Flashback-NYC Public Art- Ai Weiwei- “Arch”

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Public Art, Sculptors / Sculpture, Seattle, Washington
Jul 112025
 

Ai Weiwei‘s Arch, pictured above, was part of his 2017 multi-site exhibition Good Fences Make Good Neighbors. The exhibition was curated by Public Art Fund and took place in several parts of New York City. This work was located in Washington Square Park.

About the exhibition from Public Art Fund’s website-

Ai Weiwei conceived this multi-site, multi-media exhibition for public spaces, monuments, buildings, transportation sites, and advertising platforms throughout New York City. Collectively, these elements comprise a passionate response to the global migration crisis and a reflection on the profound social and political impulse to divide people from each other. For Ai, these themes have deep roots. He experienced exile with his family as a child, life as an immigrant and art student in New York, and more recently, brutal repression as an artist and activist in China. The exhibition draws on many aspects of Ai’s career as a visual artist and architect, and is informed by both his own life experience and the plight of displaced people. In 2016, Ai and his team traveled to 23 countries and more than 40 refugee camps while filming his documentary, Human Flow.

“Good fences make good neighbors” is a folksy proverb cited in American poet Robert Frost’s Mending Wall, where the need for a boundary wall is being questioned. Ai chose this title with an ironic smile and a keen sense of how populist notions often stir up fear and prejudice. Visitors to the exhibition will discover that Ai’s “good fences” are not impenetrable barriers but powerful, immersive, and resonant additions to the fabric of the city.

Seattle Art Museum is currently showing Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei, his first US retrospective in over a decade. The exhibition “highlights the artistic strategies of his 40-year career for questioning forms of power”. It will be on view until 9/7/2025.

Throwback- NYC Art Shows- Jesse Krimes at MoMA PS1 in 2020

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Brooklyn, Collage, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Queens, Sculptors / Sculpture
Jul 102025
 

“Apokaluptein 16389067” 2010-2013, Prison bed sheets, transferred newsprint, color pencil, graphite, and gouache

Apokaluptein: 16389067 by Jesse Krimes was part of the group exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, on view at MoMA PS1 from 2020-2021. This work can currently be seen as part of his solo exhibition Corrections, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art until 7/13/25.

From MoMa PS1 about Krimes and Apokaluptein–

Jesse Krimes graduated from art school shortly before he was arrested and incarcerated. He spent his first year in prison in an isolation cell in North Carolina. After being transferred to Federal Correctional Institution, Fairton, in New Jersey, Krimes formed a multiracial art collective with Jared Owens and Gilberto Rivera, whose works also appear in this exhibition. During his time at Fairton, Krimes used penal matter to address questions of political theory, philosophy, aesthetics, and value.

Made over three years, Apokaluptein: 16389067 comprises thirty-nine prison bed sheets that depict a sweeping landscape representing heaven, earth, and hell. Using hair gel and a spoon, Krimes transferred images from print media to the bed sheets, drawing and painting around them to create an exploration of social value, state power, idealized beauty, and extractive capitalism. The work’s title combines the Greek word “apokaluptein,” meaning “to reveal” or “to uncover,” with Krimes’s prison number. The mass destruction Krimes depicts resonates with what he has described as his “loss of identity and stripping away of all societal markers and this destruction that happened on a very personal level….You lose your name; you become this number.” Imprisoned people are rendered state property and exploited to produce state goods: the bedsheets that compose Apokaluptein: 16389067 were made by imprisoned workers through a federal government-initiated program called UNICOR.

Krimes made each panel of this work individually, using the edge of his desk to measure the horizon on each sheet so that the panels would line up once joined. Assisted by incarcerated mailroom workers and sympathetic guards, the artist clandestinely transported finished panels out of prison before they could be confiscated. Upon his release in 2014, he assembled Apokaluptein: 16389067 and was finally able to see the work in its totality for the first time.

From The Met’s website about Corrections–

Photography has played a key role in structuring systems of power in society, including those related to crime and punishment. This exhibition presents immersive contemporary installations by the artist Jesse Krimes (American, b. 1982) alongside nineteenth-century photographs from The Met collection by the French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon, who developed the first modern system of criminal identification before the adoption of fingerprinting.

Krimes’s image-based installations, made over the course of his six-year incarceration, reflect the ingenuity of an artist working without access to traditional materials. Employing prison-issued soap, hair gel, playing cards, and newspaper he created works of art that seek to disrupt and recontextualize the circulation of photographs in the media. Displayed at The Met in dialogue with Bertillon, whose pioneering method paired anthropomorphic measurements with photographs to produce the present-day mug shot, Krimes’s work raises questions about the perceived neutrality of our systems of identification and the hierarchies of social imbalance they create and reinscribe. An artist for whom collaboration and activism are vital, Krimes founded the Center for Art and Advocacy to highlight the talent and creative potential among individuals who have experienced incarceration and to support and improve outcomes for formerly incarcerated artists.

One of his recent works on view in Corrections, Naxos, was created to pair with Apokaluptein.

About the work from curator Lisa Sutcliffe’s essay on The Met’s website–

The breadth of this interest in collaboration and advocacy can be seen in Naxos (2024), which features nearly ten thousand pebbles gathered from prison yards by incarcerated individuals around the country and shared with Krimes. Each hand-wrapped stone is suspended from a needle by a thread hand-printed with ink to match imagery from Apokaluptein. Installed across from each other, their pairing mirrors and deconstructs that earlier work, serving as a reflection of individuals caught up in the system of mass incarceration. The artist was inspired by the writings of psychologist Carl Jung, who warned of the danger of reducing individuals to statistics: Jung noted the impossibility of finding a river stone whose size matches the ideal average. With each distinctive yet anonymous pebble standing in for the mugshot, Krimes interweaves the complexity of individual experience with the broader social and political context in which mass incarceration exists.

Krimes’ Center for Art and Advocacy recently opened ts flagship location in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Its inaugural exhibition, Collective Gestures: Building Community through Practice,  highlights “the transformative work of over 35 artists who have participated in The Center’s Right of Return Fellowship Program” and will be on view until 9/20/25.

Flashback- Kerry James Marshall at Cleveland Museum of Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Cleveland, Mixed Media, Ohio Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Jul 042025
 

Bang, 1994, by Kerry James Marshall was on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2024.

From the museum about the painting-

One of Kerry James Marshall’s earliest and most iconic large-scale paintings, Bang depicts three Black children in a verdant suburban backyard, observing the Fourth of July. Invoking the grand tradition of European history painting, the work exemplifies Marshall’s commitment to, in the artist’s words, “representing Blackness in the extreme and letting it be beautiful. Bang embodies Marshall’s dedication to a vision of American culture that includes and honors Black histories.

 

Throwback- NYC Art Shows- Bo Bartlett at Miles McEnery Gallery in March 2025

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Jul 032025
 

In March of 2025, two of Bo Bartlett‘s series, Summer and Home, were on view at Miles McEnery Gallery in New York. This work in particular, Saudade (with The Painter to the left and The Skippers on the right) has an unsettling quality- note the smoke in the distance.

From the gallery’s website-

This exhibition brings together works from two distinct but intimately connected series: his early “Home” paintings and the more recent “Summer” works. While deeply personal, these works invite viewers to reflect on universal themes—longing, nostalgia, and the sense of home—offering a moment of connection through shared human experience. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated digital publication featuring an essay by Patricia Junker.

As Patricia Junker writes, “Bartlett embraces what he calls his topophilia: More than a connection, it is love of place.” Take his work, Home, where “we feel the texture of a subject’s madras shorts, the elasticity of her red knit headband, the suppleness of her black leather ballet flats, cast aside, and the soothing feel of cool grass on her bare feet and its scratchiness on a boy’s knees and palms. We know that time of day when light can penetrate a white linen shirt just so, and we know the quiet that allows a tuckered-out child to lie listening, lost in thought, on the verge of dreamland, perhaps. We take stock and try to make sense of a strange scene—a house of dark windows, a searching youth who crawls to peer around a corner, a forthright young woman at the center, a still baby at the far right. It seems as real before us as life itself. It is at once familiar and curious, because, as Eudora Welty has aptly put it, ‘Life is strange. Art makes it more believably so.’”

 

Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Thaddeus Mosley at Karma in 2023

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Public Art, Sculptors / Sculpture
Jun 202025
 

The hand carved wood sculptures above were created from 2020-2022 by Pittsburgh artist Thaddeus Mosley and were on view at Karma in NYC in 2023.

From the gallery’s press release-

In a recent photograph taken in his studio, Thaddeus Mosley peers between the soaring columns of his sculptures. They are gallant constructions of wood, each hand-carved and formed out of unique sections from three to four logs. With his chisel, Mosley exalts the warm tones and woodgrain which lay beneath the outer tree bark. His dimensions vary, ranging from monumental to modest, rounded to angular, vaulted to hovering just above the ground. Their presence is determined by Mosley’s negotiation between natural materials and an exploration of weight and space. A feat of balance, his sculptures exist in a constant state of suspension: heavy sections seem to float above the delicately-carved pieces that support them.

Mosley began creating wooden sculptures in the 1950s while working at the United States Postal Service, which enabled him to both provide for his family and develop his craft in his free time. At 96 years old, Mosley continues his life’s work as an artist in his Pittsburgh studio near the Allegheny River. A strong influence in his practice can be traced to his encounter with a photograph of African American grave markers in Georgia. According to Mosley, their slender, soaring forms called to mind Constantin Brâncuși’s Bird in Space (1923). He explains that “in each of them I saw a similar spirit, a similar approach to clean fluid shapes coming from people working close to the earth and trying to fuse the earth and human spirituality into a single form.”

Mosley allows the natural forms of wood to guide him toward a conceptual and aesthetic meeting point, where European modernism meets the abstract and interpretive traditions of West African mask-making, and the movement of his chisel captures the rhythmic improvisations of a Jazz soloist. Mosley’s process bears traces of Isamu Noguchi’s own navigation of natural materials, providing new meaning to the late sculptor’s adage that “it is weight which provides meaning to weightlessness.”

Working primarily in hardwoods such as walnut, cherry, and chestnut, Mosley reveres the surfaces he uncovers with his chisel: deep lustres, arcs of bright coloration, growth rings, and the shadowy depth within deep cuts. Panoramic Quarter (2021) brings together inverted forms, in which recessed spirals and connected logs create a dramatic inflection. Horizontality is emphasized in Phase of a Phrase (2022), while Path of Pendulum (2020) delights in the vertical movement of arching forms, which are composed in a gravity-defying embrace. His work dances with viewers as they encircle it.  Mosley’s dynamic forms encourage deep looking, whether it is in Id (2021), a low, conical carving, or Southwestern Suite (2021), in which monumental sections seem to vanish when viewed at specific angles. In Elegiac Stanza for Sam Gilliam (2022), Mosley honors the life of the abstract painter and close friend through a lyrical intersection of walnut, varying between hewn and smooth surfaces.

On rare occasions, Mosley has incorporated salvaged metals into particular pieces of hardwood. In the case of Industrial Collage (2022), a curved cut of steel is affixed to a base of walnut, from which Mosley has balanced two pieces of chestnut, adorned with pounded metal that has been grounded off from the steel section. Mosley salvaged the steel piece from an abandoned industrial building, where it was previously used as a support beam for an industrial fan. It stayed with him in his studio for fourteen years while Mosley waited, searching for the right slab of wood. Each piece of wood, every material for Mosley is subject to this process of aesthetic consideration: a three-dimensional call-and-response.

His work can currently be seen in City Hall Park in NYC for the exhibition Touching the Earth, on view until 11/16/2025. The eight bronzes included were cast from wood sculptures he made between 1996 and 2021.

For more information on the artist- this ARTNews article is an interesting read.

Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Cinthya Santos Briones at Photoville Festival in Brooklyn

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Brooklyn, Fiber Arts, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Public Art, Video and Film
Jun 202025
 

Founded in Brooklyn in 2011, Photoville is a free annual photography festival that includes over eighty exhibitions of local and international photography. The main exhibitions take place in shipping containers and on banners and cubes in Brooklyn Bridge Park- although there are other locations around the city. The festival also includes free events, demonstrations and talks.

The work above is from artist Cinthya Santos-Briones‘ series Herbolario Migrante (Migrant Herbalism). For these pieces she embroidered over cyanotypes and lumens of various medicinal herbs on fabric and also embroidered illustrations from the Cruz-Badiano Codex.

More information from Photoville–

Migrant Herbalism is a project that examines the belief system of traditional and popular medicine—Afro-indigenous—of Latin America and how their knowledge, healing practices, and rituals have migrated with forced displacement to the United States.

Through alternative techniques of cameraless photography, visual documentation, ancient codices, oral history, community workshops, and embroidery, I document and share ritual knowledge to heal physically and spiritually, with herbs and therapies offered by traditional healers, among communities of immigrants, in response to racial and economic disparities in health care access in New York City – where most of the “undocumented” immigrants do not have health insurance.

Inspired by Anna Atkins’ photographs of algae, I create photograms: cyanotypes and lumens on fabrics embroidered with illustrations from the Cruz-Badiano Codex – the oldest book on medicinal plants in the Americas, written in Nahuatl by the Aztecs in the 16th century – and medicinal herbs, barks, and seeds that have migrated with us and are found in botanicas in New York City. Through community workshops, migrant women collaborate in this project by writing ancestral knowledge about herbalism, with which I create hand-made artisanal books challenging Western beliefs about health.

This is the second and last weekend of the festival and as part of this year’s event programming, Santos-Briones is teaching a cyanotype workshop. Botanical Photography: Memory Printed in Light. Cyanotypes and Herbalism: Art from Nature  will take place tomorrow 6/21/25 from 12-2pm.

Pennsylvania Art Shows- Andrew Wyeth at Brandywine Museum of Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Drawing, Painting / Painters, Pennsylvania Art Shows
Jun 132025
 

“Adam”, 1963, Tempera on panel

“Adam”, 1963, Tempera on panel (detail)

The Brandywine Museum of Art is currently showing Human Nature, a selection of work by Andrew Wyeth focused on the human form. The museum has an extensive collection of the artist’s paintings and often has shows focused on him and his artistic family.

From the museum about this exhibition-

One of the artist Andrew Wyeth’s enduring legacies is his highly original response to the subject of the human body. Alongside his iconic landscapes and visionary responses to buildings, botany, and beyond, his figure paintings and drawings offer particular insight into how this unique creative journey took shape, and how he was connected to the history of art.

The rarely seen paintings and drawings on view in Human Nature reveal an artist who was steeped in the tradition of Western art, engaged in a diligent study of the human form via the long-tested methods of sketching from live models and plaster casts, and who found in his portrait subjects ways of evoking enigmatic narratives and inner lives.

The works in this exhibition, drawn from the Brandywine and Wyeth Foundation collections as well as one exciting loan from a private collection, present a unique opportunity to understand Wyeth’s eye. Case studies include early figure drawings made in his father’s studio, self-portraits, intimate depictions of close family members, a little known and fascinating body of commissioned portraits, a broad representation of his mature practice including many major figural temperas and watercolors, and a final section on how he approached the nude figure. One highlight is the loan of Wyeth’s portrait of Professor Joyce Hill Stoner, a leading art conservator who shares in the exhibition’s wall texts some firsthand reflection on the process of being painted by Wyeth. Visitors will come away with new understanding of a remarkable lifelong practice that clarifies the operations and values at work across his art.

The painting above is of Adam Johnson who raised chickens and pigs a short walk from Wyeth’s studio in Chadds Ford. When this was painted, Wyeth had already known him for thirty years. Other interesting paintings in the show include the two very different portraits of Wyeth’s sister Ann, from earlier in his career, pictured below.

“Ann Wyeth in White”, 1936, Oil on canvas

“Ann”, 1939, Egg tempera on panel

From the museum about these two works-

As a young artist, Wyeth made a few dozen works in oil on canvas before abandoning this medium for good. There is a stark difference between the two portraits of pianist and composer Ann Wyeth, the artist’s sister, made three years apart. This depiction is handled very freely, in contrast to the more tightly painted tempera to the right, in which the artist and, by extension, the viewer loom over the subject in a most unsettling way while Ann Wyeth ignores our gaze in her peripheral vision.

This exhibition closes 6/15/25. A new exhibition of Wyeth works, Andrew Wyeth at Kuerner Farm: The Eye of the Earth, will open on 6/22.

Throwback- NYC Murals- Tomokazu Matsuyama

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Drawing, New York Art Shows, Nyack, Painting / Painters, Public Art
Jun 122025
 

This mural was created in 2019 by Tomokazu “Matzu” Matsuyama as a commission for The Houston Bowery Wall in NYC.

Matsuyama recently completed the painting Morning Sun Dance, inspired by Edward Hopper’s 1952 painting, Morning Sun. An exhibition of his paintings and works on paper centered around this new work opens at Edward Hopper House Museum in Nyack, New York, on Friday, 6/20/25.

From the museum about the exhibition-

The exhibition centers around Matsu’s new large-scale painting Morning Sun Dance. Of the work that inspired his painting, Matsu says, “While Hopper’s Morning Sun captures a moment of introspective stillness within the psychological landscape of mid-century urban life, his treatment of solitude, light, and constructed space continues to influence my own approach to thinking about isolation as well as my approach to painting.”

In Morning Sun, Hopper depicts a woman sitting on her bed in the sun, alone in an empty room, wearing a plain orange dress and a simple, contemplative expression. In Morning Sun Dance, Matsu paints a solitary woman with a similarly meditative demeanor. However, her environment is far more richly layered: the room is filled with personal artifacts—dogs, magazines, and a luxurious couch—reflecting contemporary material life. Notably, the presence of dogs, while suggesting companionship, also references historical depictions such as Toutou, le bien aimé by Rosa Bonheur (1885) and A Nurse and a Child in an Elegant Foyer by Jacob Ochtervelt (1663), in which dogs symbolized wealth and ownership. In Matsu’s work, these animals subtly underscore solitude rather than alleviate it—suggesting not connection, but the heightened self-awareness of being alone.

Her clothing fuses Western and Japanese motifs—a William Morris textile layered with traditional patterns—while a Sports Illustrated poster of Muhammad Ali nods to her alignment with diversity, strength, and modern identity. In contrast to Hopper’s figure, who gazes outward toward the cityscape, Matsu’s subject turns inward, facing her domestic space. This shift in gaze implies a broader narrative: solitude, once externalized and meditative, is now negotiated through personal space and cultural consumption.

The exhibition will also feature Matsu’s process drawings, which reveal how the artist engaged with Hopper’s use of light, figuration, and abstraction. Two additional smaller paintings by Matsu also reinterpret Hopper’s iconic figure in the orange dress—one from Hopper’s original perspective, and the other from an external vantage point, as if observing the figure from the outside.

“This exhibition offers a fascinating dialogue between two artists from different eras, both grappling with the complexities of modern life and the experience of solitude,” says Kathleen Motes Bennewitz, Executive Director of the Edward Hopper House Museum. “Matsu’s vibrant and layered response to Hopper’s work invites us to reconsider themes of isolation and introspection through a contemporary lens, highlighting the enduring relevance of Hopper’s vision while embracing new perspectives.”

Flashback- Ohio Art Shows- Lari Pittman from “New Narratives” at Cleveland Museum of Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Cleveland, Ohio Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Printmaking
Jun 062025
 

Pictured above is All that Glitters is Gold (for Liberace), 2000, from the portfolio 1989. A Portfolio of 11 Images Honoring Artists Lost to AIDS, by Lari Pittman. It was on view last year as part of Cleveland Museum of Art’s group exhibition, New Narratives: Contemporary Works on Paper.

From the museum about the work-

Lari Pittman made this print as part of a portfolio honoring visual and performing artists lost to the AIDS epidemic. Dedicated to pianist and singer Liberace (1919-1987), Pittman referenced the performer’s renowned love for glitz and glamour through what he calls over-decoration. The male profile (perhaps representing a young Liberace), diamonds, sunbursts, and undefined architectural elements in layers of bright, complementary colors celebrate artificiality, or in the artist’s words, “frippery” that defines both Pittman’s practice and Liberace’s public persona.

 Art21 also has several videos of Pittman discussing his work worth checking out.

NYC Public Art- The High Line- Teresa Solar-Abboud

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Public Art, Sculptors / Sculpture
Jun 042025
 

Currently on view on the High Line in NYC is Teresa Solar-Abboud‘s colorful sculpture, Birth of Islands.

From the High Line’s website about the commission-

Teresa Solar-Abboud creates sculptures, drawings, and videos characterized by an interest in fiction, storytelling, natural history, ecology, and anatomy. In her work, she alludes to material entities in states of transformation and the tension between the organic and synthetic, interior and exterior, gestation and birth, and embryonic and advanced. Solar-Abboud wields these tensions as a tool, not to draw binary juxtapositions, but rather to suggest that they co-exist in a quantum world, in a constant flow state of evolution. This is articulated in her work through an interest in and re-imagination of life’s diverse and sophisticated networks—cultural, geological, industrial, and anatomical—and how these systems overlap or sometimes clash.

For the High Line, Solar-Abboud presents Birth of Islands, a new sculpture in her series of zoomorphic shapes inspired by animals and prehistoric life forms. Birth of Islands, is composed of slick, blade-like foam-coated resin elements that emanate outward from the pores of a muddy, gray ceramic stump. When visiting New York, Solar-Abboud was struck by the landscape—building after building rising from the soil in a fight for prominence, just as vegetation in the forest combats for sunlight in order to survive. Birth of Islands refers to this competitive ecosystem, while also evoking human anatomy: two yellow, tongue-like emanations have seemingly tunneled their way from underground onto the High Line. The forms are spoon-like in their appearance, concave or convex, depending on one’s vantage point. The result appears simultaneously post-human and primordial, sophisticated and elementary—a representation of our own unending transformation alongside nature’s ever-evolving state.

This sculpture will be on view through July 2025.

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