Contemporary Art and Culture
Out in Front of the Back of Beyond, the title of Daniel Wiener’s current solo exhibition at Satchel Projects, is a perfect pitch for the work on view. The notion of “front and back” strikes a strong chord throughout — explicit in the freestanding sculptures, hinted at in the wall pieces.
American Abstract Artists turns 90 this year, an unusual achievement for an artist-run group. Its anniversary show, Abstract by Definition: An Index, opened in April at Art Cake in Brooklyn, curated by Saul Ostrow, who brought 88 current members together under a single roof: a curatorial puzzle, an organizational feat, and a long-running argument about what abstraction can be. A companion exhibition at D. Wigmore Fine Art on West 57th Street focuses on the group’s founders and work made between 1936 and 1950 and runs through July. Here, painter Jacob Cartwright, who serves as AAA’s Secretary, reflects on the group’s nomination-only structure, how a show this size actually comes together, and where he wants AAA to go next.
HIGHLIGHTS
During this season, art spaces across Philadelphia step up to demonstrate the voices of underrepresented communities as the city prepares to celebrate the semi-quincentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. While institutions and sports fans are celebrating, artists take this moment to reflect on America’s 250 years, and how definitions of liberty, equality, and justice have evolved beyond what the Founding Fathers drafted.
What can sound art contribute to the ecological turn? When the Taiwanese sound artist Huichun Yang described her process as getting to know the entire life of the tree that became her instrument, she had my attention. The entire creative arc of her process is rooted in reverence toward materials. Yang selects the wood, sculpts it into an arbrosan—an instrument first introduced to the world in 1996—and plays it by directly sensing its surface with her hands, using gestures that evoke repair and tending.
Karla Black presents her first show in New York City since 2016, and inaugurates Rodder’s expanded Upper East Side gallery space.
Karla Black is a canonized Scottish artist known for working with basic art materials like plaster, paper, and chalk, alongside beauty products like bath bombs, rouge, Vaseline, and lipstick, all in shy pastel colors to create womb-like, abstracted dreamscapes. At Rodder, she creates a site-specific installation, painting Rococo silhouettes in light hues on mirrors as well as constructing monumentally delicate, scented sculptures that glide through the space, chiming in on somatic echoes of the building’s historical narrative, and celebrating feminine beautification rituals.
Jaynie Crimmins’s Busywork turns junk mail, catalogs, and security envelopes into exquisite objects: cones, ovals, and circles arranged across the walls, the larger pieces standing alone and the smaller ones mounted on panels. The show fills Garage Art Center, a converted garage in a Bayside house, now a clean, narrow gallery. The work asks for close looking, and the room is built for it.
No one ever thinks the plate is going to become a problem.
A plate survives three apartments and one bad Thanksgiving. A suitcase gets hauled across borders or shoved beneath beds; sometimes it is packed in hope, sometimes because someone has no choice. An iron presses school clothes and funeral clothes, then outlives its usefulness and sits in a closet somewhere, still holding the pressure of human hands.
That is the animating idea behind extraORDINARY things, the quietly arresting exhibition at the Flinn Gallery in Greenwich Library.
Interspersed throughout the stately library of the Academy of Arts and Letters in Washington Heights, in and around shelves holding works by Academy members like John Cheever, Pearl S. Buck, and Grace Paley, a new exhibition of collages by the cultural critic, essayist, and Dylanologist Lucy Sante is on display. Knots, organized by curator Kristin Poor, features mostly recent works from the last few years, save one, Haussmann, or the Barricades, which dates to 1979.
Few New York galleries build their programs around the kind of organizing principle that anchors Carter Burden Gallery. Since 2008, the Chelsea space has focused on artists with long careers that haven’t followed conventional commercial arcs. Here, Associate Executive Director Marlena Vaccaro and Assistant Director Sarah Leon discuss the gallery’s mission, the values guiding their curatorial choices, the thinking behind the current exhibition, Material Matters, and what that focus has opened up.
During a studio visit with Carol Diamond before her upcoming exhibit, Carol Diamond: Go Ahead, Make Me (Equity Gallery), our discussion of her recent sculptures elicits the term “Janus heads”–not because she makes two-headed portraits, but because each dynamic work encapsulates a battle of competing forces that hint at varying degrees of figuration and diverse human backstories.