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 162025
 

“Sí y No”, 1990, Acrylic and collage on canvas

“Sí y No”, 1990, Acrylic and collage on canvas (detail)

“Sí y No”, 1990, Acrylic and collage on canvas (detail)

Luhring Augustine and kurimanzutto are currently showing paintings by the late Mexican artist Julio Galán in both of their galleries. The captivating paintings are filled with symbolic imagery and reflect the artist’s struggles with identity.

From kurimanzutto-

Galán’s brilliant career, which spanned from the mid-1980s until his untimely death in 2006, was primarily centered in New York City, Paris, and Monterrey, Mexico. While his work has not been broadly exhibited outside of his native country since his passing, his work was exhibited internationally extensively during his life, and he is widely considered the preeminent Mexican painter of his generation. Galán’s nonconformist and expansive multidisciplinary practice addresses issues of identity, gender, culture, and social constructs in works that layer self-representation and aspects of the personal with larger themes of cultural and sexual difference. Infused with an allegorical quality and woven throughout with a complex array of signifiers—enigmatic iconography and cultural references—his works, as well as his carefully crafted public persona, embraced a self-conscious othering and an ambiguous mutability that refused fixed interpretation. As art historian and professor Teresa Eckmann writes, “On canvas, he recounted and constructed illogical visions, teasing out the line between the real and artifice, his artwork deemed an “inaccessible yet formally intoxicating fabrication of self.” Galán hid from the viewer his artwork’s content as much as he revealed it; simultaneously, with his body, he explored fluid identity through masquerade.”

Rendered in a pastiche of styles, with a syncretic approach to culture, Galán’s work blends references and influences from Mexican folk and religious imagery to Surrealism, Pop Art, and graffiti. While he has often been associated with the Neomexicanismo movement of his native country and the Neo-expressionism of his peers in New York, these were characterizations he resisted, much in the way that he deliberately rejected any form of restrictive definition or singular interpretation. Magalí Arriola, former director of Museo Tamayo and curator of Galán’s most recent major retrospective, notes, “Though in some of his work [he] resorted to an iconography associated with popular Mexican culture…the use of stereotypical figures such as the charro of the Tehuana, was also related to his interest in transvestism and disguises as strategies to subvert sexual identities and other cultural constructs.” Galán’s approach exposes the limitations and issues inherent in the interrelated sentiments and systems that create and uphold any form of binary classification or fixed characterization, be they related to sexuality, nationality, spirituality, or any categorization. As writer Evan Moffitt notes, “Galán’s adoption of Mexican stereotypes and Platonic personalities reveals nationalism to be a kind of pompous drag…. There’s plenty of kitsch in Galán’s paintings, to be sure, but that kitsch is fundamental to their radicalism.” Continuing to resonate today are the remarkable energy, intelligence, and theatricality of Galán’s work, and the questions he explored regarding the relationship of individual identity and the creation of the self to oversignified notions of culture and nationalism.

For more detail on Galán, kurimanzutto has provided a link to an excellent essay by Evan Moffit about the artist and his work.

This exhibition closes 4/19/25.

Apr 082025
 

“Hemisphere”, 2024, Wood, ink on paper, hemp, linen, glass beads and frame by the artist

“Corps Astral/ Astral Body”, 2024, Ink, gold leaf, and paper on wood in an artist frame

“In Vitro”, 2024, Ink on paper, hemp, linen, and blown glass eggs mounted on wood in an artist’s frame

“Okinawa”, 2024, Ink on paper, hemp, coral, and sand stars mounted on wood in an artist’s frame

Lyne Lapointe’s works for Becoming Animal, her exhibition of new work at Jack Shainman Gallery,  natural and hand made materials add dimension to works focused on the body and its connection to the natural world.

From the gallery-

Inspired by a passage in A Thousand Plateaus, written by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the exhibition title recalls the attitude they describe as being essential to the creative process: ‘becoming animal,’ or, an ability to inhabit different material and ontological perspectives. This phrase philosophically expresses a consistent quality in Lapointe’s work, namely her ability to ‘embody’ her materials—whether it be ink or glass beads, coral or abandoned beehives—by allowing them to retain their own specificity while also fully incorporating them into the pictorial spaces of her figures. Just as Lapointe’s materials contribute to the transformation of her figures, so too do they undergo their own metamorphosis as they are integrated into the compositions, a process that reflects the body’s capacity to adapt and change while still retaining continuity with the past.

Over the past four decades Lapointe has created poetic and materially complex works that consider the corporeal and psychological consequences of existing in a world of uncertainty. Her site-specific installations and architectural interventions created throughout the 1980s and 1990s, in partnership with critic and artist Martha Fleming, established many of these essential thematic concerns. At their core was the role that social spaces play in creating and modifying subjectivity, an experience Lapointe has continued to dissect and explore through other media, including the paintings on paper in this exhibition. Together, they demonstrate her consistent focus on the body and its relationship to external factors, whether they be socially constructed or naturally occurring.

Through research, careful sourcing and sustainable practices, Lapointe has expanded her process to include heterogeneous materials and found objects alike. In Beehives Apiarists (2024), the diptych’s beehives have been affixed to the figures while propolis—a resin-like substance produced by bees and typically used for medicinal purposes—has been used to cover the works entirely. In Mother of Pearl (2024), a large shell has been placed at the center of the figure while pearls punctuate the background. In Vitro (2024) brings together blown glass eggshells, hemp and recycled linens. Lapointe’s method of collecting these items, locating additional materials and preserving their respective histories is a process that metaphorically expresses her long-standing desire to use resources that not only describe our world, but that remind us of its innate worth and beauty and thus of our own as well.

By incorporating objects found in nature and the home, Lapointe creates moments that reimagine the body and place it in a point of transition. At times between genders, while at others void of identity altogether, her figures always question the viability of personal expression in our current socio-political context. Though typically characterized by vulnerability and fragility, they also and just as often embody a position of triumphant resistance to a world that seeks to restrict gender expression, categorize sexuality and stigmatize ‘otherness.’ When responding to a world of danger and hostility her figures can don protective armor, as in Black Billed Cuckoo / Magnolia Grandiflora (2023) and Okinawa (2024). In the series The Head and the Body (2024) Lapointe renders each figure in both deep black ink and shimmering gold leaf, suggesting an inner psychological world that the materials merely hint at. This is a world where resilience and radiance take form as proffered by the gold leaf, while tenacity, seen in the deep opacity and outward reaching gesture of the inked figure, takes root.

Though Lapointe’s practice has often centered femininity and womanhood in its many personal and social forms, in Becoming Animal she has gone one step further by creating figures that appear genderless, or which seem to exist outside of such rigid codification entirely. The found objects she uses to characterize these anonymous forms also signify their environmental context and invite viewers to consider the works through the lens of environmentalism. By encouraging each figure to occupy multiple ontological perspectives at once, Lapointe creates both a literal and conceptual connection to the construction of the works themselves. They straddle the line between painting, sculpture and collage, while finding ways to express the body in a fugue state through her singular craftsmanship and mastery of materials—or as Deleuze and Guattari write, they seek to ‘un-human the human.’

This exhibition closes 4/12/25.

Oct 022024
 

Kathleen Strukoff, “Turquoise Bird”, Mixed Media, Kee Gallery

Backstreet Art District in Palm Springs consists of several art galleries and studios and hosts a monthly event on the first Wednesday of every month. For additional information and a list of all of the galleries and their current showings, head to their website.

Below are a few selections from this past summer.

Work by Ernesto Ramirez

Work by Erich Meager

Kee Gallery is owned and operated by artists Kathleen Strukoff, Ernesto Ramirez, and Erich Meager.

Work by Aurora Lucia-Levey at Tom Ross Gallery

Work by Rae Harrell from her gallery

Paintings by Martin Prew at Kevin Goddess’s gallery

Paintings by Kevin Goddess

The studio in the back of Stephen Baumbach Gallery

Stephen Baumbach Gallery hosts numerous photography exhibitions throughout the year and houses a fine art printing business.

 

Work by Gary Wexler

The studio at Gary Wexler Design

 

 

Sep 252024
 

“Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe les Trois Femmes Noires d’apés Picasso (Luncheon on the Grass, Three Black Women after Picasso)”, 2022

“Look at What You’ve Become”, 2005 and “Portrait of Mnonja with Flower in Hair”, 2008, Rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel on wood panel

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love at The Broad presents a beautifully curated collection of work from the artist’s impressive career. Below are a few selections and information from The Broad about the show and some of the individual works.

From the museum about the exhibition-

Mickalene Thomas’s paintings, photographs, video installations, and sculptures celebrate the experiences of Black women. Her work is rooted in the intimacy of relationships between mothers and daughters, between lovers, and between friends. Thomas’s work centers the joys and complexities of self-respect and love, especially at times when they are diminished or threatened.

Thomas was born in Camden, New Jersey, and grew up in Hillside and East Orange, a childhood evoked in the building facades that open this exhibition. After coming out at the age of sixteen, she moved to Portland, Oregon, where the encouragement of a small group of local artists and an inspiring encounter with the work of Carrie Mae Weems led her to attend Pratt Institute, then Yale University, to pursue visual art.

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love begins in 2003, when Thomas turned from making abstract paintings to portraiture and photography. Her first subject was her mother, Sandra Bush, affectionately known as “Mama Bush.” By focusing on their relationship, Thomas began considering identity through the mirrors of family and friends, as well as through public images manifested by Black musicians, fashion icons, actors, and performers.

From early in her career, Thomas built sets in which she would photograph her muses. She wanted her subjects to feel in a place of mutual comfort, respect, and trust. Later, Thomas would take her muses into the environments and scenes of art history, claiming space inside the narratives and imagery from which Black and queer people have been either excluded or shown anonymously. Recent work in the exhibition, such as Thomas’s Jet series and Tête de Femme (seen in Los Angeles for the first time), confronts cultural conventions of beauty, reconfiguring norms in celebration of beauty centered in individuality and acceptance.

Spanning twenty years of Thomas’s career, this exhibition takes its title from bell hooks’s essential collection of essays All About Love, in which the writer argues that in order to counter and reorient a culture of power and domination, one must act according to a set of principles where “everyone has a right to be free, to live life and well.” In the spirit of hooks, the artwork of Thomas aims to make space for Black joy, leisure, and eroticism, both for their own sake and to counteract injustice.

“A Little Taste Outside of Love”, 2007 Acrylic, enamel, and rhinestones on wood panel

“Three Graces: Les Trois Femmes Noires (Three Graces: Three Black Women)”, 2011, Rhinestones, acrylic, oil, and enamel on wood panel

“Afro Goddess Looking Forward”, 2015, Rhinestones, acrylic, and oil on wood panel

About the work above from the museum-

In this work, Thomas is the main subject, the muse of her own practice. In a 2006 photo session, the artist produced a series of self-portraits that has become the inspiration and visual material for many paintings. Early paintings based on these images include intact bodies shown inside of a shifting assortment of collaged patterns that accumulate and fracture around the subject. However, in this 2015 painting, Thomas collages a set of eyes onto the figure, drawing attention to the artist’s gaze of the viewer. This strategy- collaging onto the figure- continues today, as Thomas obscures and asserts different features of the body to investigate the construction of identity and beauty.

Her photography and video work shared a large room in the exhibition.

From the museum about the wall of photos above (image is a section of the full wall)-

Photography has long played an important role in Mickalene Thomas’s work. As a student at Yale, in a class with David Hilliard, Thomas was encouraged to experiment with the medium, to explore a subject that came “from a vulnerable place.” This led to photographing her mother, early engagements with self-portraiture, and photo sessions with women close to her. Initially, Thomas’s photography was used as material in her collages and paintings, but over time, the artist has embraced her photographs as standalone artworks.

This wall contains many facets of Thomas’s photography practice, all “proof of an experience between her and her subject,” as writer Jennifer Blessing observes. Some of the photographs—like La leon d’amour (A Lesson of Love), 2008, and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les trois femmes noires (Luncheon on the Grass: Three Black Women), 2010— became springboards for Thomas’s most well-known paintings. Other photographs speak to Thomas’s success and visibility as a dynamic studio photographer, as in her commission for Aperture in 2019, Untitled #3 (Orlando Series), and in Madame Carrie, 2018, for the New York Times.

About the video installation pictured below-

For this eight-channel video, Thomas was inspired by Eartha Kitt’s 1953 song Angelitos Negros (Black Angels), in which the singer implores artists of religious devotion to paint Black angels and add their depictions to visions of heaven. “You paint all our churches, and fill them with beautiful angels,” a translation of the song records, “but you never do remember, to paint us a Black angel.” For Thomas, the song was a revelation, speaking to the heart of her artistic practice of celebrating and advancing joyful images of Black women. This video is a collage, repurposing found footage from YouTube and enlisting Thomas’s muses to perform, all coming together in fulfillment of Kitt’s wish.

“Angelitos Negros (Black Angels)”, 2016, Eight channel digital video

There is a section of the exhibition devoted to Thomas’s Resist series, which includes The Charnel House (Resist #5), 2021, pictured below.

About the Resist paintings from the museum-

Mickalene Thomas made her first Resist painting in 2017 for the Seattle Art Museum’s Figuring History, an exhibition focused on questioning distorted narratives of history through Black experience. Making new work, Thomas brought her extensive artistic toolkit of collage, her use or rhinestones and other craft materials, and her viewpoint as a Black queer woman to create a direct encounter with the civil rights era of the 1960s. Thomas has spoken of being especially inspired by the work of Robert Colescott, whose satirical paintings offered her a sense of permission and a voice to approach social events proactively.

In the Resist series, Thomas finds echoes of the past in the present, layering archival images from the civil rights era with images from recent protests and uprisings related to Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements. Of central importance in Resist is memory, the remembrance of lives that have been taken by police brutality and injustice. In the works on view in this gallery, protests, such as those in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, are seen in the context of images of activists like James Baldwin and Shirley Chisholm, as well as of photographs of race-based attacks on Black people from many decades

From the museum about The Charnel House

In this painting, the history of civil rights in the United States meets the open conflicts and struggles of the present. The surface is an accumulation of slogans: signs for the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast for children program join the names of Freddie Gray and Alton Sterling (both killed in encounters with police), as well as posters for Black Lives Matter and others from the March for Racial Justice held in September 2017 in Washington DC, specifically “Women of Color Have Always Led Change.” The collision of eras in the work is buttressed and sharpened by deep questions about art’s ability and responsibility to be an agent for political protest and change. Thomas interlaces the panel with patterns from Pablo Picasso’s The Charnel House, 1944-45,  a work that Picasso considered a depiction of a massacre and that (along with Guernica, 1937) is seen as the artist’s most direct engagement with the politics and horrors of the Spanish Civil War and, for some commentators, World War II and the Holocaust.

In 2017 Mickalene Thomas began using Jet magazine as a source in her work, specifically it’s nude calendar which used anonymous models.

From the museum about the series-

Thomas speaks of her Jet series as rooted in desire, in her openness to unapologetically love Black women: “I think there’s something to owning Black women’s erotica-us owning our sexuality needs to be validated as we own and love our own bodies, and want to be desired.
The Black female body is beautiful.”

“February 1976”, 2021, Rhinestones, glitter, charcoal, acrylic, and oil paint on canvas mounted on wood panel and oak frame

About the above work from the museum-

The original Jet calendar image for February 1976 featured a model in an interior populated with plants, one of which served to obscure her genitals. A decorative screen acts as a backdrop and the model is posed like an odalisque, right out of art history. In Thomas’s work, she intervenes dramatically in the scene, leaving the model mostly intact and expressive, while radically abstracting the plants and screen. For the painting’s debut at Lévy Gorvy gallery in 2021, the artist evoked both the grid of the screen and the plants in the space itself, filling the floor with mirrored tiles and greenery, as seen installed here.

 

Jet Blue #28, 2021 Rhinestones, acrylic paint, oil pastel, mixed-media paper, and archival pigment prints on museum paper mounted on Dibond with mahogany and Jet Blue #45 (Neon), 2024, Neon

This exhibition closes 9/29/24.

Aug 292024
 

“Somos Monstros 2”, 2016

The work above was part of Raúl de Nieves’ large installation created for the 2017 Whitney Biennial.

From the museum about his work-

For his site-specific work for the 2017 Biennial, Raúl de Nieves covered six floor-to-ceiling windows with eighteen “stained-glass” panels he made using paper, wood, glue, tape, beads, and acetate sheets. The windows create a vivid backdrop for de Nieves’s elaborately beaded sculptures, some of which are based on shoes (but are adorned to the point of abstraction), while others take the form of figures draped in heavy costumes worn by the artist in his performances.

In all of his work, de Nieves treats modest materials with meticulous attention, turning the mundane into the fantastical—with metamorphosis a common theme. The windows depict a world in which death and waste are omnipresent, often symbolized by a fly. Unlike many Western spiritual traditions, however, de Nieves presents death as a metaphor for the possibility of spectacular transformation and rebirth in an unpredictable and turbulent world.

Fashion magazine W interviewed the artist about the work- here.

Aug 022024
 

The above image is of Jessie Homer French’s  Mapestry California 2012, 2012 (fabric, thread, fabric paint, and pen), which was on view in 2018 at Palm Springs Art Museum.

From the museum about the work-

This work is from a series of “mapestries” that the artist made between 2012-2017. These textile works graphically map out natural elements and forces in California, from prominent flora and fauna, natural monuments and mountain ranges, as well as hidden fault lines that spur the earthquakes that constantly threaten the region and its inhabitants. The work reflects the artist’s hyperawareness of the environment around her. Their flat, graphic qualities are similar in form to the artist’s paintings. The mapestries were made specifically for Californians, as artworks that could do no harm hanging over one’s bed in case of an earthquake.

One of her paintings is currently part of the benefit exhibition Art for a Safe and Healthy California at Gagosian Beverly Hills. The exhibition, presented by Jane Fonda, along with the gallery, is raising money to protect communities from toxic oil drilling.

Jun 012024
 

It’s easy to become a bit overwhelmed at Arthur Jafa’s exhibition BLACK POWER TOOL AND DIE TRYNIG at 52 Walker. His latest show includes a large installation, photography, sculpture, painting and a new film. Passing the reflective black surface and walking through his sculptural installation, Picture Unit II,  you’ll find portraits of bikers, a photo from the Manson murders, a subway car, and a stripper at a club next to a photo from a Rwandan genocide memorial. Next to where a video plays a collage of clips, an installation of cut out figures includes himself, Miles Davis, The Sex Pistols, and artists Cady Noland and Adrian Piper.

Death plays a large part in the show, as does personal and collective history. His best friend of forty years, cultural critic Greg Tate, recently passed away, also contributing to the heaviness of this recent work.

From the press release-

Lauded for his achievements as a filmmaker and cinematographer as well as a visual artist, Jafa has developed an incisive, chameleonic practice, through which he seeks to unravel the cultural significance and strictures ascribed in tandem upon Black existence in the Western world. In BLACK POWER TOOL AND DIE TRYNIG, Jafa invokes the body’s personal, political, and industrial guises in one fell swoop, deftly interweaving images and objects to create a forceful and maximal space that beckons toward engulfment and revelation alike.

Jafa’s exhibition at 52 Walker brings to the surface questions of form, force, and resistance— in addition to tensions that result from common slips and errors. The title of the show, BLACK POWER TOOL AND DIE TRYNIG, applies strategies of sequencing and juxtaposition, channeling various meanings in its wordplay—including political ideologies, industrial terminologies, and the specter of death—while also nodding to the complexities of the word “black” and its many inflections. Favoring intuitive arrangement over uniformity, the artist eschews traditionally monolithic modes of presentation and instead coheres multiple simultaneous events, applying a decidedly Black and non-Western viewpoint that confronts twentieth-century art historiography and museology’s indebtedness to African aesthetics.

In the video below, also on the 52 Walker website, Jafa discusses the show with screenwriter Judnick Mayard and is worth watching for additional insights.

This exhibition closes 6/1/24.

May 242024
 

“The Water-Bearer (Version 20)”,2024, Acrylic, charcoal, colored pencil, graphite, ink and marker on canvas with collage

“The Water-Bearer (Version 20)”,2024 (detail)

“The Fish (Version 20)”, 2023, Acrylic, colored pencil, graphite, ink, permanent marker and oil-based permanent marker on canvas with collage

“The Fish (Version 20)”, 2023, (detail)

Tomorrow (5/25/24) is the last day to see Edward Holland’s mixed media zodiac paintings, At the Bottom of the Celestial Sea, at Hollis Taggart. The layers of color and the collaged items combine to form fascinating portraits of the astrological signs, while also hinting at larger themes.

From the press release-

Edward Holland’s zodiac painting series, which he started creating in 2014, are inspired by the many dimensions of zodiac signs from the astronomical to the astrological and the mythological. Holland incorporates the linear geometry of a zodiacal constellation in each painting, using this as a kind of framework onto which he collages printed papers ranging from notes from his neighbors and poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti to maps and doodles created by his two daughters. Holland then builds on this foundation with graphite and paint, at times scribbling out the words on the printed papers, and at others layering expressive brushwork – usually incorporating the color associated with the given zodiac – in what resemble fragments of Abstract Expressionist paintings. The resulting works are almost like abstracted portraits of each zodiac, inviting the viewer into a game of excavating their many layers of meaning.

To take one example, The Archer (Version 18), 2024, is scaffolded by the constellation of Sagittarius rendered in purple and anchored by moments of bold yellow, which is complementary of the color attributed to the zodiac. Partially hidden beneath layers of paint are instructions for how to bandage a wounded leg as well as anatomical drawings of legs, nodding to Sagittarius’ association with lower limbs. Peeking through at the center of the canvas is the signature moustache of Frank Zappa, the legendary musician and composer born under the sign of Sagittarius. Each painting contains dozens of such zodiacal associations – some more obscure than others, with certain material so painted over that it is no longer visible to the viewer. While it may seem that Holland would search for such reference material intentionally, he only ever uses materials he finds on the street or which is shared with him by friends and family. This adds a sense of wonder to the works, as the material has come to the artist through serendipity.

For more on the artist and this series, Artnet recently visited him in his studio to discuss his work and process.

 

May 172024
 

“Island”, 2024. Acrylic on paper

“Daredevil”, 2024, Acrylic and colored pencil on paper, and “L’Observatoire, 2024, Acrylic on paper

Yancey Richardson is currently showing two exhibitions which focus on architecture and city life. Mary Lum’s paintings and collages for temporary arrangements combine elements of city life found on her walks in New York and Paris. Fragments she discovers along the way combine to form dynamic interpretations of these environments.

From the press release-

Lum mines aspects of daily life, vistas of architecture, design, and advertising that could easily go unnoticed. These familiar and often mundane sights are transformed into something more: juxtapositions and layers of random elements, which show both spontaneity and control, perhaps revealing a glimpse into the soul of a city.

The exhibition title temporary arrangements refers to Lum’s journeys though the streets of New York and Paris, observing the fragments of a crumbling façade of a building, a vendor’s pushcart, or a poster for a vernissage, which may have a short shelf life in the urban environment. Lum takes photographs on the streets looking at geometric forms, planes of color, and text. She pulls off bits of advertising posters that are peeling from their bases and collects printed materials – all of which are collaged in her sketchbooks, becoming the basis for her paintings. These elements provide inspiration for Lum, who creates a collision of perspectives and forms that boldly announce the delights of quiet discoveries.

Susan Cross, Senior Curator, Mass MoCA, wrote that Lum’s work “suggests the speed of daily life and the fragmented way in which we encounter language in the world. Language speeds up and slows down, much in the way that when we are walking or riding a bike in the city our pace is determined by what we notice around us. Words come together and fall apart, with each individual viewer making meaning.”

Influenced by Cubism and Russian Constructivism, Lum is also interested in the concept of psychogeography, as practiced by members of the Situationist International movement in the 1950s and ‘60s. Referring to the effect of a geographical location on the emotions and behavior of the individual, one may see Lum’s interdisciplinary practice as a physical manifestation of this phenomenon. Lum also finds inspiration in artist and activist Corita Kent’s graphic style and fractured text as well as artist Ray Yoshida’s use of comics, which tell stories with isolated fragments.

Mary Lum wrote, “A couple of years ago I saw a William Kentridge exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. One of the things that kept jumping out at me from that show was the phrase: ’FIND THE LESS GOOD IDEA.’ That painted phrase was repeated several times in various parts of the exhibition, and each time I saw it I got a little jolt of recognition. I’m not sure exactly what Kentridge meant by that phrase (it’s related to his Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg), but to me it meant everything about the way I work. I took the reference to mean finding the things that are in the margins, those things that are on the periphery, those things that are between the lines, that you see out of the corner of your eye. Not through a concerted effort, but by paying attention, looking around, looking the other way. And often, later, you are not sure that you’ve seen these things at all.”

For Lynn Saville’s exhibition Elevated, she has captured NYC at its most peaceful time, twilight.

From the press release-

Twilight in the city, after the sun disappears below the horizon and the hustle and bustle has dissipated, is where Lynn Saville finds refuge and inspiration. For decades, she has documented these fleeting, dream-like moments suspended in time within the urban landscape.

Elevated showcases Saville’s mastery of the city’s natural light. Much like Edward Hopper, who painted the solitude of New York City through its buildings and rooftops, Saville’s photographs transform architectural elements and structures into dramatic geometric forms and patterns through light and shadows. Saville describes the importance of capturing images at twilight, “During this transitional time, the change from daylight to moonlight and artificial light seems to awaken the city’s own dreams, apart from the business and errands of its inhabitants. For me, these dreams are expressed in basic shapes and patterns, as if the infrastructure were communing with its own geometry while distracting details are hidden in shadow. The shifting light brings out forms that may disappear in the darkness of night or remain invisible during the more chaotic visual world of daylight.”

As the exhibition title implies, photographs featured in the show were taken from the elevated platforms of New York City’s mass transit system or from the street looking upward at structures on rooftops. These photographs explore perspectives on the language of the built environment and our perception of the cityscape. For example, Elevated subway platforms offer an expanse of skyline structures such as rooftops, water towers, and upper sections of nearby buildings, which along with the coming and goings of trains become the focal point.

Both of these exhibitions close 5/18/24.