October 18, 2004
Yinka Shonibare at Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia
Artforum.com has posted my brief review of the Yinka Shonibare exhibition now on view at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. It's archived at BrianSholis.com, and here's the text:
This small survey was judiciously selected: Three works sufficiently outline the boundaries of current Turner Prize nominee Yinka Shonibare's practice, and a fourth piece suggests a way to expand them—a necessary move for an artist who has recently seemed to be on autopilot. For several years Shonibare has used brightly colored and patterned African kinte cloth (originally made in Holland for Indonesians; later printed in England for West African markets) as an inspiration and medium. 100 Years, 2000, comprises one hundred small canvases on which various kinte patterns alternate with crudely painted graphic squiggles reminiscent of the 1940s moment when Surrealism was becoming Abstract Expressionism (and a host of European and American artists had a heightened interest in "primitive" African art). Characters culled from farther back in the history of European painting often populate Shonibare's sculptural tableaux. Pedagogy Boy/Boy, 2003, presents two schoolboys whose period dress is sewn from fabric featuring similar African patterns. For his collaboration with the Workshop, Shonibare printed the images and names of 1970s "Philly Sound" bands (The Intruders, The O'Jays) onto sculptures of a male and female astronaut. Its site-responsive (if not quite -specific) character brings forward by about a century Shonibare's infusion of African (and now African-American) culture into the history of "Western" achievement.
A discussion about the show with a friend summed it up pretty well. A fan of his work, she thought the show was paltry; not tending to like his art, I thought the small size worked to its advantage, eliminating redundancy. In an odd twist on my normal preferences, I tend to prefer Shonibare's non-scultpural, non-narrative works: in this exhibition, my favorite work is Dorian Gray, a suite of twelve photographs wherein the artist reenacts scenes from Oscar Wilde's book. But I digress.