Richard Beavers Gallery

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LAST WEEK OF WORKS ON PAPER

On View: June 6th - July 11th

“Experience art through artists vulnerability, revision, and risk”

At a moment when audiences increasingly crave intimacy, transparency, and human connection, Works on Paper asks viewers to consider what it means to encounter works that preserve traces of artistic searching. In many finished works, process disappears beneath refinement. Vulnerability is resolved, polished, and concealed. Works on paper often resist that concealment. They allow viewers closer access to movement, tension, instinct, and discovery. They reveal not only what an artist made, but how they arrived there.

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The lawsuit between Odili Donald Odita and Jack Shainman Gallery exposes a glaring double standard within the Black art community. When a premier white-owned gallery is accused of retaining over $1M in artwork, the behavior is intellectualized as a complex business dispute, and the institution continues to operate with minimal fallout. However, if a Black-owned gallery were accused of the exact same actions, the response would be swift and unforgiving. The Black art community would immediately deem the business unethical, the owner would be completely ostracized, and the gallery would be no longer supported. While powerful white gatekeepers are granted the grace of legal nuance, Black spaces facing the same crisis are essentially criminalized and dismantled by their own peers.