Abstract painter, writer, and art professor, Jason Stopa shows a new series of work, DIY Paradise, at Assembly in Houston.

“Destination/El Destino: a decade of GRAFT,” is the upcoming exhibition at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center, which opens on April 22, where Soto wanted to mark her decade-long engagement with the project. 

For the latest exhibition at Hyde Park, the viewfinders will show photos of past iterations of “GRAFT,” in order to “instigate a certain engagement” from the viewer in a direct and intimate way. Soto’s practice generally, is an archive of research materials, essays, and responses to her work commissioned from architects, historians, political writers, poets, artists, and more, all of which is available on her website. 

Recently, Soto started painting again, incorporating elements from “GRAFT” into wall-hung abstract canvases, which she said grew out a wave of grief. Several of the paintings will feature in Soto’s solo show at Morgan Lehman in New York, which opens Saturday.

Curated by Jennifer Samet and Andrea Belag, this group exhibition in NYC explores the feminine through aesthetics, as opposed to identity or gender.

Over the course of the previous decade, Soto has been expanding upon one of her most recognizable projects, Graft. The series includes sculptures and reliefs of iron screens, or rejas, that are pervasive in the postwar architecture of Puerto Rico. In late April, Graft will be making another appearance in Chicago, in her highly anticipated solo exhibition, “Edra Soto: Destination/El Destino: a decade of Graft,” at the Hyde Park Art Center.

Hyde Park Art Center will present “Destination/El Destino: a decade of GRAFT,” the largest solo exhibition to date of Puerto Rican artist, educator and community organizer Edra Soto. The exhibition offers a survey of the artist’s “GRAFT” series that began in 2013, and premieres a new, large-scale commission created in part during the artist’s 2022 yearlong residency at the Art Center. 

The exhibition celebrates a decade-long exploration of Soto’s widely-exhibited multimedia sculpture series addressing the influence of Afro-diasporic cultures on Puerto Rico’s decorative architecture.

Organized by the Center for Puerto Rican Studies and Hunter East Harlem Gallery

Ida y Vuelta: Experiencias de la migración en el arte puertorriqueño contemporáneo is an expansive exhibition of 19 Puerto Rican artists whose works express their varied interpretations of the experience of migration—often formulated from direct experience—whether they refer to their own emigration or to the process of adapting to a new environment. 

March 30-September 30, 2023

The Schingoethe Center of Aurora University presents "No Place Like Home," an exhibition featuring artwork by 38 artists, including Theaster Gates, Dorothea Lange, Sally Mann, Wendy Red Star, Edra Soto and Carrie Mae Weems. It continues through April 28.

This exhibition features photography, sculpture, video, painting, textiles and printmaking that explores the many facets of home as a place of joy and sorrow; rest and labor; refuge and jeopardy.

The free exhibition is open to the public weekly on Monday and Wednesday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and on Tuesday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Founded as a bequest of Lucy Copeland Farnsworth in honor of her father, the museum’s collection began as a modest holding of several hundred objects. Farnsworth at 75: New Voices from Maine in American Art is a two-part exhibition presented on the occasion of the 75th anniversary.

New Voices from Maine in American Art unveils new acquisitions to the museum’s collection in the last two years. Organized thematically, these objects revisit histories, narratives, and myths about the sea, industries, identity, community, and places, both real and imagined.

The work of 15 of those artists was brought together in what is already the first academic exhibition focused on Puerto Rican art organized by a major U.S. museum in half a century. It is called "There Is No Post-Hurricane World: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria," and it will be on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art, noted for its spectacular collection of modern and contemporary American art.

January 2023 –  Drew University’s Jason Karolak, associate teaching professor of art, joined us for our Focus on Faculty series, where we highlight the many accomplishments, research, and scholarship of Drew’s incredible faculty members.

“La Distancia” is Chicago artist Edra Soto’s solo show, opening October 28 at ENGAGE Projects. “Elaborating on her series ‘GRAFT,’ Soto will intermingle the aesthetic languages of Puerto Rican visual culture and American architecture in the gallery.

Open from October 29 - December 9, 2022

The 2022 Cornell Biennial presents, "At What Point Does The World Unfold?", a new installation by Sara Jimenez.

Jimenez has taken the main elements of Goldwin Smith Hall’s Beaux Arts architecture and individually abstracted and fabricated them to scale. The installation goes across part of the Arts Quad, partially tied to trees, and partially rooted into the ground. Each architectural element is made of brightly colored textiles, with printed floral patterns and ornamentation.

The exhibition is on view from Sep 15 - Oct 27, 2022 at the Arts Quad, Goldwin Smith Hall.

Jason Stopa's painting, "A New Harmony" was recently acquired as part of the Wellin Museum's permanent collection. It is currently on view in the group exhibition, "Dialogues Across Disciplines: Building a Collection for the Wellin Museum".

Hamilton College celebrates the 10-year anniversary of the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art. Featuring a selection of more than 80 artworks acquired through gifts and purchases over the last decade, the exhibition highlights the museum’s ongoing commitment to building a globally representative teaching collection that is reflective of the academic and cultural richness of Hamilton College.

Curated by Tracy L. Adler, the Wellin Museum’s Johnson-Pote Director, and Alexander Jarman, Assistant Curator of Exhibitions and Academic Outreach, the exhibition will be on view from September 17, 2022, through June 11, 2023.

“Must See” is Artforum's editors' selection of essential exhibitions worldwide and is a feature of artguide, which provides a comprehensive index to all art-world events.

no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria is organized to coincide with the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Maria. 

Opening Nov 23, 2022 through Apr 23, 2023

"Time and Time Again" features a selection of Carly Glovinski's works at the Zillman Art Museum University of Maine through Labor Day

"As the exhibition title suggests, the artist’s work emerges through repetitious acts that reflect the passage of time and natural cycles of renewal. Often Glovinski’s pieces are a response to a specific space—such as the monumental wall installation titled Parade created for the Zillman – in which the gallery walls are filled with an immersive array of painted flowers. The colorful cutout forms that meander around the walls are based on flowers the artist has gathered and pressed, their flattened shapes giving them a “nostalgic, keepsake quality.” While rooted in the representational, the flower petals also take on an abstract quality as the vivid paint passages bleed and bloom on the transparent Mylar."

New Permanent Edra Soto Sculpture in Knoxville Tennessee, Curated By Tri-Star Arts with the Assistance of the UT School Of Art 

"Edra responded to the rolling topography of the sculpture site with a work that anticipates visitors and offers a space of contemplative rest. Sculpture students in several different classes met with the artist multiple times in person and on zoom throughout two years to talk about the design."

Carly Glovinski's features work with Lynne Harlow and Charly Nijensohn through October 30th 2022

Polygreen Culture & Art Initiative (PCAI) and the Fidelity Art Collection inaugurate their new group exhibition in Delphi, Greece, with works from their respective collections.

"Carly Glovinski’s work explores the make-do, resourceful attitudes associated with domestic craft and a reverence for nature and the great outdoors. The elements of time and place are embedded in her work, measured by tides and seasonal flower blooms, and marked by labor and repetitive process. For Keeping Time she will be exhibiting her most recent body of work, Canning the Sunset made during the pandemic."

Paul Villinski's 1994 textile piece "Comforter" has been newly aquired by the Smithsonian American Art Musuem Renwick Gallery, installed in their 50th Anniversary Exhibition, "This Present Moment: Crafting a Better Future" 

Through April 2023!

El Museo del Barrio presents ESTAMOS BIEN – LA TRIENAL 20/21, the museum’s first national large-scale survey of Latinx contemporary art featuring more than 40 artists from across the United States and Puerto Rico. Originally planned for Fall 2020, the show has been reconceived and expanded as a yearlong initiative, the exhibition debuts summer 2020 with online projects  followed by an onsite exhibition in Las Galerías (Galleries) opening Spring 2021. Related public programs featuring curators, artists, invited scholars and other guests will take place throughout the year.

ESTAMOS BIEN – LA TRIENAL 20/21 is made possible by The Jacques & Natasha Gelman Foundation. Leadership support is provided by The Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Commissioned works are made possible by Tony Bechara. Major funding is provided by Morgan Stanley and The Lenore G. Tawney Foundation. Generous funding is provided by The Cowles Charitable Trust and La Trienal Council: Craig Robins and Jackie Soffer, and The Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation at The Miami Foundation. Additional support is provided by The El Museo Fund.

Written by Monica Khemsurov

The paintings of Dallas-based Anna Membrino — on view now at Morgan Lehman gallery in New York — feature “curvilinear geometries and planes of glowing color” that land in the ambiguous space between abstraction and reality. That’s because Membrino makes them by building small colored-paper maquettes in her studio, then paints them, but not faithfully. Their “elongated shadows and long, arcing color gradients suggest the lingering of light and the gradual passage of time,” writes her gallery.

Curated by Tom Kotik

"Inspired by One New York Plaza’s proximity to water, Current, a new commission for Arts Brookfield by artist Carolanna Parlato, is a vivid, expressive exploration of the ebb and flow of ocean currents. Created by pouring brilliantly colored paints in layers, directly over flat canvases, then adding undulating connecting lines, Parlato reveals playful forms that emerge from the natural flow of liquid pools of pigment. These organic shapes and lines create a rhythm within the work that can be seen as an allegory for the pulsating tidal movements and energy of the ocean. Scanned and enlarged to architectural scale, Parlato’s paintings surround visitors in currents of bright color that playfully dance across the walls of the concourse level like giant luminous waves."

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Brooklyn-based artist Carolanna Parlato received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has had solo exhibitions at the Islip Art Museum, Islip, NY; and the Phatory, Elizabeth Harris Gallery, and Morgan Lehman Gallery, and in New York, NY. Parlato has been included in group exhibitions at Morgan Lehman Gallery and Asya Geisberg Gallery, Lesley Heller Workspace, the Drawing Center, Art in General, and White Columns, all in New York, NY; the Brooklyn Museum; Fullerton Art Museum, Fullerton, CA; and Amy Simon Fine Art, Westport, CT; among others. Public collections include the Brooklyn Museum; ArtBank Collection, and The Library of Congress, both Washington DC; and Public Art for Public Schools, New York, NY; among others. Parlato was a nominee for the Anonymous Was a Woman Award in 2016. Her paintings have been written about numerous publications including The New York Times, Art in America, The Boston Globe, Artcritical, ARTnews, Two Coats of Paint, The New Criterion, White Hot Magazine and The Brooklyn Rail.

"AUSTIN, Texas — Dell Medical School at The University of Texas will be the new home of Paul Villinski’s ethereal sculpture, 'Passage,' a floating wood and metal sculpture on loan to Dell Med from the Blanton Museum of Art. The installation process begins this Thursday at the school’s Health Learning Building as the centerpiece of its five-story glass-encased atrium space.

'In conversations with students, we have talked about how the two major elements of butterflies and airplane suggest a relationship between nature and technology, and how medicine engages information from both domains,' said Ray Williams, the Blanton’s director of education and academic affairs, who has focused on 'Passage' when teaching Dell Med students.

'The spiraling butterflies, lifting and supporting the incomplete machine, evoke the power and inevitability of nature, even amidst the pursuit of new technologies,' Williams explained."

"How do you locate a landscape? For the eighth installment of the currents series, Carly Glovinski posed this question to generate a group of works for a two-part exhibition that will be shown concurrently at the Colby Museum and the Waterville Public Library. In its presentation of painted, cast, and woven forms, the exhibition manifests what Glovinski calls a “viewshed,” a term she has adopted from terrain analysis to describe her associative and egalitarian reflections on how we understand nature through the world of things.

Glovinski’s painted sculptures can often be mistaken for functional objects. The list of varied items invoked in her currents project includes fishing poles, books, partially completed jigsaw puzzles, and a colorful crocheted blanket. Glovinski approached the Colby Museum’s Lunder Collection of American art in a similarly acquisitive spirit, and a complementary arrangement of these works—by Winslow Homer, Thomas Moran, and Edmund Charles Tarbell, among others—will be displayed at the Colby Museum in a gallery adjacent to her commissioned installation. For the portion of the exhibition mounted at the Waterville Public Library, Glovinski has created a group of three-dimensional paintings that closely resemble books in the library’s collection. These painted objects, all of which take landscape or other forms of nature as their subject, will be exhibited on the library’s shelves. Designed to be explored by the hand and eye, they will be discovered by library patrons via a finding aid."

"The mundane moments of Williamsburg trespass on Leigh Ruple’s canvases. The Brooklyn-based artist’s works are inspired by her daily life, featuring stylized, temperamental depictions of objects and figures abstracted within an array colors and forms.

Her studio is located in East Williamsburg, allowing her to observe the architecture and people within the thriving neighborhood, and the geometries and patterns of the district’s local architecture have become motifs of her paintings. Her work also explores the city’s nightscape, with changing highlights and shadows. In a painting titled Nightstand, the Manhattan skyline is backlit by moonlight, while an assortment of prosaic objects including kitchen gloves, a pair of scissors, and a trimmed plant occupies the foreground, hinting at the inner life of an unseen subject.

In Red Door, a bare-chested man sitting on an inverted tin bucket paints a fence door from blue to red; the red light shining from behind the fence illuminates parts of the man’s torso. The placid scene is dramatized with contrasting tones, hues, and lighting effects."

"Nancy Lorenz draws inspiration for her art from many sources — from the traditional gilt artists of Italy and the 1960s Italian arte povera movement to American painter James McNeill Whistler. But it was the five years she spent in Japan as a teenager that is her biggest influence.

Her distinctive East-meets-West style is characterized by the use of gold and silver leaf, lacquer and mother-of-pearl inlay. Lorenz describes her work, which ranges in scale from room-sized panels to small boxes, as 'kind of a combination of abstract expressionism along with Japanese techniques.' The result is a visual feast of rich metallics often set against utilitarian materials such as cardboard and burlap.

'It is tremendously sensual art, both in so far as the forms themselves can be very gestural and sinuous and recalling natural forms, but also her use of materials is very unusual. I’ve never seen work quite like it — the way she combines lacquers and gilding work and inlay. Many of these techniques are quite traditional but she uses them in fairly unconventional ways,' said Ariel Plotek, curator of modern and contemporary art the San Diego Museum of Art."

"Seeing the work of photographer Erin O’Keefe and painter Matt Kleberg side by side, it’s as if they are of one mind: the brightest orangey reds, the richest teals and greens, and the textured yellows; the crisp angles, the unexpected shapes, and the lively abstractions. Their current collaboration, a two-person exhibition titled Ecstatic Vernacular on view at Morgan Lehman in New York until May 19, is a conversation between the artists and their differing mediums."

"Sharon Louden is best known for room-size, site-specific installations constructed from thousands of small components. She uses a variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, and animation, aiming to capture movement and light. Within these works, industrial materials (her favorite is aluminum) are transformed into something more closely resembling forms in nature, even the human body. She calls her abstract creations 'anthropomorphic individuals,' acknowledging the human-like aspects that result from minimal lines, textures, and gestures.

The editor of Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists and The Artist as Culture Producer: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life, Louden wears many hats—artist, advocate, and educator (she has taught for more than 25 years). Though she started her artistic career as a painter at Yale, over time, she became bored with the limitations of canvas: 'I wanted to paint the inside of figures and dissect them. I would think of them as architecture.'"

"However improbable—given the bleak current national mood—the self-congratulatory strain of American modernist painting known as Precisionism is again in vogue. The Jazz Age movement, known for its sleek depictions of industry that tend to fall just on the romantic side of Photorealism—which mostly subsided in favor of more comforting figural works as the Great Depression (and American Regionalism) rolled in—is the subject of an upcoming survey at San Francisco’s de Young Museum. Less surprisingly, the aesthetic has popped up in contemporary painting, where its signature, evenly gradated planes have been flattened and distilled to their extremes. The effect is one of gentle rebuke, as if to say, “Look what subtleties your unqualified idealism has cost us!”

To these artists’ ranks, one can add Leigh Ruple, whose recent paintings gaze at the Manhattan skyline as one might from the vantage of an unheated studio in Queens. Ruple’s scenes, composed of flat, clearly delineated shapes nestled to suggest dimension and shadow, evoke the Precisionist Charles Sheeler’s renderings of factories from the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. Like Sheeler’s celebrated industrial depictions, they are cold, crystalline things, suggesting the low, blue light of winter. But Ruple trains her eye on Brooklyn’s unglamorous corners. She homes in on the weeds that gather frost in sidewalk cracks, and feral cats that roam empty, frozen-over lots at night."

"See how animals have captivated artists throughout history in Stampede: Animals in Art. This cross-departmental exhibition brings together more than 300 objects from the Denver Art Museum’s collection to explore the presence of animals in art throughout centuries and across cultures.

Stampede creates an opportunity for visitors to discover and consider the role animals play through themes such as personal connections with animals, how animal materials have been used in art, how animals are used to tell stories or represent political ideas, and how artists use animals in imaginative ways."

"Nancy Lorenz: Moon Gold will be the first major solo museum exhibition to showcase the art and alchemy of New York-based Nancy Lorenz. Having trained in the conservation of Japanese decorative arts, Lorenz continues to employ traditional lacquering and gilding techniques as points of departure in her studio practice. This collaboration with the Museum will feature new works by the artist inspired by Japanese masterpieces from the permanent collection and will be accompanied by a catalogue published by the Museum.

Among the painted works in the exhibition will be what Lorenz calls Pours, abstract compositions involving gestural applications of water-gilded gesso. Varying in scale, these paintings turn on the tension between arid fields of pigment and sumptuous cascades of gold, silver, and platinum. More intimate, though no less beguiling, will be a group of decadently adorned boxes."

"Kim McCarty knows about loss, but she speaks about it with such positive acquiescence that you feel like you’re talking to a Yogi about yin and yang, not an artist about a studio fire in ’93. I ask about the story of the studio fire wondering if she is tired of telling it, but she indulges me: “The fire occurred during the huge Santa Ana winds in 1993. Two hundred houses were destroyed. We then moved into a small house where I began to paint on the side porch. With a lack of space and ventilation—and with small children—I began to rediscover watercolor on paper.” She adds that at the time, “works on paper became an accepted art practice in the art world,” and I begin to get the sense that for McCarty, life is a continuous process of overcoming—you acknowledge the obstacles ahead of you, and then you keep pushing forward.

McCarty has tapped into something both universal and mysterious. Her work captures the longing for something permanent in a world that’s constantly in flux. With over 20 solo shows, multiple group exhibitions, and works in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, UCLA’s Hammer Museum, and the Honolulu Academy of Art, it’s clear that she’s saying something that society, and the art world, needs to hear right now."

"Alex Greenberger of Artnews reports that Morgan Lehman gallery in New York, located at 534 West Twenty-Fourth Street in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, will open another location at 526 West Twenty-Sixth Street."

"NEW YORK, NY.- Morgan Lehman announces the opening of a new auxiliary gallery, inaugurated in 2018. Morgan Lehman 2 is located at 526 W. 26th street, suite 419. This modern, flexible exhibition space expands the gallery’s ability to offer the curatorial freedom and ambitious programming of the original MLG vision."

"Tread Lightly is the first solo exhibition of artist Carly Glovinski’s work in the Midwest. Rooted in observation, her mixed media practice investigates objects, patterns, and organizing systems found in daily life. This exhibition brings together work on paper, small object sculpture and painting, and focuses on landscapes, textiles, and reference books as its main subject matter.

In works like the Time Life Nature Series and Pawtuckaway, Glovinski breaks with conventional approaches to landscape painting – instead of painting plein air vistas, she locates landscape “once removed” (i.e, the topography and design of trail maps, and landscape images printed on book covers) and re-creates these objects to mimic the original."

Acclaimed abstract artist Tim Bavington, who moved to Las Vegas in 1993, has picked that song as the focus of a permanent monument honoring first responders and those affected by the tragedy. Funds raised will furnish the materials for this project, which is still in its infancy.

Bavington is donating his time, and Jewel her voice, to the effort.

“It’s exciting to be creating a memorial that will help transfer the pain and add to the culture of a city that I’ve really come to love,” Jewel said during a phone chat Wednesday morning. “I have found a humanity and depth here, people at the core who really care about the community. It doesn’t surprise me, because you find that in communities everywhere, but I am part of Las Vegas and find the people here are really focused on what is good.”

Bavington is familiar with civic projects of great structural and artistic integrity, as well as using music to spark his ingenuity. Bavington’s most-recognized work in Las Vegas is his towering “Pipe Dream,” sculpture at The Smith Center for the Performing Arts, inspired by Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man”

“It’s quite an honor to work with that song, and to work on this project,” Bavington said Wednesday. “I like to pair musical notes and colors, but it was really her voice that was the inspiration. I can almost see or feel the vocals in an abstract way in her voice.”

Bavington promises, “I’ll be doing something different. It has to be unique.”

Co-curated by musician and painter Scott Avett, lead singer of the folk-rock band The Avett Brothers, and David Kratz, president of the New York Academy of Art, ABOUT FACE, which will feature sculpture, paintings, and photographs, brings celebrated artists, many from the East End, together with emerging artists to examine the diverse ways human beings are presented in portraiture today.

The exhibition’s theme is closely tied to the Academy’s mission of promoting and preserving the tradition of figurative art within the contemporary art world. How we look at people says as much about who we are as who they are. In the era of the ubiquitous selfie, this exhibition asks the viewers to slow down and consider the story inherent in every human face.

"Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Kysa Johnson. This is the artist’s first solo show with the gallery and her first in the city of Los Angeles. Kysa Johnson’s artistic practice is grounded in the language of microscopic systems to describe the phenomena of our reality. The Long Goodbye is an ongoing series of notable sky objects like the Sagittarius Star Cloud and the Orion Nebula represented by subatomic decay patterns - or scientific play-by-plays of unstable particles morphing into stable ones. Johnson coopts these patters as mark-making vehicles. Thus, the life cycles of minuscule particles express the life cycles of astronomical landscapes measuring light years across. By interweaving extremities of scale into single compositions, Johnson underscores transformation as a universal thematic."

From The Taubman Museum: "Paul Villinski: Farther will survey developments in Villinski's practice over the past decade, as well as publicly debut multiple new works direct from the artist's New York studio. The sculptures and installations of Paul Villinski engage with subjects both sublime and neglected. Influenced by a life-long concern for environmental issues, his work transforms seemingly useless and discarded materials -- often trash found on the streets of New York City -- into uplifting and humanizing works of art. Flocks of aluminum-can butterflies, wings feathered with lost gloves, and fantastical flying machines evoke motifs of flight, metamorphosis and rebirth. These themes inform a visual language which Villinski uses to explore the many contradictions of human experience." The exhibition is curated by Amy Moorefield, Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Collections, Taubman Museum of Art and will be on display June 16, 2017 – January 21, 2018.

"In Part 1 of 2, Los Angeles artist and activist Kysa Johnson talks about: the various platforms and outlets for her activism, and how donating money, signing petitions and watching protest-based movies gave way to attending the initial protest in L.A., the Women’s March in Washington, a protest at LAX airport, artist political group meetings, [and] phone calls to Congress; how her 'being active' was a necessary reaction to the extreme change in the political landscape, and how protests... matter because the visibility and solidarity of resistance is a key arm of resistance that lets those in power know that you’re angry."

"Et al. etc. is pleased to present Nutshell, a solo exhibition by Laurie Reid, curated by Juana Berrío. Laurie and Juana have been in conversation for the past few weeks. 

Et al. etc. is Et al.'s expanded program, presenting two concurrent exhibitions: one organized by Et al. and one organized by a guest gallery. The exhibitions play with incidental contact and surprising context along with Et al.'s longtime interest in hospitality."

Kysa Johnson will be showing at Eastside International (ESXLA), in their group exhibition entitled Echo Location, curated by Lisa C. Soto. "The exhibition features work by artists who participated in a series of talks at Soto’s Inglewood studio entitled 'Conversations By Artists For Artists', which began in November of 2015. The conversations were intended to build connectivity, cultivate empowerment, and provide an intimate space for the exchange of ideas, energies, and perspectives. In Echo Location the visions and voices of the twenty-three participating artists co-mingle again and offer an alternative mapping of LA’s creative landscape."

Headlands Center for the Arts has announced the fifty artists and collaboratives who have been awarded into their renowned Artist in Residence program for 2017, including two Morgan Lehman artists, Brittany Nelson and Edra Soto. Nelson, Soto, and the other practitioners will be supported by Headlands' fully-sponsored live-in residencies "designed to sustain their artistic process."

Katia Santibañez's most recent video piece A National Nightmare will be on view at Petzel Gallery through February 11, 2017 as part of the group exhibition We need to talk... The exhibition aims "to address the myriad issues presented by the election results of November 8th."

"M/E/A/N/I/N/G is a collaboration between two artists, Susan Bee and Mira Schor, both painters with expanded interests in writing and politics, and an extended community of artists, art critics, historians, theorists, and poets, whom we sought to engage in discourse and to give a voice to." - Susan Bee and Mira Schor

From the exhibition press release: "'Bedazzled' implies amazement, to be overwhelmed to the point of confusion; going beyond our senses and reason. This lush exhibition of 43 artists includes work that seduces with glitz and glamour, and allures with a sense of magic and mystery. The exhibition presents a broad range of media—painting, installation, sculpture, printmaking, and digital media—that entice the viewer, while blurring the boundaries between the aesthetic experience and enchantment... The exhibition highlights optics, ornament, surfaces, light, mirroring, pattern, repetition, abstraction, and geometry." 

The artists represented in the exhibition are themselves a bedazzling array of famous names, mid-career artists and freshly emerging local talents, whose colorful and provocative works play with and illuminate each other. The artists in the exhibition are: El Anatsui, Radcliffe Bailey, Nancy Blum, Paul Corio, Katherine Daniels, Evie Falci, Vibha Galhotra, Ori Gersht, Damien Hirst, Jessica Johnson, Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner, James Lecce, Chris Leidy, Crystal Liu, Nancy Lorenz, Liza Lou, Susie MacMurray, Armando Marino, Sasha Meret, Betriz Milhazes, Marilyn Minter, Melissa “MRS” Castignoli, Paula Nadelstern, Eva Obodo, Caitlin Peluffo, Rubem Robierb, Carlos Rolón/Dzine, James Rosenquist, Michelle Sakhai, Nancy Saleme, Holly Sears, David Shaw, Devan Shimoyama, Rachel Stern, Megan Suttles, Barbara Takenaga, Mickalene Thomas, Federico Uribe, Paul Villinski, Stephen Westfall, Saya Woolfalk, and Robert Zakanitch.

Curated by Bartholomew F. Bland. Opening reception Wednesday, October 5, 2016, from 6:00 - 8:00pm. 

Morgan Lehman Gallery artist Amy Park will be featured in Gagosian Gallery's "Ed Ruscha Books & Co.,” an exhibition of artists' books by and after Ed Ruscha, organized by Gagosian director Bob Monk.

From the Gagosian press release: "For the first time in this exhibition, nine works will be shown from Amy Park's Ed Ruscha's Every Building on the Sunset Strip, an ambitious series in which the entirety of Ruscha's original artist book is enlarged and rendered delicately in watercolor, refining and refracting the images, fifty years after the fact—watercolor having been widely used as the preferred medium to document building elevations and topography pre-photography."

The exhibition will be on view from July 28 - September 9, 2016 at Gagosian Gallery, in Beverly Hills, California. 

This summer the Academy will present Water | Bodies, an exhibit curated by Eric Fischl and President David Kratz (MFA 2008), at the Southampton Arts Center. The exhibit presents painting, sculpture, photo, and print works on the theme of the human figure in and around water. Notably, artists run the gamut and pieces by newly minted Academy MFAs will hang alongside major works from established artists. The opening reception will be on July 2, and the show will run through July 31. 

"John Salvest challenges pre-conceived notions of everyday objects and their inherent value. He revisits business cards, reclaimed medicine cabinets, and pills and also introduces new materials such as secondhand romance novels and used crutches. The found objects are recontextualized, often with the assistance of the written word, to create works that both communicate personal realizations about morality and time and also comment on the triumphs and follies specific to our era. Salvest believes that the beauty, courage, sadness, humor, and absurdity of the world are reflected in the physical evidence of our human needs and shortcomings – specifically in the detritus of our daily lives."

"Children’s Museum of the Arts is pleased to announce Game On!, an exhibition about our passion for sport and how it has defined our individual and collective identities. Throughout history, the world of games —with its inversions of mastery, dependence on chance and reliance on both verbal and physical play—has intrigued and inspired visual artists. Game On! presents works by contemporary artists who take a reflective, critical or inspired look at sport and how we play the game. Addressing issues of identity, power, heroism, nostalgia, popular culture and gender, Game On! highlights a variety of media that reminds us that within every ruled system, there exists potential for creativity and exploration.

The artists featured in Game On!—Louisa Armbrust, Zoe Buckman, Dario Escobar, Michelle Grabner, Norm Paris, David Rathman, Christin Rose, Jean Shin, and Hank Willis Thomas—investigate the line between freedom and authority embodied in games and sports."

In her intricate watercolor paintings, Laura Ball portrays a colorful tangle of creatures that weave their way into our consciousness. She charts a course through our dreams and memories to environmental values long neglected. As she leads us through visions of intertwined beings, Ball projects the passion and concern of a loving steward. She reminds us that our ward — the primal, natural world — is an interconnected whole more valuable than the sum of its parts, and uses materials (watercolors and graphite) that are as ephemeral and unpredictable as nature itself. In these works, Ball is not offering a simple celebration of the animal kingdom. She is exploring the relationship between humans and our fellow creatures and highlighting tensions and recurring failures in our stewardship of nature. 

Of Animal Importance, a four-person exhibition, showcases the work of San Diego artists Laura Ball, Belle Baranceanu, Jeff Irwin, and Walter Haase Wojtyla. With the depiction of animals as a subject, these four artists interpret the animal form through diverse media, each captivated by differing concerns ranging from human interaction with the natural world, animals as spiritual beings, and the wild beast within us all. Laura Ball and Jeff Irwin have both found enduring inspiration in social and environmental issues (conservation serving as a core undercurrent within their work). Ball’s watercolors transport the viewer to a realm of dreams where instinct and primal nature reign over moral judgment and mental dexterity. Irwin’s sculptural forms are delicate in their white simplicity, yet possess an undertow of violence, sharing a subtle bond with Walter Haase Wojtyla’s (1933 – 2014) aggressive paintings of canines. Ten block prints and one drawing by Belle Baranceanu (1902 – 1988), selected from the San Diego History Center’s own fine art collection, represent her as a key figure in the history of San Diego art.

Kysa Johnson's work explores patterns in nature that exist at the extremes of scale. Inspired by the 80-acre grounds at Grace Farms, she has made a new, 360-degree drawing, which creates an immersive experience for visitors at the Pavilion, a glass-enclosed volume in the River building. This installation, which opens on April 23 and is on view through May 31, 2016, marks the first time Johnson has worked on a transparent surface, providing the opportunity for a seamless interplay between in and out-doors.

"Artists John Salvest and Les Christensen transform the ordinary into extraordinary, turning what most think of as trash or junk into thought-provoking and beautiful sculptures and installations.

Both artists work in education at the Arkansas State University in Jonesboro; Salvest is a Professor of Art, and Christensen is the Director of the Bradbury Art Museum. Christensen and Salvest have exhibited throughout the South and beyond in group and solo exhibitions."
 

"In a provocative display that incorporates contemporary art, relics from the natural world, and items of material culture, the forthcoming exhibition The Nest, an exhibition of art in nature, examines the exquisite beauty and profound symbolism of the nest in art and culture. Drawing its inspiration from the extraordinary form of the bird’s nest, the exhibition examines how the fundamental drive to gather, assemble, and create is a function of both nature and the artistic process.

The exhibition features a selection of real birds’ nests from the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History collection, one of the most extensive and significant in North America. Works by fifteen contemporary artists—whose practices encompass sculpture, painting, collage, photography, and video—examine the life of birds, as well as the concept of the nest as metaphor of home, birth, protection, and the human body. Drawing from the intersection of nature and technology, bird cams appear on monitors installed throughout the galleries, introducing a view of live birds into the context of natural materials and art objects. Artists in the exhibition include Sharon Beals, Sanford Biggers, Dove Bradshaw, Björn Braun, John Burtle, Shiela Hale, Porky Hefer, Nina Katchadourian, Louise Lawler, Judy Pfaff, James Prosek, Kiki Smith, Andreas Sterzing, Paul Villinski, and David Wojnarowicz."

"All the arguments against it are right: too crowded, too loud, too spread out, too expensive. But also: too exciting, too energetic, too fast, too much. All superlatives. New York, I love You, But… is a glimpse at the superlative that is New York, an audience to the internal conversation of the person pressed against the subway door, smelling something unidentifiable on the journey home from some unique, strange wonderful New York moment. It is a glance at the instances of excess and intimacy, humanity and wonder that define being a New Yorker." 

Amy Park’s large-scale watercolors illuminate the artistry of modern architecture with crisp blocks of color and mesmerizing detail. Inspired by the forms and patterns found in the New York cityscape, Amy works from her own photographs of major landmarks and skyscrapers to create hard, geometric compositions that border abstraction. Bringing color and light to an often muted subject matter, Amy highlights the sculptural qualities of these buildings with a skill and control that defies the usual limitations of the medium.

The exhibition will be on view from November 5, 2015 - January 26, 2015, with an opening reception on November 5, 2015, from 6:00 - 8:00pm.

For the Tweed Museum of Art, Sharon Louden has created a site-specific, multidisciplinary installation inspired by new works on paper. Suspended from the ceiling and throughout the gallery, Windows will consist of clear acetate drawings, bright, thin, mirror-like sheets of aluminum, and colored aluminum attached to the walls. A musical component will be added by contemporary classical composer, Andrew Simpson, a Washington, D.C.-based pianist and organist. He will compose a new score to be performed live by University of Minnesota, Duluth, music students the night of the opening. In addition, lighting designer, Arden Weaver, will provide theatrical lighting that will help activate the dynamic character and drama of Windows.

An opening reception will be held on October 22, with an Artist as Entrepreneur Workshop on Novemner 21. 

Katia Santibañez was recently interviewed by Yale University Radio WYBCX. Click here to listen to the interview. 

"Amy Park’s visual art has long reflected a deep interest in architecture. This collection of 36 ink drawings is her own idiosyncratic survey of the highlights of Modernism. It’s a fresh, spontaneous approach that will help you see Modernism with new eyes."

As part of the larger collaboration exploring the Seven Deadly Sins, this project leverages the idea of Gluttony – a term expressing excessive self-indulgence as well as over-consumption – as a springboard for a special installation by the artist Emilie Clark. This one-person project at the Katonah Museum of Art explores the complex interconnectivity of consumption, waste, decay, and regeneration. Using her family’s preserved food waste – from egg shells to desiccated tangerines to fish heads in a jar, Clark turns our attention to food at its most elemental level. Belied by their waste-based content, Clark’s installations hold a quality of old-world still life paintings. Clark was born and raised in San Francisco and currently works in New York.

The exhibition opens to the public on July 12, with an opening reception and artist talk on July 19 at 1pm. 

 

Katia Santibanex recently spent a month in residency at Casa Wabi: "Casa Wabi, founded in October by Bosco Sodi, a Brooklyn-based Mexican artist, is part retreat, part community arts program — an effort, Mr. Sodi said, to give something back to the country where he grew up. In return for the chance to work without distractions and within earshot of the pounding Pacific — there is no cellphone signal, and the house is a half-mile down a dirt road — Mr. Sodi, and Patricia Martín, Casa Wabi’s director, ask residents to organize art projects with local villages."

Click on the link below to read the New York Times article. 

The Fire Next Time is a group exhibition featuring artists Kysa Johnson, Angel Otero, Michael Cline, James English Leary, and Kenny Riviero, curated by Christian Viveros-Fauné. 

New York Times reporter Ruth La Ferla interviews Blythe Danner about her recent film, life, and her long time appreciation of the work of Kim McCarty. 

"Farther north, the Katonah Museum will be tackling gluttony with Emilie Clark: The Delicacy of Decomposition, an installation that comments on consumption and decay. It will contain an arrangement of Ms. Clark‘s family’s preserved food waste, delicate watercolors that echo the moldering fare and an interactive “Research Station” equipped with a microscope, drawing pad, and jarred and stuffed specimens."

"I wanted to work with the shape of the wall to create a narrative within the piece itself—the same way I would over many pieces within a solo show of my paintings. I was able to create a story with this piece by using compositional elements and recurring motifs: a cabinet with familiar but intangible objects, plants, pots and vaguely historical imagery. It incorporates many of the objects and shapes which I see as characters that can interact in different ways through use of color, line and juxtaposition. This installation depicts the version of a passage of time. The first object has a sense of potential energy and growth. As you make your way through the mural, you see a human manipulation of this energy in conflict and in conjunction with the natural, and end with the hopeful balance of the two." - Paul Wackers

"In terms of New York City gallery history, the Upper East Side, roughly from 57th Street northward, is the establishment, the old regime. Galleries that put the city on the international map in the 1950s started here. Several of our big museums call this turf home. So do several of the elite contemporary galleries that now serve as feeding tubes to those museums.

True, there have been some shake-ups. A few young dealers have recently moved in; and a major museum, the Whitney, has moved out. But in true establishment spirit, many of the exhibitions on view at the moment are of artists in mid- or late career, and heading toward, if they haven’t already achieved, classic status."

ANCHOR is an exhibition centered on the photography of Hiram Maristany, and features new peojects by Nicole Cohen, Selena Kimball, Miguel Luciano, Steven Perez, Saul Williams, and Caroline Woolard. A video art installation opening of Nicole Cohen's work will open on Wednesday, April 29, at the East Harlem Church. 

Throughout every age, art and technology have come into contact, but maintained an unequal relationship. Today, however, art is not afraid to use any tool that contemporary science or technology has developed. This group exhibition aims to show how various artists approach technology in their practice.

The participating artists are: Nick Gentry (England), Benjamin Dittrich, Annett Zinsmeister, Ewerdt Hilgemann (Germany), Nicole Cohen, Anne Spalter, Shane Hope, Joshua Citarella (USA), Marialejandra Lozano (Peru).

Frohawk, artist and storyteller, paints and writes stories about battles, conquests, and the cast of characters that makes it all happen for his imaginary Republic of Frengland. In ink, acrylic and tea, on paper and on canvas, Frohawk, born Umar Rashid in 1976, creates a fictional world that looks quite a bit like our real one.

This exhibition is the final episode in the artist’s series on Colonial America, his successful combining of art, history, and sometimes wicked but always fun-to-read commentary on people — Europeans adventurers and explorers, North American Indians, freed and enslaved blacks, and ravishing women who love, laugh, and die on the banks of the Hudson from Manhattan up to Lake Oneida.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: Visualized is a vibrant exhibition of high quality works showcasing a range of styles and produced in a diverse media by internationally renowned as well as some new emerging talent. The works selected will reflect the specific content within key chapters in Michael Pollan's food-centric book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. 

Curated by Barry Rosenberg.

Beauty Reigns features the work of 13 emerging and mid-career abstract painters, working in studios across the United States. The exhibition celebrates the exoticism, exuberance and optimism found in the artists’ work. Among the characteristics these artists share are high-key color, layered surface imagery, use of overall and repeated patterns, stylized motifs and a tension between melancholy and the sublime.

Beauty Reigns, which is organized by Rene Paul Barilleaux for the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, features works by artists both national and international perspectives. With the exception of Beatriz Milhazes, who lives in Brazil, the artists—who span two generations—work in communities across the United States. They span two generations and several include elements of visual vocabularies they were introduced to in other countries in their distinctive canvases.

Artists have long been interested in depicting interiors - whether to prove their ability to create three-dimensional space, a love of objects, or still life - or perhaps a desire to create a setting injected with political, religious or personal ideas. Nicole Cohen’s videos bring together past and present. Each begins with the stillness of a historical period interior and is boldly interrupted by new digital animation. This overlay provides a new narrative of mystery, humor, or excitement as old collides with new.

History's once unquestionable integrity has eroded over time, with as much fiction, interpretation and imagination revealed in the pages of our esteemed libraries as actual facts and events. The volumes written, disseminated and institutionalized by presiding political entities are now compromised by a swelling number of alternative histories – giving voice to minorities, migrants and those formerly on the losing end of landmark battles. In this expanded, if no less tangled forum there now live as many versions and renditions as there are subjects to voice them.

Chicago-born, Los Angeles-based Frohawk Two Feathers is an artist, historian, and self-described "myth-maker" who re-imagines 18thcentury colonial history through a fictive cast of slaves, revolutionaries, militiamen and aristocrats. On flags, parchment and otherwise invented heirlooms he fuses historical portraiture, indigenous traditions and folk art with hip hop culture, role playing and rebel fantasy. Together, these artists cast outlandish, irreverent and ultimately insightful visions of the way the world was made.

David Rathman: Stand By Your Accidents is the artist’s first major museum survey and provides a comprehensive overview of the artist’s production, highlighting the progression and evolution of a unique studio practice spanning two decades. 

Ritual & Residue: The Art of Drink focuses on rituals formed around tea, coffee, beer, wine and bourbon and the residue left behind. These beverages, created by humans, have inspired countless cultural traditions from decorative vessels to social gatherings. Whether habit, necessity, or custom, consuming beverages is often a community endeavor.  In contemporary life, ideas are shared over a cup of coffee, friends meet at the bar, and a sip of bourbon unites an entire state in camaraderie. 

Artist’s Artists consists of sixty-four prints and books from the personal collections of three contemporary artists who incorporate printmaking into their artistic practice. The exhibition reflects the expanse of interests among the three lenders as well as the artistic influences that connect them. 

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas recently announced that the exhibition State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now will feature 102 artists from all over the country. Morgan Lehman Gallery artist John Salvest’s work will be included in State of the Art, which debuts at Crystal Bridges on September 13. Crystal Bridges President Don Bacigalupi and Assistant Curator Chad Alligood traveled to Salvest’s studio in August 2013 to conduct an interview with the artist as part of the search for the most compelling American art being created today.

This studio visit was one of nearly 1,000 stops made by the curatorial team during a year-long, 100,000 mile journey across the country to discover artists whose work has not yet been fully recognized. The result is a one-of-a-kind exhibition that draws from every region of the U.S., offering an unusually diverse and nuanced look at American art. The 102 artists selected range in age from 24–87, including 54 male and 48 female artists from across the country. 

“The complexity of themes in the exhibition’s work mirrors the diversity and individuality of the makers. Each artist represents meaningful conversations happening in rural communities, small towns, and more densely populated urban centers all across the country,” said Alligood. “The artists are responding to the same things we’re all responding to in our daily lives. We hope that this exhibition will inspire new ways to experience contemporary art and the evolving narratives that make up our cultural fabric.”

June 11 - August 17, 2014

"Beauty Reigns: A Baroque Sensibility in Recent Painting", organized by René Paul Barilleaux, the McNay Art Museum's Chief Curator/Curator of Art after 1945, assembles the work of thirteen emerging and mid-career abstract painters whose art is characterized in whole or part by high-key color, obsessive layering of surface imagery, use of overall and repeated patterns, stylized motifs, fragments of representation, and a tension between melancholy and the sublime. . ."

Join us Thursday, May 29, 5-7pm for a conversation between Amy Park and 2014 Whitney Biennial Curator, Michelle Grabner.

Amy Park's solo exhibition, 1200', is on view May 22 - July 3, 2014. 

Thursday, May 15, 2014 - 7pm

Location: Lexington Avenue at 92nd St

Price: from $6.00

April 25 –May 31, 2014
reception Friday, April 25, 5:30-7:30 PM

George Lawson Gallery

315 Potrero Ave., San Francisco, CA 94103

View more here.

7:30 – 9 pm, Monday, April 21st, 2014

160 Kroeber Hall, UC Berkeley Campus
Reception to follow
Free and Open to the Public!

More information here

Judith Belzer is painter who lives and works in Berkeley, California, where she moved from the East Coast in 2003.  Her current work explores places where the natural and built landscapes meet.  Belzer’s work is exhibited regularly around the country.  She received a degree in English from Barnard College and studied at the New York Studio School.

Click here to see the full list of recipients. 

March 8 - July 6, 2014

The first garden was Eden - a setting of flowers and plants for the creation of our world and mankind. Ever since, we have cultivated gardens simply for their beauty or for the sustenance they provide as food. Flowers have served as inspiration for painters and poets from time immemorial. From the mundane to the exquisite, flowers enhance every facet of our lives. Their physical expression may be found in gardens and outdoor parties of every kind, from the humblest to the most elegant 18th-century fête champêtre.

Garden Party is on view from March 8, 2014 to July 6, 2014. The exhibition is organized by guest curators Franklin Hill Perrell, the museum’s former senior curator, and JoAnne Olian, curator emeritus at the Museum of the City of New York. Garden Party explores the imagery of outdoor entertainments and garden parties through paintings, sculpture, costume, fabrics and decorative arts and designs.

Sharon Louden is a well respected and very talented artist who does a bit of everything. She’s taught at several universities over the past twenty years and has shown all over the world. Most recently, she’s edited a book of essays about artists making and living called Living and Sustaining A Creative Life. . .

See the full article here.

"Material Transformations"

January 25 - April 6, 2014

Organized by the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama.

Steven Zevitas, publisher of New American Paintings, ranks the top shows to see throughout the country.

Click here for the full article.

Written by Steven Zevitas

There are more than two-dozen exhibitions by New American Paintings' alumni on view this month. Among them are the always environmentally conscious Alexis Rockman at Baldwin Gallery in Aspen, hot Chicago export Scott Reeder at Lisa Cooley in New York City, and the extraordinary Sarah McEneaney at Locks Gallery in Philadelphia. . .

See the full article here.

Anyone who’s chosen to live a creative lifestyle — not just artists — knows what it means to worry. Rather than gun for the safety of a monthly paycheck, most of us (this writer included) have to find a way to put food on the table, without sacrificing our proverbial souls. . .

Read the entire article here.

Click here for link.

Open Society Foundation has organized Talking Transition, a temporary structure at Duarte Park, located at Spring and Canal Streets, that will serve as a platform for public dialogue with the Mayor elect.

Click here to read the New York Times article.

Join us Wednesday, November 6th, 6 - 8 PM for a book event celebrating Sharon Louden's latest publication, Living and Sustaining a Creative Life. Edited by Louden, this collection of essays by 40 working artists from across the country and abroad is published by Intellect Books and distributed by the University of Chicago Press. Sharon Louden and many of the contributors will be present for readings and a book signing.

Written by Julie Chae

Artist Andrew Schoultz' art projects are currently on view in California, New York and Virginia. At the Monterey Museum of Art, Schoultz' solo exhibition "In Process" includes sculpture, large multi-story wall paintings and a mural on the outside façade. At Morgan Lehman Gallery in New York, Schoultz created an installation of paintings against "brick" wall papering that creates a unique way to experience paintings. And at the RVA Street Festival in Richmond, Schoultz has a gigantic public mural at a former public transportation bus depot. . .

Read the full article here.

October 5, 2013 - March 9, 2014
Casazza Gallery

New York-based artist Emilie Clark creates art installations informed by the history of science and natural history. The latest in series of works focused on the work and lives of Victorian women scientists and naturalists, Sweet Corruptions departs from the work of Ellen H. Richards—a sanitary chemist who studied air, water, and food. . .

Click to read full press release.

It wasn’t easy being a female Victorian scientist. Even if you got a place to work beyond your home, it was unlikely you would ever receive an academic position, or any sort of wide recognition for laboratory success. It’s this “in-betweenness” that has fascinated artist Emilie Clark and prompted her to develop a series of exhibitions called Sweet Corruption. It’s also involved her saving her family’s food waste for a year and putting it on display.

Read the full article here.

September 28 – December 22, 2013

You Can Fall:The War of the Mourning Arrows(An Introduction to the Americas and a Requiem for Willem Ferdinand)

Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College
198 College Hill Road
Clinton, NY 13323

Published by Intellect Books (UK), distributed by University of Chicago Press, and edited by Sharon Louden, the tour of "Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists" will commence on September 16, 2013 at 7:30pm in Nashville, TN.

Click here to follow the tour.

September 14, 2013 - January 5, 2014

The artists of Material Transformations, Angela Ellsworth, Alison Foshee, Johnston Foster, Kirsten Hassenfeld, Rune Olsen, Lucrecia Troncoso, and Paul Villinski all find symbolism in the very unconventional substances they use to construct their works of art. They find inspiration in the stuff of life, items we frequently encounter, use, and discard with rarely a second thought such as aluminum cans, cleaning sponges, construction debris, corsage pins, masking tape, office supplies, and wrapping paper. . .

September 12 - November 12, 2013
9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.

The Arsenal in Central Park Accessible
830 Fifth Avenue
Manhattan

This exhibition features eleven contemporary artists who offer probing personal interpretations on the importance of insects through a variety of media: Brandon Ballengée, Joianne Bittle, Rebecca Clark, Emilie Clark, Talia Greene, Asuka Hishiki, Julian Montague, Lisa Murch, Julia Oldham, Christy Rupp, and Ben Snead. The show is curated by Jennifer Lantzas, NYC Parks’ Public Art Coordinator.

Click here to read more.

Identifying Laura Ball as a naturalist, a passionate advocate in the preservation of animal species and an artist who embodies the protection of the evolution of existence, would be an understatement. To envision the catalog of her life's work and surroundings as comprised of anything other than our natural environment seems nearly impossible. Within her work nearly every species finds refuge, tangled and twisted into one, like multi-spirited beings, a composite of beastly bodies, a testament to the power of strength in numbers. . .

Click here for pdf.

961 Chung King Road
Los Angeles, CA, 90012
Wednesday - Saturday 12-5 PM

View exhibition here.

Opening: “BATHERS” at Morgan Lehman

Summer is all about the beach, water and flesh, and so this sounds like one great summer group show, focusing on that time-honored Modernist subject, the bather. Among the 13 young artists providing work are Gina Beavers, Melissa Brown (whose work is pictured), Hope Gangloff, Daniel Heidkamp, Ryan Schneider and Ruby Sky Stiler. —A.R.
Morgan Lehman, 535 West 22nd Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

Click here to view.

July 5-November 17, 2013
MMA La Mirada
July 5, 2013: Open to the public to view the mural in process
July 12, 2013, 6-8 pm: Opening Reception

Click here for link.

‘Nancy Lorenz: New Work’ (closes on Saturday) Operating in the gap between painting and the decorative arts, Ms. Lorenz’s latest efforts add to the history of modernist abstraction by way of seemingly gestural marks and lines fashioned from mother-of-pearl inlaid in surfaces of silver, white gold or palladium. It makes for a striking specificity. Her compositions are based on drawings of various weather conditions off the coast of Ireland, and are most convincing when seas are becalmed, and the marks meander, least when Turneresque storms of slashing lines prevail. Morgan Lehman, 535 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, (212) 268-6699, morganlehmangallery.com. (Roberta Smith)

Click here for link.

FROM INCEPTION TO INSTALLATION – KYSA JOHNSON AND HER NEW PROJECT FOR HALSEY MCKAY

"Here is the first note (of an as yet undetermined number) chronicling the progress of my upcoming installation project for Halsey McKay Gallery, from its messy (and potentially embarrassing) beginnings to its final (and hopefully impressive) end."

Click here to read more from the artist.

It’s a treat to see an artist working confidently with unusual materials. In her exhibition New Work, Nancy Lorenz has made use of mother-of-pearl inlay, lacquer, white gold, and small amounts of pigment, among other materials, to create an engrossing body of work on view at Morgan Lehman Gallery until June 29th. The artist’s new works, while relatively monochromatic, possess surfaces that are sliced into—much like an etcher’s zinc plate scratched by dry-point drawing. Lorenz’s wide array of unusual materials merge through a process that is all her own. The exhibition embraces drawing and mark. . .

Click here to read more.

June 14 through August 11, 2013

During the Smoky Hill River Festival, New York City-based visual artist Sharon Louden transformed the Oakdale Park practice court into a living room furnished with sculptural objects created from found pieces of furniture, repurposed scraps of discarded material, and paint. That work will be reconfigured and installed in the Art Center’s galleries along with a selection of Louden’s abstract animations from June 14 through August 11. There will be an opening reception June 14, 6-8 p.m.

Click here for link.

Nicole Cohen is a video installation artist whose work focuses on interior spaces, accessibility, history and technology. Her main intention is to represent spaces that viewers would not normally have access to, and to allow them to virtually enter or connect with these environments via familiar imagery and sound. She received her MFA from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles and is the founder of Berlin Collective, an organization that provides international exchange between artists, curators and art lovers. . .

Click here to read on.

June 2, 2013 - August 25, 2013
Opening reception: Sunday, June 2, 2013, 3-5 pm

Since 2003 artist Emilie Clark has inserted herself into the works and lives of Victorian women scientists and naturalists including Mary Ward, Mary Treat, Martha Maxwell, and Ellen Henrietta Richards. Treating her studio like a laboratory, Clark literally restages much of the research these women undertook. This investigative activity and her archival research and writing inform a practice that involves painting, drawing, installation and sculpture. . .

Click here for link.

Gramercy Theatre
Thursday, May 9th, 2013
Special VIP Viewing 7-8pm
Doors open to public 8-11pm


Click here to RSVP.

The side of the local dive bar, Pops in the Mission District of San Francisco just got hooked up with this impressive mural by Andrew Schoultz. Over the last week Schoultz has been spending everyday painting this building... sounds more appealing than sitting at a computer all day when the weather has been as freakishly nice as it has been in San Francisco. If you want to see it in person, head down to 24th and York St. The piece was made in conjunction with Converse and Juxtapoz...

Click here for link.

April 26 - June 30, 2013
Opening Reception: Friday, April 26, 6 pm - 8 pm

You Can Fall: The War of the Mourning Arrows (An Introduction to the Americas and a Requiem for Willem Ferdinand)

Los Angeles-based artist Frohawk Two Feathers is known for his inventive and playful re-imagining of history. His intricate drawings include portraits of colorful characters, reconfigured maps and narrative scenes.

A trio of perception-bending exhibits arrive at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey this week. The featured artists expand sensory context, reimagine history and delineate invented environs. . .

Click here to read on.

On the Edge: Judith Belzer at Morgan Lehman
by Alexandra Anderson-Spivy

Judith Belzer’s recent paintings careen between the vertiginous grandeur of her larger, blueprint-like compositions and the close-up, increasingly flat and microscopic intimacy of her smaller canvases. The cellular, gridded patterns of these latter paintings (each only 10 by 10 inches), derive from birds-eye views of fuel storage tanks and industrial sites that flank the freeways, often alongside the compromised wetlands of San Francisco Bay: those eight-lane highways packed with perpetually congested or rushing traffic that snakes far below the precipitous Berkeley highlands. . .

Click here to read on.

Friday, April 19, 2013, 10:45-11:30am

NICOLE COHEN, Speaking on her work
Artist Lecture, Thinking Creatively
Kean University

Click here for link.

Dallas-based artist Bret Slater, featured in August’s FD Luxe, has been touted as one of the “100 Artists to Watch” by Modern Painters magazine. He received the 2012 Fashion Group International Dallas Rising Star award in fine art for his acrylic-on-canvas pieces that are influenced by his curiosity of common objects and his childhood days of the ’90s. His work is simple yet intriguing — and quickly becoming coveted by art collectors locally and abroad.

At Morgan Lehman in The Study, through April 27.

Click here for link.

Ellie Irons keeps her eyes to the ground in her Bushwick, Brooklyn, neighborhood. She is looking for plant life, invasive species that pop up beside tree roots and between cracks in the sidewalk. She plucks what she finds and, back in her studio, researches their identities and their origins. Then she crushes them to produce colors she uses to paint maps tracing their journeys to New York. . .

Click here to read on.

Opening reception: Saturday, April 6

Kim McCarty Paints is a vibrant installation and art sale presented by GRACIE, The Santa Monica Museum of Art’s innovative gift store. Kim McCarty Paints features an array of intimate watercolors created by the artist exclusively for SMMoA. During the installation and sale, a watercolor studio in the project room will provide visitors with close-up access to McCarty at work. . .

Belzer channels her inner West Coast self through the spirits of Thiebaud and Diebenkorn in these richly sketchy panoramic landscapes with sweeping spaces, vertiginous views, the light of San Francisco, and the glow of a restless painter in search of a real abstract landscape. —Jerry Saltz

At Morgan Lehman, through April 27; and in the group show “Against the Grain” at the Museum of Arts and Design, through September 15.

Click here for link.

April 2 - June 16, 2013

In her Edgelands series, Judith Belzer investigates the fissure separating the built environment from the natural one. As these drawings make clear, however, there is not always a distinct boundary between the two. Belzer’s observations, sensations and meanderings are absorbed and manifested through energetic mark making on canvas and paper. . .

Click here for link.

About five years ago, Lowery Stokes Sims, whom the Museum of Arts and Design had recently hired as curator, was mulling ideas for exhibitions. At the time, the artist Martin Puryear, who is known for large, delicate sculptures made of wood, had a retrospective at MoMA, and one day Ms. Sims went to go see him in conversation with John Elderfield, then a curator at the museum. . .

Click here to read on.

March 22 - May 26, 2013

The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum is pleased to announce the opening of two new exhibitions this week, Pattern: Follow the Rules and Variations on a Line (Moving). The Broad MSU will host a private members-only preview on Thursday, March 21, from 7–9pm to celebrate the opening of these exhibitions, which will then open to the public on Friday, March 22.

Click here for link.

An unexpected texture, a new angle, or a jarring juxtaposition—no matter the medium, artworks are always different when you see them in person. Here are some of our favorite Instagram images, taken around The Armory Show and hashtagged #ArtsyArmory.

Click here for link.

March 19, 2013 to September 15, 2013

Featuring nearly 90 installations, sculptures, furniture, and objects, Against the Grain: Wood in Contemporary Art, Craft and Design explores some of the most cutting-edge conceptual and technical trends in woodworking today. . .

Click here for link.

February 9, 2013 - June 9, 2013

‘And Those Figures Through the Leaves. And That Light Through the Smoke,’ Part Two of "The Americas"

March 15, 2013: Meet the artist 12-1pm and musical performance by SUPERDELUXE 7-10pm

Frohawk Two Feathers is the artistic alter-ego of Umar Rashid, born in 1976 in Chicago, Illinois. A performer, writer and artist, his work is filled with real and imagined colonial histories and often takes the form of mixed media paintings that resemble Native American ledger paintings. Central to the understanding of Two Feather’s work is a construct he calls “Frengland.” The artist explained, “Frengland is a place I created that presupposes that 18th century England and France were never at war with each other and that they merged into one huge, unstoppable colonial empire. Imagine all the countries they conquered put together. They’d put a flag in most of the world.” And Those Figures Through the Leaves. And That Light Through the Smoke is the second installment of Two Feathers’ “The Americas” series, which takes place on the continents of North and South America. . .
 

Not long ago, Patrick stopped by the Morgan Lehman Gallery. He picked out some his favorite pieces there, and wanted to highlight them here.

Click here to view his selection.

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This year’s Armory Show is short on video. My explanation is that videos are hard to sell, and harder to get the friends whom you’re trying to impress to watch. There’s also the risk that the video you paid $50,000 for won’t look much better than the video made by your child. Remember that kid who’s costing you $55,000 a year at NYU Film School?

Let’s not start with moving pictures, but with production design. At the north end of Pier 94, near the entrance to the New York Times Media Lounge, where real moving pictures are shown (and panelized, of course), Kysa Johnson’s replica of a Bank of America waiting room is installed. You can do everything but sit in the chairs and write on the walls – and you can even do that if security isn’t watching. It’s the size of a small art fair booth, nowhere near too big to fail. . .

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The Armory Show seems a bit same-y this year, and fairly conservative. This atmosphere makes the booths that are truly different stand out all the more, though, and one of these is definitely to be found at Morgan Lehman’s stand. There, Kysa Johnson has completely taken over the space with a full-scale recreation of a Bank of America waiting room, complete with chairs and the looming BoA logo, all of it composed out of black board. The furniture and walls alike are covered with ghostly chalk drawings that come together, from a certain angle, to depict a totally new image: a plunging vista of Roman ruins (inspired by Piranesi). . .

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A NEW YORK CITY ARTIST REINVENTS PIRANESI’S RUINS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

Morgan Lehman Gallery Ξ This Chelsea gallery has a roster of very talented emerging artists, that create art which is dynamic, young, meaningful and invigorating. As Sally Morgan Lehman, Founder and Director at Morgan Lehman Gallery explains, for The Armory Show the gallery is structuring their booth around a single installation by a young New York City artist who constructs her work around the premise of combining opposite notions and using that new concept as a foundation for her reinvented Baroque still lives or the 18th century Roman Ruins after Giovanni Battista Piranesi. . .

Click here to read on and watch video.

March 2 - March 30, 2013
Opening: Friday, March 1st, 6 pm - 8 pm
Curated by EFA Studio Program Director, Bill Carroll

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New Image Art is pleased to present, “Early Romantics”, a solo exhibition by Paul Wackers, opening Saturday, February 16, 2013, 7pm-10pm.

Paul Wackers will exhibit a new body of paintings that depict geometric still life assemblages interacting with natural settings. Wackers takes the still life object, deduces it into geometric and linear form, and takes an additional step: the form is simplified to abstract shapes while raw painting techniques mimic the nature of the object itself...

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February 13 - March 14, 2013

Opening reception: Wednesday, February 13, 5:00-8:00pm
Meet the artists: Wednesday, February 27, 5:00-8:00pm

Co-curators: Tom Dowling & Trevor Norris

Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion
2701 Fairview Road
Costa Mesa, CA 92626

Allee photographs the outside world from indoors through windows, creating frame-within-a-frame narratives.

Adam Cvijanovic has ripped a figurative seam along a 65-foot wall inside The Alexander.

The deceive-the-eye wreckage of broken studs and jagged insulation opens to a vista of Indiana farmland seen from 10,000 feet above. Ice Age glaciers left the northern half of Indiana flat and fertile for growing corn and soybeans, but not much for scenery at ground level.

New York-based painter Cvijanovic said midair perspective can mesmerize, as seen in his panoramic grid of green and gold. . .

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Indianapolis Museum of Art curators have filled a nearby hotel with contemporary art that resonates with and sometimes mocks the region. At the Alexander Hotel, designed by Gensler, which opens Monday, windows here and there are covered with the artist Kim Beck’s vinyl silhouettes of local weeds (above). The sculptor Sonya Clark built a portrait of the Indianapolis hair-care tycoon Madam C. J. Walker out of 3,840 combs (top right). Paul Villinski’s wall-mounted installation is made from vinyl records by musicians including the Gary, Ind., native Michael Jackson (top left). And Mark Fox’s stream-of-consciousness text, cut from reflective stainless steel, notes that John Dillinger is buried about seven and a half miles from the Alexander, and that hotel rooms are zones of “mirrors and copulation.”

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BOHEMIAN NIGHTS 4: THE SECRET LIFE OF ARTISTS

Short films by artists selected and organized by INGRID DINTER. Films will remain on view through January 29th, by appointment Monday through Friday, 10:30am to 6pm.

DAN ASHER, LIZA BÉAR, DIANNE BLELL, DAVID CLARKSON, LUIGI COLARULLA, DAVID DUPUIS, EGAN FRANTZ, JUDITH HUDSON, MELISSA KRETSCHMER, ELIZABETH LENNARD, JULIE RYAN, KATIA SANTIBAÑEZ, GERD STERN, TARO SUZUKI, GWENN THOMAS, CARRIE ELSTON TUNICK, MARGUERITE VAN COOK

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Ryan Wallace: I know that music and sound influence how you approach your paintings. Is this important to you in terms of their reception? Are you trying to conjure up more than "painting"?

Timothy Bergstrom: Oh yes my friend. However, it is quite strange, I am attempting to deal with my most core interests in painting (surface, color, form, content) and most of my painter friends do not see me as one. Laughs. I don’t mind this, not because there is anything wrong with making a traditional painting, but I like it when things slip off of sticky definitions. I think this relates to the way I go about making— pictorially describing things that are intangible, like sound. This sets up a different hierarchy of importance, leading to different and personally surprising conclusions, then if I was only painting “off the cuff.”

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Living with other people in New York—no matter how sweet the deal or clean and un-psycho the roomies—often enough brings a deep claustrophobia, like an in-law Christmas in a closet. The artist Paul Wackers (like all of us) sometimes wishes that closet could be kinda like the one in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. And sometimes his shared three-bedroom walkup feels right, like home.

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Wednesday, November 28, 2012 6PM - 8PM

Morgan Lehman Gallery (Floor 6)
Morgan Lehman will be offering six recent gallery publications, as well as books and catalogs published by friends and colleagues, including: Halsey Mckay, Geoffrey Young and Scott Zieher. Gallery artists Paul Villinski, Kim McCarty, Ryan Wallace and Katia Santibanez will be present to sign their books.

Julie Saul Gallery (Floor 6)
Julie Saul Gallery will be featuring new publications by gallery artists Maira Kalman and Charlotte Dumas as well as celebrating Roz Chast's current exhibition, "New Cartoons and a Hooked Rug. " Roz Chast and Maira Kalman will present to sign books.

P.P.O.W. (Floor 3)
Judy Fox will be present to sign her exhibition catalogue that accompanies her current show, "Out Of Water."

Yancey Richardson Gallery (Floor 3)
Yancey Richardson Gallery will host a book signing of new monographs by gallery artists, Sharon Core, Lisa Kereszi, and Andrew Moore. In addition, a limited number or previously released publications by these and other artists will be available.

Sourcing inspiration from 15th Century German map making and Indian miniature paintings, Andrew Schoultz’s (b. 1975, WI) frenetic imagery depicts an ephemeral history bound to repeat itself. In his mixed-media works, notions of war, spirituality and sociopolitical imperialism are reoccurring themes, which shrewdly parallel an equally repetitive contemporary pursuit of accumulation and power. Intricate line work, painting, metal leaf and collage twist and undulate under Schoultz’s meticulous hand, ranging from intimately sized wall works to staggering murals and installations. While his illustrated world seems one of chaos and frenzy, Schoultz also implies a sense of alluring fantasy and whimsy – a crossroads vaguely familiar to the modern world.

If Marlene Dumas' subjects had a ghostly doppelgänger, we imagine they'd look something like Kim McCarty's watercolors. Her portraits of youth are both innocent and unsettling, suffusing the unexpected qualities of humanity with an alien radiance.

The pale bodies, swirling with washed out pigment, resemble the fragile identity of an adolescent, pushing and pulling in infinite directions at once. Her boys and girls are barely held together at all, their tie-dyed interiors threatening to gush outside their thinly-drawn outlines.

McCarty invites strangeness to permeate personal portraits, which are inspired by photographs. The young subjects, fading away before your very eyes, embody the uncertain futures awaiting us in our youth. There is a noticeable hint of sexuality to the works, amplified by the exhibition's title, "Boys & Girls," and yet the gender of her subjects is arguably fluid. The works, light in texture and hue yet possessing darker undertones, ask us to look closer at those uncertain moments of adolescence.

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HALSEY MCKAY GALLERY is pleased to present HABEAS CORPUS an exhibition of paintings by Ted Gahl, An Hoang, Shara Hughes, Alisha Kerlin, Keegan McHargue, Jeanette Mundt, Sara Murphy, Ryan Mrozowski, Christoph Roßner, Lisa Sanditz, Ryan Schneider, Billy Sullivan, Paul Wackers and Chuck Webster. The right of habeas corpus has been a part of our country’s legal tradition longer than we’ve actually been a country*. The representation of the human figure has been a part of art history as long as paint has been used to depict images from the natural world. While this title is borrowed from its namesake writ, a more literal translation of the term commands us to “produce the body.” Across their varied practices, this group of painters consistently draw on modes of representation to inform their visual vocabularies. For this exhibition, habeas corpus is suspended as the figure is removed from their pictorial statements. Vacant interiors, littered landscapes, collections on display all show how human presence is evident even when a picture is devoid of human form. Far from voids, these “empty” paintings let us examine ways in which the human spirit lingers even when a body does not.

Artist Included: Ted Gahl, An Hoang, Shara Hughes, Alisha Kerlin, Keegan McHargue, Jeanette Mundt, Sara Murphy, Ryan Mrozowski, Christoph Roßner, Lisa Sanditz, Ryan Schneider, Billy Sullivan, Paul Wackers, Chuck Webster.

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Friday, December 21, 6:30–7:30 p.m.

See the Met's collection through artists' eyes. This fall, inspired by the exhibition Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years, artists discuss works of art in the collection that have influenced their own work. These talks will not tour the exhibition itself. Note: Limited to forty-five people; tickets are distributed thirty minutes prior to the talk in Gallery 534, Vélez Blanco Patio, first floor.

Nicole Cohen's work is positioned at the intersection of contemporary reality, personal fantasy, and culturally constructed space. She consistently explores her interest in engaging the audience and challenging notions of lifestyle, domesticity, celebrity, and social behavior. Although trained in painting and drawing, Cohen most frequently uses video as her medium, playing upon its intrinsic capacities to manipulate time, distort scale and environment, and overlay imagery.

She has exhibited at several museums, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, Williams College Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. She has also shown internationally in Berlin, Germany; Bergen, Norway; Paris, France; Harajaku, Osaka, Kobe, and Tokyo, Japan; and Shanghai, China.

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Derived from the sampler patterns of his Elementary Forces series, Eric Beltz will install a unique 9’ x 12’ wall drawing for Texas Contemporary. This series uses the grid-map of cross-stitch to create eye-popping illusions in his signature grayscale palette. Bringing these drawings out of the frame and into monumental scale is a first for Beltz.

Emilie Clark would seem to have bitten off more than she could chew. But she’s not serving herself, she’s serving us lessons about ecology, about composting, about recycling as nature’s entropic state, and, most important here, about turning all this thinking and doing into visual art. It would perhaps have sufficed had Clark simply presented her tables and shelves laden with edible discards rescued from her own kitchen over the course of a year, as she does at the center of this exhibition. But (at least until pressed into performative service) that strategy would only have built, rather weakly, on decades of post-hippie earth art. Instead, Clark has amplified her installation crucially, festooning the walls with small, energy-packed drawings and larger, magnificent paintings whose formal language clearly derives from the tendrilous, decaying things she has been wrestling with. Also delightfully augmenting Clark’s funky laboratory is her documentary text, The Art of Right Living, interjected as audio recitation and limited-edition chapbook. The writing, at least as literary as it is diaristic, accounts for the method to Clark’s gentle madness. But it’s in the most traditional elements of this exhibition, its paintings and drawings, that that madness comes rushing fully to the fore. The drawings seem to be growing their own plant life even as they observe plant life a-growing; they seem to begin as clinical descriptions of smaller botanical forms and then get infected by natural process, burgeoning organically into fantastical vines and entrails. The tumultuous forms and colors that have taken over Clarks’ canvases seem even more unleashed, swelling and proliferating less like plants than like the clouds of a gathering storm. These paintings, gravid with energy and irrepressible drive, manifest a kind of Kantian sublime: they allow us to observe from afar a force of nature that would surely engulf us were we near enough. (Morgan Lehman, 535 West 22nd St., NY; thru Oct. 20. www.morganlehmangallery.com)

– Peter Frank

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BAD FOR YOU, an exhibition of art from America. With 67 of the country's most contemporary and established artists, curator Beth Rudin Dewoody's sweeping exhibition captures the panoramic strand of contemporary art that deals with the show's eponymous title.

Beth Rudin DeWoody is a New York based art collector and curator. She sits on the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Creative Time, and The New School, and is known for being one of New York's most dedicated patrons, often acting as an early champion of America’s great artists.

Shizaru will also host a Frieze pop-up shop by New York's GREY AREA called BAD FOR ME that will be selling art objects curated according to the theme of the show.

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Finished in just six days, the mural exemplifies Schoultz's mastery of intricate compositions on a grand scale. With other existing solo murals in Miami, San Francisco, Indonesia, and Toronto, Schoultz's inaugural L.A. fixture makes for his eighth major public work. The project was carefully followed by such publications as Cartwheel Art and Juxtapoz Magazine, both of which highlight the mural's content as a potential foreshadow to Schoultz's upcoming January (2013) solo exhibition at the gallery. On the heels of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego's acquisition of Schoultz's work for its permanent collection, the mural has already been met with much praise and many visits.
- Mark Moore Gallery

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Drawing from The Sally and Wynn Kramarsky Collection:

September 14, 2012 - January 7, 2013

Drawing is a medium that offers an intimate and open field for imaginative elaboration, in which concepts and ideas can emerge and change with relative ease. Uninhibited by the obligation to create a finished and independent object, as is traditionally associated with painting and sculpture, drawing as a medium lends itself readily to the theoretical and the experimental. Notations: Contemporary Drawing as Idea and Process brings together over sixty works by thirty-nine artists from the postwar decade to today.

Notations is curated by Meredith Malone, associate curator at the Kemper Art Museum. The exhibition will be on view at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum from September 14, 2012, to January 7, 2013. All artworks in the exhibition are on loan from the collection of Sally and Wynn Kramarsky, New York, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

This online catalog features an essay by Meredith Malone, as well as images of all of the works in the exhibition, artist interviews and select entries by graduate students in the Department of Art History & Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis and at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. The online catalog is organized and edited by Rachel Nackman, curator of the Kramarsky Collection.

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To get an idea of how Ryan Wallace approaches materials, look no further than one of the walls of his studio, made from the kind of slatboard paneling that a Chinatown souvenir shop might use to stack metal shelves full of I ♥ New York T-shirts. When Wallace found the studio last year, it was perfect otherwise — a clean, well-lit space above Paulie Gee’s pizza in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, right near his apartment. “At first I thought the wall was kind of gross,” he says. But he slowly began to accept it on a purely functional level; the way things could be hung at different heights was ideal for a painter. “I thought, ‘What can I do with this?’ A thing like that gets planted in my head, and eventually it finds its way into the next thing I’m doing.”

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Sep 01 - Jan 27
Organized by the Museum of Art and Design and including works by Eric Beltz.

Against the Grain: Wood in Contemporary Art, Craft and Design demonstrates how 20th and 21st century creators have engaged the medium of wood with conceptual and technical strategies. This timely exhibition addresses a heavily debated topic in the field: as the boundaries between art, craft and design increasingly overlap, should these categories be redefined, and if so, how? In Against the Grain, the versatile medium of wood is used to address this issue, exploring postmodern tendencies including mimicry, assemblage, virtuosity, and whimsy (with a serious purpose), as well as environmental issues associated with woodworking. Against the Grain debuts at The Mint Museum followed by a presentation at the Museum of Art and Design in New York (February - May 2013).

There are approximately 60 works in the exhibition including vessels, furniture, sculptures, paintings, installations and works created since 2000 by an international roster of artists, craftspersons, and designers such as Alexandre Arrechea, Martin Baas, Gary Carsley, Andrew Early, Maria Elena Gonzalez, Silas Kopf, Mark Lindquist, Sofia Maldonado, Matthias Pliessnig, Martin Puryear, Betye Saar, Hiroki Takada, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, and Ai Weiwei.

Against the Grain will debuts at The Mint Museum during the Democratic National Convention, followed by a presentation at Museum of Arts and Design, New York, New York (February-May 2013). The exhibition is organized by the Museum of Arts and Design and made possible, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional support from Larry and Madeline Mohr. It is brought to The Mint Museum through the support of Moore & Van Allen PLLC and Founders’ Circle Ltd.

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Beta Pictoris Gallery is excited to present the second annual pulp group show featuring works made on and with paper from July 20 - August 24.

Always pushing the confines of contemporary art, beta pictoris makes no exception with the addition of the annual pulp series.
pulp is an invitation for a select group of national and local artists to rise to this occasion. Those who do and do not normally use "pulp-based" materials have been asked to incorporate and/or expel their typical mediums for those less explored. The beauty of the pulp series is the challenge it initiates in going back to basics. Paper was the corner stone of the Masters, it is the text holder of our history, and an identity-maker to our thoughts. The results of this proposition will surely be memorable with this year's edition of pulp (pure xtract), focusing exclusively on abstraction.

Work by Jarrod Beck, Steven Bindernagel, Clayton Colvin, Tomory Dodge, Peter Fox, Sharon Louden, John Powers, Susanna Starr, Jürgen Tarrasch, Caleb Taylor, Dannielle Tegeder, Mario Trejo, Jack Whitten, and Matt Wycoff.

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Unnatural - Natural History is an artistic exploration of an alternative world. It is a world where the dominant species are not human and natural objects are metamorphosed into unexpected and unnatural forms. A place in which genetic mutations and environmental pressure have altered the natural course of evolution.

Chippy Coates, one half of Coates and Scarry says “We asked artists from around the world to explore the theme of “unnatural natural history” and the results are diverse and alluring. It’s a blend of innovative art, creative ideas and lateral thinking.” With this in mind, the exhibition looks to create a stir and stimulate rigorous discussion as to what can be considered natural.

For the 35 local and international artists exhibiting – some in the UK, or Bristol, for the first time – heightened environmental awareness has doubtlessly been influential in their work. One of the exceptional artists in the show, Kate MccGwire, who uses a powerful and challenging medium in itself creating otherworldly sculptural forms from feathers. MccGwire’s incredible feathered installations have been shown across the world, but it’s the first time the artist has been displayed in Bristol.

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The heat has been turned way up on the East Coast, which is all the more reason to duck into a few galleries as you trudge through the city. As is typical for the summer months, a lot of galleries have mounted ambitious group exhibitions, many of which focus on painting.

In New York City, be sure to see: "The Big Picture" at Sikkema Jenkins (featuring NAP alums John Dilg and David Schutter); "Breed" at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery (featuring NAP alum Eddie Martinez); "Stretching Painting" at Galerie Lelong (featuring NAP alums Sarah Cain, Kate Shepherd, and emerging Chicago-based artist, Gabriel Pionkowski); "Contemporary Watercolor" at Morgan Lehman (featuring NAP alums Nina Bovasso, Sarah Cain, Ellen Lesperance and Kim McCarty);

"Yeah we are friends and shit" at Josee Bienvenu Gallery (featuring NAP alums Kirk Hayes and Devin Troy Strother); "Stand still like a hummingbird" at David Zwirner (featuring NAP alum Ruth Laskey); "In plain sight" at Mitchell-Innes and Nash (featuring NAP alum Anna Conway); "Everyday Abstract - Abstract Everyday" at James Cohan Gallery; "Painting in Space" at Luhring Augustine; "Context Message" at Zach Feuer; "Hot Tub Time Machine" at Canada; and "Braman, Buren, Falls, Heilmann, Louis, Thurman" at Eleven Rivington.

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July 28-29, 2012
Basilica Hudson 110 South Front Street, Hudson, NY

The New Art Dealers Alliance and Basilica Hudson are pleased to announce NADA Hudson, a large scale exhibition featuring 51 projects presented by NADA members and affiliates. NADA Hudson is not an art fair, but rather a site-specific project produced by the New Art Dealers Alliance, which will build upon the character of a historic venue in showcasing contemporary sculpture, installation and performance.Morgan Lehman Gallery will be exhibiting Ryan Wallace’s Consensus series. In his Consensus sculptures, Ryan Wallace explores the nature of perception. He combines his allure to contemporary science with his skepticism of representing the spiritual and mystical, suggesting the only constant among these disciplines to be the limit of human observation. The stones are arranged in formations inside vitrines behind varied tinted films. The automotive tints act as a filter, skewing the repeated objects visual reception. The rocks themselves suggest the possibility of infinite replication, with the exception of the tinted screen, which suggests the uniqueness and malleable nature of individual perception.These mineral formations in Wallace’s trompe l’oeil sculptures are “insignificant arrangements” but that the compositions force a viewer to consider a “potential higher meaning,” creating formal exercises that can’t escape their loaded nature. He cites Giuseppe Penone’s river stones, Stonehenge, and the caves of Lascaux and Cheveux among his influences, but claims the inspiration itself is analogous to the drive behind the scientist: the desire for discovery. Wallace’s usage of pedestrian media like auto tints and vitrines in the fine art context works to break down the barriers between high versus low, art object versus scientific display.

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Instead of tackling a neighborhood festival like Northside in Williamsburg/Greenpoint or Bushwick Open Studios, last weekend I decided to explore Queens Arts Express, a project of the Queens Arts Council, in the hopes of acheiving some level of understanding regarding the creative spirit of an entire borough over the course of four days. Though I longed to visit Woodside, Jamaica, Jackson Heights, Middle Village, Sunnyside, Ridgewood, Astoria, College Point, Corona, Middle Village, Rockaway Beach and Flushing, the subways, notorious for weekend delays and disappearing routes, devoured my afternoon and stranded me in Long Island City. Apologies to the plethora of unvisited artists and neighborhoods notwithstanding, I still found two stellar shows, and a number of grassroots developments.

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Eric Firestone Gallery is pleased to announce an installation and exhibition of new works by the San Francisco based artist, Andrew Schoultz. Opening with a reception for the artist on Saturday, June 23rd from 6:00 to 8:00pm, the exhibit will continue through July 7th.

The show, Andrew Schoultz, Ex Uno Plura (from one, many), takes its title from a riff on the commonly known United States motto, e pluribus unum (from many, one). Indeed, Andrew Schoultz is a cross-platform phenomenon whose immense outdoor murals, complex installations and one of a kind paintings have catapulted him to the forefront of contemporary art's international stage.

At Eric Firestone Gallery, Schoultz will mount an exhibition that combines his signature mural painting in a unique installation as well as multiple works focused on the nature of, and visual commentary on the American flag. Applying thick layers of paint atop authentic flags, Schoultz gilds his creations in gold and white gold leaf to stunning effect. In full view of the web of politics, history, and global significance of the flag, this promises to be a provocative show.

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The Secret History of Weeds

Eric Beltz was driving through LA when he spotted, on the side of the freeway, a sacred plant he was researching for its role in Shamanic cultures. From there, Beltz has delved into the secret history of weeds in drawings that take a plants-eye view of human history, particularly the role psychedelics have played in the development of human religions and even early America. One drawing takes its inspiration from a colonial regiment that accidentally ate Jimsonweed while on the march in 1676, succumbed to its psychedelic effects, and failed to quell Bacon’s Rebellion.

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June 21 – September 9, 2012

WE BUY GOLD, WE BUY EVERYTHING, WE SELL SOULS

MCA Denver will present the first solo museum exhibition dedicated to the work of Frohawk Two Feathers, the pseudonym for L.A.-based artist Umar Rashid. The exhibition, entitled Frohawk Two Feathers: We Buy Gold, We Buy Everything, We Sell Souls, will be on view from June 21, 2012 through September 9, 2012, and feature more than 20 paintings, works on paper and sculpture. Over the course of his career, Frohawk Two Feathers has created works that provide a magnificent re-imagining of history, narrating the story of Frengland, his fictionalized empire of a combined France and England. His drawings are detailed accounts of the traditions and rituals associated with the Frenglish leaders and culture, confronting issues of racism, power, greed, and ideological opposition within an invented period during the eighteenth century. By re-imagining colonial history, his work shows the subjective nature of historical recollection.

Co-curated by Nora Burnett Abrams and Tricia Robson, the presentation at MCA Denver focuses on key characters and battles from the initial formation and early expansion of Frengland, as well as subsequent imperial conquests and campaigns against the crown. Rooted in this early history, the artist produced new works for this exhibition that further develop the complex narrative of the Frenglish empire, expanding the scope of his earlier work to North America and linking the narrative of Frengland to Colorado.

The exhibition’s opening celebration kicks off Thursday, June 21, 2012, at 6PM for members and 8PM for non-members. The museum’s hours will be extended until midnight (12AM, Friday, June 22), with special events surrounding the summer solstice, including a rap performance with Superdeluxe featuring Umar Rashid and Micah James.

The exhibition is sponsored in part by Tina Walls, MCA Denver’s Director’s Vision Society members, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. We would also like to further thank the citizens of the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District.

West Collection through the 2012 West Collects initiative. 2,650 artists applied online from 80 countries and the caliber of work this year was quite incredible. This year we collected from galleries as well as unrepresented artists. In each case the 30 new artists define or redefine areas of the West Collection and add amazing content to our program. We look forward to the fall exhibitions both at City Hall in Philadelphia for the Philadelphia-based artists, and at SEI and our new warehouse space in Oaks, PA for the national/ international artists. A public opening and catalog of their works will accompany the West Collects exhibitions.

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May 4 - June 30, 2012

Using luminous new media, the six artists in this exhibition harness and explore light - dazzling and ordinary - as both subject and form. Curated by Lisa Banner.

Light Matter features works by: Bryan Graf, Sharon Louden, Beatrice Pediconi, Chris Smith, Joe Winter, and Jeph Gurecka.


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Image: Beatrice Pediconi, Untitled III, 2009, chromogenic print. Courtesy of the artist.

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By Janet Koplos
MINNEAPOLIS In creating a new installation for the reopening last fall of the enlarged Weisman Art Museum (WAM), artist Sharon Louden was commissioned to take inspiration from the WAM building itself, Frank Gehry’s 1993 warm-up for Bilbao, with its curvilinear stainless-steel-plated facade, as well as his new addition and his remarkably fluid preparatory drawings. Last summer, she and a group of helpers spent weeks mounting a quarter of a million pieces of cut aluminum flashing, fastened together with 14,000 screws, in a 1,900-square-foot rectangular gallery and an adjacent passage.

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The Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina (CCCS – www.strozzina.org) at the Palazzo Strozzi (www.palazzostrozzi.org) in Florence, Italy, is currently organizing for the spring/summer 2012 in partnership with the Hudson River Museum, New York.

2012 marks the 500th Anniversary since the death of the Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci, who gave his name to America. The city of Florence will mark this event with two exhibitions conceived to honour the strong ties linking the Old World and the New. One of the exhibitions will be “Americans in Florence: Sargent and the American Impressionists” presented at the Piano Nobile of Palazzo Strozzi exploring the American impressionists' relationship with Italy, and with Florence in particular, in the decades spanning the close of the 19th and dawn of the 20th centuries. The historical show will present works by John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Winslow Homer, William Morris Hunt, John La Farge and Thomas Eakins.

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The March 2012 issue of Juxtapoz, featuring Andrew Schoultz on the cover, is now on newsstands and on our webstore. In a weird way, this issue began on the shores of Norway and ended in a desert in Tucson, Arizona, and found itself in the SFMoMA and in a studio in Miami, Florida. And we followed filmmaker, author, and performance artist Miranda July as she released her newest book, It Chooses You.

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David Brody, Karen Gover, and Ara Merjian join David Cohen to discuss Nan Goldin at Matthew Marks, Jim Lambie at Anton Kern, Suzanne McClelland at Sue Scott, and Katia Santibañez at Morgan Lehman.

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Primary Flight is Miami's original open air museum and street level mural installation that takes place annually throughout the Wynwood Arts District and the Miami Design District. Primary Flight is arguably the world’s largest event of its kind, having featured over 250 world class artists from around the globe since its inception, the majority of whom travel to Miami during Art Basel. Artists from all walks of contemporary art headline our annual event, collaborating on high profile walls throughout Miami’s urban landscape. Maps outlining the installation are circulated, providing patrons with an opportunity to view the works in progress.

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Checkbooks on the Ready: Art Basel Miami 2011 by THE EDITORS
Art has found its place in the sun. This week sees the tenth edition of Art Basel Miami, previewing Wednesday, with a host of other fairs and art events also taking over the Art Deco Miami Beach neighborhood, the Design District, Wynwood and Downtown Miami. artcritical will be covering the fairs day by day with highlights and personal reports from our regular correspondents and guests.


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The latest U.S. Census shows a nation that not only eludes any singular definition but is defined by its pluralities. “Being American” is an exhibition that explores the poles of experience in American society today and the many inherent tensions and contradictions contained within. Spanning mainstream media headlines and personal stories, “Being American” includes a heterogeneous mix of photography, illustration, animation, painting and video works which actively comment upon the social environment from which they arise. Participating artists include: Steve Brodner, Edward Burtynsky, Jessica Craig-Martin, Alfredo Jaar and Martha Rosler, among many others.

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Katia Santibañez: Journey of a Solitary Painter has been selected for this month's Review Panel presented by the National Academy Museum in partnership with artcritical.com.

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October 2, 2011 - May 20, 2012
Opening reception: Sunday, October 2, 2011, 1-6pm
Artist Talk: Wednesday, February 29, 2012, 6-8pm

This solo exhibition for the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis opens to the public on October 2nd, 2011, the same day as the Museum reopening, with new additions by Frank Gehry.

Sharon's new installation, "Merge", includes over 225,000 pieces of aluminum strips and takes over an approximately 5,000 square foot space with 21 foot ceilings. In celebrating the reopening of the museum and the new additions, Sharon's installation is designed to be in dialogue with Frank Gehry and his work for the Museum.

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There are 300+ galleries holding openings in Chelsea this season. WNYC has mapped out which ones we think have the most potential to offer something intriguing — be it art or people-watching.

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Click here to LISTEN.

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Creating a visual dialogue across a century, drawings by contemporary Bay Area artist Andrew Schoultz respond to the inventive works of Swiss-born Modernist Paul Klee, which are featured on an ongoing basis in SFMOMA's Djerassi Gallery.

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Grand Arts is pleased to announce the upcoming installation of sculptor John Salvest’s IOU/USA, a major public artwork to be sited in Memorial Hill/Penn Valley Park.

IOU/USA will transform the ubiquitous material of cargo shipping containers into a giant, temporary public sculpture. One hundred and five containers will be stacked seven high to create a massive wall with embedded text on both sides. The containers will spell out “I O U” on one side and “U S A” on the other.

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The Moving Image Art Fair has partnered with The James New York to offer artistic summer programming that will feature a screening of the animation The Bridge by artist Sharon Louden. The program features a selection of short contemporary video work, from the best of up-and-coming international artists.

Andrea Inselmann, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in Ithaca, NY, wrote about Louden’s animation The Bridge, “Stemming from her training in landscape and figurative painting, Louden’s shapes and lines in mostly primary colors or hues of gray seem to act out some kind of narrative in The Bridge. Geometric forms resembling sheets of paper flutter in virtual landscape tinged in shades of blue and orange, simulating a beautiful desert sunrise. While in her digital works Louden misses the tangibility and tactility that are such critical elements in the artist’s sculptural environments, her animations invite a different kind of interaction between image and viewer....”


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The James New York is located in Soho on the southwest corner of Thompson and Grand Street at 27 Grand Street, New York, NY.

Sourcing inspiration from 15th Century German map making and Indian miniature paintings, Andrew Schoultz’s frenetic imagery depicts an ephemeral history bound to repeat itself. In his mixed-media works, notions of war, spirituality and sociopolitical imperialism are reoccurring themes, which shrewdly parallel an equally repetitive contemporary pursuit of accumulation and power. Intricate line work, painting, metal leaf and collage twist and undulate under Schoultz’s meticulous hand, ranging from intimately sized wall works to staggering murals and installations. While his illustrated world seems one of chaos and frenzy, Schoultz also implies a sense of alluring fantasy and whimsy – a crossroads vaguely familiar to the modern world. The artist is also featured in the two-person exhibition, “Images in Dialogue: Paul Klee and Andrew Schoultz” opening at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on August 13, 2011.

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Exhibition

Terrible Beauty: Art, Crisis, Change & The Office of Non-Compliance

The title and theme of Dublin Contemporary 2011 is Terrible Beauty—Art, Crisis, Change & The Office of Non-Compliance. Taken from William Butler Yeats’ famous poem “Easter, 1916”, the exhibition’s title borrows from the Irish writer’s seminal response to turn-of-the-century political events to site art’s underused potential for commenting symbolically on the world’s societal, cultural and economic triumphs and ills. The second part of the exhibition’s title underscores Dublin Contemporary 2011’s emphasis on art that captures the spirit of the present time, while introducing the exhibition’s chief organizational engine: The Office of Non-Compliance. Headed up by Dublin Contemporary 2011 lead curators Jota Castro (artist/curator) and Christian Viveros-Fauné (critic/curator), The Office of Non-Compliance will function as a collaborative agency within Dublin Contemporary 2011, establishing creative solutions for real or symbolic problems that stretch the bounds of conventional art experience.

Physically sited within the grounds of the larger exhibition, The Office of Non-Compliance will function as a promoter of ideas around a laundry list of non-conformist art proposals and, when inhabited by given artistic projects, as a work of art itself. The Office of Non-Compliance posits the obvious fact that not only has the world changed in the last few decades, the idea of change itself has changed utterly. An exhibition that looks to highlight less conventional, largely artist-led models of art discourse, production and presentation, Dublin Contemporary 2011 will find in The Office of Non-Compliance an active thresher for novel, underrepresented and even untested ideas around contemporary art and its myriad possibilities.

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Flag Day examines the way in which information, belief systems, politics and identity are communicated through pennants, banners and flags as well as things that wave, fly or hang like a flag, that relate to nationalism, pride of place/gender/race/ideology or that celebrate events, mark a place or time, celebrate a triumph or mourn the loss of a loved one.

An object that is designated as a flag -- whether national, personal or ornamental -- is purposeful and symbolic. Like painting, flags are rooted in the distinct conveyance of an idea. Since Betsy Ross stitched those first 13 stars into a circle, there have been over 27 iterations of the American flag, each one signifying a precise adjustment in meaning.

From the patriotism of Childe Hassam to appropriation as in Jasper Johns' Flag and David Hammons' African American Flag to the fierce protests against Dread Scott for his 1989 installation at the Chicago Institute of Art; the flag -- graphic, plastic and ripe with content - continues to be a provocative artist's muse.

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Andrew Schoultz, Paul Wackers and Eric Beltz in Domestic Goods: Curated by Ryan Wallace at Eric Fire Stone Gallery
May 28 - June 26
____________

Ryan Wallace is included in 2 group exhibitions.
Zieher Smith's group exhibition organized by Patrick Brennan
June 16 - July 22
Rachel Uffner's group show 'Summer Whites'
June 24 - 29
___

Katia Santibañez
OSEZ! (DARE!) An exhibition of erotic photography
With; C'est Elle, Frantisek Drtikol, Ariane Lopez-Huici, Mackenzie Parker, Sebastien Ricciardi, Katia Santibañez, James Siena, Roy Stuart, Kunie Sugiura

Ryan Wallace is a painter and mixed media artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. His body of work spans a range of influences, re-purposing a variety of art historical and popular references into a fluid vocabulary of rough, playful abstraction. His paintings vary in size and medium but are united by their alternating notions of fragmentation and unity and by a moody, often diffuse tone. His compositions reflect the payload of modernism viewed through the dust covered lens of a gritty, sun bleached kaleidoscope. His interest in the way information is presented, transmitted and stored results in a sensibility that is equal parts science, mysticism and high fives. I had a chance to stop by the artists Greenpoint studio recently to talk with the artist.

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In Wall Works, six artists were invited to create site-specific wall installations in response to the Museum’s collection of modern and contemporary American art. In preparation for the exhibition, artists Kysa Johnson, Natalie Lanese, Caleb Neelon, Alison Owen, Justin Richel, and Mary Temple trolled the Museum’s database of 3,500 objects and selected an artwork to serve as a source of inspiration for their proposed “wall work.” The artists identified artworks that resonated with their varied interests and aesthetics and have consequently assembled an eclectic assortment of objects from deCordova’s collection. Sited both in the gallery and the Museum’s Café, these new installations reflect each artist’s own practice while creatively engaging the Permanent Collection as an educational, historical, and inspirational entity.

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To be honest, I haven’t found myself spending very much time in Chelsea as of late. For one reason or another I find myself chasing the promise of art in the Lower East Side along Orchard Street, or running through the galleries scattered across Williamsburg. This said, I was happily surprised when I walked into Andrew Schoultz’s opening last week at Morgan Lehman gallery. The gallery features primarily young, emerging artists and the exhibition felt all the more vibrant considering its 23rd street environs.

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Flora Fauna Art Design is a stroll through the natural world, as seen through the eyes of artists working in glass, ceramics, metal, fiber, and wood. From insects and birds to trees and flowers, this exhibition is a lively and engaging look at Mother Nature at her best. In addition to works from the permanent collection, promised gifts and loans will be included. Artists presented in the exhibition include: Lino Tagliapietra, Paul Stankard, Ted Muehling, Eddie Dominguez, Carol Eckert, and Pedro Friedeberg.

On May 7th, from 8pm - midnight, a short time-lapse video of me (5 storeys tall!) creating a new site specific cut paper installation "inside" the New Museum building will be projected on its entire 174' façade. Hopefully frightened citizens will not run down the Bowery with torches, calling for my destruction...

Filmed inside of an 11' high scale model of the museum over 8 hours, the final 30 second video will show a dramatic weather system that gradually fills the museum, swirling inside of its walls, dematerializing the interior of the building.

The video is part of Let Us Make Cake, a collaborative projection directed by Nuit Blanche New York and Light Harvest Studios. Let Us Make Cake is part of the Festival of Ideas for the New City, which runs from May 4th - 8th.

Participants range from established artists such as Vito Acconci, Jon Kessler and Marilyn Minter, to emerging artists such as SOFTlab, Chris Jordan, Mia Pearlman, Dustin Yellin and Brooklyn-based street artists. The 20 minute program of projections will loop from 8pm - 12am.

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Save Saturday, May 7 for the “innovative, minimal-waste” outdoor StreetFest, which will take place along the Bowery. “This is not a street fair for tube socks and sandwiches,” said Bob Holman, founder of the Bowery Potery Club. Expect local organizations presenting their wares, urban farmers offering cooking demos beneath innovative tented modules, exciting eats, and “outdoor living rooms.” Finally, the entire weekend will be a showcase for approximately 100 independent projects, exhibitions, and performances all over downtown. A few that caught our eye: the Art Production Fund, in partnership with Sotheby’s, will brighten up the dingy rolling gates of local businesses with murals by the likes of Glenn Ligon and Lawrence Weiner, artist Paul Villinski will welcome visitors to his Gulfstream trailer-turned-solar-powered mobile art studio, and Mott Street’s Church of the Transfiguration will host an all-night Pecha Kucha with a creative urban theme. Holman summed it up nicely: “It sounds like a party to me.”

The critics will consider recent work by veteran Fluxus artist Alison Knowles at Lower East Side gallery James Fuentes, LLC; two Chelsea gallery shows, Jaq Chartier at Morgan Lehman and Iván Navarro at Paul Kasmin; and Rirkrit Tiravanija's Fear Eats The Soul, at Gavin Brown's enterprise, an exhibition that incorporates a soup kitchen in keeping with the Thai artist's "relational aesthetics"and his longstanding involvement with literally feeding his audience.

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Like a scientist growing cultures in a lab, Jaq Chartier methodically arranges her inks, stains, and dyes to interact with layers of white paint and acrylic resin on immaculately prepared wood panels. The saturated pigments bleed and seep in unexpected ways, creating a matrix that at times resembles a DNA chart. In some pieces, the technical components of her startlingly lovely compositions are carefully noted in pencil, directly on the white ground.

Her precise patterns are infused with a fluorescence that is neither science nor nature: Patches of color may fade out as they approach the edge of a panel, or a more diffuse grouping might alternate with sharply contoured hues. These compelling juxtapositions result from truly obsessive artistry. (So obsessive, in fact, that if the surfaces are not perfectly smooth or if the colors become muddy, Chartier takes the rejected panels to a dump and watches while the bulldozer's treads crush them, an exercise just crying out for a performance video.)

Like most painters, Chartier was trained to use predictable, steadfast materials, but years of experimentation have allowed her capricious elements to evolve into gorgeous mutations. Morgan Lehman, 535 W 22nd St, 212-268-6699, morganlehmangallery.com. Through April 2

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To make Large Spectrum Chart, which is both the highlight of "Slow Color" at Morgan Lehman and an important reference for its other pieces, Jaq Chartier began with a 40-foot-by-50-foot gessoed white panel. Using an eyedropper, she laid out 19 long rows of small vertical lines in a variety of stains. She covered the stains with spray-painted, horizontal bars in several shades of white. And then she laid over this deceptive whiteness a varnish whose interaction with the paint caused the stains to come blooming through.
The final effect is similar to the gel electrophoresis images used to analyze DNA. The resemblance is intentional: Ms. Chartier's pictures, too, are full of information. She began using stains this way to test their archival stability, and the sides of Large Spectrum Chart are covered with handwritten notes about which colors are which and what they're doing. But unlike with images of DNA, the beauty here is also intentional, and the gathering of information, at least as far as we're concerned, is only a means to an end.

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In this new series Allee has emerged into the daylight, but again is pressing his camera to record images that are not readily seen by the naked eye. This time he is directly facing the bane of daytime landscape photographers, glare. But instead of adding on the polarizing filters in an attempt to blunt the bright spots, he has gone the other direction and exposed for the rays bouncing into his lens. The resulting photos have a few bright spots and lines, but most of the scene is in a murky, total eclipse of the sun, darkness.

 

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Photographer David S. Allee knows how to capture urban landscape at its finest probably because he has an eye for design—the photographer first began his career as an urban and environmental planner. For his latest exhibition, Dark Day, Allee reflects on New York and its scenery by photographing it in the daylight using tiny apertures and the highest shutter speeds possible, unlike his previous photographs in which he took pictures at night using intense artificial lighting. So at first glance, we might assume his images of the J train, the Trump International Hotel and Tower, and Goldman Sachs headquarters were taken at night, but in reality, Allee captures the texture of the sun’s brightest reflections, showing New York in a whole new light.

Allee's stark and hypnotic photographic series Dark Day enables us to explore a side of our city - including the J train, the Trump International Hotel, and the headquarters of Goldman Sachs - that we wouldn't normally be able to see.

Process, exposed: In much of Allee's earlier work, he photographed locations at night using strong artificial lighting and extremely long exposures, catching landscapes in a time suspended between night and day. He went with the opposite approach for Dark Day, shooting on sunny days using tiny apertures and the highest shutter speeds, with exposures reaching up to 1/10,000th of a second.

"The works chosen for this rotation are among my favorites in the museum’s collection. When Suzanne asked me to post my version of the Collection Rotation on Open Space, I was flattered and began by looking at image after image of a collection I have watched grow for 10 years. There were memories of favorites, reunions with works I had not seen in quite some time, and works I wonder if anyone has seen yet. I must share these, I thought. During this selection process, I also reflected on the way these works were brought into the museum’s collection — through the cultivation of the accessions committees, as bequests, as promised gifts, and as works co-owned by the museum and collectors in the community — and a history being built not only for the sake of the work and its content as art history but for the museum, its community, and its placement in the art world. However, the images were chosen not in reference to any external criteria such as date, artist, credit, but in relation and response to the image itself. They are, to me, immediate and striking in their beauty, speak a visual poetry through form and composition, share humor and delicate movement, vibrant color palettes … a telling tableau of sorts. What a thrill to reflect on our collection, and just as the museum’s 75th anniversary year comes to a close. — Maria"

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BAM, Natman Room, Peter Jay Sharp Building, 30 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY
BAMart is pleased to invite you to the opening of Cover Version (LP), an exhibition in which diverse artists reimagine the cover art of albums they find influential. These unique reinterpretations of the iconic LP bring new life to the art that covers vinyl, highlighting the intersections of art and music.
Featured Artists: Glen Baldridge, Kadar Brock, Colby Bird, Jessica Cannon, Mathew Cerletty, Devon Costello, Justin Craun, TM Davy, Langdon Graves, Joseph Hart, Elizabeth Huey, Scott Hug, Butt Johnson, Faten Kanaan, Denise Kupferschmidt, Josh Kline, Erica Magrey, Michael Mahalchick, Eddie Martinez, Dave McDermott, Keegan McHargue, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Nolan Simon, Colin Snapp, Jennifer Sullivan, Nick Van Woert, Ryan Wallace and Will Yackulic
Leadership Support for BAMart provided by Agnes Gund

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"Kysa Johnson tracks the travel paths of subatomic particles in swirling colored lines — there’s no Lonely Planet accompanying her map, either."

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Stranger Than Fiction: Narrative in Works by Selected Contemporary Artists

At our second Atelier of the season on October 21st, we were graced with the charismatic presence of LA-based artist Frohawk Two-Feathers, whose work is currently featured in the exhibition Stranger Than Fiction. Guests donned pseudo-historical costumes and posed with an array of fun props for photo portraits taken by the artist—inspired by the photographs he takes of his friends that serve as studies for his drawings.

 

American, born 1975; Lives and works in Santa Barbara, CA.
Laced with sharp humor, Eric Beltz’s graphite drawings explore the origin of symbols and myths with hypnotic precision. Working only with a pencil and paper, Beltz finds color to be a distraction in his work—a preference mirrored in the white, gray, and black Miniature Schnauzers that keep him company in the studio and at home. He currently teaches drawing and painting at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In his series “American Visions,” Beltz recasts stories and characters from colonial American history, like George Washington and his fabled cherry tree, in a grayscale revelation. These drawings includes quotes from the Old Testament, Revolutionary-era texts, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Medieval herbals among other sources, with narrative imagery to render historical facts as founding myths.
Beltz’s meticulously composed drawings, Drunk Jesus Calendar (2010) and How to Identify Flowering Plant Families (2010) are currently on view in Stranger Than Fiction. Both works are part of the artist’s latest series, “Trance Farm,” which explores religion and spirituality through the natural world as well as altered states of consciousness.

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A favorable review for Jeff Perrott in the Boston Globe, with a great mention of Nothing Doing, the major work featured in the Morgan Lehman exhibition!

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We are thrilled to announce that the Musuem of Fine Arts, Boston, has acquired two works by Jeff Perrott for their permanent collection. One work is from the current Random Walk series, and one if from the early '90's, showing their committment to Jeff's work over the course of his career.

Congratulations Jeff!

Villinski recently created a large butterfly installation for the hit Warner Brothers TV show “Gossip Girl”, which will be featured throughout the upcoming Season 4. The piece, comprised of more than 200 smoke-black butterflies, is installed over the bed in lead character Serena’s (played by Blake Lively) room. The set will be “revealed” during the broadcast Monday, Sept 27, 2010.

Stockholm: Transparency and Trans-formations in Contemporary American Art
Exhibition of Contemporary Works by American Artists to be Exhibited at Residence of U.S. Ambassador to Sweden

Transparency and Trans-formations in Contemporary American Art, an exhibition of 23 works by 20 American artists — including Kiki Smith, Spencer Finch, Claes Oldenburg, Mark Bradford, Laura Ball, and Jennifer Steinkamp — will be on view at the residence of the U.S. Ambassador to Sweden from April 16, 2010, through June 2012. Reflecting America’s increased emphasis on transparency and international engagement, the exhibition offers a view of the rapid shifts occurring today in culture, society, technology, and science.

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click on projects, then click on Stockholm

"What is consciousness? Religion, philosophy, even science can't give us an exact definition. Yet this is the questions posed by curator Ryan Wallace in his group show, Default State Network, now on view at theMorgan Lehman Gallery.
Wallace chose work from 12 artists (including himself) that offer a visual interpretation of consciousness. Drawing inspiration from science, spirituality and philosophy, the pieces range from coffin photos by Glen Baldridge to Alex Dodge's sculpted self-portrait as an android, from geometric symbols by Elise Ferguson to Hilary Pecis' status symbols.
.... In his search for consciousness, Wallace acts as that curator/director, and this show highlights what can be accomplished when one consciously uses collecting as a medium and a tool for self-discovery."





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Consumo Ergo Sum, 2005, Miscellaneous Plastic Container Lids
Courtesy of the artist and Morgan Lehman Gallery
Curated by Marina Pacini, Chief Curator

John Salvest has long made artworks out of used objects such as coffeefilters, cigarette butts, nail clippings, and chewed bubble gum. In his installation, he has amassed hundreds of plastic bottle caps to make acolorful map of the United States that is both a visual pleasure andalso a reminder of the downside of our consumer society.

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"... Judith Belzer also conducts her inquiry, using paint and other graphic materials, into the order of things—how natural processes create patterns that, once exposed, speak of the underlying and connective structures of life."

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On Sunday May 16th at 3:30 p.m. Brooklyn Botanic Garden's inaugural artist-in-residence program presents a panel exploring the intersection of contemporary art and the history of natural science.

Panelists:
Sina Najafi as moderator, Editor-in-chief of Cabinet magazine and Editorial Director of Cabinet Books
Alexis Rockman, Artist
Barbara Gates, Alumni Distinguished Professor of English and Women's Studies, University of Delaware
Emilie Clark, Artist

IN THE LIFE talks to hate crime victims and perpetrators about The Nature of Hate. Followed by a visit with artist Alix Smith, who is traveling the country photographing hundreds of same-sex couples, challenging stereotypes and taking conventional portraiture to a new level.

Aired on PBS April 2010

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Artist Emilie Clark’s exhibition at Brooklyn Botanic Garden was inspired by the 19th-century natural scientist Mary Treat, an expert on carnivorous plants and the relationships between insects and plants. Based on the artist’s research on Treat in BBG's Rare Book Room and her observations in the Garden, this conceptually based installation includes paintings, works on paper, archival letters, and plant samples, as well as a mapping of Treat’s correspondence with such luminaries as Charles Darwin and Asa Gray, who admired and cited her work.

Art and Scientific Correspondence: Methods, Metaphors, Missives: a panel discussion with artists Emilie Clark and Alexis Rockman and professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Delaware Barbara Gates, moderated by Sina Najifi, editor of Cabinet Magazine.
Sunday, May 16, at 3:30 p.m. | Free with admission

Emilie Clark is represented by Morgan Lehman Gallery, in New York, where she exhibited Maxwell’s Lair in fall 2009.

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"If the scientists at CERN want to ease the crackpot fears of their Large Hadron Collider destroying the universe, they should hire Ryan Wallace to design the group's promotional material. Inspired by the search for the Higgs Boson—the so-called God particle—Wallace based the show's works of paint and collaged material on graphs of high-energy collisions. But in Quest (Higgs Boson) 1, Glean 1, and the series A Brief History of Demise, the jittery progressions of vertically parallel lines—strips of paper and cellophane painted shades of blue and white—seem less representative of hard-core quantum mechanics than they do of simple bliss. Shredding the canvas here and there, Wallace even goes a little manic. The exquisite textures, sometimes sprinkled with opalescent powder or blurred with an overlaid sheet of Mylar, may remind some of Mark Tobey's mysticism. This is decidedly physics for poets—and painters."

"The best of them tend toward abstraction, like Katia Santibanez's minimalist painting Universal Pleasure, a bifurcated, heart-shaped patch of dark brushstrokes..."

Katia Santibanez included in "The Visible Vagina", group show at David Nolan
527 West 29th St, New York, NY
Through March 20, 2010

"And it's the power of these themes—and Wallace's deft ability to communicate them, to turn them from concept to canvas – that make his work so compelling. Collaged canvases feature deftly arranged strips of colored paper in a deep and beautiful vortex—some nearly faded to nothingness. Paintings present otherworldly geometric scapes and textures.

Jay Lehman, owner and curator of Morgan Lehman Gallery says that it's not just the theoretical underpinnings of Wallace's work that are so striking, but also his technical savvy. 'The work has both artists and non-artists asking—how did he make that?—the surface is so matte yet luminous. Is it encaustic? Is it resin? Collage? Paint? All of the above? How does he achieve the depth of field?'"

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Antennae
The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture


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Curated by Joao Ribas (The Drawing Center) and Independent Curators International, NYC
January 16 – February 20, 2010

FAX invites a multigenerational group of artists, as well as architects, designers, scientists and filmmakers, to conceive of the fax machine as a tool for thinking and drawing.

Faxes by over 100 artists sent to the initial showing of FAX at The Drawing Center will form the core of the exhibition, and will include seminal examples of early telecommunications art; and each institution will invite up to twenty additional artists to submit works, which will be presented at successive venues. These works may be transmitted to each participating institution’s working fax line throughout the duration of the exhibition. The active accumulation of information—received in real time, in the exhibition space—will include drawings and texts, and even the inevitable junk faxes from telemarketers and local businesses as well. All the transmitted pages will be archived or displayed together with the active fax machine, which may produce new faxes from invited artists at any moment. The result—an ongoing cumulative project—is a show concerned with ideas of reproduction, obsolescence, distribution, and mediation. Here, reproducible yet erratic production via the fax machine displaces traditional notions of the hand‚ still commonly associated with the medium of drawing, and foreground the role of drawing as a generative process.

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With her new project States of Union, photographer Alix Smith gives a sense of legacy and context to her portraits of gay and lesbian families by referencing classical works.
By Advocate.com Editors
Posted on Advocate.com January 16, 2010

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"The New Modern Art", by Dave Hickey

"There have been street artists as long as there have been streets. Traditionally they haven't had much choice. Playboy presents six artists, from Nara to Banksy, who take it outside"

Solo Exhibition, curated by Glenn Helfand, Jerome Zodo Contemporary, Milan, Italy
http://www.jerome-zodo.com/mostre.php?Id=4

In this show of oil-on-canvas works, titled "Edgelands," the Berkeley, California-based artist Judith Belzer imagined freeways, train routes, harbors, and canals as edgelands, places where the built environment comes into uneasy contact with the natural one. . .

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