Welancora Gallery is delighted to present Racing Thoughts-Fever Dreaming: New Paintings by, Guyana - born and New York - based artist, Carl E. Hazlewood at Art Basel Miami Beach, Nova Section booth N17.
After many years of creating free form site-specific installations and other combined-media works, Carl E Hazlewood (b.1951) has made new paintings that formally echo, in some ways, the colorful poetics of his process oriented paintings from the ‘Demerara’ series produced during the late 1970s through 1980s.
About those earlier paintings he said at the time, “I was born in the Demerara region of Guyana. There is a great river, ‘Demerara’ and a county named after it. Without sounding overly dramatic or romantic, my paintings are, at least in the conventions of naming, an acknowledgement of the persistence of cultural and personal memory encoded in the way I see colour—that is, landscape colour, skin colour, pure prismatic colour. “
More introspective in its approach to themes and concepts regarding identity and how one exists in our current social and cultural reality, this new body of work retakes its place alongside the extemporaneous wall works the artist has become known for over the last ten years or so.
Unlike color field painting, each new work begins with a geometric structure supporting layers of powdered pigments, acrylic polymer emulsion, tape, oil pastel, brads and gold cord collaged on canvas. We witness Hazlewood return to a theme that appears in his recent works on paper: movement, which can include ideas of formal ‘movement’- a lyrical something happening in and a cross a work of art, or/and the idea of travel as in movement across space (forced and unforced) and across time... from there to here.
The words BlackHead Anansi appear in many titles of works that Hazlewood has done over the years. The artist explains, “He is mostly me - and others like me. It’s a non-figurative (signifying way) of animating my abstract art with references to a Black diasporic identity. It allows generally for a more nuanced and complex visual expression within contemporary art; a creative form and poetic counter to all of the negativity and despair usually associated with historic black life and experience particularly in the last few years.” Anansi the Spider is the famous character from West African and Caribbean folklore who is adept at shapeshifting to survive.
About the artist
Carl E. Hazlewood, was born in 1951 in Guyana, South America. He graduated with honors, from Pratt Institute, and Hunter College, CUNY. Parallel to his studio practice, Hazelwood co-founded Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, NJ in 1983. Recent honors include fellowships and residencies from The Brown Foundation Fellows Program at the Dora Maar House, (administered by MFAH (The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), Ménerbes, France, Summer & Winter 2018; The Bogliasco Foundation (Fellow) Liguria Study Center for the Arts & Humanities, Village of Bogliasco, Italy, Fall 2018; NARS Foundation; the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; Headlands Center for the Arts; Yaddo; Vermont Studio Center; and the MacDowell Colony, among others.
A 2017 ‘Tree of Life’ award grantee, his fifty-two f00t painting installation, ‘TRAVELER’, was commissioned by the Knockdown Center, Maspeth, Queens, in 2017. As a curator and writer, he is the associate editor for NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art (Duke University), and “The Arts Journal: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Literature, History, Art and Culture of Guyana and the Caribbean”, Georgetown, Guyana. He has written for many periodicals, including Flash Art International, ART PAPERS Magazine, and NY Arts Magazine. Since 1984, he has organized numerous curatorial projects for Aljira such as Modern Life (co-curated with Okwui Enwezor). His project on behalf of Aljira, “Current Identities, Recent Painting in the United States,” was the U.S. prize-winning presentation at the Bienal Internacional de Pintura, Cuenca, Ecuador, in 1994. It traveled for three years to eleven other countries and museums in Latin America.
Hazlewood has organized exhibitions for the Nathan Cummings Foundation, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Hallwalls, New York; Artists Space, New York; P.S. 122 New York; and, co-curated “Aljira at 30, Dreams and Reality’ for the New Jersey State Museum, Trenton (2014), among other venues. He has lectured in Art History at New Jersey City University, and was visiting artist/critic at various institutions, most recently, Ithaca College (2021), and Pratt Institute (2019). He’s written catalogues for The Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois; The Cress Gallery of Art, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; The Ben Shahn Center, William Paterson University, NJ; The New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ, the Samuel Dorsky Museum book/catalogue, “Andrew Lyght - FULL CIRCLE” (2016), and Terry Adkins: RECITAL', Tang Museum, Skidmore University (2017), Saratoga, NY and others. BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, The New Yorker and The New York Times are among publications that have written about the artist. He was curatorial adviser for BRIC’s project: ‘The BRIC Biennial, Volume Two’, Brooklyn, NY, Fall 2016.
Collections (brief listing) include: National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; The Study Center, Bogliasco Foundation, Genova, Italy; The Dora Maar House, Ménerbes, France; 50 West Street - The Francis J. Greenberger Collection, NYC; OMI International Art Center, Ghent, NY; Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, Louisiana; Museum Brasileiro da Escultura, São Paulo – Brazil;Johnson and Johnson, Inc; The Schomburg Center Collections, New York, NY; The University of Guyana, South America; and, The National Collection of Fine Arts, Castellani House, Guyana, South America.