AZIKIWE MOHAMMED

UNTITLED, ART MIAMI BEACH NOV 29-DEC 4, 2021

Moments Before Seating

Elijah Wheat Showroom is beaming at the presentation of Azikiwe Mohammed at the Untitled, Art Miami fair in 2021. Mohammed makes objects, paintings, videos, and installations that emphasize inclusion. From his nomadic New Davonhaime Food Bank to The Black Painter’s Academy, he surrounds his witnesses with images and productions with hopes for Black prosperity.

The uplifting bright colors Azikiwe uses to execute his paintings are co-mingled with serious scenes of food. Then, he boldly explores helicopter searches and raging fires that have he’s personally witnessed in 2020 and 2021. His work creates an awareness that travels beyond just inclusion, inviting his audience into intimate participation. Rich warm violet walls with golden pin stripes wrap the booth while faux-wood flooring clings to the concrete. Wall paintings exemplify a setting for interchange, comfort and nostalgia. Painted mirrors, with found gilded frames, hang and display a joyful floral arrangement or picnic, interwoven with the viewer’s visage. Retrofitted televisions will host lo-fi single-channel videos containing dreamy landscapes, scrolling psychedelically. They compile ritual-like found audio with cries and cheer alongside overlays of natural field recordings. Perhaps they are sounds of joy or of a contemplative soul searching for meaning that emerges from the audio tracks. Text in the videos provide insightful offerings while hosting poetic scrolling of poetic thoughts electronically manipulated in the artist’s voice.

Iterations of spaces and places that Azikiwe Mohammed activates steadfastly include service to the community while he encourages accessibility for all audiences. An artist with a broad media and social practice conjures an Untitled, Art fair atmosphere that intends to lift and empower a Black experience for the people of Miami. Namely, the artist negotiates public programming that brings his “New Davonhaime Food Bank” mission to the beach, finding a way to include and incorporate an invitation to participate in helping feed the people of Miami with a simple raffle. As a longtime educator and community advocate, his mission belongs to all people.

Whether painting sandwiches, roses, pies, or burning portraits, Mohammed instigates a query on living space and how art is not only collected, but presented in a home and aims to understand how it feels to love and to own. He establishes how works can be included in any home, yet how it accentuates a Black home especially.

The safe space Azikiwe Mohammed create’s with Elijah Wheat Showroom invites a community to chill, to reflect and to not be too weary of found objects encasing valuable works of art. Whether carefully placing ephemera, philosophizing or including vague silhouettes, he records and shares Black stories. The comforts of living with highfalutin art, however, stray from traditional white-walls, pristine monitors and custom frames. We invite further conversation about how we can work together to enjoy an exhibition as an experience; not just a commercial booth at Untitled, Art Miami Beach, 2021.

Azikiwe Mohammed’s artwork has been shown in galleries both nationally and internationally. A 2005 graduate of Bard College, where he studied photography and fine arts, Mohammed received the Rauschenberg Artists Fund Grant in 2020, the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant in 2016, and the Art Matters Grant in 2015. He lives in New York and currently has his studio at Mana Contemporary.

Mohammed has presented a number of solo exhibitions in venues including Elijah Wheat Showroom, Newburgh, NY; the Knockdown Center, Maspeth, New York; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; Ace Hotel Chicago, Illinois; IDIO Gallery, Brooklyn, New York; Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL and Anna Zorina Gallery, New York, NY; as well as multiple solo offerings at Spring Break Art Show, New York. He has participated in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Queens, New York; Antenna Gallery, New Orleans, Louisiana; Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, California, David Kordansky, L.A.; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, among others. He is an alumnus of Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York, and Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, New Jersey. His work has been featured extensively in publications and magazines, including The New York Times, Frieze Magazine, VICE, I-D, Artforum, Forbes, BOMB and Hyperallergic.

Elijah Wheat Showroom (est. 2015) is a New York-based artist-run gallery and nomadic curatorial experience founded by Carolina Wheat & Liz Nielsen. The gallery is named after their late son, Elijah, whose creative insight, righteous vision, perceptive being and stylistic voice for trendsetting compose the spirit that the Showroom honors. EWS artists are socially conscientious, politically engaged and reflective of a creative community striving to cultivate interactions and instigate critical conversations while also promoting art’s accessibility outside of a purely commercial focus.