John Edmonds, Tamara Johnson

Episode No. 446 features artists John Edmonds and Tamara Johnson.

This month the Brooklyn Museum had planned to open "John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance," an exhibition of 25 new and recent pictures including portraits and still-lifes of Central and West African sculpture, including works in Brooklyn's own collection (some of which were donated by writers Ralph and Fanny Ellison). Edmonds is the first winner of the Uovo Prize, a new annual exhibition award for an artist living or working in Brooklyn. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the exhibition's opening date is to be determined; it is scheduled to be on view through August 8, 2021. The Brooklyn exhibition was curated by Drew Sawyer. A mural-sized Edmonds, "A Lesson in Looking with Reverence," is installed at Uovo's forthcoming storage facility in Bushwick, where it will remain on view into November.

John Edmonds is also included in "Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition" at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. The museum has extended the show through January 3, 2021. "Riffs and Relations" offers works by African American artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries alongside works of the European modernists whose work they engaged. The exhibition includes art from Edmonds's "Tribe" series, which examines early modernism. The exhibition was curated by Adrienne L. Childs, who was recently on Episode No. 444.

On the second segment, Tamara Johnson discusses her installation of Deviled Egg and Okra Column (2020) at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. The Nasher is temporarily closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it has scheduled installations for its new "Nasher Windows," series of exhibitions sited within the Nasher’s entrance vestibule on Flora Street. ("Nasher Windows" installations may be seen from outside the institution's Renzo Piano-designed building.) Johnson's sculpture goes up Friday, May 22, and will remain on view through Wednesday, May 27.

Johnson is a Dallas-based artist who has previously exhibited her work at CUE Art Foundation, New York, in Maria Hernandez Park in Bushwick in partnership with the NYC Parks and Recreation Department, at Wave Hill in the Bronx, and at and in partnership with Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City. Along with Trey Burns, she operates the Sweet Pass Sculpture Park in West Dallas. Sweet Pass presents the work of early and mid-career artists in an outdoor setting, and on a rotating basis.

Johnson and host Tyler Green mention Paulina Pobocha's 2018 presentation of Brancusi at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Pobocha discussed the exhibition on Episode No. 353.