Antwon Sargent was caring for a Negroni at his haunt Frankie’s Spuntino in Brooklyn as he described the benefits of his multi-layered career.
“I had dinner with Madonna,” he said recently on Friday. “Coming of age as a gay man in Chicago in the ’90s, you can imagine, I was excited. My time passes missing him.”
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But within moments of their encounter last year, the sergeant struck the ground. Taking out his iPhone, his predecessor’s idol proceeded to show him artifacts by Rocco Ritchie, her 21-year-old son with filmmaker Guy Ritchie, persuading her for about an hour about her hopes for the boy.
“It made things real,” said Sgt. “Here was the Madonna—a legend, an icon—asking for guidance, just being the mother.”
Looks like the pop diva knew where to turn.
Sargent, 33, a former kindergarten teacher, artist and curator and vocal champion of black artists, was appointed in January 2021 as a director at Gagosian, a blue-chip megagallery with a mandate to make waves .
Their first show, “Social Works” (2021), highlighted a multidisciplinary roster including Thester Gates, architect David Adjaye and filmmaker Linda Goode Bryant, who set up a small, working farm in the gallery space. The show also highlighted Sargent’s mission: to give black artists, who were only represented at major art-world institutions, a highly visible seat at the table.
This was a mission Sergeant happened to share with cultural polymath Virgil Abloh, each one intent on conveying a commitment and sense of community. artist’s Of all stripes – painter, architect, sculptor, musician and fashion designer.
So it was all but inevitable that Abloh, whose work encompasses fashion, music, architecture, and art, would invite Sgt. to curate his retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. The show was a turning point in his career — Abloh passed away last year after a long illness — and certainly a feather in Sgt’s hat.
The exhibition, “Figures of Speech”, opens on Friday, with works arranged not on walls, but along tables, displaying artifacts and artifacts from Abloh’s collection. The show is quite different from its earlier incarnation, which was exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2019 and was curated by Michael Darling.
Sargent, a former kindergarten teacher-turned-artist and curator, has been a vocal champion of black artists and was commissioned with a mandate to make waves. He already has. (Nate Palmer/The New York Times)
The Brooklyn setting opens modestly with a 1981 high school architecture project by Abloh and includes some of his early fashion drawings, artworks, and clothing. It showcases items from the designer’s fashion labels: Pyrex Vision, Off-White, and Louis Vuitton menswear, along with impressive collaborations with Takashi Murakami, Kanye West and Rem Koolhaas.
The show’s charming centerpiece, a rustic-looking schoolhouse in Pine, is built to function as a real-life classroom that offers visitors “cheat sheets” lessons, covering industrial design, music, architecture and fashion design. Huh. “Everything in a nutshell that Virgil touched,” said Sgt. The structure will occupy 1,400 square feet of the museum’s Great Hall.
Yes, it takes up space – and that’s it. “Space is the thread that connects everything I do,” said Sargent. Space can add to the power, he said. “The question is: ‘What are you going to do with that space?'”
If an artist is simply hoping to push himself, “I’m not interested in that,” said Sargent. “But if you’re looking to make space for other people, for other black artists, to make a difference, I’m deeply interested in that.”
taking up space
Sergeant himself means to capture a wide swath of people consciousness, He writes profusely and has published important essays in The New York Times and The New Yorker, among other places. Last year, she served as guest editor for Arts in America, turning the magazine’s new-talent issue in May into a platform for black critics, illustrators, and photographers. He has published a series of house catalogs – zines, they call them – in Gagosian.
“He has a great kind of work ethic and he’s a team player,” said Larry Gagosian. “He deserves the attention he’s getting, but it’s not like he wants too much attention for himself. You’re not dealing with someone who’s constantly on an ego trip.”
Gagosian said: “A lot of galleries are focusing on underrepresented artists of color. But Antwon really pushed this forward more effectively.”
Part art nerd, part crusader, Sargent has gathered the works of black artists into two books, “Young, Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists” and “The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion.” He continues to oversee exhibitions and publishes critical commentary on Kehinde Wiley, Alexandria Smith, Nick Cave and Amanda Williams, among others.
Sargent has modeled for GQ and was recently seen on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, her slender 5-foot-11 frame and signature cuffed Russian karakul hat. She was visible in a crowd that featured West, Megan. Joined by stallion and photographer Tyler Mitchell (a friend), Balenciaga is all yearning for the scene of the spring 2023 show.
In the relative calm of the Frankies, the sergeant spoke swiftly, fingers tracing Arabic in the air as he reminisced about the highlights of his spring social season.
Earlier this year, while living in Positano on the Amalfi Coast in Italy, he was invited to a party in Capri, a modernist villa on a high cliff that is strictly off-limits to the general public.
“I didn’t know how I was going to get there,” said Sargent, noting that he also sounded like a “broken” writer. He hired a boat and headed precariously to a dock marked on Google Maps with an arrow. “I had to keep saying to myself, ‘It’s okay, I’m going to this crazy house where no one can go.'”
He jumped into his good fortune having fun like a child. The evening was eye-opening. “We had dinner on the terrace, and there was opera singing,” he said. “It was also the night that I realized, ‘Wow, this world – this is not the world I came from.'”
Art. cheated by
The sergeant quickly developed his fierce sense of commitment. A Chicago native, he grew up in the infamous Cabrini-Green Homes, which have since collapsed. “You know what that scenario was,” he said calmly. “You clearly know that a lot of people never made it out there.”
He owed him partly to his mother, he said, who sent him to Catholic school and managed to subsidize his youthful ambitions while working at Walgreens.
“We were under-resourced,” as he said. But when he asked to join a student exchange program in Germany, his mother didn’t reassure him, “We’ll figure it out.”
Keen to pursue a career in the Foreign Service, he entered Georgetown University in 2007, volunteered for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and an apprenticeship with Hillary Rodham Clinton before accepting a position with Teach for America. who was assigned the task of teaching reading and writing in a classroom. 30 furious 4- and 5-year-olds in Brooklyn.
He said, “I was getting up every day at 5:45 to take the C train in East New York, teaching and writing during the day, partying, doing everything that a 21-year-old would do at night. does.” As the art world betrayed him, his friend and housewife Jiajia Fei, a digital strategist for the arts, was circling the gallery.
“We went to every possible show, to every party, whatever was happening,” said Sgt. “When I’m fascinated, I need to meet everyone. I have to read everything.”
He decided to contribute in some way or the other. “Writing became like this,” he said.
At first he panicked. “No one likes to face a blank screen,” he said. But neither was teaching a walk in the park.
“It wasn’t some tony Upper East Side scenario,” he said. “You really had to believe in those kids, support them.” Children, like artists, he discovered, “can smell a bad idea. He is the harshest critic. But if you’re there for them, they know it.”
He is well aware that the art world may not prove to be that stable. “We have moments where black artists ascend into the culture, and then many years later, they are gone,” he said. “Without any structural change from institutions, you have fashion, a trend.”
The Sergeant’s schedule these days leaves little time for entertainment, less so for romance. He recently ended a three-year relationship with a performance artist. “Finding balance in a relationship is hard, especially when you’re at a hyperproductive moment in your career,” he said. “Right now, I’m thinking it might be good to take that moment to focus on work.”
Still he had to rest. About departing for a long weekend at GoldenEye, a luxury resort on Jamaica’s north coast, she betrayed a touch of anxiety.
Disconnecting? Well, it was going to be an experiment. “I’ve never taken a vacation, not even for four days,” he said. “I’m afraid to stay too long.
“Already, I’m thinking, ‘Oh my god, what if I get bored?
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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