May 092025
 

The images above are from Saya Woolfalk‘s exhibition The Woods Woman Method at Susan Inglett Gallery this past March.

From the gallery about this show-

The Woods Woman Method is the newest manifestation of the artist’s ongoing exploration of hybrid identity, accomplished through an elaborate fiction inspired by her own family background. Combining elements of African American, Japanese, and European cultures with allusions to anthropology, feminist theory, science fiction, Eastern religion, and fashion, Woolfalk depicts the story of a chimeric species she names the Empathics, botanic humanoid beings with a highly evolved ability to understand the experiences of others.

The Woods Women, a secret society of forest dwellers, first emerged within Woolfalk’s Empathic Universe, as she prepared for her solo exhibition at the Newark Museum of Art in 2021.  While an Artist-in-Residence at the Museum from 2019 to 2021, she closely engaged with its renowned Herbarium and Hudson River School collections, leading to her reimagining of the earth and sky as she considered the “speculative fictions” of these idealized American landscapes, and her consideration of indigenous North American creation myths, oral histories of the descendants of enslaved Africans, and their uses of medicinal plants.

The exhibition features drawings, prints, mixed-media collages, sculpture, and video. Among the works on view are Birthing a New Sky: Starship Moon Cycle (2022), an inspired visualization of the artist’s sister, sitting in a lotus position, anticipating the birth of her daughter. Woolfalk writes:

“For a new sky to be born she must split herself into a million pieces. Each cell in her body replicates itself, spinning in twirling orbits. Her atomized insides burst apart, cascading into the void around her. Swirling and churning, one cell makes its way back to her center, where her heart had been. This brave new life expands, forcing its way out as new light, new land – a new sky.”

Other highlights include the landscape collages, Birthing a New Sky: Manuscripts 3 and 4 (2021),and 5 and 6 (2022),  in which Woolfalk posits an alternative American creation myth. While appearing to be simple abstractions, these works are quite complex, composed of hundreds of intricately pieced and layered elements created from handmade Japanese papers that she has painted and stained with watercolor and gouache, Japanese silver foil, and acrylic medium.

The series of large-scale prints, The Four Virtues (2017) depict the physical embodiments of Prudence, Fortitude, Justice, and Temperance, qualities that are vital to the ethos of her world.

The exhibition was held in advance of Woolfalk’s mid-career survey at the Museum of Arts and DesignSaya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe, curated by Alexandra Schwartz. That exhibition includes multimedia installations paintings, sculptures, performance, and works on paper created during the past twenty years and will be on view until 9/7/25.

Apr 252025
 

Mural by Donald Walker

ArtFields Community Mural by Jessica Diaz, Morgan Funkhouser, Olivia Cramer, Sam Ogden

Today’s flashback is to 2021 and a trip to Lake City, South Carolina to check out ArtFields.  Started in 2013, the event is a wonderful example of how the arts can revitalize local economies.

So what is ArtFields? Every year for one week local businesses and galleries host works created by artists from the Southeastern United States for a competition with prizes totaling over $145,000. There are also two People’s Choice Awards which are determined by the attendees of the festival. The other awards are chosen by a panel of art professionals. Special events take place throughout the week and ArtFields Jr. offers a chance to see work by South Carolina students.

This year the event runs from April 25th to May 3rd, 2025. Even if you can’t make it, it’s worth taking a look here at this year’s artwork as well as from past years.

Below are a few selections from 2021-

Mural by Lance Turner

“From This Moment Forward” by Herman A. Keith Jr. inspired by Gee’s Bend Quilters

Partially finished mural by Broderick Flanigan honoring Lake City educators Elouise Cooper and Derrick Faison.

“7 Red Wolves” by Joann Galarza Vega

About the work from the above by Joann Galarza Vega

“There may be as few as only 7 red wolves remaining in the wild. These animals, like so many others, are disappearing in the shadows of our periphery. Their very existence depends on us, as did their extinction. Let us see them, acknowledge them, acknowledge that biodiversity and the balance of life matters. They are painted bright red in order to stand out and bring attention, no longer hidden away.”

Pictured above is The House on Church Street which in 2021 was used for several art installations including the two below. The first is New Histories: The Gadsden Farm Project by Michael Austin Diaz and Holly Hanessian.

About the installation-

The installation below, All Too Brief, was created by Gainesville, Florida artist Cindy Steiler.

From the ArtFields website about the installation-

All Too Brief was inspired by the movement of time and the unconscious process where our present moment is being continuously converted to memory. The elements comprising All Too Brief include a series of scrolls of cyanotype photographs and repurposed textiles wound on antique industrial weaving bobbins. Each scroll has a WW2-era laundry pin embossed with a number that corresponds to the written narrative of the images and textiles it holds. This piece is my attempt to document and archive people, places, and fleeting moments I hold dear. This piece became even more meaningful to me this year. My studio assistant at the time this piece was created has since passed.

Finally- while in town it’s also worth checking out the Ronald E. McNair Life History Center and Memorial Park. The Lake City-born astronaut and physicist died tragically in the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion.

Apr 102025
 

For Camille Henrot’s imaginative installation for A Number of Things at Hauser & Wirth, a variety of sculptures, including several from her Abacus series, are surrounded by paintings from her Dos and Don’ts series. There’s a playfulness to both, but something a bit darker too. Walking on the soft floor among the sculptures there is a feeling of childlike wonder, while at the same time, in combination with the paintings, you are reminded of the rules and restrictions that are imposed on us, starting when we are very young, and how they become more oppressive with age.

From the gallery’s press release-

Evoking children’s developmental tools, shoes, distorted graphs and counting devices, new large-scale bronze sculptures from the artist’s ‘Abacus’ series (2024)—presented alongside recent smaller-scaled works—address the friction between a nascent sense of imagination and society’s systems of signs. The exhibition will also feature vibrant new paintings from Henrot’s ongoing ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series.

Initiated in 2021, the ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series combines printing, painting and collage techniques where etiquette books become the palimpsest for play with color, gesture, texture and trompe l’oeil. The artworks will emerge from a flooring intervention—conceived and designed with Charlap Hyman & Herrero—that transforms the gallery into a site of sensory experimentation. Henrot’s exhibition vivaciously sets the stage for the arbitrary nature of human behavior to circulate freely between rule and exception.

As viewers enter the gallery, they will be greeted by a pack of dog sculptures tied to a pole, as if left unattended by their walker. Shaped from steel wool, aluminum sheets, carved wood, wax, chain and other unexpected materials, Henrot’s creatures speak to the ever-unfolding effects of human design and domestication. As an extension of Henrot’s ongoing interest in relationships of dependency, the dogs stand in as the ultimate image of attachment.

Henrot’s latest ‘Abacus’ sculptures unite the utilitarianism of the ancient calculating tool with the arches and spirals of a children’s bead maze—a toy popularized in the 1980s as a heuristic diversion in pediatric waiting rooms and nursery schools. Through these formal associations, an instinctive sense of play collides with the learned impulse to search out patterns and impose order. With their biomorphic contours, opaline patinas and quadruped or biped anatomies, these works seem charged with a lifeforce of their own. Hovering between pure abstraction and their multivalent referents, Henrot’s bronzes invite our unfettered, sensuous engagement, even as they allude to the symbolic systems that tyrannize our imaginations.

Behavioral conditioning is a central concern of Henrot’s ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series. These richly layered paintings consider the idea of ‘etiquette’ as it relates to society at large: its codes of conduct, laws and notions of authority, civility and conformity. The works feature collaged fragments of invoices from an embryology lab; a note conjugating the German verb ‘to be;’ dental X-rays; digital error messages; children’s school homework; and to-do lists, among other things. Together, they build on Henrot’s interest in making sense of the urge to organize and categorize information—a theme that has been prevalent in her practice since her groundbreaking film ‘Grosse Fatigue’ (2013). The ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series distorts its source material to reveal the constructed, performative nature of any social identity, while acknowledging the emotional security that behavioral mimicry and groupthink can provide.

As the exhibition’s almost childlike title suggests, ‘A Number of Things’ brings together a disparate but related group of works that collectively address the enormously difficult task that is living, learning and growing in society. With tenderness for the most banal traces of our existences, Henrot offers a meditation on the competing impulses to both integrate and resist the unquestioned structures of society in our everyday lives.

‘There’s a reason why, in English, the word ‘politics,’ ‘polite’ and ‘police’ all sound the same—they are all derived from the Greek word polis or city, the Latin equivalent is civitas, which also gives us ‘civility,’ ‘civic’ and a certain modern understanding of ‘civilization.’

—David Graeber, ‘The Dawn of Everything’ (2021)

In the video walkthrough with Henrot (below) she discusses many of the inspirations for the work.

This exhibition closes 4/12/25.

Mar 262025
 

Jennie C. Jones, “Fluid Red Tone (in the break)”, 2022, Architectural felt, acoustic panel, and acrylic on canvas (left) and Steve Wolfe, “Untitled (Bookends)”, 1990, Bronze, lacquer (bottom right)

Unrecorded Betsi-Nzaman artist, Fang peoples Male Reliquary Guardian Figure (Eyema Byeri), 19th Century Wood, metal, pigment (center sculpture), Andy Warhol, “Close Cover Before Striking”, 1962 Acrylic and collage on linen, (right) and Judy Linn “James Joyce on 23rd st.”, early 1970s, Archival pigment print (on window)

Ronny Quevedo, “body and soul (Reflection Eternal)”, 2022, Pattern paper, gold leaf, and metal leaf on muslin (left) and Christian Marclay and Steve Wolfe, “La Voix Humaine”, 1991, Wood console, oil and screenprint on aluminum (right)

Larry Wolhandler, “Bust of James Baldwin”, 1975, Bronze, and Rudolf Stingel, “Untitled”, 2016, Electroformed copper, plated nickel, stainless steel frame (right)

Medardo Rosso, “Rieuse”, 1890, Wax on plaster, and picture of Joan Didion

Ellen Gallagher “DeLuxe”, 2004–2005 Grid of 60 photogravure, etching, aquatint and drypoints with lithography, screenprint, embossing, tattoo-machine engraving; some with additions of plasticine, watercolor, pomade and toy eyeballs

Writer Hilton Als has brought together a wonderful collection of works exploring art and language for The Writing’s on the Wall: Language and Silence in the Visual Arts at Hill Art Foundation.  Quotes from several authors are included alongside the art, adding another dimension to the show.

From the gallery-

This group exhibition presents artists whose work explores the relationships between communication and language. In the curatorial text, Als explains: “for this exhibition, I wanted to show what silence looked like—at least to me—and what words looked like to artists.”

“Writing and erasure have been important sources of inspiration for many of the artists in my family’s collection, including Christopher Wool, Rudolf Stingel, Vija Celmins, and Cy Twombly,” says J. Tomilson Hill, President of the Hill Art Foundation. “Hilton Als has identified a fascinating motif and introduced important loans to illustrate the rich history of these lines of inquiry into the present day.”

In his accompanying essay, Poetics of Silence, Als probes the power of visual art to skirt the written or spoken word. The works included convey “the sense we have when language isn’t working,” evoke “EKGs of rhythm followed by silence, or surrounded by it,” reveal “painting as language’s subtext,” illustrate “what we mean to say as opposed to what gets said,” and “find beauty in the tools that one uses to erase words—and then to make new ones.” He reflects on his own entry into the art world as an art history student at Columbia in the 1980s, and his efforts as a writer and curator to create a democratic “language of perception” that transcends traditional connoisseurship.

The Writing’s on the Wall encompasses a range of mediums, from video installation to printed zine. Artists in the exhibition include Ina Archer, Kevin Beasley, Jared Buckhiester, Vija Celmins, Sarah Charlesworth, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Fang: Betsi-Nzaman, Ellen Gallagher, Joel Gibb and Paul P., Rachel Harrison, Ray Johnson, G.B. Jones and Paul P., Jennie C. Jones, Christopher Knowles, Willem de Kooning, Sherrie Levine, Judy Linn, Christian Marclay, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Claes Oldenburg, Ronny Quevedo, Irving Penn, Umar Rashid, Medardo Rosso, David Salle, Rudolf Stingel, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Steve Wolfe, Larry Wolhandler, and Christopher Wool.

Als’ essay provides not only more information on the show and the art included, but also his own experience of learning about and experiencing art.

Below is a brief excerpt but it is well worth it to read the essay in its entirety.

Part of the experience I hope to evoke here draws a line between language, which is to say active contemplation, and being, which requires nothing more than your presence first and language second (or third). You know what being is. It happens to you all the time. You may be in a museum, or a public park, or sitting dully in your house, with “nothing” on your mind, and then there you are—a kind of walking phenomenology, language-free, but not feeling. In fact, you are suffused with feeling. Your feet are on the ground, and your body, released from the chatter of the everyday, is porous to the surrounding world with its various silences—a world where everything and nothing speaks to you. The clouds; some pictures on a white wall; a beautiful, hitherto-unknown sculpture reaching for eternity; that blank wall standing between you and the wonders of a garden that manages to grow right here in the middle of Manhattan—they all became part of your being, the self that is always on the verge of discovery, if only you can listen to its silences.

Silence says so much, if you listen. (From Marianne Moore’s 1924 poem “Silence”: “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.”) And since I have been a writer all my life, it’s a relief not to think in words sometimes, and to look at pictures, which do not so much deny verbalization but are without language, only the experience of here and now. Sometimes being simply means that we are somewhere, and we are porous to contemplation. When we think about visual culture or production, words aren’t the first things that come to mind. What does is the thing itself. And for this exhibition, I wanted to show what silence looked like—at least to me—and what words looked like to artists. The struggle to speak, to say, to reveal language or an attempt at language—communication—in a visual medium that has a complicated relationship to speech.

Als’ website includes his older writing ,but you can read more of his recent essays and reviews on The New Yorker’s website and he frequently posts on Instagram.

This exhibition closes 3/29/25.

Mar 172025
 

The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing by former New York magazine editor Adam Moss is a fascinating look at the creative processes of several famous artists. Each artist discusses specific works and gives the reader an inside look at how they came about.

The 43 artists included are visual artists, writers, musicians, editors, designers, and many other creative categories. Moss is also an artist and you can see that in his desire to both inform the reader, and to learn for himself, what makes these individuals tick.

Many of the names will be familiar, but these behind the scenes looks are incredibly enlightening. These discussions often also inspired, for me, a deeper dive. I found myself watching videos of Twyla Tharp‘s choreography, reading Guy Talese’s essay and Sheila Heti’s book, listening to Moses Sumney, watching Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, and so on, as I progressed through the book.

While some artists will appeal more than others depending on your interests, all of them had something interesting and valuable to say. This book was one of my favorites of 2024.

 

Feb 202025
 

Large painting on the right- Bettina Brendel, “Particles or Waves?”, 1969, acrylic on canvas

Center sculpture by Claire Falkenstein- “Point as a Set #10, c.1962, copper

Palm Springs Art Museum is currently showing Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945-1990 a selection of abstract work created by Southern California artists influenced by that era’s scientific ideas and breakthroughs. These explorations are divided into sections focused on optical science, mathematics, color in motion, and space age abstraction. The exhibition also includes several experimental films created during this period.

From the museum-

Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, scientists at institutions near Los Angeles including Mount Wilson Observatory, the California Institute for Technology, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, generated groundbreaking experimental research in astronomy and particle physics. During and after World War II, the region remained at the forefront of scientific inquiry in theoretical physics and its applications within aerospace engineering, industrial manufacturing, and communications technologies. Between 1945 and 1990, many artists in Los Angeles produced visually abstract artworks while closely engaging with scientific ideas, mathematical theories, and materials or processes derived from physics and engineering.

The exhibition unites several generations of artists working in diverse materials and styles to examine how subfields of scientific investigation inspired a range of non-figurative artworks by practitioners concerned with light, energy, motion, and time. By drawing interdisciplinary connections between the work of early abstractionists and contemporary practitioners, the exhibition considers abstract artwork from Southern California in a new way.

Below are a few selections along with information from the museum.

Claire Falkenstein, “Orbit the Earth”, 1963, Oil and metallic paint on nine canvas panels

Claire Falkenstein, “Orbit the Earth”, 1963, Oil and metallic paint on nine canvas panels

Through both abstract paintings and sculptures, Falkenstein explored subjects inspired by astrophysics. In Orbit the Earth, she conveys a sense of motion through patterns of curved points in metallic paint and sweeping lines that reveal traces of the painting’s black background. The artist referred to her small gestural marks as “moving points” and explored how arrangements of these painted forms could express types of motion and energy in the universe. In her hanging sculpture Sun represents a dynamic celestial form that shifts in appearance as viewers move around the work. The sculpture’s open, webbed structure creates a continuum between the work and its surrounding space, parallelling interconnections between the Sun and other cosmic phenomena in the solar system.

Helen Lundeberg, “Untitled (Sectioned Planet)”, 1969, Acrylic on canvas

Eva Slater, “Galaxy”, 1954, Oil on panel

Oskar W. Fischinger, “Space Abstraction No.3”, 1966, Oil on canvas

Oskar W. Fischinger, “Multi wave”, 1948, Oil on canvas

Hilaire Hiler, “Parabolic Orange to Leaf Green”, 1942, Oil on board

Dr. Frank J. Malina, “Mitosis”, 1974, Painted wood, painted plexiglas, metal, fluorescent tubes, motor

Inspired by the idea of enlivening artwork with electricity, Malina developed a range of kinetic paintings like Mitosis beginning in 1956. This work exemplifies the artist’s Lumidyne system of works where illuminated colors shift through cycles generated by an encased motor, rotating components, and electric light sources. A founder of Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1936 and a preeminent American specialist in rocketry, Malina turned to creating artwork in the early 1950s after relocating to France.

DeWain Valentine, “Vertical Section”, 1979, Laminated glass

DeWain Valentine, “Vertical Section”, 1979, Laminated glass (detail)

Bettina Brendel, “Prisms”, 1982, Acrylic on canvas

Miriam Schapiro, “Computer Series #3”, 1969, Acrylic on canvas

Bettina Brendel “A Numbered Universe”, 1966, Oil on canvas

In A Numbered Universe, Brendel painted the symbols of binary code within a grid drawn onto the canvas in pencil. The work’s composition is both structured and slightly irregular. The hand painted notations and off-kilter composition humanize the abstract technological language of computer code.

Lee Mullican, “Computer Joy”, 1987, TGA file 512 x 428 pixels

In Computer Joy, repeated and overlaid sections of lines and geometric forms produce an all-over field of pixelated patterns.
While teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1986, Mullican explored the artistic posibilities of new computer imaging technologies. The ability to readily duplicate digital shapes using the computer complemented his long-standing practice of applying repeated striations of pigment into patterned arrangements in paintings like Source from 1981.

Lee Mullican, “Source”, 1981, Oil on canvas

Lee Mullican, “Source”, 1981, Oil on canvas (detail)

James Turrell, “Afrum (White)”, 1966, projected light

In Afrum (White), a modified projector casts a rectangle of white light onto the corner of the otherwise darkened gallery, creating the illusion of a floating three-dimensional cube. The crisply defined area of light changes in appearance depending on how viewers move in the space. Through his precise manipulation of light within specific spatial environments, James Turrell creates opportunities for viewers to engage with nuanced processes of perceptual experience.

Man Ray, “Shakespearean Equation: King Lear”, 1948, Oil on canvas

While living in Hollywood in the late 1940s, Man Ray produced his Shakespearean Equations, a series of paintings depicting mathematical models that reference plays by William Shakespeare. King Lear highlights the aesthetic qualities of a particular form known in algebraic geometry as a Kummer surface with eight real double points. For the artist, the drips of paint on the mathematical form recalled the tears shed by King Lear after learning that his favorite daughter was killed, layering human emotion onto the geometric shape.

This exhibition, part of The Getty’s PST ART programming, closes Sunday, 2/24/25.

Jan 162025
 

Charles Ray “Family Romance”, 1993, and Ashley Bickerton “F.O.B.:Tied (White)”, 1993/2018

Charles Ray “Family Romance”, 1993

Maurizio Cattelan “WE”, 2010

Tishan Hsu, “mammal-screen-green-2”, 2024

Work by Josh Kline

“Untitled”, 2008-9, and “Two Breasts”, 1990, by Robert Gober

Mike Kelley, “Brown Star”, 1991 (left) and “The Judge”, 2018, by Jana Euler (painting on right)

Wanghechi Mutu, “One Cut”, 2018, (center sculpture); photographs by Cindy Sherman, 2010/2023

“Pep Talk”, 2024, by Cajsa von Zeipel and Jamian Juliano-Villani, “Women”, 2024, (painting on right)

Post Human, the current group exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch’s Los Angeles location, continues an artistic investigation of humanity that began with the 1992 exhibition of the same name. Some of the over forty artists (and even some of the works) were in the previous iteration, but now their work is placed alongside others made more recently. Seeing them together offers viewers a chance to  contemplate the shifts and continuations in culture, technology, and what it means to be human.

From the gallery-

“Post Human was virtually a manifesto trumpeting a new art for a new breed of human,” wrote the art historian and curator Robert Rosenblum discussing the impact of the exhibition in the October 2004 issue of Artforum.

In 1992, Post Human, curated by Jeffrey Deitch, brought together the work of thirty-six young artists interested in technological advancement, social and aesthetic pluralism, and new frontiers of body and identity transformation. Through their art, these artists were exploring the same questioning of traditional notions of gender, sexuality and self-identity that was—and still is—taking place in the world at large. Capturing a developing social and scientific phenomenon, Post Human theorized a new approach to the construction of the self and interpretation of what defines being human. The exhibition set the agenda for the 1990s, and its influence on artists and philosophers led to a new field of academic study.

In her book Posthuman Feminism (2022), the philosopher and feminist theoretician Rosi Braidotti credits Deitch for capturing “the avant-garde spirit of the age by foregrounding the role of technology in blurring binary boundaries between subjects and objects, humans and non-humans.” She adds, “Post Human showed also that art assumed a much more central role as it merged with science, computerization and biotechnology in further re-shaping the human form and perfecting a flair for the artificial.”

The catalogue of the 1992 exhibition, with its visual essay and innovative design by the late Dan Friedman, also proved lasting relevance. Deitch’s influential essay predicted many of the scientific and sociological shifts that have since shaped our cultural and social environment, even the pandemic.

More than thirty years later, Post Human at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, revisits the theme of the exhibition, bringing the discourse into the present. The show includes several of the key figures who participated in the 1992 exhibition in dialogue with some of the most interesting artists continuing the exploration of these themes today. In keeping with the social and technological trends that inspired it, the interest in figuration of the original artists and the younger generations presented in the show is conceptual rather than formal.

Much of the then-new figurative work was descriptive of the “real” world but cannot, in fact, be called “realistic” in the conventional sense. That is because so much of the “real” world the artists were reacting to had become artificial. With the concept of the real disintegrating through an acceptance of the multiplicity of reality models and the embrace of artificiality, Realism as it was once known was no longer possible. This new figurative art may have actually marked the end of Realism rather than its revival.

Fully integrated into our pop psychology, the term “posthuman” is now used in everyday conversations and has come to primarily identify with the trope of the cyborg. This exhibition, like the 1992 show, however, examines multiple declinations and aspects of the postmodern construction of personality and the engineering and transcendence of the human body. The artists in the exhibition embrace notions of plurality, metamorphosis and multi-beingness. Cyber-futuristic, surgically improved, commodified, stereotyped, and politicized, the “cultured body” lends itself to reflect on a variety of concerns that define our age.

Several works in the exhibition will embrace the biometrical aestheticization of the human body to address the decay paranoia, the social conflict over genetic engineering and the use of biotechnologies, and the conversation around the limits of “natural” life.” Artists have long engaged with the threats of biometric surveillance, the possibility of virtual reality overtaking our physical one, the accelerating real-time consumption of experience, and the automation of the workforce. As AI’s ability to fulfill our creative and specialized needs has reached mass fruition, artists are confronting the impact of what was once considered speculative science fiction, an everyday reality.

Post Human was first presented at FAE, Musée D’art Contemporain, Pully/Lausanne (June 14–September 13, 1992) and traveled to Castello di Rivoli—Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli/Turin (October 1–November 22, 1992), Deste Foundation, House of Cyprus, Athens (December 3, 1992–February 14, 1993), Deichtorhallen Hamburg (March 12–May 9, 1993), Israel Museum, Jerusalem (June 23–October 10, 1993). A number of the works shown in 1992-1993 are now in international museum collections. Matthew Barney’s REPRESSIA (decline) (1991) is now in the collection of LACMA, where it was on view in 2023. Posthumanism has since been the subject of countless books, movies and high-profile exhibitions.

Artists in the exhibition: Isabelle Albuquerque, 
Matthew Barney
, Ivana Bašić
, Frank Benson, 
Ashley Bickerton, 
Maurizio Cattelan
, Chris Cunningham
, John Currin, 
Alex Da Corte, 
Olivia Erlanger
, Jana Euler
, Rachel Feinstein, 
Urs Fischer, 
Pippa Garner
, Robert Gober
, Hugh Hayden, 
Damien Hirst
, Tishan Hsu, 
Pierre Huyghe, 
Anne Imhof
, Alex Israel, 
Arthur Jafa, 
Jamian Juliano-Villani
, Mike Kelley, 
Josh Kline, 
Jeff Koons
, Paul McCarthy
, Sam McKinniss, 
Mariko Mori
, Takashi Murakami
, Wangechi Mutu
, Cady Noland, 
Charles Ray
, Cindy Sherman, 
Kiki Smith
, Hajime Sorayama, 
Anna Uddenberg, 
Cajsa von Zeipel
, Jeff Wall
, Jordan Wolfson, and 
Anicka Yi

This show closes Saturday, 1/18/25.

Jan 032025
 

Michael Joo, “Noospheres (Composition OG:CR)”, 2024

Cannupa Hanska Luger, “Sovereign”, 2024

Yoshitomo Nara, “A Sinking Island Floating in a Sea Called Space 1 and 2”, 2024

For the group exhibition Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice, Hammer Museum has gathered artists from around the world to present work that addresses environmental and social issues. The exhibition is part of the PST ART: Art and Science Collide programming taking place throughout Southern California.

From the museum about the exhibition-

The confluence of cataclysmic events that marked the year 2020-among them the global COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing economic crisis, the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, and the murder of George Floyd, which gave powerful momentum to Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements-created a rupture. For many, it felt like the end of the world that they had known. Under circumstances of physical and psychological lockdown, the very notion of taking a single breath-an act vital to multispecies existence since time immemorial-took on renewed significance. Breathing as an act of resistance and survival in the face of racial inequity and a global health crisis calls attention to the inextricable link between social and environmental injustice. The often imperceptible but ever growing burden of climate-related tragedies-the thawing cryosphere, extreme heat, flooding, deforestation, radioactive aftermaths of wars, and ocean acidification-has played a direct role in the deterioration of economic conditions and the displacement of populations.

Breath(e) assembles artists from around the world who share concerns about threats to their communities and environments. The exhibition foregrounds an ethical stance that critiques the privileging of the human being as the most significant among all entities and instead values interdependence. Some of the works reassess philosophical assumptions regarding what constitutes the “human,” while others question who speaks on behalf of the rights of nature and how we adjudicate the agency of the earth, trees, air, and oceans. The exhibition also highlights artistic practices that have transformed the cultural tropes of the climate crisis into narratives of resilience, transformation, renewal, and coexistence. These narratives are explored through various means: restoring balance and belonging to the land through speculative models for future survival; exploring the regenerative capacities of waste through structural transformations in life cycles; making visible the impact of anthropogenic violence on our bodies over time; the passing down of living knowledge that promotes biodiversity through multiple generations; giving voice to youth and empowering them with food sovereignty; and the radical presence of multispecies survival amid capitalist exploitation. Each of these strategies points to systemic shifts, reminding us of the power of each breath and of how the ethical principles of justice can be advanced amid life as well as on the path to extinction.

Below are a few selections and some additional information from the museum.

Xin Liu, “The Mothership”

About the work above-

Identifying as both a scientist and an artist, Xin Liu uses the language of technological development to explore our desire to preserve and artificially extend biological life. In 2023, inspired by scientific innovations in cryonics and egg freezing, Liu developed Cry:0, a series of mixed-media sculptures that includes The Mothership, a science fiction-like panel equipped with a cooling mechanism that pulls water directly from the air, causing thin layers of frost to gradually develop on the surface of the central bronze mouth, which the artist cast from her own body. With its spectral, biomorphic form and evocative title, The Mothership reflects on technologies designed to manipulate time as well as the central role played by the female body in perpetuating the human species.

Installations by Korean art collective ikkibawiKrrr and Garnett Puett (structure in the back on the right)

About the ikkibawiKrrr multimedia installation and video-

The Korean collective ikkibawiKrr’s expanded approach to art making encompasses performance, workshops, and events. The neologism ikkibawiKrrr consists of the Korean words ikki, meaning “moss”; bawl, meaning “rock”; and krrr, an onomato poetic word that implies a rolling motion. Through its work the group aspires to be “moss-like,” an organism constantly adapting in response to its surroundings. It has focused its recent work on the culture and ecology of the tropical Jeju Island, located off the southern coast of Korea.

A popular tourist destination known for its pristine ecosystem, Jeju Island is home to a community of haenyeo (female divers, or “women of the sea’), who are venerated for their ability to hold their breath for long periods of time while underwater. Upon rising to the surface, the haenyeo make a distinctive whistling sound as they rapidly exhale carbon dioxide and inhale fresh oxygen, a breathing technique called sumbisori, or “breath sound.” A matriarchal community committed to environmentalism, the haenyeo have been sustainably harvesting seafood for centuries. Given their symbiotic relationship with nature, their already arduous work has been greatly impacted by climate change, particularly rising water temperatures, which have harmed algae and changed the migratory patterns of predatory fish. Additionally, Jeju Island is not as clean as it once was, and the haenyeo now risk being trapped by discarded fishing nets and spend their time collecting plastics from the ocean.

In the video that forms part of ikkibawiKrr’s multimedia installation Seaweed Story (2022), a haenyeo choir stands on the cliffs of Hado, a fishing village on Jeju Island, singing a regional variation on “Arrang,” an ancient folk song with strong ties to Korean nationalism. During Japan’s imperialist era (1910-45), the fishing industry exploited the haenyeo and overfished their waters, leading the women to organize local cooperatives and public demonstrations, many of which took place in Hado. Through their performance, the haenyeo reinforce their connection to both the ocean and historical resistance movements. The installation also includes a sandbox containing miniature replicas of the small houses where these women convene, rest, and change in and out of their wetsuits.

Below is Garnett Puett’s sculpture, located inside the enclosed structure pictured above, where bees help create the work.

From the museum-

A sculptor and fourth-generation beekeeper based in Hawaii, Garnett Puett collaborates with bees to create what he terms “apisculptures” (api is the Latin word for “bee”). Combining ancestral knowledge with his passion for art, Puett conceived of this signature method in 1983, when he was a graduate student at Pratt Institute in New York City. As demonstrated by the newly commissioned work on view, Puett emphasizes the creative process over any particular outcome. To initiate Untitled (Paradoxical Garden Downstream) (2024), he conceived a figurative armature for the sculpture, coated it in thick layers of beeswax using a rotating table of his own design, and enclosed it in a habitat for bees. He then introduced a locally sourced queen along with her hive, thousands of worker bees (female honeybees), who made the work their home. Over the course of its brief lifespan, approximately six weeks, the colony will gather nectar and pollen to sustain the queen while elaborating the structure with honeycomb. Working symbiotically, Puett and the bees will eventually arrive at a final apisculpture. Three previously realized works are on view in the same gallery.

Garnett Puett, “Untitled (Paradoxical Garden Downstream)”,2024

Roxy Paine, “Chart”, 2024

Roxy Paine, “Chart”, 2024 (detail)

From the museum about Roxy Paine and the work above-

Since the 1990s, Roxy Paine has made thousands of scientifically accurate reproductions of mushrooms, underscoring the important role played by fungi in balancing our ecosystems. As agents of decomposition, fungi drive the global carbon cycle-the process by which carbon moves between the soil, living organisms, and the atmosphere. Belonging to a category of artworks that Paine calls “replicants,” his synthetic fungi colonies convincing y mimic the ways organic mushrooms spread in concentrated areas, sprouting directly from the floor or from wall-hung supports. Paine has researched and replicated the three major types of mushrooms: parasitic fungi, which attack living matter, thus regulating the populations of their hosts; saprophytic fungi, which consume and recycle dead matter; and symbiotic or mycorrhizal fungi, which flourish synergistically with the roots of plants and trees, supporting forests as they absorb carbon. Also known as “climate change warriors,” mycorrhizal fungi have the capacity to delay the effects of global warming, but rising temperatures could be putting them at risk of decline.

Chart (2024), a multivariant field, presents lesser-known examples of parasitic, saprophytic, and symbiotic fungi, including Geastrum striatum, or earthstars; the coral-like Clathrus ruber, or cage fungus, a type of stinkhorn that attracts insects by smelling of rotten meat; the scaly, globular Scleroderma citrinum, or pigskin poison puffball; Sarcoscypha coccinea, or scarlet cup, composed of small, open ellipsoids, reminiscent of bodily orifices, that gather in moist moss or on the forest floor; and Lycogola epidendrum, creamsicle-colored pustules that, when naturally occurring, ooze pink slime when pressed. Paine also simulates the neon-bright nets of plasmodium slime mold, a saprophytic organism resembling fungi that consumes mushrooms, bacteria, and other rotting matter. While these species would not be found cohabitating in the wild, they unite in their effort to erode a Turkish rug patterned with abstract representations of flora and fauna. This syncretic rug, a product of merging cultures, stands in for the invisible, carpet-like mycelium, the network of threads that form the rootlike structure of a fungus.

Paintings from Mel Chin’s series of paintings for “Interpretation of Vision (or IOV, pronounced “eye of”)”

About Mel Chin’s work from the museum-

Commissioned for this exhibition, Interpretation of Vision (or IOV, pronounced “eye of”) consists of thirty-two paintings realized through personal connections with individuals whose lives were altered by phenomenological experiences. Chin believes that the first step in the collective undertaking to fight persistent social and climate injustice is to dismantle division and promote empathy toward others. Opposed to proselytizing, he feels obligated to take the first step.

Like the artist Frida Kahlo, Chin drew inspiration from retablos and ex votos, small-scale devotional paintings, typically on wood or metal, that serve as votive offerings. During the nineteenth century any life-changing event could warrant the making of an ex-voto as an offering of gratitude. Typically produced by anonymous artisans on behalf of a patron, these paintings represent the tragic circumstances, such as accidents and near-fatal Illnesses, that precipitated their commission, showing saints or martyrs intervening to save the life of the afflicted. IOV is a multistage commission that began with a public call for stories from people whose lives were altered by natural, spiritual, or supernatural phenomena. Inspired by the unnamed ex-voto artisans, Chin collaborated with each respondent to honor and elevate their stories. Each dialogue resulted in a diptych, a two-part painting, presented on an artist-designed, seismically sensitive plinth. In each work the rendering of reality is embedded into an aperture on the right, while its corollary, the depiction of the transformational experience, is mounted on the surface. The wall fluidly accommodates any shifts between perception and knowing.

Ron Finley created the large scale garden installation, Grounded for the exhibition, pictured below. Also included in his section of the exhibition are several of the shovels created by his artist friends for Urban Weaponry Project, Weapons of Mass Creation, located in a separate room.

From the museum-

Finley, also known as the Gangsta Gardener, empowers people to grow their own food and advocates for communities to have access to fresh, nutrient-dense, organically grown food. Through the Ron Finley Project, he has cultivated gardens in urban food deserts, places where access to healthy food and fresh produce is limited or nonexistent. In 2009 he began planting vegetables, fruit trees, and other greenery along parkways, the stretches of land between the sidewalk and the street, in South Central Los Angeles. “I wanted butterflies and hummingbirds. I wanted something pretty, like amaryllis and agapanthus, and I wanted it to smell like jasmine, juniper, mint, and orange blossoms,” he recalls. “So that’s what I did.” After receiving a citation from the city for gardening without a permit, he fought back, and the City of Los Angeles changed its ordinance regulating gardening on public land.

With the commissioned work Grounded, Finley brings his urban gardening practice to the Hammer, creating a green, nourishing respite on the museum’s terrace in emulation of his own extraordinary garden. Both sites include vegetables and fruit trees growing alongside artworks and repurposed objects and contain communal spaces intended to rejuvenate audiences while fostering dialogues about food access, empowerment, and freedom. Inside, Finley presents selected works from his ongoing Urban Weaponry Project, Weapons of Mass Creation (2018-), a project that underscores his deep-rooted devotion to art, design, gardening, and grassroots organizing. Seven years ago he noticed that many of his artist friends were working in isolation. In an effort to connect them, he began inviting each one to transform a common, mass-produced gardening shovel into a distinctive work of art. A testament to Finley’s strength in community building, the present installation represents only a small fraction of his expansive collection. “A tool of mass creation,” as he frequently calls it, the shovel becomes a twin symbol of artistic production and food cultivation.

Lan Tuazon also created a large installation outside of the main galleries (pictured below).

From the museum-

Part of a generation of artists invested in criticizing institutionalized systems, Lan Tuazon proposes methods for recirculating organic and human-made materials to sustainably extend the lifespan of our things. In a linear economy, most consumer products begin as natural resources extracted from the landscape only to conclude as waste in a landfill. Commissioned for this exhibition, Over Your Head & Under the Weather (2024) stages a circular economy by demonstrating techniques of material recovery. Single-use plastics have been industrially shredded and pressed into panels, surplus newspapers are densified into newspaper wood, and other organic materials like coconut fibers are reconfigured into papercrete. Tuazon also makes use of innovative industrial products. The entire structure is constructed from multifunctional WaterBricks, interlocking, modular storage containers originally designed to preserve food and water for emergency and disaster relief purposes, and the floor is lined with Biomason’s carbon-reducing/sequestering Biolith tiles, made with recycled aggregates and bacterium-cultivated cement.

Designed to resemble a functionalized minimal sculpture, Over Your Head & Under the Weather wraps around the building to form two primary architectural bays. One side houses an industrial shredder and a plastic-collection station. Visitors are invited to contribute to the work’s circular economy by donating their #2 and #5 plastics, which will later be processed and shredded. The windows on the other side of the structure contain sculptural reliefs from Tuazon’s Assorted Drive series. Drawing on the language of data storage, the Assorted Drives ironically preserve physical evidence of human production and consumption: found materials, plastic beverage rings, bread ties, caps, and confetti made from previously shredded plastics. Part of an ongoing series, the towering sculpture Future Fossil-made from mass-produced containers, cut and nested like Russian dolls-uses the metaphor of geological petrification to allude to the tremendous scale and indeterminate lifespan of consumer and industrial waste.

Tiffany Chung’s stored in a jar: moonsoon, drowning fish, color of water, and the floating world, 2010-11, pictured below, references Vietnam and its vulnerability to flooding and the rising sea level.

Through meticulous archival and mapping practices, Tiffany Chung commemorates the experiences of local communities facing sociopolitical and climate-related trauma, placing those experiences within a global context. Born in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, Chung was forced to relocate following the fall of Saigon in 1975 to one of the government’s New Economic Zones (NEZ) as part of a population redistribution program aimed at restructuring Vietnam’s economy and southern society. Chung moved with her family to the Mekong Delta, the southwestern region of Vietnam where the Mekong River meets the South China Sea. In 1978 she witnessed a historic riverine flood in the area that killed seventy-four, left seventy-nine thousand homeless, and impacted more than four hundred thousand people. Eventually Chung migrated to the United States, taking part in the massive exodus of refugees precipitated by the NEZ program. Today Vietnam is among the countries that are most vulnerable to sea-level rise. According to recent projections, by the year 2050 almost all the land in southern Vietnam could be engulfed, displacing twenty million people, or nearly one quarter of the country’s population.

In several works, Chung explores extreme flooding — a natural phenomenon that in Vietnam is exacerbated both by the construction of hydroelectric dams in the Mekong River Basin and by human-driven climate change-and proposes solutions. In 2010 she constructed stored in a jar: monsoon, drowning fish, color water, and the floating world, a large-scale model for a floating village. To create this utopian world, Chung drew a formal language from vernacular architecture throughout Asia and structured a city in emulation of actual floating communities: vessels and houseboats tethered together in Ha Long Bay in Vietnam; floating communities on Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia; a makeshift system of interconnected house-rafts on the Song Kalia River in Sangkhlaburi, Thailand; and camps of floating palaces on a network of rivers in Srinagar, India.

Tiffany Chung, “stored in a jar: moonsoon, drowning fish, color of water, and the floating world”, 2010-11

Sarah Rosalena, “Exit Point”, 2019

About Sarah Rosalena’s work pictured above-

To make Exit Point, Rosalena trained a neural network to combine the Blue Marble photo and the M87 black hole image and output the results to a mechanical loom, which materialized each pixel as a thread in a Jacquard textile. As the Jacquard loom is considered a predecessor to the modern computer, her textiles also challenge linear accounts of technological progress. Through the use of artificial intelligence, Rosalena creates coiling, looping, and spiraling temporalities that function as tools for examining our past and present.

About Bently Spang‘s War Shirt #6- Waterways, pictured above-

The Northern Cheyenne artist Bently Spang creates multidisciplinary artworks inspired by the utilitarian and artistic practices of his ancestors, the Tsitsistas/Suhtaio people. One of Spang’s first such projects was War Shirt #1 (1998), which he made by stitching together family photographs and film negatives, using the negatives as fringe. Spang notes that ancestral war shirts are “reciprocal garments” created by the community to shelter warriors as they battle to protect that community. In 2017 Mountain Time Arts in Bozeman, Montana, commissioned Spang to create a work that would explore the influence of climate change on water resources and raise awareness of the issue in the region. The result was War Shirt #6-Waterways (2017), a multimedia sculptural installation that takes the form of a Plains-style war shirt.

The body of War Shirt #6-Waterways is made up of twenty-one monitors and fringed with six digital still photographs. With the help of a local support team, Spang welded the steel armature and programmed the monitors to present a synchronous, multichannel video, which he filmed while walking from the Tongue River, a tributary of the Yellowstone River that traverses Montana and Wyoming, to a local spring on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation; the digital fringe presents images from a preserved plant press book collected by a tribal historian and ethnobotanist. “I’m telling the viewer to know your water, know where it comes from and how it gets to you, and then you can protect it,” says Spang. “We should all have a relationship with that water, with these places that the water manifests.”

Sandy Rodriguez, “YOU ARE HERE/ Tovaangar / El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula / Los Angeles”(2021)

About the Sandy Rodriguez work above-

Made during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the multilingual map of the greater Los Angeles area YOU ARE HERE / Tovaangar / El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula / Los Angeles (2021) draws inspiration from the region’s history. It includes depictions of the trial of Toypurina, an Indigenous woman who led a rebellion against the Mission San Gabriel in 1785, as well as sixteenth-century primary source materials, including the Florentine Codex (ca. 1529-69), an encyclopedic ethnographic study of central Mexico. YOU ARE HERE includes images of plants and animals used by Native peoples, which represent geographic locations and serve as indicators of the cardinal directions. Place-names are hand painted in English, Spanish, and Tongva to reference renaming in the region over time as a colonial act of aggression. Rodriguez wants visitors to encounter this painting as they might a way-finding map and to use it to reorient themselves in space and time. She studies, documents, and processes native botanical specimens that have healing properties to create pigments, inks, and watercolors, applying these handmade materials to amate paper made from the bark of trees in Puebla, Mexico. A symbol of Indigenous culture, this sacred pre-Columbian material was prohibited by the Spanish during the colonial period.

Pictured below is one of Yangkura’s “waste monsters”, Tongsinsa, and his film depicting the monster in public (him in the costume).

From the museum-

Working on the west coast of South Korea, Yangkura is a performance and installation artist who uses ordinary trash to represent the dynamics of foreign relations in northeast Asia. Provoked by the 2007 MT Hebei Spirit Oil Spill (HSOS), in which 10,900 tons of crude oil spilled into the sea and contaminated the Korean coastline, Yangkura has focused his practice on the effects of anthropogenic marine pollution. In 2013 he began collecting and categorizing the waste from North Korea, China, and Japan that washed ashore on the coast of South Korea. By tracing tidal movements, he established the migratory pattens for marine debris moving among these countries, discovering that Korea’s trash frequently makes its way to Tsushima Island in Japan. He suspects that this island’s unique geographic formation makes it behave like a vacuum for international garbage, allowing the waters east of Korea to stay relatively clean. As Yangkura’s research suggests, the litter collecting in our oceans does not recognize geopolitical boundaries.

In 2015 Yangkura began constructing “waste monsters” —whimsical, colossal trash costumes, each with its own fictive identity. Yangkura wears these costumes while stilt-walking in performances intended to draw public awareness to the grotesqueness of our collective marine pollution problem. While he recognizes other environmental activists attempting to shock the public into change, he does not believe this approach is sustainable. Instead, he prefers to broach the topic of anthropogenic pollution through storytelling, weaving fantastic, subliminal narratives to engage and educate. In 2017 Yangkura began working with Tsushima CAPPA, a Japanese environmental organization focused on promoting awareness of marine pollution and on cleaning Tsushima Island. He used this collaboration to create a new “monster,” a character he hoped would deftly underscore selfishness as a fundamental human problem. Forgotten Tongsinsa or Forgotten Messenger (2017-) is constructed from trash originating in Korea, China, and Japan recovered from the coast of Tsushima Island (the word tongsinsa refers to a messenger with a diplomatic purpose, and it was originally applied to envoys sent to Japan on goodwill missions during the Joseon era). Yangkura describes Forgotten Tongsinsa as a good monster who dearly misses home and is simply trying to find his way back again.

This exhibition closes 1/5/25.

Dec 132024
 

Anthony James uses math and science to explore concepts of the infinite in his Portal sculptures. One of them, 80″ Great Rhombicosidodecahedron, 2020, pictured above, is currently on view at Palm Springs Art Museum.

 

Dec 122024
 

The pictures above are of Kapwani Kiwanga’s sculpture On Growth, commissioned for the High Line in NYC. This sculpture will be on view until February of 2025.

From the High Line about the artist and the work-

Kapwani Kiwanga is a conceptual artist working across film, performance, sculpture, and installation. Through exhaustive research into topics including colonial history, social segregation, and marginalized stories, Kiwanga constructs artworks that tease apart power imbalances and the imperceptible nuances that comprise the aesthetics of power. Often grounding her projects in architecture and horticulture, Kiwanga has created artworks that engage a wide variety of subjects including mono-crop agriculture in Tanzania, the oil and fracking industries, ceremonies related to key moments in African independence, and historical racist lantern laws from New England and New York. In her ongoing work Flowers for Africa, Kiwanga installs fresh arrangements of cut flowers that are replicas of bouquets visible in archival images of the inauguration ceremonies of African countries.

For the High Line, Kiwanga presents On Growth, a sculpture of a fern encased in glass. The multi-faceted case is constructed from dichroic glass, which captures and transforms the light that passes through it, changing tone and color as it’s viewed from different vantage points. The work references Wardian cases, a predecessor of the terrarium, which were used to transport uprooted plants to Europe from overseas, allowing those species to continue to thrive amid London’s polluted air in the late 19th century. These enclosures resembled jewelry cases at the time and, similarly, often protected treasures from distant lands. On Growth draws on the colonial histories of institutional and commercial botanic nurseries that heavily influenced the scientific understanding of plants and horticulture of today.