London's White Cube shows 'fresh and new' art at first New York gallery
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
The London-based White Cube gallery has opened a space in New York. The subversive inaugural exhibit, "Chopped & Screwed," takes its name from the 1990s Houston hip-hop scene.
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NOTORIUS B I G: If you don't know, now you know.
FADEL: White Cube's U.S. senior director, Courtney Willis Blair, listened to this music while preparing the exhibition.
COURTNEY WILLIS BLAIR: And I realized that this framework around experimentation and distortion was incredibly crucial to some of the practices that these artists had.
FADEL: NPR's Olivia Hampton spoke with her and brings us this report.
OLIVIA HAMPTON, BYLINE: The four-story brick building was once a bank. It's been completely gutted to make room for light and more light.
WILLIS BLAIR: It's key to viewing the works.
HAMPTON: Willis Blair walked through the space as guests arrived for a sneak preview.
WILLIS BLAIR: It's important that what we do bring to New York is something that is fresh and new and that we're able to carve a space out for ourselves not only in the work that we show, but also the dialogues and the conversations that we're able to have.
HAMPTON: The kind of conversation triggered by Theaster Gates' "Civil Color Spectrum." Flattened fire hoses form a thick canvas 9 feet wide by 7 feet tall, shifting from red to orange to yellow.
WILLIS BLAIR: Theaster is really thinking about the 1963 demonstrations protesting some of the Klan bombings and fires and the police who subsequently did this really violent act by spraying them with fire hoses and injuring children and men and women. He's rendered this tool of violence sort of useless but also points to this really powerful moment in our history.
HAMPTON: We headed upstairs to find "Skunk" by Ethiopian American artist Julie Mehretu. Densely layered blue, black and red streaks swirl across the canvas in a kind of haze.
WILLIS BLAIR: It's really a collage of images. She made this painting for this show thinking about this understanding of chopped and screwed.
HAMPTON: White Cube cut its teeth in London 30 years ago by showcasing the often-irreverent Young British Artists movement that it helped shape. Today, the gallery has grown with sister spaces across London and in Paris, Hong Kong and Seoul. So what might you expect when you push open that glass entrance door on Madison Avenue?
WILLIS BLAIR: World-class art. They can expect to walk into those doors and be transformed.
HAMPTON: The gallery prides itself on being artist led. This next stage in New York involves artists like Ilana Savdie. She's 37 and grew up in the U.S. and Colombia.
ILANA SAVDIE: Well, it meant the world to me to have a gallery like White Cube with the history that White Cube has to be invested in what I had to say, to offer me a platform to say it in the way that I wanted to say it without limiting my voice.
HAMPTON: I caught up with Savdie at night at White Cube's launch event in a huge French Renaissance-style mansion nearby. We searched out a quiet corner to speak about her drawings and vibrantly colored paintings whose lines hint at a breast or teeth, peaks and valleys.
SAVDIE: To be shown within that context as a sort of peer of that art history allows you as an artist to contribute your voice to that history of art.
HAMPTON: On the floors above us, the glitterati of the art, music and fashion worlds converged in a Gilded Age decor dancing the night away.
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