Tag: Nora Griffin

Gallery shows

Griffin and Griffin: City lights

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The painter Nora Griffin, nonpareil chronicler of New York City, grew up in Noho as her father George conjured, as she puts it, “a sweeter version of R. Crumb’s debased Zap comix” and helped pave her way as an artist. Fierman’s current show “Time Café,” named for the restaurant that anchored the neighborhood, galvanically pairs the two, complementing Nora’s shrewdly lyrical paintings with George’s quizzical drawings, flip-books, and avant-garde cartoons. The result is a deeply plumbed sampling of 1970s and ‘80s New York and what it wrought, poised between nostalgic commemoration and acknowledged perpetuity – a duality reflected in Nora’s 2026 portrait of her father circa 1976, one profile looking reflective and the other anticipatory. Ultimately, both artists understand that any desperation in extending sentimentality to the city is likely unwarranted because its susceptibility to discomfitingly rapid change – the “New York minute” – is largely a myth, its past firmly embedded and there to see. Their mission, undertaken exuberantly, is to record it in context. 

Solo Shows

Nora Griffin’s beating heart

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / I first encountered Nora Griffin’s paintings on a blisteringly hot Saturday in the summer of 2022. David Fierman had just opened his rakish subway-tiled space on Pike Square, and it was unfinished as well as uncooled (though not, of course, uncool). The paintings in “Liquid Days” harmonized all the moody vibes vectoring into and radiating out of that vortex of LES attitude and history, rendering a sweaty refuge a sublime interlude. Her compositions were frenetic, with marks, cognizable images, and found objects wafting like crowd-wise insects all about the canvas, sometimes spilling over its edges….

Screens Solo Shows

Art and Film: Nora Griffin, Wes Anderson, and nostalgia’s virtues and limits

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In 2000, The Onion published a durably wise wise-ass book called Our Dumb Century, chronicling with heavy satirical spin the endless follies of the twentieth one. Maybe a sense of relief lifted the editors. They could be forgiven for surmising, mistakenly, that centuries couldn’t get any stupider. That was the year before 9/11, when the world looked improbably rosy. It remains a moment that many look back on with special fondness. But there is dumb nostalgia and there is smart nostalgia. In “1999 NYC Tees,” a bracing four-day exhibition at Fierman on the Lower East Side, painter Nora Griffin zones in on this period and shows that the smart kind lives on the border “between kitsch and pathos.”

Solo Shows

Nora Griffin’s defiant valentine to New York

Contributed by Zach Seeger / Nora Griffin’s ostensibly playful, jangled paintings, on display at Fierman West, reflect not only a galvanizing appreciation of the moment but also a deep understanding of art history and its connection to the contemporary zeitgeist. There is a sheer, crude brilliance about them, and it is inspiring.