ArtSeen
Joan Snyder: To Become a Painting
By Norman L KleeblattRegulars of New York City’s contemporary art scene have recently been treated to two doses of Joan Snyder’s paintings. Joan Snyder: To Become a Painting, currently on view at the Franklin Parrasch Gallery on the Upper East Side, includes seven recent works whose combined energy and elegant, clear installation in the gallery’s domestic-scale spaces contribute to the rewards of such a modest presentation.
Pamela Sneed: ABOUT time
By Jillian McManeminIf you have any interest in poetry, you probably know Pamela Sneed—Black, lesbian, radical poet, and one of the infamous Grand Dames of the downtown scene. Her stage presence is formidable and her voice, revolutionary. Her 2020 book Funeral Diva published by City Lights Books looks back on her experiences during the AIDS Crisis while making correlations to COVID-19, and the ongoing layered impacts of racism, homophobia, and political brutality. In ABOUT time at Laurel Gitlen, Sneed’s visual practice merges with her poetic one, creating an exhibition that is fiercely outspoken, experimental, and personal.
Matthew Wong: The New World, Paintings From Los Angeles 2016
By Jessica HolmesMatthew Wong: The New World, Paintings From Los Angeles 2016 at Cheim & Read allows the viewer space to tune out from the mythological Wong and instead focus on the material Wong.
PLEASE SEND TO REAL LIFE: Ray Johnson Photographs
By Mark BlochJohnson shot three thousand 4 by 6 inch consumer-grade photos in thirty-five months on 137 single-use, point-and-shoot Fujicolor Quicksnap cameras.
Assembly 1: Unstored, Contemporary Sculpture from Mexico
By Hovey BrockMuch of the sculpture in this maiden exhibition has a post-Minimalist vibe that feels right at home in the spare elegance of the former showroom space, but even those pieces that skew toward something more figurative benefit from Assembly’s spaciousness and natural light. If you’re heading upstate this summer, put Assembly 1: Unstored on your itinerary.
Cindy Sherman: 1977–1982
By Ann C. CollinsIn every photo, Sherman’s sense of light and shadows is breathtaking, her images as beautiful as they are unnerving.
Inga Danysz: In Ancient Rome
By Alexandra DrexeliusThere is something old and familiar, yet out of step in Inga Danysz’s new sculptures. Glistening tombs for the future, they hint that something has already passed, but whatever that thing is—an object, a person—it has yet to come. Or maybe it has come and gone unnoticed, and is now poised to return.
PLEASE SEND TO REAL LIFE: Ray Johnson Photographs
By Jean DykstraThe photographs he made in his last three years, which have the muted color particular to disposable-camera snapshots, convey a kind of restless energy and a bottomless curiosity about framing the world through a camera lens, even—or especially—through the small fixed lens on a throwaway plastic camera.
Whistler to Cassatt: American Painters in Paris
By Joe FyfeWhistler to Cassatt illustrates the story of the changes in American art that took place after the Civil War. Many artists turned away from the methodology of the Hudson River School, and it became the norm for literally hundreds of them to train in Paris, with its superior art academies and the Louvre’s masterworks available to study and copy; the entrance to the exhibition includes a wonderfully evocative photo mural of the Eiffel Tower under construction.
Paula Rego
By Natalia GierowskaThis monographic exhibition at the Museo Picasso Málaga is the most extensive retrospective of the artist’s work to date, and impeccably illuminates the artist’s limitless imaginative power. Curated by Elena Crippa and organized in collaboration with Tate Britain and the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, it features over eighty works, including collages, pastels, drawings, and etchings.
everything slackens in a wreck
By Annabel KeenanReflecting on the complex consequences of indentureship, the show explores how these four artists respond to their shared diasporic heritage.
Marley Freeman: take care
By Alfred Mac AdamMarley Freeman is breaking loose from herself. Not to worry; even as she moves forward, she, like Janus, keeps an eye on the past. In this, her second solo show with Karma (her first was in 2020), she is clearly shredding her ties to figuration, but not entirely or absolutely: several of the smaller works here contain human figures and faces reminiscent of her 2020 work.
Writing a Chrysanthemum: The Drawings of Rick Barton
By Ann McCoyBarton’s drawings are windows into his modest rooms, jail cells, church sanctuaries, and San Francisco’s gay clubs. His work chronicles a period when queer men flocked to San Francisco, yet he was not part of the celebrated gay scene around the King Ubu Gallery founded by Jess Collins and Harry Jacobus with Robert Duncan, and he was not known to other San Francisco artists like Wallace Berman and Bruce Conner.
![Rick Barton, <em>Untitled</em> [Signature self-portrait], 1961. Pen and ink, 8 x 51/4 in. (20.3 x 13.3 cm).Rick Barton papers (Collection 2374), UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles](https://brooklynrail-web.imgix.net/article_image/image/33988/mccoy-barton-1.jpg?w=200&q=80&fit=max)
Rirkrit Tiravanija: Mezcal vs. Pulque
By Tom McGlynnFor Mezcal vs. Pulque, Tiravanija collaborated with cooperativa 1050°, a collective of potters from the Mexican states of Oaxaca, Puebla, and Chiapas, and led by Kythzia Barrera. The result was numerous vessels in the exhibition shaped by Margarita Cortés Cruz, Marisela Ortiz Cortés, and Gregoria Cruz Peralta from Río Blanco Tonaltepec, as well as Silvia García Mateos and Leopoldo Barranco in San Bartolo Coyotepec.
James Brooks: Rendez-vous Paintings 1972–1983
By Robert C. MorganAlthough I have encountered the paintings of James Brooks sporadically in various group exhibitions focused on Abstract Expressionism, it has been relatively rare to encounter his works shown together in a context all their own. As such, the collection of works included in the current exhibition from the 1970s and early eighties suggest a somewhat timely occasion, providing the uncommon opportunity to understand Brooks solely through his own work and ideas.
Mother Cyborg: Crafting Our Digital Legacy
By Steve PantonMother Cyborg (aka Diana J Nucera) is a “queer as fuck,” Latina digital justice activist, a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, and a 2022 Knight Arts and Tech fellow based in Detroit. Her ever-expanding practice includes music-making, performance, education, community organizing, gardening, research, writing, and publishing.
Klea McKenna: Rainbow Bruise
By Hearne PardeeIn reaction to what she calls our “soft-apocalypse,” Klea McKenna brings fresh urgency to her techniques of camera-less photography, greatly expanding its range in twenty-two analog prints and twenty NFTs. Her exhibition title, Rainbow Bruise, aptly conveys the photographs’ sensory fusion of bodily and optical experience, achieved with her process of embossing fabrics and other source materials onto photographic fiber paper.
Lydia Ourahmane: Tassili
By Dina A. RamadanMuch of Lydia Ourahmane’s work has been an exploration of the multiple connotations of barzakh, the barrier or threshold that separates two things that must be kept distinct. In Islamic philosophy, this is the liminal place which the soul inhabits after death, while awaiting the Day of Judgment. For the multi-disciplinary artist based between Algiers and Barcelona, this space of limbo between life and death has generative potential.
Alain Kirili
By David RhodesThis commemorative exhibition comprises three different groups of work and four additional individual pieces. The first group presented is Commandment XVI (1991). The eleven individual pieces are made of forged iron and stand between nineteen and twenty-nine inches, relatively low in height from the floor, placed in a close configuration and viewed primarily from above.
J.M.W. Turner: Turner’s Modern World
By Jason RosenfeldThis exhibition brings together over a hundred oils, drawing, watercolors, and sketchbooks in seven galleries that illuminate the artist’s complex perspectives on technology, empire, war, and the vagaries of the human condition. Turner did not shirk big themes, from either the past or the present—he was as at home with Hannibal as he was with Napoleon—although his deepest sympathies were reserved for the working class.
Nicole Eisenman: Untitled (Show)
By Ksenia SobolevaLast month, Eisenman opened Untitled (Show) featuring a total of twelve paintings and seven sculptures spread across two floors. The expansive room on the fifth floor presents a series of ten (mostly) large canvases depicting a range of subject matter.
Carla Zaccagnini: Cuentos de Cuentas/Accounts of Accounting
By Jenny Wu
The sculptures, installations, films, and videos in Cuentos de cuentas/Accounts of Accounting, Zaccagnini’s first solo show in the US, contain similar anecdotes that are at once purposely naïve and endearing.
Cezanne
By William CorwinThe depth of this exhibition allows for the rare opportunity to view multiples of similar images or genres in series and view the artist modifying his touch.
Ellie Ga: Quarries
By Amelia SaulThe world of Ellie Ga’s Quarries is almost entirely after the fact, in a time when current events have hardened into history or dissolved into personal memory.
Milton Avery: Fifty Paintings/Fifty Years
By Tom McGlynnMilton Avery is an artist who, considering his long career, can’t be pinned to any one salient American style; yet it can be said that he midwifed many.
Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine
By Daniel FullerThompson (1937–66) had a knack for keeping us on the edge of our seats. Throughout the exhibition Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine it becomes clear that he moved fast, that in the moment, most could not keep up. After leaving Louisville University in 1958, he was relentless, finishing over 1,000 paintings before passing on at the age of 28.
Nora Turato: Govern Me Harder
By David CarrierTurato’s art is difficult to classify. In advertisements the words often supplement an image. You see a glamorous model and learn who designed their clothes. Or you view a car and read the manufacturer’s name. But what is Turato advertising?
The Baroness
By Brittany Rosemary JonesThe forerunner of several of the greatest dissident movements of the twentieth century—from Dada to punk to feminist performance—Freytag-Loringhoven pushed modernism forward while challenging its tenets.
Ruth Asawa: Citizen of the Universe
By Vani AnandamIn Citizen of the Universe, the artist’s first public solo exhibition in Europe, Modern Art Oxford (MAO) presents Asawa’s work, all of her work—art, family, and community—in tandem, akin to her lived life.
Stan Douglas: 2011 ≠ 1848
By Amin AlsadenDouglas’s 2011 ≠ 1848argues for the difference in scale between these historical moments: while the former primarily shook France, the latter signifies global revolutionary potential today.
Lingua Franca
By Maia SiegelThe new group show, Lingua Franca, opened June 18th, and runs to July 29th. Daniel Kapp, who curated the show, finds a common language between nine very different artists.
Paul Pagk: Queen of Spades
By Emireth Herrera ValdésPaul Pagk, a British-American-French artist based in New York, demonstrates his mastery of color and painting. His first solo exhibition with the gallery in Lower Manhattan was on view until July 9, 2022, at Hionas Gallery.
Jonathan Silver: Matter and Vision
By Brandt JunceauExistential sculpture as practiced by Alberto Giacometti, his via confrontational and often desperate portrait objects that stare back unblinking, or howl open-mouthed—has been little exercised since. It sleeps like a buried high-voltage line, as perilous as a third rail. No artist who isn’t perfectly serious, and tinged with gallows humor, should touch it either.
Ani Liu: Ecologies of Care
By Helena HaimesEcologies of Care, Ani Liu’s current exhibition at Cuchifritos Gallery and Project Space, uses the language of technology and material culture to confront the all-encompassing, messy, pressured experience that is contemporary motherhood and thrust it front and center.
Women at War
By Annabel KeenanWomen at War is an exhibition, a history lesson, and an effort to preserve Ukrainian nationalism and culture. Hosted by Fridman Gallery and presented with Voloshyn Gallery, the group show features leading Ukrainian women artists who tell complex stories of war and life in Ukraine. Curated by Monika Fabijanska, Women at War addresses over a century of conflict, touching on the impact of both World Wars, the eight years of fighting that followed the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and the present-day war.
Kazuko Miyamoto: Works from 1966 to 2005
By Jonathan GoodmanNow an octogenarian, Japanese-born sculptor and multimedia artist Kazuko Miyamoto lives downtown, in the East Village. Originally from Tokyo, the artist came to New York City in 1964, studying at the Art Students League from 1964 to 1968. Lacking money, Miyamoto took on restaurant jobs and manual labor to pay for her education and living expenses.
The Condition of Being Addressable
By Olivia GauthierOn view at the ICA LA, an intergenerational group show of contemporary artists takes on the broad topic of identity politics as a lived experience, or, as the exhibition is titled, The Condition of Being Addressable.
Lynda Benglis
By Conor LauesenSpanning five decades of creative output, Lynda Benglis’s solo show at Locks Gallery in Philadelphia is an inebriating—and joyous—encounter with the artist’s uncompromising creative practice.
Klammern aus denen Blätter Sprießen
By Hannah Sage KayCapitalist realism and the many ills it diagnoses are explored in Klammern aus denen Blätter Spriessen (Brackets from which Leaves Sprout), a group show at Hunter Shaw Fine Art in Los Angeles featuring work by Colleen Hargaden, Filip Kostic, Yein Lee, Andrew Rutherdale, Jonas Schoenberg, and a text by Steph Holl-Trieu.
Eyes of the Skin
By Folasade OlogunduduHere, each artist explores tactile experiences through bodily memory, engaging in a decidedly introspective practice.
