Project for Empty Space opened the doors to its new exhibition space at IRONSIDE, 110 Edison Place, on Friday, October 11th, with the inaugural exhibition Trains, Buses, and the Four C’s by 2023 - 2025 Artist In Residence Azikiwe Mohammed. The show will run from October 11th, 2024, through January 25th, 2025.

Currently in its eighth cycle, the Artist In Residence Program is an annual initiative that invites four visual artists to Newark, NJ, to create work around social impact. The mission of the program is multifaceted and is intended to benefit both the Artists In Residence and a larger audience. The program strives to create a symbiotic relationship between the artist and the audience as a conduit for new artistic practice and intervention.

In Mohammed’s work, and particularly in the new body of work created in the past year for Trains, Buses, and the Four C’s, social bonds and experiences are evoked in mixed-media drawings, photographs, paintings and sculptures. While their subjects emerge from personal memories-- some Mohammed’s, and many sourced from other people-- the compositions, colors, and ideas simultaneously reference and electrify the tradition of history painting. Conventionally, history paintings glorify canonical subjects which are then revivified through the styles and movements of the painter’s day, and by the ideas and approaches of the artist. For Mohammed, they represent “new beginnings” to old stories; by layering complex washes of paint, and adapting historical compositions to beautifully render everyday subjects, Mohammed calls attention to the pervading tropes, characters, biases and narratives of our day-- some beloved, and others tired and ready for history’s dustbin. 

Mohammed’s social landscape paintings exalt the buses and trains that connect communities to each other and their shared histories and land. This is echoed in the frames as part of each painting, painstakingly sourced from thrift stores in an act of collective recovery. What once had enveloped decorative “home objects” in the artist’s term, now accentuate piles of glossy donuts painted in staining techniques; or a ripe banana poised like an odalisque amidst energetic layered gestures; as well as abundant and kaleidoscopic floral still lives and portraits. More than forty paintings cross-pollinate and collapse subjects and composition styles in Mohammed’s singular electric color palette, with his furthest exploration to date into overlapping and complex washes of paint, akin to the chromatic expanses of color field painting. These paintings draw on the foundation set by the earlier series Nya’s House (begun in 2019), Places I’ve Been With Helicopters (begun in 2020), and Stepping Into Tomorrow (begun in 2023).

Often centering food as a vehicle for memory, connection, and community in his work, in Mohammed’s hands, a Jell-o dessert can appear sculptural and solid, transparent and murky, or relaxed and collapsed. The paintings are thus created as new history paintings, scaled for the home. Joining the realism and utility of “home objects” like lamps, chairs, and vases that translate the experiences of light, rest, and flowers into the home, Mohammed creates space for intimate evocations of what is so often denied to Black people. Mohammed solidifies this interest through chair-sculptures and visitor seating made from salvaged wood, making room for reflection that acknowledges the functions and needs of the body as an agent of history.            

Pulsing through the artist’s practice, and embedded throughout the dynamic environment of objects, photographs, drawings and paintings inaugurating Project for Empty Space’s new exhibition space. The “Four C’s”-- Mohammed’s system of individualized guiding principles for people to better move through life-- represent a possible open-ended foundation of relation to one another. This is further reflected in Mohammed’s New Davonhaime Food Bank project, which provides nourishing food in community distributions powered by mutual aid; in June 2024, the New Davonhaime Food Bank partnered with Project for Empty Space to give more than 200 bags of food to neighbors in Newark. By activating the communal stories and power of the everyday-- and documenting them in a dazzling refresh of an illustrious tradition-- Mohammed visualizes and preserves “what new histories we need to survive this increasingly difficult time.”  

Trains, Buses and the Four C’s will be on display from October 11th, 2024, to January 25th, 2025.