This month’s Manhattan highlights focus on artists tapping into the natural world, where these practices converge with the man-made in a clash of stunning reinvention and compelling engagement. These exhibitions channel the experimental through exploratory processes that harness our attention and hold us in their spell.
Installation view of ecofeminism(s) curated by Monika Fabijanska, left to right: Eliza Evans, Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Hanae Utamura, Betsy Damon, Aviva Rahmani, and Jessica Segall. Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, June/July 2020 (photos: Andreas Vesterlund).
The exhibition ecofeminism(s), on view at Thomas Erben Gallery from June 19th to July 24th, will reopen Tuesday, September 8th through Saturday, September 26th, 2020. Curator Monika Fabijanska brings together works of sixteen artists in graceful, yet dense and thoughtful way as a museum show would. Albeit in the gallery consistently staging pivotal and sophisticated exhibitions,including among many others shows of Senga Nengudi, Dona Nelson, Painting Forward and Looped and Layered – Contemporary Art from Tehran.
During the coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.
Swale, Concrete Plant Park 2018, Photo: Subhram Reddy
Mary Mattingly works with photography and sculpture. She is currently artist in residence at the Brooklyn Public Library. In 2016, she founded Swale, an edible landscape on a barge to circumvent New York City’s public land laws, and in 2018 dismantled a military vehicle and deconstructed its mineral supply chain with BRIC Arts. Her work has been exhibited at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de la Habana, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Storm King, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Palais de Tokyo. It has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times, Le Monde, New Yorker, NPR, Art21, and included in books such as MIT Press Documents of Contemporary Art, and Henry Sayre’s A World of Art.