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Patricia Sweetow Gallery

November 6 - December 14, 2008

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480 23rd Street Oakland, CA 94612
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Dig it! Dig it, 2008, oil, acrylic and glitter on panel
PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is pleased to present Bay Area artist David Huffman, Dig it!, paintings & drawings; and Washington DC artist Jefferson Pinder, Afro Cosmonaut/Alien (White Noise), performance video & c-prints. Exhibition dates are November 6 through December 13, 2008. The artists' reception is Thursday, November 6, from 5:30 - 7:30 pm. An illustrated catalog accompanies the exhibition of David Huffman. "Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about allegory. And history. And David Huffman. Which also means I’ve been thinking a lot about elephants and their bones, astronauts and afros, hoops and spaceships, referees and pinups, Masonic temples and chicken shacks and auction houses, about churches both as places and as a fast-food place that sells chicken. In other words, I’ve been thinking of the nomenclature of America." - Kevin Young, poet & scholar, Emory University David Huffman is referenced as an Afro Futurist artist, whose paintings are brushed and poured, combined in a swirling, sensual Rorschach, simulating an alien environment. But, like a graphic novel, Huffman’s paintings are populated with bold images of social/political sci-fi. In 1997 Huffman began working with the image of the Minstrel, which has morphed from the Blackface to Black explorers in spacesuits, referred to as Traumanauts. His protagonists, dressed as astronauts, are cast as the perpetual visitor – without home, without borders. His metaphoric story of conflict, enlightenment, fear, and resolution mines events, whether historical or contemporary, from various sources. Arnold Kemp states, "Huffman works with metaphorical figures — outta-this-world protagonists in a project of grand, speculative history. His Traumasmiles are a homeless, individually alienated people who seem like kissing cousins to the legendary Afrofuturist, Afronaut and musician George Clinton." Huffman calls his current exhibition Dig it!, with 9 paintings on view. One of the paintings, Nomenclature, depicts elephants in a meticulously painted social group, mourning over the bleached skull of a deceased elephant whose ivory tusks are missing, possibly harvested by poachers. In the background, the elephants have as company colorful pyramids, harbingers of power and hope. In the same painting Jackson Pollock passionately paints outside his studio, while a liquor store with razor wire hovers at the bottom of the paper. In a landscape of extraterrestrial terrain, these seemingly dissociated depictions are Huffman's vision of survival and hope, which often turn into nightmarish aphorisms. Arnold Kemp said it best: "Huffman’s deceptively cool graphic style is simultaneously messy and rife with angry contradiction. It swings dramatically, emotionally and entropically. In short, it’s so funky that one wonders if those black-blues represent the remains of a disastrous crude oil spill or a decidedly dark spot in Huffman’s emotional relationship to the plane of here." David Huffman's work gained national attention during the The Studio Museum in Harlem's celebrated Freestyle exhibition in 2001. Huffman was the recipient of the Artadia Foundation Award in 2001, and the Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship in 2008. In November 2008, Huffman will be a panel speaker at Transformations: New Directions in Black Art, the 3rd Annual Conference for African American Art, hosted by the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University. Exhibitions include the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and the Institute of International Visual Arts, London; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; New Langton Arts, San Francisco; Santa Monica Museum of Art; de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; The Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; and The Luggage Store, San Francisco. Huffman's work has been reviewed and written about in Frieze, Artforum, Art Papers, Flash Art, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, The International Review of African American Art, NY Arts, Art Journal, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
Dig it! MLK, 2008, acrylic, oil and glitter, black light paint, collage on canvas
Dig it! America, 2008, acrylic and glitter collage on canvas
Dig it!