Alvaro Barrington

Blum & Poe is pleased to present Brooklyn and London-based artist Alvaro Barrington's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

91–98 JFK–LAX Border

This exhibition is my thank-you to some of my heroes.

When the bro Chadwick Boseman died, so many of us felt a huge pain and deep loss. People cried because a fictional king had died. It made me think of how I can’t even imagine the pain a generation must have felt when a real king—Dr. King, Malcolm, and the Panthers—got taken from us. A community that really needed love and support saw Reaganomics and new Jim Crows, along with other new systems of hate, take hold. For many in that generation, the reasonable option to self-medicate through disco and cocaine turned into the crack epidemic, and needle sharing exasperated the new HIV virus.

A generation who saw the pain in the eyes and the souls of their mothers, fathers, aunties, uncles, and neighbors began to reimagine how to address these issues when the larger structural solution was locking us up. In L.A., Dr. Dre and Snoop made the less dangerous chronic cool. They told us to put on jimmy hats, and—10 million records later—my generation started smoking up and wrapping up. Snoop, Dre, and the chronic saved a generation.

In N.Y.C., they said Giuliani cleaned up the city, which is wild because every kid I know knew we needed to change this generational curse. We started smoking up, and they came and locked everyone up. Humans need a sense of self-worth and a sense of dignity. A generation returned from jail with wild scars: people saw their family members gunned down in front them; Latasha Harlins was murdered; and 90 percent of women are sexually assaulted before they get locked up. In some prisons, one half of the men have been sexually assaulted—trauma on trauma, put in a box.

When these folks came out, Biggie, JAY-Z, and Lil’ Kim gave us the commandments to get fly and carry our heads high. Pac told us to keep our heads up. When he was taken, DMX carried the torch to make us bark, pray, and cry. Mary J made us say we need real love. Ghostface took his darkest moment and made us use the newspaper—made us want to ground our souls and reach for the skies. Magazines and the press people, with only profits in their mind, claimed to love the culture; they made millions of dollars telling the West and East Coast that we were at war on the ground. The only real narrative was that we saved each other.

L.A., thank you.

—Alvaro Barrington

Alvaro (cadet) Barrington (b. 1983, Caracas, Venezuela)

Biography

Figuring it out is hard and I’m sorry

Everything I experience is real

Sometimes the safest place I feel is sleeping on the streets

Latasha Harlins

It’s your job

Consider the source

Wish we grew up on the same advice

Arbitrary geopolitical cousins fight political identity

Embodied knowledge

Practicing Trust

For the CULTURE/

If you were them, You would be them/

LISTEN/

Play your part don’t let the position play you

Emotional moron but he isn’t evil

Them “ALL THAT I GOT IS YOU” days

Hip-hop is not the problem our reality is the problem

We shall overcome… We gonna be alright

Fight the power

Residue of racism

Where there is lions there are vultures

Cultural confidence

They get accustomed to the sweet tooth

The enslaved

Shack poor

We are all just walking each other home

Concept Albums

Whatever the fuck is whatever da fuck

Ok, Sorry/

It’s my flesh that holds on to facts, It’s my spirit that holds on to truth/

She riding dick on her tippy toes/

Trauma looping/

The culture sometimes bigger than the charts

The liquor store closer than the mosques

People come in with the platform for their own questions more than to sit and listen

The art lies in concealing the art

Public squalor and private opulence

Painting in the service of ideas

Socializing risk/privatizing profits

It was all a dream

More conscious of the way we raise our daughters