OCT. 11 @ 5PM | AZIKIWE MOHAMMED: TRAINS, BUSES, AND THE FOUR C’S

Project for Empty Space will open the doors to its new exhibition space at Ironside Newark, 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 others – 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 (started 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 every day – 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.

About Project for Empty Space
Project for Empty Space (PES) is a multifaceted arts organization that includes Exhibitions, Artists Residencies, Public Art initiatives, subsidized Artist Studios, and Artist Professional Development/Granting opportunities. Our programs lean social discourse, including narratives that have been historically and systemically erased. We strive to course correct historic instances of forced marginality, in-equity, and in-visibility. Today, in our efforts to support socially-oriented artists, we maintain a commitment to holding space for both looking back and looking to new potentials and futures.
PES is a woman-run, femme-powered, People of the Global Majority/BIPOC, Queer, and unapologetically Intersectional organization. Our permanent homes are in Newark, NJ, and Chinatown, New York City.

About Azikiwe Mohammed
Azikiwe Mohammed (b. 1983, New York, NY) is a 2005 graduate of Bard College, where he studied Photography and Fine Arts. Mohammed has held solo exhibitions at Canada Gallery, New York (2023), the Yeh Art Gallery, New York (2021), the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2019), Knockdown Center, New York (2017), as well as a two-person show at California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2022-23). His work has been featured in important group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; MoAD, San Francisco; Frac Normandie Caen, France; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, among many others. Mohammed received the Ruth Foundation for the Arts Artist Choice Grant (2023), Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant (2023), Rauschenberg Artists Fund Grant (2021), Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artists Grant (2016), and Art Matters Grant (2015). His work has been reviewed in magazines and publications including Artforum, VICE, I-D, Forbes, BOMB, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Hyperallergic. He is an alumnus of Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York and Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, New Jersey. Mohammed lives in New York City and has his studio at Project for Empty Space.

About The Artist In Residence Program
The PES 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 artists-in-residence and a larger audience. The program strives to create a symbiotic relationship between the artist and audience as a conduit for new artistic practice and intervention.

At its core, the PES AIR program was created to support artists who are interested in social engagement. It achieves this by providing studio space for two years; providing unrestricted honoraria; cultivating professional development opportunities such as studio visits and critical feedback meetings; facilitating community programs with the artist’s work; and finally, presenting a solo exhibition of the artists’ work towards the end of their cycle.

The program strives to not only support individual artists; but also, to cultivate conversation around social equity and engagement that are often swept by the wayside. We see the AIR program as a bridge between artist and community, as well as community and community, to push important dialogues forward.

The PES AIR Program is currently in its eighth cycle. Past Artists in Residence include Adama Delphine Fawundu, Amy Khoshbin, Damien Davis, David Antonio Cruz, Delano Dunn, Derrick Adams, Kambui Olujimi, Nadia Liz Estela, Nina Chanel Abney, Renluka Maharaj, Richard Hart, Ron Norsworthy, Shoshanna Weinberger, Victoria-Idongesit Udondian, Wardell Milan, jaret vadera, and jc lenochan.

Host or Publisher Project For Empty Space