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reviews donelle woolford
Donelle woolforD
wallspace, new York
10 JanuarY – 16 februarY
Donelle Woolford, a young Harlem-based African-American artist, has race-based interpretation. If anything, Woolford’s persona inclines back
made an understated New York solo debut at Wallspace. Exhibiting a level towards – and sends up – a mode of 1990s production, when biography
of art-historical savvy well beyond her twenty-seven years, Woolford takes was, at best, an asset; at worst, a limit to a minority artist’s career.
a page from Marcel Broodthaers, with an installation including gigantic What’s clever about Scanlan’s project is its way of acknowledging
tropical plants, a seating area and a copy of Brian O’Doherty’s Studio and the politics of the West’s professed multiculturalism, in that his protagonist’s
Cube: On the Relationship Between Where Art Is Made and Where Art Is historical revisionism can, in a sense, best be enacted by someone who
Displayed (2008). She is a cubist painter by name, though this legacy takes speaks from within the boundaries of her identity group: hence the need
a somewhat counterintuitive route through her practice, manifesting as for Woolford’s creation. The fact that the artist hired women as partial
assemblages of wood scraps sourced from Woolford’s studio (in a lumber collaborators in his tale doesn’t absolve it of its potentially button-pushing
reclamation factory in Connecticut) and backed by corrugated cardboard. content, but may, in any case, be its most compelling dimension, without
These works assume the character of ‘bulky stage props’, as the artist which Woolford’s profitably ‘insincere’ practice and deadpan writings on
puts it in one her many essays, and enact a performative, identity-based race and history might seem less theatrically incisive, and more in poor
appropriation of Cubism – a movement, Woolford contends, which was taste. It’s evident that race isn’t Scanlan’s sole focus, and that Woolford’s
purloined from her African ancestors. analysis of high-art conservatism runs parallel to those of some of his other
Assessing the extent to which Woolford succeeds in her project projects, which also entail collaborative infiltrations of the canon’s hallowed
requires one additional piece of information: she is the construction of halls. Yet Woolford will remain among his least resolved works (perhaps
white, middle-aged American artist Joe Scanlan. This fact isn’t withheld but constructively so), as the power relations inherent in her invention remain
rather intimated by the women Scanlan hires to play Woolford at exhibition provocative, however thoughtfully they are staged and critiqued.
openings, and embedded in the biography and secondary material he has Tyler Coburn
assembled around her. In a mock essay that could best be described as an
idealised meeting of minds, Ralph Ellison and Broodthaers’s widow, Maria
Gilissen, call Woolford ‘an African American artist for the 21st century’,
yet her practice owes little allegiance to a recent generation of ‘postblack’
artists (so-titled by Thelma Golden), whose practices resist stringently Donelle Woolford, 2007 (installation view). courtesy wallspace, new York
Artreview 160
march_REVIEWS.indd 160 5/2/08 13:54:00
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