Figures waiting to be installed at the Rock Garden
While $2000 entrance fees a day are taken from Rock Garden, the sculptures and structures of the Rock Garden are being just left to rot. The world’s largest and most spectacular visionary environment, Nek Chand’s incredible legacy, is under very serious threat as the Chandigarh Administration takes all the funding away and cuts out Nek Chand’s son and family.
After many years of semi-neglect the position in Chandigarh has reached crisis point as the city Administration has given up all pretence of looking after the Rock Garden and has left it to deteriorate while taking all the entrance money of about $700,000 a year. Where all this money goes is a closely guarded secret.
There is NO conservation programme, NO repairs, NO staffing, NO guides, NO visitor supervision, NO working toilets or washrooms, NO care, NO pride and all the entrance money is syphoned off.
PLEASE make your protest known. This appalling state of affairs must not be allowed to continue unchallenged. Click here for details. Click here for the recent article published in the Hindustan Times.
A garbage bin stationed at the abandoned Nek Chand Memorial (Ravi Kumar/Hindustan Times)
Creativity Explored Artists at Jack Fischer Gallery, CA
until September 1, 2018 Jack Fischer Gallery presents “Nine Hearts Exploring”, a group show of works by Samedi Djeimguero, Daniel Green, Camille Holvoet, Andrew Li, John Patrick McKenzie, James Miles, Roland Record, Evelyn Reyes, and Nubia Ortega, all from the San Francisco art studio Creativity Explored. Jack Fischer Gallery
311 Potrero Ave., San Francisco, CA 94103
www.jackfischergallery.com
www.creativityexplored.org
until August 15, 2018 Recent media art from Creative Growth's Digital Arts Studio will be exhibited in "Chroma Key" along with a site-specific installation by Creative Growth artist Terri Bowden. Creative Growth Art Center
355 24th Street, Oakland, CA 94612
www.creativegrowth.org
until November 3, 2018 Paul Amar used painted shells with nail varnish, glitter and mica to create lavish sculptures. Musée des Arts Buissonniers pays tribute to the self-taught artist who passed away in November 2017, exhibiting special and unfinished pieces, and also the tools and instruments he used to produce his work. Musée des Arts Buissonniers
Rue de l'Église, 12370 Saint-Sever-du-Moustier, France
www.artsbuissonniers.com
Featuring: - Julia Sisi
- Metropolitan Museum
- Edmund Monsiel
- Kemel Leeford Rankine
- Jana Paleckova
- Josephine Tota
- Odinga Tyehimba
- Evelyne Postic
Raw Vision 98 Article Preview
Capturing History, Holding Spirits:
The compelling and complex art of Odinga Tyehimba
For Brother Rosales, a piece prompted by a dream, and created to provide spiritual protection for a Palo priest who was the subject of magical attacks. The ritual blades – like the spikes, the chains, and the pot holding the piece – are iron, invoking the power of the orisha Ogún All photos by Roger Manley
Odinga Tyehimba didn’t intend to carve pieces that would become homes for spirits. And though he certainly had African spirituality in mind when he created his striking figures, he didn’t expect spirits to actually inhabit his carvings. Yet the spirits clearly thought otherwise. Tyehimba, a self-taught sculptor, had sensed this in the troubling dreams that plagued him while he was creating his pieces. But it wasn’t until friends visiting his home in Durham, North Carolina, kept reporting that they felt a distinct and often overpowering presence when they approached his carvings that he began to wonder what was happening.
Odinga Tyehimba with Papa Ghede, the guardian of the crossroads, here carved in wood and webbed with rope wrapped in red cloth and yarn, signifying a baptism in blood. As with all of Tyehimba’s carvings, the title simplifies a far more complex set of identities than the piece represents
At one point, a friend with a particularly spiritual bent reported that the spirits in the pieces had things to say. Channelling their messages, the friend began recounting details from Tyehimba’s past that he had never revealed. “It’s not like I could argue”, Tyehimba recalls. “I mean, how can I argue against someone who had information that there’s no way they could know?” Soon, other friends began to have the same experience. At first Tyehimba resisted their explanations. It was too strange, too unreal. But they kept saying the same thing – asserting that the carvings were “alive” and he had “somehow created a doorway [such] that these beings in this other dimension, a subtler realm, can have some degree of agency in
this world.”
Shango, the Yoruba orisha of thunder, wears hammered metal plates on his face, upper body, and feet, signifying his armoured preparation for spiritual warfare. His limbed arms represent lightning, while the negative spaces in his wings invoke his double-headed axes
“It was intimidating at first”, Tyehimba remembers. “But, in a way, it made sense, given all the things that I was experiencing in my dreams. Eventually, I just accepted that that’s where it was.” Tyehimba’s journey since this moment of acceptance has led him much further into the spiritual realm, on a path partly guided by believers in the African Caribbean faith of Palo Mayombe. Local practitioners of this Cuba- and Kongo-based belief system have increasingly become Tyehimba’s principal clients, contending that his pieces can act as portals to another dimension.
Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader of the Haitian revolution, here offers himself as a sacrifice for his people. Horn talismans in each hand offer protection, while the hollow in his flaming heart represents the countless ritual objects stolen from Africa by colonial powers.
While now recognising this potential in his carvings, Tyehimba nonetheless views himself as an artist who carves pieces that speak to black history and spirituality, and to his experiences as a veteran, father, spiritual seeker and black man living in the South. While honoured by the spirits’ presence, he recognises that his creations carry many messages that are his alone. These messages – pointed, nuanced, multidimensional – have characterised Tyehimba’s work since he began carving more than two decades ago, at the age of 19. Mississippi-born Tyehimba was then in the Marines, and was increasingly aware of the racism that surrounded him both there and in the outside world. He traces the beginnings of this awareness to his final year in high school, when hip hop
opened up a world of black history that he realised had pointedly not been part of his education. Always insistently inquisitive (his kin in Mississippi used to call him “an old soul”), Tyehimba set out to learn all he could about black nationalism, colonialism and the systemic structures of racism. What drew him to carving at the time was seeing a set of carved staffs in a hip hop video by the Afrocentric ensemble, X Clan. “I had never seen anything like that”, he recalls, “and I was completely inspired.” Read the rest of this article in Raw Vision 98, out now!
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