Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Dread Scott at James Cohan in 2019

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Politics
Sep 262025
 

“Imagine a World Without America”, 2007, Screen print and acrylic on canvas

The painting above is by Brooklyn-based artist Dread Scott and was on view as part of the 2019 group exhibition Borders at James Cohan gallery in NYC.

From the press release about the work-

His 2007 work, Imagine a World Without America, calls upon the viewer to participate in the titular thought experiment and contemplate that absence. The painting de-centers the United States of America from the middle of the map that most Americans are familiar with. Scott utilizes the language of cartography to encourage the exploration of social questions, not geography. Land mass and sea are depicted but—like the world as it actually is—borders don’t exist.

The work is currently on view as part of 15, a group exhibition at Cristin Tierney gallery, celebrating the gallery’s anniversary and new location. 15 will be on view until 10/4/25.

Dread Scott has created political works throughout his career in a variety of mediums. In the video below he discusses how one of his art installations, What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag (1989), drew controversy- including denouncement by then President George H.W. Bush.

Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Sandy Williams IV at Socrates Sculpture Park 2020

 Art, Artists, Conceptual Art, New York Art Shows, Public Art, Queens, Sculptors / Sculpture
Sep 192025
 

Wax Monument IV (Free Wax) by Sandy Williams IV was on view at Socrates Sculpture Park in 2020 for Call and Response, Part II of the MONUMENTS NOW exhibition. The outdoor exhibition included ten monuments projects realized by the Park’s 2020 Artist Fellows.

From Socrates Sculpture Park about the work-

A monument to living history, this wax flag can be set alight from multiple-wicks and rests perpendicularly upon a black mulch base shaped like the borough of Queens. Rendered in black and white, the wax flag is reminiscent of – but not equivalent to – the U.S.’s own flag and emblem of patriotism. By enlarging the candle- a commemorative form often spontaneously employed in immediate reaction to events, Williams celebrates this popular, accessible form of expression. Alive with transformative potential, the work invites participation, mark-making, melting, and molding of a malleable symbol.

The 2025 Socrates Annual: Up/rooted– featuring new commissions from the Park’s 2025 Artist Fellows: Natalia Nakazawa, Pioneers Go East Collective, Rowan Renee, Catherine Telford-Keogh, Zipporah Camille Thompson – opened on 9/12 and will be on view until 4/6/26.

Flashback- Robert Irwin at Pace NYC and Palm Springs Art Museum

 Architecture, Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Conceptual Art, Films, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Palm Springs, Palm Springs Art Shows, Public Art, Sculptors / Sculpture
Sep 122025
 

Born today, 9/12, artist Robert Irwin used light and space in his work as a way to create an experience for the observer. He started out as a painter but later became well known for his site-specific installations and architectural and outdoor projects- including the central garden at the Getty Center in Los Angeles (pictured below) and his work for the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

The works above are from his 2020 exhibition, Unlights, at Pace Gallery in New York.

About that show from Pace-

Irwin’s new works are composed from unlit six-foot fluorescent lights mounted to fixtures and installed in vertical rows directly on the wall. The glass tubes are covered in layers of opulently colored translucent gels and thin strips of electrical tape, allowing the reflective surfaces of unlit glass and anodized aluminum to interact with ambient illumination in the surrounding space and produce shifting patterns of shadow and chromatic tonality. Reflecting his recent turn toward the perceptual possibilities of unlit bulbs, Irwin’s new body of work expands the range of possibilities for how we experience sensations of rhythm, pulsation, expansion and intensity, while continuing the artist’s long-standing interest in registering the immediacy of our own presence in space.

Expanding from his breakthrough disc paintings of the late 1960s, Irwin’s new works effectively dissolve the perceived border between object and environment, focusing the viewer’s consciousness on the act of perception. Each light fixture in Irwin’s sculptures contains one or two unlit bulbs—or no bulb at all—while alternating gaps of “empty” wall are painted in subtle shades of gray, producing a sense of uncertainty about what is tactile and what is merely optical. As the shadowed, painted and reflected intervals of space reverberate in the viewer’s visual field, the wall itself enters the composition, destabilizing any sense of figure and ground. To encounter Irwin’s sculptures is thus to allow oneself to be caught in a ceaseless oscillation between flatness and volume, transparency and opacity, solidity and atmosphere.

In Irwin’s art, the object functions as a kind of score for orchestrating “the continual development and extension of humans’ potential to perceive the world.” Although unlit, the bulbs in these new sculptures are therefore never “off.” Their optically rich surfaces serve as energetic loci for heightening the sensory possibilities of the human body. In their chromatic complexity, the works convey an almost painterly quality, recalling Irwin’s origins as a second-generation Abstract Expressionist painter in the 1950s. Suggesting a rhythmic, minimal composition of repeated linear elements, the works also evoke his innovative line paintings of the early 1960s, which involve us physically and perceptually in an open-ended, immersive and transitory experience of seeing.

Widely recognized as a pivotal figure in contemporary art, Irwin is closely associated with the Light and Space movement that emerged in Los Angeles in the 1960s, and he has continued to live and work in Southern California for his entire career. He first used fluorescent lights as substrates for producing what he has called a “conditional art” in the 1970s, often in combination with architectural scrims and other spatial interventions. In the 1990s he introduced colored gels to the fluorescent tubes to alter the chromaticism of the light, and, over the past decade, began isolating the bulbs and fixtures as sculptural objects in their own right. In returning to the use of solely ambient light, Irwin’s new sculptures embody the culmination of seven decades of rigorous experimentation.

“Everything in the world is ultimately conditional,” Irwin has observed. “There is nothing that’s transcended or infinite or whatever you want to call it. Everything acts within a set of conditions.” Like all of Irwin’s works, his new sculptures respond differently to the conditions of each specific environment in which they are installed, attuning our senses to a given context and making possible an intuitive and incidental experience of seeing that resists rational or conceptual explanation. “It’s not about answers,” the artist once remarked, but rather about the act of questioning: “It’s the constant pursuit of the possibilities of what art is.”

Getty Center, Los Angeles

Below is one of his earlier paintings Untitled, 1964-6, which was on view at Palm Springs Art Museum for the 2024 exhibition Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945-1990.

From the museum about the work-

Although this work appears to have a monochromatic white surface from afar, a matrix of thousands of painted dots becomes visible from a closer vantage point. Irwin aimed to highlight the visual effects of color interaction by juxtaposing light green and lavender, complementary colors across from each other on a color wheel. The canvas’s outwardly bowed supports and the increasing density of dots towards the painting’s center further heighten the viewer’s perceptual experience of the work.

The documentary Robert Irwin: A Desert of Pure Feeling, does an excellent job detailing his life, art, and the philosophy behind his work. It is well worth a watch and inspiring to watch him still at work in Marfa at 87. He passed away in 2023 at the age of 95.

Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Whitney Biennial 2024- Mavis Pusey

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Sep 052025
 

Mavis Pusey‘s painting, Within Manhattan, 1977, pictured above, was one of several included as part of Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing.

From the museum about the artist and the painting-

Mavis Pusey was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1928. She is known for her abstract paintings of bold shapes and hard edged lines found in architectural spaces. Pusey was a prolific artist who found inspiration in the geometric forms found both in fashion patternmaking and in the printmaking process. During sessions at the Robert Blackburn workshop, Pusey began to develop a body of work revealing the process of urban transformation happening in New York City. She was captivated by the shifts in the urban environment that kept the city suspended in a cycle of destruction and reconstruction.

Throughout her career, Pusey taught at institutions for higher education in New York, Pennsylvania, and was a high school teacher in Virginia. In 2019 at the age of ninety, Pusey passed away after years of declining health. Her legacy lives on through the collections of major cultural institutions across the U.S.

Inspired by the ever-evolving changes in the urban landscape, Pusey presents a familiar scene of demolition and construction in the painting Within Manhattan. Geometric forms resemble architectural building blocks in the process of being assembled or possibly deconstructed. The configuration of shapes in the work allows us to imagine the motion present at the site with scaffolding giving way to discarded boards, positioning us as spectators to change.

The first major museum survey of her work, titled Mobile Images, is currently at ICA Philadelphia until 12/5/25.

 

Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Katie Bell at Spencer Brownstone Gallery

 Architecture, Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Sep 052025
 

“In Search of Form”, 2024, Acrylic, wood, aluminum, glass, rubber baseboard, rope, plastic tubing, drywall, solid surface, and cue balls

“Through Line (Grass) 1”, 2024, Acrylic and wood

“Line of Sight (Sunset)” and “Line of Sight (Horizon)”, 2024, Wood, acrylic and rubber

The images above are from Katie Bell‘s 2024 exhibition Edges in Search of Form at Spencer Brownstone Gallery in NYC.

From the gallery press release-

The lawn’s flat nature leads your eye to the edges in search of form, and if the edges are not sharp it will not show.

Spencer Brownstone Gallery is pleased to present Edges in Search of Form, Katie Bell’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The show is composed of a collective of individual paintings, sculptures, and installation elements that share a common visual language with influences from architecture, the landscape, and Surrealism. The title of the exhibition references the quote above, advice from a gardener on crafting the perfect lawn.

Trained as a painter, Katie Bell’s sculptural practice stems from a rethinking of the painting process in the third dimension. Basic forms and simple found objects act as individual marks within the canvas of space, most evident in Through Line (Grass). The monochrome, matte grass green prisms are assembled together and around, activating space and generating an environment of its own. Pared down to its base attributes, shape, color, scale, and quantity foreground their objectness while their modularity alludes to a whole, greater than the sum of its individual parts. The rigidity and simplicity of the form is contrasted by its color and organic arrangement.

Operating similarly are the Line of Sight paintings, compact forms reduced to its base elements. Their shape, undulating line, softer hues, and subtle change in tones recall landscapes, shifting light, and the passage of time. The opposite wall features an amalgam of fabricated and found objects. In Search of Form is various in material and texture, with components overlapping, weaving, and puncturing the other. The eyes follow the intricacies of their interaction like a visual Rube-Goldberg machine. Or like the futile attempt of some to maintain the length and shape of grass, an exercise in controlling those things in our world that resist.

Reconciliation comes in the form of bird baths. Often found on lawns or backyards where the natural order is kept at bay to the best of one’s ability, they are beacons that welcome natural behavior. Composed of a patchwork of stone-like Corian, Water Table (Bird Bath) melds with the tones of our landscape while standing out in its formality.

Bell’s overall installation illustrates the light and often hard touches of human intervention. Her constructed worlds explore the absurdity of our extreme pursuit in controlling our environment, and ultimately its analogue in art making.

Flashback- Paul Signac’s “The Demolition Worker” from MoMA’s 2020/1 exhibition- “Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde-From Signac to Matisse and Beyond”

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, History, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Politics
Aug 292025
 

Today’s flashback, in honor of Labor Day weekend, is to Paul Signac’s Le Démolisseur (The Demolition Worker), 1897–99, which was on view at MoMA in NYC in 2020/2021 as part of- Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde-From Signac to Matisse and Beyond.

About the exhibition-

Who was Félix Fénéon? The first exhibition dedicated to this extraordinarily influential but little-known figure explores how he shaped the development of modernism. A French art critic, editor, publisher, dealer, and collector, Fénéon (1861–1944) championed the careers of young, avant-garde artists from Georges-Pierre Seurat and Paul Signac to Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse, among many others. He was also one of the first European collectors of art from Africa and Oceania. A fervent anarchist during a period of gaping economic and social disparities, Fénéon believed in the potential of avant-garde art to promote a more harmonious, egalitarian world.

About the painting from the museum-

Signac called for artists to deliver the “forceful blow of a pickaxe to the antiquated social structure.” Here, he depicts demolition workers tearing down the edifice of the old order as a new dawn rises behind them. The monumental canvas is an allegory for Signac’s anarchist vision of a modern, egalitarian society in which laborers would be treated with fairness and respect.

Anarchism flourished during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in France, a period often referred to as the Belle Époque. Though celebrated for its extraordinary cultural achievements, the era saw horrendous economic devastation for a large swath of the population, instilling in many a profound distrust of state institutions. Anarchists, including Fénéon, Signac, and many of their artist and writer friends, looked to a utopian future, when the dissolution of the capitalist government and bourgeoisie would allow social harmony, economic fairness, and artistic freedom to prevail.

This exhibition is included in MoMA’s Virtual Views series on their website- allowing the public to view the show, learn from the curators, and more.

Throwback- NYC Art Shows- Whitney Biennial- Takako Yamaguchi

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Jul 312025
 

The two large paintings pictured above are by Takako Yamaguchi and were on view as part of Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing.

From the Whitney Museum website about the artist-

Takako Yamaguchi’s recent seascapes use meticulously rendered zigzags, tubes, and lines to suggest weather and other natural elements. They reflect Yamaguchi’s experimentation with what she calls “abstraction in reverse,” or taking recognizable forms, like clouds or waves, and abstracting them to the point of pattern. Her interest is less in nature itself than in the artifice that has allowed artists to represent it. The artist aims to paint “umbrellas” that will read as “trees,” referring to a quote by the poet Wallace Stevens, who said, “All of our ideas come from the natural world: Trees = umbrellas.”

The resulting paintings work against Western art historical ideas of “pure” abstraction. The luminous surfaces are intentionally decorative and structured using graphic techniques drawn from Mexican muralism and Japanese print design alike. Throughout her career, Yamaguchi has also resisted assumptions by critics that Japanese aesthetics are inherently minimalist, drawing from the most opulent and intricate aspects of Japanese visual culture.

Yamaguchi’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles is currently on view at MOCA until 1/4/26.

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.

Throwback- NYC Art Shows- Bo Bartlett at Miles McEnery Gallery in March 2025

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Jul 032025
 

In March of 2025, two of Bo Bartlett‘s series, Summer and Home, were on view at Miles McEnery Gallery in New York. This work in particular, Saudade (with The Painter to the left and The Skippers on the right) has an unsettling quality- note the smoke in the distance.

From the gallery’s website-

This exhibition brings together works from two distinct but intimately connected series: his early “Home” paintings and the more recent “Summer” works. While deeply personal, these works invite viewers to reflect on universal themes—longing, nostalgia, and the sense of home—offering a moment of connection through shared human experience. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated digital publication featuring an essay by Patricia Junker.

As Patricia Junker writes, “Bartlett embraces what he calls his topophilia: More than a connection, it is love of place.” Take his work, Home, where “we feel the texture of a subject’s madras shorts, the elasticity of her red knit headband, the suppleness of her black leather ballet flats, cast aside, and the soothing feel of cool grass on her bare feet and its scratchiness on a boy’s knees and palms. We know that time of day when light can penetrate a white linen shirt just so, and we know the quiet that allows a tuckered-out child to lie listening, lost in thought, on the verge of dreamland, perhaps. We take stock and try to make sense of a strange scene—a house of dark windows, a searching youth who crawls to peer around a corner, a forthright young woman at the center, a still baby at the far right. It seems as real before us as life itself. It is at once familiar and curious, because, as Eudora Welty has aptly put it, ‘Life is strange. Art makes it more believably so.’”

 

Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Thaddeus Mosley at Karma in 2023

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Public Art, Sculptors / Sculpture
Jun 202025
 

The hand carved wood sculptures above were created from 2020-2022 by Pittsburgh artist Thaddeus Mosley and were on view at Karma in NYC in 2023.

From the gallery’s press release-

In a recent photograph taken in his studio, Thaddeus Mosley peers between the soaring columns of his sculptures. They are gallant constructions of wood, each hand-carved and formed out of unique sections from three to four logs. With his chisel, Mosley exalts the warm tones and woodgrain which lay beneath the outer tree bark. His dimensions vary, ranging from monumental to modest, rounded to angular, vaulted to hovering just above the ground. Their presence is determined by Mosley’s negotiation between natural materials and an exploration of weight and space. A feat of balance, his sculptures exist in a constant state of suspension: heavy sections seem to float above the delicately-carved pieces that support them.

Mosley began creating wooden sculptures in the 1950s while working at the United States Postal Service, which enabled him to both provide for his family and develop his craft in his free time. At 96 years old, Mosley continues his life’s work as an artist in his Pittsburgh studio near the Allegheny River. A strong influence in his practice can be traced to his encounter with a photograph of African American grave markers in Georgia. According to Mosley, their slender, soaring forms called to mind Constantin Brâncuși’s Bird in Space (1923). He explains that “in each of them I saw a similar spirit, a similar approach to clean fluid shapes coming from people working close to the earth and trying to fuse the earth and human spirituality into a single form.”

Mosley allows the natural forms of wood to guide him toward a conceptual and aesthetic meeting point, where European modernism meets the abstract and interpretive traditions of West African mask-making, and the movement of his chisel captures the rhythmic improvisations of a Jazz soloist. Mosley’s process bears traces of Isamu Noguchi’s own navigation of natural materials, providing new meaning to the late sculptor’s adage that “it is weight which provides meaning to weightlessness.”

Working primarily in hardwoods such as walnut, cherry, and chestnut, Mosley reveres the surfaces he uncovers with his chisel: deep lustres, arcs of bright coloration, growth rings, and the shadowy depth within deep cuts. Panoramic Quarter (2021) brings together inverted forms, in which recessed spirals and connected logs create a dramatic inflection. Horizontality is emphasized in Phase of a Phrase (2022), while Path of Pendulum (2020) delights in the vertical movement of arching forms, which are composed in a gravity-defying embrace. His work dances with viewers as they encircle it.  Mosley’s dynamic forms encourage deep looking, whether it is in Id (2021), a low, conical carving, or Southwestern Suite (2021), in which monumental sections seem to vanish when viewed at specific angles. In Elegiac Stanza for Sam Gilliam (2022), Mosley honors the life of the abstract painter and close friend through a lyrical intersection of walnut, varying between hewn and smooth surfaces.

On rare occasions, Mosley has incorporated salvaged metals into particular pieces of hardwood. In the case of Industrial Collage (2022), a curved cut of steel is affixed to a base of walnut, from which Mosley has balanced two pieces of chestnut, adorned with pounded metal that has been grounded off from the steel section. Mosley salvaged the steel piece from an abandoned industrial building, where it was previously used as a support beam for an industrial fan. It stayed with him in his studio for fourteen years while Mosley waited, searching for the right slab of wood. Each piece of wood, every material for Mosley is subject to this process of aesthetic consideration: a three-dimensional call-and-response.

His work can currently be seen in City Hall Park in NYC for the exhibition Touching the Earth, on view until 11/16/2025. The eight bronzes included were cast from wood sculptures he made between 1996 and 2021.

For more information on the artist- this ARTNews article is an interesting read.

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