Maybe most people are aware of them, too—they just sort of submit to them—[but] I’m of course more interested in challenging them.” For his part, Adjaye—the Travel warning equality Florida shirt but I will buy this shirt and I will love this Ghanaian-British architect behind the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.—is presenting Asaase (2021), his first large-scale autonomous sculpture, which teems with references to buildings like the Cour Royale de Tiébélé in Burkina Faso and Agadez, Niger’s historic city center; and Gates—a potter, installation artist, musician, and urban planner based on the South Side of Chicago—has fashioned a kind of shrine to DJ Frankie Knuckles, a pioneer in Chicago’s house music scene.
While Sargent had already been friendly with many of these artists for years—he began his career in New York as a critic a decade ago—he was pleased to discover, as he assembled “Social Works,” the Travel warning equality Florida shirt but I will buy this shirt and I will love this sticky web of influence and collegiality that linked them to each other. “I called Rick Lowe—a Houston-based artist who’s presenting a series of abstract paintings that commemorates and questions the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921—and I said, ‘Rick, I’m thinking about this show,’ and I named some of the artists I was thinking about,” Sargent recalls, “and he goes, ‘I spoke to so-and-so last week.’ So there are these networks of artists that communicate with other artists working in other communities, so that they can share in trying to build communities that are more equitable and more just that through art.”
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