Noah Jemisin: Then and Now, 1974-Present

Press Release

Steal-Away-1990-Encaustic-on-canvas-66×54-inches

Skoto Gallery is pleased to present Then and Now: 1974-Present, an exhibition of selected works by the African-American artist Noah Jemisin. This will be his third solo show at the gallery. The reception is Thursday, October 13, 6-8pm and the artist will be present.

Noah Jemisin was born in Birmingham, AL and obtained an MFA degree from University of Iowa in 1974. His extensive travels in Africa, Europe and Asia over the years have helped him to develop an approach to life and art that enables him to synthesize into a distinct and dynamic whole the various components of his identity and create work that strive to make meaning of his personal history as well as the ambiguities and contradictions of contemporary culture. There is a great deal of critical experience, of knowledge and intuition in his work as well as an ever sensitive deftly balanced interaction between modernism’s formal concerns with a belief in the emotive potential of painting. Performance art, spectacle, theatre, music, dance and masquerade are influences and artistic manifestation that run parallel to his creative vision as an artist. And as aptly noted by the artist “I am trying to break the rules and boundaries and establish my own limits. I am not concerned with atmosphere or linear perspective, not with western or eastern art ideas. I am pushing to develop my own conception of reality from scratch.”

Jemisin’s work reflects total control of the material he uses which makes possible an intimate integration of vision and matter. He exploits the fissure between abstraction and figuration, employing strategies that grasp notions of artworks as conceptual totalities, multivalent narratives crafted from a variety of approaches that reflect subtle understanding of context. The textural and color possibilities inherent in his mastery of the encaustic technique as well as the watercolor and gouache mediums – with the free-flowing capriciousness of water, much like hot wax – combined with an open-ended improvisational sensibility and awareness of the crucial links between culture, politics and social agency allow for his ability to make paintings that are original, inventive and full of new meanings. The gradual, deliberate evolution of the artist’s works from the 1970s through the present becomes evident in the strong body of work included in this exhibition, a testament to his uncanny ability to focus on a given theme and generate a cohesive and vigorous body of work, a veritable product of intense and deep reflection.

He is included in the highly anticipated exhibition Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces, Museum of Modern Art, (MoMA), New York; October 9, 2022 – February 18, 2023. JAM was an art gallery that fore-grounded African-American artists and artists of color in New York City from 1974 until 1986. Upcoming shows include “Back to B’ham”, a survey exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL.; Spring, 2024. He is represented in numerous public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum, New York, the Library of Congress, Washington DC, The Museum of Art at the University of Iowa, Montclair Museum of Art, Museum of Santa Fe, New Mexico and the Miami-Dade Public Library, Florida. Awards include New York Foundation for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, a travel grant from Arts International, Artist in Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem and The Bronx River Art Gallery, Bronx, New York.

This exhibition coincides with and celebrates the upcoming exhibition “Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), October 9, 2022 – February 18, 2023, Curator: Thomas (T.) Jean Lax. Founded in New York City from 1974-1986 by Linda Goode Bryant as a self-declared laboratory for experimentation, JAM Gallery encouraged artists and visitors to challenge hierarchies within the art world and definitions of what art should be.