Artists Adam Pendleton, Nadine Robinson, Jefferson Pinder, Jeffrey Grove, and Hank Willis Thomas, along with Kenya Evans and Jabari Anderson of Otabenga Jones & Associates, discuss their participation in the exhibit *After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy*. The exhibit and their art reconsider the pivotal time in American history and explores its relevancy to and influence on a new generation.
Adam Pendleton is an artist based in New York.
Born in London in 1968, Nadine Robinson received a BA from State University at Stony Brook, New York in 1995, and an MFA from New York University in 1997. She has been honored with artist in residencies at several prestigious venues including at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1997 and the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2000.
Kenya Evans's paintings and sculptures convey an intentionally didactic message about history's tendency to repeat itself. In their sampling of diverse references, these pseudo historical collages, which combine texts from children's books with popular toys, and comics with Islamic proverbs, comment on the reductive simplicity of history books, while asserting their own critical analysis of the foundations on which the United States was built. Evans is also a hip-hop musician, and his use of the medium itself a repository of black experience and a primary means of black expression in his artwork functions to create a multilayered juxtaposition of historical and contemporary situations, making it all too clear that little has changed. Evans is a member of Otabenga Jones & Associates.
Mixed-media painter Dawolu Jabari Anderson attended Texas Southern University in Houston. While enrolled there, he participated in numerous prestigious exhibitions. Along with his individual success, Anderson is a founding member of the Otabenga Jones & Associates collective, which was formed by Anderson and the artists Jamal Cyrus, Kenya Evans, and Robert Pruitt after meeting at Texas Southern University. In 2006, the collective was invited to participate in the Whitney Biennial, displaying both their collective and individual works, and all have since experienced steady success.