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.

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.