"Larry Bell: Improvisations" celebrates the artistic achievements of one of the most influential and renowned artists who emerged from the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s. An experimental artist from the start, Larry Bell, born in Chicago in 1939, has dedicated his career to exploring themes of light and surface by transforming industrial materials into physical realities. The exhibition, originated by the Phoenix Art Museum, includes works created between 1969 and 2024 in various media ranging from intimately scaled collages to Bell’s signature floating glass cubes and monumental glass wall installations. The selected works demonstrate Bell’s ongoing innovations with industrial materials and processes.

In the 1960s Bell discovered a vacuum deposition technique using a tank, or chamber, that allowed him to transfer thin film deposits onto glass panes. The resulting sculptures and installations enhance the elusiveness of space by allowing light to pass through and feature metallic coatings that create subtle optical shifts. Bell has since been using light as his medium to focus on how different surfaces reflect, absorb, and transmit light. 

Visitors may recall that during the the exhibition recent "Still Brewing Art" exhibition a a collections care area demonstrated how museum staff examine objects to inform conservation, storage, and display. "The Dilemma of Griffin’s Cat", a large-scale installation that SAMA commissioned Bell to create for the Mmuseum’s grand opening in 1981, was one of those artworks. The artist and representatives from his studio traveled to SAMA in summer 2023 and consulted with our team. "Larry Bell: Improvisations" presents an exciting opportunity to collaborate with the Bell studio to install the work again in a new iteration. 

Saif Azzuz: Keet Hegehlpa’ (the water is rising) solo exhibition at Blaffer Museum of Art at the University of Houston, Houston, TX.

Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives is a major group exhibition that centres on animal rights and animal well-being, highlighting the need to recognise and defend the lives of non-human animals in an anthropocentric world that marginalises, oppresses and brutalises them. The exhibition is inspired by the seminal text of the same name by John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” (1980), which explores the animal-human relationship in modernity and how animals have become marginalised in human societies. With the participation of more than 60 artists from four continents and with over 200 works occupying all the floors of the Museum, Why Look at Animals? is the largest exhibition ever organized by EMΣT and the first major exhibition on non-human animal rights internationally.

The exhibition and public programme organised around it aim to raise awareness of the conditions of non-human animal life today – from the agricultural industry, the science lab and the business of entertainment, to the state of wildlife and animals subsisting in urban environments – asserting the personhood of animals as sentient beings, with unique intelligences of their own. Why Look at Animals? highlights the fact that the myriad species that exist alongside us are an integral part of our biosphere and ecosystems, not products and automata, separate from and subordinate to us. With this project EMΣT puts ecological justice and the rights of non-human life at the heart of its programming for the months to come. If humanity wants to engage with climate justice, biodiversity and environmental protection, non-human animals form an integral part of the discussion.

Τhe exhibition features a guest curated project, Sonic Space, consisting of a selection of audio works created by artists and researchers in fields such as zoomusicology and eco-acoustics, curated by Joanna Zielińska.

Through the Texas Medal of Arts Awards (TMAA), the Texas Cultural Trust spotlights Texas leaders and luminaries who have achieved greatness through their creative talents, as well as those whose generosity has opened doors to artistic opportunity for Texans of all ages. Presented biennially since 2001, the two-day affair is a star-studded celebration of the creative excellence, exemplary talents, and outstanding contributions by Texans in all disciplines of the arts. The TMAA raises substantial financial support, visibility, and awareness about the power of the arts to enrich a child’s education and enhance our state’s economy and cultural heritage.

Join Los Angeles-based artist Rob Reynolds for a talk about his work in painting, sculpture, video, sound, and augmented reality (AR). Reynolds will discuss his ongoing project, A Fragile Absolute, which emerges from extensive travels with earth scientists in the Arctic, and the making of his film The Word for Weather is Knowledge, filmed in Greenland in the summer of 2019. 

Please join us at the gallery on 25 January 2025 at 4 pm for a conversation between artist Dave Muller and John Goddard, owner of the nationally renowned record store Village Music, located in Mill Valley, CA.

The talk coincides with Dave Muller's solo exhibition, Bay Area Music Village - on view at the gallery through 14 February 2025.

Location:
Anthony Meier | 21 Throckmorton Ave, Mill Valley, CA

This is event is free and open to the public.

The Rice School of Architecture will present an evening of dialogue with artist Zoe Leonard and Marfa Book Co. owner Tim Johnson.

Leonard, an artist known for her work in photography, sculpture, and site-specific installation, will discuss her project "Al río / To the River." The visual exploration of the 1,200-mile stretch of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo examines the border region’s complex social, political, and environmental dynamics.

From the border cities of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico, Leonard’s five-year journey captures landscapes alongside the human impact on this vital waterway - touching on themes of migration, commerce, and environmental change.

Johnson, poet, editor, and owner of Marfa Book Co., played a pivotal role in this project, editing the two-volume publication that accompanies the exhibit. Having accompanied Leonard on much of the journey, Johnson will join her in conversation to discuss the broader implications of the project, which has sparked dialogue across borders and industries.

All This Soft Wild Buzzing considers the relationship between artists and the natural landscape through a lens of collaboration, of listening, and of reciprocity. Nature is often viewed as a neutral space, but landscape—with its connotations of ownership and control—is fraught. The sweeping vistas of early American landscape painting and photography promoted and perpetuated Manifest Destiny, and artists replicated a prevailing desire to conquer the land. In direct contrast to this earlier narrative, the contemporary artists in this exhibition hone in on details, incorporate organic materials into their process, and allow nature to exist. Artists included: Saif Azzuz, Teresa Baker, Christopher Robin Duncan, Nicki Green, Bessma Khalaf, Dionne Lee, Young Suh, Stephanie Syjuco.

All eight of the artists in the exhibition live, or have lived, in northern California, and their work resonates with the specificity of the Bay Area terrain and the people who inhabit it. The title of the exhibition is drawn from the final line of a poem by Camille Dungy that draws parallels between the soft, protected soul of her partner and the untouched, pre-colonial coastline of California. The artists in the show engage with the effects of forest fires, the Land Back movement, the carceral system, belonging, climate change, and the resiliency of Indigenous life, among other topics. Landscape is exposed as a historical construct that is interrogated by a new generation of artists grappling with the relationship between humans and nature. In these works, the artists invite viewers to also consider site, place, and the land beneath and around them. All This Soft Wild Buzzing inaugurates the Wattis galleries on the newly expanded CCA campus.

All This Soft Wild Buzzing is curated by Jeanne Gerrity and organized by Diego Villalobos.

Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions is an exhibition in two parts with programming examining the shifts in dilated time, ritual, memory-keeping, and community-building in artistic practices in the years 2020-2024. Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions traces the cyclical nature of improvised, responsive yet sustained systems of mutual aid, information sharing, and embodied knowledge and their intersectional, intimate, and enduring effects, as magnified by the COVID-19 global pandemic. 

The exhibition considers artists as prognosticators and traces their evolving practices and approaches, informed by activism and the creation of mutual aid networks spurred from lived experiences such as the still ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic and Black and Brown grief. The artists assume the role of narrators for memetic memory, muffled silences, and informal archiving against power structures sanctioning conditions of personal isolation, cultural amnesia, and planetary extinction. 

Amplifying the concurrent exhibitions presented in Houston and San Francisco, public programs are activations and timely engagements of the current moment, during the final months of the 2024 U.S. presidential election cycle. Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions is a diary of experiences, encompassing not only what happened but also the possibility of what never happened in the ongoing process of remembering and recollection, as a form of ‘protest against forgetting.’ 

The years 2020-2024 began with the onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic, which continues to expose systemic inequities disproportionately affecting historically marginalized communities. In the 2022 book What World Is This?: A Pandemic Phenomenology, Judith Butler advocates for intertwinement as a ‘“collective effort to find or forge the best form of ‘interdependency’ as one that most clearly embodies the ideals of radical equality.”’ The concurrent exhibitions in Houston and San Francisco and their related public programs are guided by entangled ethics in order to untangle forms of sustained solidarities inching toward liberation.

Landmarks and the Department of Art and Art History welcome artist Janine Antoni for a public lecture. Antoni’s visit coincides with the screening of her work Touch (2002), presented this October as part of Landmarks Video.

Known for her unusual artistic processes, Antoni uses her body as both a tool and a source of meaning within the framework of her practice. Her early methods involved transforming materials such as chocolate and soap through everyday processes like bathing, eating and sleeping to create sculptural works and installations.

The lecture will be held in the Art Building Atrium; Room 1.102 and is free and open to all. Visitors may park in the San Jacinto Garage or in paid spots on the streets nearby.

Part of Getty’s region-wide initiative PST ART: Art and Science Collide, the Hammer presents Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice, organized by guest co-curators Glenn Kaino and Mika Yoshitake. The exhibition considers environmental art practices that address the climate crisis and anthropogenic disasters and their inescapable intersection with issues of equity and social justice. Breath(e) features works by more than 20 artists, including works by Mel Chin, Ron Finley, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Garnett Puett, and Lan Tuazon, commissioned specially for this exhibition.

Breath(e) was conceived during the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic and America’s racial reckoning in 2020, and as such explores pressing issues related to the ethics of climate justice, while proposing pragmatic and philosophical approaches to spur discussion and resolution. The exhibition strives to challenge and deconstruct polarized political attitudes surrounding climate justice in America and offers new perspectives around land and indigenous rights of nature.

Artists

Brandon Ballengée
Mel Chin
Tiffany Chung
Ron Finley
LaToya Ruby Frazier
Cannupa Hanska Luger
Ryoji Ikeda
ikkibawiKrrr
Michael Joo
Danil Krivoruchko
Xin Liu
Yoshitomo Nara
Otobong Nkanga

Roxy Paine
Garnett Puett
Rob Reynolds
Sandy Rodriguez
Sarah Rosalena
Bently Spang
Mika Tajima
Clarissa Tossin
Lan Tuazon
Yangkura
Jin-me Yoon
Zheng Mahler

Reshaping the Narrative: California Perspectives surveys the myriad ways artists represent and reflect our local communities. The featured artists offer unique and local perspectives on themes that resonate during this presidential election year, such as immigration, civil rights, labor activism, feminism, and cultural identity.

The Spotlight series includes a new or never-before-exhibited artwork paired with a commissioned piece of writing, creating focused and thoughtful conversations between the visual arts and authors, critics, poets, scholars, and beyond. In this iteration, the Spotlight features Sarah Cain’s Path of Totality, 2024. A text by curator and writer Jamillah James accompanies the presentation.

From Where You Stand: On Sarah Cain’s Path of Totality
By Jamillah James

One of many things that comes to mind when thinking of Los Angeles, where artist Sarah Cain has called home for years, is the manner in which the sky envelopes the landscape—at dusk, when the horizon melts into strains of warm pinks and golds as the day transitions into night; the searing whiteness of the midday sun—its warmth, its bite, and tenacity; and the canopy of violets that slowly recede to blues of different temperatures when another day begins, in a place where seasons are indiscernible from one to the next.

In recent years, Cain’s work has become increasingly monumental, forging its own landscape. Major works, like her remarkably complex projects in stained glass or her massive painting-installations that encompass seemingly infinite expanses of wall and floor with exploded color and line, show the artist taking up space—holding ground against and atop received, outmoded histories, or just plain boring mythologies of painting as a practice. Taking up space is radical—it is how you are seen, felt, and heard. At their very core, Cain’s abstract paintings are radical and disorienting in the best possible way. Her attack and command of both physical and pictorial space is incisive yet wildly generous, leaving the viewer with no singular place to stand or look. There is no one history from which her paintings pull; her wellspring of influence is a panoply of styles and gestures that intersect in unexpected ways. There is the specter of abstract expressionism, which quickly gets pushed to the margins in favor of other, more discursive trajectories within the historical and emerging canons of painting or artmaking more generally. What immediately comes to mind is the boisterous spirit of Pattern and Decoration, the organic sensibilities of the Feminist Art Movement, and the inherently defiant posture of graffiti. Cain’s work is inventively fearless as it establishes its own vernacular at this very point in time, as painting remains both central yet ever contested. Cain is gleefully and thankfully part of its contestation.

Path of Totality (2024) is a new work by Cain which finds the artist indexing familiar gestures in an exciting direction. She continues to embrace materials that have become intrinsic to her work—spray paint, glitter, stringed beads, and rope. The painting contains a host of tensions that are inherent to Cain’s paintings of the past decade: patterns beginning and terminating unexpectedly, shapes that announce themselves boldly in saturated hues yet dissipate into thin streams and drips of diluted paint, hard edges giving way to soft, organic forms and vice versa. The tactility of Cain’s surfaces are an extension of her insistence on having the viewer not just see what is in front of them, but to embrace it with full engagement. There is no wrong way or place to look.

At the painting’s furthest reach is a rectangle in its upper left corner, a discrete painting within the painting. Its edges are framed by two scalloped lines in a complementary orange and blue. These lines abut, propping each other up, but do not complete the perimeter. It is somewhat unclear whether this is the painting’s starting point or if it is the end, placed additively after the rest of the work took shape. Contained within this section are assertive, chunky pink and blue forms fenced in by sprayed squiggle marks that reach beyond the scalloped frame. Try as it might, the rectangle’s geometry cannot hold everything.

Another framing device is the braided rope that cuts through the center of the painting, camouflaged by radiating bands of color, yet clearly demarcating one side from the other. The braid defects from matching its surroundings at its ends—where it starts, with a knot resting on the top of the painting, as if this were the point where it is held up to the wall, and at the bottom, where it is dipped in day-glo orange paint and rests against four contiguous circular forms. It is these moments where the surface reveals its expansive intentions, something as slight as a braid asserting itself into real space.

The title of the work is a term relating to the space in which a solar eclipse is fully visible, that is when the moon completely covers the sun. At the right of the painting is a sphere cloaked in silver leaf, its shimmer recalling the cool glow of the moon, while the wavering lines coming from its center evoke the bathing darkness of an eclipse. However, Cain’s eclipse is in marvelous color. This introduction of a metallic breaks the picture plane which is dominated by intensely saturated color in all directions. While a comparatively small gesture within this large format canvas, it is a grounding force, the most sharply defined form within the painting. As Cain’s emanating lines ease their way toward the viewer, they sometimes take a moment to rest. The lower half of the painting has rainbow-like arches that crest and then relax at the edge of the painting. This, as well as the soft scratchiness of the muted gray, white, and pink anchoring a slightly skewed center, is yet another departure from expectation within the painting. While there are moments of pause in Path of Totality, the viewer does have their work cut out for them while viewing. Cain is a generous painter whose dynamic work is always full of surprises. Painting is not always the friendliest form. It is enshrined, calcified even, in its idiosyncrasies, secrets, and exclusions. Though, in the case of Path of Totality and Cain’s work more broadly, we stand in the path of her brilliant gestures and dexterous exchange of ideas. Expectations are defied, tradition is yesterday’s concern, and with each new day, there is a new horizon to see and feel.

Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel is pleased to collaborate with Nara Roesler for the fourth edition of the summer exhibition at Comporta, Portugal. Throughout July and August, the former rice barn and once cinema Casa da Cultura da Comporta hosts a group show curated by art historian Nancy Dantas featuring works by five contemporary artists from different parts of the globe, whose practices trace pathways through Brazil, South Africa, and the United States. 

Through works by Alberto Pitta (Salvador, Brasil 1961), Efrain Almeida (Boa Viagem, Brasil, 1964), Igshaan Adams (Cape Town, South Africa, 1982), Leonardo Drew (Tallahassee, USA, 1961) and Marina Rheingantz (Araraquara, Brasil, 1983), the curator, herself a scholar working between Johannesburg, Cape Town and Almada, poses a reflection on the paths and knowledge systems that accompany the rice crop, a dietary staple in countless cultures and a common plantation in the fields surrounding Comporta. An ancestral and contemporary summoning, Stirring the Pot, conceived as cooking, disrupting, and celebrating, takes place when work is over and tools are stored away, opening a circle for dance, liberation, and communication across realms and times. While the sculptures of Igshaan Adams and Leonardo Drew embody historical contexts in South Africa and the United States in sculptural objects, the wildlife sculptures of Efrain Almeida and Alberto Pitta’s textile prints reference specific Brazilian cultures and rituals, and Marina Rheingantz’s painting translates an outdoor sensory experience in abstract materiality. 

“Stirring the Pot temporarily transforms the Casa da Cultura, a former rice barn and once cinema, into a staging of scenes and entwinements between the material and the ethereal, the overt and latent, inside and outside, past and present, the historically distant and poetically close”, writes the curator. 

Developed in 2021 by Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, the Comporta summer show originated from a desire to establish alternative models and collaborative projects. It has previously featured exhibitions in partnership with kurimanzutto (2023), Clearing and Madragoa (2022), and Galeria Luisa Strina and Sé Galeria (2021). Initially conceived as a response to the pandemic-related restrictions that disrupted the global art calendar, the exhibition has become a permanent fixture. As Comporta has gradually emerged as a cultural  destination, the show has firmly established itself as an annual highlight.

Caragh Thuring has been elected as a Royal Academician in the category of Painting by The Royal Academy of Arts.

Thuring works with painting, drawing, weaving and photography. She builds and arranges layered imagery in opposition to traditional visual and logical hierarchies. Painting the overlooked and the out of sight, Thuring is curious to what lies beneath the surface. Filtering landscape, people, places, boundaries and territories, she interweaves the technological and human: volcanoes, submarines and bricks appear viscerally or bodily whilst emphasising the clash between the natural and the manufactured.

For over 250 years, the Royal Academy of Arts has existed to champion art and artists. The academy is run by the Royal Academicians, artists and architects elected by their peers in recognition of their exceptional work. The Royal Academy is home to Britain's longest established art school, the RA Schools. Every year since 1768 they have held an annual Summer Exhibition, the largest open-submission art exhibition in the world. The Royal Academy presents their collection of art and architecture in free displays throughout their home on Piccadilly and put on world-class exhibitions of art from around the world, welcoming hundreds of thousands of people to their galleries each year.

This exhibition features works by eleven contemporary artists from around the globe to explore how these individuals engage with topics such as resilience, strength, labor, women’s rights, and queer aesthetics through athletic imagery. It also queries preconceived notions of femininity through a range of conceptual approaches, be they celebratory, humorous, or critical.

Artists featured in this exhibition are Bianca Argimón, Libby Black, Zoë Buckman, Monica Kim Garza, Riikka Hyvonen, Sophie Kirchner, Eddie Lanieri, Hazel Meyer, Fay Sanders, Sheena Rose, and Kawita Vatanajyankur.

She’s a Knockout was guest curated by Caitlin Swindell, Chief Curator, Vero Beach Museum of Art.

Phoenix Art Museum is pleased to present Larry Bell: Improvisations, a career survey of Bell’s work. The survey explores the progression of Bell’s process from the 1960s through the present day, featuring a wide range of glass cubes, sculptures, large-scale standing walls, and mixed-media collages the artist created using the cutting-edge vacuum deposition technique. The exhibition debuts a selection of Light Knot sculptures that suspend from the ceiling and appear to dance as they absorb and reflect the surrounding light. It also premieres one newly commissioned large-scale work—a cubic form representing the mercurial sun, surrounded by clouded glass evocative of the fog of Venice Beach, California. Improvisations additionally features rarely exhibited collage works from the Phoenix Art Museum Collection, including examples from Bell’s Vapor Drawings (1978-present), Mirage series (1980s-present), and Fraction series (1996-2001).

Larry Bell's largest site specific commission, Reds and Whites (2024), is now on view at North Carolina State University's Centennial Campus grounds. Consisting of four main elements that explode the traditional cube form and breaks it into its component parts of right-angle corners in an ever-increasing complexity of color and form, Reds and Whites is installed outside of the Snøhetta-designed Hunt Library where it is now a fixture of the NC State University campus and encompasses a total area of approximately 40 x 40 feet. The site-specific installation was unveiled in a ribbon cutting ceremony on May 1, 2024.

Photography by Matthew Millman, San Francisco.

Milwauke Art Museum is pleased to present "Winter Series: Larry Bell's Iceberg". 

The Winter Series is a new annual exhibition series that brings color and joy to the coldest, dreariest months of the year. Each year between December and March, the light-filled, 90-foot-high Windhover Hall will showcase a large-scale installation by a renowned or up-and-coming artist whose work reflects a profound meditation on nature. Open to all with free admission, this series invites visitors to experience an intriguing and often colorful alternative to the winter beyond the windows and affords artists an opportunity to reflect upon nature within this one-of-a-kind space.

This unique series commences with the installation of Iceberg (2020) by Larry Bell (b. 1939), a leading artist of the California Light and Space Movement. Comprised of four zig-zagged, free-standing panels of laminated glass, each seven feet tall at its pinnacle, Iceberg sits in the prow-like space of the magnificent hall, set against the backdrop of Lake Michigan. It connects the architectural wonder that is Windhover Hall to its natural, seasonal surroundings by evoking the shape and shifting tones of floating ice forms and, incidentally, the effects of a changing climate.

Bell is known for his innovative sculptural experiments with light and perception, primarily using glass. He explores the medium’s ability to simultaneously reflect, absorb, and transmit light and utilizes alternative, often industrial materials—here, commercially available color film sandwiched between sheets of clear glass—to create complex spatial ambiguities. A see-through object one moment becomes mirrored the next; shadows turn into windows. Iceberg, with its many surfaces, amplifies these subtle effects and offers a polychromatic contrast to the wintery expanse beyond the soaring windows.

Pioneer Works and Headlands Center for the Arts are pleased to co-present "Climate Futurism", an exhibition featuring new commissions by Artists Erica Deeman, Denice Frohman, and Olalekan Jeyifous presented at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY. 

Curated by ecologist and climate policy expert Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, the exhibition represents the culmination of Headlands’s inaugural Threshold Fellowship, a two-year program which highlights the power and efficacy of artists’ methods and processes to imagine a more equitable future. Taking inspiration from Johnson’s forthcoming book, What If We Get It Right?, the Artists have created works that explore topics such as creating new traditions, transforming our food system, reconnecting with nature, strengthening our diasporas, and proceeding with justice and love.

"Climate Futurism" is curated by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, and is made possible by generous funding from the Joe & Clara Tsai Foundation’s Social Justice Fund. It is also supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Headlands’ Threshold Fellowship is supported in part by Christine & Curtis Gardner, Gruber Family Foundation, and The Hayabusa Charitable Foundation.

Image: Olalekan Jeyifous, PFC – Seneca SunCraft Orchards, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Pioneer Works.

Including works by: Saif Azzuz, Matthew Kirk, and G. Peter Jemison.

New York-based artist Jessie Henson will make her Broadway debut with "See What the Sun Thinks", an exhibition of new works in Broadway Gallery's Project Room. 

Working with an industrial sewing machine and gold leaf on paper, Henson approaches her abstractions with as much muscle as grace.  As the tightly nestled and brightly colored thread accretes across the surface in clusters, the paper buckles and contorts adding a sculptural dimension that is echoed by the reflectivity of the metallic leafing. 

Henson is a subtly clever colorist as well, at times situating slight tonal variances side by side or leaving considerable swaths of the paper unsewn. A group of works using primarily black thread on black paper reinforce this disciplined aspect of her work, encouraging a totalizing, topographical effect. 

Taken together, this body of work serves as a concise introduction to Henson’s practice and her particular inversion of painterly abstraction—one that is refracted through a prism of both craft and industrial manufacture. 

Jack Barrett presents "Plant a Weed", a group exhibition that brings together new and existing works by sixteen artists, from New York City, Los Angeles, Pacifica and Mexico City. On view from June 17 to July 22, 2023, the exhibition is curated by Francesca Altamura, an independent curator and organizer based in New York, NY. The exhibition will mark the debut of new works by over sixteen participating artists.

The artists in "Plant a Weed" offer a counterpoint to what is understood as natural, offering an expansion of systems, of publics, and a glimpse into the lives lived and loved within the urban ecosystem. Street detritus, both natural and human-made, maps out a cosmos of the non-desirable. Paper towels, Windex, egg shells, cigarettes, mummified rats, scorpions, lollipops, hard-shell tacos, fabric, paper, plastic, leather, and other mixed debris coagulate to form a new ecology.

The scurrying of critters acts as a score for the de facto co-habitual relationship New Yorkers, human and non-human, share. While pizza rats embark on a quest for a slice and a subway seat, the Adams administration appoints a ‘Rat Czar,’ a Sisyphean display of control over the non-human taking place during a generation-defining housing and medical crisis.

Amidst meticulously manicured astroturf and glistening corporate lawns, a weed resolutely disrupts the imposed order of the grid, of who belongs here, and of authority. In this whimsical interplay of urban encounters, resilience emerges, dismantling the hedgerows between the imaginary borders that demarcate the natural and human worlds.

Several artists in the exhibition including Michael Assiff and Salome Asega have undergone extensive fieldwork to shed light on their artworks. In Assiff’s new paintings from 2023, he trucked cross country with a childhood friend, observing the infrastructure and plant life that grows alongside truck stops, highways and spaces frequented by long-haul truckers. The 3D-printed monster truck model, Asega’s RATs, literally printed in the shape of a rat, which first debuted in the 2022 iterations of Nuit Blanche and Munchmuseet’s Munch Triennale, delves into Risk Assessment Tools, or AI technological systems, that are used by city agencies to make biased decisions about bail, prison sentencing, welfare, medical benefits and housing services. Saif Azzuz excavates the colonial history of Collect Pond Park in Lower Manhattan. In We don’t want your kind here (No’-oh) from 2022, the steel fence acts as a physical symbol of relentless colonial campaigns to privatize and monetize land and natural resources once stewarded by the Lenape.

Both Antonia Kuo and Ragini Bhow are inspired by the mercurial and moody rhythms of New York City. Kuo combines the photography taken around her home and studio, with industrial processes she learned growing up in her family’s casting foundry to create two new photographs, Aftermath and Phosphor, both from 2023. The densely layered compositions are so far abstracted from their original meaning, yet portray an emotive story about the urban landscape. Bhow enters into a transcendental state to create Wood Entity from 2023. As a means of digesting the sights and sounds of the city, she articulates amoebic forms by pressing on the blank aluminum sheets bought from an industrial metal supply store. Similar to Kuo, Justin Cloud grew up in a family of farmers, mechanics, and engineers. He uses an ancient technique called “repoussé and chasing” to create Mood Graft and Knight Kitchen from 2023, an art form used around the world to ornate metal from chalices to armor. The artist uses a hammer and chisel to shape the metal into realistic depictions of flowers.

Aryana Minai presents View and Embodied & Embedded IV from 2022, as emblems of architectural design elements. Minai creates a liquid pulp from recycled paper, then presses objects like bricks and stones, salvaged from the street, textile woodblocks and other urban artifacts, to create fossil-like imprints of the cities which she calls home, Tehran and Los Angeles. Tamara Santibañez creates new work from 2023 that exposes and interweaves meaning assigned to industrial materials, architecture and objects used for mass socio-political and symbolic actions. The artist renders two flowers, commonly used symbols of peace and resistance, in glazed porcelain that delicately hold a chain of keys and a heart-shaped lock at the center. For Santibañez, these objects represent the ‘lock bridge,’ where couples inscribe their names on padlocks, lock it on the bridge and throw the keys into the river. These gestures of eternal love are cut short due to ongoing maintenance costs and the structural integrity of the bridge being endangered by the added weight. Rodrigo Red Sandoval’s handmade manholes, constructed in Amsterdam and clogged with urban detritus from New York City, activate the gallery floor. In Sandoval’s new molds from 2023, cigarette butts and various debris clog the mouth-like openings, truncating the possibility of waste disposal. Sandoval lays bear the entanglements of global environmental degradation, breaking down the boundaries between the here vs. there of waste offsets. Within a series of three new small-scale works from 2023, Emma Safir fabricates portals between the inside and outside worlds. She first takes iPhone images from the streets, which are obscured through digital manipulation. These abstract backgrounds are printed on silk, then further distorted through traditional methods of fiber manipulation.

On view at Jack Barrett for only two weeks before the pandemic, Molly Soda presents for the second time, two vinyl windows, which incorporate “invasive” weeds that were grown in her apartment. These sculptures act as windows into the artist’s private space, as reminders that no matter how disorganized and chaotic her life becomes, the surrounding environs will always continue to flourish. Sydney Shen revives a sculpture from 2015, Please Don’t Eat Me, that consists of a dustpan and scorpions sourced from Etsy, a reminder of the life that exists between floorboards, in the walls, in the alleyways between apartments and on online marketplaces. Christine Egaña Navin questions utility and value, especially of objects, structures and processes made by humans and organically. In Botiquín 1.22 from 2018, she encases a mummified two-toed adult female Ring Tailed Cat, 22 two-dollar bills, a Blow Pop, two dehydrated Taco Bell hard-shelled tacos, and a mummified adolescent male Brown Rat, among many other objects, in epoxy taxidermy putty.

In Hamlet from 2022, Justin Chance uses a number of techniques to create his quilts, with wet and felt needle that is arranged, collaged, and sewn together with fibers and wool that are then encased in silk organza. His title refers to human settlements that are not legal entities and have no local government or official boundaries. Chance’s work represents an idealized version of rural life, where manicured lawns are within close commuting distance of a city. Em Rooney is also inspired by nature and creates botanical forms with large-scale industrial processes and materials. In trouble every day from 2022, a blue cocoon is made from steel, indigo-dyed rice paper, rhinestones, and synthetic whale boning, among other materials. In stark contrast, Monsieur Zohore’s material of choice is paper towels, an artistic practice that has been honed in for over ten years. In a new work from 2023, he presents a relic of old New York City, a plastic takeaway bag emblazoned with the former two-dimensional I ❤ NY logo. In another new work from 2023, Zohore depicts an iconic image of Mierle Laderman Ukeles performing Touch Sanitation Performance: “Handshake and Thanking Ritual” with Sanitation Workers of the New York City Department of Sanitation from 1979–80. Over the course of 11 months, Ukeles shook the hands of all 8,500 sanitation workers, thanking them for their service. Zohore re-writes this iconic image from performance history by adding the world's most expensive handbag ($450,000), designed by former Louis Vuitton Creative Director Marc Jacobs.

In this whimsical interplay of encounters, the resilience of artists thriving in the city is evident, as they subvert the borders between the haves and the have-nots, the locals and the interlopers, the perfect specimens and the riff-raff. The weed will always prevail.

Gagosian is pleased to announce "To Bend the Ear of the Outer World: Conversations on contemporary abstract painting", an exhibition of new and recent works by more than forty artists from the Americas, United Kingdom, and Germany. The exhibition has been organized by guest curator Gary Garrels, who, in collaboration with the artists, has selected a single painting by each, with most works presented here for the first time. This is Gagosian’s first exhibition to be sited across its two galleries in Mayfair, at Grosvenor Hill and Davies Street.

The exhibition in London examines the significance of abstract painting today, from Garrels’s perspective. Juxtaposing a diverse range of approaches to contemporary abstraction, the exhibition brings together works by three generations of artists, including some never before shown by Gagosian.

Participating artists include Tomma Abts, Richard Aldrich, Tauba Auerbach, Frank Bowling, Mark Bradford, Cecily Brown, Vija Celmins, Matt Connors, Tomm El-Saieh, Jadé Fadojutimi, Suzan Frecon, Katharina Grosse, Mark Grotjahn, Wade Guyton, David Hammons, Mary Heilmann, Thilo Heinzmann, Richard Hoblock, Jacqueline Humphries, Suzanne Jackson, Jennie C. Jones, Brice Marden, Helen Marden, Julie Mehretu, Oscar Murillo, Albert Oehlen, Laura Owens, Nathlie Provosty, David Reed, Gerhard Richter, Amy Sillman, Pat Steir, Ryan Sullivan, Lesley Vance, Charline von Heyl, Mary Weatherford, Stanley Whitney, Pamela Helena Wilson, Terry Winters, Christopher Wool, and John Zurier.

Caragh Thuring: The Foothills of Pleasure

A panel of nationally recognized curators, local arts professionals and community members from the Purple Line Extension Section 2 and 3 project areas has selected artists to create site-specific, integrated artworks for the future Wilshire/Rodeo, Century City/Constellation, Westwood/UCLA and Westwood/VA Hospital stations.

The diverse range of accomplished artists includes: 

Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio (Century City/Constellation Station) 

Moses X. Ball (Westwood/UCLA Station) 

Sandow Birk (Westwood/VA Hospital Station) 

Sarah Cain (Century City/Constellation Station) 

Victoria Fu + Matt Rich (Westwood/VA Hospital Station) 

Karen Hampton (Westwood/UCLA Station) 

Phung Huynh (Century City/Constellation Station) 

Oscar Magallanes (Century City/Constellation Station) 

Yunhee Min (Westwood/UCLA Station) 

Meleko Mokgosi (Wilshire/Rodeo Station) 

Rigo 23 (Wilshire/Rodeo Station) 

Gala Porras-Kim (Westwood/UCLA Station) 

Analia Saban (Century City/Constellation Station) 

Francesco Simeti (Westwood/VA Hospital Station) 

Eloy Torrez (Westwood/VA Hospital Station) 

Devon Tsuno (Wilshire/Rodeo Station) 

Iris Yirei Hu (Westwood/UCLA Station) 

As part of a competitive process, the artist selection panel carefully considered each artist’s professional qualifications and examples of past work. Panelists included: Arthur Lewis, Creative Director, United Talent Agency Artist Space; Anna Sew Hoy, Chair, UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, Department of Art; Cate Thurston, Associate Curator, The Skirball Cultural Center; Connie Butler, Chief Curator, The Hammer Museum at UCLA; Jean Tardy-Vallernaud, Founding Chair, Century City Arts Council; Ken Gonzales-Day, artist; LeRonn P. Brooks, Associate Curator, The Getty Research Institute; Michael Amescua, artist; Stephanie Vahn, Chair, Beverly Hills Arts and Culture Commission; and Thao Nguyen, Art and Design Agent, Creative Arts Agency. 

Erica Deeman is included in "When Things Go Back to Normal" at Worth Ryder Art Gallery, Berkeley, CA from 27 January - 25 February 2021.

Sarah Cain is included in "Grouper" at Broadway Gallery, New York City, NY from 20 January – 20 February 2021.

Kate Shepherd is included in "Rhe: everything flows" at Galerie Lelong & Co., New York City from 7 January 2021 – 13 February 2021. 

Jim Hodges recently unveiled a new permanent installation in New York City’s historic Grand Central Terminal. Entitled "I dreamed a world and called it Love" (2020), the sprawling public work is comprised of over 5,000 individually cut pieces of glass that the artist layered to create a swirling camouflage of over 70 various colors.

Erica Deeman is included in Erica Deeman in "Justice" at Marin MoCA, Novato from 14 November 2020 - 24 December 2020.

The exhibition "Teresita Fernández: Maelstrom" will be on view at Lehmann Maupin, New York from 12 November - 21 January 2020. 

Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce Teresita Fernández, Maelstrom. This exhibition will feature a new series of monumental sculptures and installations that unapologetically visualize the enduring violence and devastation ignited by colonization.