ARTFORUM Cover Image: Darkroom Mirror (_2070386) (detail), 2017, Paul Mpagi Sepuya. Courtesy of the Artist and ARTFORUM
Photographer and Tisch alum Paul Mpagi Sepuya (BFA '03) provided the cover image for the March 2019 issue of Artforum Magazine and was subject of a feature in the same issue. From the accompanying article by David Velasco:
When I invited Sepuya to do a project for Artforum that followed a single subject over many years, he suggested his self-portraits, many of which also contain friends and lovers. So we get the best of all worlds: the single, repeating subject of Sepuya himself amid the constellation of his peers...
...Sepuya wants to withdraw from the promises of clarity, lucidity, lightness. He likes to think of all the things that happen in darkness, in back rooms, after hours, away from the beguiling curse of transparency. This is a space that queerness has earned hard. Sepuya also thinks of it as the space of photography, which he consideres a craft of negotiating light in the dark. The "Darkroom Mirros," 2017–, represented by...this month's cover, are taken in humble makeshift portrait studios created by constructing a hanging tent of black or brown velvet, leaving a small aperture for sunlight. The mirror is doubly indexical: It reflects its subjects, but the camera also picks up the traces––dust, fingerprints,––of activity on its surface.
This comes at a particularly busy time for the artist: Sepyua was recently included in the upcoming 2019 Whitney Biennal and has work on view currently at the ICP Museum and a solo exhibition opening this week at Team Gallery, Inc.