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.

Sana Musasama: Returning to Ourselves centers around a series of dolls, based on African-American topsy turvy dolls. Musasama uses this formal structure to juxtapose figures drawn from the global Black diaspora. Returning to Ourselves is rounded out by a series of ceramic houses she began early in her career and returned to during the pandemic.

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.

In conjunction with the exhibition Godzilla: Echoes from the 1990s Asian American Arts Network.

Moderated by Ryan Lee Wong, with Helen Oji, Charles Yuen, and Bing Lee. Held in conjunction with the exhibition Godzilla: Echoes from the 1990s Asian American Arts Network. On view at Eric Firestone Gallery, 4 + 40 Great Jones Street, New York, through March 16. 

A second panel discussion in conjunction with the exhibition will be held on March 9 at 3:00 PM, details to come. 

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.

We are pleased to announce that Shirley Gorelick’s Family II (1973) has been acquired by the Brooklyn Museum as part of the museum’s permanent collection.

We are pleased to announce that Pat Passlof’s Ile Fra (1960) has been acquired by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art as part of the museum’s permanent collection.

held in conjunction with the exhibition Elise Asher: The Vintage Years Paintings of the 1950s and '60s

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

This exhibition is the first of two consecutive installations featuring the closely related techniques of collage, assemblage, photomontage, and found object sculpture. The diverse selection of artworks by leading national and international artists, drawn from Mia’s collection and local private collections, emphasizes the museum’s commitment to modern and contemporary art. The exhibition examines the resurgence of interest in these art forms during the postwar period and ensuing decades, highlights both formal and conceptual experimentation, and demonstrates how these interrelated techniques are particularly suited to exploring social, political, cultural themes and content.

Each year, the popular "Meet the Artists" event allows visitors to the fair to learn more about exhibitor presentations from artists whose work is on view and from experts associated with historical presentations. 

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.

Blum & Poe, Los Angeles is pleased to present “Pictures Girls Make”: Portraitures, an exhibition bringing together over fifty artists from around the world, spanning the early nineteenth century until today. Curated by Alison M. Gingeras, this prodigious survey argues that this age-old mode of representation is an enduringly democratic, humanistic genre. 

The power of an artwork is often amplified when in dialogue or debate with another. It Takes 2: Unexpected Pairings explores the resonances and dissonances that arise when unrelated objects are set side by side.

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?”

University at Buffalo Art Galleries is pleased to present FUTURA2000: Breaking Out, a retrospective of artist FUTURA2000 that will span both University of Buffalo Art Galleries locations; UB Center for the Arts and the UB Anderson Gallery. 

Over his career span of five decades, FUTURA has built a reputation and continues to be an unrelenting innovator. He has inspired and influenced multiple generations of creative purists and polymaths while intersecting his enigmatic oeuvre with various disciplines and remains at the forefront of the cultural zeitgeist. FUTURA2000: Breaking Out is a comprehensive survey featuring paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, studies, collaborations, and archival paraphernalia. The exhibition will also feature new site-specific works. Breaking Out examines one of New York's most-loved artists' essential themes and polyphonic output.

At their core, creating and looking at works of art are acts of care, from the artist’s labor to the viewer’s contemplation and appreciation. Storage, conservation, and display are also ways of tending to art. This exhibition invites visitors to explore how contemporary artists trace and address concepts of care through their materials, subjects, ideas, and processes

What Has Been and What Could Be: The BAMPFA Collection inaugurates a year-long presentation of the BAMPFA collection, bringing a contemporary perspective to the museum’s global art holdings.

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.”

Jeanne Reynal, A Good Circular God, 1948–50, is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in 2023. 

"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. 

This exhibition—the first in the Museum’s history to have been fully developed and curated by an undergraduate student—features more than 50 contemporary artworks by women artists, with an emphasis on works created with unusual techniques or media.

Nina Yankowitz takes over an entire gallery to literally offer alternate perspectives for experiencing art: Reclining lounge chairs invite viewers to look up at works by Tara Donovan, Rashid Johnson, Louisa Chase, Mary Heilmann, and Vija Celmins; a 7-foot platform allows a view from above of a visual sound score woven into a rug. Seated in a heavy chair with tiles, viewers confront Chuck Close‘s self-portrait, while small works hang at tilted angles in the distance. Yankowitz chose works relevant to life in America today, including Jackie Black’s Last Meal (Series), 2001–2003, 24 photographs of meals requested by death-row inmates, paired with Yankowitz’ uncanny sculptural paintings of body parts protruding from the wall to imagine “what’s on the other side.”

David Zwirner's group exhibition So let us all be citizens too explores and celebrates the legacy of post-war American artist Bob Thompson (1937–1966) and his dynamic figurative style and use of colour. Bringing together contemporary international artists of several generations whose aesthetic affinities to Thompson are both discernible and surprising, the exhibition includes paintings and works on paper by Emma Amos, Michael Armitage, Betty Blayton, Vivian Browne, Beverly Buchanan, Lewis Hammond, Cynthia Hawkins, Marcus Jahmal, Danielle Mckinney, Cassi Namoda, Chris Ofili, Naudline Pierre, George Nelson Preston, Devin Troy Strother, and Peter Williams.

One of only a few African American participants in the abstract expressionist movement, Thomas Sills (1914–2000) has been largely overlooked until recently. Donated by John Pappajohn to the National Gallery of Art, the painting Flagship (1963) epitomizes the distinctive style and technique Sills developed to create elegant abstractions with a limited palette and disciplined forms.

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.

Moderated by William J. Simmons | with Judith Brodsky, Carrie Moyer, Komal Shah, and Lisa Wainwright.

Held in conjunction with the exhibition Miriam Schapiro: The André Emmerich Years Paintings from 1957–76

Moderated by Elissa Auther | with Joyce Kozloff, Melissa Meyer, Beau R. Ott, and Mira Schor.

Held in conjunction with the exhibition Miriam Schapiro: The André Emmerich Years Paintings from 1957–76

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.

Presented by K11 MUSEA and K11 Art Foundation, City As Studio, China’s first major exhibition of graffiti and street art, will showcase the breadth and depth of the graffiti and street art scene across generations, styles and geographies.

Featuring over 100 works by more than 30 artists, City As Studio traces the global history of graffiti and street art from its emergence in the subway yards and parking lots of 1970s New York to its rise as a worldwide phenomenon. It begins with the movement’s pivotal innovators such as Fab 5 Freddy, FUTURA and Jean-Michel Basquiat who were part of the dialogue and the Downtown art scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and goes on to highlight artists such as Barry McGee, Mister Cartoon and OSGEMEOS, and the groundbreaking styles they created in San Francisco, East Los Angeles and São Paulo. The exhibition also documents the emergence and evolution of artists such as KAWS and AIKO who represent a younger generation of New York street artists.

[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.

"Too Much Is Just Right: The Legacy of Pattern and Decoration" features more than 70 artworks in an array of media from both the original time frame of the Pattern and Decoration movement, as well as contemporary artworks created between 1985 and the present.

The Addison Gallery of American Art at the Phillips Academy, Andover, MA

Comprised almost entirely of works from the collection—including Jeanne Reynal's Servants of the Sun, 1950—this exhibition explores how women have deployed the visual language and universal formal concerns of abstraction—color, line, form, shape, contrast, pattern, and texture—to create works of art across a wide variety of media (including paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, ceramics, textiles) from the 18th century to the present day.

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.

The Houston Museum of African American Culture presents Ellsworth Ausby: Odyssey, a posthumous exhibition of paintings by the artist Ellsworth Ausby who died in Brooklyn in 2011. The HMAAC exhibition primarily focuses on the Afrofuturist abstract painter's work on cut canvas from the 1970s which embodies his vibrant geometric forms that reflect his achievement of liberating the canvas from rigid structures, allowing them to float freely on the walls and spaces they occupy.

Spirit in the Land is a contemporary art exhibition that examines today’s urgent ecological concerns from a cultural perspective, demonstrating how intricately our identities and natural environments are intertwined. Through their artwork, thirty artists show us how rooted in the earth our most cherished cultural traditions are, how our relationship to land and water shapes us as individuals and communities. The works reflect the restorative potential of our connection to nature and exemplify how essential both biodiversity and cultural diversity are to our survival.

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.

I use color and an outsider’s point of reference in my paint handling, creating an immediacy and a response that endows the work with a sense or feel of currency. … While it is painful, for some, that I bring a state of offensive literature, I think we are also deserving of a critique by looking at representations of race and representation. — Peter Williams

Moderated by curator and critic Larry Ossei-Mensah, this panel discussion meditates on the legacy of Peter Williams (1952–2021) whose punk-pop paintings such as My Culture is Yer Freight (2019) evoke the complex experiences of Black Americans in the contemporary age. Organized in conjunction with Peter Williams: Nyack on view at Eric Firestone Gallery, this program brings together artist Dominic Chambers; artist Jameson Green; curator and gallerist Ebony L. Haynes; and poet and critic John Yau. 

This panel discussion at 40 Great Jones Street will be followed by a reception at 4 Great Jones Street in the concurrent solo show Abigail DeVille: Original Night, also on view through December 23, 2022.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) announces Gratiot Griot, the first solo museum exhibition of mixed media collage artist Judy Bowman. This exhibition will present new works alongside older collages by the artist that invite viewers to engage with the rich cultural tapestry of life across the African diaspora. Gratiot Griot will be on view at MOCAD from October 29, 2022 – March 25, 2023.

Born and raised in Detroit’s legendary Black Bottom neighborhood, just off of the iconic Gratiot Avenue, Bowman creates visual works inspired by stories of African American life. Collaged images depict and highlight the intimate landscape of neighborhoods, homes and gathering places – the iconic Belle Isle, cozy and colorful living rooms and popular street corners filled with small local businesses – that encouraged Bowman’s development as a griot. In West African tradition, a griot is a storyteller who, through creative performance, preserves and shares the cultural legacy and histories of their people. Gratiot Griot highlights Bowman’s extensive career as a storyteller.

In the spring of 1963, the New York Art Committee for Tougaloo College established Mississippi’s first collection of modern art at Tougaloo, a historically Black college located north of Jackson. As civil rights protests swirled across the fiercely segregated state, the College became an unlikely hub of European and New York School modernism and a place that the collection’s founders envisioned as “an interracial oasis in which the fine arts are the focus and magnet.” Co-organized by the American Federation of Arts and Tougaloo College, Art and Activism traces the birth and development of this significant and distinctive collection. With approximately thirty-five artworks by artists such as Francis Picabia, Jacob Lawrence, and Alma Thomas, the exhibition brings renewed attention to a complex American collection established at the intersections of modern art and social justice.

"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

Curator Alexandra Schwartz, who recently organized Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art (2022) at the Museum of Arts and Design, will moderate a conversation with Nina Yankowitz, Joyce Kozloff, and Meg Lipke regarding their daring approaches to abstract painting. This discussion will consider how each artist has moved beyond painting’s traditional form. Often leaving behind the conventional stretched canvas support, these practitioners have embraced handicraft techniques or alternative materials while intervening in space in novel ways. 

This program is organized in conjunction with Yankowitz’s solo exhibition of unstretched paintings from the 1960s and ‘70s at Eric Firestone Gallery.

To register for the Zoom link, visit the link below:

REINVENTING ABSTRACT PAINTING | A PANEL DISCUSSION AT ERIC FIRESTONE GALLERY

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.

After thirteen years and twenty-one exhibitions, rennie museum announces our final presentation in the historic Wing Sang building. The exhibition opens August 13 and concludes November 12, 2022.

Featuring fifty-one artworks by thirty-seven prominent artists from A(bdessemed) to Y(iadom-Boakye), the farewell exhibition breaks the museum’s self-imposed rule of not titling its shows. 51 @ 51 references the number of artworks in the exhibit as well as the address of the museum—51 East Pender Street.

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.

Mostly New: Selections from the NYU Art Collection presents modern and contemporary artworks, the majority of which have entered the New York University Art Collection over the last decade.

The founding of the NYU Art Collection followed A. E. Gallatin’s Gallery (later, Museum) of Living Art, which operated from 1927 until 1942 in the same space the Grey currently occupies. As the first American institution to exhibit living artists, Gallatin’s Museum provided an important forum for contemporary visual expression and access to original works for NYU students. Initiated in 1958, the NYU Art Collection grew quickly through the mid-1960s, with many sculptures, drawings, prints, and photographs installed throughout the campus. In 1975 Abby Weed Grey donated some 700 works from the Middle East and Asia dating primarily from the 1960s—a magnanimous contribution that also established the Grey Art Gallery as NYU’s fine arts museum. The collection will again expand significantly with Dr. James Cottrell and Joseph Lovett’s promised gift of approximately 200 artworks—a number of which are on view here—by downtown New York artists.

The project was born of necessity. When Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro began the Feminist Art Program at CalArts, the school’s new Valencia campus was not complete, so they had to work off-site. They decided to use a soon-to-be-demolished 17-room house in Hollywood with broken windows, no plumbing and no heat as their studios and exhibition hall. Students worked together for weeks clearing rubbish, replacing and glazing windows and painting walls, while also developing their art and their confidence as artists. With group sessions that Chicago calls content-searching and others call consciousness-raising, the programme was so physically and psychologically demanding that alumnus Mira Schor compares it to boot camp. “It was very intense—unlike anything I had ever experienced before,” she says, “and I made sure never to experience exactly that again.”

Organised by Anat Ebgi gallery called Womanhouse 1972/2022 (18 February-2 April) exploring the Feminist Art Program, its origins and its legacy.

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.

Unbound brings together a multigenerational group of artists whose work takes an inventive and experimental approach to abstraction.

The MFAH presents the U.S. tour of Afro-Atlantic Histories, an unprecedented exhibition that explores the history and legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. The exhibition comprises more than 130 works of art and documents made in Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe across 500 years, from the 17th century to the 21st century.

Afro-Atlantic Histories dynamically juxtaposes works by artists from 24 countries, representing evolving perspectives across time and geography through major paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, photographs, time-based media art, and ephemera. The range extends from historical paintings by Jean-Baptiste Debret, Frans Post, and Dirk Valkenburg to contemporary art by Melvin Edwards, Ibrahim Mahama, and Kara Walker.

The exhibition premiered at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) in Brazil, and the U.S. tour builds on the presentation through the overarching theme of histórias—a Portuguese term that can encompass both fictional and non-fictional narratives of cultural, economic, personal, or political character. The term is plural, diverse, and inclusive, offering viewpoints that have been marginalized or forgotten. Afro-Atlantic Histories unfolds through six thematic sections that explore the varied histories of the diaspora.

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.

Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 foregrounds how visual artists have explored the materials, methods, and strategies of craft over the past seven decades. Some expand techniques with long histories, such as weaving, sewing, or pottery, while others experiment with textiles, thread, clay, beads, and glass, among other mediums. The traces of the artists’ hands-on engagement with their materials invite viewers to imagine how it might feel to make each work.

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. 

This two-year reinstallation of the museum’s contemporary art collection examines the ways artists have produced new forms of knowledge about the world. Nearly 100 works made primarily by Black and female artists—and many new to the collection—will reframe the museum’s holdings and follow artists in their expansive thinking and prismatic explorations of social, historical, and environmental perspectives. Among the themes explored in the exhibition are care, progress, wayfinding, witnessing, reckoning, and legacy. Grouped within and across these interrelated subjects are dynamic works across media by Robert Colescott, Paul Chan, Jadé Fadojutimi, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rashid Johnson, Gisela McDaniel, Meleko Mokgosi, Martine Syms, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Kay WalkingStick, Wilmer Wilson IV, and many others. The BMA is committed to telling stories that reflect the true spectrum and diversity of voices and experiences in our world. The reinstallation of the contemporary wing speaks to the museum’s commitment to sharing narratives that expand the art historical canon. As this story is continually evolving, nearly half of the works will change every six months during the two-year presentation.

The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, investigates the aesthetic impulses of early 20th-century Black culture that have proved ubiquitous to the southern region of the United States. The exhibition chronicles the pervasive sonic and visual parallels that have served to shape the contemporary landscape, and looks deeply into the frameworks of landscape, religion, and the Black body—deep meditative repositories of thought and expression. Within the visual expression, assemblage, collage, appropriation, and sonic transference are explored as deeply connected to music tradition. The visual expression of the African American South along with the Black sonic culture are overlooked tributaries to the development of art in the United States and serve as interlocutors of American modernism. This exhibition looks to the contributions of artists, academically trained as well as those who were relegated to the margins as “outsiders,” to uncover the foundational aesthetics that gave rise to the shaping of our contemporary expression. The exhibition travels to the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, Oct. 23, 2021-Feb. 6, 2022; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Ark., March 12-July 25, 2022; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, Sept. 2022-Feb.

In February 1971, the newly formed Delaware organization, Aesthetic Dynamics, Inc., presented its first major undertaking: the exhibition of over 130 works of art—drawings, prints, photographs, paintings, and sculpture—by 66 African American artists. Numerous factors led to artist Percy Ricks’ founding of Aesthetic Dynamics and their ambitious inaugural exhibition, most notably the trauma suffered from the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the subsequent nine-month National Guard occupation of Wilmington and Ricks’ desire to emphasize the influence of African American artists in Wilmington.

Now at its 50th anniversary, Aesthetic Dynamics, Inc. and the Delaware Art Museum are collaborating to revisit this momentous exhibition. Afro-American Images 1971: The Vision of Percy Ricks will include most of the artists who participated in the 1971 show, many known locally—Humbert Howard, Simmie Knox, Edward Loper, Sr., and Edward Loper, Jr.—as well as those recognized nationally including Romare Bearden, Sam Gilliam, Loïs Mailou Jones, Faith Ringgold, Alma Thomas, and Hale Woodruff. By rehanging the show as accurately as possible, the partnering organizations hope to examine the exhibition’s role in the Black Arts Movement as well as question why this seemingly successful event was largely neglected by historians in the decades that followed.

Öyvind Fahlström (1928–1976) was one of the most innovative and mercurial artists of the 20th century, who produced a truly innovative and boundary-defying oeuvre. This unique exhibition includes visual art, poetry, theatre, literature, music, dance, and film, and will reflect the great diversity of expression within the large international network of artists who inspired and were inspired by Öyvind Fahlström.

Sven-Harrys’ party for Öyvind brings together many of the most influential artists of the era, including Alexander Calder, Andy Warhol, Barbro Östlihn, Carl Johan De Geer, Christer Strömholm, Claes Oldenburg, Cy Twombly, Dennis Hopper, Ernest Cole, Faith Ringgold, Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss, Jean Tinguely, John Cage, Kiki Kogelnik, Lee Bontecou, Lena Svedberg, Marie-Louise Ekman, Marisol, Merce Cunningham, Mimi Gross, Niki de Saint Phalle, Patty Oldenburg, Peter Weiss, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein. And, of course, Öyvind himself.

Party for Öyvind reflects an age that was shaped by the challenges of the post-war era, but which also offered unique opportunities for a new kind of openness and playfulness, as a younger generation sought to throw out the old and find their own way of life that would focus on their lust for life and hope for the future, as well as the right to own one’s identity, sexuality, and expression, in art, music, literature, and poetry.

The name of the exhibition comes from the invitation that Patty and Claes Oldenburg sent their friends to a celebration of Öyvind Fahlström’s birthday and his first solo exhibition at the legendary Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1967. The party was a huge affair, with several hundred guests, many of whom are also participants in the exhibition.

In the early 1980s, Leonard McGurr's name was often uttered in the same breath as those of his artist friends Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Known then as Futura 2000, he was a rising star of New York's graffiti scene, his celebrated subway murals bridging the gap between graphic street art and abstraction. But then, as galleries began merging street art with fine art — an evolution that would propel some of his contemporaries to multi-million-dollar stardom — he grew disillusioned with the establishment. "I got sour," he recalls.

In the decades that followed, he moved beyond walls, canvases and aerosols, finding new mediums for an aesthetic that nods to particle physics and the space age. With two children to support, McGurr shunned exhibitions in favor of graphic design and, later, edgy brand collaborations with the likes of Comme des Garçons and Nike. We meet in the labyrinthine basement of Hong Kong's upscale Landmark mall, where McGurr's "Futuraland" sculptures, mobiles and streetwear are available via a pop-up store that counts Dior and Gucci as neighbors. In the atrium above, his largest work to date — a 20-foot-tall stainless-steel rocket — regularly shoots clouds of smoke over passing shoppers.

This exhibition invites viewers to consider how size and repetition can be interpreted as political gestures in the practices of many women artists.

Taking Space: Contemporary Women Artists and the Politics of Scale examines the approaches of women artists for whom space is a critical feature of their work, whether they take the space on a wall, the real estate of a room through sculpture and installation, engage seriality as a spatial visual practice, cast a wide legacy in art history or claim the space of their body. This exhibition invites viewers to consider how size and repetition can be interpreted as political gestures in the practices of many women artists.

Featured artists include Mequitta Ahuja, Polly Apfelbaum, Jennifer Bartlett, Maria Berrío, Chakaia Booker, Emily Brown, Joan Brown, Tammy Rae Carland, Squeak Carnwath, Vija Celmins, Elizabeth Colomba, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Eiko Fan, Louise Fishman, Audrey Flack, Mary Frank, Viola Frey, Hope Gangloff, Judy Gelles, Nancy Graves, Guerrilla Girls, Ellen Harvey, Clarity Haynes, Orit Hofshi, Barbara Kruger, Winifred Lutz, Vanessa Marsh, Ana Mendieta, Leah Modigliani, Elizabeth Murray, Wangechi Mutu, Alice Neel, Dona Nelson, Louise Nevelson, Ebony G. Patterson, Liliana Porter, Debra Priestly, Ana Vizcarra Rankin, Faith Ringgold, Mia Rosenthal, Brie Ruais, Betye Saar, Miriam Schapiro, Mira Schor, Alyson Shotz, Sylvia Sleigh, Becky Suss, Mickalene Thomas, Stacy Lynn Waddell, Marie Watt, Dyani White Hawk and Deborah Willis.

Featuring works from the permanent collection, including many recent acquisitions, Taking Space is one of three exhibitions at PAFA in 2020–2021 celebrating women artists in honor of the 100th anniversary of the passing of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which granted women the right to vote.

A pioneering painter and street artist, Futura has exhibited at institutions like the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, collaborated with Louis Vuitton and Supreme, and created album art for The Clash. Now he’s teaching you his signature, kinetic approach to abstract art. Learn how to express yourself and paint with color, dimension, and detail. All you need to create art is an idea and a can of spray paint.
15 video lessons (2h 33m)

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.”

Where Art Might Happen: The Early Years of CalArts focuses on the legendary founding years (1970–1980) of the California Institute of the Arts, which has produced numerous well-known artists. This wide-ranging group exhibition presents a variety of perspectives on the school: parallel movements from the milieus of Conceptual Art, feminism, and Fluxus as well as the school’s radical pedagogical concepts will be brought together for the first time.

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.

Body Language: Picturing People
July 18, 2019 —June 2020

This exhibition considers how the pose, the gesture and the body in motion are used by artists to convey meaning. Figural artworks from the CU Art Museum’s collection are brought into conversation across cultural geographies and historical eras. Whether in presenting portraits of individuals or fictional personages, or in picturing religious icons, artistic depictions of the body speak volumes about personality, character and the values of a time or place.

Exhibition curated by Hope Saska.

“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.”

Encapsulating the moment of the arrival of the Pilgrims, both from their perspective and the perspective of the native tribes (primarily the Nauset and Wampanoag), this exhibition will feature life-sized figures, a to-scale Mayflower, and proportional sea and sky, turning one PAAM gallery into the shores of Provincetown as it existed 400 years ago. It will also highlight the concept of water – both the idea of water as a mover, and as a necessary source of nourishment, exploring the absence of water as among the reasons the Pilgrims left Provincetown.

“In her proposal for the exhibition, the bow of the Mayflower is seen crashing through the wall, intruding on an established society. It’s a thoughtful consideration of the arrival of the Mayflower in what is now Provincetown, with its implications of the arrival for the land and the Native population, as well as for the Pilgrims themselves. The story is presented uniquely through the artist’s eyes–one who understands the complexities and historical inaccuracies this occasion conjures,” curator Breon Dunigan told Provincetown Arts Magazine.

Joe Overstreet, an artist and activist who in the 1960s took abstract painting into the sculptural dimension and later created a home in New York for art- ists who had been ignored by the mainstream, died on June 4 in Manhattan. He was 85.

My paintings don’t let the onlooker glance over them, but rather take them deeply into them and let them out—many times by differ­ent routes,” artist Joe Overstreet once said, describing viewing experiences that can be variously harrowing and exhilarating. “These trips are taken sometimes subtly and sometimes suddenly.”

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power shines a bright light on the vital contribution of Black artists to an important period in American history and art. Featuring the work of 60 artists and including vibrant paintings, powerful sculptures, street photography, murals, and more, this landmark exhibition is a rare opportunity to see era-defining artworks that changed the face of art in America.

One late night in the spring of 1979, a man wearing high-waisted white corduroy pants on the corner of First Avenue and East Fifth Street immediately caught 
Keith Haring’s attention. “He was so eccentric looking that I knew I had to meet this person,” Haring wrote in his journals. “I ended up sort of cruising him, but then we became friends.”

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.’”

The Bronx Museum of the Arts is pleased to announce Henry Chalfant: Art Vs. Transit, 1977-1987, the first U.S. retrospective of the pioneering photographer, on view from September 25, 2019 to March 8, 2020. Recognized as one of the most significant documentarians of subway art, Chalfant’s photographs and films immortalized this ephemeral art form from its Bronx-born beginnings, helping to launch graffiti art into the international phenomenon it is today. The historic exhibition looks back at a rebellious art form launched in the midst of a tumultuous time in New York City history.  Chalfant’s graffiti archives are a work of visual anthropology and one of the seminal documents of American popular culture in the late twentieth century.

The internationally acclaimed exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power will travel to San Francisco this fall. Celebrating the works that African American artists created during two pivotal decades in American history (1963–1983), the exhibition—organized by Tate Modern, London—examines the very purpose of art and the role of artists in society. 

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.  

In 1898, the renowned Russian author Leo Tolstoy wrote: “Real art, like the wife of an affectionate husband, needs no ornaments, but counterfeit art, like a prostitute, must always be decked out.”

When the acclaimed touring exhibition Solidary & Solitary reaches the BMA, it will significantly expand to more than 80 paintings, sculptures, and mixed media works and take on a new title, Generations:  A History of Black Abstract Art. The exhibition offers a sweeping new perspective on the contributions black artists have made to the evolution of visual art from the 1940s to the present moment. Artists featured include pioneers of postwar abstraction once overlooked by history, such as Norman  Lewis, Alma W. Thomas, and Jack Whitten, as well as artists from a younger generation such as Kevin Beasley, Mark Bradford, Martin Puryear, Lorna Simpson, and many others.

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. 

With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 is the first full-scale scholarly survey of this groundbreaking American art movement, encompassing works in painting, sculpture, collage, ceramics, installation art, and performance documentation. Covering the years 1972 to 1985 and featuring approximately fifty artists from across the United States, the exhibition examines the Pattern and Decoration movement’s defiant embrace of forms traditionally coded as feminine, domestic, ornamental, or craft-based and thought to be categorically inferior to fine art. 

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.

Ornament as Promise was the premise of the Pattern and Decoration movement in the United States (1975–1985). In this exhibition, mumok presents the rich collection of works from this movement of Peter and Irene Ludwig, in the largest presentation of Pattern and Decoration in German-speaking Europe since the 1980s.

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power shines a bright light on the vital contribution of Black artists made over two revolutionary decades in American history, beginning in 1963 at the height of the civil rights movement. The exhibition examines the influences, from the civil rights and Black Power movements to Minimalism and developments in abstraction, on artists such as Romare Bearden, Barkley Hendricks, Noah Purifoy, Martin Puryear, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Alma Thomas, Charles White, and William T. Williams.

Rarely seen works and recent additions to the museum's permanent collection.

This exhibition explores the personal vision of iconic artists of the 1950s and 1960s. Many artists of the mid-twentieth century felt that academic traditions and the societal conventions they implied had become obsolete.

Painting and fiber art—artwork made with woven or nonwoven natural or synthetic fibers—have traditionally been viewed as distinct genres. This installation questions that division. It includes works by fiber artists whose formal art studies first centered on painting. There are also works by painters, some who have influenced fabric design, and others who have paid close attention to textile patterns and the relationship of clothing to the female body. Featuring many new additions to Mia’s collection, this display illustrates how artists often think and create outside the categories of art that museums generally like to employ. Among the thirteen artists included are Sheila Hicks, Yayoi Kusama, Marcia Marcus, Elizabeth Osborne, Christina Ramberg, and Shinique Smith.

Iconic Figurative Artists Featured in Exhibition at Shirley Fiterman Art Center
On May 23 in the Shirley Fiterman Art Center, a reception will celebrate the opening of Double Portrait: Mimi Gross and Marcia Marcus. Gross and Marcus are innovative figurative painters whose work from 1958 to 2012 will be on display

Art after Stonewall, 1969–1989 is the first major exhibition to examine the impact on visual culture of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) liberation movement sparked fifty years ago with the Stonewall Uprising. The show includes works by openly LGBTQ artists such as Scott Burton, Vaginal Davis, Lyle Ashton Harris, Greer Lankton, Catherine Opie, and Andy Warhol. Also considered are the practices of straight-identified artists such as Alice Neel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lynda Benglis, and Kiki Smith in terms of their engagement with the newly emerging queer subculture. Divided in two parts, the show is on view at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, which primarily presents works from the 1970s, while here at the Grey Art Gallery, art from the 1980s is featured.

When an international art star curates an exhibition revisiting one of the most dynamic eras in American art history, expect fireworks. Eric Fischl, master of the loaded group portrait, has been the curatorial advisor for a stunning show featuring more than a hundred works by all the great personalities of the Eighties, beginning with him and his wife April Gornik, along with Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Ross Bleckner, Bryan Hunt, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Jenny Holzer, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annette Lemieux, Charlie Clough, Tseng Kwong Chi, Jonathan Lasker and others. The show also features a “hall of fame” of music and sports memorabilia, including Michael Jackson’s glove, Prince’s fashion, Madonna’s jewelry, and autographed items from the Islanders, Mets and the 1980 Olympic hockey team.

From 1979-1981, over twenty-eight children and young adults were abducted and murdered in the city of Atlanta. Collectively known as the Atlanta child murders, the killings drew the attention of the nation and altered daily life in the de facto capital of the South. The city imposed curfews. Some parents withdrew their children from school and forbade them from playing outside. On June 21, 1981, Wayne Williams was arrested and ultimately convicted of two murders and sentenced to two consecutive life terms. This past March, the Mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Bottoms, reopened the cases hoping to use modern technology to lead to further convictions. Williams maintains his innocence.

Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design brings together works in painting, sculpture, ceramic, dance, furniture design, and more that privilege decoration, pattern, and maximalism.

Borrowing its attitude from architect Robert Venturi’s witty retort to Mies van der Rohe’s modernist edict “less is more,” Less Is a Bore shows how artists, including those affiliated with the Pattern & Decoration movement of the 1970s, have sought to rattle the dominance of modernism and minimalism. Encouraged by the pluralism permeating many cultural spheres at the time, these artists accommodated new ideas, modes, and materials, challenging entrenched categories that marginalized non-Western art, fashion, interior design, and applied art.

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.

The medium of fiber is also weighted with gendered, socio-political signifiers that are imparted onto the final work of art.  To put it plainly, fiber is feminine. Weaving, embroidery, knitting and sewing are thought to be the domain of women, whose productions in these areas have long been relegated to the status of “decoration.” Objects described in these terms traditionally do not fall into the rarefied, male-dominated Pantheon of “Fine Art,” which has long been the province of painting, drawing, sculpture and printmaking.  But given the shift of values in contemporary culture, does this distinction hold true today?

Forty-some years ago, Henry Chalfant trained his camera on the graffiti artists who turned New York’s streets, trains, and underground stations into their own personal canvases. Now, the photographer is returning to the Bronx—the place where it all began—for his biggest institutional outing yet.

In June of 2015, Miriam Schapiro, the pioneering feminist artist and founding member of the Pattern and Decoration movement, passed away at the age of ninety-one. Surprisingly, given her status as the elder stateswoman of the feminist art movement, the tremendous impact of her oeuvre on contemporary art has yet to be fully acknowledged or critically assessed. This exhibition seeks to redress this gap in the history of American art through an exploration of Schapiro’s signature femmages, the term she coined to describe her distinctive hybrid of painting and collage inspired by women’s domestic arts and crafts and the feminist critique of the hierarchy of art and craft.

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. 

Slab City Rendezvous, whose title comes from a 1964 painting by Red Grooms, features the work of a group of young New York-based avant-garde artists who in the years following World War II discovered the pleasures of summering and working in Maine. They became some of the most successful and important artists of their generation, charting new directions for contemporary art. Their work presented a return to realism and figuration in the face of Abstract Expressionism, the style then dominating the increasingly important center of international contemporary art in New York. Their accomplishments formed another chapter in the story of Maine’s ongoing role in American art.

The exhibition will include works by Rudy Burckhardt, Lois Dodd, Rackstraw Downes, Red Grooms, Mimi Gross, Yvonne Jacquette, Alex Katz, Neil Welliver, and Bernard Langlais, among others.

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. 

Taking inspiration from Mia’s recent acquisition of Frank Bowling’s map painting False Start(1970), “Mapping Black Identities” challenges the notion of Black identity as monolithic. Championing the diverse experiences of artists from America, Africa, and the diaspora, this exhibition seeks to amplify underrepresented voices and create connections around the concept of Blackness in contemporary art across time and place.

MAMCO examined in this large group exhibition the “Pattern & Decoration” movement, formed in the 1970s and that enjoyed international success in the 1980s, before fading in the decades thereafter. 

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power shines light on a broad spectrum of Black artistic practice from 1963 to 1983, one of the most politically, socially, and aesthetically revolutionary periods in American history. Black artists across the country worked in communities, in collectives, and individually to create a range of art responsive to the moment—including figurative and abstract painting, prints, and photography; assemblage and sculpture; and performance.

Patchworks and decorative patterns on the one hand and a political-emancipatory claim on the other – the Pattern and Decoration movement combines apparent contradictions. In the mid-1970s, the movement developed in the USA as one of the last art movements of the 20th century, brought forward by as many female artists as no other movement before. It was supported, among others, by feminist artists such as Joyce Kozloff, Valerie Jaudon, Robert Kushner and Miriam Schapiro. 

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.

The period covered in the exhibition and film tells the story of Jean-Michel’s early work, peers, and creative community in gritty, pre-AIDS, downtown New York—before the rise of the 80s art and real estate juggernaut. It was a time when decay, drugs, and dissolution fueled a boom in creativity where the definition of fame, success, and power was not based on money, Facebook likes, and self-promotion. For these creators, to be a penniless published poet or a musician gigging at CBs was the height of success. In the rawness of the work, the focus on street art and graffiti, and the experimentation and cross-pollination of styles and disciplines, the era has become a flash point for younger generations seeking to learn about and understand the authenticity, closeness, and community expressed in the work of the artists in Zeitgeist.

Born on January 2, 1940 in Sewicley, Pennsylvania, Chalfant is a renowned and acclaimed photographer and cameraman dedicated to urban culture, renowned for his graffiti and photography and films about breakdancing. Distinguished by his knowledge of hip hop and underground culture, his photographs are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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. 

Joseph Overstreet is the 2018 recipient of the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts presented by the Mississippi Arts Commission. Born in Conehatta, Mississippi, in 1933, Joe Overstreet is an artist with a record of accomplishments as an artist, arts promoter, and activist that spans 60 years. 

The Menil’s growing collection, while not encyclopedic, spans the prehistoric era to the present day. Particular areas of strength include Byzantine art, West and Central African art, Surrealism, and 20th and 21st century American and European art. On September 22, 2018, the museum reopened with a year-long permanent collection initiative featuring many of the museum’s most well-known paintings and sculptures, as well as recent acquisitions and other works and promised gifts that have never before been on view in the museum. The installations will be changed several times over the course of the year-long period.

The opening installation in the African art galleries features more than 60 masks, figural sculptures and shrines, and vessels from regions of West and Central Africa. Introducing the galleries is a new presentation of paintings, works on paper, and sculptures that explore the shared histories Africa and Europe after 15th century.

Nothing in art is more powerful than color. From Matisse to Mark Rothko and Frank Stella, and onward to the huge Color Field canvases and pulsing neon sculptures of today, color as a means of expression is the keynote for this wildly exuberant show.

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.

Featuring work by thirty-six global artists, Women House challenges conventional ideas about gender and the domestic space. The exhibition is inspired by the landmark project Womanhouse, developed in 1972 by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. With works that disrupted traditional ideas about the home as a feminine realm, Womanhouse was the first female-centered art installation to appear in the Western world. In the new exhibition, Women House, women artists from the 1960s to today examine the persistence of stereotypes about the house as a feminine space.

“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.

Way Bay is a sweeping exploration of the creative energies that have emerged from the San Francisco Bay Area over the past two centuries. An innovatively organized exhibition of art and film, plus poetry, performance documentation, and archival materials, Way Bay features nearly two hundred works that reveal the depth and diversity of artists’ engagement with the region’s geographic, social, and cultural landscape.

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.

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power shines a bright light on the vital contribution of Black artists to an important period in American history and art. Featuring the work of 60 artists and including vibrant paintings, powerful sculptures, street photography, murals, and more, this landmark exhibition is a rare opportunity to see era-defining artworks that changed the face of art in America.

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.

The East Village of the 1970s and 1980s continues to thrive in the global public’s imagination. Located in the basement of a Polish Church at 57 St. Marks Place, Club 57 (1978–83) began as a no-budget venue for music and film exhibitions, and quickly took pride of place in a constellation of countercultural venues in downtown New York fueled by low rents, the Reagan presidency, and the desire to experiment with new modes of art, performance, fashion, music, and exhibition. A center of creative activity in the East Village, Club 57 is said to have influenced virtually every club that came in its wake.

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.

Western art history is often viewed as a neat succession of individual artists and their singular masterpieces. This narrative runs parallel to the American story of westward expansion, propelled by the idea of individualism and independence. West by Midwest offers a messier alternative—one that illuminates the ways that contemporary art practices spread and develop by tracing the intersecting lives of artists who have migrated from the American Midwest to the West Coast since the mid-20th century. Lured by career opportunities, warmer weather, and the prospect of a better life promised by the postwar boom, artists in this exhibition attended art schools together, shared studios, exhibited work in the same galleries, collaborated on projects, engaged in activism, and dated. Following these crisscrossing lines of kinship, West by Midwest reveals social, political, artistic, and intellectual networks of artists and their shared experiences of making work and making a life.

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 show opens in 1963 at the height of the Civil Rights movement and its dreams of integration. In its wake emerged more militant calls for Black Power: a rallying cry for African American pride, autonomy and solidarity, drawing inspiration from newly independent African nations.

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.

Between the apex of Abstract Expressionism and the rise of Pop Art and Minimalism, the New York art scene was transformed by artist-run galleries. Inventing Downtown presents works from fourteen of these crucibles of experimentation, highlighting artists’ efforts to create new exhibition venues for innovative works of art—ranging from abstract and figurative painting, assemblage, sculpture, and works on paper to groundbreaking installations and performances.

Two exhibitions offer a broad overview of the 60-year career of influential first-generation feminist artist Miriam Schapiro, who died last summer at the age of 91. With Judy Chicago she established the CalArts Feminist Art Program in 1970 and organized the legendary CalArts “Womanhouse.”

“Miriam Schapiro, A Visionary,” at the National Academy is the artist’s first survey in New York and ranges from her de Kooning–esque fleshy Abstract Expressionist paintings of the ’50s to her gorgeous hard-edge acrylics of the ’60s to her subversive crazy-quilt florals, pinwheels, and fan collages of the Pattern and Decoration ’70s and beyond. Dollhouse (1972), which was included in “Womanhouse,” contains soft Oldenburgian kitchen appliances, a witty endless column of wine corks, and a tiny cloth doll—wearing Barbie’s plastic cowboy boots—that could almost have been by Louise Bourgeois.

“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.

Whitechapel Gallery presents a major exhibition of 150 paintings from an overlooked generation of 81 international women artists.