Artsy
The 10 Best Booths at Art Basel in Miami Beach 2022
November 30, 2022
By Ayanna Dozier
“…In the Nova section of the fair, Welancora Gallery presents a stunning display of abstract paintings by Carl E. Hazlewood. Hazlewood, who was born in 1951, has been on the rise over the past few years due to the increasing popularity of Black abstraction. The brightly colored vertical panels evoke the works of Sam Gilliam and Frank Bowling.
Gallery director Ivy Jones told Artsy that enthusiasm for Hazlewood’s work was running high throughout the opening day, and attributed that in part to enthusiasm for the Nova section. “Nova is one of the smaller sections of the fair…I think people come to it looking for exciting, new artists that are not as prominent as some of the others in the main section,” Jones said.
By midday, the gallery had sold one of the nine available paintings to a private collector for a price in the range of $22,000–$28,000. With several pieces left by the day’s end, Hazlewood’s awe-inspiring, ethereal abstractions are poised to become highly sought-after…”
The New Yorker
Goings on About Town — Art
Carl E. Hazlewood
“Most of New York City’s galleries are clustered in districts. (See the lately ballooning scene in Tribeca.) But some spaces are destinations in themselves. Two decades ago, in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, the insightful Ivy Jones opened Welancora, a Black-owned gallery anchored by the work of Black artists, long before every big-box gallery in town began jumping on the diversity bandwagon. In the airy parlor floor of a brownstone at 33 Herkimer Street, Welancora is showing (through May 7) the abstractions of Carl E. Hazlewood, a Guyanese-born American artist, who is also an accomplished curator and writer. In Hazlewood’s hands, simple means—plastic mesh, cut paper, pushpins, fabric, metallic string—assume formally and intellectually complex dimensions. Slipping between painting, installation, and drawing, he introduces ideas of the African diasporic experience (the Middle Passage, Afro-Caribbean folktales) in layered compositions that are buoyant but searing. The shape-shifting trickster Anansi is one recurring motif (as seen in “BlackHead Anansi Ensnares the Sun,” pictured above), a proxy, perhaps, for the ingenious artist himself.”
BOMB Magazine
Picturing the Unsayable: Carl E. Hazlewood
October 1, 2013
By Patricia Spears Jones
“…I met Carl Hazlewood in that most millennial of ways: Facebook. His daily postings of his and other artists’ works intrigued me; I had to “friend” him. What started as an interest in daily musings and pictorial renderings became a full-fledged 3D friendship. But Carl’s work remained mysterious—just what was he doing? What had he done? And why wasn’t there more of it, or why didn’t I know more about it? Some of these questions will be answered in two exhibitions this fall: a solo show, Temporality and Objects: Installations & Photographs at Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, and in a group show, Unsayable: Wall Worksat FiveMyles in Brooklyn.
Carl rarely makes “paintings,” though he started as a painter and is among a group of Guyanese visual artists who, since the ’80s, have gained international reputations. He co-founded Aljira, and has developed a curatorial and arts journalism practice, primarily focused on contemporary artists of color. But his art making was put on hold, in spite of his early success. So what brought him back to art making big time? Well, a personal crisis. His mother’s passing put things into perspective. He asked himself, ‘Do I want to reach the end of my own life never having done what I believe I was born to do?’”
The New York Times
ART IN REVIEW; 'Bending the Grid' -- 'Modernity, Identity and the Vernacular in the Work of Donald Locke'
June 25, 2004
“…With a gallery on one of Newark's major thoroughfares, the nonprofit Aljira puts art where art should be: in the thick of things. And its exhibition series ''Bending the Grid'' does the same by locating African-American art at the center of the modernist spectrum, its rightful place.
Organized by Carl E. Hazlewood, a co-founder of Aljira, the third installment in the series is a minisurvey of work by Donald Locke, who was born in Guyana in 1930, studied in London and lives in Atlanta. Among other things, the show demonstrates how one artist can, over decades, approach an immense subject from many angles. Mr. Locke's subject is the presence of pre-Columbian and African cultures in the New World, where the soil has been rich for cross-fertilization but the social climate unnurturing. He responds to these complex conditions with a complex art, one that has changed focus as his own perspectives on art and history have deepened…”
