Impressions from South Africa

I found South Africa to be a strange place: caught between a painful past and an awkward present, and not knowing what to do with itself, kind of like the Deep South. My memories of Cape Town are multi-layered: on one layer, thrilling, because of the sheer beauty and randomness of the city, and on another, unsettling, because of the segregation that was everywhere I turned. Black artists living in South Africa under Apartheid faced endless hurdles. But they somehow managed to thrive through underground and alternative art studios and print workshops.

In two weeks, the exhibit “Impressions from South Africa” will open at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The show is a collection of over 100 posters, wall stencils, and books that display the huge range of printmaking done by artists during and after Apartheid. These prints, products of periods of repression and upheaval, reflect both the personal and political longings of the diverse printmakers. And they also reflect the New South Africa, still unsure of what it wants to be.

Photo via MoMA

Making Mexican History at MOMA

For the first time since the late, famed painter and muralist Diego Rivera, a Mexican artist has a career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art: the widely praised and enthralling Gabriel Orozco. Orozco’s mid-career retrospective examines two decades of Orozco’s work in an exhibition of some 80 pieces, revealing how the artist jumps among drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, and painting and focuses on everyday, little-noticed objects. Since the early 1990s, Orozco has become one of the leading artists of his generation because of innovative works like La D.S. and Ping Pond Table.

Despite the abundance of acclaimed contemporary Mexican art, the most popular art auction sellers at Sotheby’s and Christie’s remain Rivera, Frida Kahlo and other deceased muralists, as I say in this story for Newsweek. But Orozco’s show will be on view through March 1, 2010.

Photo via Hemispheres Magazine