Alekhuogie, David

David Alekhuogie

American, (born 1986-)

About the Artist

The works by Los Angeles-based artist David Alekhuogie in the West Collection were collected from the exhibition that showcased a couple of series at Yancey Richardson Gallery in 2021. 

"Naivete was a series of photographs, collage and fabric sculptures, informed by his 2019 trip to Nigeria, the birthplace of his father. Alekhuogie's recent work incorporates African sculpture and textiles to question the route through which African Americans become cognizant of their cultural heritage, authorship, and the hierarchy of art versus craft. In the photographic series "A Reprise", Alekhuogie proposes a rewriting of Perfect Documents, the exhibition catalogue of documentary photographs of African sculptures by Walker Evans. Alekhuogie has recast Evans's two-dimensional images as physical sculpture, photographed them against traditional African textiles, and then overlaid this image onto the original catalogue. The resulting photographs oscillate between object and print, two and three dimensions, and nod to Cubism's relationship to African sculpture. The images by Evans are the result of a commission from MoMA to document their 1935 exhibition African Negro Art, a forerunner in presenting African objects as artworks rather than anthropological artifacts. With many of the objects unable to travel, Evans's formal, modernist photographs subsequently toured as an exhibition throughout the United States in their stead. Through his own transmutation of these images, Alekhuogie brings what he calls "the hand-me-down nature of Pan Africanism" to the foreground, and questions through whose eyes, and whose agency, African Americans form their cultural narrative." -All-About-Photo review 2021.

Works

Exhibitions

coming soon…