MORE THAN ONE WAY HOME

SOPHIE MATISSE
MORE THAN ONE WAY HOME

October 10 - November 24, 2020​

Baahng Gallery celebrates its 2020 reopening with More Than One Way Home, an exhibition featuring the gallery’s represented artists: Sophie Matisse, Janet Taylor Pickett, and Zhang Hongtu. The exhibition offers a glimpse into the struggles of the artists and their coming to terms with their individual challenges. Sophie, the great-granddaughter of Henri Matisse and step-granddaughter of Marcel Duchamp, is an American oil painter working in New York City; Janet is an African American multi-media artist working on the West Coast; Hongtu is a Muslim Chinese artist who has been working in New York since 1982. The exhibition acknowledges and affirms that home, for these artists, is not situated in nostalgia. Rather, through a cyclical process of revisitation, they find home in both the present and future potential. More Than One Way Home follows a journey through each artist’s rite of passage in life and is a compelling visualization of distinct, individual expressive forms. Baahng Gallery is open Monday thru Friday, noon to 3pm, and by appointment.



Selected works from Sophie Matisse’s ‘Be Back in Five Minutes’ series are strategically installed in the gallery. Returning to renowned paintings by Gustave Courbet, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Charles Wilson Peale through her unique lens, she appropriates and embellishes upon, or subtracts from, recognizable works from art history. The interplay between absence and presence in these haunting paintings is evocative. Featured as well is her most recent painting, ‘Homeward 1’. In this contemplative autobiographical tondo completed during the pandemic quarantine, the artist positions an errant chess piece peering out over a window ledge into the hazy verdant void, invoking solitude and the uncertain but hopeful future ahead.


‘Mappings of Memory’, a survey showcasing Janet Taylor Picket’s works, introduces selected paintings, collages, sculptures, and quilts from the 1990s through 2020. Her experiential work chronicles her journey as an African American woman, daughter, mother, and artist. Images drawn from art history, Africa, America and Europe, past and present, coexist in her often-ornate collages and paintings, defying linear timeframes and logical geographic or cultural relationships. The inclusion of the shipping crates in which the works were transported to the gallery adds a poignant historical dimension to the installation, referencing both her personal odyssey and that of her ancestors. The suggestive titles of the works on view reflect her creative vision: ‘Spirit Catchers', ‘Hot House', 'Melon Dress’, 'Exotica Botanica’, ‘Thoughtful Resilience’, and ‘She Has An Agency,’ the latter produced in 2020. These works constitute the artist’s confessional narrative circling back with newly found wisdom in life as well as in art. More Than One Way Home inaugurates Pickett’s representation with Baahng Gallery and presents her first New York exhibition.


Zhang Hongtu’s video, ‘Van Gogh/Bodhidharma’, is the centerpiece of his installation. This mesmerizing video production builds on his seven-year project (2007 – 2014), a set of 39 ink paintings that rework Van Gogh’s 39 extant self-portrait oil paintings in the style of classical Zen portraits of Bodhidharma. Revealed in both this video and the original endeavor upon which it was based are parallels in the lives and aesthetics of Zhang and Van Gogh. The artist compels viewers in both iterations of this project to reconsider Van Gogh’s fascination with Asian aesthetics, registering a more philosophical connection and inner resonance between the European post-impressionist artist and the East. Reflecting upon this project, Zhang expresses his approach as one that ‘dares to mate a horse with an ox’. Framing the video are wall texts quoting provocative passages from Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo and to Paul Gauguin. More Than One Way Home marks the launch of Zhang’s visionary ‘Van Gogh/Bodhidharma Project’—a quixotic effort to unite his ink paintings with the original painted portraits—and announces his official gallery representation with Baahng Gallery.

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SECRET GARDEN

SECRET GARDEN

Sophie Matisse
May 15 - June 30, 2021
SOPHIE MATISSE

MORE THAN ONE WAY HOME

Sophie Matisse
Janet Taylor Pickett
Zhang Hongtu
October 10 - November 24, 2020
SophieMatisse at the Art Newspaper

Sophie Matisse was interviewed by BBC TWO on “Becoming Matisse”

Broadcasted on Saturday, April 25, 2020, 9:15pm - 10:15pm.
Sophie Matisse, Nighthawks

SOPHIE MATISSE

Be Back in 5
April - June, 2020
Zhang Hongtu at Museo Picasso Málaga 

Zhang Hongtu at Museo Picasso Málaga 

October 3, 2023 - March 31, 2024
Madison Ave New York Picasso, Welcome to America June 15 – July 31, 2023

PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA

June 15 – Sept 27, 2023
Pitches & Scripts

PITCHES & SCRIPTS

Group Exhibition
January 20 - March 11, 2023
(DE)CONSTRUCTING IDEOLOGY: THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION AND BEYOND November 13, 2022 to March 12, 2023

Zhang Hongtu lectures and exhibits at the Wende Museum

November 13, 2022 - March 12, 2023
TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

TANGO

Summer Exhibition
July 13 - August 17, 2022
Zhang Hongtu

VAN GOGH / BODHIDHARMA

Zhang Hongtu
March 25 - April 27, 2022
LOVE DIFFERENCE

LOVE DIFFERENCE

Eric Brown, Janet Taylor Pickett, Zhang Hongtu
May 15 - June 15, 2021

JANET TAYLOR PICKETT

Janet Taylor Pickett

JANET TAYLOR PICKETT

Lives and works in California

ARTIST BIO

Janet Taylor Pickett (b. 1948) received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan School of Art in 1970, and her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan School of Architecture and Design in 1972. Devel-oping a groundbreaking visual vocabulary to probe themes of Blackness, identity, and the complexity of lived experience, Taylor Pickett continued her studies at Parsons School of Design, the Fashion Institute of Technology, and The Vermont Studio School. She taught the History of African American Art at both Essex County College and Bloomfield College for over thirty years and has received grants and fellowships from The New Jersey Council of the Arts Grant, The Ford Foundation, and the Mid-Atlantic States Art Council. Her artist residencies have included the Pilchuck Glass School, Val- paraiso Foundation (Majorca, Spain), University of Eastern New Mexico, Visiting Artist Lecture Series at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Lafayette College. A fore-runner in contemporary painting whose work has been compared to that of Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, Taylor Pickett has had her work showcased in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, as well as in private collections. Her masterwork, “And She Was Born” (2020) was featured on the cover of the exhibition catalog for Seeing Differently: The Phillips Collects for a New Century (2021) at The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. Other selected exhibitions include Progressions: A Cultural Legacy at MoMA/PS1, African American Women Artists and the Power of their Gaze at the David C Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, The Matisse Series at the Montclair Art Museum, The Atlantic World-Layered Histories at the Harvard Art Museums, Hagar’s Dress at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, and Necessary Memories at Jennifer Baahng Gallery. Additionally, her work has been shown at The Studio Museum of Harlem in New York, Howard University, and Telfair University, among others. Taylor Pickett is also the former Chair of the African American Cultural Committee at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey. Janet Taylor Pickett is represented by Jennifer Baahng Gallery.

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JANET TAYLOR PICKETT

Mappings of Memory

April – June, 2020

……………………….“Throughout my development as an artist, I began to recognize ‘home’ to be a metaphor; an idea for finding my visual voice.  The ‘home’ of personal geography, the self-landscape of memory revealed, become the journey from which the artworks in this exhibition have been created.”……………………………………….

Due to the ongoing situation with COVID-19, Baahng Gallery is postponing upcoming exhibitions and programs. In the meantime, we will be providing series of online exhibitions and announcements.  For information about the exhibitions or the works, please contact us at inquiries@baahng.com

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