WHAT IT MEANS TO DREAM AVANT-GARDE

To Dream Avant-Garde acknowledges the artistic innovators of today — those who push the cultural status quo in their work.

Sarah Rose Sharp

To Dream Avant-Garde at Hammond Harkins, installation view (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

COLUMBUS, Ohio — There are at least two schools of thought around notions of the avant-garde. One defines it narrowly as linked to the period of modernism in contemporary art, from the late 19th century into the mid-20th century, while another associates it more broadly by the earmark of vanguardism — that is to say, a tendency to push the cultural status quo. Put another way: one version casts the avant-garde as a fixed canon, to which entry is permanently closed. The other considers it a kind of ongoing party, which any like-minded and counter-cultural artist may join.

As a number of the artists participating in To Dream Avant-Garde, curated by Alteronce Gumby at Hammond Harkins Galleries, are engaged in rather exciting and extremely current practices, we can assume the avant-garde in this case represents the latter view, rather than the former. The show includes work by young guns like Aaron Fowler and Tariku Shiferaw, as well as that of long-established practitioners like Faith Ringgold, who grew up in Harlem on the heels of the Harlem Renaissance — the centennial of which is being celebrated citywide in Columbus this year. To Dream Avant-Garde is Hammond Harkins’s piece of dedicated programming within I, Too Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100, and unsurprisingly, every featured artist and participant is reflective of the collective flourishing of artists of color in the mainstream, due in part to the influence of that movement.

“As an acknowledgment to those innovators, who were also dreamers of an American identity and country to call their own,” wrote Gumby in his curatorial statement, “the artists in this exhibition display a survey of ideas, intention and materials that invoke the legacy and culture of Harlem.”

Through a series of eclectic choices, Gumby extends his cohort beyond a sense of kinship — which is ultimately a compulsory kind of relationship — into an air of riffing and conversation more characteristic of friendship. From Lucia Hierro’s digital print collages mounted on felt pillow-like canvases that were expressly forbidden from being hung on walls, to a partition by Eric N. Mack, comprised of pegboard panels embellished with rope and acrylic, to a series of hanging blown-glass ornaments containing evocative hand-stitched iconography by Leslie Jimenez, and Tschabalala Self’s loose, figurative study of cans of incense, there is a feel of abstraction on the edges of everyday objects. This kind of culture-bending is, arguably, owed its own chapter within the mapping of the avant-garde, a kind of remaking and customization of Duchampian readymades; a different approach to cultivating the stuff of life to the stuff of art…………….

https://hyperallergic.com/470398/to-dream-avant-garde-hammond-harkins-galleries/