Most recently, it was Eric Firestone Gallery that began working with Futura to reintroduce him to the art world proper in 2020. What the gallery recognized was that beyond his reputation in the graffiti world, Futura was and is an artist with a decades-long studio practice.

In East Hampton, Eric Firestone Gallery opens a sprawling show of bold and elaborate works by 22 artists. Loosely themed around optimism, Alright Alright Alright is a showcase of pattern, material, and color that feels high-energy and offers a little jolt in the slowest part of summer. Kelsey Brookes’s kaleidoscopic sewn Indian tapestries and the pristine lines of automotive paint on maple wood by Jason Middlebrook are intricate and hypnotic. Among the more geometric, abstract works, notably the engrossing Ellsworth Ausby, there are some irreverent and intriguing characters, one-eyed with bubble-flip hair or with no face at all, the work of New York–based Bruce M. Sherman, who makes pieces out of ceramic, metal, and rock. Closes September 22.

Legendary artist, Paul Waters, dives into his beautiful yet grueling life as an artist. Sammy Loren joins him in his studio to delve into Waters’ extraordinary journey from post-war obscurity to relentless pursuit of artistic expression.

“Community works here in a way that they take notice if you’re accessible or if you’re not accessible,” Firestone told Artsy. “I’ve never hidden behind a wall. I don’t sit in an office and wait to come out for the right people.”

Having dropped out of high school, left an abusive relationship, escaped a Pentecostal cult, and uncovered her repressed sexuality, and all before the legal drinking age, Lauren dela Roche felt aimless at twenty-three. Untethered to few places or people, she moved to her family’s wooded farmland in East Central Minnesota—property acquired by her Swedish potato farming ancestors in the 1800s—arriving with little more than a few pairs of clothes and a machete. Seven years later, she was living in a straw bale cottage she had constructed from the ground up, and sustaining herself off food she had grown in soil composted with her own manure. 

In preparation for her first solo show at Eric Firestone Gallery, on view through June 29, dela Roche seized the same grit, fortitude, and commitment to self that building a house and a life from the earth requires.

Naked women lounge across cotton feed sacks mounted on stretcher bars in “No Man’s Land,” the self-taught painter Lauren dela Roche’s debut show with the Eric Firestone Gallery. Their heads all have the same dark hair and fine features, as if copied from the cover of a single Victorian calendar, and are two or three sizes too small for their statuesque bodies. An unbroken vista of fountains, butterflies, flowers, shallow tunnels and swans with chili-pepper beaks extends behind them.

With Talk Art Podcast, KAWS aka Brian Donnelly discusses his three major institutional exhibitions all opening in 2024. The first show has just opened at The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh and is the first time that Donnelly's work has been aligned with Warhol. Followed by the Parrish Art Museum this summer, and The Drawing Center, set to open in Autumn.

Lauren dela Roche is growing, literally. In preparation for her first New York solo show, on view at Eric Firestone Gallery through June 15, the Missouri-based artist shut herself in the studio for months, working away at the dense feed-sack frescoes she is making her name with. Her one extracurricular? Weightlifting. “My whole life I have tried to be really small, like physically really small,” she tells me over the phone. “I’ve tried to restrict my eating and never gain weight. I'm trying to take up space for the first time in my life. And I think that's the only reason I was able to make a big painting.”

That ’70s Show and Esther are not only authentic community builders, but become visual collective memories thanks to their theme and scale.

Season 2 of the wildly successful mini fair returns to Eric Firestone’s loft this year, with a showcase of 18 stalwart galleries presenting works by artists who were active in the titular ’70s. Look out for New York favorites Ryan Lee, Ortuzar Projects, Karma, Andrew Kreps, and Franklin Parrasch, plus host Eric Firestone, all bringing interesting and oft-overlooked artists who were integral to their local art scenes of the decade.

For the second year in a row, far from Frieze New York in Hudson Yards, the SoHo art dealer Eric Firestone is hosting 18 New York galleries, all of whom are celebrating the 1970s.

The micro fair, organized by the dealer Eric Firestone (and on view in his walk-up loft), returns for its second year. That ’70s Show bills itself as an “alternative” to the fairs of Frieze and as a community of artists who celebrate one another. This year it will feature 18 New York galleries presenting artists who created work during the 1970s. Entry is free. May 2–5 at 4 Great Jones Street, Manhattan; 70sshownyc.com.

Judging by Eric Firestone’s recent programming (woe to New Yorkers who missed a recent show about the Godzilla collective), the gallery gets what means success for a group show. No color, pattern, or material overstays its welcome; each addition enriches the lot, all in service of a grand purpose. The gallery’s booth at Expo is much of the same, a vibrant medley of paintings, ceramics, and collages. A 1967–70 painting from Regina Granne is among the more interesting nudes on the sales floor, and a 2024 black and white collage from Cato, a London-based artist and musician, is a promising teaser for his forthcoming show at the gallery.

The legacy of Ishirō Honda’s 1954 cinematic triumph, “Godzilla,” extends far beyond the big screen. Unfolding against the backdrop of post-war Japan, devastated by atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a dormant leviathan, mutated by nuclear testing, emerges from the Pacific Ocean and wages war against humanity. For a group of Asian American artists reckoning with the exclusionary policies and lack of representation in the art world in 1990, Godzilla became a fitting moniker. The metaphorical resonance of the anarchist lizard’s emergence, reflecting the consequences of nuclear testing and the struggle for recognition, mirrored the artists’ own challenges and their determination to reform the tide of hegemonic American consciousness.

The short month of February still packs a lot of art in New York City, from a survey of the influential Godzilla Asian American Arts Network to Apollinaria Broche’s whimsical ceramics and Aki Sasamoto’s experimentations with snail shells and Magic Erasers in her solo show at the Queens Museum.

Odes to tea, kung fu and fortune cookies, as well as sly responses to racism, sexism and negative stereotypes swirl through the works in Godzilla: Echoes From the 1990s Asian American Arts Network, a two-venue show featuring 39 artists. The title refers to the collective Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network, which was founded in New York in 1990 to support Asian American artists of different backgrounds.

The Maverick Legacy of Godzilla Asian American Artists Network 

An exhibition at Eric Firestone Gallery spanning the late 1980s to present day delves into their multidisciplinary output.

On his birthday, the artist looks back at his singular journey from graffiti writer to industry game-changer.

Eric Firestone has made a career of rescuing artists from the dustbin—or at least the margins—of art history, particularly New York in the late 20th-century. Here he’s featuring five who appeared in important exhibitions devoted to Black art in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Paul Waters’s canvases have a gorgeous, geometric simplicity, but the real standout is Anderson Pigatt, a self-taught sculptor who also worked as a restorer of antique furniture after studying cabinetmaking on the G.I. Bill. In Honor of the Brothers and Sisters of Reclamation Site One (1969) is a hulking monument made from a fallen oak tree in a Harlem park. The idea that wood has a spirit is deftly translated in this tough-but-tender memorial to civil rights activists.

The first career retrospective in the United States of the seminal New York City-based artist opened this weekend at UB Art Galleries. The exhibition, FUTURA2000:Breaking Out, spans the vast output of an artist who rose to prominence with aerosol can-propelled graffiti and street painting in the 1970s and ‘80s, evolving into painting on canvas, sculpture, wall murals, and product design and high-end fashion.

The works of three late women abstract artists were the subject of New York gallery Eric Firestone’s Frieze Masters display, a smartly curated booth that pays tribute to a group that has gained a long-overdue reappraisal in recent years. “The booth really evokes the mission of the gallery, which is to focus on reexamination and scholarship, primarily of American artists,” Firestone told Artsy. The artists on view—which the gallery represents the estates of—certainly belong in that category.

Women Artists and Collectors Are at the Fore of the Hamptons Art Scene. Here Are 6 Female-Focused Exhibitions to See Into September: Here's a rare chance to glimpse into the blue-chip collections of some of the world’s top female collectors.

This August Eric Firestone Gallery is presenting a two-part exhibition across its East Hampton and New York City locations. The Hamptons iteration of (Mostly) Women (Mostly) Abstract features a cross-generational group of 22 experimental post-war artists, often on the fringes of the mainstream art world. “The show delves into the works of contemporary artists and their predecessors, who practiced abstract art and explored otherness in this genre—themes such as ethnicity, race, gender, and sexual orientation, which are as relevant now as ever,” gallerist and curator Eric Firestone told Artnet News. Though the artists are separated by time and experiences, their “intensely graphic work and saturated colors” form a cohesive narrative.  

As the title suggests, a roster of mostly women artists can be seen on view, alongside other creatives working in abstraction, whose art aligns with the subject matter at hand—including those like Sally Cook, Judy Pfaff, Helen O’Leary, Jenny Snider, Despina Stokou, Reginald Madison, Keiko Narahashi, Pam Glick, and Kennedy Yanko, to name a few. Works on view span at least 50 years, creating a dynamic and energetic display of textures, surfaces, and dimensions that lead the viewer on a thoughtful journey of otherness to wonder, “What defines abstraction?”

Femininity and summer are at the forefront of this new East Hampton show. It gives viewers the opportunity to celebrate the season—embodied in florals, sunbeams, and beach scenes. Work from 15 different artists, among them Sylvia Sleigh and Robert De Niro Sr., will be on display, and the show includes pieces from artists Eric Firestone is showing for the first time, like Lauren dela Roche and Elise Asher. Beauty of Summer will be on view through July 30, 2023 at Eric Firestone Gallery in East Hampton.

Self Portrait Five Images is one of several standouts in “Where Fantasy Has Bloomed, Painting and Poetry since the 1960s,” an excellent survey of Cook’s work on now through July 8 at Eric Firestone Gallery in New York. Included is work from three decades of her career—a time period that saw her switch styles, cities, and priorities. It expands on an exhibition that opened at the University of Buffalo Art Galleries in mid-March of 2020, only to be shuttered by the COVID-19 pandemic days later.  

Salon Summer 2023
Eric Firestone Gallery, The Garage 62 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY

Featuring a new installation combining historic material represented by the gallery, and younger generations of contemporary artists, this 7,000-square-foot open warehouse space was recently renovated with specially designed, large moveable walls to create exciting exhibition possibilities. The gallery hopes that the Salon installation will encourage viewers to spend extended time looking as they visually showcase and highlight the gallery’s mission: “an ongoing reevaluation of the art historical canon, and its legacy and influence on younger artists.”

"Despite its relatively modest profile, as an art experience I think That ’70s Show will stick around in my head longer than Frieze. Maybe there’s just a certain organic fit between the concept, the art on view, and the venue—all are kind of scrappy and off-the-beaten-path and so worth championing."

Sana Musasama at Eric Firestone Gallery Booth 8

Across the hall, we were drawn to Eric Firestone Gallery's solo presentation of Sana Musasama's sculptures hanging on the wall, as well as ceramics displayed on tabletops. For the show, the Brooklyn-based African-American feminist artist and activist showed works that reflected her mantra, "Inspire, Commit, Act," including new and existing pieces across several series. They are also in dialogue with furniture and design items from her personal home and studio in Queens, as well as pieces she's collected over years of international travels.

Get Out Your Checkbook, It's Frieze Week-Month in Manhattan

Another pleasant surprise was a very serious fair with an extremely silly name: That ’70s Show. No, it has nothing to do with the Topher Grace–Ashton Kutcher sitcom; it’s just a cool micro-fair where local galleries brought a few works and installed them in Eric Firestone’s two loft-through spaces at 4 Great Jones Street. All the works in the show were made in the 1970s, many of them by artists who lived in the neighborhood, in SoHo and NoHo, in semi-legal apartments.

Sana Musasama at Eric Firestone Gallery Booth 8

New York’s Eric Firestone Gallery is showing a solo booth of ceramic works by Sana Musasama, an African American artist who has been working since the 1970s, drawing inspiration from her activist work with international communities of women. On the first day, four works had been sold to “significant private collectors,” the gallery’s director said, including a large standing sculpture from the artist’s “Maple Tree Series” (1979–83), as well as smaller works that dot the booth’s walls.

That 70s Show, a 20-dealer takeover of Eric Firestone Gallery’s loft space at 4 Great Jones Street in New York, spotlights artists who were active during the titular decade, a period of enormous growth and experimentation across genres and media. The thematic fair (until 21 May) was inspired by a lecture given by the critic Jerry Saltz about the importance of keeping the legacies of older artists prominent in the cultural consciousness, after which dealer Eric Firestone resolved to “disrupt the usual fair week”, gathering a large variety of works from a pivotal moment in the New York art scene. Galleries participating in the project include PPOW, Karma, Kasmin, Ortuzar Projects, Craig Starr Gallery and Gordon Robichaux, among others.

Tucked into the third and fourth floors of an old building on Lower Manhattan’s Great Jones Street, an expansive gallery exhibition is paying homage to the 1970s. Running through Sunday, May 21, That ’70s Show is a refreshingly free alternative to this weekend’s astronomically priced art fairs. It includes presentations by 21 galleries, all featuring work from the decade of the shag carpet. The two upper-level loft spaces are part of Eric Firestone Gallery, which has its primary storefront a few blocks away on the same street. All three spaces are in Soho, the bohemian hub of 1970s New York.

In a project organized by the dealer Eric Firestone, 21 galleries will exhibit works by artists who were active in the 1970s. Calling itself an “alternative” to the fairs of Frieze, the show—on display in his walk-up NoHo loft—pays tribute to galleries invested in scholarship and the re-examination of artists from that decade. Entrance is free. May 18–21 at 4 Great Jones Street, Manhattan; 70sshownyc.com.

There’s an outsized emphasis on newness during Frieze week. But this week, 21 dealers will ignore the new and instead look 50 years back in time. This is the precept behind That‘70s Show, a joint presentation of work from the 1970s by 21 New York galleries, including Bortolami, Karma, Kasmin, Lyles & King, and Ortuzar Projects. From May 18–21, they will set up shop across two lofted floors at Eric Firestone Gallery on Great Jones Street, a raw, light-filled space that itself feels like the downtown art world of yesteryear.

Twenty-one New York galleries are presenting an alternative to Frieze in the form of a throwback exhibition well worth the 20-minute trip from the mega-fair. Anton Kern, Bortolami, PPOW, R & Company, Venus Over Manhattan, and Kasmin are just a handful of those contributing ‘70s-era works to the group showing, which its organizer, Eric Firestone, is hosting at his loft space on Great Jones Street. You’d think they’d want to make the most of all that organizational effort, but this ‘70s show won’t be back for reruns. It’s on view from May 18 through 21, then it’s gone.

With two weeks worth of art fairs in New York, from Independent to Frieze, the city is about to add one more, a new initiative called That ’70s Show. Organized by dealer Eric Firestone during the past month, 20 dealers will take over Firestone’s loft space on 4 Great Jones Street to show works from artists who were active in the 1970s. Spread across two floors, the galleries lined up to participate include P.P.O.W., Karma, Kasmin, Ortuzar Projects, Craig Starr Gallery, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, Anton Kern Gallery, and Gordon Robichaux.

Eric Firestone Gallery, a well-known New York gallery that has been following abstract art in the 20th century, participated in Taipei Contemporary Art Fair for the first time, and introduced five mid-century abstract female artists from New York. One of them, Pat Lipsky (b. 1941), is famous for exploring the color gamut painting. The large-scale work Winter used back and forth smudged brushwork and harmonious tones to express her lyrical and abstract skills. You can also see the rhythm of her body in the picture. Staring at the picture is like seeing the endless ocean in winter, waiting alone for a ray of hope.

There is no doubt Miriam Schapiro has received more attention and accolades in recent years than she had in the later period of her life. However, the urge to pigeonhole her into strictly feminist art movements, which many have, misses entire aspects of her creative output and her prescient and revolutionary approaches to new technology and art making. 

At a panel discussion on April 26, conducted by Zoom from the Eric Firestone Gallery in downtown Manhattan, artists and art historians attempted to define her contributions in a more holistic sense and ask the important question of why she hasn't received her full due. 

Described by Monica Ramirez-Montagut as a "homecoming" for artists who have worked with the Parrish Art Museum over the years, the museum's 125th anniversary celebration has officially begun, with the first iteration of its "Artists Choose Parrish" series of exhibitions now on its walls.

Abigail DeVille’s exhibition, appropriately titled Bronx Heavens, begins by offering visitors an invitation to board Lunar Capsule (all works cited, 2022). The quirky Mork & Mindy–style spacecraft, with its gilded interior and Rococoesque chair—an item of furniture that conjures an elder’s sitting room, where family history is often passed down—has traveled to many cultural events and festivals, collecting stories from people of all ages that have now become treasured records of daily life on Earth.

A voice-activated microphone within Lunar Capsule captures our narratives, which are eventually broadcast through a media player connected to the headphones of a separate work, Black Monolith, a telephone booth–like object that glows with numinous blue and purple lights. A direct refutation of the idea of a singular experience of Blackness, Monolith operates like an inverse of Adrian Piper’s What It’s Like, What It Is #3, 1991, a rectangular white cube containing a series of videos in which a Black man plainly states, among other things, that he is “not shiftless,” “not childish,” and “not evil” in order to challenge any stereotypical ideas a white and presumably liberal museum-going audience might have about Black people.

In Martha Edelheit’s groovy scenes of erotic languor—featuring nudes in unselfconscious poses with intent or with distant facial expressions, usually basking in the sun—the pulsing undercurrent of optimism is most seductive. That, and the THC-Technicolor extravagance of her realist style. The ninety-one-year-old artist’s exhibition here, Naked City, Paintings from 1965–1980 which included several monumentally scaled works, spanned a period of social upheaval, when the artist labored with visionary feminist vigor. She rendered slack dicks and unidealized bodies in detail, holding the sexual revolution to its word in the realm of painting.

[Edelheit’s] figures achieve true transcendence in the real space of the city. . . . The frisson of a rippling deltoid foregrounding the unloveliness of crumbling infrastructure, as in “Major Deegan Expressway With Fruit” (1972-73), both sends up Western traditions and refreshes them.

For Edelheit, the city’s built environment is as spiritually revelatory as any desert. Bodies rendered in creamy pastels merge into a single mass before the seal enclosure, or dissolve into Central Park’s lake, becoming the landscape itself, a poetic depiction of art’s fundamental indispensability from life.

Judy Bowman: Gratiot Griot
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART DETROIT (MOCAD)
October 29, 2022–March 26, 2023

In her debut solo museum exhibition, “Gratiot Griot,” seventy-year-old mixed-media collage artist Judy Bowman pays tribute to the community that raised her.

Miriam Schapiro’s Idyll II (1956), in the section dedicated to performance and gesture, is undeniably brought to life by her sweeping, quivering brushstrokes, which simultaneously trace her own expressive movements and coalesce to suggest a dynamic throng of colourful figures. Three paintings by Yvonne Thomas (To the Forest, 1960; Exploration, 1954; and Transmutation, 1956) in the ‘Environment, Nature, Perception’ group demonstrate how the artist modified her palette to match the mood of her surroundings, ranging from shadowy blues and greens in the first work, to warm, hazy hues in the latter.

The wrenching, spiky and jagged forms in Martha Edelheit’s Sacrificial Portrait, and the frightening red and white gestures exploding against black in Sonia Gechtoff’s work, have all the attack and suddenness of a punch in the face. Corinne West, meanwhile, resorted to painting under the name Michael West. George (Grace) Hartigan and Lee Krasner, whose name was originally Lena, also felt it necessary to disguise their gender. It is no wonder women get angry.

Your list of must-see, fun, insightful, and very New York art events this month, including Ed Ruscha, Nina Katchadourian, Luis Camnitzer, Martha Edelheit, and more.

I am rooting for Martie Edelheit.

At the age of 91, she’s finally emerging from years of obscurity. Her mind is clear and her body agile enough to enjoy every small step of it all—a bustling opening, a post-opening dinner at the fashionable restaurant Il Buco—while leaning on a cane, or a friend’s arm. Small, fierce, outspoken, Martha Edelheit keeps pushing forward, with new 11-foot paintings and a planned return to New York City, her hometown.

I first encountered Edelheit in the context of another story, which explored the asymmetry of market acclaim for female artists based on the findings of the Burns Halperin Report.

As I wrote in December: “The overwhelming majority of women, especially women of a certain age, are ghosts as far as auction sales go. The reasons for this vary, from the market’s preference for painting over conceptual and performance art to lack of access to the gallery system to individual choices to slow artistic production during child-rearing years.”

A pioneer in graffiti, Futura needs little introduction. The artist has blazed a trail in the world of art that is as colourful as the stunning art pieces he has produced throughout his career. Born in the mid-50s in New York, Futura (born Leonard Hilton McGurr), was one of the earlier pioneers of the graffiti movement.

In 1972, the year that art historian Cindy Nemser cofounded the Feminist Art Journal, she fired off a letter to the New York Times, taking critic James Mellow to task for labeling a female artist’s exhibition a “one-man show.” “Evidently,” she wrote, “Mellow still has not caught on to the fact that women are not ashamed of their sex and resent being mistaken for men.” After protesting the reviewer’s chauvinistic language—the work was “seductive,” “feminine,” even “en déshabillé”—Nemser closed with a scorcher: “Sexist critics take note. When you start seeing scantily clad females in every abstract painting, they may start calling you ‘a dirty old man.’”

The artist in question was Nina Yankowitz, and the show was her second solo at Kornblee Gallery in New York. This past autumn, some of the same paintings were back on public view in “Can Women Have One-Man Shows?” at Eric Firestone’s two-floor space on Great Jones Street. By alluding to Nemser’s letter so directly, the exhibition not only positioned Yankowitz as a significant figure in feminist art, but also raised the issue of her early work’s reception—or lack thereof.

Are we finally back to our normal selves after almost three years of a global pandemic that upended so many lives? It’s still hard to tell, isn’t it? In most of the world, art museums and galleries sprung back to life in 2022, matching or coming close to pre-pandemic levels of programming and attendance. Here in New York, we’ve returned to the familiar pickle of too many shows running at once, and not enough time to see them all. This year, we’re going big with a list of 50 memorable shows from around the world, seen and loved by our team of editors and contributors. It’s by no means an exhaustive list, as travel was still limited this year. Instead, this is a snapshot of who we were and what we saw in 2022, including some surprises. —Hakim Bishara, Senior Editor 

The auction market for Pablo Picasso is larger than that for all female artists over the past 14 years.

Peter Williams's paintings have a quality that I'd describe (without value judgment as) as "too-muchness." His works are loud, with arrays of colors in grids, stripes or dots; they feature cartoonish figures in dreamlike states, amid such symbolic imagery as basketballs, African masks, Mickey Mouse ears and flowers. Each painting is a puzzle so jam-packed with feelings and ideas, I can't help but be dazzled by it.

With reproductive rights severely under attack in the U.S., and women’s bodies yet again a battleground, feminist artist Miriam Schapiro’s groundbreaking work becomes urgently relevant, again.

By the late 1960s, the women’s liberation movement was gaining traction throughout the United States, giving rise to the women’s health movement at the end of the decade. At the moment when activists urged women to take control of their reproductive health—often beginning with handheld mirrors, flashlights, and speculums—women’s art of the period similarly focused on the female reproductive system. 

Toward the end of the 1960s and into the early ’70s, Nina Yankowitz was engaged with core questions about the nature of painting. Then an undergraduate student at New York’s School of Visual Arts—at a time when two- and three-dimensional objects inhabited distinctly separate realms—she voiced a seditious desire to upend the binary: “I want to do both,” she told the head of SVA, according to her 2018 oral history interview for the Archives of American Art. In 1969, at age twenty-three, she had her first full-scale solo show at Manhattan’s Kornblee Gallery (during a period when gallery representation for women was exceedingly rare), where she showed her series of “Draped Paintings,” 1967–72, ten of which were on view in her exhibition here. Freed from the stretcher and large in scale (two of them are more than ten feet high), the reconfigured works were imposing but not overpowering. Using sailboat canvas as her ground, she engaged both surface and space with a playful spirit of experimentation. She applied spray paint with varying degrees of saturation to make colorful abstractions; she then attached the works to the wall with staples, arranging them to accentuate their voluminous folds. In their most elegant iterations, such as the sunrise-hued Goldie Lox, 1968, which modulates from a sparingly pigmented left edge to a warmly saturated right, they married subtleties of color and form. Two pieces from Yankowitz’s series of “Pleated Paintings,” 1970–72, also on view here, showed yet another way in which she pushed her experiments with three-dimensional form, adopting highly textured commercial pleating as an additional compositional tool. Pleated Diptych, 1972, revealed the complex compositions made possible by the combination of the folded substrate and spray, although its overall impact seemed more constrained than in the draped paintings.

"A highlight was the celebration of some of the female (abstract) greats—Joan Mitchell (Helly Nahmad), Helen Frankthaller (Berggruen Gallery) and Pat Passlof (Eric Firestone Gallery) and Vivian Springford (Almine Rech)."

The buzz of contemporary art at Frieze London might take centerstage in October, when the U.K. city’s art galleries bring out their finest works, but the fair’s classic arm Frieze Masters is where the hidden gems are.

Featuring more than 120 galleries, Frieze Masters is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year as well as its recent debut in Seoul. The fair’s main section has around 97 galleries from around the world presenting works spanning six millennia of history (in organizers’s words), from ancient artifacts to Modern art, as well as previously unrecognized talent.

The main exhibitors are joined by 28 galleries in the Spotlight section dedicated to women artists curated by Camille Morineau, co-founder and research director of Archives of Women Artists, Research, and Exhibitions (AWARE), and her team. And Luke Syson, the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, is the curator of the Stand Out section, highlighting 10 galleries under the theme of global exchange.

Our highlights of the art historical (re)discoveries in this year’s Frieze Masters center around female artists from a diverse cultural and geographical background. Many of them have lived through turmoil and upheavals of the 20th century, or having struggled to find a foothold in a male-dominated art world. Eventually they succeeded in creating these rich bodies of work that helped to push the boundary

In a body of work that drapes over the edge what was and what will be, Futura2000’s Tarpestries summon up the memory of a grittier (and perhaps more exciting) New York City subway as much as they do your favourite scenes from Dr. Who and Blade Runner. There are than 20 of these upstretched “tapestries” on view, which range from seven to 25 feet, at Eric Firestone’s two locations in East Hampton. The monumental size gives viewers the chance to see Futura2000’s work in its natural form: large scale, enveloping, as if it was once part of the city. The tapestries is juxtaposed with a massive bronze sculpture of “39 Meg", the robotic visitor from another planet that has beamed its way into the artist’s work on more than one occasion.

When Shirley Gorelick was in high school in the late 1930s, she took art classes on weekends and in the summers from the sculptor Chaim Gross and painters Moses and Raphael Soyer at the Education Alliance in New York City. Still early in the search for her own visual style, she was already quietly rebellious. She recalled in 1968 that “the painting class didn’t interest me. It was too crowded and I couldn’t see. And I felt I had to be right up front to see.” But Gorelick did pursue painting, landing in the late 1960s as a masterful painter of large-scale, realist figures. In these portraits, which she made through the early 1980s, that imperative to be right up front takes the form of a close attention to her subjects and the exchange that occurs between them and the viewer. Larger than life-size, the figures crowd into our space, so near that sometimes their bodies are truncated by the edges of the canvas.

“Family,” a new exhibition curated by Max Warsh at Eric Firestone Gallery in New York, gives an overdue look at Gorelick’s intimate and psychologically penetrating portraits of the five families who mattered most to her. These were people who did not then typically find themselves the subjects of art: middle-aged women, disabled people, mixed-race families, and older couples. David Ourlicht, one of Gorelick’s subjects and the son of Libby Dickerson, the model to whom Gorelick returned most often, said of his mother’s involvement, “The personal relationship came first.” The two women shared progressive politics, he said. “It was equal rights, women’s rights, gay rights, civil rights.”

Larger-than-life terracotta heads form an operatic visual finale in Eric Firestone Gallery’s exhibition Reuben Kadish: Earth Mothers. An amalgam of human beings and some strange subspecies, these crenellated heads, which look as if they were built from jagged scree, radiate a silent nobility. Frozen in semi-repose or grim rumination, or perhaps caught in death throes, they loom like beatific elders from a civilization wiped out by divine ordination, or by some cosmic whim. 

In fact, confronting the unimaginably real, and responding to premonitions of cataclysm and its aftermath, inform sculptor Reuben Kadish’s art as well as his biography. Born in Chicago in 1913 and raised in Los Angeles, he attended high school with Jackson Pollock, a lifelong friend, and furthered his studies at Otis Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design) in 1930 before apprenticing under Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. Amid the political despair of the mid-1930s, he traveled to Morelia in Mexico and, collaborating with Philip Guston, created a 1,000-foot mural, “The Struggle Against War and Fascism” (1934–35) — a nightmarish epic that rang alarms about global far-right political terror and its concomitant militaristic barbarisms. 

But the mural project was only the first act in Kadish’s artistic interventions based on humanity’s universal inhumanity. During World War II, while in the US Army Artist Unit, he was commissioned to photograph civilian carnage in Burma and India, savageries that he further memorialized in pen-and-ink sketches. These acts of witness presumably gave rise to the artist’s poignant, sublimated ethics of paying close, empathic attention to corporeal anguish. 

The abundance of artwork in Earth Mothers, along with the works’ varied scale and psychological tenor, make sculpture seem like Kadish’s destiny from day one. But he only committed to it in full after a studio fire in the late 1940s destroyed most of his paintings. The surviving canvases — many done in what came to be known as an Abstract Expressionist mode — are featured here and underscore how, in turning from purely abstract painting to imaginative and figurative sculpture, he found a far more suitable métier for cultivating and refining an existential outlook. 

Partly instigated by the archeological fieldwork of his wife, Barbara Weeks, who introduced him to ancient sculptures from far-flung times and epochs, especially from the Kingdom of Benin and the Aztec Empire, Kadish tirelessly produced one sculptural series after another until his death in 1992.

Pat Passlof

ERIC FIRESTONE GALLERY | NEW YORK

Pat Passlof (1928–2011) was an important figure in the development of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. She was there from the beginning and, indeed, one of its incubators. In 1948, she studied with Willem de Kooning at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, the place to be if one wanted to become an avant-garde artist. That was also the year Arshile Gorky committed suicide; his Surrealized take on abstraction, along with that of his friend de Kooning, remained an influence on Passlof. But as “Memories of Tenth Street: Paintings by Pat Passlof, 1948–63”—a presentation at Eric Firestone Gallery that featured a thoughtful selection of works the artist created in Manhattan’s East Village at the titular address—made abidingly clear, Passlof’s painterly innovations eschewed the aggressive grandiosity of her mentors for something more lyrical, intimate, and inviting. Even though Untitled, 1950, with its thin black lines and planar, smeary sections of pale gold and white, seems indebted to Gorky’s paintings, and Theater, 1957, with its turbulent facture and thick encrustations of dirty violet, red, and fawn, carry a generous dose of de Kooning’s method, Passlof truly astonishes in such delicate, subtle works as Miss Julia, 1961, with its quivering, luminescent surface awash in sundry pinks, yellows, browns, and blues radiating from a loosened grid. In this “pure” abstraction, Passlof achieves aesthetic independence. “The being of the work of art yields itself only through its sensuous presence,” French phenomenologist Mikel Dufrenne wrote, “which allows [us] to apprehend it as an aesthetic object.” Outgrowing the lessons of her confreres, Passlof comes into her own with extraordinary sensuousness. It seems safe to say that without Black Mountain College there would have been little or no future for avant-garde art. (And Europe, where it had developed, had become a war-torn ruin by 1948.) It is important to emphasize the year Passlof began studying with de Kooning: The New World was the place to revivify the sensation of the new, which had become timeworn and stale in the Old World. It also seems safe to say that Passlof’s transcendental aesthetic, and its subliminal affinity with American Luminism, surpasses the more earthbound—dare one say heavy-handed?—work of de Kooning and Gorky.

Passlof was instrumental in the restoration of vanguard culture in more ways than one. As the gallery’s press release tells us: “In 1949, Passlof helped renovate the Eighth Street loft, which was the first location of ‘The (Artists’) Club,’ attending every talk and panel. Noticing that many of her peers rarely spoke when they came to the Club, she decided to organize an alternative ‘Wednesday Night Club,’ envisioning it as a kind of ‘junior club.’ The Wednesday evening sessions quickly became popular, leading the old guard to squelch it for fear of competition.” Clearly, Passlof was in the thick of it, fearlessly holding her own despite the condescending dismissal of her paintings as retardataire—“more ‘impressionistic’ than ‘abstract,’” as Donald Judd once wrote, along with his trivialization of her color as “somewhat sweet,” another coyly misogynist characterization. Certainly Passlof’s paintings don’t climb the wall like desperate, erect penises the way Judd’s sculptures do, the boxes that constitute them a record of so many feckless orgasms. If the Abstract Expressionists were masturbators of gesture, then Judd was a masturbator of geometry. These were so-called big men: They always seemed to live in fear of the “junior club,” i.e., smart, pioneering women.

— Donald Kuspit

Thomas Sills (1914-2000) is, for many contemporary viewers, a discovery: Much of the work in “Variegations, Paintings From the 1950s-70s” at Eric Firestone was in storage before being mounted here. Sills was hardly unknown during his lifetime, though. He socialized with New York School painters like Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko and had several solo exhibitions at the historically significant Betty Parsons Gallery before receding from the art world around 1980.

Sills’s paintings here include many of the traditional mid-20th-century New York School concerns. Abstract canvases with colored interlocking forms like “Travel” (1958) and “Son Bright” (1975) have a vibrant, dynamic tension similar to works by Lee Krasner and Piet Mondrian, who played with the painterly grid, and with the fleshy, promiscuous pink favored by de Kooning. Sills’s surfaces are also notable. He used rags instead of brushes to finish his paintings, and this gives the pigment a particularly even look, beautifully integrated into the canvas surface.

On the busy thoroughfare of Grand Concourse in the south Bronx stands a contemporary building resembling origami folds. Home to the Bronx Museum of the Arts, this cultural institution offers the Bronx and greater New York City seasonal exhibitions and an impressive permanent art collection. Currently on display is Henry Chalfant’s graffiti archive and Alvin Baltrop’s queer photography. The museum relies on donations and grants to guarantee free entry to all visitors, so a celebratory fundraiser dinner was a natural fit. 2019 marked the museum’s inaugural BxMA Ball, a multi-sensory gala co-chaired by Angel Otero and Jerome Lamaar.

Joe Overstreet’s 1972 unstretched, untitled canvas unfurls from the wall in a similar fashion to Eric N. Mack’s “Pelle Pelle” (2017), which is made with a microfiber blanket, polyester fabric and silk curtains tacked to the wall. Paintings and assemblages from the ’70s based on the grid by Joan Snyder, Howardena Pindell, Sean Scully and Al Loving sit comfortably next to more recent riffs on geometry by Sadie Benning, Matt Connors and Dona Nelson.

Titled “Double Portrait,” this electrifying exhibition unites Mimi Gross and Marcia Marcus, who began making figurative paintings in the 1950s. Born 12 years apart, Ms. Marcus and Ms. Gross crossed paths in downtown New York, as well as on sojourns to Italy and Provincetown. Both were putting paint to canvas at a time when Minimalism and Conceptualism reigned supreme, and both were interested in representations of their gender.

In 1972, this Afrofuturist abstract painter—who died in Brooklyn in 2011—wrote of his desire to “mirror the dynamo of our antecedent heritage despite the temerarious and presumptuous canons of the established art world.” Those poetic words introduce the artist’s current show, at the Eric Firestone gallery, echoing the blazing refinement, the style, and the priorities of the vivid works on view, made between 1969 and 1979. Ausby introduced the forms and the palette of traditional African art into both the geometric sensibility of American hard-edge painting and, later, the post-minimalist sensuality of the Pattern and Decoration movement. The earliest pieces here, including the exhilarating “Moving It,” from 1970, suggest enlarged swatches of kente cloth. In subsequent multipart compositions—such as “Shabazz,” from 1974, with its rich hues and pointed barbell silhouette—Ausby liberated the canvas from its stretchers to stunning effect. These works seem to float, kitelike, on the white walls, giving fresh meaning to the exhibition’s title, which is borrowed from a Sun Ra song: “Somewhere in Space.”

Walls of flesh, walls of skin. I meet this at Galleri Larsen/ Warner, where I am overwhelmed by Marta Edelheit's paintings from the 1960s and 70s. Edelheit has lived in Sweden since the 1990s, but during the previously mentioned decades she was in the middle of the action, in New York's avant-garde art scene, in the city where she herself was born and worked for many years. Works from this period are now displayed in two small gallery rooms on bstermalm in what is Edelheit's first exhibition in Stockholm in a couple of decades. Sometimes her naked bodies are close, completely enlarged in a way that almost obscures what you look at: from the lines of the small pastel drawings, zoomed in almost abstraction, you can read the volume of a thigh, the folds of the vulva, the roundness of the buttocks. The color scale is strong, you could call it psychedelic, but I prefer to call it fruity: together with the more skin-friendly tones of peach, blushing inside, blue and green and yellow are found. A milky pink nipple is paired with the colors of an overripe banana. Edelheit's color management is phenomenal. In the drawings, it appears to be both inviting, tempting and a little repulsive. 

 Eyes that are sometimes closed, like closed in a sweet intoxication, sometimes turned away, sometimes angled straight towards the viewer. It is only when elements of voyeurism affect one. As in A View of Lake Atitian (1973) where the nickel-yellow woman in the armchair locks her eyes in one. In the other paintings, the painted ones are rather enclosed in themselves. In the kaleidoscope -linking form where the same person reappears at different angles on the same painting, a dreamlike dimension is added to these enchanted portraits. 

The exhibition title “Go Figure” at the Eric Firestone Gallery in East Hampton has multiple meanings, which suits an exhibition that exuberantly presents a plethora of ways to address the genre of figurative art.
Often double and even triple hanging, the show appears to be a salon-style exhibition from afar, but once inside, cohesion becomes readily apparent. Beth Rudin DeWoody, a collector known for her discerning eye and ability to launch artistic careers just from a single purchase, served as curator. She brought together artists who came of age in the mid-20th century, many from the Firestone inventory, with contemporary artists. For years she had a house in the Shinnecock Hills artist colony enclave and is well familiar with the artists who have lived and worked here over the decades. 

Jeanne Reynal
ERIC FIRESTONE GALLERY | NEW YORK

In 1958, Clement Greenberg penned a short essay that posited aesthetic parallels between Byzantine art and modernism. Despite their differences, he said, these movements were united by an emphatic pictorialism, their transcendent qualities tied up with a shared repudiation of illusionism. In this text, the critic cited the work of certain painters, such as Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, as examples. “This new kind of modernist picture,” Greenberg wrote, “like the Byzantine gold and glass mosaic, comes forward to fill the space between itself and the spectator with its radiance.”

During the acent of Abstract Expressionism, Reynal reinvented the art of msaics, embracing lyrical geometries and biomorphism in a glimmering, varied body of wall-mounted and freestanding works. This bountiful survey, filling two floors at Eric Firestone Gallery, spans three decades of the New York School artist's career, from 1940-1970. (Reynal died in 1983, at the age of eighty.) Her novel approach involved a degree of spontaneity that is not usually assocated with the ancient medium; a short documentary on view, from 1968 captures Reynal speedily sketching into wet cement and scattering stone tiles. Her early compositions are flat and graphic, as examplified ina 1943 collaboration with Isamu Noguchi, for which she decorated the surface of a low triangular table. But moody, encrusted works fromt he fifties play up the craggy topographical  potential of mosaics, which Reynal studied with a Russian master, in Paris, in the ninteen-thirties. By 1970, her pieces had become quai-figrative, seen here in striking procession of undulating, patterned pillars rising from a bed of white gravel. 

Raised in and around New York by French parents, Jeanne Reynal (1903–83) spent most of the 1930s apprenticed to a Russian mosaicist in Paris. She came back with strong opinions: Mosaic was neither painting nor sculpture, she wrote in a 1964 monograph, and Renaissance artists had “taken an ax” to the ancient art form by laying their tiles flush instead of letting them protrude to catch the light.

Policing genre boundaries no longer seems so important. But the strongest pieces in this show, titled “Mosaic Is Light: Work by Jeanne Reynal, 1940–1970,” derive much of their considerable impact from their disconcerting perch between painting and sculpture.

“Ogo,” a cement-on-board panel just over 4 feet by 5 feet, is a busy abstract whorl of reds, grays and blacks. As a painting, it would be overwrought. But the variety of its textures — the pits, the streaks, the unexpected glitters as you shift from foot to foot — draw your attention away from the composition and, in a way, counterbalance it. Three 1959 monochromes — a flat red hexagon, an enormous yellow diamond, and a triptych of blue squares, all of them strewn with broken glass and mother-of-pearl — go further, wringing so much action out of a broken surface that the very notion of a flat one comes to seem absurd.

Seven elegant monoliths that Reynal made in the early ’70s after a trip to Africa do something like the opposite. Covered with red, black and gold tiles so shiny they’re almost reflective, and studded, in one case, with palm-size pieces of mother-of-pearl, their surfaces dazzle, letting their sinuous shapes slip right behind your eyes.

“Futura 2000” at Eric Firestone Gallery

Born in New York City in 1955, Futura 2000 (Leonard Hilton McGurr) emerged as one of the pioneering graffiti artists of the 1970s, tagging subway cars and Bowery walls, and showing works alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring at the pivotal 1980 Times Square show. Now, after a career focused on abstract art (still inflected with spray-paint and graffiti-gestures) Futura 2000 is finally getting a long-awaited solo exhibition at Eric Firestone’s ground floor space. The show features more than 20 new paintings inspired by the artist’s fascination with science fiction and natural phenomena.

The artist known as Futura — to close friends, he’s Lenny — estimates that he visited around 17 countries last year. This year looks much different; he’s spent the majority of 2020 at home in New York.

He’s discovered that there’s plenty upside to staying close to home, including “Futura 2020,” his first solo gallery show in New York in 30 years, and the release of his eponymously titled monograph with Rizzoli.

On a recent rainy afternoon, Futura walks into the Eric Firestone Gallery in NoHo with a small cardboard box nestled in the crook of his arm. Inside are six cans of spray paint and a blue 3-D-printed version of his signature, which he’s been using as a reverse stencil to sign work. Despite being grounded by the pandemic, the artist is still busy as ever; he’s in the midst of working on a project with the Noguchi museum, painting lamps for an exclusive exhibition (hence the box of paint).

The week before he turned 65, Futura was contemplating his legacy. Considered one of the progenitors of graffiti art, and one of its most recognizable figures, he was sitting in Eric Firestone Gallery in NoHo, where “Futura 2020,” his first solo exhibition in New York in 30 years, is on view. Across the river, in Queens, his installation at the Noguchi Museum, a suite of hand-painted Akari lanterns, had opened the day before. Futura, who is rangy and was wearing a wool knit cap pulled to just above his eyes and a jacket from his recent collection with Comme des Garçons, was discussing the long arc of his career, one that has taken him from painting in unlit subway tunnels to working for the United States Postal Service to being a frequent presence in the global luxury fashion market.

“My ambition to be successful in a monetary way never interested me,” he said. “I just wanted to support my family, take care of my children” — he has two. “As it turns out, I’m actually doing much better now, so I guess it’s a question of my patience. I stayed even when things weren’t there for me, or I saw other people running past me on the track of life. But here I am.”

EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. — The art collectors were finally coming out of hiding here recently, albeit quietly and tentative-ly. The artists were, too. The lure? All of a sudden, they have a lot more gallery options lining the immaculate streets of this famously upscale summer town, a seemingly unexpected development in the middle of a pandemic. Since the beginning of June, five major art galleries have opened here: Pace, Skarstedt, Van de Weghe, Michael Werner and Sotheby’s, all arms of New York art powerhouses. And more are on the way soon, in Montauk (Amalia Dayan and Adam Lindemann’s new venture, South Etna Montauk) and Southampton (Hauser & Wirth). 

In October, the The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation opened its third exhibition, “Pat Passlof: The Brush Is the Finger of the Brain,” a survey of Passlof’s paintings curated by Karen Wilkin. Comprising twenty-six works on three floors, the show efficiently and effectively samples Passlof’s art from 1949 to 2011. Although she showed regularly in New York galleries (in recent decades, primarily at Elizabeth Harris), Passlof often garnered more attention for her active art-scene presence and her associations with other artists than for her own work. Happily, this seems to be changing. In 2017 the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired its first work by Passlof, a ca. 1950 oil on paper that the museum has already shown twice, in “Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction” in 2017 and in the current reinstallation of the collection.

Frieze New York proved surprisingly robust, answering the question, “Can a fair survive online?”

Eric Firestone, who sold Charles Duback’s 1960 oil on canvas “Black and White (Anne Waterhouse)” on opening day for $200,000, said he appreciated the data feedback, which told him which works got the most views and how long they were viewed. He also said the price transparency was a welcome development. “It’s very intimidating sometimes for the viewer to ask what a painting price is,” he said. “It helps level the playing field to say, ‘This is what we’re asking.’”

Last year the Armory Show weathered a crisis when Pier 92 over the Hudson River was condemned shortly before the art fair opened, precipitating a last-minute reshuffling of booths and the shutting down of a satellite display.

Founded in 1994 by four gallerists—Colin de Land, Pat Hearn, Matthew Marks, and Paul Morris—the Armory Show began life as the Gramercy International Art Fair, a yearly event at which art dealers took over rooms in the then-funky Gramercy Park Hotel, displaying art on chipped bureaus and in dimly lit bathrooms.  

Figurative paintings by three Americans reflect the shifting social and sexual mores of the nineteen-sixties and seventies in this wonderful show, whose title is borrowed from a 1962 essay by Dore Ashton. 

When Henry Chalfant sees ads on the sides of today’s subway trains, he often mistakes them for the graffiti he used to photograph in the 1970s and ‘80s.

When Henry Chalfant arrived in New York City from suburban Pittsburgh in 1973, as an aspiring sculptor, he found a place teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. This was “Ford to City: Drop Dead” New York. But amid the turmoil a new form of art making was taking shape — one that took up space where it could, which was mostly everywhere.

I was reminded of the phrase, Other Traditions (2001), the collective title John Ashbery gave to the publication of his six Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University, when I was looking at Marcia Marcus’s grisaille portrait of “Edwin Dickinson” (1972) in the timely exhibition, Double Portrait: Mimi Gross and Marcia Marcus, at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (May 23–July 27, 2019), curated by Lisa Panzera.

Among Friends: 1958–63, the exhibition of Mimi Gross’s paintings and drawings from the early 1960s at Eric Firestone Gallery, is not only a sheer visual pleasure, it also adds to our understanding of American modern art. Like so many “re-discovered” bodies of work, usually by women, it reveals dimensions of artistic practice that were always present but never given critical attention within certain over-determined narratives of 20th-century art. 

Practically overflowing with radiant portraits, “Mimi Gross: Among Friends, 1958–63” at Eric Firestone Loft should be of the major crowd-pleasers of the moment, but it feels like it’s flying under the radar. Channeling a rare, quicksilver sense for detail, Gross was only in her late teens and early 20s when she made these pieces in crayon, paint, and pastel, working in New York, Provincetown, and Europe, where she and friends traveled northern Italy by horse-drawn carriage, doing shadow-puppet shows in small villages. (To think that young artists today believe a night at Berghain is bohemia!) Two highlights of many: Grand Street Boys and Grand Street Girls (both 1963), whose many young sitters look interesting enough to sustain a few seasons of prestige television about the Lower East Side during the Kennedy years. The show depicts an artistic life that was just getting started, and already being lived very well. 

The exhibition Mimi Gross: Among Friends, 1958-1963 helps to set the record straight: Gross was a strong, confident artist when she met Red Grooms at the age of 18, and that her work continued to grow right up to their marriage in 1964.

On an evening in December, 1980, the photographer Tseng Kwong Chi gate-crashed the party of the year: the gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was the opening night of “The Manchu Dragon,” an exhibition (organized by Diana Vreeland) of Chinese costume from the Qing dynasty. 

For most of the last four decades, Pattern and Decoration art seemed wonderfully outré to many observers, an eccentric violation of the standards and norms of serious painting and sculpture that was itself not to be taken too seriously.

This amazing Noho gallery is lighting up the past with the enormous “flesh wall” paintings of Martha Edelheit. Born in New York in 1931, she is still painting and, judging from what’s here, has one of the most mysteriously erotic-hot inner lives of any painter of the 1960s. Witness lounging female and male bodies and men with enormous erections performing acrobatics for women.

Martha Edelheit is yet another indication that 20th-century art history is still under construction, with large areas unfinished or invisible. Ms. Edelheit was included in last year’s “Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965” at the Grey Art Gallery, which featured several artists unfamiliar to wider audiences. Now “Flesh Walls: Tales From the 60s” at Eric Firestone is devoted to Ms. Edelheit’s work from that era. She was part of the downtown, artist-run Reuben Gallery, where she had her first solo show in 1960. The “Flesh Walls” title is not metaphorical or accidental. Ms. Edelheit’s meaty, sexy paintings and drawings iterate tales of the sexually permissive ’60s. She approached the human body through the skin, inspired initially by the writings of the anthropologist Claude LeviStrauss, who suggested that the body was the original canvas for painting, in the form of tattoos. 

Joe Overstreet’s experimental paintings from the early 1970s were made to be suspended from ceilings and tied to floors using a system of ropes and grommets. As a result, they occupy a good deal of three-dimensional space, and by design their shapes change every time they are installed, depending on how they are stretched out, draped, or crumpled. In some works, such as St. Expedite II and Untitled, both 1971, and Untitled, 1972, Overstreet has painted squares of canvas in solid colors-red, green, navy blue, deep purple-edged in contrasting stripes. Other works, such as the enormous Boxes, 1970, play with vibrant patterns of geometric abstraction but, at the same time, appear haunted by the ghosts of earlier, more figurative gestures.

“Abstraction represents self-determination and free will.” So avowed the painter James Little at a recent panel discussion held in conjunction with an exhibition of works by his fellow painter Joe Overstreet, but with the broader purpose of examining the question of “Black Artists and the Abstraction Idiom.” Little’s ringing declaration of aesthetic independence was couched in a language both explicitly political (self-determination being a right underwritten by the United Nations in its 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, which held that “All peoples have the right to…freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development”) as well as theological (though the problem of free will has earlier roots, it became urgent when Christian thinkers had to explain the origin of sin and damnation in a world created by a perfect and benevolent God). The implication of Little’s statement is that abstract art, by eschewing the forms of representation through which political and religious narratives are conveyed, enacts and exemplifies a kind of self-emancipation.

In a 1989 interview, the artist Miriam Schapiro discussed her admiration for “heroines” like Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Frida Kahlo. Noting their rather fraught lives, she said “that doesn’t stop you from expressing your point of view in whatever manner you choose to do it.” In the 1970s, Schapiro herself chose to make craft works that she termed “femmages” (a portmanteau of “feminine” and “collage”), which staked a claim for women, both in the art world and outside it, by centering the home as a site of resilience and subversion. And she certainly lived by these principles of resistance, deliberately situating her practice against artistic norms of her day.

The history of postwar American abstract painting remains a work in progress. We are barely beginning to understand its sheer multiplicity in terms of the artists’ races and cultures and the works’ physical character. New information arrives in regular and humbling batches. The latest is Joe Overstreet’s stunning exhibition “Innovation of Flight, Paintings 1967-1972” at Eric Firestone. With 20 rarely seen works, it covers a brief period when Mr. Overstreet’s disavowal of painting’s usual standards and practices was unfolding rapidly in several directions, alongside efforts by Sam Gilliam, Harmony Hammond, Alan Shields and Howardena Pindell, among others.

New York artist Marcia Marcus (b. 1928) emerged mid-century as a promising painter of portraits and figurative tableaux, depicting herself, friends, and acquaintances in scenes that often have a mythological or theatrical feel. In the early 1950s, she studied painting at Cooper Union, where her peers included Alex Katz and Lois Dodd, and shortly thereafter attended the Art Students League, where she absorbed the lessons of Edwin Dickinson. She collaborated on Happenings with Allan Kaprow and, in 1960, showed a series of self-portraits at the Delancey Street Museum, an alternative space run by Red Grooms. Despite an impressive exhibition record and a peer group of downtown luminaries, Marcus eventually fell into obscurity. The recent show at Eric Firestone included twenty-four paintings she made between 1958 and 1973, amounting to a small-scale retrospective for this audacious and fascinating artist.

Marcia Marcus Through Dec. 2. Eric Firestone Gallery, 4 Great Jones Street. Art history is in constant flux, as you can see by the recent rise of artists who were left out of earlier narratives. This year, the exhibition “Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965,” at the Grey Art Gallery, featured many overlooked artists whose contributions to mid-20th-century art are noteworthy. One of them is the painter Marcia Marcus, whose work is currently on view in “Role Play: Paintings 1958-1973” at Eric Firestone Gallery.

The twenty-three paintings by Marcia Marcushere deliver one knockout after another. In the oval portrait Nude with Mirror, 1965, a woman languorously appraises her own reflection. In Florentine Landscape, 1961, three ghostly, pale figures and a pumpkin patch appear like holograms beamed into an ancient garden. In Frieze: The Porch, 1964, three distinctly different pictures—a double portrait of the critic Jill Johnston and the painter Barbara Forst, a self-portrait of the artist in a billowing floral robe, and a picture of her as a child with her father—are all crammed together in a way that feels weirdly spacious.

“The California Years: 1967–1975” documents a momentous shift in Miriam Schapiro’s practice, from the wry, abstract feminist-futurism of her hard-edge paintings to the busy decadence of her mixed-media “femmages.” For her handsomely mod paintings in the former category, she used computer software to model and manipulate three-dimensional geometric structures. While the exhibition’s press release notes that these images are often “coded depictions of yonic forms,” we’re not talking about seashells and split melons here. In the pristinely painted Keyhole, 1971, a fiery red-orange and rose-colored mother ship approaches from a cloudless blue sky. The chic all-blue Horizontal Woman No. 2 from the same year slyly references a reclining nude with its blank virtual architecture. A kind of landscape, the painting depicts something resembling a compound of modernist bungalows built into a featureless hilltop.