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<\/a>Whitney Tassie, the new Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at UMFA stands among salt 7, an exhibition of paintings by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Painting to her right: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. A Toast to the Health Of, 2011, oil on canvas, 78 7\/8 x 98 1\/2 inches. Collection of Noel Kirnon. Courtesy of the artist, Corvi-Mora, London, and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo by Simon Blundell.<\/p><\/div>\n
At the artist conversation for the recently-opened\u00a0salt 7<\/em>\u00a0show at the Utah Museum of Fine Art, Whitney Tassie seems relaxed and at home. Tassie is the new Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the UMFA, and the exhibition she\u2019s designed for her inaugural offering to Utah is a body of work that provides numerous complex angles to consider. Tassie fields questions about the multiple facets of the work with a casual deftness that attests to the hours of scholarship that have gone into examining the work, as well as an easiness born of years immersed in the complicated landscape of contemporary art. Tassie has only been at the UMFA since last August but already she is fully engaged with Utah and is bringing in first-rate national programming\u2014as evidenced in this newest installment of the museum\u2019s ongoing exhibits about contemporary art.<\/p>\n salt 7<\/em>\u00a0features an exhibition of paintings by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, a British artist of Ghanaian descent. Most of the subjects in Yiadom-Boakye\u2019s paintings are black, and the works examine racial themes. \u201cShe is someone I\u2019ve been following for a couple of years,\u201d Tassie says of her first\u00a0salt<\/em>\u00a0artist. When she saw that the\u00a0salt<\/em>\u00a0program had never featured a painter, Tassie leapt at the opportunity to exhibit Yiadom-Boakye\u2019s work.<\/p>\n Tassie came to the UMFA last year after being selected from an international pool of candidates. She says the decision to come to Utah was not hard. \u201cA lot of it had to do with the university. I had been at a university museum prior to going into the commercial world, and I love university museums. We have all these resources here, and can do nerdy academic shows, as opposed to the giant blockbusters that a lot of other museums have to do.\u201d As an undergraduate, Tassie had worked at the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. After earning her bachelors in art history and archeology, she stayed at the museum for an additional year, contributing to education, collections, exhibitions, and curatorial work. From there Tassie went on to earn a master’s degree in modern art history, theory and criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In Chicago, she started working at Monique Meloche Gallery, where she advanced to gallery director and where she would stay for seven years. She says it was the pleasure she drew from working directly with artists that propelled her into the contemporary art world. \u201cI wanted to work with living artists and be an advocate for them.\u201d With her new position at the UMFA she can do just that, and still bask in the university environment. \u201cIt\u2019s the greatest thing to work with students and to have that audience and mission.\u201d<\/p>\n The museum has many different audiences, but Tassie identifies three groups that she\u2019s particularly focused on. The local university community is a very high priority, but she also stresses that the international contemporary art world is an important audience. \u201cI have an international audience and colleagues that I keep in mind and that I need to stay on par with,\u201d she says. In addition, she\u2019s thinking about people from the wider community who are just curious and engaged.<\/p>\n How much of Utah\u2019s unique\u00a0terroir<\/em>\u00a0influences the selection of a show and how much is Tassie taking into consideration the international conversation happening in contemporary art?<\/p>\n \u201cThere is something very unique about this place,\u201d Whitney says of Utah. \u201cIt\u2019s apparent right when you step off the plane. I think the UMFA is very invested in that pride of location. And we will continue to be invested in Smithson, and land art, and artists that are inspired by this place, and artists who live and work in this place, but I think it\u2019s also extremely important to bring in the international conversation that the art world is having right now and to inform artists of each other.\u201d She says the museum functions like a portal. A unique function of its\u00a0salt<\/em>\u00a0program is to \u201cbring people in from the outside world and introduce them to Utah.\u201d And when they leave, she hopes they become emissaries, in a way, for what we\u2019re doing here.<\/p>\n The\u00a0salt<\/em>\u00a0program has featured one local artist, but the series is really focused on internationally emerging artists, Tassie explains. She\u2019s very glad that just across town, the UMOCA has a locals-only gallery: it frees her up to work with the international community, and if she\u2019s working with a local artist in\u00a0salt<\/em>, it\u2019s because they\u2019re emerging onto the international scene.<\/p>\n It\u2019s evident Whitney Tassie is treating Utah with a deep amount of respect. She\u2019s not filtering the conversation through any assumptions about Utah; she\u2019s purely offering her constituents a chance to engage in the international conversation.\u00a0salt 7: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye<\/em>\u00a0is about race, and we\u2019re having that conversation because it\u2019s a conversation that the art world is having. And because the art is simply great.<\/p>\n At her February 21st artist conversation, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye said she\u2019s \u201calways painted black figures. Basically,\u201d she says, \u201cit would be strange for me not to. I don\u2019t see them as one color or another. First of all, because they\u2019re not real people.\u201d Her subjects are re-imagined composites of people, often taken from life, but also reminiscent of images from advertising and current media, historic photographs, as well as African portraits.<\/p>\n \u201cIn this sense,\u201d Tassie writes in her exhibition essay, \u201cher depiction of black figures is a representation of normalcy rather than defiance or celebration. However, when considering the history of portrait painting and black representation, which Yiadom-Boakye\u2019s work clearly references, her ordinary subject matter assumes an additional, subversive role. \u2018This is a political gesture for me,’ Yiadom-Boakye says. \u2018We\u2019re used to looking at portraits of white people in painting.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The political nature of the paintings works in a subtle, very quiet way. Yiadom-Boakye prefers to keep her subjects vague, timeless, placeless, often ambiguous in gender or age. They exist outside of time, which, as Tassie points out in the exhibition essay, \u201copens up the psychological side of her characters and [she] is able to suggest non-representable states like vulnerability, superficiality, or contempt.\u201d Often one doesn\u2019t even consider the political aspects of the piece until one looks at its title. For example, one of the paintings in the show, the portrait on the front of the exhibition booklet, is a nice picture of a woman that looks almost like it could be hanging in the office of a university president \u2014 perhaps she was a former dean, or a major donor to the university. That is what one might be thinking, anyway, until one looks at the title: \u201cFurther Pressure From Cannibals.\u201d<\/p>\n There is a narrative element to the work that is transmitted in hints and snippets. In a recent review in\u00a0Interview Magazine,\u00a0<\/em>Christopher Bollen wrote, \u201cYiadom-Boakye’s intentional withholding of details or narratives seems particularly effective in our information-obsessed age, as if the artist is asking the viewer to help complete the fiction she’s begun.\u201d If they are fictions, they are short-shorts that create vivid worlds using few words but that deliver incredibly powerful punches.<\/p>\n