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

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.

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.

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.

Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to share that Leonardo Drew will be in conversation with Nari Ward at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, on the evening of Friday, March 1, 2024. This dynamic program celebrates the recent acquisitions of artworks by the artists into the Norton's Contemporary Collection.

Leonardo Drew is a contemporary American artist based in Brooklyn, New York. He creates sculptures from natural materials and through processes of oxidation, burning, and decay, Drew transforms these objects into massive sculptures that critique social injustices and the cyclical nature of existence.

Nari Ward is a Jamaican-American artist based in New York City and is known for his sculptural installations composed of discarded found material collected throughout his Harlem neighborhood. Ward re-contextualizes these found objects in thought provoking sculpture that create complex conversations around social and political realities of race, migration, democracy, and community.

This exhibition of eight artists: Saif Azzuz, Chelsea Culprit, Brian DeGraw, Brittni Ann Harvey, Erin O'Keefe, Eddie Martinez, Sarah Peters and Derek Weisberg showcases work that in some way engages with the triumphs and fallacies of the modern project. As the lines in the verse above state, "Doin' things I used to do/ They think are new," artists are filled with enthusiasm and excitement that belong to those who feel they are in the process of original invention, like children at play. Yet, as time goes by, we realize that this feeling of newness will be discovered and reclaimed by the next generation.
Examining this framework, images and motifs from the past become replete with additional meaning, celebrating the movement and repetition in many of the works which speak to this cyclical framework and create a vibrancy and mode of activity that is in communication between the various artworks.

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Throughout her career, New York-based artist Kate Shepherd has explored abstracted spaces in her richly colored works. For this "Artist Talk," Shepherd discusses the evolution of her formal technique, including her signature use of fine lines to delineate space, her focus on paint reflectivity and texture, and her most recent works on paper. She will also discuss how she developed the exhibition "April, May, June, etc., etc., Upended Floor (Mud, Blood)," 2020, at Josh Pazda Hiram Butler Gallery in Houston from afar while living in New York City. Two of her works related to that exhibition are currently on view in "Spatial Awareness: Drawings from the Permanent Collection" at the Menil Drawing Institute.

The "Artist Talk" series is supported by a gift from the Cockrell Family Fund.

About the artist: Kate Shepherd (b. 1961) was born in New York City, where she currently lives and works. Her works are in such collections as Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; the Menil Collection, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Morgan Library & Museum, New York. Shepherd has a long-standing commitment to printmaking, and she has made editions with and for Pace Prints, Chinati Foundation, Dieu Donné, Lower East Side Printshop, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Visit menil.org/events to learn more about upcoming programs. Public Program of The Menil Collection, Houston, TX. February 17, 2022.

Sarah Cain's "My favorite season is the fall of the patriarchy" will be on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC when the East Building reopens in December 2021. 

Sarah Cain’s energetic installation jumps the bounds of a 45-foot-long painted canvas to integrate a variety of surfaces in the East Building’s Atrium. Extending onto the nearby protective sculpture enclosures and well covers, Cain’s painted elements surround and complement the canvas to create a dynamic installation that encourages movement and close-looking.

The exhibition "Sarah Cain–Enter the Center" will be on view at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College from 10 July to 28 November 2021.

Sarah Cain is an artist who explores and expands upon traditional ideas of painting. Cain works on canvases of all sizes, often modifying canvases by cutting and braiding, painting on all sides, and installing the canvas with the back of the painting facing the viewer. She also paints on other surfaces, including interior and exterior walls, floors, and dollar bills.

The creation and destruction of her paintings is part of Cain’s process that, in part, revolves around self-discovery. Cain describes herself as a feminist painter, using elements that are traditionally seen as feminine and “girly” as an act of non-conformity and antipathy to the patriarchal hierarchies of painting.

Artist Talk: Lorraine O’Grady in conversation with Zoe Leonard at the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York on Thursday, 27 May 2021 at 6 PM (EST).

Join Lorraine O’Grady, one of the most significant contemporary figures working in performance, conceptual, and feminist art, for an in-depth conversation in conjunction with a special exhibition Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And. O’Grady is joined by photographer Zoe Leonard to discuss their respective approaches toward conceptual photography, moderated by Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

Larry Bell is included in "The Paradox of Stillness: Art, Object, and Performance" at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis from 15 May 2021 – 8 August 2021. 

Artists On The Future: Teresita Fernández and Sir David Adjaye in conversation on Stanford University Youtube on Monday, 10 May 2021 at 5 pm (PDT).

This conversation brings together Cuban American visual artist Teresita Fernández with Ghanaian-British architect Sir David Adjaye to discuss place, geography, and global environmental issues. The program is free and open to both members of the Stanford community and the public. 

The exhibition "Jim Hodges" will be on view at Gladstone Gallery in Brussels, Belgium from 8 May – 18 June 2021.

Artist Talk: Teresita Fernández On Art And Eco-Trauma in conversation with Hirshhorn associate curator Marina Isgro virtually on Wednesday, 28 April 2021 at 7 pm (EDT).

Artist Talk: Zoe Leonard in conversation with curator José Esparza Chong Cuy at the Harvard Graduate School of Design virtually on Thursday, 1 April 2021 at 12 PM (EST).

Zoe Leonard will present a work in progress titled Al Rio/To the River, and will engage in conversation about the project with curator José Esparza Chong Cuy.

Music Talk: Justin Vivian Bond in conversation with Jim Hodges virtually at The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in Chicago, Ilinois on Saturday, 27 March 2021 at 4 PM (CT).

Acclaimed singer-songwriter, author, painter, performance artist, and actor Justin Vivian Bond chats, riffs, and improvises with long-time friend and collaborator, installation artist Jim Hodges.