North Hennepin Community College is wrapping up a celebratory gallery of retired art teacher Will Agar’s photography. The show, called, “Voyages of the Eye: A 50-Year Retrospective,” is expected to close Oct. 6.
The gallery is located in the Joseph Gazzuolo Art Gallery in the Fine Arts Center and is free and open to the community 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., Monday through Friday, and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday.
Queens, New York has hosted the World’s Fair twice: once in 1939, and then again in 1964. Now the borough is home to something else: “The World’s UnFair,” a feverish carnival of attractions that evoke the look of those old 20th-century expos—but not their nationalistic aims. New Red Order, the group of Native artists behind the public art project, has an altogether different agenda in mind: the return of all Indigenous land.
The Creative Time-presented exhibition opened this month in a raw, half-block lot that is owned by a developer, but not yet developed. In theory, that sense of provisionality teases the possibility that the site could be restituted. For now, it feels like it’s been hijacked. Wheatpaste posters styled like men’s magazine ads tote “rematriation services” on the lot’s walls. So do sandwich boards inside. Tribal flags are staked in Home Depot buckets and strung like banners at a car lot. A film, pitched like a corporate commercial, reminds us to “Never Settle.” It plays inside a sculpture that is half cheval de frise, half white picket fence, while an animatronic beaver and tree chat about settler colonialism nearby.
This is a body of work that is not afraid to hit you over the head with what it has to say, even if that means mocking pockets of its audience along the way. But the cumulative effect is powerful. It’s the most essential show in New York right now.
New Red Order, Dexter and Sinister (2023). Courtesy of New Red Order and Creative Time.
New Red Order defines itself as a “public secret society composed of networks of informants and accomplices dedicated to rechanneling desires for indigeneity towards the expansion of Indigenous futures.” If that description sounds elaborate, it’s because it was designed that way. “We don’t want to be contained to just being an art collective,” New Red Order said in a recent interview. (The three founding founders interviewed for this article—Adam and Zack Khalil, both of the Ojibway, Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, and Jackson Polys, of Tlingit heritage—prefer to be identified under the collective banner of the group.)
The language of the mission statement is also coded with New Red Order’s argot. By “informants,” it means people who share knowledge of their own communities and cultures. “Accomplices” are those who support informants. The shadowy tone of it all echoes, with knowing irony, the group’s namesake, a 19th-century white fraternity called the “Improved Order of Red Men.” (The organization, which once counted Presidents Warren Harding and Franklin Roosevelt as members, often used Native designs and rituals.)
But not all of New Red Order’s messaging is that complicated. The group’s central refrain—and the title of its main, ongoing body of work—leaves little room for misinterpretation: “Give it back.” It is both a provocation and a demand: Give back all land to the peoples who were forcibly displaced from it by colonialists. Give it back now.
Installation view of “New Red Order: The World’s UnFair,” September 15 October 15, 2023. Courtesy of New Red Order and Creative Time.
Throughout “The World’s UnFair,” you’ll find variations of that message presented through the visual language of agitprop, infographics, recruitment videos, real estate placards, and other pieces of media that, in their ordinary states, are used to sell the idea of a better life. Many of these works also feature the same recurring character, played by veteran actor—and frequent New Red Order collaborator—Jim Fletcher. He is the apparent ringmaster of this weird pageant, but also something of a mascot. The group first met the white actor after he donned Native American garb in a 2014 stage Wooster Group play called “CRY, TROJANS!” The incident stoked backlash among Native communities.
Regretful of the decision, Fletcher—who now identifies as an “accomplice” and a “Native American impersonator”—has since given himself over to a number of New Red Order projects. For a 2017 Artists Space performance conceived by the group, he stripped naked, put on a department store “Indian” costume, and apologized for his role in “CRY, TROJANS!” Even when the joke is on him, Fletcher, to his credit, is game.
“It’s Jim Fletcher playing Jim Fletcher,” New Red Order said of the layers to the actor’s performance in “The World’s UnFair,” referring to him as a proxy. “If we say ‘Give it Back,’ I worry that it gets dismissed by many people. But if a successful middle-aged non-Native performance artist says it, maybe it has a chance of making it out of the echo chamber.”
Installation view of “New Red Order: The World’s UnFair,” September 15 October 15, 2023. Courtesy of New Red Order and Creative Time.
With its puppets and punny riffs of self-help speak and jingoistic lingo, “The World’s UnFair” is very funny (one banner reads “Mission Accomplice,” referencing the infamous George W. Bush proclamation). The tone is a welcome twist on the solemnity that typically categorizes projects about indigeneity or repatriation, though it has its risks as well.
“At times, humor has been a roadblock for some people to engage, because they don’t want to be made fun of,” said the group. “We find it’s a necessary way to engage, to crack open really uncomfortable conversations in ways that don’t lead to the expected places, to keep people on their toes… so they can’t easily categorize it in ways that they already understand.”
But in putting together “The World’s UnFair,” New Red Order’s members also found themselves drawn to an earnestness that hasn’t always been present in their past work. Playing on several screens throughout the show are examples from their ongoing Give It Back series of documentary-style films highlighting people who have voluntarily repatriated land to Indigenous communities, tribes, or non-profits. Surrounded by works barbed with wit, these clips have a refreshing sincerity.
“We found a need to [lean] a little bit more toward sincerity and transparency,” New Red Order explained. “That way, the real, powerful actions that real people are taking to address settler colonialization and the ongoing occupation of Indigenous land isn’t disregarded as a fantasy or as a joke, but seen as something real.”
“New Red Order: The World’s UnFair” is on view now through October 15, 2023 at 24-17 Jackson Ave. in Long Island City, Queens.
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In the thick of winter 2021, photographer Siân Davey’s 33-year-old son proposed a family project. “Why don’t we fill our back garden with wildflowers and bees, and the people we meet over the garden wall, we’ll invite them in to be photographed by you,” he said. Davey and her four children were galvanised by the task and set about clearing the small, neglected garden of their cottage on the Dartington Estate in Devon. The resulting photographs show passers-by, friends and family — including Davey’s daughter Alice, pictured here — as they react to the profusion of flora. What we see, says Davey, is “the chemistry between humans and nature”.
That alchemy is at the heart of this year’s Prix Pictet exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, where Davey is showing alongside 11 other photographers shortlisted for the sustainability-focused award. Each entry for the SFr100,000-prize was selected for its relevance to this year’s theme: “human”. “In a world facing unprecedented challenges, from social inequality to environmental crises, it was crucial to turn the lens towards humanity itself,” says Prix Pictet’s executive director, Isabelle von Ribbentrop.
Hoda Afshar, an Iranian photographer based in Australia, is also presenting work about an emotional and spiritual relationship with the Earth. Her project, titled Speak the Wind, which featured in this magazine in 2022, explores a belief held by people in the Strait of Hormuz, off the southern coast of Iran, that the wind can come to possess a person and cause them harm.
Other photographers were interested in the precarity of children’s futures. The UK’s Vanessa Winship and New Delhi-based Gauri Gill focused on the challenges and joys experienced by schoolgirls in rural villages — in the harsh, dry landscape around the borderlands of Eastern Anatolia (for Winship) and Rajasthan (for Gill), where droughts and monsoons can change the fate of a year. They featured in the magazine in 2018 and 2019 respectively. Polish photographer Michał Łuczak and Lima-based Italian photojournalist Alessandro Cinque each chronicled the impact of mining on the people in their communities.
Here, we look at four nominated photographers offering new perspectives on the human.
Siân Davey
Devon, UK
Among the native wildflowers that Davey and her family planted in their garden — meadowsweet, wild carrot, sunflowers, poppies and cornflowers, as well as structures for clambering gourds and sweet peas — the photographer also placed chairs and chaises longues for her subjects to rest on.
Davey spent 15 years working as a psychotherapist before turning to photography, and says the garden, replete with couches, explores a similar principle: “how a space can enable someone to inhabit their true self”. Some stripped off their clothes and lay against the cool of the grass, others wandered through the flowers. “People bring in their ancestry, they bring their hopes,” says Davey, who’s still welcoming new subjects, “their lack of purpose, their longing for purpose, their grief and their profound joy”.
Michał Łuczak
Upper Silesia, Poland
Łuczak was raised in a region of southern Poland where coal has been mined for the past 200 years. “When you are born in this landscape, it’s quite normal,” he says of his relationship to the industry. But his perspective changed when earthquakes — caused by the ground adjusting to the hollow, mined-out spaces — became more regular.
“It was so frequent that I was annoyed with it,” he says with a laugh. He began to photograph other “consequences” of mining: the small lakes and rotting trees created by eroded ground, the patterns of coal dust on the skin of the miners, the crooked slant of a sinking house. The project has also become a way for Łuczak to think about his conflicted feelings around coal, “or black gold, as we call it here”. “We have to find a way to disconnect from this kind of extracting, but to remain with our tradition,” he says.
Gera Artemova
Kyiv and Cherkasy Oblast, Ukraine
Artemova began her visual diary on the morning of February 24 2022, when she was awoken by the sound of explosions in her Kyiv apartment. Russia had begun its invasion of Ukraine. The next day she moved with her family to a tiny house in a village in Cherkasy Oblast, 130km from Kyiv. She continued photographing daily life throughout the evacuation and their return to the city.
War Diary, the resulting body of work, is sequenced in diptychs: the hand of a fresco in Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv beside the hand of her son as he plays with a leaf in the village; the steam from a simmering pot next to the smoke from a bombed-out building in Kyiv. “You are cooking, and you see the beautiful light from the window and spring outside, but you can’t forget about the war and why you are there,” says Artemova. “The diptych shows both sides of this reality”.
Vasantha Yogananthan
New Orleans, US
Off the back of a grant to shoot anywhere in the US, French-Sri Lankan photographer Yogananthan decided to explore the reality of life in New Orleans almost two decades on from Hurricane Katrina. He focused his lens on the generation born in the years following the 2005 storm, spending three summer months observing a group of boys as they became teenagers. In the resulting series, titled Mystery Street, we only see children.
“It seems like the city was abandoned by others,” Yogananthan says. “I liked the idea that the children would be on their own in an urban environment that was shaped, constructed, partly destroyed by past generations.” In this photograph, taken one evening in the park as the boys played football in “the blue hour, sunset hour”, the subject is watchful, looking protectively at something outside the group. Yogananthan says, “I was feeling that in this moment there was a sense of community, and there was a sense of hope.”
Prix Pictet Human, 2023 is at the V&A’s Porter Gallery until October 22
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Lewis Rath sold totem poles, masks, and pendants at Seattle retail shops, including Pike Place, for over a year, says the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
SEATTLE — A 54-year-old pretending to be a member of the San Carlos Apache Tribe was sentenced to two years of probation and 200 hours of community service after selling fake Native American art.
Lewis Anthony Rath from Maple Falls pleaded guilty to violating the Indian Arts and Crafts Act. For over a year, Rath sold the fake art pieces to Seattle retail stores.
During sentencing, U.S. District Judge Tana Lin read aloud the letter from San Carlos Apache Tribe chairman Terry Rambler. In the letter, he underscored the harm caused to the 17,000 tribal members by Rath’s misappropriation.
In a court statement, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tate London also added, “Rath’s victims are real: they are Indian artists, many who struggle to make a living, who lost out on sales to those who seek authentic Indian artwork; and they are also consumers who were defrauded into purchasing fake Indian art.”
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the investigation began in July 2019 after a complaint was made to the Indian Arts and Crafts Board. Undercover agents were sent to the Pike Place Market gallery and bought a carved totem pole and necklace for over $1,334. Both the artist’s biography at the shop and on websites used to sell pieces claimed Rath was Native American.
Agents also recovered feathers from protected birds at Rath’s house during a federal warrant execution. He also pleaded guilty to violating the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in March 2023.
“His actions also undermine consumers’ confidence in the Indian art market in the Northwest and nationwide.” said U.S. Department of the Interior Indian Arts and Crafts Board Director Meridith Stanton in a statement, “…Mr. Rath is being held accountable and the message is clear. For those selling counterfeit Indian art and craftwork, it is important to know that wherever you are we will diligently work to find you and prosecute you under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act.”
MIAMI – A photographer captured 44 grieving mothers forever impacted by gun violence. Many of them have turned their pain into activism.
Kathy Shorr, of Brooklyn, New York, asked the group of mothers to take her to places where they felt connected to their children.
“This is a major problem. This is an epidemic and we stand here today because we know change can be made,” Shorr said.
The women’s portraits will be on exhibit in Miami’s Overtown neighborhood until November. The photos are lined up on a fence at the Theodore Gibson Park, at 350 NW 13 St.
“A child who loses a parent is called an orphan, a spouse who loses their partner is called a widow, but there is no word to describe a parent who loses their child,” Shorr said.
Tanya Fincher saw the exhibit and she was in tears. She said the mothers’ gun violence grief reminded her of her own grief after a shooting took her child’s life.
“I get emotional because I feel her pain,” Fincher said. “I am a mother. I have been there.”
For the first time in Paris, a set of 120 photographs – carefully preserved by the Estate of Sam Haskins, will be offered for auction on Friday September 29, 2023 at the Hôtel Drouot, under the hammer of Maître Alexandre Ferri, assisted by Charlotte Barthélemy , photography expert.
A particular look at women, a powerful and poetic aesthetic, an emphasis on natural beauty, timeless photography, this is how the work of Sam Haskins is defined.
Sam Haskins (1926-2009) is today considered one of the masters of artistic nude photography of the 20th century.
The sale of these vintage prints offers the opportunity to acquire photographs that marked the 1960s and 70s with the success of his works Five Girls, Cowboy Kate and Other Stories, November Girl, Haskins Posters, African Image.
These 120 photographs were selected from the prints made by Sam Haskins for his research or for his books, most of them are unpublished. They are estimated between 1,500 and 4,000 euros.
“Haskins is fully aware of the importance of the face and expression on the effect of a nude and shows the faces of his models. Smiling quietly, laughing in an exuberant joie de vivre (…), they seem totally carefree about their nudity. It seems to me that it is precisely this frankness (…) which gives Haskins’ nudes (…) their bewitching quality, this indescribable mixture of pure physical beauty, sensuality and honesty which (…) makes these women an element of nature, belonging to the universe, like a tree, the sea or the sky.”
Andreas Feininger. American Society of Magazine Photographers: 1963.
Auction
Friday September 29, 2023
Hôtel Drouot – Room 7 – 2 p.m. – 9, rue Drouot – 75009 Paris
Public exhibitions
Thursday September 28 from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.
The morning of the sale from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. Catalog and results on www.ferri-drouot.com
