Blues for Smoke explores a wide range of contemporary art through the lens of the blues and blues aesthetics. Turning to the blues not simply as a musical category but as an artistic sensibility, the exhibition features works by over forty artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat and Romare Bearden, as well as materials culled from pop culture (The Wire and Azealia Banks’s 212 music video are both being screened on loop).
The exhibition’s title is drawn from a 1960 solo album by virtuoso jazz pianist Jaki Byard in which improvisation on blues form becomes a basis for avant-garde exploration. The title suggests that the expanded poetics of the blues is pervasive—but also diffuse and difficult to pin down. By presenting an uncommon heterogeneity of subject matter, art historical contexts, formal and conceptual inclinations, genres and disciplines, Blues for Smoke holds artists and art worlds together that are often kept apart, within and across lines of race, generation and canon.
A series of performances, events, screenings and readings accompanies the exhibition.