Can’t Turn Around

“Can’t Turn Around, is Ta-coumba T. Aiken’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Featuring recent paintings, collages, and drawings, this exhibition highlights the full range and depth of the artist’s practice. From masked and layered paintings to painted tape collages made from the latter’s remnants, and gestural, intuitive drawings, the works in Can’t Turn Around reveal increasingly complex compositions intertwined with multiplying visions of the artist’s ancestors.

At the core of Aiken’s practice is a process he terms spirit writing – a loosely drawn mélange of figures, faces, eyes and appendages drawn from the artist’s ancestors that form the grounds of his work and suggest shared history, community, and experience. Rhythmic and sinuous, his line doubles back on itself in the infinite manner of a Mobius strip, nesting one body or visage inside another. Echoing the jazz-inflected musicality of Norman Lewis compositions, Aiken’s paintings thrum with vitality.

A recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Arts and a fixture in the Twin Cities’ art scene for decades, Aiken’s paintings, drawings, collages and monumental public commissions are represented in numerous public and private throughout Minneapolis and St. Paul. In a recent essay on the artist, Siri Engberg, Senior Curator and Director of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center, describes Aiken as “part of a lineage of Black abstract artists who have employed strategies of abstraction as containers for deep meaning, and as explorations of the personal, the historical, and the social.” - Dreamsong

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