Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to present “Let my hair down,” the fifth conversation in our series “Galerie Lelong: Dialogues” held on occasion of Tariku Shiferaw’s solo exhibition It’s a love thang, it’s a joy thang (April 1 – May 15, 2021). Shiferaw will be in discussion with author, art historian, and collector Charles Moore about the use of mark-making in the artist’s personal practice and in contemporary art. Looking at the painterly style of abstraction, the conversation will also ruminate on its role within culture and society.
galerielelong.com/exhibitions/tariku-shiferaw3
Charles Moore is an art historian, art collector, author, and doctoral student at Columbia University’s Teachers College. He writes on the economics of art and contemporary artists for publications as diverse as Artnet, Artsy, Cultured Magazine, Juxtapoz Magazine and Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Titus & Venus Legacy award from Harvard University’s Black Grad Association, and the Artis curatorial fellowship, in collaboration with the International Studio & Curatorial program, to research contemporary artists in Israel. His first book, The Black Market, explores ideas around how to start collecting art.
Tariku Shiferaw is known for his practice of mark-making that explores the metaphysical ideas of painting and societal structures. This formal language of geometric abstraction is executed through densely layering material to create “marks,” gestures that interrogate space-making and reference the hierarchy of systems. As the artist explains, “A mark, as physical and present as cave-markings… reveals the thinker behind the gesture—an evidence of prior markings of ideas and self onto the space.” Museum exhibitions that have presented works by Tariku Shiferaw include the 2017 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; A Poet*hical Wager at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Ohio; Unbound at the Zuckerman Museum of Art (ZMA), Kennesaw, Georgia; Men of Change, organized by The Smithsonian Institution, and held at the California African American Museum (CAAM), Los Angeles; and What’s Love Got to Do with It? at The Drawing Center, New York, New York. Shiferaw has participated in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art (Studio), in Open Sessions at The Drawing Center (2018-2020), and he was artist-in-residence at the LES Studio Program in New York City. Shiferaw is currently an artist-in-residence at the World Trade Center through Silver Art Projects. Shiferaw was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1983, raised in Los Angeles, California, and now lives and works in New York City.
