For his debut solo exhibition in Los Angeles, London-based artist Alvaro Barrington hosted an all-day barbecue in the Blum & Poe gallery parking lot and invited Ghostface Killah to perform. From the pop-up stage, the Wu-Tang Clan scion looked out on the crowd and bashfully called it “mixed”; there were adult Ghostface fans as well their children, plus moneyed art collectors who had come to buy new, very in-demand work. What ensued was, in modern parlance, iconic – a half-hour singalong of Wu-Tang hits, with bonus tracks commemorating the late Biz Markie and Marvin Gaye. There were even product samples of Killah Bee, Ghostface Killah’s gold-speckled, cannabis-infused brownies. The opening was uplifting, in every sense of the word.
“The show wouldn’t have been complete without Ghost,” Barrington said. His exhibition, 91–98 jfk–lax border, on view at Blum & Poe through 30 April, is an acutely personal look back at the 90s through hip-hop, an unvarnished record of an era ripe for closer examination.
