William Powhida
Complicities
September 7 - October 12, 2019
Postmasters Gallery is pleased to announce Complicities, William Powhida's first solo exhibition with the gallery in
nearly five years (and almost a decade since the Brooklyn Rail published "How the New Museum Committed Suicide
with Banality").
Complicities is a show of painfully obvious, politically didactic, research-based, and precisely rendered works on paper.
Produced over the last ten months in the wake of the crisis at the Whitney Museum, the work makes visible generalized
and abstract systems -- investment, real estate, museum boards, private family-owned companies, curation, public policy
-- illuminating the connections between art and the ruling class.
Through specific subjects and case studies, Powhida uses an aesthetic of what might be best described as
'capitalist realism' to render an image of neoliberal governance and art's instrumentalization in perpetuating
a system of private-public partnerships. Punctuating these slow takes are a series of paintings based on the artist's
Instagram memes drawn from films and series including Halloween, Don't Look Now, The Terminator, Robocop,
Chernobyl, and Billions, which offer a different kind and degree of reflection on art's role in society.
Over the last decade the need for critical re-evaluations of American social and cultural governance continue to intensify
as the degrees and layers of structural, systemic, pragmatic, and opportunistic 'complicities' are laid bare.
The private and public systems that William Powhida maps out involve a lot of powerful white people.
The artist visualizes financial investments in a military and defense conglomerate by four Whitney board members;
the corporate web of profit, violations, lobbying, and philanthropy of the Koch Brothers' sprawling empire; the policies
and investments behind developer Stephen A. Ross's Hudson Yard's project initiated by former major Michael Bloomberg;
laws and executive orders behind privatization since President Reagan; the direct flow of businessman Warren B. Kanders'
tear gas to his previous role as a trustee at the Whitney Museum; and the curatorial structure of the Venice Biennale.
The artist has described the resulting works as a form of 'capitalist realism' -- a data visualization made of charts,
diagrams and annotations filled with his exquisite watercolor drawings. He is attempting to put information back into
circulation as art-- the thing that links all of his subjects together.
Through a companion series of Instagram memes largely drawn from science fiction and horror, the artist comments
on the institution of critique -- "political art is a joke" -- but as Kanders' resignation from the Whitney Board shows,
there are, in fact, ways to engage institutional critique outside of the studio. As the Teargas Biennial essay, the
Decolonize this Place protests, and the withdrawal of 9 artists from the Whitney Biennial demonstrate, internal and
external pressure can compel institutions to change. Nan Goldin's efforts and lawsuits, brought by five states,
representing thousands of victims, have caused museums to sever ties with the Sacklers and ask existential questions
about their relationship with structural inequality.
Artsy's Nate Freeman recently reminded us that it's been nearly 10 years since Greek mega-collector Dakis Joannou
purchased a $1,000 William Powhida print How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality. It is a drawing
"that satirizes the various players in the scandal and maps out all their connections, brutally criticizing the institution
and its benefactor. "Freeman's observation, beyond suggesting Mr. Joannou has a sense of humor, implies that
Powhida's own complicity in the systems -- museums, the art market, social media, white male privilege -- undercuts
or negates the function of critique. Powhida it would seem, is already bought and compromised.
At the risk of centering structural problems on himself the artist has long been engaged through satire, parody,
and self-critique of the problem of his identity as an artist. A crucial aspect of this problem is best articulated by
artist Xaviera Simmons, "Understand the historical American narrative and see yourselves within that framework;
do the cultural autopsy, name what whiteness is and the centuries of harm it has done; show yourselves to each
other and wrestle with the implications of whiteness on canvas, in performance, in front of the camera and definitely
in writing; and, most importantly, stop oppressing us through dismissive and condescending words and deeds."
William Powhida has no illusions that this work will change the systems he inhabits,
or save anyone, but he will not be selling any of this work to any of the subjects depicted
(sorry, Glenn Furhman!). The artist will make any information about sales that transform
art into commodity public upon request and tell you some other things about unpaid labor.
William Powhida [b. 1976] lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His recent shows in 2018 On
the Contemporary at Gallery Poulsen and After After the Contemporary at Charlie James Gallery follow
his first solo museum exhibition After the Contemporary in 2017 at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
in Connecticut. His work will be included in Twenty Twenty at the Aldrich and SUM Artists: Visual Diagrams
and Systems-Based Explorations at the Wellin Museum in Ithaca next year. His work has been reviewed
and discussed in the New York Times, Hyperallergic, Art in America, Artforum, October, The Los Angeles Times,
and Artnet. He holds a BFA in painting from Syracuse University and an MFA from Hunter College.
He currently teaches at Cornell University and the School of Visual Arts.
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William Powhida Complicities installation shot |
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William Powhida Collectors (Halloween) 2019 Watercolor and acrylic on paper metadata: posted April 20th, 2019. 144 likes 15 x 15 inches |
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William Powhida Crushing Anxiety (Chernobyl) 2019 Watercolor and acrylic on paper metadata: posted May 28th, 2019. 333 likes 15 x 15 inches |
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William Powhida Venice (Don't Look Now) diptych 2019 Watercolor and acrylic on paper metadata: posted May 5th, 2019. 256 likes 15 x 15 inches (each) |
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William Powhida Art World Insider (Robocop) 2019 Watercolor and acrylic on paper metadata: posted July 18th, 2019. 147 likes 15 x 15 inches |
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William Powhida Barca Nostra (Venice Biennale) 2019 Watercolor and acrylic on paper metadata: posted May 12th, 2019. 129 likes 15 x 15 inches |
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William Powhida Memes (Sam Was Here) 2019 Watercolor and acrylic on paper metadata: posted June 21st, 2019. 56 likes 15 x 15 inches |
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William Powhida Sea Dragon (A County Fair) 2019 Watercolor and acrylic on paper metadata: posted May 2nd, 2019. 142 likes 15 x 15 inches |
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William Powhida Alex Poots (Billions) 2019 Watercolor and acrylic on paper metadata: posted June 7th, 2019. 128 likes 15 x 15 inches |
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William Powhida Hudson Yards (Equilibrium) diptych 2019 Watercolor and acrylic on paper metadata: posted July 15th, 2019. 194 likes 15 x 15 inches (each) |
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William Powhida Political Artist (Mary Magdalene) 2019 Watercolor and acrylic on paper metadata: posted April 21st, 2019. 244 likes 15 x 15 inches |
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William Powhida Neoliberalism (Policy) 2019 watercolor, ink, The U.S. Government, and the Internet on paper mounted on dibond 23.5 x 54 inches |
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William Powhida Koch Industries (Private Company) 2019 watercolor, ink, Rolling Stone, and the Internet on paper mounted on dibond 38 x 54 inches |
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William Powhida The Sacklers (Family Tree) 2019 watercolor, ink, The New York Times, and the Internet on paper mounted on dibond 53 x 40 inches |
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William Powhida Hudson Yards (Phase I) 2019 watercolor, graphite, colored pencil, PVA glue, ink, the Internet and The Cost of the Hudson Yards Redevelopment Project by Bridget Fisher and Flávia Leite on paper mounted on panel. 58 x 78 inches |
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William Powhida Safariland (Direct Investment) 2019 watercolor, ink, transfer, and the Internet on paper mounted on dibond 21.5 x 54 inches |
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William Powhida Textron (Indirect Investments) 2019 watercolor, ink, and the Internet on paper mounted on dibond 33 x 53 inches |
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William Powhida La Biennale di Venezia (Propaganda) 2019 Watercolor, gouache, transfer, and the Internet on paper 27 x 74 inches Image courtesy of the gallery and the Nasher Museum. Special thanks to Paddy Johnson for her collaboration on the piece. |
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William Powhida La Biennale di Venezia (Propaganda) (detail) 2019 Watercolor, gouache, transfer, and the Internet on paper |
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William Powhida Koch Industries (Private Company) (detail) 2019 watercolor, ink, Rolling Stone, and the Internet on paper mounted on dibond |