Kojo Griffin: New Work

Cross a Saturday-night special with the Saturday-morning cartoons and you get a sense of the shady-sweet flavor of this Atlanta-based artist’s paintings. Crayola-colored refugees from the toy chest–Teddy bears, elephants, and rag dolls–don human garb and star in ambiguous narratives laced with menace. A green horse holds a gun to the head of an orange bear while a blasa yellow doll checks his watch; a red elephant offers candy to a reticent purple bear cub in knee socks. Over all, Griffin gives us a sense of compassion, which is not to say hope, for his hapless menagerie. –The New Yorker This is the first catalog devoted to the work of Kojo Griffin, an up-and-coming artist whose work was featured in Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.