Duane Michals (1932-2026)

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Fashion, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Video and Film
Jun 122026
 

Duane Michals, “The Spirit Leaves The Body”, 1968, courtesy of DC Moore Gallery

 

“Magritte with Easel”, 1965, courtesy of DC Moore Gallery

“A Letter From My Father”, 1975, courtesy of DC Moore Gallery

Innovative photographer Duane Michals passed away on Tuesday, 6/9/26, at the age of 94. He was famous for both his portraits of famous artists and celebrities, and for more personal work that often included his writing on the prints, something not done at the time.

He continuously worked up until his death, even shooting the campaign, What are Dreams, for Bottega Veneta last year. Featuring actor Jacob Elordi, it includes a short film along with a photo series, both based on a poem by Michals.

Jacob Elordi and Duane Michals in Bottega Veneta’s “What Are Dreams” campaign, photographed by Duane Michals in 2025. Photo courtesy of Bottega Veneta (image via Artnet)

His 2019 exhibition, Illusions of the Photographer at The Morgan Library and Museum included The Spirit Leaves the Body, and A Letter From My Father (pictured above), along with a few handwritten notes in his distinctive style, like the one below on death. Many of his photographs reflected an interest in mortality, but there was also a lighthearted aspect to many others.

For more on the artist, also check out this 2022 interview in Aperture magazine. In it he talks about his work, his partner of over 50 years (architect Fred Gorrée), his dreams, the importance of curiosity, and more. He also had a fun Instagram worth taking a look through.

 

Throwback- NYC Art Shows- Nicole James at Harsh Collective in 2024

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Apr 232026
 

The painting above, [12:02 AM] by Nicole James, was part of Harsh Collective‘s 2024 exhibition Entropy in NYC. She is currently part of the group exhibition March Madness at Room57 Gallery, on view until 5/1/26. Loft Projects will also be showing some of her smaller paintings and mini-paintings at Future Fair in Chelsea, May 13-16th.

A little bit about the artist from Harsh Collective-

Nicole James (b. 1987, Los Angeles, CA) embraces chaos in her figurative compositions, even amidst the quest for aesthetic perfection. Using a systematic painting approach, James seamlessly integrates elements from modern photography, pop culture, and self-documentation. Her compositions, born from this fusion, offer viewers a glimpse into the beauty inherent in life’s chaos, inviting them to immerse themselves in the captivating allure of disorder while imagining themselves as the subject of the composition.

Also check out her Instagram, where James often shares videos and still shots of the process behind creating her work.

 

Los Angeles Art Shows- Todd Gray at Perrotin and LACMA

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography
Apr 212026
 

Todd Gray, “The Song Remains (assumptions about the nature of time)”, 2024, Two UV pigment prints on Dibond, artist’s frames

In LA-based artist Todd Gray’s The Song Remains (assumptions about the nature of time), two images, one of Iggy Pop and the other of a statue in Italy, merge both visually and conceptually. It was on view as part of While Angels Gaze, his exhibition at Lehmann Maupin in NYC in 2025.

About the work from the gallery-

In The Song Remains (assumptions about the nature of time) (2024)—one of the exhibition’s smallest works, composed of just two panels—Gray depicts Iggy Pop in black and white, his image overlaid against a statue from Villa Torlonia of a figure holding a pan flute. The gesture of the statue’s outstretched arm on the left is mirrored in Iggy’s raised hand on the right, connecting the two figures across time as if by an invisible thread. The image suggests an enduring human archetype, different and yet unchanged over the course of many centuries, and invites wider questions about the essence of human nature.

Gray’s latest solo exhibition, Portals, is currently on view in Perrotin‘s new Los Angeles gallery through until 5/30/26. His commissioned piece, Octavia’s Gaze, was installed last year at LACMA in the new David Geffen Galleries, which are opening to the general public in May (they are currently open to members only).

Flashback- Kay Rosen at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins in 2024

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Mar 202026
 

Kay Rosen‘s painting Spring (2021), was part of the 2024 group exhibition Healing at Sikkema Molloy Jenkins in NYC. You can currently see this work as part of John Cage and Kay Rosen at Krakow Witkin Gallery in Boston. The exhibition opens 3/21 and runs until 5/9/26.

From Krakow Witkin Gallery about the exhibition-

The current exhibition arranges works from the past 15 years by Kay Rosen with works from 1983 by John Cage. While not an obvious aesthetic or conceptual pairing, the juxtaposition of works hopes to provide more nuanced understanding and appreciations of both artists’ approaches to observation, appreciation, chance, choice, and control.

And about the painting-

SPRING, like many of Rosen’s works, strives for efficiency and economy. It finds a way to enhance the meaning of spring without adding a word. It cannibalizes one of its own body parts, the letter N, turning spring into sprig, five little green shoots. SPRING is another one of those found works that almost makes itself. Her intervention is merely a small excision of a letter, leaving behind a new word that that suggests hope.

 

Throwback- NYC Public Art- Alex Da Corte for the High Line

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Public Art, Sculptors / Sculpture
Dec 112025
 

Alex Da Corte‘s Soft Power was on view from the High Line until June of last year.

His latest exhibition, Parade, is currently on view at Matthew Marks in NYC, on view until 12/20/25. The Pink Panther appears in this show as well- Da Corte depicts himself as the character painting the gallery pink.

From the High Line website about the billboard-

Known for his immersive installations, sculptures, and films, Alex Da Corte’s work explores themes of identity, consumerism, and taste, challenging societal norms and reimagining the familiar in unexpected ways. The artist draws from myriad sources, including popular and consumer culture, art history, classical literature, and modern design, seamlessly weaving together disparate elements into cohesive narratives. His adept use of vibrant color and surreal imagery lends a dreamlike quality to his work that captivates viewers and blurs the lines between fantasy and reality.

Da Corte presents a new artwork for the High Line’s 18th Street Billboard, inspired by the Pink Panther, a Friz Freleng creation designed for the animated opening sequence of a 1963 Hollywood comedy that came to embody the film and has evolved, through 60 years of spin-offs and reinventions, into cultural ubiquity. Pink’s durability across many generations has allowed it to sell countless products, from fiberglass insulation foam to artificial sweetener, yet the creature’s essence remains out of reach. With neither master nor peer—and seemingly eternally unbound by the rules of others—Pink represents a certain queer freedom. Da Corte revives Pink as an icon of resistance, supine but poised, wielding a sign of universal protest, brandishing a clear pink purpose. “There is a difference between falling down and laying down,” Da Corte explains. “I call that soft power.” This billboard is an advertisement for the value of such power.

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.

Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Clive Smith at Marc Straus Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Nov 072025
 

“Drexler Pigeon (Columba blued)”, 2022, Oil on wood panel

Clive Smith‘s incredibly detailed trompe-l’œil paintings of birds were part of the 2024 exhibition From Cellar to Garret at Marc Straus gallery in NYC.

The first image is of the painting Drexler Pigeon (Columba blued) which uses elements from fellow artist Lynne Drexler’s 1961 painting Blued.

 

 

Flashback- Sofia Love at Shelter in NYC

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Oct 312025
 

Today’s flashback is to a few of the intricate works from Sofia Love‘s 2023 exhibition Vaquera at Shelter in NYC.

From the gallery about the exhibition-

Vaquera – not determined by an article, the word becomes both a noun and an adjective, an iconic figure and a way of being in the world. For Brooklyn-based painter Sofia Love’s debut solo exhibition in New York, vaquera is both a manifesto of queer self-fashioning and a patron saint.

Born and raised in Boston, but with deep family ties to the Mexican community of Laredo, TX, Love’s acrylic paintings serve as a negotiation between ancestral memory and contemporary identity. The titular cowgirl recurs throughout the exhibition – gun-slinging, brown, and frequently nude – framed by expanses of desert. She’s a real, historical cowgirl. She’s the artist traversing her own imagination. She’s a badass dyke. For Love, vaquera is an object of desire and an extension of herself.

While there are traditional canvases, the majority of works on view take the form of nichos, intimate yet elaborately decorated altars that can be found in homes across Mexico. Dedicated to deceased ancestors or particular saints, nichos blend folk spirituality with Catholicism, smuggling pre-Colombian vernacular traditions into contemporary, Westernized culture. Love’s nichos draw on this history to produce art objects that exist at the border of painting and sculpture, with frames that extend the content and imagery of the paintings they enshrine.

The resulting works each have interiors and exteriors, the painting and the frame, in which ambivalent scenes are surrounded by totems and animals that seem to hint at the psychological subtext of the central image. Figures reappear across the framed nichos like characters in a narrative, each with its own personal connotation for the artist. Skulls, moths, storks tell stories that are only partially legible from an external perspective. Like the vaquera herself, Love’s layered compositions refuse any easy interpretation.

 

Throwback- NYC Art Shows- Sahara Longe at Timothy Taylor

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Oct 162025
 

Sahara Longe “Skull”, 2024, Oil on Linen

“As We Are (after Otto Friedrich)”, 2024, Oil on Linen

“Liar”, 2024, Oil on linen

This week’s throwback is to Sahara Longe‘s paintings from her 2024 exhibition at Timothy Taylor gallery in NYC, Sugar.

From the gallery about the work-

Featuring twelve vivid and haunting canvases, Longe’s second exhibition with the gallery sees the artist reconceiving various art histories to arrive at an uncanny interplay of figures, allegories, and enigmatic landscapes. The show will be accompanied by an essay by Ferren Gipson, art historian and writer based in London.

In paintings characterised by a preternatural handling of line, colour, and figuration, Longe depicts partially abstracted subjects in atmospheric environments. Working on thick grain linen with raw pigment in a distinct palette of vermillion, lilac, raw sienna, and ochre, she renders her scenes with a fluid painterly freedom that is nevertheless quiet and precise in its effect. Across her work, she recalls aspects of the Symbolist ethos, which moved between nostalgia and rupture, seeking not to capture something directly, but rather convey the sensations it produces.

In her new paintings, Longe focuses on the nude. Articulated in spare, suggestive gestures, her subjects, largely women, are pictured huddled together, embracing a lover, or striding alone. Some set their gaze on an unknown distance, others stare down the viewer, and one confronts a fish. Each seems possessed by a disquieting tension that is emphasised by a shadowy apparition lurking in many of the works. Masculine in stature, the incubus perches over a scene or cradles another figure therein. Where Longe’s previous series reflect on social dynamics, depicting parties and crowds, these paintings are more personal; the artist explains that the new works look inward rather than outward. Expressive, brushy marks bring subtle notions of agitation, dreaminess, and intimacy to otherwise minimal passages of colour.

These paintings further explore the ideas set out in Longe’s earliest work, which emerged from her study of classical portraiture at Charles H. Cecil Studios in Florence; in her early canvases, Longe integrated and recontextualised themes and styles of old-master paintings. Here, her compositions draw from Secessionist painter Otto Friedrich’s nudes and Symbolist Ferdinand Hodler’s ominous portraits. They likewise reveal the influence of a recent trip to Oslo, where Longe was taken by Henrik Sorensen’s mural (1938–50) in Oslo City Hall (where the Nobel Peace Prize is selected), and the marginalia of illuminated manuscripts. Ushering these disparate sources and traditions into her singular aesthetic, Longe poses subtle questions about representation—who it serves, and what narratives it upholds—just as she underscores figuration’s expressive potential.

Throwback- Corita Kent at MoMA and at Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Drawing, Illustration, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Politics, Printmaking
Oct 022025
 

Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita)’s print I Should Like to Be Able to Love My Country and Still Love Justice, 1968, was on view at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC in June of 2024.

From the museum about the artist-

Corita Kent, also known in the Catholic Church as Sister Mary Corita, incorporated a range of references into her silkscreen prints, spanning pop culture imagery and song lyrics, biblical allusions, and literary conceits. After seeing Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans in 1962, she was inspired to embrace the language of Pop art, using bold, graphic designs to convey anti-war messages. In the 1980s Kent’s posters and ephemera were collected by PAD/D (Political Art Documentation/Distribution), a New York-based art activism group with a mission to create an archive of politically concerned art and ephemera from around the world. The materials are now part of the MoMA Archives, Library, and Research Collections.

You can currently see some of her photographic archive at Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles for the exhibition Corita Kent: The Sorcery of Images, on view until 1/24/26. The show “focuses on a little seen part of Corita’s artistic practice: her archive of over fifteen thousand 35 mm slides that she and her cohorts took between 1955 and 1968 while she was a beloved teacher in the art department at Immaculate Heart College”.

As part of their press release they include this lovely quote from the artist-

“In a sense, the whole world around the artist is his source, his sorting and relating powers are his sorcery, and the one isn’t much good without the other. … Anything can be a source, even a mistake. The sorcery or the thievery is the art of relating sources into a new solution.”

Her work can also be seen in Los Angeles at the Corita Art Center. The center is free to visit on Saturdays (with appointment).

 

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