Antwaun Sargent

2023 Honoree / Spotlight/Visionary Award

Antwaun Sargent is a writer, curator, and director at Gagosian.

He is the author of The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion (Aperture, 2019) and the editor of Young, Gifted, and Black: A New Generation of Artists (DAP, 2020). He guest-edited the May/June 2020 “New Talent” issue of Art in America. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, GQ, and in museum and gallery publications for artists Nick Cave, Ed Clark, Arthur Jafa, Meleko Mokgosi, Yinka Shonibare, and Mickalene Thomas, among many others.

The exhibitions The New Black Vanguard and Young, Gifted, and Black were both organized in 2019 and are currently on tour. Sargent defines the New Black Vanguard as a manifold collective of photographers across the African diaspora whose works “establish the significance of the Black figure—and even more radically, the Black creator—as a new ideal in contemporary culture.” Devoted to The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art, Young, Gifted, and Black assembles works across generations and media, including photographers LaToya Ruby Frazier, Deana Lawson, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and D’Angelo Lovell Williams. In 2020, Sargent curated Just Pictures at Barrett Barrera Projects, St. Louis, an exhibition focused on younger photographers who work between the spaces of fine art, fashion, and history of the medium.

Sargent made his curatorial debut at Gagosian in 2021 with the group exhibitions Social Works (New York) and Social Works II (London). Considering the relationship between space—personal, public, institutional, and psychic—and Black social practice, the exhibitions featured works by artists who utilize space as a community-building tool and a means of empowerment.

2022 exhibitions at Gagosian include Awol Erizku: Memories of a Lost Sphinx, Alexandria Smith: Pretend Gravitas and Dream Aborted Givens, Amanda Williams, Rick Lowe: Meditations on Social Sculpture, and Tyler Mitchell: Chrysalis. Memories of a Lost Sphinx in New York featured Erizku’s lightbox photographs and a mixed-media sculpture that represent the sphinx as a hybrid symbol.
Chrysalis, in London presented Mitchell’s photographs of Black men and women in idyllic state of leisure and repose, proposing a utopian vision of Black beauty, desire, and belonging. Also in 2022, Sargent organized the presentation of Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech at the Brooklyn Museum, the first museum exhibition dedicated to the visionary artist and designer.

This year, Sargent announced the gallery’s representation of Derrick Adams, Cy Gavin, and Deana Lawson. 2023 exhibitions at Gagosian include Cy Gavin in New York and Rome, Honor Titus in Los Angeles, Derrick Adams in Los Angeles, and Rick Lowe in Athens. In addition, Sargent co-curated Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick, an exhibition of key works by the influential portrait painter at the Frick Madison, New York.

Instagram: @sirsargent

Photo by Chase Hall