Jinny Yu’s Panel 61

The story of migration is ongoing. In the final, 60th panel of The Migration Series, Jacob Lawrence leaves us with the words “And the migrants keep coming.” The Phillips has invited contemporary artists to continue Jacob Lawrence’s work. Check the recently launched Jacob Lawrence website for additional works to be unveiled in this dynamic curated selection, or contribute your own #Panel61.

jinny-yu_dont-they-ever-stop-migrating

Jinny Yu, Don’t They Ever Stop Migrating?, 2015. Ink on fabric and sound, installation at Oratorio di San Ludovico, Nuova Icona, Venice, Italy

Jinny Yu, Don’t They Ever Stop Migrating?

Jinny Yu’s work challenges the materials and formats of painting. Her work grows out of an inquiry into the medium of painting, as a means of trying to understand the world around us. Denaturalizing the medium of oil on canvas and questioning its authority, her most recent work Don’t They Ever Stop Migrating? is a reflection upon both painting and migration, attempting to grasp the fear that host populations feel about migrants. Her work both seeks to understand that sentiment and also to bring us back to the human.

Kerry James Marshall’s Panel 61

The story of migration is ongoing. In the final, 60th panel of The Migration Series, Jacob Lawrence leaves us with the words “And the migrants keep coming.” The Phillips has invited contemporary artists to continue Jacob Lawrence’s work. Check the recently launched Jacob Lawrence website for additional works to be unveiled in this dynamic curated selection, or contribute your own #Panel61.

kerry-james-marshall_great-america

Kerry James Marshall, Great America, 1994. Acrylic and collage on canvas, 103 x 114 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Collectors Committee © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Kerry James Marshall, Great America

Great America is contemporaneous with Marshall’s well-known Garden Project (1994–95), a series of paintings based on housing projects with “gardens” in their names, such as Nickerson Gardens in Watts, where he grew up. In those works, Marshall sought to convey the dignity and complexity of lives set within difficult circumstances. In Great America he re-imagines a boat ride into the haunted tunnel of an amusement park as the Middle Passage of slaves from Africa to the New World. What might in other hands be a work of heavy irony becomes instead a delicate interweaving of the histories of painting and race. The painting, which is stretched directly onto the wall, creates a screen or backdrop onto which viewers project their own associations triggered by the diaphanous yet powerful imagery.

Hot tip: if you’re in the neighborhood, you can see this work on view in the recently reopened East Building of the National Gallery of Art.