Alvaro Barrington, The Rose That Grew from Concrete: Frank Miller Batman LA (2022), via Blum and Poe
On view this month at Blum & Poe’s Los Angeles exhibition space, artist Alvaro Barrington presents a powerful, challenging show dedicated to the music and culture of Los Angeles and New York during the 1990’s. Bearing the title 91–98 jfk–lax border, the show presents itself as an expression of joy and hope, and a tribute to the thriving hip-hop culture of both cities during the decade.Â
Alvaro Barrington, The American Dream (2022), via Blum and Poe
The press release for the show makes the most of that tribute, taking the form of a short essay by the artist: “When these folks came out, Biggie, JAY-Z, and Lil’ Kim gave us the commandments to get fly and carry our heads high,” he writes. “Pac told us to keep our heads up. When he was taken, DMX carried the torch to make us bark, pray, and cry. Mary J made us say we need real love. Ghostface took his darkest moment and made us use the newspaper—made us want to ground our souls and reach for the skies. Magazines and the press people, with only profits in their mind, claimed to love the culture; they made millions of dollars telling the West and East Coast that we were at war on the ground. The only real narrative was that we saved each other.”
Alvaro Barrington, Here Comes the Boom (2022), via Blum and Poe
The works turn that powerful sentiment towards an expression of joy of self-exploration. Portraits of Lil’ Kim and Lauryn Hill stand near an immense sculptural assemblage of a basketball hoop, with paintings dotting the walls that translate these iconographies into energetic swirls of paint and collage. Barrington’s work here presents plaintive moments of natural beauty, posed against famous hip-hop lyrics and strident gestures on canvas. The Rose That Grew from Concrete: Frank Miller Batman LA presents a stream of cultural references in title, citing Tupac and comic books in pursuit of language that expresses the vivid culture of the era, while creating a new iconography that poses an art object as something to exist within the material of world under construction.
Alvaro Barrington, 1 O’Clock (2022), via Blum and Poe
In the strongest sense, Barrington’s show meditates on loss and love, on African-American culture as one suspended always in the strongest sense of self as art, expression as survival. Paying homage to heroes still alive and those who have passed on, the show seeks a way to reflect while always moving forward.
The show is on view through April 30th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Alvaro Barrington: 91–98 jfk–lax border [Exhibition Site]
