BLACK LIFE: Adrian O. Walker
Here at Black Life, we are thinking about what it means to “get what you need” as an artist during our time. Black Life’s co-curator Ryan Austin Dennis talks with mixed-media artist Adrian Octavius Walker to discuss his transition to freelance work, how his creative practice has evolved working in a new photographic form, and how he places himself within the canon of art.
The stream premieres April 28 and will be available in the digital archives.
Adrian Octavius Walker (b. 1988) is a mixed-media artist based in Chicago, IL by way of St. Louis, MO. His work is inspired by the Black body, dynamics of the Black family and archival work related to the African American experience and the untold stories they share.
Working in both film and digital-format photography, Walker creates penetrating portraits influenced by his deep awareness of the nuances that pervade the human experience. In 2015, Walker self-published the book My Lens, Our Ferguson, a documentation of protests against police brutality after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. The book was shortlisted for a Paris Photo-Aperture First PhotoBook award and selected images were featured in a solo exhibition at the University of Alabama and five group exhibitions internationally.
His greatest milestone to date is being one of the prize-winning artists in The Outwin 2019: American Portraiture Today competition which was on display at the National Portrait Gallery Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. He’s done commissioned work for Apple, Nike, Levis, Google and Time magazine.
BAMPFA REOPENING
Reserve Your Tickets for our Reopening
As we get ready to welcome you in person starting April 30, you can claim your tickets now! We can’t wait to see you at the museum soon for safe and meaningful art experiences.
Black Life posters at the Art Lab!
Don’t forget to to stop by the Art Lab downstairs. BAMPFA Art Lab will offer new art projects each week to try at home. Share your work using the hashtag #bampfaartlab or email us at bampfaartlab@berkeley.edu to share your projects and ideas, and get updates about new Art Lab offerings.
BAMPFA Recommendation:
Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective
February 19, 2020–July 18, 2021
Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936–2006) is widely considered one of the most brilliant and inventive quiltmakers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Her reputation has grown to the point where her work is no longer considered solely within the context of quilting, but celebrated among the great American artistic achievements of our time. Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective is the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work to date, featuring approximately seventy quilts, pieced tops, embroideries, assemblages, and decorated objects. It reveals Tompkins to be an artist of extraordinary variety, depth, and impact.
Born Effie Mae Howard in 1936 in Arkansas, the artist later adopted the pseudonym Rosie Lee Tompkins. She learned quilting from her mother as a child but did not begin to practice the craft seriously until the 1980s, when she was living in the Bay Area city of Richmond. Often inspired by her belief in God, Tompkins made quilts directed toward her own healing and spirituality and to honor family members. She employed a wide variety of traditional patterns, including half-squares, medallions, and yo-yos, exploring and adapting these approaches through her individual sensibility and integrating such favorite fabrics as velvet, artificial fur, and various types of glittery material. She also frequently incorporated embroidery—stitching words and citations of Christian scripture—as well as printed images on recycled clothes, which suggest the artist’s commentary on contemporary social, political, and cultural events.
Made up almost entirely of works from BAMPFA’s collection, Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective is the first in a series of exhibitions celebrating the donation of approximately 3,000 quilts by African American artists from the estate of the collector Eli Leon. This transformative bequest makes BAMPFA a leader in the field of African American art with what is probably the largest public collection of African American quilts in the world.