John Outterbridge Exhibition
Tilton Gallery
This event has ended.
Tilton Gallery presents an exhibition of sculpture by Los Angeles based assemblage artist John Outterbridge. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition at the Tilton Gallery and his first solo exhibition in New York.
Born in 1933, Outterbridge is a seminal figure in the Los Angeles assemblage movement of the 1960s and 70s, particularly within the African-American community of Watts and Compton. Serving for years as a Director of Watts Tower Museum, Outterbridge was crucial as a teacher and mentor to countless artists in Los Angeles, including David Hammons, Betye Saar, John Riddle and Noah Purifoy. Searching for a new visual language to represent the African-American experience, Outterbridge drew on assemblage, folk art, African sculpture and community activism. Throughout his long career, Outterbridge has created profoundly poetic work from the basest of found objects, the discarded materials of American society – trash, rubber, burlap, nails, broken glass, rusted steel and hair.
The works for this exhibition are inspired by the traditional folk medicine Asafedita bags his grandmother made for him as a child. Mixing garlic, spices and other herbs into small, beadlike pouches, healers made hand crafted necklaces to ward of ailments and ill will. The necklaces started out pure and white and with wearing, patinaed to a beautiful earthy scented brown. To the artist, they are a spectacular manifestation of folk medicine and fashion, and hoodoo’s curative and transformative aesthetic power.
The artist’s work has recently been exhibited in The Pompidou Center’s 2006 ground-breaking exhibition, Los Angeles, 1955-1985: The Birth of an Artistic Capital.
Media
Schedule
from April 07, 2009 to May 16, 2009