Alternating Currents: Curated by Niama Safia Sandy

Fridman Gallery is pleased to announce Alternating Currents, an exhibition of new works by 12 emerging and mid-career artists. The exhibition reveals a pursuit of a sense of connection to something larger — to history, to cultural heritage, to traditional notions of artmaking — and sometimes a desire to break from it.

Curated by Niama Safia Sandy, the exhibition explores recent breakthroughs of the artists’ respective practices over the last year-and-a-half. The pandemic shifted our understanding of our concept of time, ourselves, our place in the world and the systems we have built as vehicles to navigate it all. The works demonstrate not only the artists’ intense relationship to their practice, but also their own radical self-exploration and acceptance of themselves as agents of change in the world during this time of immense shifting and reflection.

Allana Clarke’s sculptures, made with hair bonding glue, explore her complicated relationship with her hair and the normative rituals and processes used to “manage” Black hair and thus bodies in the world. Similarly, investigating notions of adornment, Ashanté Kindle’s enveloping and sinuous paintings are a bridge into the visual language and lineage of Black hair as a gateway toward representation and beauty. Adama Delphine Fawundu’s immersive video installation builds on her practice of reframing Black and gendered bodies toward full expressions of the embodiment of freedom. Rob Redding’s radiant smear paintings are a formal engagement with material, and an unapologetic declaration of freedom and power.

Evan Paul English’s energetic and sprawling paintings excavate gender, class, sexuality and ask the viewers to reconsider and rescind the boundaries between object, space, and themselves. Kearra Amaya Gopee‘s video work provides a strategy to reconnect to our personal power and “the intuitive knowledges that have been historically cast aside in favour of Western assimilation.” Hong Kong–born Hiu Ching Leung’s monumental painting explores identity and the historical tensions on the socio-political landscape of China through color, material, and fragmentation. Basil Kincaid’s collage is a meditation on the artist’s journey of breaking out of tightly constructed, prescribed gender identities to the freedom of understanding and ultimately accepting all aspects of himself. Marcelo Eli Sarmiento’s mythological figuration is an exercise in contemplation and canon-breaking toward establishing the fullness of his own voice and hand.

Yashua Klos’ monumental mixed media print negotiates his connection to the resilience of both his paternal relatives and his artistic lineage through the scale, texture and physicality of woodblock. Nyugen Smith’s sound installation taps into the power and emotional resonance of the rhythms of a Black Atlantic world reflecting on the past with a focus on wayfinding toward the future. Khari Turner’s water-based painting draws from coastal regions of West Africa and the United States to represent the elegance, chaos, and spiritual richness of Black life.

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Niama Safia Sandy is a New York–based cultural anthropologist, curator, producer, and multidisciplinary artist. Her creative practice delves into the human story through the application and critical lenses of culture, healing, history, migration, music, race, and ritual. Sandy is a co-founder of The Blacksmiths, a coalition forging support for Black liberation against anti-Black racism and its manifestations in the academy and at cultural institutions on the global stage. She is also an active member of Resistance Revival Chorus and Wide Awakes. Sandy is the inaugural Curator-and-Writer-in-Residence at Fridman Gallery.