What will a more inclusive art world look like?

Antwaun Sargent: The critic and curator’s first show for Gagosian is a multifaceted exploration of the Black social practice

- Camille Okhio

For centuries, Black Americans have built, maintained and improved coping strategies to overcome countless barriers to their safety and success. Drawing creative inspiration from oral traditions, spiritual practices and learned experience, they have sought and converted spaces to occupy and define. This multigenerational feat has long been the expertise of the New York-based critic and curator Antwaun Sargent. For his first show as a director at Gagosian, Sargent has gathered a range of artists at different stages of their career, working in different media, but who all have the same goal: creating and dissecting space for the betterment of themselves and their communities.

‘Social Works’, which opened on 24 June at Gagosian’s West 24th Street gallery, showcases site-specific works by David Adjaye, Theaster Gates, Linda Goode Bryant, Rick Lowe, Titus Kaphar and many others. The show (and Sargent’s role at Gagosian) builds on over ten years of conversations with Black American artists. In this time, he has started fires and put them out, curated shows and authored books, written diatribes and offered anecdotes. Every project Sargent takes on is broached with searing criticality, a staunchly realistic interpretation of what is and what can be, all presented with an unapologetic undertone of self-advancement. With, of course, the caveat that his own advancement swings a pendulum that hits many other notes on its way.