Odili Donald Odita, David Hartt

Episode No. 524 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artists Odili Donald Odita and David Hartt.

Odili Donald Odita is featured in "Point of Departure: Abstraction 1958-Present" at the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska. The exhibition is drawn from the Sheldon's excellent collection of two-dimensional abstraction and reveals how artists have used abstraction to advance ideas and ideologies from outside art's own history.

Odita's abstract paintings marry color and composition to history, sociopolitical investigation and ideology. He has fulfilled major mural commissions for museums such as the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. Recent exhibitions of his work have included the Laumeier and Jeske Sculpture Parks in Saint Louis and Ferguson, Missouri, the ICA Miami, the Sarasota Museum of Art, the Front International triennial in Cleveland, the Newark Museum of Art, and more.

David Hartt is the subject of a Hammer Projects exhibition on view at the Hammer Museum through January 2, 2022. The show features Hartt's 2020 The Histories (Old Black Joe), two jacquard-woven tapestries and a quadraphonic soundtrack arranged by musician Van Dyke Parks. Hartt's work joins and interrogates three nineteenth-century figures : American painter Robert S. Duncanson, Trinidadian painter Michel-Jean Cazabon, and composer Stephen Foster, whose song “Old Black Joe” has endured as a dying slave’s lament even though of Foster mostly wrote for blackface minstrel shows. The Hammer presentation was curated by Aram Moshayedi with Nicholas Barlow.

Other Hartt museum projects have included "David Hartt: A Colored Garden," which just closed at The Glass House in New Canaan, Conn., and exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, The Graham Foundation in Chicago, LAXArt in Los Angeles, the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.