As interpreted by Michel Foucault, Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools), a fifteenth-century satire by Sebastian Brant, imagines a world in which knowledge belongs squarely in the realm of madness, useful only to those who would debate idly and apply nothing to experience. Artist Daniel Joseph Martinez (born 1957) has recognized the relevance of this allegory to present times, and through text paintings, photographs and sculptures, he has traced contemporary Los Angeles onto Foucault’s conception of Narrenschiff. Inspired by bus rides observing his fellow passengers, Martinez conceived of four narratives that explore a modern kind of knowledge-based perversity. The Report of My Death Is an Exaggeration, which documents Martinez’s installation of these works at Roberts &amp; Tilton in Culver City, California, also features an essay by art historian, critic and curator Juli Carson.

Daniel Joseph Martinez: The Report of My Death is an Exaggeration: Memoirs: Of Becoming Narrenschiff

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Roberts & Tilton

The latest in the World Stage series of portraits by Kehinde Wiley (born 1977), this volume presents 13 new paintings, the result of the artist's trip to Haiti―a nation that is often presented as a place of chronic poverty, corruption and deprivation. In Haiti Wiley actively went looking for beauty, staging pageants to cast his portrait subjects and advertising with open calls on the radio and posters put up in the streets of Jacmel, Jalouise and Port-au-Prince. Wiley worked within the tradition of pageant culture native to the Caribbean but also subverted it, choosing his winners at random. The paintings draw on the artistic traditions of France and Spain (the colonial rulers of Haiti before the Haitian Revolution), as well as Haiti's varied religious traditions and local crafts, creating a composite portrait of contemporary Haiti through its people, history and culture.

Kehinde Wiley: The World Stage: Haiti

History & Criticism

Essay by Camille Mary Weiner.New Babylon, an exhibition organized by Michael Dopp brings together fourteen artists based on an underlying sensibility exploring the collaborative aggregate as a symbolic social space with moveable articulations. New Babylon takes its form as a freestanding structure designed by architect Joakim Dahlqvist, with the artworks on view - sculpture, painting, ceramic, and photography - functioning as both autonomous objects and site-specific installations within the building's apparatus. As a gallery turned out from within itself, New Babylon is as much a structure of wood as it is space. Its seemingly unfinished state - a framework of 2x4's with open walls and ceilings - allows for an uninterrupted process, or wandering, through the site. In this arrangement, space is both paradoxically delineated and unlimited.This publication accompanies the exhibition New Babylon, organized by Michael Dopp, at Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California (July 18 - August 15, 2015).Published by Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California, 2015Format: Softcover, 6.25 x 8 inches / 200 pagesEnglish

New Babylon

Throughout the last 30 years, Los Angeles–based painter James Hayward’s (born 1943) practice has focused exclusively on the monochrome, developing from flatter works into thicker, impasto abstractions. This monograph compiles Hayward’s most recent monochromatic paintings, exploring their sculptural peaks and fissures.

James Hayward

This volume includes a selection of 22 new portrait paintings from Kehinde Wiley's multinational World Stage series, which has included Africa, China and India in the past and now moves on to Brazil. Immersing himself in the local culture of Rio de Janeiro, Wiley incorporates the people, history and aesthetic of the city in each of his monumental male portraits. His models, chosen from the favela slums, reflect historically significant public sculptures found within the city. Oversize tropical flowers in full bloom, appropriated from Brazilian textiles, inundate the work with saturated, brightly hued colors suggestive of Brazilian exoticism. Likening African-descended, young Brazilian males to canonical figures from Western art history as well as Brazilian public monuments, Wiley renders masculinity both august and noble. Text in English and Portuguese.

Kehinde Wiley: The World Stage, Brazil (ROBERTS & TILTO)

Kehinde Wiley

Brian Keith Jackson

Reynaldo Roels Jr.

Kehinde Wiley’s acclaimed World Stage series inserts into the language of old master portraiture the very ethnicities and ethnic iconography that western art has most excluded from it, or that western art has portrayed solely in colonial, Orientalist terms. Among the countries and continents he has previously depicted in this ambitious traveling epic are Brazil, Africa, China, India and Sri Lanka. The rhetoric of Wiley’s paintings is powerful in its compositional candor, color palette and playfulness with constructions of visual meaning; as Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky) notes, “Wiley’s canvas surfaces are a mirror reflection of America’s unceasing search for new meanings from the ruins of the Old World of Europe and Africa.” This volume includes a selection of new World Stage portraits, focusing on contemporary youth from Jewish-Ethiopian-Israeli, Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Israeli communities.

Kehinde Wiley: The World Stage: Israel

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Roberts & Tilton publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.