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Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Visual Art What Does the Art of World Change Look Like? Delphine Diallo Coming Up at the New MIA Gallery

Posted by Jen Graves on Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 4:01 PM

Is this what the art of world change looks like?

By Delphine Diallo
Is this what the art of world change looks like?

Today I finally got to see the Malick Sidibé exhibition at MIA Gallery downtown (about which more later—bottom line: go!, and give yourself at least an hour so you can look at what's on the walls and also pore through the catalogs), and owner Mariane Lenhardt mentioned that the next two shows at the gallery are now set: Delphine Diallo and Soly Cissé.

Cissé, the Senegalese artist whose post-Basquiat expressionist creations have made him a rising star on the international circuit, is not a surprise announcement; Lenhardt has said before that his work was coming.

Or is this what the art of world change looks like, too?

By Delphine Diallo
Or is this what the art of world change looks like, too?

I don't know Diallo's work. What I've seen online ranges so much it makes me curious: There are fashion-friendly but earnest collages. Early in her career, she was designer and animator for bands like Coldplay and Smashing Pumpkins. There's a large, nonironic portrait of herself done up as an Avatar character. There are documentary photographs she shot on the Crow Reservation in Montana. She was born in 1977 in Paris to Senegalese and French parents, and now lives and works in New York. (A video on her.)

Firm dates haven't been set yet for these next shows, but they give Seattle more of an idea of what Lenhardt means to do with MIA. At first, the word was that it was a gallery devoted to contemporary African artists, but she quickly corrected me when I asked her about that a month ago. "I don't have any limits," she said, "except, and this is egocentric, I'm going to show how I see the world. I believe in social change. I want to say, 'Okay, the world is changing.'"