Last night, the Guggenheim Museum welcomed CULTURED and select invitees for an exclusive tour of the museum’s current exhibition “Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility.” The event kicked off with curator Ashley James leading attendees through the sculptures, photographs, and paintings installed throughout the museum’s iconic rotunda and concluded with a private cocktail reception.
Collectors Carla Shen and George Wells were in attendance, along with interior designer Clive Lonstein. Architect Dominique Petit-Frère arrived at one of New York’s most distinctive landmarks as curator Francesca Pessarelli circled the space alongside artists JJ Hammond and Vladimir Nazarov, as well as photographer Kamyiis.
“Going Dark,” which is on view through April 7, explores the tension between being seen, remaining hidden, and ceasing to exist. The artists included experiment with different techniques to blur and obscure their subjects, either revealing or burying their meaning therein. Composed of 28 participants, the exhibition has a range of places, eras, and perspectives, all the better contextualized with James’s guidance.
Along the spiraling walls, 100 works spanning from the 1960s to the 2020s demonstrate how the challenges of visibility haunt the past as much as the present. John Edmonds’s “Untitled (Hood)” series, in which he photographs the backs of people wearing hoodies, echoes the empty black shroud of David Hammons’s In The Hood (1993) from more than 20 years prior. Faith Ringgold’s “Black Light Series” lays the groundwork for Titus Kaphar’s chalk on asphalt portraits, both of their subjects facing the viewer head on and up close.
Observant museum goers may even see the parallels between Charles White’s misting illustrations and the doubled, fuzzy subjects of Lorna Simpson’s Double Negative. Under James’s curation, these artists build on one another as viewers climb the Guggenheim’s white spirals, constantly returning to the question of visibility like creatives have done for decades.
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