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
 

Work by Roger Halligan

Work by Jan Chenoweth

While visiting Lake City, South Carolina for ArtFields one must see gallery is Chenoweth. Halligan Studios. The gallery showcases the work of artists Roger Halligan and Jan Chenoweth who relocated to the area from Chattanooga, Tennessee in 2019. In addition to being a gallery, it is also a working studio with an outdoor sculpture space.

During ArtFields and other events the gallery is open to the public, but they are also available by appointment.

Work by Roger Halligan

Work by Roger Halligan

Work by Jan Chenoweth

Mar 282025
 

“Blood Orange Moon”, 2024, Oil on linen

“Daydream of a Nocturne”, 2023, Acrylic and oil on linen

The two paintings above are from In My Mind, Out My Mind, Shyama Golden’s exhibition at Harper’s last year. Golden, along with Narsiso Martinez was recently selected by LACMA to be the Art Here and Now (AHAN) Studio Artists of 2024.

From the Harper’s press release for Golden’s 2024 exhibition-

Across the paintings that comprise In My Mind, Out My Mind, Golden depicts universal cycles of rebirth as told through her personal biography and cultural memory. The artist derives inspiration from her neighboring Los Angeles landscapes and the figure of the yakka in Sri Lankan folklore, a demon or trickster spirit. Plummeting into the belly of the beast, Golden unravels her subconscious turmoil and is then reborn. In the biomythographical series, the artist transcends binaries of good and evil while meditating on the psychic, social, and ideological fissures that inform cyclical transformation.

Like a cinematic storyboard, each painting presents a different scene in Golden’s speculative odyssey. The narrative begins in the cemetery: eerie green hues resound, invoking the unsettling terrain where the living greet the dead. From there, Golden’s protagonist travels through gopher holes and subconscious highways where she collides with an imagined yakka and plunges into its wound. Golden’s avatar concludes her expedition at the Los Angeles River. Here, she emerges from a tree reborn, mirroring the river’s regenerative journey.

Repeatedly, Golden faces troubled interiority directly within this visual retelling of internal affliction. In works like Daydream of a Nocturne, which marks the beginning of the series, the artist’s fictional self sits beside a yakka alter ego among a ring of graves. On a padura, or traditional reed mat, Golden’s avatar presents an offering to the hybrid creature who bears a toothy grin: fish, served on a banana leaf, a clay oil lamp, and an all-American corn dog. These miscellaneous treats appease the yakka while gesturing towards diasporic hybridity.

In Blood Orange Moon, Golden represents herself after she’s ejected from a tree trunk following her expedition through psychological space. As if Alice, emerging from the rabbit hole that leads to Wonderland, Golden’s protagonist shimmies out from the world of her inner demons and happens upon an optimistic landscape. This surreal work, like the rest that comprise In My Mind, Out My Mind, beckons a curiosity for the unfamiliar—a desire that dwells at the pith of the exhibition. Across these scenes, Golden invites the onlooker to be gentler with all that is flawed and foreign. It is these perplexing yet dynamic differences, within ourselves and among others, that make us human.

 

Mar 212025
 

To celebrate the beginning of Spring, two paintings by Haitian artist Rigaud BenoitFleurs du printemps (Spring Flowers),1965 and Les Oiseaux (The Birds), 1973.

The work was part of last year’s exhibition Reframing Haitian Art: Masterworks from the Arthur Albrecht Collection at Tampa Museum of Art.

Oct 112024
 

Above is artist Larry Gray’s oil painting Anywhere Before, taken when it was on view at The Haen Gallery in Asheville, North Carolina in 2021.

Sep 202024
 

The two paintings above by Ulla Scheinemann are from the group show Femme, on view at Susan Eley Fine Art this past May.

From the gallery’s Instagram about her work-

Ulla Scheinemann’s paintings are intimate and intuitive. She explains this process, “I am quite curious about trying out new things while painting. I always try to contribute something new. The painting I like the most is therefore always the painting that I am currently working on. My paintings sometimes make me wonder, where the figurative stops and the abstraction begins and I like to be in between terms of “style”. The paintings are a way of expressing my view of the world. The figures are to some degree an expression of the human condition every individual lives by. It is not something that I plan, it just seems to end up that way in the process. I can’t be dishonest, while I am painting.Paintings never lie.”

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.

Aug 302024
 

Raúl de Nieves created these sculptures for the group exhibition The Musical Brain, located on the High Line in NYC in 2021.

From the High Line’s website about the exhibition-

The Musical Brain is a group exhibition that reflects on the power music has to bring us together. The exhibition is named after a short story by the Argentine contemporary writer César Aira, and explores the ways that artists use music as a tool to inhabit and understand the world. The featured artists approach music through different lenses—historical, political, performative, and playful—to create new installations and soundscapes installed throughout the park.

Traditionally, music is thought of as an art form we construct ourselves. With different organizing rules, instruments, and traditions across cultures, music has underpinned essential collective moments in societies for as long as we know. But music is also the way that we hear the world around us. Often used to described nature (wind whistling through trees), the cosmos (in the Music of the Spheres, or musica universalis), and even the built industrial environment (the rhythmic lull of a train car), music is the order we project onto a cacophonous world. Humans seek order and patterns but also relish chaos and noise; in many ways, music becomes the way that we can experience both at the same time.

The artists in this exhibition listen closely to the sonic world and explore the different temporal, sculptural, social, and historical dimensions of the ways we make music, and the ways we listen. They wonder what stories discarded objects tell when played, what happens when a railway spike becomes a bell, and how the youth of our generation sing out warnings to save our planet. They remind us that music is a powerful tool for communication, especially in times when spoken language fails us. The sonic brings us together to celebrate, protest, mark the passage of time, and simply be together.

And about the artist and this work-

Raúl de Nieves (b. 1983, Morelia, Mexico) makes colorful sculptures and elaborately costumed performances. Having learned to sew and crochet as a child, de Nieves collages found fabrics onto mannequins and coveralls to create fantastical figures that he displays as sculptures and wears in musical performances. De Nieves installs three of these figures sitting on benches on the High Line. The sculptures reference the costumes musicians wear to become their larger-than-life personas and interrupt the crowds with their magical splendor.

Aug 232024
 

This painting by David Alfaro Siqueiros, Our Present Image, 1947, was part of the Whitney Museum’s exhibition Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945 that ran from February 2020 through January 2021.

From the museum about this work-

In this painting, which demonstrates how Siqueiros would continue to develop the techniques he pioneered at the Experimental Workshop long after he left New York, the artist has replaced the face of a man with an oval stone to signify not one specific race or nationality but all of humanity. Rejecting the fixed perspective of more traditional painting, Siqueiros employed multiple viewpoints that cause viewers moving through space to experience the figure in motion. Although the exact meaning of the figure’s foreshortened arms and outstretched hands is ambiguous, Siqueiros was a dedicated Communist who believed in the ultimate triumph of the proletariat. Hands, for him, symbolized the heroic strength of the worker. The people, as he wrote in another context, march from “a distant past of misery and oppression… toward industrialization, emancipation, and progress.

Aug 232024
 

This mural was created by German artist Case Maclaim for 2016’s Top to Bottom mural project- a group of murals covering a building in Long Island City organized by Arts Org NYC.