The Appearance: Art of the Asian Diaspora in Latin America & the Caribbean

Before The Appearance: Art of the Asian Diaspora in Latin America & the Caribbean, curated by Tie Jojima and Yudi Rafael, work from the Asian diaspora had not been part of the exhibition program at the Americas Society, which has been dedicated to exhibiting art from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada since the mid-1960s. In this show, a dialogue among thirty artists’ works in sculpture, painting, photography, video, installation, and conceptual art highlights references to Eastern culture and philosophy, social marginalization, being visible and invisible, materiality and immateriality, and crossing cultures.

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Published online November 2024

THE PLEASURES WE CHOOSE – Finland’s Pavilion for the 60th Venice Biennale

I use this summary of Finland’s recent history as a precursor to understanding the artists and work that represent Finland in this year’s Pavilion, The pleasures we choose, to address Adriano Pedrosa’s theme, which highlights that we are all foreigners at some point, and thus each one of us navigates the spectrum of complexities that come with moving across geo-political and cultural borders.

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Published in theorema online September 2024

Marcus Jahmal: Higher Animals

In the last eight years, Marcus Jahmal’s work has charmed many across the world, gaining the critical attention of global galleries and collectors. The Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania is the first public institution to recognize his work, with a modest solo exhibition titled Higher Animals, which focuses on the relationship between man and animal through his recognizable dreamscape compositions and bold, simple color palette.

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Published in print and online September 2024

Deborah Buck: Witches Bridge

Deborah Buck’s first solo exhibition at Jennifer Baahng, Deborah Buck: Witches Bridge, on the Upper East Side is curated as a small survey spanning her forty-year career.

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Published in print and online July/August 2024

Venice Biennale National Pavilions: Jeffrey Gibson and Manal AlDowayan

The 60th Venice Biennale, curated by Adriano Pederosa, is responding to an ever present and urgent acknowledgement that visual art has often excluded certain demographics of artists from its main stages. How do we as a global multi-cultural society come to terms with a post-colonial world where the residue of former imperialist power structures is still felt in existent social structures across the globe?

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Published online June 2024

Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper

Much has been extolled about Rothko’s retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton (LVF) in Paris, but the exhibition at the National Gallery of Art (NGA), featuring work on two levels, reveals the breadth of Rothko’s painting through highlighting smaller scale works and explorations on paper in which he employs a heavy watercolor paper substrate alternating with watercolor, ink, acrylic, and oil paint.

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Published in print and online February 2024

Anne Patterson: Divine Pathways

The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine on the Upper West Side of Manhattan serves both as a spiritual sanctuary and a cultural one, with a dedicated program to visual arts and music. Divine Pathways (2023) is Anne Patterson’s newest installation in a place of worship, coming ten years after Graced With Light (2013) in the Grace Cathedral of San Francisco. Hundreds of colorful ribbons hang from the nave of St. John’s tall vaulted ceiling, organized into even intervals. Grouped together, they form a large, pointed mass like a long chandelier.

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Published online Dec-Jan 2023-24

Susan Te Kahurangi King & Philip Emde: Playdate

Tribeca has been sprouting galleries every season since the COVID-19 pandemic, and Ruttkowski;68, located in the Cortlandt Alley since early 2023, is an emerging gallery active in Europe for the last decade, and is the latest addition in this sizzling neighborhood. It shows mostly European artists or artists from outside the United States. Playdate, the title of the exhibition, highlights the work of Susan Te Kahurangi King and Philip Emde. The former, a New Zealand artist, who has been non-verbal her whole life. In this exhibition we see a selection of early work from the 1960s, when King was a teenager, made before the artist stopped drawing between the 1990s–2008.

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Published online October 2023

Artist as Thinker: The Camargo Foundation

Conceived by American artist and philanthropist Jerome Hill (1905–1972), the Camargo Foundation is a residency for artists, scholars, and thinkers in Cassis, France. Hill became enamored by French culture during numerous visits to Europe with his family. In the 1930s, he purchased property in Cassis, located on the Calanques of the Mediterranean Sea, which is now the grounds of the Camargo Foundation.

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Published online June 2023 in ArTonic

Cathy Josefowitz: Forever Young

Hauser & Wirth on 69th Street is showing the work of artist Cathy Josefowitz (1956-2014), who lived between Western Europe and the Boston and New York regions, holding family roots in Woodstock, NY where she would spend many childhood summers. Largely self-taught, she started making art at a young age although her work expressed in painting and drawing was scarcely shown during her lifetime. This exhibition provides insight into her trajectory from her early days of painting the figure in Paris, to then engaging the body in movement through choreography as she immersed herself in Primal Theatre in 1978, (the work documented with video), which then developed into her lifelong dialogue with choreography, painting, and drawing.

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Published online July-August 2023

Andrea Marie Breiling: Swallowtail

There are four paintings in each room: the main gallery, back gallery, and connecting hallway. Their cinematic and stage-like scale is entirely made with spray paint applied with swooping gestures, like the swallow’s flight path as the exhibition’s title, Swallowtail, suggests. The larger-than-life repeated, curvilinear lines are evocative of the movement of a living creature and swift navigator of the skies. We can hear a swish, a swoop, a zoom among the cross-hatchings and visual sound vibrations interspersed with silence, evasion and collision, and moments of bright light and darkness.

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Published online May 2023

Ariane Lopez-Huici: Exuberant Bodies

Ariane Lopez-Huici began photographing the human body in 1975. Most often her images preserve encounters with individuals at the margins of society engaged in a life dedicated to culture. They celebrate the movement of the body, and seek to challenge the norms of classical beauty. In Lopez-Huici's work, the body is full of life, dignified like a sculpture and immortalized, both exuding poetry, calm, poise, strength, and force.

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Published online March 2023

Bruno Dunley: Clouds

Bruno Dunley has eleven large-scale oil paintings and eleven notebook-scale drawings on display at Nara Roesler in Chelsea, known for its roster of Brazilian artists. Much of Dunley’s new work is the result of a deep investigation into color and finding raw materials within Brazil’s rich and vast natural resources to make handmade oil paint. During the pandemic, it became more challenging to find art supplies as Brazil’s borders closed and imports became expensive. Suddenly, it dawned on Dunley and his business partner, artist Rafael Carneiro, to search locally for the means to make oil paint.

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Published online February 2023

CURATORIAL

Persiana Americana: Astrid Dick, Yasue Maetake, Armita Raafat at Below Grand gallery

curated by Amanda Millet-Sorsa

June 24 - July 29, 2023

PRESS RELEASE

Rhodes, David, Persiana Americana, The Brooklyn Rail, July/August 2023.

Benzine, Vittoria, The Latest Exhibition at Experimental Below Grand Trades in Art Across Phases, FAD Magazine, July 5, 2023.

Pat Steir: Blue River and Rainbow Waterfalls

With Blue River and Rainbow Waterfalls, Pat Steir has transformed Hauser & Wirth’s immense ground floor gallery in Chelsea into an arena for transcendence. We are lifted away by the gravitational pull of her monumental canvases, each awash with mesmerizing color and the movement of paint. Steir has been developing her mature work since the early 1990s, and her paintings today continue to command respect—and even awe—from their viewers. In her current exhibition, there are three bodies of work in which we are confronted with the sublime, each drawing us into its expansive space.

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Published online December 2022

Carol Saft: The Cynnie Paintings

Canada is currently showing ten small-scale paintings by artist Carol Saft. Her lifelong practice has included video, sculpture, and installation, and though she trained as a painter in her early years, she chose to freshly turn to this medium during the pandemic when we were asked to cloister ourselves indoors in a global effort to stop the spread of the Covid-19 virus. Her painting asks us to slow down, to self-reflect, and cherish the ones we hold dear. For Saft, that meant turning her gaze to her partner, Cynnie, who takes center stage in these paintings, and thus gives us an intimate view into the domestic life of a mature lesbian couple, a subject that has not often been addressed in this tender and quotidian way in art history.

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Published online November 2022

Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: Meditations on Resilience

For 25 years the LeRoy Neiman Center has shown its dedication to printmaking by providing students and artists an environment to educate, learn, and work with master printers. To celebrate its long-standing collaborations with close to seventy artists, the Center invited affiliate artists to organize exhibitions highlighting work within its vast print collection. William Cordova is the first artist to organize such an exhibition. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: Meditations on Resilience features work by Fab 5 Freddy, Lee Quiñones, and William Cordova.

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Published online October 2022

Jorge Galindo: Verbena

Last summer 2021, Jorge Galindo had his first major exhibition in the United States, and this year he returns to New York with Verbena, his first solo exhibition of his newest works, at Vito Schnabel. Since then, his work has gained in momentum and has been shown at Nino Mier in Los Angeles, the Hall Art Foundation Schloss Derneburg Museum (Germany), and the Museu Municipal Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso (Portugal), where his collaborative work with Pedro Almodóvar was exhibited.

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Published online October 2022

Zeshan Ahmed and Yasi Alipour: to bleach, to fold

Transmitter gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn has put together an exhibition of works by artists Yasi Alipour and Zeshan Ahmed curated by Martha Fleming-Ives and Kate Greenberg. Both artists’ works consist of photographic images created without using a camera: Alipour favors cyanotype and inkjet prints while Ahmed uses RBG pigmented C-prints on transparency sheets. Alipour folds paper as one might origami, carving out straight horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines that unfold geometric forms. Ahmed, on the other hand, erases printed sheets of pigment with bleach, blocking shapes using masking tape. Both artists challenge the flatness of photography and drawing, whether we’re engaging with Alipour’s reliefs of undulating paper or Ahmed’s transparent sheets, hung off the wall in layered curtains that allow light to shine through.

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Published online September 2022

Naudline Pierre: Enter the Realm

The James Cohan Gallery has organized Naudline Pierre’s first solo exhibition in New York at its two spaces on Walker Street, featuring a selection of oil paintings on linen, painted triptych panels and three-dimensional structures adorned and supported with wrought-iron details, a room-sized iron gate, and small- to large-scale mixed-media works on paper. This exhibition affirms the presence of a promising artist whose nascent aesthetic language is becoming recognizable, with its vivid colors and mythological subjects featuring nude Black women and fantastical winged and feathered angels from religious iconography. Pierre’s spiritual upbringing with her father as a Haitian minister can be felt in the visionary and biblical subjects that weave in and out of her work.

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Published online June 2022

Tomas Vu: The Man Who Fell to Earth 76|22

The Boiler in Williamsburg, Brooklyn opened during the pandemic in 2020 as an extension of the ELM Foundation’s programming, and invites contemporary artists to create installations and exhibitions in its space, previously run by Pierogi Gallery from 2009–2015. The current show, The Man Who Fell to Earth 76|22, by artist Tomas Vu, is his first solo show in New York since 2008. The raw industrial space exudes an extraterrestrial feeling, perfect for a show whose title recalls David Bowie’s central role in the eponymous 1976 movie. A gigantic Geodesic dome with polychrome triangular panels greets the visitor in the center of the space, as if a temporary structure built for shelter on new terrain. It is surrounded by six works on mirrors, thirteen works on paper, an etched lead surfboard, and a painting on canvas hung on white gallery walls adjacent to exposed brick, industrial pipes, and skylights 40 feet high.

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Published online June 2022

Joan Mitchell Foundation

“By continually developing and implementing novel concepts and ideas, the Foundation serves as a model for younger artist foundations looking to form their own goals and legacies.”

In order to understand the motivations and mission behind the Joan Mitchell Foundation, it is helpful to first understand that artist Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) placed art above all else, both at the center of her own life and through supporting her artist peers—thick in the battle and euphoria of the studio—who surrounded her during her lifetime. Mitchell was a pioneer artist in Post-War New York, earning an esteemed reputation among her Abstract-Expressionist cohort while also creating a dialogue with the French Impressionists of the previous century. Mitchell saw herself as a weed in the garden, embodying a tenacious spirit that stood out with particular strength during a time when most art made by women was overlooked and unremarked upon.

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Published online June 2022 in ArTonic

Willie Birch: Chronicling Our Lives: 1987–2021

Willie Birch has exhibited his work in New York for the first time since 2000 at the Fort Gansevoort Gallery located in the Meatpacking District. Originally from New Orleans, Birch is no stranger to New York City. Aside from Broken Dreams (Tattered White Picket Fence) (2020–21), the exhibition centers on Birch’s New York period (1983–1997). Three floors of this historic Greek Revival row house (built in 1849) light up with Birch’s probing practice that deploys four styles: painted papier-mâché sculpture, sartorial reliefs, works on paper with bold paint and text, and narrative watercolors with adorned frames highlighting scenes from African American life.

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Published in print May 2022

Bill Jensen: Stillness/Flowing

Bill Jensen’s new body of work, largely made in the last three years, is displayed in all four rooms of Cheim & Read gallery in Chelsea. These paintings embody both the wisdom and maturity of a sage, while maintaining the energy and vulnerability of new life.

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Published in print March 2022

#524 New Social Environment: Bill Jensen with Amanda Millet-Sorsa. View Here.

Stanley Whitney: TwentyTwenty

Stanley Whitney’s recent exhibit of new paintings presents his lifelong exploration of an endless oasis of color. We can both look and listen as the variations across each painting reveal rows of bold color rectangles or squares and lines compressing together to form abstract color compositions in this architectural structure unique to his vision. Whitney’s sensitivity to pure colors, their intensity, and their complexity of undertones is archived through thin applications and the simplicity of his brushwork.

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Published in print December 2021

Myeongsoo Kim and Cy Morgan: Classical Mechanics curated by Wangui Maina and Mo Kong

Below Grand is a gallery in the Lower East Side with a twist. This space is a closet-sized gallery nested into the storefront of Fortune Line Trading Corporation, a Chinese owned restaurant supply store. We are charmed by the concept, which is quintessentially New York in its spirit and scarcity of space, but also by the pairing of six works by artists Myeongsoo Kim and Cy Morgan and curated by Wangui Maina and Mo Kong. Below Grand has also inaugurated a second space, this time deeper inside the store, thus expanding the potential of showing emerging artists and blending in with the ambiance of Chinese retailers at work.

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Published online December 2021

A Tribute to Alain Kirili (1946–2021) Edited by Carter Ratcliff and Robert C. Morgan

Alain Kirili was a sculptor, an artist, a friend to many, a mentor, a lover of life, and an optimist, who exuded warmth while fighting for joy with every inch of his large being, and shared his journey with photographer, artist, and life partner, Ariane Lopez-Huici. He believed in forming personal and familiar relationships with a large community of people, and as I worked and partook in the vast activity flourishing in Alain and Ariane’s studio on White Street for past decades, he and I developed a close friendship in the last 10 years as well as a relationship as mentor and mentee, which as a young artist for me was very formative and essential.

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Published online November 2021

Tamara Gonzales: Horrible Beauty

Tamara Gonzales has spent her life living, experiencing, understanding, and connecting with the indigenous cultures of the Americas, spiritual and ritual practices from India and the Caribbean, and with Magick, as well as undergoing healing journeys facilitated through psychedelic plant medicines, without forgetting her early years professionally decorating cakes while being immersed in counterculture and the punk music circles of the 1970s in New York. She has a personal desire to seek out and live with these marginalized and ancient cultures and rites that are often neither fully understood nor embraced in Western mainstream culture. We can recognize all of these experiences in Gonzales’s fourth exhibition at Klaus von Nichtssagend gallery.

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Published online October 2021

A Wild Note of Longing: Albert Pinkham Ryder and a Century of American Art

New Bedford, MA is a town built on whaling, and it is amongst the cries of the seagulls, the humidity of the harbor, and the moodiness of the sea skies that Albert Pinkham Ryder spent the first 20 years of his life. Subsequently, he moved to New York City, where he would develop his most influential work, earning him the respect of many modern American artists such as Jackson Pollock, who considered Ryder the most important American master. It’s heartwarming, and a real rarity, to see so many works by an artist in his hometown—and in a whaling museum, which adds context to both Ryder’s life and the seascapes prevalent in his work.

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Published online October 2021

McArthur Binion: Modern:Ancient:Brown

McArthur Binion’s second solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in Chelsea is filled with a new series of nine paintings in the two spaces of the ground-level gallery all titled Modern:Ancient:Brown (all 2021). We can readily recognize in each of them the familiar collaged elements or motifs in Binion’s “underconscious” of hand-written names and addresses on dated address book cards, his birth certificate, his profile picture, or other personal photos in repeated patterns and layers on the grid formation.

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Published online October 2021

Rosy Keyser & Joseph Montgomery: Wrecked Angle

In their two-person show at Ceysson & Bénétière, the abstractions of Rosy Keyser and Joseph Montgomery take us through an eclectic journey of Constructivism, Abstract Expressionism, Arte Povera, assemblage, and Minimalism into their own personal synthesis of painting and sculpture as frictional yet unified objects. Each practice is closely linked to the exploration of paint and found materials, revealing similar musical and geometric surfaces through color, form, and process.

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Published online July 2021

Jorge Galindo & Julian Schnabel: Flower Paintings

To paint a rose is a gesture, imbued with meanings of passion, friendship, admiration, love, elegance, luxury, royalty, beauty, possibility … for whom are the lush roses found in Jorge Galindo and Julian Schnabel’s recent works at the Vito Schnabel Gallery painted? In this two-person exhibition, their first together, they share this subject and express their mutual love for painting and roses, yet their interpretations are drastically different from one another.

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Published online June 2021

Koho Yamamoto: Under a Dark Moon

At the age of 99, master calligrapher and sumi-e artist Koho Yamamoto is having her first museum show at the Noguchi Museum. Curated by Dakin Hart, 10 paintings are exhibited in an intimate gallery and reflect a humble selection from her life-long practice. They are dark and mysterious, infused with intimate moments that reveal her powerful resilience and endurance through hardship. One feels Yamamoto’s social struggles as much as the joys of innovation in the medium, and above all the sense of healing materialized through her use of the ink and the vibrations of her simple yet complex gestures.

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Published online May 2021