![Esteban Cabeza de Baca](https://img.artlogic.net/w_740,h_556,c_lfill/exhibit-e/57ab21f484184ea8138b4568/d2ab446ea0d4fdb13c0f9a5acdc70319.jpeg)
Paul Feeley, Untitled (January 29), 1962
Oil-based enamel on canvas
57 x 81 inches
For the 2024 edition of the Armory Show, Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to present a group show featuring new work by Cannupa Hanska Luger, Yatika Starr Fields, Esteban Cabeza de Baca, Michael Namingha, Howardena Pindell, and Emmi Whitehorse alongside a selection of signature works by Paul Feeley, Al Loving, and Fritz Scholder.
In Esteban Cabeza de Baca’s Red Chicano Studio (2024), yellow light from a window skips across a recording studio littered with instruments. The abandoned room is both dynamic and ambiguous: a place both of longing and as passionate potential. A rare example of an interior scene, Red Chicano Studio hints at the decades of passionate political and cultural movements that preserved Indigenous and Chicano life and culture. Of Mexican and Native American heritage himself, Cabeza de Baca was heavily influenced by his parents’ intersectional political awareness and respect for human dignity, which ultimately led them to shelter undocumented migrants in their basement during his youth.
For Yatika Starr Fields, joining the water protectors at the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 prompted a shift in focus towards the Indigenous history of hope and struggle. Many of his recent works take on contemporary protest as a subject. In Along the Tracks (2024), a new work debuting at the Armory Show, Fields recasts tents—the familiar mainstay of middle-class camping holidays—as a revolutionary symbol. The artist first became interested in the structure when he witnessed Seattle’s brightly colored homeless encampments, and in numerous modern protest movements, like those at Standing Rock. The artist’s works blur the boundaries between political polemic and abstraction, finding a balance between distress, resistance, and hope.
Cannupa Hanska Luger’s ongoing project Future Ancestral Technologies grapples with the notion of Indigenous futurity, challenging viewers to critically re-evaluate our collective relationship with nature. The two sculptural busts included in the presentation, Engineer and Oracle (both 2024), appear in dazzlingly patterned regalia. In Engineer, the otherworldly spider has a gunmetal exoskeleton, while a web of polychromatic yarn constitutes its cocoon-like body. The creature, a target of contemporary phobias, is also a symbol of creation and interconnectedness. These figures suggest the possibility of a ceremony reconciling past and future, articulating the complex, interconnected realities and historical contingencies that often elude contemporary perception. Another work from the Future Ancestral Technologies series recently featured in the 2024 Whitney Biennial.
This presentation of Emmi Whitehorse’s paintings, Pollinator and Pressed Flowers (both 2023), coincides with both the Venice Biennale’s Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere, which includes four of the artist’s paintings, and the solo exhibition Emmi Whitehorse: Abloom, opening September 6th at Garth Greenan Gallery. Drawing on the Southwestern landscape as a source of inspiration, Whitehorse’s vaporous, Turneresque compositions are densely populated by organic forms and direct, intricate drawing.
Michael Namingha's Yupkoyvi series depicts the sacred ancestral lands that make up the present day Chaco Canyon. As the 2020 global pandemic began, the artist canceled a trip to New York, opting to return to the spiritual site of his Puebloan and Hopi ancestors. In the two screen prints, Namingha overlays multiple perspectives, reflecting the sense of temporal dislocation and disorientation that was only heightened by lockdowns. In 2014, NASA scientists discovered a massive pinkish cloud of methane, a product of the region’s oil producers, a spectral presence that looms over the land, and colors the artist’s works. The otherworldly color of the compositions is strangely beautiful, even as it portends a dying planet. Dark clay from a familial site is embedded into the works’ surfaces, linking the artist’s practice to his forebears' generations of work in clay.
A selection of significant recent and historic works by other gallery artists including Paul Feeley, Al Loving, Howardena Pindell, and Fritz Scholder are also on view. In Howardena Pindell’s new painting, Untitled #21 (2024), vibrant pink and orange geometries are formed from the rarefactions of innumerable acrylic dots. While Paul Feeley’s quasi- hard-edge shapes bleed and quiver at their edges (a hallmark of the thinned, oil-based paints he used), Al Loving’s shaped abstractions, such as Untitled (1969), embrace the rigorous hard-edge form of the septahedron.
Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent Esteban Cabeza de Baca, Yatika Starr Fields, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Howardena Pindell, and the estates of Paul Feeley and Al Loving. Garth Greenan is pleased to represent the estate of Fritz Scholder in association with LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM.
The exhibition will be on view at the Armory Show, Booth 230, from September 6 through 8, 2024. The VIP Preview will be held on September 5, 2024.