Naturally, during art fairs, gallerists are constantly promoting their booths and their artists. Glasstire received several emails from New Orleans’ Jonathan Ferrara Gallery about its invitation-only exhibition during the current Art Basel Miami fair, Guns in the Hands of Artists. Yesterday, the email was re-sent with the opening sentence, “I wanted to follow-up in light of yesterday’s tragedy in California.”
For the exhibition, 186 guns were taken from the streets of New Orleans and given to thirty artists across mediums to create works of art that address the issue of gun violence in America. The first version of Guns in the Hands of Artists appeared at Jonathan Ferrara’s former gallery, Positive Space the Gallery, in 1996. Most reviews of the various iterations of the show since then have been able to begin with “in light of yesterday’s tragedy in PLACE THIS WEEK’S MASS SHOOTING LOCATION HERE.”
Houston native Mel Chin is one of the artists in this exhibition and it will travel to the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft in 2017. Let’s hope any reviews of that show will not have to begin with that awful sentence.
