Please join Arcana: Books on the Arts on Saturday, September 20th, between 4:00 and 6:00 PM as they welcome Los Angeles artist David Alekhuogie to celebrate the release of his new Aperture publication, A Reprise. In addition to signing copies, he will engage in a discussion of the book and his work with fellow Los Angeles artist Awol Erizku.

“A Reprise, David Alekhuogie’s first monograph, confronts the intriguing legacy of narrative and authorship behind Western presentations of African art, and poses timely questions about how Black aesthetics are circulated, accessed, valued, and interpreted today. In 1935, Walker Evans was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to photograph hundreds of African sculptures for the exhibition African Negro Art. Nearly ninety years later, Alekhuogie began investigating Evans’s images, provocatively remixing them into his own vibrant and multilayered photographic collages. Transposing facsimiles of Evans’s original images onto cardboard or paper structures of his own making, Alekhuogie rephotographs these image-sculptures against striking backdrops — often using East and West African textiles — thereby inviting multiple dimensions of viewership. Alekhuogie’s images draw upon the musical idiom of the reprise — a performance of repetition — and stake a claim to crucial, restorative ideas around Black antiquity by questioning our relationship to what we consider fake or original, art or archive.”

The discussion will begin at 4:20 PM. If you cannot attend and would like to order a signed copy of David Alekhuogie’s A Reprise, or Awol Erizku’s brilliant Aperture monograph, Mystic Parallax, please place your order here!

David Alekhuogie received his MFA from Yale University and post-bac BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work was included in “Companion Pieces,” the 2020 iteration of MoMA’s biannual New Photography exhibition, and in “Men of Change: Power. Triumph. Truth” at the California African American Art Museum in Los Angeles. In 2019, he was the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. Alekhuogie has had solo exhibitions at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, CA (2019); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, CA (2019); Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles, CA (2017); and at the Chicago Artist Coalition (2016). His work has been published in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Time Magazine, Timeout, Chicago, Vice, and The Los Angeles Times.”

Born in Gondar, Ethiopia, in 1988, Awol Erizku is a multidisciplinary artist working in photography, film, sculpture and installation, creating a new vernacular that bridges the gap between African and African American visual culture. Erizku’s work refers to subjects as diverse as art history, hip-hop, and spirituality, rejecting Eurocentric notions of art and beauty in favor of building an Afrocentric aesthetic, something he refers to as “Afro-esotericism.” With a distinctive emphasis on reclaiming and reinterpreting historical narratives within a contemporary context, the artist’s work challenges viewers to reconsider conventional perspectives on art and society through a lens that merges personal narrative with broader socio-political commentary. Erizku received a BFA from The Cooper Union, New York, in 2010, and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, in 2014. His work has been exhibited at prominent institutions including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arkansas; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; The Studio Museum, Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto; FLAG Art Foundation, New York; and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah. Erizku also brings high concept to commercial photography highlighting cultural and creative leaders for publications such as The New Yorker, New York Magazine, GQ, and Vanity Fair.