Favorite Paintings at Art Basel 2023

"Nursery Rhyme" by Honore Sharrer (1971) 
Note that the fork is running away with the spoon. 

When I got back from Art Basel, people asked me what my favorite works were. The honest answer: I had no idea. With 277 participating galleries, visual overload was the order of the day. But looking back at my photos, I have some clear favorites. (FYI, you can see larger images of the pix by clicking on them.) 

In the Kabinett section of Art Basel, galleries highlight a specific artist or theme. Hirschl & Adler Modern featured the work of Honore Sharrer, an artist with whom I was not familiar. What a story she has -- and what wonderful work. 

Born in 1920, Sharrer was a young woman during WWII. Although she had attended Yale Art School and the San Francisco Art Institute, she worked as a welder during the war. (Her father was both an artist and a career military man, so she was following in his footsteps.) Her "Tribute to the American People" -- painted in 1950 -- is the best known of her works and inserts workers and other ordinary people into a five panel painting reminiscent of a work created during the Renaissance. Sharrer was a big advocate for the common man. 

In the 1950s, Sharrer and her husband were outspoken about their Communist beliefs. They were blacklisted and spent ten years in Europe and Canada before moving back to the US. Sharrer's political beliefs were strike one against the artist. Strike two was that she worked in the surrealist style at a time abstract expressionism was in favor. Strike three was the fact that she was a woman. And so, despite an auspicious beginning to her career, Sharrer and her art fell out of favor, only to be "rediscovered" after her death. To see more of Sharrer's work, click here and here. I love it. 

"Thanks" by Benny Andrews (1977)

Benny Andrews' "Thanks" grabbed my attention, and not only because the noses on this painting protrude from the canvas. There's a story behind those noses, but it's a circuitous path. 

Andrews was one of ten children born to sharecroppers. He and his siblings attended school sporadically because they had to help plant and pick the cotton. But his parents also valued education and ideas and free expression. A self-taught artist, his father in particular encouraged Benny's interest in painting. So after a stint in the Air Force, Andrews attended the Art Institute of Chicago on the GI Bill. He had never stepped foot in a museum before his first day there. 

Andrews faced discrimination when he was at the Art Institute. It wasn't, however, because he was Black. Instead, it was because he was a figurative painter at a time when abstract expressionism was the style du jour. (Yes, he and Sharrer had this in common.) Andrews began to explore different media in his work. He sometimes used paper towels to add dimension. Other times, as in "Thanks," he used fabric. His work garnered attention, and he became known in the art world. His contributions extend beyond the canvas to teaching, serving for two years as the director of Visual Arts for the National Endowment for the Arts and co-founding the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition. (The BECC came into existence in 1969 after the Met mounted an exhibit entitled "Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of America" that did not include the work of any Black artists. What?!!!)

To see more of Andrews' work, click here. While looking at his estate's website, I noticed that a permanent exhibit of Andrews' work opened this fall at the Madison-Morgan Cultural Center in Madison, Georgia where the artist grew up. A road trip is definitely in order the next time I'm in Atlanta.   

"jvc rc-550 (amauta)" by william cordova (2022-23)

I suspect you might shake your head at "jvc rc-550 (amauta)" by william cordova, but it's an image I kept coming back to when I looked through my pictures. I am taken by the juxtaposition of the boombox with the gold leaf. Perhaps it's an elevation of every day life? Nope. That's way too pedestrian a meaning for cordova. 

I should have looked up the meaning of "amauta" before hazarding my guess. "Amauta" is the Quechuan word meaning master or wise one. (cordova was born in Peru, one of the homes to the Quechuan people.) This collage is from a series of 12 works depicting boomboxes from the 1970s and '80s. The explanation of the series on Artsy says, in part, "Named in the parenthesized subtitle of each collage, the spiritual envoys of cordova's boomboxes reference figures from Yoruban and Andean spiritualities, voudou and Indigenous Incan history. For cordova, boomboxes take on the role of the divine vessels, orating revolutionary sounds and disruptive energies." Hmm. It would be interesting to dig into that meaning, but I'll leave that for another day. For more of cordova's work, click here. 

"A Knowledge Becoming" by Phoebe Boswell (2023)

Speaking of leaving, I'll end this post with "A Knowledge Becoming" by Phoebe Boswell. Boswell is one of those ridiculously talented artists who creates across a wide variety of mediums, including drawing, animation, performance and chorality. (The last is a new word for me and seems to mean voices coming together for a social purpose rather than "just" to create beautiful music.) 

Wentrup, the gallery that represents Boswell, describes her current series of pastel paintings as an exploration of "the dichotomy of water, where histories of migration, both traumatic and liberating, exist within the ebb and flow, surge and swell of the ocean." Of course, I didn't have that description at hand when the painting captured my attention in the midst of the chaos of the convention center. What struck me about the work was the beautiful way she captured the grime of the tee shirt, its contrast with the dark skin of the wearer and, of course, the fact that the man's head is cut off. His identity doesn't seem to be important. Instead, he is a stand in for every person caught in this liminal space. It's an image that's both beautiful and haunting. For more of Boswell's work, click here. 

Not surprisingly, there were many more paintings I'd like to share, but it's time to move on to some of the sculptures at this year's Art Basel. Stay tuned -- and happy holidays!