ArtSeen
MARGARET EVANGELINE An Injured Armory
By Jonathan Goodman
The title of Margaret Evangeline’s show was An Injured Armory. In this body of work, the artist, whose son served in the Iraq War, has turned to allegorical protest rather than specify the particulars of an actual historical conflict. So her exhibition, which was small but powerful, consisted of several stainless-steel panels that incorporated randomly spaced puncture holes, resulting from bullets fired by Evangeline herself at a military shooting range.
From the Ruins…
By Tom McGlynnSince the future was invented as a rational concept in time, relieved of its superstitious portents and omens during the Enlightenment, ruins have been relegated to picturesque monuments of the past in the present. Ruins came to represent a second-order past, not to be dwelt upon too long in a modernist lurch toward utopic ends.
Arthur Ou
By David CarrierWhen an old master painter shows someone reading, it’s natural to wonder: what is that document? So, for example, when we view the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Johannes Vermeer, “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter” (1663 − 1664) we may speculate: is this a love letter, a note about practical business, or perhaps something even less exciting?
LEON GOLUB Riot
By Kara L. RooneyThe April 25 headline of the New York Times read, “Scenes of Chaos in Baltimore as Thousands Protest Freddie Gray’s Death.” The article goes on to describe how a largely peaceful protest, staged in the wake of this country’s third publicly documented murder of a black youth by police in less than a year, gave way to looting and riots in the streets of Baltimore.
Salon Style
By Simone KrugBraids, wisps, tufts, and beads are combed, coiled, and stacked in Salon Style, the Studio Museum in Harlem’s exhibition on African and African American hair and fingernails as sites of creative expression.
Audubon’s Aviary: The Final Flight
(Part III of the Complete Flock)
By Tom McGlynn
In 1863, in the midst of the Civil War and facing family financial hardship, Lucy Bakewell Audubon (John James’s widow) sold her husband’s portfolio of original paintings executed in preparation for his engraved and hand-colored masterwork The Birds Of America (1827 – 38) to the New York Historical Society.
BENJAMIN COTTAM
By Jonathan GoodmanFor more than a year now, curator Lisa Banner, who graduated with a doctorate on 17th-century patronage and collecting in Spain from the Institute of Fine Arts, has been curating contemporary art exhibitions in two small vitrines found on the steps of the Institute’s Great Hall.
June Leaf
By Robert BerlindThere are many ways to enter June Leaf’s multifaceted domain: through her mythic story telling, her often idiosyncratic procedures with diverse mediums and materials, or through representations of herself making her art.
LISA YUSKAVAGE
By Phong Bui“Pile up”—the accumulation of the history of her images / Dating as far back as our earliest folktales, advocates for mythical behavior. / “Striped Socks” centralizes the space you may not, or may, enter.
RICHARD ESTES Painting New York City
By David Carrier“Fascinated with buildings—with their spaces, the light that plays around them, their human uses…” the paintings of this artist, which are “works of great poetic beauty, carry an apparent objectivity.” I quote from Gary Schwartz’s account of the Dutch 17th-century painter Pieter Saenredam, which applies also word for word to Richard Estes’s pictures.
LAURA OWENS
By Geoff Mak“Isn’t it interesting,” said Laura Owens in a 2013 interview, “that a male orgasm has a DNA imprint that will replicate itself over and over again […] but the female orgasm has no use, no mark, no locatability?”
PIERRE OBANDO Like New
By David RhodesThis is Pierre Obando’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The title of his exhibition is taken from Roy Lichtenstein’s painting “Like New,” which is an atypical work for Lichtenstein and a telling choice for Obando.
One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series
By Mary ProenzaIn 1941, 23-year-old Jacob Lawrence (1917 – 2000) finished 60 tempera paintings on small hardboard panels, along with narrative captions for each, chronicling the mass migration of African Americans that had begun during World War I and continued as he worked.
IDA APPLEBROOG The Ethics of Desire
By Ashton CooperIda Applebroog’s third show with Hauser & Wirth, The Ethics of Desire, is titled after a concern at the heart of Plato’s Symposium—how desires form the contours of our lives.
EMILY MASON The Intuitive Print
By Jessica Holmes“If you ponder a rose for too long you won’t budge in a storm.” The work of octogenarian artist Emily Mason shares roots with those words by poet Mahmoud Darwish, on the importance of adhering to one’s intuition.
RUSSELL TYLER Radiant Fields
By Jason StopaRussell Tyler's solo show, Radiant Fields, effectively combines three major painterly characterizations of space: the cinematic, the theatrical, and the digital, with surprising result.
BRENT WADDEN
By Maggie BarrettStand inches away from a Brent Wadden canvas and the work takes on a similar monumentality to a Clyfford Still painting. The edge of a given shape seems to drop into a bottomless void.
SARAH PETERS
By Sara ChristophIn the mythological tales of ancient Greece, the power of a “seer” was her ability to see through time—both a blessing and a curse.
GILLIAN LAUB Southern Rites
By Hilary ReidIt’s prom night in Mount Vernon, Georgia. The prom prince and princess are mid-slow dance. He wears a sherbet-colored polyester vest, and she wears a tiara, with long, bleached blonde banana curls cascading down her back.
RICHARD SERRA Equal
By Phong BuiFrom the East to West arms were made from this substance; / Later bridges, railroads, and steamships became its perpetual “custodians”, / To comfort human lives. Some of us are in debt to Gonzalez for his contributions.
BEVERLY BUCHANAN And You May Find Yourself...
By Chloe WilcoxIt is tempting to talk about Beverly Buchanan’s diminutive sculptures of houses and shacks as though they were built by a Lilliputian population, who live their little lives inside of them.
between a place and candy: new works in pattern + repetition + motif
By Kate LiebmanA good group show is like a good dinner party. As the guests—or the works—interact, new topics arise, and something might be learned. Conversation occurs at a constant hum, with interludes of laughter or argument. In this respect, Norte Maar’s between a place and candy: new works in pattern + repetition + motif does not fall flat.
DAVID GOODMAN Apparatus
By William CorwinDavid Goodman’s current exhibition of sculpture and works on paper, entitled Apparatus, confronts the viewer with two questions. One is aesthetic: Can two trajectories of visual practice be combined in a harmonious and visually meaningful and satisfying whole? In Goodman’s case the answer is yes and works itself out wittily through the small sculptures.
SUSAN CIANCIOLO if God COMes to visit You, HOW will you know? (the great tetrahedral kite)
By Liz Hirsch“Think about your grandmother differently,” the artist Robert Kushner said to me last summer, reflecting on the years he spent during the mid-1970s cutting, sewing, and crocheting handmade garments.
JOAN SNYDER Sub Rosa
By Hovey BrockJoan Snyder’s current exhibition takes its title from the ancient Roman code of party decorum, where the image of a rose on the banquet hall ceiling functioned as an emblem of confidentiality reminding merrymakers to keep secret the indiscretions made by tongues unhinged by wine—not unlike “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”
