Taylor De Cordoba is please to announce a talk and facilitated conversation with Frohawk Two Feathers at his studio at the Brewery Art Complex in Downtown Los Angeles.
Taylor De Cordoba artists Kimberly Brooks, Frohawk Two Feathers, Kyle Field and Claire Oswalt are participating in this year’s Venice Art Walk and Auction, taking place May 19 and 20.
Kimberly Brooks | Mom's Friends Study, 2008 | Gouache on paper | 8" x 11"
Kyle Field | A Place in the Park, 2008 | Ink and watercolor on paper | 7 x 8.75 inches
Claire Oswalt | Doubled Over, 2009 | Graphite, paper, wood | 26''x36''x13''
Frohawk Two Feathers | Tales of Heroism, Part I (God Help The Enemy), 2006 | Xerographic transfer print on wood | 7.5" x 8"
This year the auction is being hosted by Google and includes artist studio tours, gourmet food trucks and live music. Tickets to the event can be purchased on their website.
Frohawk Two Feathers‘ solo exhibition ““Every Winter Was A War,” She Said” is currently on view at Heiner Contemporary in Washington DC.
Heiner Contemporary is delighted to announce Frohawk Two Feathers: “Every Winter Was A War,” She Said, a solo exhibition of work by the Los Angeles based artist. Featuring portraits on paper, the exhibition presents women warriors from Two Feathers’ imagined Frenglish Empire. Although female protagonists have always played an important role in the artist’s histories, this is the first time he has devoted an entire exhibition to them.
April 27 – June 9 2012
Click HERE to view the gallery’s website.
Frohawk Two Feathers is featured in the April 2012 issue of Angeleno, where he is highlighted in the “Men of Style” feature.
“Umar Rashid, aka Frohawk Two Feathers, never planned on becoming a darling of L.A.’s contemporary art world. His intricate ink- and tea-stained war-themed works (produced in the downtown L.A. house where he lives with his wife, Michiyo Suda, and their daughter, 2-year-old Iroha) have attracted The New York Times, are repped by white-hot gallerist Heather Taylor and have been featured in exhibitions around the world. Up next? His first solo exhibition at a museum, taking place this summer at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. Rashid’s bold, melting-pot fashion sense can be seen as an extension of his art, so it comes as no surprise that the 35-year-old’s most-loved pieces include an ethical fur raccoon tail from a Native American collective in Washington state. He favors vintage suits and a pair of metallic slippers he snagged on a trip to Dubai, and is quite fond of the traditional Japanese karate gi. While anything Paul Smith and Woolrich Woolen Mills tickles his fancy, it’s the old and quirky—feathered headdresses, Vietnamese police hats and even ill-fitting leather jackets—that make him happiest. “The sleeves are too short,” he says, pointing to his jacket. “But it’s my own personal style.”
Click HERE for the complete article.
RECRAFTING HISTORY: history, nostalgia & craft in the American memory
curated by Ellen Caldwell
October 29 – December 22, 2011
“Cultural memory is produced through objects, images, and representations. These are technologies of memory, not vessels of memory in which memory passively resides so much as objects through which memories are shared, produced, and given meaning.”
– Marita Sturkin, Tangled Memories
Artists Eric Beltz, Jen Pack, Karen Spector, Frohawk Two-Feathers, and Stephanie Washburn all speak to Sturkin’s concept of a shared history and entangled cultural memory. Exploring our modern world through a recrafted lens, they create fictitious, re-envisioned, nostalgic, and comical memories and renderings of the past and present. Negotiating themes ranging widely in subject and medium, each artist in Recrafting History answers the question, how do we exhibit histories that we don’t talk about? In experiencing their art, we as viewers, are welcomed to explore the deeper themes that trouble the American psyche and collective American memory.
With Eric Beltz’s series of graphite-drawn needlework, Beltz calls the concept of Americana and nostalgia into crisis, by recrafting traditional female work (often considered lowbrow), into male-made High Art (with a capital “A”) for the gallery wall. He appropriates the aesthetic of the craft, but changes the medium and technique, at once reviving and altering the tradition. Additional textual messages tangle and trouble the subject further.
Built of chiffon, thread, and wood, Jen Pack’s Green Bikini and (k)not Entangled use a deconstructed and reconstructed medium to create a dialogue between the viewer and art. Her work, though built from the same materials, takes on a transformative air in the final products’ drastically different forms and functions. And her seemingly disjointed titles are about displacement, and the eternal struggle that comes from deconstructing and reconstructing one’s identity on an ongoing basis.
In Surplus of Light, Karen Spector situates the viewer in an endless video loop that taps into and oscillates from a national post-9/11 fear and insecurity, to a ridiculous feeling of lavishness, abundance, and wealth (found in the extravagant display of fireworks), to a looming uncertainty questioning and undermining American monumentalism and ballsy patriotism. The reversed anthems are a type of siren song, hovering and looming in the soundtrack as both celebratory and foreboding.
With Frohawk Two-Feathers’ latest installment of the saga of the Frenglish Empire, viewers become part of an exchange between cultural memory and history—between the fictitious Frenglish Company Crocodile and our world, with reality being somewhere in the middle. His work focuses mainly on the conflict arising from European colonial conquest, though it is shown predominantly in America, thus forcing American audiences to view this work, and this imperialist retelling, as culturally and historically relevant.
Stephanie Washburn’s Margaret Thatcher’s Garden, offers a sneak-peak into the intimate domestic space of a political body. Through her musings of this imagined realm, we are not just in the midst of a physical interpretation of an exterior location, but are also conceptually in an interior realm of Thatcher herself. Through something as concrete as a garden, we can re-imagine the historical setting for actual political decisions, while also envisioning Thatcher’s internal, private space of contemplation away from the public eye.
Recrafting History included in “Best Art I Saw All Week,” by Megan Sallabedra for the LA Weekly.
“…And on the note of fiction and memory, “Recrafting History: Nostalgia & Craft in the American Memory” at Taylor de Cordoba down the street is well worth checking out. Frohawk Two-Feathers‘ depictions of the (fictional) saga of the Frenglish Empire (yeah, you read that right) result in a witty and totally awesome-to-look-at set of drawings and paintings…”
Click HERE to read the complete article.
Fact, Fiction and Friction: Frohawk Two Feathers
by Ellen Caldwell for New American Paintings
“During a time when fiction dances eerily with fact, it feels appropriate to look to a contemporary artist from my generation who is using acrylics, tea-dyed paper, and a variety of mediums to blur, illuminate, disguise, and play with these lines. I first saw Frohawk Two Feathers’ (NAP #73) work at Taylor De Cordoba in 2006 and have followed him and his empire literally through many gallery and museum openings, and figuratively through 100’s of years, numerous battles, wars, and revolutions. Lives have been lost, prisoners have been taken, but Frohawk always comes out on top.
As current 30-somethings, Frohawk and I grew up in a murky time. For me, my 20’s were formative: besides being post-college and post-9/11, the 2004 elections, The 9/11 Commission Report, the United States’ invasion of Iraq, and Sarah Palin’s vice presidential nomination influenced my worldview largely. Bottom line: I don’t believe anything anyone says anymore…”
Click HERE to read the full article.
Beyond the White Cube: Time Traveling with Artist Frohawk Two Feathers
by Yasmine Mohseni
Artist Frohawk Two Feathers has a gift. In his paintings and illustrations, he weaves a story that keeps his audience riveted and on their toes. Frangland? Is that a tiny forgotten island in the Caribbean? What about Batavia? That’s a little country nestled somewhere in Northern or Eastern Europe, right? No, neither of those places exist, they’re both instances of Frohawk Two Feathers creating fictional worlds through his art. With his singular voice, Frohawk creates luscious and highly detailed artwork, breathing fresh air into contemporary art’s stuffy climate. Born Umar Rashid in Chicago in 1976, he one day began looking into his own heritage and was disappointed at the meager information he uncovered. So, he started inventing his own ancestry. This then informed his work, in which he weaves actual history and fabricated history together to create an original narrative dealing with issues of colonialism and imperialism. I stopped by his studio recently and time traveled to the 18th century battlefield of Cape Colony…
Click here to read the rest of the article on the Huffington Post
The gallery is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in South Africa by gallery artist Frohawk Two Feathers at Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town.
FROHAWK TWO FEATHERS
THE EDGE OF THE EARTH ISN’T FAR FROM HERE
25 October – 25 November 2011
STEVENSON
Buchanan Building
160 Sir Lowry Road
Woodstock 7925
South Africa
Soul Searching in the U.S.A. by Michael Duncan. March 2011.
