Visiting Painter Troy Lamarr Chew II Wields a Coded Visual Language to Project Black Culture Anew

Another West Coast artist joins us next week as the third creative participating in the 2022-2023 Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series. Troy Lamarr Chew II is a Los Angeles-born and based painter who skillfully and subversively uses traditional European painting techniques “to reframe their exclusion of Blackness.” In his most recent series, Slanguage, Chew, a former dancer, renders a layered pastiche of the original cultural references attributed to popular dances through hip hop slang, e.g. the cabbage patch, the Roger Rabbit.

At the invitation of Drawing and Painting Associate Professor Benjamin Britton, Chew will be visiting the Lamar Dodd School of Art from November 2nd through November 4th for a series of engagements with students, faculty, and the general public — culminating his visit with a lecture about his work on Thursday November 3 at 6:00 PM at the School of Art main building on 270 River Road in room S150. The event is free and the public is invited to attend.

Chew is exhibiting work through March 26, 2023 in the exhibition Continuum, presented by the Kinsey African American Art & History Collection and Residency Art Gallery at Sofi Stadium, Inglewood, CA. Read an interview with the artist in Juxtapoz Magazine published earlier this fall.

Artist Biography

Troy Lamarr Chew II (b. 1992 in Los Angeles, CA, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) explores the legacy of the African Diaspora and its reverberations throughout American culture. His work looks methodically at systems of coded communication and how this is translated and mistranslated both within the Diaspora and the mainstream.

Chew’s rich artistic visual language draws inspiration largely from Black culture and its history. A highly skilled realist, inspired by European painting techniques, Chew uses these art historical traditions to reframe their exclusion of Blackness. In his Out the Mud series, hand dyed and sewn cloths from West Africa are replicated in a trompe l’oeil fashion, their patterns “torn” away to reveal portrayals of contemporary Black culture and resistance. In another series, Slanguage, the artist paints Flemish style vanitas picturing everyday objects, coded in hip-hop lexicon. His most recent Three Crowns series explores the social history of cosmetic dentistry and the use of grills in hip-hop culture. The artist’s lush and luminous oil paintings embody the energy of this infinitely re-mixed yet deeply rooted genre.

In 2020, Chew was awarded the prestigious Tournesol Residency at Headlands Center for the Arts after becoming a Graduate Fellow from California College of the Arts, San Francisco in 2018. Solo exhibitions include The Roof is on Fire, Altman Siegel, San Francisco, CA (2022), Yadadamean, CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions, San Francisco, CA (2020); Fuck the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men, Parker Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2020); WWJZD, Cushion Works, San Francisco, CA (2019) and Stunt 101, Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco, CA (2019). Recent group exhibitions include I Yield My Time. Fuck You!, Altman Siegel, San Francisco (2020), California Winter, organized in collaboration with Hannah Hoffman at Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2019), Vanguard Revisited, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA (2019), Graduation, Good Mother Gallery, Oakland, CA (2019) and Black Now(here), Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA (2018).

His painting Too Many Names is in the collection of KADIST, Paris and San Francisco.

Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series

The Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture series has brought over 80 distinguished guests to the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia since 2002. Visiting Artists and Scholars spend three days on campus interacting with students and faculty, the culmination of which is a public lecture on the subject of the artist’s or scholar’s work.