Last week Paddy Johnson and I spent the most hours either of us ever had at a single art fair (except for that time in 2006 where I interviewed people at Aqua in Miami about art fairs or the time at Parker’s Box where I took confessions for 3 days). Seriously, this was the most time I’ve ever spent looking at art in a fair context, which Yelp Elite critic and Art in America editor Brian Droitcour called “Bushwick Open Studios in Times Square.” He’s not wrong, but I don’t really read it as an insult compared to corporate chill of The Armory Show or the tasteful boredom of the Independent (which I skipped out on paying $25 bucks for this year). After 8 eight hours of art-ing at Spring Break, we discussed a few of the works that resonated with the show’s theme this year, A Stranger Comes to Town, in Part II after taking a broader look at the theme, trends, and some of the Open Studios level entries in Part I.
After After the Contemporary opens Saturday January 20th from 6 - 9 pm at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles. I’m pleased to debut 120 new watercolor and acrylic paintings of Artforum ads that form a timeline of the Contemporary. The new paintings expand on the fictional retrospective look at the twenty-five-year period I developed for my 2017 solo exhibition at the Aldrich. The works are available in chronological order here or as a PDF catalog you can download here
powhida-afterafterthecontemporary
. The exhibition also includes drawings that informed the Aldrich show from 2016 that were shown in Brussels, a print of my text-based timeline “The Contemporary in Context”, and three new sculptural Artforum watercolors on paper mounted on aluminum that were recently shown at Untitled in Miami. The press release is also available as PDF here
WilliamPowida_AfterAftertheContemporary
The timeline of After the Contemporary from my 2017 show at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. The Contemporary in Context Transfer and graphite on drywall 96" x 48" 2016-17 Private collection
Back in 2015 I made a series of fonts for a show, Mediations, at Charlie James Gallery. Most of them are totally useless and poorly designed, but I’m happy to release Powhida Standard gratis and free for whatever strange and ill-conceived uses one might find for it. The font is all caps, but there are lower case and upper case characters. Feel free to download the True Type file here.