Carl E. Hazlewood

Welancora is pleased to present a solo exhibition of recent work by Carl E. Hazlewood. This is Hazlewood’s second solo show with the gallery. This exhibition will run concurrently with Hazlewood’s show at the Newark Museum of Art: Dreamtime In Newark: Aljira and the Making of Global Contemporary Art, which opens on Friday, October 16.

Our exhibition is anchored by two large-scale works, on view in New York for the first time; a new suite of small works on paper; and, medium scale works created in 2022. The show experiments with scale, materiality, and the progression of Hazlewood’s abstractions over recent years.

For Hazlewood, abstraction remains central within his process. It serves not as retreat, but as charged territory. Form operates as a carrier of memory. Edges fold, puncture, suspend. Surfaces press forward and recede, evoking bodily presence, landscape, and psychic interior simultaneously. The abstract draws back to materiality– that of our world, and of Hazlewood’s manipulation of medium.

Hazlewood’s works merge painterly sensibility with the improvisational material logic of his extemporaneous wall installations. Oil pastel, colored pencil, and touches of acrylic polymer coexist with roofing felt, polyester rugs, plastic mesh, tacks, grommets, and plywood: materials more readily sourced from hardware aisles rather than from art supply stores. The collision of these vocabularies collapses distinctions between studio refinement and provisional construction, permanence and ephemerality.

BlackHead Anansi: Guardians 1 & 2 are collages on plywood panels that extend Hazlewood’s long-standing exploration of abstraction as both structure and survival strategy. Whereas earlier installations asserted themselves directly in architectural space, Guardians internalizes that urgency: the wall becomes a panel, the temporary becomes anchored, and improvisation becomes concentrated. Anansi, the Caribbean trickster, appears not as an illustration but as a structuring principle—adaptive, elusive, and resistant. Here, the “guardian” is not a fixed figure but a condition: resilience held in tension. The works suggest protection without rigidity and vulnerability without collapse. BlackHead Anansi: Guardians resonates as a meditation on passage, cultural memory, and the architecture of survival.

This presentation presents a unique and intimate opportunity to view Hazlewood's work, which was rarely seen while he focused much of his career on the founding and running of Aljira, a center for contemporary art in Newark. Aljira curated exhibitions, hosted public programming, and fostered cross-cultural dialogue for thirty-five years, playing pivotal roles in supporting the then-emerging careers of artists such as Derrick Adams, Firelei Báez, Frank Bowling, Mickalene Thomas, and more. The exhibition at The Newark Museum of Art, Dreamtime In Newark, pays tribute to the history and global impact of the center.

Carl E. Hazlewood (b. 1951, Guyana) uses the structural language of abstraction as a clarifying act of progress in what he considers an unstable world. Through a suite of shapes and symbols, his work speaks to the power of resiliency through references to Anansi the Spider, a prominent character in West African and Caribbean folklore. More broadly, Hazlewood's approach to his work and life seeks to counter the insinuation that there may be limitations on what he should do or what he can achieve. He strives for an art and life of open possibilities, for a poetic presentness beyond time, place, race, and other distracting polemics. His work is in the collections of Kenkeleba House, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, The Petrucci Family Foundation, The Shah Garg Foundation, OMI International Art Center, The Francis J. Greenberger Collection, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and The Dora Maar House, among others.