Sculptor Leonardo Drew is the next contemporary artist to transform the Museum’s first floor galleries with a new site-specific commission. Known for his large-scale, multi-dimensional installations, Drew employs organic materials to create topographies that are at once looming in size and stunning in their intricacies. For this project, Drew will anchor sculptural pieces that he refers to as “planets” and surround them with hundreds of smaller objects as he works to identify the interconnectedness of them all. This commission is the latest in a series initiated by the Carter in 2015 to respond to works in the Museum’s collection through the perspective of American artists working today.
Sarah Cain: Day after day on this beautiful stage
Known for her exuberant abstractions, Sarah Cain (b. 1979, Albany, NY) often extends her practice beyond the canvas into installation, site-specific painting, stained glass, and furniture. Her work draws from sources as disparate as Abstract Expressionism, graffiti, and pop music, and incorporates materials as diverse as sand, feathers, jewelry, crystals, and fabric. At the Henry, the artist has created an immersive architectural intervention in dialogue with the double-height architecture of the museum’s East Gallery.
Cain’s muscular, gestural painting embraces a strategically intuitive power that both undermines and expands our expectations of what has been historically considered “serious” abstract painting. Her color-soaked palette often mixes with a wide range of found objects that in turn complement her titles, which range in reference from the sweet to the erotic, from the mystical to the political. Cain redefines abstraction in feminist terms as an architecture for transformative, embodied, emotive experience. Her work emphatically insists on the value of feminine, queer, and other “othered” aesthetics, intentionally subverting male-dominated art historical traditions.
At the beginning of her career, Cain made dozens of site-specific paintings in abandoned buildings; by nature, these were ephemeral works. As her practice evolved, she has continued to create massive on-site works and preserved the impulse to treat painting seriously, but not preciously. For this exhibition, Cain transforms the gallery into a single monumental painting that wraps the floor and walls, created entirely on-site. Extending the full height of the walls, the work connects the two floors, creating different vantage points and experiences on each level. On the mezzanine level, viewers first encounter the artist’s suspended stained glass piece placed in the window, where it interacts with the exterior environment in constant flux depending on conditions of light and shadow. In the lower gallery, the work creates an immersive and surprisingly intimate, energizing space for the viewer. The audience becomes physically a part of the work as they enter, and can directly engage with the couch sculptures. Enhancing this direct intimacy are a suite of the artist’s $ Talismans, which transform the everyday item into a magical object of power.
Often referencing lyrics from popular or particularly resonant songs in her titles, Cain has chosen Day after day on this beautiful stage, a line from the 1998 Silver Jews song “We Are Real,” for this exhibition. In it, musician/poet David Berman captures the painful yet transformative experience of creative life (or perhaps just life itself), and embraces how we retain meaning over time despite its darkness and our inevitable mortality.
Living and working in Brooklyn, New York, Leonardo Drew’s abstract works, made from an outpouring of chaotic elements, create installations that express immense tension and turbulence. The artist’s new work, Number 360 (2023), commissioned for YSP’s 18th-century Chapel, is a powerful reflection on the weight of collective experience, memory, and the cycles of life and death, decay and regeneration. This resonates within a historic building where many lives have been played out for centuries – unknown to us, yet somehow conveyed by the atmosphere of the space.
Drew joins several artists in responding to the Chapel, which was built in 1740 and is a singular, contemplative place. Projects here set out to connect emotionally with a wide humanity and to be welcoming to everyone. Previous artists include Ai Weiwei, James Lee Byars, Kimsooja, Rachel Kneebone, Shirin Neshat, Yinka Shonibare, Chiharu Shiota and Bill Viola.
The basic material of Number 360 is plywood, either blackened or covered with textured coloured paint, which has been ripped apart and splintered to form the building blocks of a conical monolith that surges to over five metres in height. Unusually for Drew, Number 360 is a vertical installation, responding to the height and width of the chapel nave.
Like an explosion held in time, Number 360 conveys ferocious energy as well as trauma and rupture. Drew’s fractured surfaces create their own language, embodying the laboured process of writing the artist’s experience into history. An African American artist born in Tallahassee in 1961 and raised in public housing in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Drew has often alluded to socio-political issues in his work, using such symbolically charged materials as cotton, rope, rags and rust that relate to the antebellum South, the African American experience, and America’s industrial past. He is, however, adamant in his resistance to impose explicit meaning, and chooses to title his pieces only with numbers in order, “to give the viewer enough room to find themselves in the work”.
One of the typical measures of success for artists is the ability to quit their day jobs and focus full time on making art. Yet these roles are not always an impediment to an artist’s career. This exhibition illuminates how day jobs can spur creative growth by providing artists with unexpected new materials and methods, working knowledge of a specific industry that becomes an area of artistic interest or critique, or a predictable structure that opens space for unpredictable ideas. As artist and lawyer Ragen Moss states:
Typologies of thought are more interrelated than bulky categories like ‘lawyer’ or ‘artist’ allow. . . Creativity is not displaced by other manners of thinking; but rather, creativity runs alongside, with, into, and sometimes from other manners of thinking.
"Day Jobs", the first major exhibition to examine the overlooked impact of day jobs on the visual arts, is dedicated to demystifying artistic production and upending the stubborn myth of the artist sequestered in their studio, waiting for inspiration to strike. The exhibition will make clear that much of what has determined the course of modern and contemporary art history are unexpected moments spurred by pragmatic choices rather than dramatic epiphanies. Conceived as a corrective to the field of art history, the exhibition also encourages us to more openly acknowledge the precarious and generative ways that economic and creative pursuits are intertwined.
The exhibition will feature work produced in the United States after World War II by artists who have been employed in a host of part- and full-time roles: dishwasher, furniture maker, graphic designer, hairstylist, ICU nurse, lawyer, and nanny–and in several cases, as employees of large companies such as Ford Motors, H-E-B Grocery, and IKEA. The exhibition will include approximately 75 works in a broad range of media by emerging and established artists such as Emma Amos, Genesis Belanger, Larry Bell, Mark Bradford, Lenka Clayton, Marsha Cottrell, Jeffrey Gibson, Jay Lynn Gomez, Tishan Hsu, VLM (Virginia Lee Montgomery), Ragen Moss, Howardena Pindell, Chuck Ramirez, Robert Ryman, and Fred Wilson, among many others.
Organized by Veronica Roberts, Former Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, with Lynne Maphies, Former Curatorial Assistant, Blanton Museum of Art
One of the typical measures of success for artists is the ability to quit their day jobs and focus full time on making art. Yet these roles are not always an impediment to an artist’s career. This exhibition illuminates how day jobs can spur creative growth by providing artists with unexpected new materials and methods, working knowledge of a specific industry that becomes an area of artistic interest or critique, or a predictable structure that opens space for unpredictable ideas. As artist and lawyer Ragen Moss states:
Typologies of thought are more interrelated than bulky categories like ‘lawyer’ or ‘artist’ allow. . . Creativity is not displaced by other manners of thinking; but rather, creativity runs alongside, with, into, and sometimes from other manners of thinking.
"Day Jobs", the first major exhibition to examine the overlooked impact of day jobs on the visual arts, is dedicated to demystifying artistic production and upending the stubborn myth of the artist sequestered in their studio, waiting for inspiration to strike. The exhibition will make clear that much of what has determined the course of modern and contemporary art history are unexpected moments spurred by pragmatic choices rather than dramatic epiphanies. Conceived as a corrective to the field of art history, the exhibition also encourages us to more openly acknowledge the precarious and generative ways that economic and creative pursuits are intertwined.
The exhibition will feature work produced in the United States after World War II by artists who have been employed in a host of part- and full-time roles: dishwasher, furniture maker, graphic designer, hairstylist, ICU nurse, lawyer, and nanny–and in several cases, as employees of large companies such as Ford Motors, H-E-B Grocery, and IKEA. The exhibition will include approximately 75 works in a broad range of media by emerging and established artists such as Emma Amos, Genesis Belanger, Larry Bell, Mark Bradford, Lenka Clayton, Jeffrey Gibson, Jay Lynn Gomez, Tishan Hsu, VLM (Virginia Lee Montgomery), Ragen Moss, Howardena Pindell, Chuck Ramirez, Robert Ryman, and Fred Wilson, among many others.
Organized by Veronica Roberts, Former Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, with Lynne Maphies, Former Curatorial Assistant, Blanton Museum of Art
In Autumn 2022, Hastings Contemporary will present the first major survey show of the work of Caragh Thuring
(b. Brussels, 1972) – her first UK exhibition in six years.
Spanning the last 15 years with more than 20 works, it will include paintings, drawings and monotypes. All works are on loan from the artist and public and private UK collections, in order to avoid the environmental impact of international shipping.
Thuring’s nuanced compositions juxtapose signs and imagery from her recurring iconography of volcanoes, bricks, flora, tartan, human silhouettes, and submarines, to explore where natural and manufactured worlds collide.
Thuring grew up in Scotland near to the majestic Holy Loch, the site of the renowned Cold War US nuclear submarine base and next to the construction site for the first concrete North Sea oil rigs. This clash of nature and industry has continued throughout her practice: looming submarine silhouettes, vast industrial structures and striking landscapes frequently appearing across different series. Similarly, Thuring incorporates a recurrent brick motif in her work, which for her perfectly represents the natural and the manufactured in a single object.
Volcanoes and submarines lurk beneath, intermittently breaking through to the surface, obliquely referencing Thuring’s curiosity about what lies out of sight. Brick walls obstruct our view and untreated or woven canvas draw our attention to the surface of the painting itself and what might lie beyond. What is not obscured is often fragmented, disrupting the viewer’s familiarity of what they are looking at.
For more recent works, Thuring has collaborated with silk weavers in Suffolk to create bespoke cloth for use as her canvas. The fabric is woven on a loom, sewn together, and stretched onto a wood frame before being painted onto. These fabrics are digital renderings of previous paintings, photographs she has taken or found images. As she describes it: “I want to build the work into the surface, to continue the work I’ve already begun.” Both the labour and the depiction are worked into the surface and the painting becomes a continuation upon this ground.
The paintings also illustrate Thuring’s fascination with boundary lines and liminal spaces, perfectly reflected by the gallery’s own position on the foreshore – surrounded by the town’s historic beach, net huts and working structures of the fishing fleet. Massacre of the Innocents (after Breughel), 2010, almost echoes the towering architecture of local fishermen’s huts on Hastings’ beach, while the language of maritime and landscape permeate throughout.
Caragh Thuring was born in Brussels in 1972 and has lived in the United Kingdom since 1973, moving first to Argyll, Scotland and later to West Sussex. Receiving a BA Hons in Fine Art from Nottingham Trent University in 1995, she moved to London the same year and currently divides her time between London and Argyll in Scotland.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Caragh Thuring, Luisa Strina Gallery, São Paulo, Brazil (2019); Builder, Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago IL (2019); Caragh Thuring, Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples, Italy (2019); Selected group exhibitions include: Mixing it Up; Painting Today,Hayward Gallery, London, England (2021); Masterpieces in Miniature: The 2021 Model Art Gallery, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, England (2021); Vesuvio Quotidiano Vesuvio Universale, Museo di San Martino, Naples, Italy (2019), Slow Painting, England (2018/2019); Virginia Woolf, An exhibition inspired by her writings, Tate St Ives, Cornwall, England (2018).
Curated by the museum’s CEO and Director Heidi Zuckerman, 13 Women marks the museum’s 60th anniversary, paying homage to the 13 women who founded the Balboa Pavilion Gallery, the earliest iteration of OCMA, which was opened in 1962. Presented with multiple rotations over the course of almost a full year, 13 Women presents work from the 1960s to the present by artists central to the museum’s collection. Centered on the work of 13 pioneering female artists, each of whom share the visionary qualities of the museum founders, the multigenerational group exhibition celebrates OCMA’s rich history—one distinguished by innovative and groundbreaking exhibitions, thoughtful programming, and a deep commitment to artists. The 13 women included in the exhibition’s first rotation, on view October 8, are Alice Aycock, Joan Brown, Lee Bul, Lucy Bull, Sarah Cain, Vija Celmins, Mary Corse, Mary Heilmann, Barbara Kruger, Cady Noland, Catherine Opie, Hilary Pecis and Agnes Pelton. From timely and prescient works to iconic pieces, 13 Women looks back to look forward, exemplifying the museum’s commitment to sharing outward through objects and storytelling. Additional highlights include Charles Ray’s work Ink Box (1986) and Self Portrait (1990), both acquired from OCMA’s presentation of Ray’s first solo museum exhibition, alongside a new site-specific painting by Sarah Cain in the Avenue of the Arts Gallery. 13 Women is supported by Bank of America.
The Chinese word for “walk” also means “to get things done” and “to move.” By walking/doing/moving, people have woven together the complex fabric of cities, history and culture. We often talk about “entering/exiting history” or “going into/coming out of a dream state.” Walking involves reality, fantasy and dreams. We also often talk about “finding a path” or “seeking the way,” using the everyday act of walking as a metaphor for the search for a goal in life. When human beings (or civilizations) encounter a heavy blow, “walking” becomes a rite to set things in motion and an act of healing. “Crack” not only refers to the spatial experience of walking, but also signifies that people always move “between” one event and the next, implying that moving “between” events always calls for strategy. This exhibition takes “Walking the Crack” as a metaphor for the contemporary state of existence, bringing together the works and writings of artists of different generations since the 1960s, from both Taiwan and abroad, and opening a conversation among them. On the second floor of Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the corridors ambiguously signify pathways, forming two crosses. The exhibition combines artworks in a wide variety of media with a spectrum of research perspectives, attempting to integrate viewing and reading into a single experience of “Walking the Crack.”
Walking creates paths, which may be shortcuts or perhaps detours. A path may start from tracking others or following in their footsteps. Sometimes people march in line. Sometimes they pace back and forth. Sometimes they walk a perilous road (for instance, we speak of risky affairs as “walking a tightrope”). These many different walking paths form lines, some running parallel to each other, others intersecting, all of them ultimately interweaving into a surface and forming a network. This is also how the exhibition connects art with daily life, artists with viewers, artworks with spaces. The viewing and reading of the exhibition are drawn together into a cycle, which implies the cycle of birth and perishing that encompasses the universe and all things.
Curator: Fang-Wei Chang
Janine Antoni's "Mom and Dad" (1994) will be included in The Double: Identity and Difference in Art Since 1900 at National Gallery of Art from 10 July to 30 October 2022.
When two forms or images are presented together, our eyes can’t help but compare them. We “see double” and identify differences and similarities. The art of the double causes us to see ourselves seeing. The Double is the first major exhibition to consider how and why modern and contemporary artists have employed doubled formats to explore perceptual, conceptual, and psychological themes. From Matisse, Duchamp, and Gorky to Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol, Truitt, and Hesse, this multimedia presentation features works by many of today’s leading artists, including Kerry James Marshall, Glenn Ligon, Roni Horn, and Yinka Shonibare. Through art, The Double explores enduring questions of identity and difference, especially self-identity as defined by our own unconscious, by society, and by race, gender, and sexuality.
Erica Deeman is included in PODIUM II at Gallery 181, San Francisco, CA beginning 23 March 2021.
Marsha Cottrell and Zoe Leonard are included in "The Way We Are 3.0" at The Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst, Bremen, Germany from 20 March 2021 - 23 January 2022.
Artist Talk: Artist Talk: Zoe Leonard and Tim Johnson in conversation with Ingrid Schaffner at The Chinati Foundation virtually on Tuesday, 9 March 2021 at Noon (CST).
Chinati hosts artist Zoe Leonard and poet Tim Johnson in conversation with curator Ingrid Schaffner about Al Rio/To the River. Over 550 photographs by Leonard focus on the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo along the stretch where the river is used to demarcate the boundary between the United States and Mexico.
Artist Talk: Leonardo Drew in conversation with Amin Alsaden at the Power Plant in Toronto, Canada on Thursday, 18 February 2021 at 7 PM (EST).
In this program, co-presented with Kuumba, artist Leonardo Drew will discuss the evolution of his work with Amin Alsaden, The Power Plant’s Nancy McCain & Bill Morneau Curatorial Fellow. The two will expand upon themes explored in the upcoming Summer 2021 exhibition, "Propelled into Otherness".
The exhibition "Sarah Cain–In Nature" will be on view at the Momentary, a satellite art space of Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, AK from 13 February to 30 May 2021.
Los Angeles-based artist Sarah Cain will create a site-responsive exhibition for the Momentary. Sarah Cain: In Nature will include colorful abstract works on canvas, functional floor paintings, sculpture, and a stained-glass window. Known for her brightly colored installations that blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture, Cain’s work moves over and off the canvas, responding to architecture at large.
The exhibition "Pour ne pas dormir: Jockum Nordström" will be on view at La Criée centre d'art contemporain, Rennes, France from 6 February to 9 May 2021.
A major figure on the Swedish art scene, Jockum Nordström has devoted over thirty years to his mischievous mix of worlds quotidian and oneiric, human and animal, abstract and naive, natural and architectural. At La Criée Centre for Contemporary Art he’s presenting a selection of recent works: collages, drawings and cardboard sculptures.
Zoe Leonard and Janine Antoni are included in "Frida Love and Pain" at High Line Nine, Gallery 5, New York City, New York. Presented by the Chelsea Music Festival, the exhibition is on view from 2 February - 27 February 2021.
Zoe Leonard is included in "La Boîte-en-Valise" at Office Baroque, Online from 9 January - 20 February, 2021.
Zoe Leonard is included in "A Fire In My Belly" at Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin, Germany from 6 February 2021 – 12 December 2021.
Artist Talk: Janine Antoni and Byron Kim in Conversation with Rochelle Steiner at Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Springs, CA on Thursday, 28 January 2021 at 5 PM (PST).
As part of Palm Springs Art Museum's virtual Public Programs series, join artists Janine Antoni and Byron Kim for a conversation with Palm Springs Art Museum's Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs and Programs Rochelle Steiner. This program is free and open to the public.
