This is the first of two posts that highlight work from the 2019 Havana Biennial in and around Old Havana area. Look for Part 2 next week. // Contributed by Katarina Wong / After being postponed due to hurricane damage from 2017, the Havana Biennial, organized by the Centro de Arte […]
Group Shows
CounterPointe: Artists and choreographers collaborate
Contributed by Sharon Butler / For the past seven years, Norte Maar, an enterprising and energizing interdisciplinary arts group based in the Cypress Hills neighborhood of Brooklyn and led by Jason Andrew and Julia Gleich, has organized CounterPointe, a series of short dance performances that pair female choreographers with female visual artists. […]
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Call it soulfulness
Contributed by Matt Mitchell / Reviewers have compulsively apprehended Lynette Yiadom-Boakye�s loving images of dark-skinned people as manifestations of black identity politics, despite the artist�s insistence that those issues are not central to her work. And, in fact, her paintings can yield some penetrating insights about the new figuration when the viewer […]
Artist to artist: An exchange with Cuba
At the official level, the United States has politically and economically ostracized Cuba for the past 60 years, since communist dictator Fidel Castro took power and helped precipitate the Cuban Missile Crisis. But after�the Cold War ended, mutual cultural exploration expanded;�recall,�for instance, the stateside success of�Ry Cooder�s 1997 album�Buena Vista […]
New subjectivity: Figurative painting at Pratt Manhattan Gallery
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In a lively group show of large canvases at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery, curator Jason Stopa makes a strong case that contemporary painters, particularly those working figuratively, are cultivating a new form of Expressionism. He cites popular culture (cartoons, fashion photography, YouTube videos), personal narrative, […]
History: Artist-run galleries in NYC in the 1950s and 1960s
Contributed by Sharon Butler / At artist-run galleries, the conversation centers on art rather than commerce. Alternative spaces provide a place for unknown and under-recognized artists to mount exhibitions, for curators to organize their first thematic shows, and for established artists to present experimental projects that their commercial galleries aren’t interested in showing. “Inventing Downtown,” an ambitious […]
Examining queer @ Yale University
Contributed by Rachel Farber / What is a queer perspective? How does queerness meet form? Students at the Yale School of Art, Loren Britton and Res, began asking these questions after seeing the student-run exhibition ” Video Mixer,” curated by Allyn Hughes & Jody Joyner, in 2015. Their conversation precipitated […]
Installation view: Machines of Paint and Other Materials
When artist Jennifer Riley saw a cavernous vacant storefront on Front Street in DUMBO, she thought it would make a good exhibition space, so she contacted the building’s owner (Two Trees Management) and asked if they would be interested in hosting a pop-up show. They agreed, and the result is […]
Installation view: Drishti, a concentrated gaze
Gallerist Elizabeth Heskin and artist Patricia Spergel, in collaboration with the NURTUREart Registry of Artists and Curators, have assembled a lively exhibition of contemporary abstraction at the 1285 Ave of the Americas Art Gallery. Aptly titled “Drishti: A Concentrated Gaze” after the yoga practice that brings awareness inward through […]
Blurring the boundary between painting and photography
For the exhibition “Chemistry: Explorations in Abstract Photography,” curator Karlyn Benson, director of Matteawan Gallery in Beacon, NY, has selected six photographers who push beyond traditional photographic processes in search of new definitions of what a photograph can be. In this exhibition, on display at Garrison Art Center May 21 […]