Today’s flashback is to Huma Bhabha‘s spooky figures for Before The End, which was on view until March of this year at Brooklyn Bridge Park. It is just one of the many projects organized by Public Art Fund.
From Public Art Fund about the work-
With the ominous title Before the End, Huma Bhabha (b. 1962, Karachi, Pakistan) sets the stage to evoke mythologies as old as humankind. Conceived for Brooklyn Bridge Park, Bhabha’s four monumental painted and patinated bronzes were cast from carved cork and skull fragments. The mysterious figures recall ancient effigies cut into tombstones, their surfaces evoking centuries of eroded sediment and stone. Yet, unlike a tomb, these four-sided vertical forms stand elevated above the earth, their bones open to the sky.
“Before the End” is a title borrowed from the writings of Vincent of Beauvais (ca. 1184–1264), whose medieval imagination sparked with supernatural and apocalyptic visions. Today, the related popular genres of horror and science fiction continue to inspire Bhabha, as does art history from antiquity to the present day. Her rough-hewn figures are ambiguous—are they emerging or trapped within, rising from the depths of the earth or returning to the underworld? Set amidst an expansive landscape where the natural and man-made converge, Bhabha’s sculptures captivate through contradiction, seemingly forged in geological time yet animated with a visceral sense of immediacy.
Below Nederveen describes his process for the work (pictured below)-
Using a mixed media approach to image making, I combine acrylic paint and C-print photographs. By layering these elements I can etch down into the emulsion of the photograph to reveal golden hues and also build up the surface with impasto and washes of colour. The result is an image with photo sharp detail in focal areas and painterly brush marks that obscure and create space for the imagination.
Both of these exhibitions close 10/11/25.
Steven Nederveen, “Gold Hidden Within”, Mixed Media
Steven Nederveen, “Gold Hidden Within”, Mixed Media (detail)
Steven Nederveen, “Breathe In the Forest Air”, Mixed Media
William Wegman‘s portraits of his Weimaraner dogs were recreated in glass mosaic form by Mayer of Munich in 2018 for “Stationary Figures”, lcated in the 23rd Street subway station. The eleven murals brighten up the walls and are one of the many projects created by MTA Arts & Design.
Photographed with the artist’s deadpan sense of humor, the dogs take on human attributes, from wearing street clothes like a shiny raincoat or flannel shirt, to being grouped like passengers as they gaze into space or peer down the platform as if waiting for the train.
Situated in bold blocks of color, the larger-than-life mosaic dogs are bursting into space and interacting with commuters. The mosaic fabricator, Mayer of Munich, interpreted the photographs taken for this project by meticulously transforming the facial expressions, skin textures and patterns of the dogs’ vibrant attire into glass mosaic. Wegman has lived and worked in the neighborhood for decades, and together with his dogs Flo and her brother Topper, they have created images that enliven this busy station.
Speaking about the project, Wegman said, “I wanted to create portraits of individual characters, people who you might see next to you on the platform. For these I dressed the dogs in more or less ordinary clothes, nothing too fashionable. I was very interested in the way in which photographs, even the out of focus dogs in the background of some images, could be translated into mosaic by Mayer of Munich, who skillfully turned gray stones into gray dogs.”
Below are the two series consisting of three panels each-
Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita)’s print I Should Like to Be Able to Love My Country and Still Love Justice, 1968, was on view at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC in June of 2024.
From the museum about the artist-
Corita Kent, also known in the Catholic Church as Sister Mary Corita, incorporated a range of references into her silkscreen prints, spanning pop culture imagery and song lyrics, biblical allusions, and literary conceits. After seeing Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans in 1962, she was inspired to embrace the language of Pop art, using bold, graphic designs to convey anti-war messages. In the 1980s Kent’s posters and ephemera were collected by PAD/D (Political Art Documentation/Distribution), a New York-based art activism group with a mission to create an archive of politically concerned art and ephemera from around the world. The materials are now part of the MoMA Archives, Library, and Research Collections.
You can currently see some of her photographic archive at Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles for the exhibition Corita Kent: The Sorcery of Images, on view until 1/24/26. The show “focuses on a little seen part of Corita’s artistic practice: her archive of over fifteen thousand 35 mm slides that she and her cohorts took between 1955 and 1968 while she was a beloved teacher in the art department at Immaculate Heart College”.
As part of their press release they include this lovely quote from the artist-
“In a sense, the whole world around the artist is his source, his sorting and relating powers are his sorcery, and the one isn’t much good without the other. … Anything can be a source, even a mistake. The sorcery or the thievery is the art of relating sources into a new solution.”
Her work can also be seen in Los Angeles at the Corita Art Center. The center is free to visit on Saturdays (with appointment).
Jon Carsman‘s painting October Visions, 1975, was on view at Akron Art Museum in 2024 as part of their permanent collection.
From the museum about the artist-
Jon Carsman painted from photographs, but though his pictures have a clear quality of precision, his intention was never to simply recreate what he had recorded on film. In his own words: “I want to give you a feel of what it was like to be there when I was.” To achieve this goal, Carsman stylized many elements of his paintings, often working toward a visual equivalent of the rhythm, movement, and energy that he found in music. He also worked most frequently with the rural scenery of Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley, where he was born and raised. As a result, images that began as still photographs take on new life through the artist’s personal experiences and memories.
“Imagine a World Without America”, 2007, Screen print and acrylic on canvas
The painting above is by Brooklyn-based artist Dread Scott and was on view as part of the 2019 group exhibition Borders at James Cohan gallery in NYC.
From the press release about the work-
His 2007 work, Imagine a World Without America, calls upon the viewer to participate in the titular thought experiment and contemplate that absence. The painting de-centers the United States of America from the middle of the map that most Americans are familiar with. Scott utilizes the language of cartography to encourage the exploration of social questions, not geography. Land mass and sea are depicted but—like the world as it actually is—borders don’t exist.
The work is currently on view as part of 15, a group exhibition at Cristin Tierney gallery, celebrating the gallery’s anniversary and new location. 15 will be on view until 10/4/25.
Dread Scott has created political works throughout his career in a variety of mediums. In the video below he discusses how one of his art installations, What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag (1989), drew controversy- including denouncement by then President George H.W. Bush.
Wax Monument IV (Free Wax) by Sandy Williams IV was on view at Socrates Sculpture Park in 2020 for Call and Response, Part II of the MONUMENTS NOW exhibition. The outdoor exhibition included ten monuments projects realized by the Park’s 2020 Artist Fellows.
From Socrates Sculpture Park about the work-
A monument to living history, this wax flag can be set alight from multiple-wicks and rests perpendicularly upon a black mulch base shaped like the borough of Queens. Rendered in black and white, the wax flag is reminiscent of – but not equivalent to – the U.S.’s own flag and emblem of patriotism. By enlarging the candle- a commemorative form often spontaneously employed in immediate reaction to events, Williams celebrates this popular, accessible form of expression. Alive with transformative potential, the work invites participation, mark-making, melting, and molding of a malleable symbol.
Abstract expressionist artist Mark di Suvero‘s sculpture Declaration (pictured above) is located on the Venice Beach Boardwalk in Los Angeles. It was installed in 2001 to commemorate the Venice Art Walk’s 22nd year and in support of the Venice Family Clinic, a local organization that provides quality health care to those in need. Di Suvero turned 92 today, 9/18.
Although he is well known for his large sculptures, he is also a painter. Some of these works were shown in 2019 at L.A. Louver in Los Angeles along with some of his smaller sculptures (pictured below).
From the L.A. Louver press release about the paintings-
A selection of brilliant abstract paintings by the artist accompanies the sculptures. Like the sculptures, his paintings are never still. Created with dazzling colors in dense layers of linear and freeform gestures, they project a swirling sensation akin to the twirling movement in his three-dimensional works. Accented with phosphorescent paints, the works luminesce and reverberate even in the absence of light (and are especially dazzling when activated by black lights installed throughout the gallery space). “The heart of art is the search for form that is electrifying, that gives life to our vision,” explains di Suvero. “This is the language of emotion. Anesthetic is to kill feeling. Aesthetic is the opposite, aesthetic is feeling. The thing that is most important is the dream, the vision for what doesn’t exist that could exist.”
It was recently announced that L.A. Louver will be closing their Venice Beach space, but in happier news they will be donating the gallery’s complete archive and library to The Huntington in San Marino, California.
Born today, 9/12, artist Robert Irwin used light and space in his work as a way to create an experience for the observer. He started out as a painter but later became well known for his site-specific installations and architectural and outdoor projects- including the central garden at the Getty Center in Los Angeles (pictured below) and his work for the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.
The works above are from his 2020 exhibition, Unlights, at Pace Gallery in New York.
About that show from Pace-
Irwin’s new works are composed from unlit six-foot fluorescent lights mounted to fixtures and installed in vertical rows directly on the wall. The glass tubes are covered in layers of opulently colored translucent gels and thin strips of electrical tape, allowing the reflective surfaces of unlit glass and anodized aluminum to interact with ambient illumination in the surrounding space and produce shifting patterns of shadow and chromatic tonality. Reflecting his recent turn toward the perceptual possibilities of unlit bulbs, Irwin’s new body of work expands the range of possibilities for how we experience sensations of rhythm, pulsation, expansion and intensity, while continuing the artist’s long-standing interest in registering the immediacy of our own presence in space.
Expanding from his breakthrough disc paintings of the late 1960s, Irwin’s new works effectively dissolve the perceived border between object and environment, focusing the viewer’s consciousness on the act of perception. Each light fixture in Irwin’s sculptures contains one or two unlit bulbs—or no bulb at all—while alternating gaps of “empty” wall are painted in subtle shades of gray, producing a sense of uncertainty about what is tactile and what is merely optical. As the shadowed, painted and reflected intervals of space reverberate in the viewer’s visual field, the wall itself enters the composition, destabilizing any sense of figure and ground. To encounter Irwin’s sculptures is thus to allow oneself to be caught in a ceaseless oscillation between flatness and volume, transparency and opacity, solidity and atmosphere.
In Irwin’s art, the object functions as a kind of score for orchestrating “the continual development and extension of humans’ potential to perceive the world.” Although unlit, the bulbs in these new sculptures are therefore never “off.” Their optically rich surfaces serve as energetic loci for heightening the sensory possibilities of the human body. In their chromatic complexity, the works convey an almost painterly quality, recalling Irwin’s origins as a second-generation Abstract Expressionist painter in the 1950s. Suggesting a rhythmic, minimal composition of repeated linear elements, the works also evoke his innovative line paintings of the early 1960s, which involve us physically and perceptually in an open-ended, immersive and transitory experience of seeing.
Widely recognized as a pivotal figure in contemporary art, Irwin is closely associated with the Light and Space movement that emerged in Los Angeles in the 1960s, and he has continued to live and work in Southern California for his entire career. He first used fluorescent lights as substrates for producing what he has called a “conditional art” in the 1970s, often in combination with architectural scrims and other spatial interventions. In the 1990s he introduced colored gels to the fluorescent tubes to alter the chromaticism of the light, and, over the past decade, began isolating the bulbs and fixtures as sculptural objects in their own right. In returning to the use of solely ambient light, Irwin’s new sculptures embody the culmination of seven decades of rigorous experimentation.
“Everything in the world is ultimately conditional,” Irwin has observed. “There is nothing that’s transcended or infinite or whatever you want to call it. Everything acts within a set of conditions.” Like all of Irwin’s works, his new sculptures respond differently to the conditions of each specific environment in which they are installed, attuning our senses to a given context and making possible an intuitive and incidental experience of seeing that resists rational or conceptual explanation. “It’s not about answers,” the artist once remarked, but rather about the act of questioning: “It’s the constant pursuit of the possibilities of what art is.”
Getty Center, Los Angeles
Below is one of his earlier paintings Untitled, 1964-6, which was on view at Palm Springs Art Museum for the 2024 exhibition Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945-1990.
From the museum about the work-
Although this work appears to have a monochromatic white surface from afar, a matrix of thousands of painted dots becomes visible from a closer vantage point. Irwin aimed to highlight the visual effects of color interaction by juxtaposing light green and lavender, complementary colors across from each other on a color wheel. The canvas’s outwardly bowed supports and the increasing density of dots towards the painting’s center further heighten the viewer’s perceptual experience of the work.
The documentary Robert Irwin: A Desert of Pure Feeling, does an excellent job detailing his life, art, and the philosophy behind his work. It is well worth a watch and inspiring to watch him still at work in Marfa at 87. He passed away in 2023 at the age of 95.
Nina Chanel Abney creates paintings, prints, and large-scale mural installations that reflect the frenzied pace of contemporary life. In a single painting, she may merge influences from news and politics, celebrity culture and gossip blogs, social media, art history, and popular television shows, all layered together to express the overabundance of contemporary culture. Layering spray paint and acrylic paint, Abney composes scenes of everyday life with graphic, angular figures posed in narrative scenes against bright, geometric backgrounds. In one of her recent series of works, Abney sets out to realize a rural Black queer utopia, inspired by the time she spent escaping New York City during the pandemic.
For the High Line, Abney realizes NYC LOVE, a new mural that celebrates the feeling of first arriving in New York City. NYC LOVE is a whimsical take on New York City’s classic iconography. When the artist moved to New York in 2005, she would meander through the city streets from Chelsea to Times Square, seduced by the hustle and bustle, bright lights, and the idea of a sleepless city. All of the “touristy” icons that most lifetime and long-time New Yorkers take for granted were gratifying and glossy to Abney, a self-described Midwestern suburbanite. NYC LOVE is representative of Abney’s first years as a student and tourist in New York City—an ode to the feeling of newness and unfamiliarity that breeds excitement and possibility. Featuring the many icons of New York—pizza slices and the Statue of Liberty, plenty of pigeons, and one Big Apple—Abney’s mural rides the subway, floats along the waterfront, and takes in all the city has to offer. NYC LOVE graces the High Line, an icon in itself that welcomes millions of New Yorkers and visitors alike to enjoy the many offerings of the bustling metropolis.
