Boomshakalaka

Autumn Ahn

Reginald Madison

Jamel Robinson

False Flag presents Boomshakalaka, an exhibition curated by Mike Mosby, featuring paintings and drawings by Autumn Ahn, Reginald Madison, and Jamel Robinson. The show borrows its title from the lyrics of the Sly & The Family Stone track, I Want to Take You Higher, from their 1969 album, Stand!. Among Sly & The Family Stone’s most-acclaimed albums, Stand! was lauded both for its commercial success and its engagement with the social and political upheaval of its time. The record had a lasting influence on popular culture: introducing the phrase “different strokes for different folks,” and the expression “boomshakalaka” into the American lexicon. Mosby cites accessibility as his main curatorial objective, stating that “art should be accessible for people in every class and social group and should not only be made available to those of a higher socioeconomic class.” Mosby gravitated toward ‘Boomshakalaka’ as the exhibition title for its connection to the accessibility of pop music and for the feelings of excitement the expression connotes.

Mosby’s curation connects Ahn, Madison, and Robinson along three planes: abstraction, praxis, and influence. The selection of works converse most obviously through abstraction - discrete voices speaking a common visual language. Ahn, Madison, and Robinson all work between performance, sculpture, painting, writing, and installation - a distinct synthesis of multiple disciplines recognizable in each practice. Mosby’s choices highlight the specific cultural references from which the three artists draw: Autumn Ahn recalls diasporic reinventions of language, immersive dream exchange, botany, philosophies of time and space, and spiritual rites founded in ancestral Korean mountain workshops; Reginald Madison cites his parents’ love of jazz and artists like Sun Ra as influences on his decades-long painting and sculpture practice; Jamel Robinson’s work is influenced by Harlem, where he was born, raised, and lives today.

Boomshakalaka unites selections from these three diverse practices to offer a resonant, accessible whole.

—Stephanie Njeri Wambugu

Michael Mosby (b.1987, Bronx, New York) lives and works in Hudson, New York. He is a multidisciplinary creative and curator who performs under the name Fulathela both in the United States and abroad, most notably at Afropunk Paris. Mosby is the co-founder of Free Range, a performance series that has been presented at Art Omi in Ghent, New York and at 777 International Mall at Mana Contemporary Miami. In the past year Mosby has curated Idealistic at University Art Museum, University at Albany, Shake Up The Room at the September Gallery, Hudson, NY and Space is the Place at Foreland Catskill, Catskill, NY.

Autumn Ahn (b.1986, Philadelphia) is an artist working through performance, installation, sculpture, video and painting to explore live space as a shapeable state built by constant change. Questioning the shifting architectures of memory and the archetypes of identity, her work focuses on elastic relationships to time, language, history and the body as both tools and dialectic forms to contemplate movement. In 2021, she was invited for a 2-month residency in Dakar, Senegal at Selebe Yoon, preceding a two-person exhibition, Mots de Neige, Histoires en sable. In 2022, she will be a resident at Headlands Art Center and is an artist advisor to Converging Liberations Residency, a QT/BIPoc-focused artist residency project based in Mass MoCA.

Reginald Madison (b. 1941, Chicago) is a painter and sculptor. In his early years, Madison was greatly influenced by his parents’ love of jazz and the stories they told of seeing Sun-Ra at the legendary Club DeLisa on Chicago’s south side, and by the family’s frequent trips to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. In 1970, Madison was invited to participate in an art show that established him in Chicago’s emerging arts scene; he went on to travel and study art independently in Paris, Venice, and Copenhagen. Madison was represented by Phyllis Kind Gallery in NYC after moving to Western Massachusetts in the 1970s.

Jamel Robinson is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist working in abstract expressionist painting, sculpture, writing, and performance. The pieces featured in Boomshakala are a departure from his usual practice of brush-based painting, allowing the freedom of using his hands and other objects as tools to create new gestures and expressions. Robinson describes his work as “pondering itself alongside maker and audience, while serving as a time-stamp of the experiences shaping my life and creative practice.” His first institutional exhibition, “Beauty from Ashes, is currently on view at the Hudson River Museum through January, 2022. Robinson lives and works in Harlem, New York, where he was born and raised.