Los Angeles Book Launch with Awol Erizku

Join Aperture and Arcana: Books on the Arts for a book launch and signing with Awol Erizku to celebrate his first monograph, Mystic Parallax (Aperture, 2023).

Mystic Parallax is the first major monograph by rising interdisciplinary artist Awol Erizku. Working across photography, film, video, painting, and installation, his work references and re-imagines African American and African visual culture, from hip-hop vernacular to Nefertiti, while nodding to traditions of spirituality and Surrealism. This comprehensive monograph spans Erizku’s career, blending his studio practice with his work as an in-demand editorial photographer working regularly for the New Yorker, New York magazine, Time, and GQ, among others, and features his conceptual portraits of Black cultural icons, such as Solange, Amanda Gorman, and Michael B. Jordan. As Erizku recently told the New York Times, “It’s important for me to create confident, powerful, downright regal images of Black people.”

This event is presented in partnership with Arcana: Books on the Arts.

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Awol Erizku (born in Ethiopia, 1988) lives and works in Los Angeles. He graduated from Cooper Union in 2010 and received his MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2014. Erizku has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, Arkansas; Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto; Ben Brown Gallery, Hong Kong; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Gagosian, New York; and FLAG Art Foundation, New York.

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Image: Awol Erizku, Ruth E. Carter’s costume design, featuring a pair of Nike Air Revolutions like the ones worn by Radio Raheem in Do the Right Thing; purses and starburst earrings for Coretta Scott King, in Selma; and Tina Turner’s pumps, from What’s Love Got to Do with It. New Yorker, 2018; from Awol Erizku: Mystic Parallax (Aperture, 2023). Courtesy the artist

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Awol Erizku: Mystic Parallax

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