Lamar Peterson “A Self-Portrait”

Fredericks & Freiser Gallery

This event has ended.

Fredericks & Freiser presents an exhibition of new paintings by Lamar Peterson. For over 15 years, Peterson has painted a wide range of subjects from cartoon landscapes populated by African American suburbanites to surreal portraits of Michael Jackson. The artist has collaged tatters into representations of faces and employed colorful party streamers as framing devices. Within all his various constructions, Peterson continually evokes a transformation or disfiguration as he depicts young African American men and women in our current culture.

In A Self-Portrait, Peterson presents a group of work that combine to reflect a persistent state of turmoil in the artist’s mind over the past two years. While each work is slightly different in style, they accumulate to become a single metaphor for black male identity in today’s world. Peterson strikes an elegiac tone in several works in which flower vases flank representations of young black men, one of whom has just been stung by a bee. Black outlining is also prevalent. Though here, it serves to interrupt rather than further the narrative structure. Other works are quasi-abstract; while still figurative, their simplified forms are pared down to raw emotion suggesting elements of strength, violence, and vulnerability.

Lamar Peterson (born 1974 in St. Petersburg, Florida) received his MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2001. He has had previous solo exhibitions at The Studio Museum of Harlem, New York; Rochester Arts Center, Minnesota; Orlando Museum of Art, Florida; University Art Museum at SUNY, Albany; Deitch Projects, New York; and Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis, MN. He has exhibited in numerous group shows including the Fifth International SITE Santa Fe Biennial 2004, Santa Fe, NM; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; The Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; and the Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY. Most recently he was included in Black Pulp curated by William Villalongo and Mark Thomas Gibson at the IPCNY, New York and Yale University Art Gallery. Peterson is Assistant Professor of Drawing & Painting at the University of Minnesota. This is his sixth solo exhibition with Fredericks & Freiser.