Installation View: Left to Right Lu Heintz, Everything is Fiber: A New Lexicon, 2024 Graphite on paper Elizabeth Duffy Wearing / Ceremonial Costume for Gathering Rehill (1904-1972), 2023-2024, Unraveled worn braided rugs made into clothing, braided rug poncho with corn-on-the-cob holders, copper dandelion leaves, copper formed shoes, rug remnant; Anna McNeary, Common Set, 2024 Fabric, velcro, wooden rack Dimensions variable
The rhymes, homophones, and translations between the work of Elizabeth Duffy, Lu Heintz, and Anna McNeary are object manifestations of “Dreams of a Common Language.” The exhibition at Overlap Gallery in Newport, RI, offers up sweet and salty juxtapositions of textile, prints, sculptures, and installations of Providence-based artists. It takes its title from Adrienne Rich’s 1976 volume of poetry, which ruminates on the possibilities of life liberated from patriarchal constraints and the feminist community emerging from speech in common. Duffy, Heintz, and McNeary explore textile not just as a shared (and often gendered) medium but as a conceptual framework.
Beverly Fishman, I dream of Sleep, 2020. Installation. Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery
This is part of a series of articles for the upcoming exhibition, The Greatest Emergency at the Circulo de Bellas Artes of Madrid. The exhibition is based on Santiago Zabala’s book, Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency. In this exhibition, ten contemporary artists rescue us into our greatest emergencies, that is, those we do not confront as we should. Each article in the series will contextualize these artists’ practices and explore how they are linked to Zabala’s aesthetic theory and the exhibition’s themes. The first article in this series highlights the work of American artist Beverly Fishman.
Unlike many art historians and art critics, philosophers do not look for works of art that are necessarily beautiful or interesting. Most of us—at least those educated in the continental tradition of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Arendt—instead look for works that disclose a theoretical stance. Martin Heidegger’s writing on Van Gogh’s shoes paintings, Arthur Danto on Andy Warhol’s Pop Art, and Jacques Rancière on Alfredo Jaar’s photographs are paradigmatic examples. This does not mean we do not care about the artist’s effort in creating such work; rather, we focus more on whether the work discloses an aesthetic notion, political idea, or anthropological concept that has meaning for society at large. Artists, for us, have the same ontological purpose as scientists or politicians. A great work of art, new scientific discovery, or progressive policy can change people’s relationship with reality. If these works, discoveries, and policies change this relationship, it is not necessarily because they are “better” than others but because they touch our existence to a greater degree.
In her 2014 essay Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain, Leslie Jamison examines the literary phenomenon of women’s suffering being depicted in almost luxuriating detail, as much an object of fetishization by men as it is a subject of shame by women. Jamison recalls a boyfriend accusing her of being a “wound-dweller,” or fixating on her own afflictions to an unhealthy, self-centered degree, to which she initially reacts with umbrage. Ultimately, she reworks this pejorative into an argument that women’s tragedy, disease and self-harm should be viewed through an empathetic lens, that women should be inclined to give themselves the space to “dwell” on their wounds as a pathway to solidarity and recovery.
Through their group show at Re Institute, Julia Kunin, Barbara Zucker, Meg Lipke, Catherine Hall, and Joanne Howard reflect on how a supportive community and friendship nourish the often solitary act of creating art. Their lives have intersected over many years, and their approach to art cross-pollinates on multiple levels.
View of Maurizio Cattelan’s 2024 exhibition “Sunday” at Gagosian, New York. Photo Maris Hutchinson
The conjunction of art and politics is a confusing and often compromised enterprise. The commentator Ben Davis argues that as our society regresses under the politics of neoliberalism, such art serves a “compensatory role.” Much explicitly political art is either pedantic or satirical. There’s a long history dating back to the Incoherents and Decadents, the late 19th-century artists who embraced absurdity, irrationality, and the grotesque to protest against emerging bourgeois values and the academic practice of art. They used parody, satire, the carnivalesque, as well as didactic and pedantic jokes to expose cultural ideocracies and societal flaws. This was followed by the Dadaists in the early 20th century, who expressly mixed real-world politics and provocative, anti-art gestures with the intention of undermining social and artistic conventions and setting the groundwork for a social and cultural revolution. Since then, and as an avant-garde compliment to social realism, there has grown up a tradition of the trickster artist—pranksters using absurdity, parody, and gestures to scandalize and provoke their audiences.
Marina Kassianidou, A Partial History, 2024. Installation view, NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY, USA. Courtesy of the artist and NARS Foundation
During her solo exhibition at the NARS Foundation, artist Marina Kassianidou spoke with Mary Annunziata, who previously curated Marina’s work, A Partial History, as part of the inaugural Immigrant Artist Biennial in 2020. In her exhibition at NARS, Marina presents new work inspired by her grandmother’s collection of 19th and 20th-century schoolbooks from Cyprus. On display are four photographs of selected pages from these books, four artist’s books that recreate the full original texts, and four large sculptural drawings. The show celebrates a call and response with ancestors’ material history, showcasing Marina’s time-intensive artistic process in which she works with surfaces found in her surroundings, such as walls, floors, fabrics, paper, and screens, and experiments with ways of marking that respond to the surface’s appearance, use, or history.
Latte Capitalizm, hand embroidery on cotton, 8×14 inch
Polish artist Monika Drożyńska brings her resistance embroidery to a New York audience in a solo show at Open Source Gallery and her Urban Embroidery project. The connections she makes with words within many different languages are a dexterous game of text and symbols on fabric, an adept study of transformative change for a better world. Polish curator Bartek Remisko, speaking about the work, said, “Embroidery can be about threads that bring us together to create social change.” Remisko’s insight speaks to Drożyńska’s focus on embroidery techniques in contemporary art and textiles in public spaces to further the collective conversation and play with conventional expectations.
Christopher Myers Ghezo’s Throne, 2021 Appliqué textile, 72 x 48 inches
BravinLee Projects has just launched an audacious, big, and bold exhibition of 60 contemporary artists working in textile or textile-related mediums. It’s a massive show in an unlikely pop-up space. A five-story historic brick warehouse building in the Seaport that is anything but the cool, clean white box gallery that we are used to. The walk-up gallery space has vintage wide planked flooring, old fireplaces, and deeply aged brick walls. Though it must have been a challenge to curate in the space and even more of a challenge to install, the result is a fascinating presentation of artists working in a wide range of materials and styles.
Yi Hsuan Lai. Something Happened, 2022. Archival pigment print mounted on dibond. 16.25 x 21.625 inches. Courtesy of Gallery 456 and the artist
I was scrolling through Instagram recently when I saw a post that read: “What’s your artspeak ick?” The word “anthropomorphism” immediately came to mind. It’s nothing personal. It’s just that a friend of mine had an art history professor who once (in)famously tweeted: “I will scream into a pillow if I see another student write the word ‘anthropomorphic’ in their paper.” Therefore, I paused before ascribing “anthropomorphic” qualities to the work of Taiwanese artist Yi Hsuan Lai.
John Cino, curator of Eccentric Abstraction at MoCA L.I, first encountered the works of Eva Hesse, Jackie Winsor, and Linda Benglis during his undergraduate years, an experience that deeply influenced him. He draws a throughline from their pioneering works to the current exhibition, “For each of the artists in the show—Stephanie Beck, Sky Kim, Christina Massey, and Sui Park—the process of making is a visible element of the work, and the forms they create are evocative with minimal narrative, Cino explains.
