New Exhibition Offers Portals Into the Past, Present, and Future of Blackness

Artist Todd Gray’s solo exhibition, "Portals," at Perrotin Los Angeles features a series of complex photographic assemblages that challenge the historical relationship between Blackness and European colonialism. By stacking framed images of West African landscapes, slave forts, and Renaissance interiors, Gray creates textured collages that collapse geographic and temporal boundaries. Notable works like "Paradox of Liberty" confront the hypocrisy of Enlightenment figures like Thomas Jefferson by physically obscuring his image with the architecture of the slave trade.

Fragility and Resistance of an Iranian Artist on Display in Rome

Fragilità e resistenza di un’artista dell’Iran in mostra a Roma

The Galleria Anna Marra in Rome is hosting "Assemblages," the first Italian solo exhibition of Iranian artist Sepideh Salehi. The show features works that blend collage, Japanese paper, photography, and drawing to depict Iranian women living in the United States who have shared experiences of displacement and political upheaval. Salehi’s figures often avert their gaze or conceal their faces, symbolizing a "calligraphy of refusal" and a quiet resistance against the historical traumas of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war.