Side Issues

By George Rush

OCT 2020 | Critics Page

With the notable exception of the brilliant Beverly Fishman, who encouraged us to question all forms of painting, my education didn’t really consider the sides of paintings. They were painted white—that ever-problematic stand-in for neutrality—or stained by action on the front, but more often simply ignored.

Mike Childs: The Journey: Grids, Color and Curvilinear forms, 2004 to 2020

By David Rhodes

JUL-AUG 2020 | ArtSeen

Toronto-born and South Bronx-based Mike Childs has been working in New York since 1995. In this exhibition, 28 paintings from the last 16 years are presented, revealing a constant and evolving exploration of how humans negotiate their surrounding modularly built, urban environment. Patterns and contiguous space interface, interlace, and proliferate like so many passing surfaces and colors, changing with the passage of time or the panorama of a gaze. Walls, graffiti, signage, and bridges of the Bronx all began to fold into the flux of Childs’s images during his time living in the neighborhood.

Artists Space

By Nancy Princenthal

JUL-AUG 2020 | ArTonic

Shocking but true: Artists Space, essential model for a generation of feisty, funky, youth-driven nonprofits, is nearly half a century old. More surprising still, initially it depended entirely on government support, at a time when both the governor of New York (Nelson Rockefeller) and the US president (Richard Nixon, newly re-elected) were Republicans. Promising to make up for a dearth of opportunity for young artists, Artists Space’s founders rounded some up and offered them the chance to call the shots, all on the state’s dime.

Shaun Leonardo: The Breath of Empty Space

By Louis Block

MAR 2020 | ArtSeen

Shaun Leonardo’s current exhibition posits a simple act of resistance: to excavate these optical memories, sifting through their noise. In his repeated drawings of news photographs surrounding violence against Black men, Leonardo builds a system that questions a singular image’s capacity for truth-telling.