“Dreamsong is pleased to announce our participation in Expo Chicago 2024. The gallery’s presentation will be in Booth 420 of the Exposure section, curated by Rosario Güiraldes, Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Our booth will feature recent work by Ta-coumba T. Aiken, whose practice is rooted in a deep engagement with Black history and culture. In a recent essay on the artist, Siri Engberg, Senior Curator and Director of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center, notes that “Aiken is part of a lineage of Black abstract artists who have employed strategies of abstraction as containers for deep meaning, and as explorations of the personal, the historical, and the social.“ — Dreamsong
Photo credit: DREAMSONG
Ta-coumba T. Aiken, installation view in Dreamsong’s booth at EXPO Chicago, 2024. Photo by Justin Barbin. Courtesy of EXPO Chicago.
Preview DREAMSONG Gallery
2024 | Can’t Turn Around
“Can’t Turn Around, is Ta-coumba T. Aiken’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Featuring recent paintings, collages, and drawings, this exhibition highlights the full range and depth of the artist’s practice. From masked and layered paintings to painted tape collages made from the latter’s remnants, and gestural, intuitive drawings, the works in Can’t Turn Around reveal increasingly complex compositions intertwined with multiplying visions of the artist’s ancestors.
At the core of Aiken’s practice is a process he terms spirit writing – a loosely drawn mélange of figures, faces, eyes and appendages drawn from the artist’s ancestors that form the grounds of his work and suggest shared history, community, and experience. Rhythmic and sinuous, his line doubles back on itself in the infinite manner of a Mobius strip, nesting one body or visage inside another. Echoing the jazz-inflected musicality of Norman Lewis compositions, Aiken’s paintings thrum with vitality.
A recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Arts and a fixture in the Twin Cities’ art scene for decades, Aiken’s paintings, drawings, collages and monumental public commissions are represented in numerous public and private throughout Minneapolis and St. Paul. In a recent essay on the artist, Siri Engberg, Senior Curator and Director of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center, describes Aiken as “part of a lineage of Black abstract artists who have employed strategies of abstraction as containers for deep meaning, and as explorations of the personal, the historical, and the social.” - Dreamsong
Opening Reception: March 8th, 6-8PM
On View Through April 20
2024 | The Way I See
“Ta-coumba T. Aiken’s prismatic paintings begin in black and white—because that is how he sees. He starts with a black stroke that contrasts against the white canvas. Then, in a process Aiken calls spirit writing…“ — DAI
Exhibition: Morrison Gallery | January 9–April 8
The poetry book combines Nationally acclaimed poet Arleta Little's poetry series with a selection of Ta-coumba’s paintings chosen to reflect the themes of mortality, ancestry, and beauty that swirl between word and image in their joint publication, Black Swallowtail.
Reception, artist talk The Way I See & Book Launch Black Swallowtail with poet Arleta Little.
Thursday, February 29, 2024 | 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Ta-coumba T. Aiken, Conversations With the Future, 2023 Acrylic on canvas. 48”H X 24”W
This exhibition made possible by the Duluth Superior Area Community Foundation Unity Fund.