Steven Evans, Jenny Holzer, Glenn Ligon, Marlene McCarty, Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, Gran Fury
In a Few Words
January 24–February 23, 2019

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present In a Few Words, a group exhibition of text-based works on view in the back galleries from January 24 through February 23, 2019.

In a Few Words reflects on the text-based strategies used by artists for social commentary and political activism in the 1980s and 90s. Language and text have been employed by artists since the early 20th century, growing in prominence in the conceptual based practices in the 1960s and 70s. But it was in the 1980s that text became more widely used by a diverse group of artists, often to make bold social or political statements. In A Few Words features examples of such work by artists Steven Evans, Jenny Holzer, Glenn Ligon, Marlene McCarty, Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, and the art collective Gran Fury.

Steven Evans’ Song Title series presents the titles and lyrics to popular dance songs in a vivid array of vinyl lettering, latex paint, and neon signs. The work considers the layers of memory, history, and identity built around the songs, and how their isolated words can be reappropriated into the rhetoric of resistance.

Jenny Holzer’s conceptual art practice centers around the use of the textual narrative within the public dimension. In her Plaques series, the artist appropriates the honorific form of the cast bronze plaque to frame her texts—inconclusive, prophetic observations on the anxieties, injustices, and ironies of everyday life. Holzer’s Plaques prompt viewers to consider how authority—of those who installed the work, and those who view it—is exerted through a permanent, public text.

Glenn Ligon’s work mines the ambiguities of language in its consideration of race, representation, and American history. In his text based works, the artist positions himself as an outward observer, reading into the cultural and political landscape of America’s past and present. Condition Report (2000) is a reference to two distinct moments in time—the original usage of the phrase as a protest sign for the 1968 sanitation workers strike in Memphis, and the condition report for Ligon’s painted reconstruction of the sign from 1998. The indexical descriptions reported—“hairline cracks; brown drips; dark smudge”—render the surface of the work as physical and insistently present as the bodies it historically stood for.

Marlene McCarty’s provacative exploration of gender, sexuality, and language has been expanding since her involvement in the activist art collective Gran Fury in the mid-1980s. UNTITLED (1990) and Election Year Coffee (1992) apply the confrontational tone of her previous works with Gran Fury onto surfaces more contained, more focused and oblique in their accusation. The unspecified identities of “you” and “I” remain ambiguous, revealing little else than the universal speaker’s desire to confront and engage the viewer.

Lorna Simpson’s influential approach to conceptual photography is largely concerned with representing the position of Black women in contemporary American society. Like many of her photographic works, Untitled (A lie is not a shelter), 1989, obscures the woman’s face, instead centering the viewer’s gaze on her gown-covered torso and the text emblazoned across it. Produced for the San Francisco Art Against AIDS Project and exhibited publicly in bus stops throughout the city, the text determinedly confronts the lies and false narratives perpetuated in the neglect of the health of Black women in America.

Kara Walker is best known for her candid investigation of race, gender, sexuality, and violence through the silhouetted medium. Yet in Walker’s monumental text Letter from a Black Girl (1998), the physical body of remains invisible and disconnected from the external voice. Instead, the accusatory narrative serves as its own deconstruction and reconstruction of the Black body and every violent fantasy imposed upon it, making and unmaking itself through its own words.

Activist art collective Gran Fury created RIOT (1989)—a study for which is presented in the current exhibition—in dialogue with fellow art collective General Idea’s 1987 AIDS silkscreen. Both adapted the composition from Robert Indiana’s 1966 LOVE silkscreen, replacing his stacked-four letter words with their own. While General Idea was interested in the transmutability of a word and concept through repeated exposure—paralleling the growing epidemic itself—Gran Fury’s RIOT instead explored the public consumption of agitprop as a catalyst for anger and direct action.

Multimedia artist Steven Evans (b. 1961, Key West, Florida) was primarily active from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, recently reemerging in 2013. He works across a wide variety of media, including photography, sculpture, and painting. He currently serves as Executive Director of FotoFest International in Houston. His work was recently included in exhibitions at CAM Raleigh and the Spiritmuseum, Stockholm.

Marlene McCarty (b. 1957, Lexington, Kentucky) has worked across various media since the 1980s. She was a member of the AIDS activist collective Gran Fury and was the co-founder of the transdisciplinary design studio Bureau with Donald Moffett. She studied at the University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, and Art (1975-77) and Schule für Gestaltung, Basel (1978-83). A major survey of her work, Hard-Keepers, was presented at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin in 2013.

Jenny Holzer (b. 1950, Gallipolis, Ohio) has been presenting her textual works to the public for over forty years. She received her BFA from Ohio University (1972), and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (1977). Holzer’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1989); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2008); Haus der Kunst, Munich (1993); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2009); and the exhibition Artist Rooms, currently on view at Tate Modern through July 2019.

Glenn Ligon (b. 1960, Bronx, New York)) lives and works in New York. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University in 1982, and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1985. A mid-career retrospective of Ligon’s work, Glenn Ligon: America, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in March 2011 and traveled nationally. His work is held in museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art; Tate Gallery, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Lorna Simpson (b. 1960, Brooklyn, New York) emerged as a pioneer of conceptual photography in the mid-1980s. She received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York (1983), and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego (1985). Her works are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Haus der Kunst, Munich, among others.

Kara Walker (b. 1969, Stockton, California) received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art (1991) and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (1994). She was awarded the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award in 1997. Her work can be found in collections worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Tate Gallery, London; and the Museum Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo (MAXXI), Rome. Walker currently lives and works in New York and serves as the Tepper Chair in the Visual Arts at Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts.

The eleven-person artist collective Gran Fury emerged in the late 1980s from the HIV/AIDS activist group, ACT-UP. The group employed the interventionist tactics of ACT-UP into the dissemination of their graphics, injecting activist messages into the public consciousness through mass advertisements, flyers, posters, and apparel. Gran Fury released their final piece “Good Luck…Miss You” in 1995, reflecting on shifting trends in HIV/AIDS activism.

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