Throwback- Brooklyn Art Shows- Amy Ritter at A.I.R. in 2023

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Brooklyn, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film
Nov 202025
 

In Welcome to Li’l Wolf, 2022-3 Fellow Amy Ritter‘s solo exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery, she explores the mobile home park where she grew up and her parents continue to live. Throughout her career she has documented several mobile home parks around the U.S. and considers how they reflect on the American Dream. For this exhibition the work is more personal and includes depictions of her father, his life, and his feelings of nostalgia.

From the press release-

In 2015, Ritter created the MH Archive to document the forgotten and marginalized mobile home communities across the United States. Through meticulous documentation consisting of interviews, photography, recordings, and video, Ritter has gained a deeper understanding of the diverse world of manufactured housing. This ongoing process of visiting mobile home parks now brings her back to where her interests originated, Li’l Wolf, her parents’ mobile home community in eastern Pennsylvania. Using her father’s camcorder from the ’90s, she turns her focus inside her childhood home for the first time. She offers the audience a glimpse into her father’s life by investigating the spaces he inhabits.

When the visitor first steps into the gallery, they are confronted by Li’l Wolf 6, part of the artist’s ongoing MH Window Series. In this life-sized photograph, taken of a window at her parents’ home, Ritter captures the exterior of a world often guarded and hidden from society. Installed opposite the photograph is the video “Happy Birthday Dean.” Here, Ritter gives the viewer an intimate tour of the inside of her father’s home, culminating with footage from a recent birthday party. The celebration evokes feelings of nostalgia in her father and a yearning for his childhood—a time when things were easier for him. As his age has increased, so too have his fears and resistance to change, encapsulated by the fifteen-minute video Fear | Comfort, projected on the central wall.

The insecurities that haunt Ritter’s father flicker across the projector and TV screen. But, unlike the details of his home’s exterior, they remain partly hidden from view. The viewer is asked to project onto Ritter’s father their own baggage about the American Dream. Seen through his daughter’s lens, he becomes a window into the psyche of an entire generation, leaving us with the question: “How do we restore the dignity of those who get left behind?”

Ritter more recently created work in a similar vein for the 2025 installation What Does it Feel Like To Be You at Ortega y Gasset Projects.

Brooklyn Art Shows- Maya Hayuk from “Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls” at Brooklyn Museum

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Brooklyn, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Jul 252025
 

Maya Hayuk is one of the four artists on view in Brooklyn Museum’s Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls.  The other artists included are José Parlá, Kennedy Yanko, and the late Leon Polk Smith.

From the museum about Hayuk and this work-

With a diverse practice as a muralist, painter, photographer, gallery founder, and member of several artist collectives, Maya Hayuk has worked internationally to bring vibrancy and movement to urban and exhibition spaces. Weaving layers of paint, she animates walls with what she describes as “perfect imperfection.” These paintings, with their symmetrical organization and brilliantly overlapping colors and drips, are both constructed and improvisational, blurring perceptions of outer and inner space and confronting paradoxes of harmony and dissonance, optimism and hopelessness. Hayuk’s Ukrainian heritage as well as current geopolitical events inspire her to express abstracted physical and psychological landscapes of the war’s front line, simulating the flash points of explosions intersecting with the hope of sunrise.

The exhibition, which takes place on the walls surrounding the museum’s Beaux-Arts Court, remains on view until January 4, 2026.

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- 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.

Flashback- Jeffrey Gibson at Brooklyn Museum in 2020

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Brooklyn, Collage, Conceptual Art, Glasswork, New York Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture
Nov 292024
 

Jeffrey Gibson’s stained glass work above, WHOSE WORLD IS THIS? IT’S YOURS IT’S MINE, 2019, was part of his 2020 exhibition, When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks at Brooklyn Museum.

From the artist about the work-

The stained-glass piece “WHOSE WORLD IS THIS?” uses a modified lyric from Nas’s 1994 song “The World is Yours“. This traditional stained-glass work proposes that this world is both yours and mine. It’s ours. I want to address the question of who owns one’s identity. I believe that identity is made up of elements of our selves that we want to share and make public and also the public’s reaction and responses to our presented identity. We need to remain in communication and show respect and even celebrate both the differences in our backgrounds as much as we do the similarities. We are stronger together than we are working against one another. Although this can be challenging, the end result is a more peaceful and accepting world where we can all thrive, support one another, and be supported. I chose to work in stained glass because the words and colors can emanate from the materials when light is shown through the piece and reflect onto the floor and surrounding walls-becoming larger than itself.

Recently the US State Department chose Gibson to represent the country at the 2024 Venice Biennale. He is the first Indigenous artist to be selected for a solo US show at the international art exhibition. For more on this exhibition, the BBC has an informative article that also includes quotes from the artist discussing the challenges of being selected for this honor.

Brooklyn Art Shows- Leon Polk Smith from “Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls” at Brooklyn Museum

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Brooklyn, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Nov 292024
 

Leon Polk Smith is one of the artists featured in Brooklyn Museum’s Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls, on view until July 2025. His work was the impetus for the exhibition which is located on the walls of the museum’s Beaux-Arts Court.

From the museum about the artist-

Known for his bold use of color and geometry, the “hard-edge” painter Leon Polk Smith drew from his youth in Oklahoma and later in life immersion into the New York City art scene. Born in what was then Indian Territory, which became Oklahoma the following year, Smith was raised on a farmstead settled among the Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations. Although his parents were of Cherokee descent, Smith was never enrolled as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and did not publicly claim his Native heritage until the end of his life. The influence of his Southwest origins and his upbringing among Native American communities can be seen through his vibrant use of color, the abstract implication of landscape and the farmland that he was raised on, and the use of symbolism that reflects the style of artworks produced by those around him.

In his adult life, Smith trained and worked as an educator while continuing to pursue painting. Without formal training in fine arts, he had his first solo exhibition at Uptown Gallery in New York City in 1941. In 1945, Smith settled permanently in the city. The Brooklyn Museum hosted his first and only major retrospective, “Leon Polk Smith: American Painter”, in 1995. The artist passed away the following year, after which his estate bequeathed eighteen works to the Museum.

Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Susan Bee at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Brooklyn, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Sep 132024
 

The paintings above are from Susan Bee’s 2023 exhibition Apocalypses, Fables, and Reveries, at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn.

From the gallery about this exhibition-

The exhibition centers on paintings depicting figures—particularly women—engaged in battle with demons, dragons, and other beasts, inspired by medieval mythology.

Twelfth-century illuminated manuscripts and hagiography serve as Bee’s primary source materials. Seven of these paintings playfully reinterpret imagery of multi-headed monsters taunting religious populaces in apocalyptic scenarios. Others show Saint Martha taming the fearsome dragon the Tarasque, and Saint Margaret praying beside the dead dragon whose belly she managed to escape from after being swallowed whole. In earlier eras, these figures were seen as icons of devotion. But in Bee’s treatment, they transmogrify into prescient myth: their stories presage the end-time fears and social injustices that plague our more secular times.

The medieval-inspired paintings are augmented by canvases offering a different vision of how we might engage with nature and fantastical “others.” These paintings feature witches and birds flying alongside one another across the daytime sky, as well as trees whose limbs culminate in eyes, hands, and other appendages. They imagine landscapes where friends might meet, or where humans and animals might find themselves in unexpected affinity.

As in her past paintings, Bee uses a mixture of linear and eccentric shapes, building up layers of oil and enamel in intensely vivid color. Blending familiar gestures with the unexpected, these works ask us to confront our present while paying homage to the past. The syncretic blend of the remembered and remade turns monumentality on its head.

Her current solo exhibition Susan Bee: Eye of the Storm, Selected Works, 1981-2023 is on view at Provincetown Art Association and Museum until 11/17/2024.

Brooklyn Art Shows- “Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo (feat. Takashi Murakami)” at Brooklyn Museum

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Brooklyn, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Printmaking
Aug 022024
 

It’s the last few days to see Utagawa Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo at Brooklyn Museum. They are incredible to view in person, but are also available to view in their entirety on the museum’s website. The exhibition also includes a few images of the places depicted in the prints today as well as Takashi Murakami’s large painted versions of some of the prints.

From the museum-

What are the must-see locations in your favorite city? Where do you go when you need a breath of fresh air? What makes certain neighborhoods famous? Join an artist-insider on a tour of nineteenth-century Tokyo (then known as Edo), from lumberyards to destination restaurants, and see if his choices illuminate your own relationship with the cities you know well.

For the first time in twenty-four years, Utagawa Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo—one of the Brooklyn Museum’s greatest treasures—returns to public display. The Museum’s complete set of these celebrated prints is among the world’s finest, full of vibrant colors preserved by decades in the dark.

While most presentations have centered on the prints’ technical sophistication and influence on European artists, here we focus on their urban subject matter. Originally published in 1856–58, the series captures the evolving socioeconomic and environmental landscape of the city that would become Tokyo. Through both the prints and complementary objects drawn from the Museum’s collection, you’ll be immersed in mid-nineteenth-century Edo and see it through the eyes of the ordinary people who populate Hiroshige’s settings. You’ll encounter all four seasons in scenes of picnics beneath cherry blossoms, summer rainstorms, falling maple leaves, and wintry dusks. The exhibition also includes modern photographs to show how Hiroshige’s scenes morphed into today’s Tokyo.

Artist Takashi Murakami (born Tokyo, Japan, 1962) takes Hiroshige’s views into a more fantastical realm with a set of his own paintings. Created in direct response to 100 Famous Views of Edo, these works invite us to reconsider Hiroshige’s world and his contributions to global art history.

Below are a few more selections from the exhibition from the museum’s website.

This exhibition closes 8/4/24.

Brooklyn Art Shows- Isolina Minjeong and Keya Tama at Court Tree Collective in Industry City

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Brooklyn, Ceramic Art, Conceptual Art, Fiber Arts, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Jun 072024
 

It was great to see new work by Keya Tama and his partner Isolina Minjeong at Court Tree Collective in Industry City. I last saw Tama’s work in Los Angeles in 2019. The woven and ceramic pieces they have created for Defender are charming and reflect their personal backgrounds. The couple have also kept the prices low to encourage younger collectors.

From the gallery-

Court Tree Collective proudly presents “Defender”, a duo exhibition by Isolina Minjeong and Keya Tama. These two young artists work by blending the old with the new and by infusing their cultural heritage into their creations. This new body of work breathes fresh life into traditional art forms. Their work is a vibrant reflection of their identity and experiences, enriching the viewer with diverse perspectives and narratives. The title “Defender” is for upholding traditions in a modern world. The exhibition features folklore history through ceramics, paintings, and tapestries. Combining traditional art forms, while incorporating elements of pop culture brings to light the protection of the past. Exacting the moment of when history becomes relevant in both the past and future.

Playing off each other’s strengths has unified the work as something special. Not only as two artists in pursuit of creating together, but in working in the present to bring a unique perspective on art history.

“Defender” is an exhibition of their collaborative language. Through tapestries, paintings, muralism, and ceramic sculptures, Keya and Isolina protect each other’s hearts. This is their first duo exhibition in New York.

This exhibition closes 6/8/24.

 

Brooklyn Art Shows- Sascha Mallon at Kentler International Drawing Space

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Brooklyn, Ceramic Art, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Illustration, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
May 252024
 

There are many little stories within Sascha Mallon’s lovely installation for Wolf Tales, on view at Kentler International Drawing Space. It includes sculptures and drawings, with pieces emerging from the walls. Each little section captures the imagination.

The press release below includes a poem by Erich Fried, as well as a more detailed discussion on the artist’s motivations and process.

WOLF TALES

“It is madness
says reason
It is what it is
says love
It is unhappiness
says caution
It is nothing but pain
says fear
It has no future
says insight
It is what it is
says love
It is ridiculous
says pride
It is foolish
says caution
It is impossible
says experience
It is what it is
says love.”
– Erich Fried

This installation synthesizes the artist’s engagement with drawing, glazed porcelain, and mohair silk crochet yarn, bringing all these elements into one monumental work that flows around the edges of the space. For Wolf Tales, Mallon is going back to her roots of drawing after being actively engaged with molding, firing, and glazing porcelain objects. In this exhibition she is primarily a draftsman on a quest, mirroring the main heroes of the story as they go through transformations. Going back to drawing in this more monumental format signifies for Mallon her long-cherished wish of making this method more dynamic, forgetting its static nature, and allowing drawings to flow.

The titular wolf is an ambivalent embodiment of spirit and energy that is at first at odds with a human presence of a girl and then goes through a series of spiritual and physical changes, inner and outer shifts. In his newly published autobiographical book, Japanese author Haruki Murakami devotes significant attention to how a narrative of a novel shifts when characters are presented indirectly versus being contemplated from within their own mind-frame. In her drawings for this exhibition, Sascha Mallon likewise changes the degree of her engagement with the heroes and heroines whom we see. Themes of belonging, sustainability, mistrust, loneliness, and connection are based on narrative points presented through figures of a human girl, a wolf, a raven, and others. Yet Mallon uses her subtle drawing skills to connect disparate parts of the narrative so that we can subconsciously see the connections and let the story unfold in our own time. The tale we see is one that stays with a viewer long after they leave the space. Drawing in motion is what this presentation underlines, tying all the elements together in one mandala directly drawn on the wall by this practicing Buddhist. The drawings are airy, frequently working with and playing with a negative space.

As do many artists, Mallon creates narratives based on issues she faces in her life, and as a Buddhist she thinks often about one’s perception of reality, how we create reality, how we can make a better world by changing the mind. She is fond of questioning rather than responding, leaving spaces for stillness and freedom for the viewers. Mallon’s body of work does not develop from project to project, it is one big story that keeps changing and transforming itself. To an observer, it is more of a conversation that she continues having with herself by visual means, artistic practice presented as a gestational thought process. You do not know where it starts and where it ends; it is fluid and dynamic.

As a story, Wolf Tales also develops on multiple planes and in multiple temporal frameworks. It is not a fairy tale, but rather an artistic representation of ideas and feelings, thinking through the poem by Erich Fried, which has occupied a special place in Mallon’s life for many years. Out of all of these narratives and feelings, she weaves characters and stories in the way that fairy tales do. There are no solutions. It’s about what is happening with our lives and our emotions, and it is complex. In the seminal analysis of fairy tale structure that Vladimir Propp published in 1927, the author outlines seven main characteristics important for a fairy tale (Zaubermärchen ): miraculous helper, miraculous spouse, miraculous adversary, miraculous task, miraculous object, miraculous power or gift, and other miraculous motives. In our time we need to emphasize the importance of miraculous, which could be understood to mean harmonious, compassionate, human.

Mallon is not a research-driven artist, as what we see on the walls is transmitted (or unearthed?) through sitting still and reflecting upon dharma talks and her work as a resident artist at The Creative Center at Mount Sinai Hospital. Working with people who have limited capacities affects Mallon, bringing an existential degree to her contemplation of humanity, anger, attachment, and suffering. A native of Austria, she studied art therapy, but ultimately developed her own intuitive technique of drawing and sculpting in order to perfect what she needed to say. This self-taught quality and a certain remoteness from the official and often overtly commercial art system creates a space for honesty, deep engagement, and compassion in Mallon’s works. Being informed by the understanding of larger and more painful experiences influences one’s ability to look at life. Mallon’s life informs her works and vice versa. Even with her patients she tries to find the healthy part and work with it.

Miraculous is an element of the drawings around us. Sascha Mallon offers to bring each of us home, just as a wolf and a girl who are tied in an ambiguous, but ultimately symbiotic relationship are able to do. What is the alternative if we turn away instead of looking into each other’s faces? Compassion is an essential part of Mallon’s work, a quality that we see less and less of in the polarized society of today’s United States. For the artist, an enemy that is initially perceived on the outside turns out to be an enemy on the inside. In this story, the lines get blurred, become vague and nonessential: you don’t know any more if it’s describing a girl or a wolf. Yet the hope of the artist is that through her heroes we are able to move toward peace rather than confrontation.

—Nina Chkareuli-Mdivani is a Georgian-American curator, writer, and researcher living in New York.

This exhibition closes 5/25/24.

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