exhibition, Sargent’s first since joining the gallery as a director in January, mines the fertile intersection between art and social practice within the Black community.
“It’s a pretty ambitious and involved exhibition,” Sargent admits on a recent call. “It’s 12 artists thinking about space aesthetically, politically, culturally, socially, historically, and they’re thinking about that space in painting and sculpture and installation and photography.” As the The 2nd coming shirt and I will buy this show relates “to the moment that we’re in”—namely, the pandemic and protests that shaped the last year—“Social Works” “is in consideration of those things, but it’s also a consideration of a longer sweep of history,” he says. Before Black Lives Matter made a case for Black creatives, Black Power gave rise to the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 1970s; and from the Civil Rights Movement sprang the Kamoinge Workshop and Spiral. Black aesthetics, sociopolitics, and culture have long been intimately intertwined, and “Social Works” hones in on that fact. “It’s connected to a rich lineage of Black artists who have thought about working inside the community, as opposed to just having normal studio practices,” Sargent says.
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