DIETMAR BUSSE

CULTURE MAGAZINE

For the artist-photographer Dietmar Busse, Manhattan is an enchanted isle, and each of his portrait subjects is the hero of a story—that’s one possible interpretation of his exhibition title “Fairytales 1991–1999.” Another might be that this from-the-vault parade of never-before-shown Polaroid images, shot during his first decade in New York (Busse grew up in a small village in Northern Germany), charts his own magical journey. Traveling by bicycle usually, using a heavy Polaroid 600SE camera (which he first tried out and fell in love with at the Meatpacking District rental studio where he worked), he photographed people he encountered, from the Chelsea Piers to Harlem, leaving one instant print behind with them as part of the exchange. [READ MORE]

DIETMAR BUSSE

AMANT

Fairytales 1991–1999 is New York-based artist Dietmar Busse’s first institutional exhibition in the US. The photographic essay laid out at 315 Maujer relays the explorative journeys the artist conducted shortly after arriving from Spain and traveling—predominantly by bike—from Brighton Beach via the Chelsea piers and Bryant Park to the Upper East Side and Harlem. En route from one place to another, on the street, at fashion shoots, or in domestic settings, Dietmar shot his Polaroids on the fly and in duplicate, leaving one copy with the portrayed figures and the other in his pocket. Produced during the 1990s and presented here for the first time, the photographs include idiosyncratic portraits of Amy Wesson, Kara Walker, Pedro Almodóvar, Philip Johnson, Rossy de Palma, Susan Cianciolo, Steve McQueen, Ultra Naté, and many others. Quiet, intimate, and emotional, Fairytales 1991–1999 captures the atmosphere of a bygone New York era. [READ MORE]

MATTHEW KIRK

KENNESAW STATE UNIVERSITY

As a member of the Navajo Nation, Kirk’s work delves into the complexities of cultural heritage and the challenges of navigating different worlds. His pieces are celebrated for their vibrant colors, intricate patterns, and powerful narratives that resonate on both personal and universal levels.

This exhibition marks Kirk’s debut at the Zuckerman Museum, of Art, showcasing an innovative and thought-provoking newly commissioned artwork that explore themes of identity, community, and the intersection of cultural influences. Visitors will have the opportunity to experience the artist’s unique approach to storytelling, as he intertwines elements of his Navajo heritage with contemporary artistic practices [READ MORE]

JIMMY WRIGHT & CHRISTOPHER CULVER

DOCUMENT JOURNAL

In the early ’70s, Wright started documenting New York’s cruising scene, specifically anonymous sex in the toilets of movie theaters and subway stops, which would withdraw into the shadows at the dawn of AIDS. But his drawings evoke a time when sex felt ripe only with promises of engulfing rapture; even the cruelest infliction of pain could be a turn-on. In this portfolio, that looks true for all but prudes. Nine-to-fivers blow leather boys and hairy hippies alike, while some Inspector-Gadget type screws one Castro clone after another. Each figure seems to stand for something—class, motive, burden—before their differences all but melt into roiling puddles of bodily fluids. [READ MORE]

NORA GRIFFIN

TWO COATS OF PAINT

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / I first encountered Nora Griffin’s paintings on a blisteringly hot Saturday in the summer of 2022. David Fierman had just opened his rakish subway-tiled space on Pike Square, and it was unfinished as well as uncooled (though not, of course, uncool). The paintings in “Liquid Days” harmonized all the moody vibes vectoring into and radiating out of that vortex of LES attitude and history, rendering a sweaty refuge a sublime interlude. Her compositions were frenetic, with marks, cognizable images, and found objects wafting like crowd-wise insects all about the canvas, sometimes spilling over its edges. Yet this apparent disorder was incongruously fluent, exuding confidence and intent: there was no doubt that Griffin knew exactly what she was doing. In barely contained barrages of color, line, and content adding up to life worth living, she snatched New York from the jaws of 9/11, the financial crisis, COVID, and Trump, and proclaimed it unsinkable, herself its sonneteer, and her work a well-lit cardiogram of its beating heart. [READ MORE]

DRAKE CARR

VOGUE

Drake Carr, the New York-based artist, will already be in Paris by the time you read this. Carr has in the last year or so gotten quite the reputation for his terrific portraiture, which combines highly stylized gestures with a very real and revealing distillation of whoever is sitting for him (a list which has, so far, included everyone from Pat Cleveland to Dara Allen, Karlie Kloss, and Connie Fleming). Now he has packed up his Caran d'Ache crayons and Holbein pencils in his Catalogue leather tote bought in Detroit to head to Paris for his Les Walk-Ins residency and drawing show at the Mariposa Gallery, which will run from February 26 to March 23. [READ MORE]

JIMMY WRIGHT & CHRISTOPHER CULVER

PAPER MAGAZINE

I started becoming interested in art in the late 2010s, in a period that roughly coincided with the rise of a style of painting no one had a very good name for. Tyler Malone came up with the term “New Queer Intimism,” Alex Greenberger identified it under the umbrella of “Zombie Figuration,” but almost everyone I know refers to this particular wave of LGBTQ art by the far more basic “queer figuration.” Its innovation was conceptual, though it wasn’t really much of a reach: artists depicting gay and trans subjects in private moments, without the burden of politics weighing down upon them. The twist was that this work was almost immediately recast as being implicitly political, pioneering a weepy new frontier of representation that GLAAD miraculously overlooked, but that the global art market certainly didn’t. Even if one swoons at Louis Fratino’s overwhelming romance or Nicole Eisenman’s cartoon friendtopia’s (as I absolutely did), much of this work to me now has the feeling of being trapped at an over-crowded and never-ending Pride parade, leaving little space to do anything but cheer. [READ MORE]

MATTHEW KIRK

ARMORY

Organizers of the Armory Show have revealed the names of more than 225 galleries that will be participating in the 2023 edition of the event. Representing over thirty-five countries, the exhibitors between them will present the work of more than eight hundred artists. For the third year running, the fair will take place at the Jacob Javits Center in New York, with September 7 preview day preceding its September 8–10 run.

More than 140 galleries participating in the 2022 iteration will return this year, among them New York’s 303 Gallery, James Cohan, and Kasmin; the Bogotá- and New York–based Instituto de Visión, Antwerp’s Zeno X Gallery, and Nara Roesler, which has outposts in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and New York. A number of galleries are returning after being absent from the show, including CLEARING, which has branches in New York, Brussels, and Los Angeles; Galeria Plan B, with outposts in Berlin and Cluj-Napoca, Romania; and Lehmann Maupin, which operates galleries around the world. Among the more than forty galleries making their debut at the 2023 iteration are New York’s 56 Henry, Budapest’s acb Gallery, Minneapolis’s Dreamsong, and Miami’s Nina Johnson. [READ MORE]

DOMINIC NURRE

NADA HOUSE / GOVERNERS ISLAND

FIERMAN presents The DMZ Photographs, from the Collection of Larry V. Nurre, Selected by Dominic Nurre, the second iteration of an extended conceptual portrait of American conservative masculinity realized through the possessions of the artist’s late father.

Upon his father’s death, Nurre inherited a large collection of taxidermy hunting trophies from both the American West and Africa, a leather bound collection of the National Rifle Association’s American Rifleman, US Army paraphernalia including film and photographs, among other personal effects. The artist has extrapolated from these objects a materialist portrait, a record of late twentieth century American masculinity. The project is at once deeply intimate and intellectually remote, the objects removed from their personal, private context and displayed as cultural artifacts to be examined. The project is open-ended, as Nurre continues to interrogate his father’s possessions and their cultural implications. [READ MORE]

NORA GRIFFIN

ARTNET

I wandered, basically at random, into Fierman gallery to find a one-weekend-only display of Nora Griffin’s paint-on-vintage-shirt art show. Griffin, a maker of wonky abstract paintings, had applied her groovy, whirling colors a collection of various New York-themed tees, all hailing from the pre-9/11 era. The vibe of approachable thrift-shop creativity combined with low-key nostalgia for a vanished era of the city made it all feel like you had time-traveled momentarily to a simpler, sunnier, nicer scene—one that you could walk away with a piece of, to boot. [READ MORE]

MATTHEW KIRK

HALSEY MCKAY

Halsey McKay presents White Snake, Matthew Kirk’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Known for his inventive use of commercial building materials, Kirk’s latest work is a series of large sculptural paintings inspired by the physical components of his studio. Kirk has consistently selected construction goods for his practice, as in his drywall paintings and tar paper weavings. In making White Snake, 4 x 8 sheets of plywood were pulled from the floor, walls, and drawing tables of his workspace and repurposed as surfaces for his objects. The immersive installation calls to mind the massive Floor works by Dieter Roth and Björn Roth. Kirk’s latest work has a strong relationship to Roth’s practice in which material stuff is subservient to the emotional and sensual experience for which it stands. Roth was not an artist who tolerated boundaries. In seeking to pulverize them, he elevated the processes by which things happen, embracing accidents, mutations, and accretions of detail over time. [READ MORE]

UMAN

THE PARIS REVIEW

The Paris Review‘s Winter issue cover, Snowfall: winter in Roseboom #4, by the artist Uman, looks from different angles like a field of floating Christmas lights, a confetti drop on New Year’s Eve, and a winter storm touched with a kind of bright magic. Uman worked on it over a period of four years, dabbing bright color on the canvas until, as they told me in our conversation, it felt a bit like “the mothership.” Born in Somalia in 1980, they grew up in Kenya and moved to Denmark in their teens. In 2004, they came to New York, where they continued to work in collage, painting, and sculpture before moving upstate. They are largely self-taught, and their signature style is bright, geometric, and vivid. We talked about their economical attitude toward paint, the process of making Snowfall, and their sheep. [READ MORE]

MATTHEW KIRK

BARRON’S

The Farley’s south lobby features a painting by Mattew Kirk, an enrolled member of the Navajo nation who was born in Arizona, raised by a non-Native American family in Wisconsin, and today lives in Ridgewood, Queens. Kirk brought all these elements of who he is into Shadow of a Shadow, a 22-foot long painting, and A Distant Lie, which is 8 by 11 feet.

These “weaving” paintings, as Kirk calls them, use a grid structure similar to Navajo rugs, in addition to construction materials such as a steel rebar grid that separates the works into hundreds of small paintings. These paintings have various symbols, from the North Star—central to Navajo culture—to references to superheroes given his life as an urban father.

The “cross-cultural hybrid language,” of the pieces alludes to the “Farley building’s identity as a hub for communication,” Meta said—first, as a central post office and now as a major hub for the company in New York. [READ MORE]

THE ART NEWSPAPER

Installations by De Baca and Howard, Collins and Kirk frame the three main entrances to the office complex. Workers entering from the adjacent Moynihan Hall train station and adjacent Penn Station transit complex may find themselves noticing new details in Kirk’s paintings each day. The Queens-based artist, who is an enrolled member of the Navajo nation, took inspiration from the grid structure of traditional weavings to create two huge works, the 8ft-wide A Distant Lie and 22ft-long A Shadow of a Shadow (both 2022). He affixed hundreds of paintings on panels composed of construction materials onto grids of rebar for a quilt-like effect that brings together elements of the Navajo language, superhero iconography, cross-cultural symbols and more. [READ MORE]

CULTURED

In the south lobby, Matthew Kirk’s “weaving” paintings A Shadow of a Shadow and A Distant Lie merge his identities as a member of the Navajo Nation and a dad in urban Ridgewood, Brooklyn. Using contemporary construction materials, such as tar paper, Kirk composes the same grid structure as Navajo rugs, weaving together hundreds of small square paintings, with subjects ranging from superheroes to Navajo language. Meanwhile in the Farley Building’s Ring lobby, which is visible from Moynihan Train Hall, Brooklyn-based multimedia artist Collins contributed Every Which Way, a work composed of 29 upholstered padded panels in her signature vibrant textiles that span over 100 feet and depict geometric patterns found in New York street signage. The textiles were made with a Jacquard loom, a weaving technology that is often considered a precursor to computing. [READ MORE]

WILDER ALISON

HYPERALLERGIC

Translated from a French alliterative tongue twister “une mûre mûre murmure au mur,” Wilder Alison’s exhibition A Ripe Blackberry Murmurs to the Wall reveals the artist’s ongoing exploration of language and queer identity through an intricate practice of wool painting.

Since 2014, Alison has been visually dissecting Monique Wittig’s novel The Lesbian Body, which theorizes the split subjectivity women experience in language, an inherently patriarchal structure, by textually slashing the French word for first-person subject: “j/e.” Translating Wittig’s seminal text into English, however, posed a problem — the first-person pronoun “I” is only one letter. The solution was to italicize the I, thus turning the word into a literal slash. This slash is at the core of Alison’s series of wool paintings currently on view at Fierman gallery. [READ MORE]

SETH BOGART

JEFFREY DEITCH

Clay Pop documents the reinvention of ceramic sculpture by a new generation of artists. A medium that has often been characterized as more craft than art is now an exciting platform for formal and conceptual innovation. A medium that traditionally diverged from engagement with popular culture is now adding a new dimension to Pop Art.

Paralleling current concerns in painting, many of the artists featured in Clay Pop are also exploring issues of gender, race and identity, using clay in new ways to engage with social issues. Artists are using the medium to create a personal narrative. Clay is being pushed beyond the confines of craft and design. [READ MORE]

UMAN

NICOLA VASSELL

Nicola Vassell Gallery is pleased to present, The Earth, That is Sufficient, a group show highlighting landscape painting, drawing, sculpture and photography as an assortment of traditional and radical depictions that characterize the ground we stand on and the distance we look out upon. The assembled, multi-generational group enlists various narrative methodologies to describe landscape in traditional terms and as new terrain possessing original and revolutionary spirit. The landscapes on view manifest as thought, object, vista and action. They offer up literal and metaphorical journeys and the terrestrial as full of physical and mental possibilities.

The exhibition features work by Etel Adnan, Alvaro Barrington, Sholto Blissett, Lauren Halsey, Barkley L. Hendricks, Shara Hughes, Marcus Jahmal, Ana Mendieta, Walter Price, Ugo Rondinone, Uman and Joseph Elmer Yoakum. The title is taken from Walt Whitman’s poem, Song of the Open Road. [READ MORE]

UMAN

ROCHESTER ART CENTER

What does it mean to be human? Individually and collectively, where are we headed and on what paths have we traveled to arrive at this moment? Each of the artists presented here approaches these foundational questions from unique perspectives, using an array of methods, with answers that often take the form of more questions. The Human Scale uses art to tell a story of the human being that embraces all of our contradictions, ambiguities and eccentricities. The most direct way to consider our “scale” is our size, but we can also look at scale from the perspective of time, or our lifespans, or the way we function as a singular organism, or as a group. The Human Scale also explores the different ways in which artists depict the human form, or less tangible aspects of ourselves such as consciousness or emotion. This exhibition is firmly rooted in our present moment, and, taken as a whole, offers one possible version of where and what we are right now. [READ MORE]

JIMMY WRIGHT

QUAPPI PROJECTS

You Got Your Secret On marks only the second time Quappi Projects has invited a guest curator into our space. I first encountered Aaron Michael Skolnick’s work in KMAC’s “In the Hot Seat” (2019); at some point last year during the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent quarantine, we began talking about partnering together on an exhibition. Both native Kentuckians and Queer men, our conversations revealed a shared lifelong love for and interest in the natural world. While not a theme that is often explicitly present in my own work as a painter, nature is an enormous part of my life as an artist, poet, and human being; for Aaron, who paints plein air, the natural world is a predominant motif, not just the dramatic scrim on which the action in his often hedonic paintings takes place.

Prompted by text written by Skolnick, You Got Got Your Secret On brings together works by a diverse group of artists exploring personal relationships with the natural world. A native of Bratislava, Slovakia, Katarina Janeckova Walshe lives and works in Corpus Christi, Texas and New York; Andrej Dúbravsky lives and works in Bratislava, Slovakia; Stephen Bron, Stephen Truax, and Sarah Kim live and work in Brooklyn; Aaron Michael Skolnick lives and works in Houston; Paul Verdell lives and works in Detroit; Hannah Beerman, Paul Metrinko and Jimmy Wright live and work in New York City; Kyle Coniglio lives and works in Hoboken, New Jersey; Ellen Siebers lives and works in Hudson, New York; and Mike Goodlett lives and works in Wilmore, Kentucky. [READ MORE]

JIMMY WRIGHT

C☆NDY

The Summer issue of C☆NDY 13 with the Fabio Cherstich's article Jimmy Wright: The Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve and Talent of Artist Jimmy Wright has been published. This issue is no. 11/13 as there are multiple artists' covers for issue 13. I was paired with Nan Golden on the cover and my drawing as the back cover. [READ MORE]

KELLY JAZVAC

THE ARCHITECT’S NEWSPAPER

Perhaps most affecting objects in the exhibition are those comprised of manmade materials and designed by nature—Kelly Jazvac’s Plastiglomerate (2013), a series of irregularly shaped lumps of variegated plastic, compressed and pressured to sedimentary rock-like density; one might think of the catalog’s call for “elegance under pressure,” an apt metaphor for precious gems, however, the Plastiglomerate are anything but elegant. Punctuated by flecks of neon-hued debris and tattered strands of castoff polymers, these objects feel more like coldly prognostic markers of the late Anthropocene than emphatically ominous evidence regarding the geological characteristics of an epoch whose outcome is yet unfolding. Examples of the series are well-placed just to the right of the entrance, establishing a logically coherent but rather hopeful node between the chic algae-based carafes from Studio Klarenbeek & Dros for Atelier Luma and Mandy Barker’s (2016). [READ MORE]

KAREN FINLEY

ARTILLERY

I have an ongoing conversation with Karen Finley that operates on several levels, one of which is simply her public conversation; i.e., the level on which her work has made its enduring imprint on the culture and more specifically the phenomenon of cultural trauma.

Our “live” conversation has been going on since 2015, around the time of her The Jackie Look performances in LA and the companion “Love Field” gallery show, in which she broke down the “Jackie” narrative—the discrete layers of trauma bound up in the interwoven narratives of Jacqueline Onassis’ lives—into its most resonant incidents, performances, props and gestures. [READ MORE]

YENI MAO

MUSEO TAMAYO

OTRXS MUNDXS is an exhibition that reviews and articulates the work of a heterogeneous and multicultural group of forty artists who work individually and collectively in Mexico City. Through four thematic nuclei (I. Capitalism and domination, II. Seriality, identity and obliteration, III. Entropy, speculation and visualization and IV. Body and materiality), this exhibition presents recent work and special commissions that reveal representative speeches of a artistic community that internalizes the paradigms and failures of late capitalism. OTRXS MUNDXS focuses on highlighting otherness: the different participations result in artistic microcosms that question pre-established and hegemonic conceptions, or else that solidify alternative visions about what it means to make art from or from Mexico City. [READ MORE]

SETH BOGART

THE NEW YORK TIMES

These scintillating works are Bogart originals. After nearly two decades on the campier, glammier edges of the rock underground with bands like Hunx and His Punx, he has become known, in recent years, as a polymath painter, illustrator, ceramist, clothing designer and the proprietor of the online shop Wacky Wacko, but more specifically, for curating a world of queer fantasy. His color-bursting installations have included a faux sex shop, as in 2018’s “Lick.” And among Bogart’s most beloved pieces are his sculptures of gay-bar matchbooks and delightfully subversive toothbrushes, and his brash “Grrrls Do Everything Better” shirts, depicting an illustrated history of women inventing punk. [READ MORE]

KELLY JAZVAC

MAC MONTRÉAL

This exhibition was assembled along an open thematic framework that stems from an interest in how language is inscribed in bodies, gestures, and materials. More specifically, we sought to explore how objects and techniques used by this “embodied language” can act as interfaces, allowing for the transmission of affects and knowledge between individuals and time periods. [READ MORE]

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

From regenerating coral reefs to contemplating feeding an overpopulated planet, the works in Broken Nature show how design and architecture might jumpstart constructive change. This exhibition—a collaboration with the Triennale di Milano—highlights the concept of restorative design, and offers strategies to help humans repair their relationship to the environments that they share with other species and each other. The projects selected for this installation explore a range of themes. Kelly Jazvac’s Plastiglomerates—dense geological formations of sand and plastic waste, fossils from the future—reveal the long-term effects that human behaviors will have on the Earth’s layers. [READ MORE]

ART MUSEUM OF TORONTO

Ahead of the promise of a nationwide ban on single-use plastics, this experimental exhibition examines plastic as art material, cultural object, geologic process, petrochemical product, and a synthetic substance fully entangled with the human body. The exhibition includes new commissions, historical and contemporary artworks that relate to plastic as a politically-loaded material and investigations into the paradoxes of plastic conservation in museum collections. It also features data visualizations of a study conducted by the Synthetic Collective that provides a first-ever snapshot of post-industrial microplastics pollution on the shores of all the Great Lakes. This exhibition links scientific and artistic methodologies to show how arts-based approaches to thinking and working can make viable contributions to environmental science and activism. [READ MORE]

JIMMY WRIGHT

WHITNEY MUSEUM

Anticipating the completion in late fall 2020 of David Hammons’s Day’s End, a major public artwork located in Hudson River Park, the Whitney will present a selection of works from the Museum’s collection that explore downtown New York as site, history, and memory. Central to this presentation is Gordon Matta-Clark’s Day’s End, the innovative project that inspired Hammons’s sculpture. In 1975, Matta-Clark cut several massive openings into the dilapidated building that existed on Pier 52 where Gansevoort Street meets the Hudson River. He described it as a “temple to sun and water.” [READ MORE]

DAPPER BRUCE LAFITTE

NEW YORKER

This New Orleans artist emerged after Hurricane Katrina as a draftsman of epic vision and humble means, rendering scenes—of marching bands, Civil War battles, and the city after the storm—in astonishingly detailed aerial panoramas. Lafitte’s works in colored ink on paper are often immersively large, but his online exhibition “Stuck Inside,” on the Fierman gallery’s Web site, features two dozen new sketchbook-size works, made during the pandemic in New Orleans. These blunt drawings address the tremendous pain of our time. In one, a hybrid of Klansman and cop points a gun at a black girl; another depicts Trump as a colorless ghoul in the center of a radial composition featuring Confederate statues and figures in Sieg heil salutes. Colorful portraits of African-American Mardi Gras revellers in fabulous costumes strike a joyous note, but images of coffins lifted through crowds act as foils, showing a tragic flip side to the celebration. In Lafitte’s city, as across the U.S., the pandemic—like police violence—has taken a disproportionate toll on black communities, and his powerful drawings illuminate the shameful connection.[READ MORE]

YENI MAO

PROXYCO GALLERY

This exhibition focuses on a group of Mexican artists that lived and worked in the US as well as American artists that resided in Mexico from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present in order to dwell on the transnational character of their productions. By including works produced in the last century, the aim is to emphasize the continuity of this condition, creative exchanges, and circulation of ideas beyond borders. The transnational character of these works gives them a certain significance that cannot be understood in terms of any singular national context. They call attention “to the political, economic, and cultural relations that do not take political borders as their ultimate horizon, as well as to their criticism of the normative and exclusionary functions of nationalism”.[1] Within the histories of modern art of both countries, these sets of dialogues and relations began after the Mexican Revolution of 1910; that is from the 1920s. By the end of the 1930s, numerous American artists had traveled to Mexico to attest to the “Renaissance” of its arts, and some of them produced works there. Simultaneously, Mexican artists, particularly male muralists, received commissions for monumental works in the US as well as exhibitions in galleries and museums. [READ MORE]

DAPPER BRUCE LAFITTE

ART NET

Ever wonder what a Where’s Waldo? illustration might look like if its creator had spent his life confronting racist terrorism in America? Well, the drawings of self-taught, New Orleans-based artist Dapper Bruce Lafitte offer some insight. After years of creating crowded images centered on parades, boxing matches, and other mostly joyful scenes, Lafitte’s 40 new works face up to the bitter realities of the US under President Donald Trump (the “45” referenced in the show’s title), with Klansmen, police shootings, and lynchings now taking center stage. [READ MORE]

DAPPER BRUCE LAFITTE

GALLERIE DELLE PRIGIONI

The exhibition, curated by Nicolas Vamvouklis, focuses on the human body: a vessel of existential struggle from which ingenuity and creativity flow. Dance is a metaphor that guides us on a journey beginning with introspection and leading to performative acts. The body moves, stops, resumes, and gains strength within a group, into a crescendo that passes from decadence to triumph. In the cells of the former Habsburg prison, the show curated by Nicolas Vamvouklis brings together sculptures, paintings, prints and videos by international artists. The starting point of the exhibition is the tension between inner and outer worlds, public and private realms, interpreted through the idea of the body as a shell that is both a home and a prison. The focus then broadens to the collective dimension and observes the performative roles the body plays in social gatherings of celebration, mourning or protest. Soundsuits – the iconic series in which Nick Cave blends armor, ceremonial dress and couture fashion – becomes a symbol of autonomy and empowerment. [READ MORE]

CRISTINE BRACHE

ARTFORUM - THE ELLIE AWARD

The Ellies are divided into three categories: The Creator Award, which offers project grants ranging from $2,000 to $25,000 to realize a visual arts project; $5,000 Teacher Travel Grants, which enable art educators to experience another city or country in order to enrich their teachings in the classroom; and the $75,000 Michael Richards Award, which honors an artist who is “achieving the highest levels of professional distinction in the visual arts through their practice.” [READ MORE]

MATTHEW KIRK

EITELJORG MUSEUM

INDIANAPOLIS – Five foremost Native American/First Nations artists have been selected for the 2019 Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship. Curator-chosen selections of their work – including installations, paintings, video and mixed media – will go on exhibit Nov. 16, 2019, at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art. Each artist receives a $25,000 unrestricted Fellowship award, is part of the exhibition and will be featured in a catalog. Additionally, works by each Eiteljorg Fellow will be purchased for the museum’s permanent collection. [READ MORE]

UMAN

TIMEOUT

Born in Somalia and raised in Kenya, Uman landed in the U.S. via Denmark in 2004, and has since settled in upstate New York. As pleasant as those surroundings must be, it’s unlikely that they can match the majestic African landscape of Uman’s memory—or at least, you can surmise as much from her gallery debut. Paintings of leopard spot patterns and monochromatic profiles of camels are joined by a silhouetted self-portrait and a padded black-vinyl chair scrawled with the message, “I will sit here and wait for you” in white. It all resounds with the plaintive sense of loss familiar to exiles. [READ MORE]

UMAN

THE NEW YORK TIMES

The multimedia artist Uman made a splash on the New York scene when she had her first solo show at White Columns in September 2015, followed quickly — maybe a little too quickly — by a second show three months later at Louis B. James on the Lower East Side. Her third show, “I Will Sit Here and Wait for You,” at Fierman, overseen by David Fierman, a former partner at James, is smaller than its predecessors — four paintings and two sculptures. But it serves to keep in sight a truly gifted self-taught artist who was born in Somalia, raised in Kenya and came to the United States in 2004. [READ MORE]

CRISTINE BRACHE

CUBAN ART NEWS, CUBAN ROOTS: 6 ARTISTS TO WATCH

Cristine Brache. Born in Miami, of Cuban and Puerto Rican descent, Brache currently lives in Toronto. But she was an active presence in Miami earlier this year with Cristine’s Secret Garden (2019), an installation at Locust Projects. A dreamlike re-envisioning of her childhood home and its front yard, the work also takes inspiration from the Santería shrines on her neighbors’ lawns—“a unique facet of Miami’s cultural landscape,” as Brache put it. [READ MORE]

YENI MAO

THE WASTELAND, NICELLE BEAUCHENE GALLERY, CURATED BY MIKA HARDING

Nicelle Beauchene is pleased to present The Waste Land, a group exhibition including the works of Andrés Bedoya, Bea Fremderman, Saskia Krafft, Yeni Mao, James Miller, Marianne Vitale, and Celeste Wilson. The exhibition takes its name from the poem by T.S. Eliot. He published The Waste Land shortly after the end of World War I—empire was in decline, millions of soldiers and civilians were dead from the War, the populace was fractured by violence and disillusioned by rapidly shifting cultural and political landscapes. The poem’s second stanza focuses on the ecological effects of war, portraying a world where only shadows and dust are left behind. [READ MORE]

CRISTINE BRACHE

IT WILL NEVER BE QUITE FAMILIAR TO YOU AT OOLITE ARTS MIAMI

It will never become quite familiar to you is a group exhibition that explores notions of heritage and cultural identity through the works of eight artists who have ties to the United States and the global south. The exhibition aims to mine the personal histories, connections, and relationships that each artist has with their respective nationalities in order to gain a broader understanding of home, ethnic identity, and the immigrant experience. [READ MORE]

DOMINIC NURRE

THE NEW YORKER

A conceptual portrait—dispassionate yet deeply personal—emerges in this taut installation, a view of the artist’s late father as a self-absorbed son, a gun enthusiast, and a white-collar criminal. In tone, Nurre’s piece suggests a cool counterpart to Louise Bourgeois’s room-filling cri de coeur  “The Destruction of the Father,”  from 1974, with the key difference being that Nurre’s materials are all ready-made. [READ MORE]

KELLY JAZVAC

MILAN TRIENNALE

Chunks of "plastiglomerate" found by Canadian artist Kelly Jazvac on a Hawaiian beach form part of this year's Milan Triennale exhibition, illustrating how the anthropocene era is leading to the formation of new man-made minerals. The hybrid material is the result of plastic items washed up on the shore fusing with shells, sand and other natural materials when burnt in campfires lit on the beach. The ready-made artworks are presented as a marker of the anthropocene, a proposed new geological era where human impact has become the dominant force on the earth's geology. "The heavier fragments could potentially be preserved in the sediment record, leaving a permanent human-made mark in the Earth's stratiography," reads the exhibition text, which describes the objects as "fossils of the future". "I think it is important to show them because of the warning signs they indicate and the curiosity they generate," Jazvac told Dezeen. "I find them beautiful and horrific at the same time. "The objects are on display as part of Broken Nature: Design Takes On Human Survival, the exhibition that forms the XXII International Exhibition of La Triennale di Milano in Milan, Italy. [READ MORE]

AARON SKOLNICK IN “THE HOT SEAT”

KMAC MUSEUM

A chair is a customary offering within our shared codes of polite behavior. For designers, it is a primary object for interpreting the intersection of function and aesthetics. In contemporary artistic practice it has become an indelible focus of creative inquiry for artists, working in a variety of media, who employ the chair for its ability to embody space, status, personal identity, memory, family history, and other aspects of our humanity. With arms, legs, a seat and a back, the chair can become a surrogate for the human body, reflecting the essence of a person and the lived experience.  [READ MORE]

JIMMY WRIGHT WITH RACHEL HARRISON AND ALBERT OEHLEN

CORBETT VS. DEMPSEY

Opening Reception Friday, April 5, 6 to 8pm Exhibition, April 5 - June 22 In the North Gallery, CvsD is pleased to present a three-person show of works by Rachel Harrison, Albert Oehlen, and Jimmy Wright. The drawings, sculpture, and paintings sustain an uneasy state of mind, riding the line between the comic and the melancholic. Harrison’s sculpture “Before You Have To” incorporates a hat gifted to the artist but is also perhaps a memorial to a time that lies ahead; Wright’s two monumental paintings have both a deep sense of sadness and a playful sexual undertone, signaling mourning and reawakening. The first of Wright’s many flower works, they were painted 1988-91, in homage to the artist’s partner who had recently died of AIDS. In four modestly sized ink drawings, Oehlen also manages to subsume several moods into a single complex space, his creature-like trees ranging from ominous to brooding to gleeful. [READ MORE]

AARON SKOLNICK

ATLANTA BIENNIAL

Every year, more cities mount biennials. Over a century of variations on a similar theme, and the purpose of this recurring model remains unclear—beyond, perhaps, attracting cultural tourism, and in some cases fueling the fires of nationalism or regional identity. These exhibitions are known to elevate the visibility of emerging and mid-career artists, but as a curatorial format, the biennial rarely yields stronger results than any other group exhibition. Nonetheless, the number of biennials, triennials, and quinquennials worldwide now hovers around three hundred, having reached only fifty prior to the 1990s.[READ MORE]

AMIR GUBERSTEIN

ART FORUM

Interested in the “choreography that comes out of the prohibition of movement,” Israeli-born Amir Guberstein assembles a body of nine new paintings for “Lamentations,” his first solo show in New York. Guberstein’s 2017 exhibition at New York’s American Jewish Historical Society was canceled due to censorship, courtesy of right-wing Judaism: His pieces incorporate black and white gesso mixed with sand from Israel and Palestine, which is then pushed through a silk screen. Of course, the artist collects the sand himself. This is a crossing, but to some, it’s considered a transgression.

In his work, Guberstein, like Anselm Kiefer and Cy Twombly, appropriates phrases from literary sources. For the suite of paintings here, the artist turned to The Book of Lamentations, found in the Torah and the Old Testament, which tells the story of the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. Guberstein’s choice transcriptions (“O daughter Zion!”), alongside his use of sand, go beyond a singular “city lament,” as the Judeo-Christian tradition of poetic elegy for lost or fallen cities would have it, and instead mourn two different versions of the same city, fought over by fractious states.[READ MORE]

CRISTINE BRACHE

LOCUST PROJECTS

Often unapologetic, diaristic, and placing the viewer in the position of the voyeur, Cristine Brache’s work ambiguously deals with identity, power dynamics, and templates of the female body and psyche in relation to public and private space. Born in Miami to Cuban and Puerto Rican parents, Brache's installation at Locust Projects is inspired by her childhood home and brings a hyperreal version of its front yard into the gallery. Exploring boundaries of private and public space in relation to womanhood, the exhibition centers around porcelain shrines of the maternal figures in the artist's life. Informed by Santeria shrines the artist saw as a child adorning lawns in her neighborhood, Brache uses Santeria's codification of Orishas and their attributes as a template for humanizing and preserving the central figures in her life, celebrating their many facets. In its totality, the artist says the exhibition is a “syncretized constellation of my personal experience, a diary of sorts, that adopts a unique facet of Miami’s cultural landscape in form.” [READ MORE]

JIMMY WRIGHT

M+B

M+B is proud to present a career spanning exhibition of paintings and works on paper by artist Jimmy Wright, his first solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition runs from February 16 through March 30, 2019, with an opening reception on Saturday, February 16 from 6 to 9 pm. 

Jimmy Wright, born in 1944, is a Kentucky native. He earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1967. Upon graduation, he received the George D. Brown Travel Fellowship, which enabled him to study and travel in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Wright earned an MFA from Southern Illinois University in 1971. His work hangs in many public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. His work was recently on view at Cooper Cole, Toronto, in a group exhibition curated by Ashton Cooper titled “Terribly Vulnerable and Terribly Hard,” Lesley Heller Workspace, NYC; Brattleboro Museum, VT; Nassau County Museum of Art, NY; Chang Kai Shek Memorial Hall, Taipei, Taiwan and Hang MingShu Museum, Suzhou, P. R. China. His book, Jimmy Wright New York Underground 1973-90, was released by DAP. [READ MORE]

CRISTINE BRACHE AND BRAD PHILLIPS, EPITHALAMIUM

ANAT EGBI

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present Epithalamium, a two-person show with Cristine Brache and Brad Phillips, organized by Blair and Eli Hansen. The exhibition will be on view at AE2, January 26 through March 9th, with an opening reception on January 26, 6-8pm.

Taking its name from the epithalamium, a poem written for a bride, Cristine Brache and Brad Phillips, wife and husband artists, examine the potential of marriage, allowing their lived experience to speak to larger narratives of bodily trauma and mortality, while alluding to the intimate qualities of a unique partnership. [READ MORE]

AARON SKOLNICK

2019 ATLANTA BIENNAL

Since its inception in 1985 the Atlanta Biennial has been an important platform for contemporary art from our region. The exhibition aims to address complexities and deep vernacular traditions of the Southeast. This exhibition continues the longstanding efforts of Atlanta Contemporary to present and debut newly commissioned work by artists from around our region. For the 2019 Atlanta Biennial, the curators will conduct studio visits in 10 states – Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee – and will look high and low, over, under, and in-between to celebrate the most compelling, creative voices working around us today. [READ MORE]

AARON SKOLNICK

BURNAWAY

In the weeks following the opening of his first solo exhibition in New York, I interviewed Kentucky-based artist Aaron Skolnick (b. 1989, Erlander, Kentucky) about the body of work featured in “A Landscape that I know,” on view at Fierman Gallery on the Lower East Side through January 13. The exhibition is comprised of graphite self-portraits and portraits of the artist’s late husband, artist Louis Zoellar Bickett II (1950 – 2017), that Skolnick made during the last month of his husband’s life as Bickett succumbed to the incurable neurodegenerative disease ALS. [READ MORE]

CRISTINE BRACHE

MECA

A retrospective of the five Puerto Rican Miss Universe winners through the lens of Miami artist Cristine Brache will represent Fierman, a New York gallery. Gender politics and power are considered through vanity-style conceptual portraits – porcelain mirrors, individual sculptures, congratulatory flowers and ribbons – installed on-site, in addition to a zine, Fucking Attention, in which Brache used a mathematical algorithm to combine images of titleholders with news articles about Trump’s tenure as the pageant’s president and, later, his treatment of Puerto Rico post-Maria. [READ MORE]

JENEEN FREI NJOOTLI

NATIONAL GALLERY FOR SOBEY ART PRIZE

“When did your art practice begin to resemble what it is now?” The question – an icebreaker intended to get interview subjects comfortable talking about themselves – generally elicits a rundown of degree programs, exhibitions and milestone projects. Not with Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation artist Jeneen Frei Njootli, however, who shoulders the question by its foundation instead. The Whitehorse-born, Vancouver-based artist is representing the West Coast and Yukon as a finalist for the 2018 Sobey Art Award and her work is on view in the Sobey Art Award Exhibition opening this week at the National Gallery of Canada. [READ MORE]

MATTHEW KIRK

PRELUDE PROJECTS
OBJECT // TOTEM
Eny Lee Parker, Hollister Hovey, Derrick Velasquez + Matthew Kirk
10.12.18 - 10.21.18

MATTHEW KIRK

MAKASIINI CONTEMPORARY
LOTS OF BACK AND FORTH, 2018
Mixed media on Sheetrock
91 x 122 cm / 36 x 48 inches 

CRISTINE BRACHE

POEMS is the debut poetry collection from artist and writer Cristine Brache, written between 2008-2018. Unapologetic and placing the reader in the position of the voyeur, Brache’s poems ambiguously deal with identity, power dynamics, and templates of the female body and psyche. Read an interview with Cristine Brache here. Book release 11/01/2018

JIMMY WRIGHT

GREENSPON GALLERY

June 28 to August 3, 2018
71 Morton Street, between Greenwich and Hudson streets, New York City

The eroticism in the light-saturated scenes of Eilshemius and Klossowski tends towards the furtive; not so the rampant action in the darkened cellars of Jimmy Wright’s graphite drawings of 1970s leather bars, with their tough, gritty evocations of rough trade in dark corners. The artist known for most of his career for exuberant, expressionist flower paintings worked (and it would seem played) underground in the pre-AIDS New York he discovered on moving via Chicago from his native Kentucky. Legendary clubs like the Anvil brought out a combination of Francis Bacon interiors and Henry Moore shelter drawings to produce something at once mythic and visceral. His figuration is equal parts Leon Golub and Tom of Finland. A more tender touch – from artist and lovers alike – emerges from the bathhouse drawings, especially an exquisite drawing in watercolor pencil of a guy feeding his partner poppers where hastily scribbly yet resolved hieratic heads, very redolent of early Hockney, dissipate into fey and stylized lower limbs in a way that mimics, perhaps, the clarifying rush and melting away effects of the narcotic. The overt sexuality of Wright’s youthful drawings ought to send us back to his flowers to look for a second subject, the equivalents of buff he-men and writhing limbs amidst the tendrils and petals. [READ MORE]

CRISTINE BRACHE

EMBAJADA

EMBAJADA in Partnership with Artist Alliance Inc. (AAI) and Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center (The Clemente) 
107 Suffolk St, Room #406, NYC
July–December, 2018

Cristine Brache
October 28th 2018 - November 28, 2018

For her residency, Cristine Brache will create a series of portrait studies of her grandmother, Juliana, in an effort to redress the systemic cultural erasure often experienced generationally by diasporas. This body of work serves to identify and place cultural characteristics specific to the Caribbean in contemporary art discourse.

Cristine Brache (b.1984, Miami) is an artist and writer of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent living and working in Toronto. She holds an MFA in Fine Art Media from the Slade School of Fine Art (London, UK). Recent exhibitions include FIERMAN, New York; Team Gallery, New York; MOCA, Miami; Bow Arts, London; The Museum of the Moving Image, New York; Collectif Jeune Cinéma, Paris; and Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover. Her poetry has been published in Publishing Genius, New York Tyrant, Fanzine, Apogee, and E Ratio Postmodern Poetry Journal, among others. Writing about her work has appeared in The New Yorker, and Cordite Poetry Review. [READ MORE]

DAPPER BRUCE LAFITTE

THE NEW YORK TIMES

When the artist who currently goes by Dapper Bruce Lafitte returned to his native New Orleans a year after being displaced by Hurricane Katrina, he started making drawings of his parade-mad city’s high-school marching bands. Starting with schools that had been closed by the storm and working from memory, he initiated both his own artistic practice, which has subsequently blossomed in all sorts of directions, and an open-ended document of New Orleans folk history. The drawings, part of his new show, “The Culture,” at David Fierman, evoke notes made by a careful court herald. The figures are thorough, but rudimentary, while the colors, applied with marker, are vivid and precise. In two pieces from 2014, the Alabama State University band wears yellow and black and the Leopards of the Lake Area New Tech Early College High School wear red and blue. All of them play gleaming brass.

The key to the drawings’ magic is the orderly arrangement marching bands take in real life. This lets the artist, formerly known as Bruce Davenport Jr., picture them, and lets us see them, in two ways at once: in a flat grid, with all the feelings of completion and control provided by a well-designed diagram, and at an angled, bird’s-eye view that suggests a larger, more complex vista to explore.

For this show, he has also used work by fellow New Orleans artists to fill the gallery with some of that expanded context. Color photos by Moriah Blue give a sense of the Crescent City’s sensory overload, and the intricate beadwork and comic-book imagery of Torrence Batiste’s pink “Mardi Gras Indian” costume its unique aesthetic dedication. Brian Guidry’s burlap clothing — made from discarded coffee sacks that he collected while working on the docks, and nodding to both the history of slavery and haute couture — is weirdly unforgettable. WILL HEINRICH [READ MORE]

JIMMY WRIGHT

THE SEAM, THE FAULT, THE FLAW

the Seam, the Fault, the Flaw draws on Roland Barthes’ 1973 work The Pleasure of the Text, in which he argues for text that is as powerful, unpredictable, and textured as the human body, which should be consumed to the point of orgasmic bliss. The radically subjective reader is anyone, from “whatever class, whatever group he may belong, without respect to cultures or languages…” Barthes notes that the “consequences” from such a union “would be huge, perhaps even harrowing,” an acknowledgement that binds the sensual to the political. In this state of bliss, what he refers to as jouissance, reader and text are cut loose from the social and political ideologies structured by and enacted through language. [READ MORE]

KELLY JAZVAC

THE GLOBE AND MAIL

When you make a project of collecting scrap plastic, it’s not long before you’re drowning in the stuff; if you look for waste, artist Kelly Jazvac knows, you find it everywhere. 

For the past nine years, the Montreal-based sculptor has piled her studio with vinyl offcuts and errors, deinstalled billboards and used-up banners. Preparing Lamina Stamina, a solo exhibition at Museum London, she wants to communicate the size of that stash, so she’s applied swatches of the salvaged vinyl around the baseboards of a large gallery space, arranged chromatically like a colour wheel. Plastic waste is so plentiful, the display suggests, it comes in all shades of the rainbow. 

Heading off material destined for the landfill, Jazvac repositions it as objects that deserve not mindless consumption, but close consideration. Her artwork asks: What does disposability really entail? Nothing disappears just because it left us in a blue bin or a trash bag or a dumpster. In sculpture and film, she visualizes the ubiquity of plastic pollution, observable at every scale – from sheets of PVC broad enough to dress a skyscraper to particle-sized microplastics in Lake Ontario. She approaches the issue with the rigour and care of a scientist. She works with them regularly. When their fields are often divorced, she says that to solve this mess, it’s going to take collaboration between disciplines. She wants more voices engaged in the same conversation. It’s a leitmotif of the exhibition. [READ MORE]

DIETMAR BUSSE

CAST OF CHARACTERS

JUNE 14th, 2018 - SEPTEMBER 16TH, 2018

OPENING RECEPTION - THURSDAY, JUNE 15th, 2018

The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division and The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center are proud to present Cast of Characters, a dramatic transformation of the Bureau by artist Liz Collins featuring a salon-style exhibition of portraits by 95 LGBTQ artists. Cast of Characters will be the Bureau’s most ambitious exhibition to date. We are thrilled to partner with Liz Collins on this exciting exhibition, but we need your help to help us fully realize her vision. [READ MORE]

JENEEN FREI NJOOTLI

The Sobey Art Foundation and the National Gallery of Canada are pleased to present the five finalists for the 2018 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s prestigious contemporary art prize that recognizes and supports emerging artists from across the country. [READ MORE]

CRISTINE BRACHE

THE LITTLE BABY SHOW

OPENING - FRIDAY, JUNE 1st 2018, 7-10

This show explores contemporary motherhood in regards to possession, religion, domination, and cuteness.

A portion of sales goes to the Trust Women Foundation in Wichita, Kansas.

[READ MORE]

KELLY JAZVAC

LAMINA STAMINA AT THE MUSEUM LONDON

May 15th, 2018 - September 9th, 2018

For more than a decade, London artist (now Montreal-based) Kelly Jazvac has created innovative art from the vinyl offcuts and other refuse of commercial sign makers. Lamina Stamina brings together an array of her diverse, often experimental pieces, including the recent Museum London acquisition Battle of Leisure (2013)—shown here for the first time—alongside a site-specific work produced from her stockpile of plastic detritus.

Jazvac develops unconventional objects and two-dimensional pieces that press against walls, linger across floors, and feature soft layers and bubbled skins. These works can be seen as contemporary contributions to the history of Canadian abstraction; some mimic living organisms, and others remain resolutely alternative creations .. [READ MORE]

MATTHEW KIRK

MATTHEW KIRK X ERICKSON ÆSTHETICS
CHAIRS 

Opening Party, Friday April 18th, 2018

6PM - 10PM 219 MADISON STREET

FIERMAN X Constance present MATTHEW KIRK X ERICKSON ÆSTHETICS: CHAIRS, a suite of collaborative unique chairs as well as paintings and design objects by Kirk and Erickson.  The show will open with a party on Friday April 13 from 6-10 PM and remain on view Saturday- Sunday April 14-15 and Friday - Sunday April 20-22 from 12 to 6 or by appointment.   Matthew Kirk's solo show 1978 is concurrently on view at FIERMAN through April 29.   

Constance is located at 219 Madison Street and is the new venture of Nathan Gwynne and Carlos Rigau. 

Matthew Kirk (b. 1978, Ganado, AZ) lives and works in Queens, NY.  A self-taught artist, he has recently had exhibitions at Adams and Ollman, Portland; Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Chicago; Louis B. James, NY; Exit Art, New York.  His work has been published in The New York Observer, Modern Painters, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. 

Ben Erickson (b. 1978, Rutland, VT), lives and works in Brooklyn.  His work has been featured in Architectural Digest, T Magazine, Luxe, and Interior Design, among other publications. ERICKSON ÆSTHETICS is currently shown by Maison Gerard, New York; Colony Gallery, New York; Not So General, Los Angeles; Modern Living Supplies, New York; and Cooler Gallery, Brooklyn, among other venues.  

JIMMY WRIGHT

COOPER COLE is pleased to present Terribly Vulnerable and Terribly Hard, a group exhibition curated by Ashton Cooper.

In James Baldwin’s 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room, the ill-fated lovers David and Giovanni first meet in a fictional Parisian gay bar that serves as a major setting in the book. Among the bar’s regulars are “the usual, knife-blade lean, tight trousered boys” who Baldwin describes as having “something behind their eyes at once terribly vulnerable and terribly hard.”  In considering these policed and unacceptable bodies, Baldwin employs a complex characterization that complicates a straightforward understanding of vulnerability. In intertwining vulnerability with hardness, he allows each term to exceed their oppositional meanings. Their hardness is fragile; their vulnerability is tough. [READ MORE]

MATTHEW KIRK

'Hog's Curve' curated by Joseph Hart at Halsey McKay Gallery

April 12th, 2018 - May 12th, 2018

[READ MORE]

CRISTINE BRACHE

Essex Flowers is pleased to present a new digital commission by Cristine Brache. Personal Effects presents a selection of private letters written by three preteens in the mid-nineties, given to Cristine Brache by her friend, Honey Bee, the original owner who received them. [READ MORE]

DIETMAR BUSSE

Book Launch & Artist Talk
Sunday, February 26th, 4:00 - 6:00

Artist Talk with Jane Ursula Harris at 4:30

DAPPER BRUCE LAFITTE

EXHIBITION AT GALERIE TATJANA PIETERS, GHENT - Opening, March 18th, 2018

CRISTINE BRACHE

EYE TO EYE
AN EXHIBITION BENEFITING SANCTUARY FOR FAMILIES

DAPPER BRUCE LAFITTE

SOLO BOOTH WITH M&B AT LOS ANGELES CONTEMPORARY

SCOTT COVERT IN

RAVELIN MAGAZINE

Under the long, obnoxious shadow that 250 South Street — the new 5,000 million story condo going up next to the Manhattan Bridge — casts on Henry street, I stopped by Situations, the brilliantly scrappy storefront gallery for a look at the Scott Covert show. Just as the gallery lies in the shadow of final-phase gentrification, Covert deals with that most permanent of shadows: death. [READ MORE]

SCOTT COVERT IN

NEW YORKER MAGAZINE

In the zine accompanying this two-gallery show, there’s a telling photo of a minivan, its back door open to reveal stacked, rolled-up canvases. Covert, a figure of New York’s fabled downtown scene (whose work also appears in MOMA’s “Club 57” exhibition), has spent several decades creating paintings from gravestone rubbings, a technique that takes him on cross-country pilgrimages. Surprisingly, the results are anything but macabre. One glittery white work features the name and short life span of the Warhol superstar Candy Darling, floating above a rubbing of Marilyn Monroe’s grave, as if uniting the performers in Heaven. A deep-blue monochrome pairs the frenemies Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. [READ MORE]

SCOTT COVERT IN

ARTFORUM

Death pairs well with glamour: Think of Marlene Dietrich’s prostitute-spy character in Dishonored (1931), as she applies her lipstick before meeting a firing squad; Bette Davis as terminally ill socialite Judith Traherne in Dark Victory (1939); or Divine’s punk murderess Dawn Davenport in John Waters’sFemale Trouble (1974), where the actor soliloquizes from an electric chair like a demented starlet accepting her first, and final, Oscar.

[READ MORE]

JIMMY WRIGHT IN

JIMMY WRIGHT AND JOHN CORBETT IN CONVERSATION

SCOTT COVERT IN

CLUB 57: FILM PERFORMANCE AND ART IN THE EAST VILLAGE, 1978-1983

Museum of Modern Art
11 W 53rd Street, New York, NY
October 31 - April 1

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.

KELLY JAZVAC IN

PLASTIGLOMERATES BOOK LAUNCH

E-FLUX 311 EAST BROADWAY
October 7, 5-7PM

6PM Jazvac in conversation with Paige West, Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College

Kelly Jazvac Plastiglomerates published by Durable Goods, Toronto

CHUCK NANNEY IN

1107 MANHATTAN AVE PT.II

SPENCER BROWNSTONE
10 SEPTEMBER – 29 OCTOBER, 2017

DAPPER BRUCE LAFITTE IN

KINGPIN OF THE ANTPIN

NTUIT CENTER CHICAGO
OCTOBER 12-DECEMBER 10, 2017
OPENING FRIDAY OCT 13

CHUCK NANNEY IN

Selected Ambient Works, Volume II

MOCA TUCSON
17 JUNE - 1 OCTOBER 2017

Chuck Nanney will exhibit sculptural works made over the last three years, along with sound pieces, comprising a mini-retrospective of recent activity. Frequently protruding from the walls, painted vividly, and installed at various heights, the works have a Calder-like ability to playfully conflate stability and mobility. Intermixing minimalist tendencies with a distinctive rough-hewn quality, their brightness and seeming joviality are complimented and belied by a devotional quality that speaks eloquently of survival. Sound pieces composed of cut-up poetry and experimental pulsing pop melded with airy drones will accompany the visual display. 

THE DAPPER BRUCE LAFITTE IN

NEW HORIZONS:
SELF-TAUGHT ART IN THE 21ST CENTURY

SHUFORD GALLERY
September 23, 2017 – January 7, 2018

DAPPER BRUCE LAFITTE IN

ARTISTS STUDIOS

APRIL 22, 2017

DAPPER BRUCE LAFITTE IN

HYPERALLERGIC

APRIL 21, 2017

Drawing on Firsthand Experience to Depict the Horrors of Hurricane Katrina: Dapper Bruce Lafitte’s work records a singular personal trajectory in a grander, historically significant moment. [READ MORE]

DAPPER BRUCE LAFITTE IN

HARPERS

APRIL 2017

CRISTINE BRACHE IN

THE EDITORIAL MAGAZINE

MARCH 6, 2017

Cristine Brache’s new show I Love Me, I Love Me Not, uses sculpture and video as self-portraiture to confront a complicated relationship to the self, identity and history. As a child of immigrant parents from both Cuba and Puerto Rico, Brache describes her experience as a type of “cultural amnesia.” [READ MORE] 

CRISTINE BRACHE IN

THE NEW YORKER

MARCH 6, 2017

In this deceptively demure show, the Toronto-based artist reflects on her identity as the Miami-born daughter of parents from Cuba and Puerto Rico, and finds it full of contradictions. A video begins with found fetish porn in which a woman eats insects and ends with Brache’s grandfather telling her that a woman without makeup is like a beautiful house whose garden has gone to waste. Delicate ceramic works—a dunce cap on a stool, a wall clock with no hands—evoke fragility. A curly-maple table displays porcelain playing cards, each one a Queen of Hearts featuring the artist’s profile.

KIRSTY ROBERTSON IN 

E-FLUX
Journal #78 - December 2016

Kelly Jazvac
Plastiglomerate

In 2012, geologist Patricia Corcoran and sculptor Kelly Jazvac travelled to Kamilo Beach, following a tip from oceanographer Charles Moore that the beach was covered in a plastic-sand conglomerate. Moore suspected nearby volcanoes were to blame. In fact, the plastic and beach detritus had been combined into a single substance by bonfires. Human action on the beach had created what Corcoran and Jazvac named “plastiglomerate,” a sand-and-plastic conglomerate.  [READ MORE]