Art Hag

Yinka Shonibare CBE | Earth Kids

Yinka Shonibare CBE, Earth Kid (Boy)

Four child-sized sculptures elegantly dressed in Victorian-era garb fight for the environment in Earth Kids, a new exhibit by British artist Yinka Shonibare CBE on view at James Cohan’s Lower East Side gallery.

Shonibare has called attention to climate change for years. Each of his Earth Kids represents a natural element—earth, fire, air, and water. “The colonization of Africa is somewhat parallel to the colonization of the planet and the climate change issues we are facing now,” the artist states in a video posted on jamescohan.net.

Shonibare has replaced each figure’s head with a globe, erasing any hint of race or ethnicity. “The children, they’re neither black nor white,” the artist explains. “They are somewhere in between.”

Yinka Shonibare CBE, Fire Kid (Girl)

Yinka Shonibare CBE, Fire Kid (Girl)

Yinka Shonibare CBE, Earth Kid (Boy)

The four figures are dressed in elaborate ensembles made from Dutch Wax fabric. “The batiks are Indonesian-influenced fabrics produced by the Dutch and then sold to the West African market," the artist notes. "The fabrics are now popularly seen as African textiles. The fabrics are now also made within the African continent.”

The colorful patterns on the Earth Kids’ outfits feature symbols of the four elements each child represents, including leaves and fruits, flames, electric fans, and faucets and pipes. “The children are actually wearing…Victorian dress and the reason for this is that I link history to the present,” Shonibare explains. “The high point of the colonial period in Africa is the Victorian era. That is why those kids are wearing those [costumes]."

Earth Kid (Boy) greets visitors as they enter the gallery. The figure slouches under the weight of a massive net slung over his shoulder filled with plastic waste—water bottles, single-use bags, food containers, and more. The sculpture demonstrates our reliance on plastic goods which impacts developing countries and chokes the oceans.

Fire Kid (Girl) leans against the burnt remains of a tree reading a book entitled Climate Change. The book is open to an image of a forest engulfed in flames. The young female figure serves as a “cautionary tale,” according to the artist, “there is a caution there as to what could happen” such as drought, wildfires and deforestation. A few budding leaves poking out from a branch above the girl represent a bit of hope and “the possibility of redemption or possibility for regeneration,” Shonibare optimistically adds.

Yinka Shonibare CBE, Air Kid (Boy)

Yinka Shonibare CBE, Water Kid (Girl)

Yinka Shonibare CBE, Water Kid (Girl)

Yinka Shonibare CBE, Air Kid (Boy) and Water Kid (Girl)

Air Kid (Boy) battles gusty winds armed only with a battered vintage umbrella. Water Kid (Girl) desperately tries to pour out every drop from a Victorian water decanter as a single droplet vexingly glistens on the rim of the vessel. The nattily dressed children are a visually compelling call to action that elucidates the perils of global warming and implores protecting the environment for future generations. 

While climate change continues to plague the planet, Shonibare finds some hope, particularly in younger environmental activists. “I’ve actually been particularly inspired by the way that the younger generation are not passive and they’re seeing what we’re doing wrong and pushing us to do something about it," the artist says. "And I think that’s admirable.”

A pictoral quilt and sculpture by Yinka Shonibare CBE

Yinka Shonibare CBE, Fire Kid (Girl) 2

Born in London in 1962, Yinka Shonibare CBE moved to Lagos, Nigeria when he was three-years-old. He returned to London and studied Fine Art at the former Byam School of Art (today Central Saint Martins) and received his MFA from Goldsmiths College. A member of the YBAs or "Young British Artists" in the '90s, the multimedia artist regularly addresses class and race in his work.

Shonibare was honored as an MBE, Member of the ‘Most Excellent Order of the British Empire’ in 2004 and was made a CBE, Commander of the Order of the British Empire, in 2019. Learn more about the artist at yinkashonibare.com.

Yinka Shonibare CBE | Earth Kids
James Cohan, 291 Grand Street, NYC
Exhibition on view December 4, 2020 through January 23, 2021

Thornton Dial: The Tiger That Flew over New York City

Thornton Dial, The Tiger That Flew over New York City (1990)

The Lower East Side's David Lewis gallery currently has on view Dial World, Part I: The Tiger That Flew over New York City featuring eight of late artist Thornton Dial’s intricate found object assemblages. Discarded materials including carpet, bedding, clothing, wood, tin, rope, even an animal jawbone, are given magnificent new life in the hands of the self-taught artist.

Born in Emelle, Alabama in 1928 to a single mother, Dial grew up on a sharecropping farm where he started picking cotton at an early age. Receiving very little formal education, Dial worked in many construction jobs, such as a bricklayer, house painter, and carpenter. He was employed as a welder at Birmingham’s Pullman Standard Company for nearly 30 years until the company closed in 1981. Dial retired that same year and began focusing on his art, a hobby he’d picked up in his youth, according to artnet.

Dial met the art collector William Arnett in 1987. Arnett had amassed a vast collection of work by Black—mainly self-taught—artists from the American South and founded the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in 2010 to house and manage hundreds of these works. Arnett provided Dial with a weekly allowance, offering the artist the freedom to fully devote himself to his art, according to Arnett’s August 2020 obituary in ARTnews.

The current exhibit at David Lewis is named after a 1990 work by Dial inspired by his first visit to NYC. A white tiger glides above the peaked rooftops of the congested city—pristine white skyscrapers towering above bleak tenement buildings composed of brown carpet—representing “the struggle for life, liberation, and justice,” according to the show’s press release. Colorful striped tigers also appear in Dial’s Patterns: Road Map of the United States (1992) and All the Cats in Town (1993), displaying joy and energy in their united fight for freedom.

Thornton Dial, Everybody Loves the United States (2002), In the Making of Our Oldest Things (2008)

Thornton Dial, Patterns: Road Map of the United States (1992)

Thornton Dial, All the Cats in Town (1993)

“People say I make all my art about tigers, but I got tigers in just some of it,” Dial told Arnett in an interview compiled at soulsgrowndeep.org. “Women be in just about everything I have made, in one way or another way. That tiger for me symbolized the Struggle, in the works of life, but women are the creation of the world, at the creation of all works. If it wasn’t for women it wouldn’t be none of us here, and without them we couldn’t make it through the struggle.”

Dial pays tribute to the women who helped raise him in his two takes on the time-honored African American tradition of quilt-making, In the Making of Our Oldest Things and In Honor. “Women was the ones always responsible for me. My great-grandmother raised me up. After she died when I was ten years old, I went to my mother’s sister, stayed there for two years, then come to Bessemer. Sarah Lockett [his grandmother’s sister] took me in and raised me on up,” Dial told Arnett.

“Women are the creation of the world,” the artist continued. “They give love and care, and they also give strength and power. But you got to listen. I always paid attention to what the women was saying, ever since I were a little fellow. Women back then was picking cotton, doing hard time fieldwork, cooking, making, and providing.”

Thornton Dial, In the Making of Our Oldest Things (2008)

Thornton Dial, In the Making of Our Oldest Things (detail)

Thornton Dial, Meat (2003)

Thornton Dial, Meat (detail)

Thornton Dial, In Honor (2002)

Thornton Dial, In Honor (detail)

Thornton Dial, Bone Dry (2011)

Dial’s first exhibition, Ladies of the United States, in Atlanta, 1990, featured work on plywood with house paint, rope, and tin. In an interview with Arnett, Dial recalled a critic condemning the show: “Mr. Dial can’t draw worth nothing and his art is ugly.” Despite this negative early review, Dial eventually found success in the art world. His work was exhibited in solo shows and group exhibitions across the country and was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. Dial died in 2016 in McCalla, Alabama at 87.

“I like to use the stuff that I know about, stuff that I know the feel of,” Dial told Arnett. “There’s some kind of things I always liked to make stuff with. I’m talking about tin, steel, copper, and aluminum, and also old wood, carpet, rope, old clothes, sand, rocks, wire, screen, toys, tree limbs, and roots. You could say, ‘If Dial see it, he know what to do with it.’” This statement sums up Dial’s work perfectly. The artist had a natural ability to take discarded objects and transform them into showstoppers. Click here to see my 2011 article on Dial’s show at Andrew Edlin Gallery which was held in conjunction with his solo exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

The Tiger That Flew over New York City is one part of a two-part exhibition of Dial’s work presented by David Lewis. The second part is taking place at 47 West 12th Street. Email [email protected] to schedule an appointment to visit that location.

Thornton Dial
Dial World, Part I: The Tiger That Flew over New York City
88 Eldridge Street, 5th Floor, NYC
Exhibition on view October 24 through December 20

Chinatown NYC Street Art

Chinatown Mural Project's Dragon Lion Medley, 140 East Broadway

A quick trip to Manhattan’s Chinatown this week offered the opportunity to check out some great street art.

First off was the Chinatown Mural Project’s exuberant Dragon Lion Medley on the exterior of Chinatown Lumber at 140 East Broadway. A collaboration between community activist Karlin Chan and artist Peach Tao @peacheeblue, the mural features a festive dragon and lion dance amid neighborhood fixtures such as PS 23, Church of the Transfiguration, and Wo Hop and Hop Kee restaurants.

The Chinatown Mural Project was founded earlier this year to install similar charming and “culturally appropriate” murals across the historic lower Manhattan neighborhood that “reflect the cultural and daily lives of residents of Chinatown,” according to the organization’s Facebook page. The initiative aims to attract tourists back to the once bustling neighborhood with Instagram-ready “selfie spots” and help the local businesses that have struggled during the pandemic.

Other Chinatown Mural Project works include Zodiac Dim Sum, the twelve Chinese astrology animals happily dining on dumplings and buns; Mahjong Social, featuring four pigeons playing the tile-based game; and Noodle Shop, starring a scallion-chopping tiger and a white rabbit serving up a bowl of noodles. The murals are filled with detail and whimsy and are sure to delight residents and visitors of all ages. There's a Go Fund Me page to help pay for supplies for Chinatown Mural Project. Click here to contribute.

MADSTEEZ, tribute to Kobe and Gianna Bryant, exterior of Emma Lazarus High School, Eldridge Street

BKFOXX, One Man's Trash (is a mouse's treasure), exterior of Emma Lazarus High School, Eldridge Street

On the wall of Emma Lazarus High School over on Eldridge Street (at the corner of Hester) are two recent murals curated by @eastvillagewalls. Street artist Mark Paul Deren @madsteez painted a touching tribute to the late LA Laker Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter Gianna who were killed in a plane crash in January. To the right is BKFOXX’s One Man’s Trash (is a mouse’s treasure), a stunning photorealistic ode to the Year of the Rat featuring a larger-than-life white rodent surveying his collection of golden trinkets.

BKFOXX, The Wrath of God, 69 Eldridge Street

@AdamFu and @SurfaceofBeauty on Hester near corner of Eldridge Street

On the opposite side of Hester Street, one block up, is BKFOXX’s The Wrath of God, an eerie black-and-white image of a mask-wearing skull. Just around the corner on Hester is a soothing collaboration between Adam K. Fujita @adamfu and Natasha May Platt @surfaceofbeauty. The piece features a striking neon violet heart by Fujita surrounding a delicate floral arrangement by Platt.

277 Grand Street

Sidewalk koi on Walker Street

@budha_delight, 7 Allen Street

@budha_delight, 7 Allen Street

Greetings from Chinatown, Allen & Division Streets

The cheerful postcard-like mural, Greetings from Chinatown, welcomes everyone at the intersection of Allen and Division Streets. The proud and loud ode to Chinatown was created in 2014 by artists Victor Ving and Lisa Beggs.

Large-scale letters spelling Chinatown contain landmarks and images found throughout the neighborhood, including a lucky cat, the Manhattan Bridge, the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory mascot, Canal Street "Louis Vuitton" bags, the Fung Wah bus, and Nom Wah Tea Parlor. After completing this eye-catching mural, the couple set out in an RV on a mission to create postcard murals in every state. They’ve completed 44 so far. Learn more at greetingstour.com and @greetingstour.

Take a trip to Chinatown and search for more street art yourself, and remember to support the small businesses while you're there.

Olivia Beens: The Storyteller | El Barrio's Artspace PS109

Tuesday (Feb. 4) is your last chance to check out The Storyteller at El Barrio’s Artspace PS109, a retrospective of NYC-based artist Olivia Beens’ 40-year career. 

Beens’ oeuvre includes performance, installation, and sculpture and addresses identity, spirituality, motherhood, and feminism. Born in 1948 in Holland, Beens moved with her mother to Portugal when she was four. The pair moved to Flushing, Queens when Beens was seven after her mother married an American.

The Storyteller: Olivia Beens Through The Decades, on view at El Barrio's Artspace PS 109

She received her BFA in sculpture from Pratt and earned an MFA from Hunter College where she began exploring performance and installation work. While still studying sculpture at Hunter, Beens created Images, Reflections, and Projections, an installation based on her year at a Catholic boarding school in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Exhibited in 1980, the work transformed a gallery into a chapel, with dozens of Polaroid self-portraits lining the walls depicting Beens as an artist, Goddess, mother, etc. A group of nuns’ habits—each stamped with “Warning: This habit contains an irritant”—floated ghostlike in the center of the room. An altar displayed a pair of scissors and braids of the artist’s hair to illustrate the “ritual of becoming a nun,” Beens explained at the gallery on Sunday, “they cut your hair.”

Spread over two floors at El Barrio’s Artspace, the exhibition features photos and video clips of Beens’ earlier installation and performance pieces on the lower level, including Fit and Flab Diaries (1985), a performance in which Beens and a fellow artist built cubicles in the basement of the 22 Wooster Gallery and lived there with their young children on weekends for a month. “After placing real personal ads in the East Village Eye, namely looking to meet a New World Man, Fit (played by Diane Spodarek) and Flab (played by Beens) discover their neighbor, played by Ian Prior, is just who they are looking for,” according to the wall text.

“There was a scripted performance that was about 20 minutes long that we did, I don’t know, every hour, and then the rest of it really was improvised,” Beens recalled. Visitors were invited to watch the performances and observe the two women, the two eight-year-old children, and the “New World Man” go about their day. Fit and Flab focused on “single mothers trying to survive,” Beens explained, “because that’s what we both were.”

Photos of Beens in The Satyr Silenus series (1984) in which she took the identity of the mythological satyr

In The Satyr Silenus, another performance series, Beens “inhabits the identity” of the Greek mythological satyr Silenus, the foster father of Dionysus, complete with animal furs, a phallus, and a tail made from her own hair. Silenus’ Summer Romp was performed in Cummington, Massachusetts where Beens was an artist-in-residence in the mid-1980s. “I involved the community. I cast body parts of community members,” Beens said. The participants traveled from a cemetery into the woods where they played drums then reconstructed the body of Dionysus using the body casts. “It involved everybody, which I wanted to do, and created ritual as performance,” Beens said of the work.

In 1980, Beens separated from her son’s father and she and the young boy moved to Canal Street (at Ludlow). “I moved into an apartment that had been uninhabited for over 40 years,” she said. “The windows were tinned up, the ceilings were falling down. There was rubble all over the place. I found objects that people left behind.”

Among the household items, linens, clothing, and newspapers she discovered was a wedding photo that she enlarged and placed behind window bars from the tenement. Another photo she unearthed features a young boy dressed in a suit and top hat. Beens framed the professionally shot portrait of the boy with curtains left behind by former tenants and painted stars and “symbols of America” on the background. “I would love to know who that little boy is,” Beens said. “He looks so prominent and confident.”

The Life of an Apartment (1983)

The Life of an Apartment (1983)

Beens’ two images from The Life of an Apartment series were included in an exhibit at ABC No Rio called Not for Sale: A Project Against Displacement. “I went to the Buildings Department and I got all of the documents on change and renovation and I wheat-pasted them” onto the walls of the gallery, Beens noted of her project that addresses the city’s ongoing gentrification. 

Beens lived in the 800-square-foot Canal Street apartment for 38 years before moving into an apartment at 215 East 99th Street two years ago. The building, where El Barrio’s Artspace is located, was transformed from PS109 into an affordable artist community in 2014 and offers nearly 90 affordable live/work units to artists. Beens noted that her son went to school in the building years ago. “It was hard for me to leave,” Beens says of her longtime residence downtown. “I was basically a Lower East Side artist and moved uptown.”

She loves her new home which is ten blocks away from the Covello Senior Center where she works from and also teaches ceramics. Beens began teaching art in NYC schools in 1982 and officially retired about nine years ago. “I am retired but I’m not retired,” said the active 72-year-old.

In the 1990s, while raising her son and working as an artist and an art teacher, Beens transitioned into “more sculptural work”—art that she “could leave and come back to.” The series, Object Spirit, features assemblages composed using found objects such as animal bones, wood, feathers, and shells. Simplifying her practice and working with nature drew Beens to these organic materials. “I have a really great love of nature. I mean I love the city…but I love being in the woods and by the sea because I feel in harmony with that.”

Who's Web? (1999)

Safiya's Song (1995), Beens made this piece for her late friend, the poet Safiya Henderson-Holmes 

Cave Dweller (1998) was inspired by the altars Beens saw in Chinatown shops and restaurants when she lived on Canal Street

The first work in the series, Spirit Ladder (1991), composed of bones, wood, pieces of glass, and wire, was made during a trip to Long Island. “I spent some summers out on Long Island and I would see these pieces of driftwood and bones along the beach and thought, ‘These have such a wonderful inherent quality to them.’ I wanted other people, and myself, to see and appreciate it. Then I thought I can assemble them to make really ritualistic pieces, so they come out of performance work in a way, and in a certain kind of spirituality that is self-identified. It’s not Catholic. It’s not Buddhist. It’s shamanistic, if anything.”

Spirit Ladder, 1991

Self-Composing Mandala, 2001

Her Icons series incorporate natural materials, hair, and bones, with copper “as a conductor of universal forces, situating the works in a unique devotional context,” according the wall text. Celebrating femininity, the works were inspired by Beens’ “interest in feminism and fertility figures. Women giving life, preserving civilization and passing it on to subsequent generations,” the artist says in the exhibition catalogue.

(L-R): Icons - A Hair's Tale (2008) and Alone Again (2010)

In the early 2000s, Beens took a trip to Prague to visit her mother’s sister who was suffering from Parkinson’s disease. The artist was overcome with emotion at the meeting. “When I saw my aunt, I just started crying,” she recalled. "It was an emotional response…. In Turkey there is this cistern and there are these columns that they call Column of Tears.” Beens associated her experience with the structures at the Basilica Cistern and began creating ceramic teardrops. Her series features column-like structures composed of dozens of dangling drops representing teardrops as well as rain, blood, and oil.

(L-R): Column of Tears - Magnolia (2010) and Lija's Tears (2013)

The shape of the teardrops that Beens constantly formed led the artist to create sculptures of small heads. “Those are little heads that I work on kind of endlessly,” she said. “They’re all made individually and I work with them starting with simple pinch pot method and I develop a relationship, something strikes me, it reminds me of somebody, or a certain expression develops,” she continued. “I love making the hair—it’s all fun—but the hair becomes this abstract kind of thing.”

Frozen in Time (2013-present), a selection of Beens' glazed ceramic heads

A closer look at Frozen in Time

More sculptural heads

Dakini's Dance (2017)

Olympiad (2017)

The heads feature meditative or knowing expressions, mischievous grins, and vivacious swirls of hair. A series of larger, more recent head sculptures feature multiple faces, adding to their mystery. Influenced by Asian art, Beens says the many faces that encircle the sculptures or poke out of a subject’s hair illustrate “how a being encompasses other beings and other lives that came before it and may go after it.”

These recent sculptures were created while Beens worked on the centerpiece of the exhibition, Baroque Passages (2012-2019) a group of ceramic busts and wall pieces which the artist created following the death of her mother. “She comes from Prague,” Beens said of her mom. “It’s a very Baroque city."

Baroque Passages (2012-2019) on the back wall. (Foreground L-R): Dakini's Dance (2017); Concerto in Bronze and Gold (2017); Bodhisattva for Yvonnne (2013)

The death mask in Baroque Passages

A closer look at Baroque Passages

Beens began the homage by creating a symbolic death mask. The artist says she “thought about churches and what’s on the ceiling and the way that the afterlife is depicted. These are fragmentary items that have to do with sky and angels,” she explained. Beens gets emotional when discussing the work, which is being shown in its entirety for the first time. The meditative, multifaceted work, featuring faces and religious icons on a warm mauve background, is moving tribute to her mother.

The Storyteller (2018)

The title of the exhibit was taken from The Storyteller, a sculpture Beens created in 2018. A torso, which “harkens back to either the Venus de Milo or the Victory of Samothrace,” rests above a skirt of netting, dotted with fragments of glass, that envelopes a group of small ceramic heads. “That came to me actually riding in a taxi cab, in the rain, seeing the reflections and what was going on inside and outside and around,” Beens explained. “She’s protecting or harboring other entities, other lives, or stories.”

Beens and her Shih-Poo Marwan stand in front of Baroque Passages

“I realized as we were putting the show together, that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been telling stories,” Beens noted. Incorporating influences from classical art, primitivism, and different religions and cultures, the artist’s diverse body of work tells fascinating stories of a New Yorker’s personal experiences as a woman, mother, activist, and artist.

The Storyteller| Olivia Beens Through the Decades
El Barrio’s Artspace PS109, 215 East 99th Street (between 2nd & 3rd Avenues), NYC
Exhibition on view January 10 through February 4

Queer + Peculiar Craft | The Clemente

Currently on view at The Clemente in the Lower East Side is Queer + Peculiar Craft, an exhibition of contemporary ceramics and textiles that examines identity and challenges viewers' expectations of craft.

Queer + Peculiar Craft installation view: works by Phoenix Lindsay-Hall (far left); Greg Climer (right and left of window); Koren Christofides (rear table); Andrew Cornell Robinson (front table); and Roxanne Jackson (far right)

Curated by Andrew Cornell Robinson, the exhibit showcases “an intersectional group of artists who explore craft to transgress expectations of traditional materials, methods, and meaning,” according to the show’s press release. The show features a diverse selection of subversive work that includes pottery, quilting, cross-stitching, printmaking, and crochet employed in unconventional and refreshing ways.

Clockwise from top: Puppetmaster Punch Bowl, Rhyton, and Doll House, all by Koren Christofides

Couple Kissing (blue and yellow), George Climer

#communication (top) and Mincing Queen Mincing Words (bottom), both by Timo Rissannen

Detail of Mincing Queen Mincing Words by Timo Rissannen

One artist featured in the show, Koren Christofides, explores feminism through ceramics. In an email, Robinson explained that some of Christofides' works are soft sculptures made with industrial ceramic fiber insulation covered in paper clay, resulting in pieces that are simultaneously “familiar and strange.” For his prismatic quilts featuring erotic males nudes, Greg Climer reinterprets traditional quilt-making methods by “creating the fabric fragments rather than upcycling scraps,” according to the exhibition essay.

Vick Quezada's Table Remains (front) and Phoenix Lindsey-Hall's Fourteen Blows (rear)

Phoenix Lindsey-Hall's Fourteen Blows

Jamon Jamon V (Chueca), Andrew Cornell Robinson

Works by Andrew Cornell Robinson

Phoenix Lindsey-Hall’s ceramic sculptures play with “repetition and formalism,” according to Robinson. “It uses that formalism to include queer stories within the framework of contemporary aesthetics.” Her Fourteen Blows features a row of white porcelain claw hammers—a weapon used in hate crimes against members of the LGBTQ community—protruding limply from a wall.

Robinson’s own ceramic and mixed media sculptures included in the show “explore historical customs as a metaphor for queer-baiting and conformity.” The sculptures in his Jamon Jamon series reference a medieval Spanish custom in which hosts offered ham to visitors to “sniff out heresy during the inquisition when the pious were looking for expressions of distaste in response to the offer of sliced pork,” the exhibit essay explains. His Jamon Jamon sculptures are a “metaphor about being ‘suspected’ and ‘queer-baited’ as a gay man."

Inspiration for Queer + Peculiar Craft came from a 1993 interview with the late artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres for A.R.T. Press. When asked about the lack of “overt political or Latino content” in his work, Gonzalez-Torres responded:

“I’m not a good token. I don’t wear the right colors. I have my own agenda. Some people want to promote multiculturalism as long as they are the promoters, the circus directors. We have an assigned role that’s very specific, very limited….”

“[Gonzalez-Torres] expressed an impatience that I could identity with as a gay man making art,” Robinson noted. “I felt empowered by his question, ‘Who is going to define my culture?’”

Born in Camden, New Jersey, and raised on the outskirts of NYC, Robinson grew up in a creative family and discovered ceramics at an early age. He studied ceramic sculpture at the Glasgow School of Art and the Maryland Institute College of Art and received his MFA in sculpture from the School of Visual Arts. “I make work that explores identities and lived experiences, but I have often come to the same conclusion that [Gonzalez-Torres] had. Our voice, our creative lineages have broader roots that span across times, cultures, politics, sexualities, genders, languages and media,” he said, noting that he is influenced by poetry, fiction, sculpture, film, dance, and more.

“I have been fascinated by how some artists challenge an accepted idea or a material tradition and are then dismissed or criticized for their peculiar transgression against the norm,” Robinson continued. “I love that sense of the peculiar, the unfamiliar…. It’s exciting.”

Queer + Peculiar Craft installation view

Healer Giant, Roxanne Jackson

Walking Ten More Steps, Suddenly Open, Dad's Tear (top); Walking Ten More Steps, Suddenly Open, Grandmother's Grievance (bottom), both by Lu Zhang

Works by Edmund Green Langdell

Queer + Peculiar Craft on view at The Clemente. _SCAR by Brian Kenny is seen beside door.

The 11 artists included in Queer + Peculiar Craft are based around the world but most have a connection to New York City, Robinson explained. “Some are gay, lesbian, straight and/or transgender. Some are older and younger and represent a multi-racial and multi-cultural group of makers,” he said. “Their work touches upon an underlying sense of being outside of a tradition, culture or common ground, and seeing the world through that particular point of view, which may often be met with suspicion, or dismissal, hence the title Queer and Peculiar.”

With works that address homosexual desire, feminism, transgender narratives, immigration, racism, and class, the artists “push the boundaries of a particular craft tradition by introducing a new technology, material, or by combining new content with anachronistic making methods,” according to Robinson, who adds that the featured artists are “doing something now and new with materials that have deep histories.”

Robinson hopes audiences will be introduced to a new group of artists and “recognize something familiar” in their work. “Perhaps they might see the common grounds that may be found in our queerness and/or peculiarity, and find empathy, or humor, or hope, or recognition,” he said. 

Queer + Peculiar Craft
The Clemente, Abrazo Interno Gallery, Second Floor
107 Suffolk Street (between Rivington & Delancey), Lower East Side
Exhibition on view through January 18
Artists' Panel Discussion scheduled for Thursday, January 16, 6pm to 8pm

Matthew Wong: Blue | KARMA

This is your last weekend to check out Blue, the final exhibition by artist Matthew Wong who took his life in Edmonton, Canada on October 2—about a month before the show’s opening.

Matthew Wong, Starry Night, 2019, oil on canvas

Born March 8, 1984 in Toronto, Wong shuttled between Canada and Hong Kong with his parents throughout his childhood, according to the New York Times. The artist was on the autism spectrum, had Tourette’s syndrome, and suffered from depression.

He received his bachelor’s degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and later earned his MFA in photography from City University of Hong Kong before switching to drawing and painting in 2012, according to Artforum. The New York Times’ Roberta Smith calls Wong “one of the most talented painters of his generation,” adding that he “made some of the most irresistible paintings I’ve ever encountered.” Smith took notice of Wong’s work in 2017 at Frieze New York. His first solo show at Karma in 2018 was highly acclaimed, establishing Wong as a rising star in the art world.

Wong completed the works for Blue, his second solo show at KARMA, “over the last year of his life,” according to the show’s press release. “Every detail of Blue was conceived of by Wong and proceeds according to his wishes.”

Matthew Wong, Untitled, 2019, gouache on paper

Matthew Wong, Untitled, 2019, gouache on paper

Matthew Wong, Untitled, 2019, gouache on paper

Matthew Wong, Untitled, 2019, gouache on paper

Matthew Wong, Untitled, 2019, gouache and watercolor on paper

Matthew Wong, Untitled, 2019, gouache and watercolor on paper

Blue takes place at two venues. A selection of Wong’s gouaches are on view at KARMA’s 172 East 2nd Street space while his large-scale oil paintings are showcased a few doors east at 188 East 2nd Street. The “semi-fictional subject matter” was inspired by a trip Wong took with his mother to Sicily in the fall of 2018 and winter of 2019, according to the gallery. The works examine the “blueness of blue,” according to the release, “its fluidity, its affect, and its uncanny ability to ‘activate nostalgia, both personal and collective.’”

Matthew Wong, Unknown Pleasures, 2019, oil on canvas

Matthew Wong, Look, the moon, 2019, oil on canvas

Matthew Wong, Autumn Nocturne, 2018, oil on canvas

Matthew Wong, Blue View, 2019, oil on canvas

Matthew Wong, Blue Night, 2018, oil on canvas

Matthew Wong, A Dream, 2019, oil on canvas

The dark, moody scenes of interiors and vast landscapes are given dazzling hints of light from a starry sky, reflections on a lake, raindrops on a window pane, moonlight filtered through trees, glowing seen behind a door or in the window of a distant cabin. The works exude a sense of melancholy, quiet, and solitude. The unpopulated scenes of urban dwellings as well as the great outdoors leave viewers with a feeling of isolation.

Get to the East Village this weekend and check out the final work of an emerging artist who left this lonely world too soon.

KARMA
172 & 188 East 2^nd Street (between Avenues A & B), NYC
Exhibition on view through January 5, 2020

Pipilotti Rist | New Museum

This is your last weekend to catch Pixel Forest, the New Museum’s survey of Swiss video and multimedia artist Pipilotti Rist’s 30 year career. Go see what the long entrance lines winding up Bowery, around Stanton and beyond are all about.

Occupying the museum’s 3 main floors, the second floor showcases a collection of Rist’s early single-channel videos from the 80s and 90s viewed inside single-capacity boxes that viewers insert their heads into. Administrating Eternity (2011), a four-channel video installation consists of dreamlike images of flowers, sheep, cats, and green fields projected onto rows of long, diaphanous, white curtains—much like Rist’s fantastic work Layers Mama Layers which was exhibited at Luhring Augustine in 2010 (see my post here). Layers Mama Layers was mesmerizing, exhibited in an intimate setting with little distraction—i.e. the bad cover of Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game that accompanies Sip My Ocean (1996) at the New Museum. Screening along with Sip My Ocean is Rist’s Ever Is Over All from 1997, a four-minute, two-channel video showing a joyous, confident woman in a blue dress and red shoes walking down a street and occasionally smashing the windows of parked cars—the suspected inspiration for Beyonce’s 2016 car-bashing music video for Hold Up.

The third floor delivers the money shot for all those whose sole purpose for going to museums and galleries is to snap selfies and post them on Instagram. Looking Through Pixel Forest (2016) features 3,000 handmade, illuminated crystals suspended from the ceiling and dangling down to the floor. Visitors can walk through the dazzling forest of glittering lights to the far corner where two mesmerizing 2014 video works, Mercy Garden and Worry Will Vanish Horizon are on view. Each of the hanging crystal pieces contains a pixel from the adjacent films, illuminating it and filling the space with magnificent, pixelated color. It was difficult to leave this gorgeous forest.

The fourth floor features 4th Floor to Mildness, which invites visitors to lie down on beds interspersed throughout the gallery and gaze upon two ceiling projections. Images of water, clouds, abstract colors, and body parts are accompanied by the haunting and somewhat menacing music of Soap&Skin, the Austrian musician Anja Plaschg.

Don’t miss this vivid, illuminating, and immersive exhibit. Learn more at New Museum and nytimes.com. And check out arthagnyc on Instagram for some videos of the exhibit. Closes January 15th.

Also, check out Rist's Open My Glade (Flatten), a multi-channel installation playing nightly on Times Square's electronic billboards from 11:57 - midnight until January 31st. Learn more here.

Ever Is Over All, 1997

Administrating Eternity, 2011

Administrating Eternity, 2011

Administrating Eternity, 2011

Boxes showing Rist's early single-channel videos

Looking Through Pixel Forest, 2016

Looking Through Pixel Forest, 2016

Looking Through Pixel Forest, 2016

Looking Through Pixel Forest, 2016

Looking Through Pixel Forest, 2016

Looking Through Pixel Forest, 2016

Massachusetts Chandelier, 2010

4th Floor to Mildness, 2016

Billy Childish | Lehmann Maupin

For over thirty-five years, artist, writer, musician Billy Childish has been producing a variety of creative works -- hundreds of paintings, over forty volumes of poetry, a series of autobiographical novels, and more than 120 blues/punk influenced albums.  I Am The Billy Childish, currently on view at Lehmann Maupin's Lower East Side space, gives visitors just a hint of Childish's prolific output.

Born in Chatham, Kent in 1959, Childish left school at 16 and worked on a dockyard and as an apprentice stonemason.  A portfolio filled with one hundred drawings earned him admission to St. Martin's School of Art where the artist's "defiance to authority led to his eventual expulsion from art school in 1981," (from the show's press release).  This clearly did not deter Childish from creating art in various ways, exploring themes of "war, history, social protest, as well as his own experiences of alcoholism, and the sexual abuse he suffered as a child."  The first floor of the gallery presents the artist's recent paintings depicting volcanoes, the German mountaineer Toni Kurz, Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, as well as scenes of the Wounded Knee massacre.  The upstairs gallery surveys Childish's music and litery projects, showcasing zines, books, and a collection of poems.  Also on view are 55 of Childish's album covers, some featuring cover art by Childish and by artists Peter Doig and Daniel Clowes.

Influenced by Edvard Munch, Vincent van Gogh, and Dada, Childish's paintings feature shadowy figures against vibrating stokes of intense color.  As the old saying goes, "write what you know," and Childish boldly and honestly writes, performs, and paints what he knows and experiences.  At the exhibition's opening, the artist was on hand to read from his fifth novel, The Stonemason, as well as from his new collection of poetry, I Fuckt Frida Kahlo.  Learn more at Lehmannmaupin.com.  Through January 21st.

Kurz Descending (Study), 2011

Lt. Sydney A. Cloman, First Infantry, on His Horse on the Wounded Knee, 2011

Lt. Sydney A. Cloman, First Infantry, on His Horse on the Wounded Knee (detail), 2011

Erupting Volcano, Chile, 2011

Sibelius (Man with Stick), 2011

Sibelius Amongst Saplings, 2011

(Elgar) Man Sat on Chairs, 2011

FriendsWithYou | The Hole

It's summertime!  The weather is hot and hazy, my mood is languid and lazy, and galleries are operating under shortened summer hours—making it impossible for me to check out any new shows.  Fortunately, The Hole's new location on the Bowery is open on Saturdays, so I was able to check out :), the delightful, first New York solo exhibiton of Miami collaborative FriendsWithYou.  Much like summery, beach reading, the exhibit is a light, fun, guilty pleasure, packed with "smiling puddles on the gallery floor... giggle sticks, smirking smoke flumes, splat-happy wall works and a grinning ghost or two," (from show's press release). 

The gallery's columns are playfully painted in candy stripes.  The array of colorful, cutesy characters include: a blue and white striped canvas with a pair of beady eyes suspiciously peeping out; two adorable happy faces that spin around and around; a flat, black circle adorned with saucer-like eyes that hypnotically glide left and right; side-by-side, rectangular, white and black faces that alternately slide up and down; a face formed by three dashes creating simple eyes and a mouth on a large canvas covered in vertical, barcode-like lines; and a gigantic, inflatable, candy-like sculpture that fills up the back-right-corner gallery. 

FriendsWithYou is a collaborative formed in 2002 by Samuel Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III with the mission "to spread the idea of Magic, Luck and Friendship around the world."  While their charming and twee works may not resemble typical fine art gallery fare, their objects "are meant to trigger the buried, neglected urges and yearnings that a seasoned art viewer may not expect to have activated; playfulness, laughter and inquisitiveness." 

:) will put a smile on your face with its super-happy-funtime humor, whimsy, and sweetness.  With its "interactive, experiential wonderland of pop-straction and participation" FriendsWithYou aims "to spread its happy meassage" and "become Friends-With-You!"  Learn more at theholenyc.com and at the artists' website friendswithyou.com.  Through August 6th. 

For maximum cuteness, click here for images of FriendsWithYou's Rainbow City, which was on view at the High Line at West 30th Street and 10th Avenue from June 8th - July 5th.

Lorna Simpson | Salon 94 Bowery

Dancing in a Lincoln Center ballet performance at age eleven left an indelible impression on Lorna Simpson.  Momentum, Simpson's current show at Salon 94 Bowery features large-scale serigraphs printed on felt inspired by the artist's ballerina past.  Recreating imagery from postcards from the 1960's in gold ink, Simpson's works show interior and exterior scenes of Avery Fisher Hall and The Metropolitan Opera House.  Inspired by her memories of performing on stage, Simpson's nostalgic works depicting water fountains, chandeliers, empty theater seats, and the iconic buildings illuminated at night, look majestic and haunting.

Playing on a small flat-screen t.v. inside the gallery as well as on a large screen in the street-level window facing the Bowery is Simpson's new video, Momentum.  Just under seven minutes, the video features a cast of dancers painted in gold body paint from afro wig to pointe shoes, alternating between twirling and pirouetting energetically to just standing around in long moments of repose.  According to the show's press release, "the video's narrative structure... fragmented by moments of inactivity" mirror the artist's "memory of the event."  By filming the golden dancers, Simpson "illuminat[es] the tenuous relationship between memory and event, performance and spectatorship."  Learn more at salon94.com.  Closes June 18th.

Curtain, 2011

Chandelier, 2011

Night Time, 2011

Momentum, 2011

Momentum, 2011

Hunter Reynolds | Participant Inc

Artist and activist Hunter Reynolds' site-specific installation Survival AIDS, currently on view at Participant Inc, features work from his key projects spanning the past twenty years.  Reynolds, a member of ACT UP since 1989 and a co-founder of Art Positive which fights homophobia and censorship in the arts, has been HIV positive since 1984. 

From 1989-1993, Reynolds cut out every HIV/AIDS and LGBT-related article printed in the New York Times (ie:  stories about discrimination, Derek Jarman's last film Blue, Robert Mapplethorpe's banned 1989 Corcoran Gallery exhibition, and obituaries for people who passed away from AIDS-related causes) for series titled Dialogue Tables and Activist Media Installations which were displayed on tables, projected onto walls, or read aloud.  After being kept in storage for the past 17 years, the newspaper clippings have reemerged in Reynolds' new Photo Weavings series.  The artist scanned, laminated, grouped, and stitched the articles together into twenty 60 x 48 inch quilt-like works that document the early days of the HIV virus and the discrimination the LGBT community endured two decades ago.  In the early 90s, Reynolds performed pieces in which he extracted his own blood, dripping it onto paper and "scanning it to create perfectly shaped spots of blood, reclaimed in his artwork ever since," (from the show's press release).  Some of these Blood Spot works commingle with the newspaper articles in Reynolds' Photo Weavings.

Reynolds' Mummification performances involve enshrouding the artist in layers of plastic, tin foil, and duct tape which are carefully cut from his body and reshaped to serve as "reminders of the many re-embodiments of the artist over time."  Reynolds' project Memorial Dress featured the artist posed on a spinning platform for hours a day whilst wearing a dress printed with the names of over 25,000 people who have died of HIV/AIDS. 

Survival AIDS is a moving, powerful, and important exhibit.  It's impossible to not want to read every single newspaper article chronicling the onset of AIDS and the hate and ignorance of conservative politicians and right wingers.  It's hard to believe that people thought and behaved this way only twenty years ago.  While we've made some progress, AIDS and discrimination still exist — we've still got a ways to go for acceptance and equality for the LGBT population.  Bold, outspoken artists like Hunter Reynolds help lead the fight with compelling, indelible, evocative work.  Learn more at participantinc.org and hunterwreynolds.com.  Through June 5th.

Kara Walker | Sikkema Jenkins & Lehmann Maupin

Known for her intricate cut paper silhouettes depicting disturbing scenes of violence and racism, Kara Walker's new body of work consists of a series of graphite drawings and hand-printed texts on paper.  Dust Jackets for the Niggerati-and Supporting Dissertations, Drawings submitted ruefully by Dr. Kara E. Walker, on view at Sikkema Jenkins, was inspired by the artist's "search for understanding of the way that power asserts itself in interpersonal and geopolitical spheres," (from the press release). 

Exploring the African American experience of migrating from the south to the north, from the country to the city, Walker uncovered "a cycle of destruction and renewal that is embodied in the move... as well as the destruction of an 'old' Black identity and the emergence of a 'New Negro' identity."  Of course most people experience a transition when they move to a very different and new environment, but the subjects in Walker's work also leave behind a dark, oppressive history marred by slavery and racism.

In collaboration with Sikkema Jenkins, Lehmann Maupin's Lower East Side space is screening three new video works by Walker.  Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi's Blue Tale, the title of the exhibit and the show's centerpiece, is a shadow puppet film which follows the heroine Miss Pipi in various scenes of beauty, violence, and sex.  Miss Pipi, a white Southern woman, must be protected by the Mandingo stereotype— or the "presumed hyper-sexuality of black men."  The video Levee casts a long, dreamy, meditative gaze on the landscape in Friars Point, Mississippi at sunset while Bad Blues is a short film showing the artist singing a funny diddy about a black woman having "The Blues."  Walker states that these works were inspired by her trip to the Mississippi Delta where she visited "thinking about the terrors of Jim Crow and slavery, yet the silent indifference of the landscape and the economic stasis, lack of mobility, and the persistence of a racist memory in the area was what stuck."  Walker delivers thoughtful, intelligent, powerful works that tackle troubling themes that many would rather ignore or forget.  Learn more at Sikkemajenkinsco.com, Lehmannmaupin.com and see my 2009 post on Walker here.  Through June 4th.

Louise Beavers, 2010

Nina Simone (top), 2010, Billie Holiday (bottom), 2010

Clockwise from top left:  A Dream Deferred; Kiss; The moral arc of history ideally bends towards justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos, 2010

Eternally Displaced Persons, 2010, The Daily Constitution 1878, 2011

N-word, 2010, Up From Slubbery, 2010

Clockwise from top left:  No Negro, the, 2010, Urban Relocator, 2011, Showroom, 2010

Dissertation 1, 2010

Changing Spots with a Leopard (another Jazz aficionado), 2010

You are a Remarkable Woman, 2010

Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi's Blue Tale

Angel Otero | Lehmann Maupin

After Angel Otero paints an image onto a pane of glass, he carefully peels off the "sheets of oil paint" and affixes them onto a canvas, frame, or piece of furniture, creating vibrant, textured abstractions.  On view at Lehmann Maupin's Chrystie Street location is Otero's first solo exhibition featuring rich works that combine Spanish Baroque imagery with influences from the artist's personal life including his childhood in Puerto Rico and his relationship with his family. 

Born in San Juan in 1981, Otero received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and currently splits his time between Chicago and Brooklyn.  Regarding his dynamic, expressive, process-based works, Otero aims to "give a sense of abundance, unbalance, ambition, courage, and persistence within form, color and texture in every painting," (from show's press release).  Otero's works are perfectly imperfect as they bunch up in creases and spill off edges.  Like the saggy skin of a Shar Pei or the rumpled sheets of an unmade bed, Otero's pieces conceal and distort an array of words, images, and patterns between their many undulating wrinkles and folds.  Learn more at Lehmannmaupin.com.  Through April 10th.

Up All Night, 2011

Left to Wonder, 2011

In the mood for love, 2011

Couch Habits, 2011

Still life with blue pot, 2011

Summer in the middle of nowhere, 2011

I can hear the world beginning, 2011

There's nothing so I wonder, 2011

Mailbox, 2011

Lynda Benglis | New Museum and Salon 94 Freemans

Currently on view at the New Museum is the first New York retrospective of artist Lynda Benglis' work.  On display are works spanning the artist's forty-year career including samples of her early wax paintings and poured latex sculptures, pieces from her "Torsos" and "Knots" series, as well as some of her lesser known photography and video works that examine "notions of power, gender relations, and role playing" (from the New Museum website). 

Born in Lake Charles, Louisiana in 1941, Benglis moved to NYC in the mid-60s where she started off painting influenced by the Minimalism and Color Field movements.  In 1968 Benglis began working on her "Fallen Paintings," created by pouring brightly hued latex onto the floor, layering streams of color that beautifully flow, intersect, and overlap with one another like melting rainbows. Through the years, Benglis has added to the vast cache of materials she employs for her sculptures—polyurethane foam, beeswax, plaster, cast aluminum, bronze—and more recently, plastics, cast glass, paper and gold leaf.  Using the body and landscape as "primary references" Benglis creates vigorous, tactile, gestural artwork "with palpable ties to her body and its potential actions, which have often been described as 'frozen gestures.'" 

A separate darkened room in the museum displays the rarely exhibited installation Phantom (1971), five alien-like, polyurethane sculptures that ooze off the wall and glow in the dark.  Whether spilling across floors, jutting off walls, or seeping out of corners, Benglis' bold, dramatic works evoke energy and action.

Running concurrently with the New Museum retrospective is Fountains, a small exhibit on view around the corner at Salon 94 Freemans.  Benglis has been making water fountains for the past 25 years (from the show's press release) and Fountains showcases three of her recent bronze creations.  Also on view are a series of drawings created between 2007-2008 depicting wild bursts of water that "capture the same sense of physicality, fluidity and sensuality conveyed by the fountains."  Visit newmuseum.org and salon94.com for more information on the two shows.  Also, click here for my post on Benglis' late 2009 exhibit at Cheim & Read.  The New Museum exhibit runs through June 19th and Fountains closes on March 11th.

Below photos taken at Fountains exhibit at Salon 94 Freemans.

Left to right:  Storm Pattern, Summer Dreams, Thunderbird, all 2003

Summer Dreams, 2003

Left to right:  Fountain Drawing #6, 2007-8, Fountain Drawing #4, 2007-8

Salon Zurcher | Zurcher Studio

From February 28th - March 6th, the 2,500-square-foot Zurcher Studio at 33 Bleecker Street transformed itself into an "accessible and impressive, small but representative [art] fair."  Salon Zurcher served as a mini fair—an alternative option to all the attention and pandemonium of The Armory Show et al, showcasing work from galleries located in the Lower East Side and Brooklyn.  Participating galleries included: Audio Visual Arts (East Village), Feature Inc (LES), The Journal Gallery (Williamsburg), The Proposition (NoHo), Parker's Box (Williamsburg), Stephan Stoyanov Gallery (LES), and of course, Zurcher Studio.  Salon Zurcher was a convenient way to check out artwork from seven galleries in one open and calm space without having to hoof it around to various venues.  Learn more at galeriezurcher.com.

Left to right:  Sam Gordon, Untitled (sweepings), 2010; Mai Braun, NYT-December 13, 2005 (Beirut), 2007; Mamie Holst, Landscape Before Dying (The Knowledge), 2011, Feature Inc

Phil Argent, Untitled (Missing Link), 2008, Stephan Stoyanov Gallery

Jeff Gibson, Asylum definitions, 2010, Stephan Stoyanov Gallery

Left to right:  Dan Hays, Colorado Snow Effect No. 8; Dan Hays, Colorado Snow Effect No. 7, Zurcher Studio

Dan Hays, Colorado Snow Effect No. 8 (close-up), Zurcher Studio

Laurie Simmons | Salon 94 Bowery

A major figure in the Pictures Generation group of artists, Laurie Simmons is known for using dolls, puppets, and ventriloquist dummies as "human surrogates" in her artwork.  Back in the fall of 2009, Simmons ordered a life-size Love Doll from Japan.  The creepily realistic Love Doll arrived to the artist's Connecticut home packed in a box wearing a flimsy, sheer slip.  Oddly (though I guess with a life-size, latex sex doll anything goes...), she also came with a small box containing an engagement ring and her genitalia (vag-in-a-box!).  The Love Doll: Days 1-30, on view at Salon 94 Bowery, documents Simmons' "photographic relationship" with the "human scale 'girl'"—the first large-scale, non-human figure the artist has shot.  Weighing just about 60 pounds, the doll proved difficult to work with—not because she's a diva, but because she is much larger and heavier than the subjects Simmons normally employs.  Her photographs show the doll in a variety of outfits posed "in an ongoing series of 'actions'" around the artist's house ranging from napping in the sun, playing with candy or costume jewelry, diving into a swimming pool, and hopping over a wall.  Things went so well with the doll, a year later, Simmons ordered another one—a second model for the artist and a friend to interact with her inanimate muse.  According to the show's press release, the Love Doll series not only references Simmons' previous "examinations of the dollhouse" in her work, "but also engages with adult fantasies and fetishes, infused with an even more potent sense of desire and regret."

The Love Doll series is like a fascinating peek into a haunted, life-size, Barbie Dream House.  The meticulously composed images are both innocent and disturbing at the same time.  You can also check out Simmons acting and playing house with her two daughters in Tiny Furniture, the debut feature film written and directed by the artist's older daughter, Lena Dunham.  Filmed in the family's Tribeca loft, the story follows a post-college, young woman (Dunham) as she moves back home with her artist mother (Simmons) and her over-achieving younger sister (Grace Dunham).  Proving that talent runs in the family, Dunham won the Best First Screenplay award at the 2011 Independent Spirit Awards this past Saturday.  Learn more about Tiny Furniture at IMDb.com and check out a short Q&A with Simmons regarding the film at dwell.com.  Learn more about The Love Doll: Days 1-30 at salon94.com and at nyt.com. Through March 26th.

Day 1 / Day 27 (New in Box), 2010

Day 8 (Lying on Bed), 2010

Left to right:  Day 11 (Yellow), 2010; Day 14 (Candy), 2010

Left to right: Day 22 (20 Pounds of Jewelry), 2010; Day 24 (Underwater), 2010

Day 25 (The Jump), 2010

Gil Woo Lee | White Box

Grand prize winner of the 14th Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh in 2010, South Korean artist Gil Woo Lee presents New York State of Mind, his first U.S. solo exhibition at White Box in the Lower East Side.  Featuring pop culture icons like Andy Warhol, Michael Jackson, and Audrey Hepburn, Lee's paintings address "western materialism, celebrity worship, and commercialism on one hand and an older Asian ideal of spirituality, contemplation and love of nature on the other," (from show's press release). 

Lee creates "screens" by burning holes into sheets of Korean Hanji paper with incense and layers them to produce paintings with overlapping images that allow "the viewer to see one image through the other and give form to a lens of multiplicity that captures contemporary global visual culture."  For New York State of Mind, the artist merged images referencing New York City like the Manhattan skyline, Warhol, and Mayor Bloomberg with dancing figures of Michael Jackson and traditional Korean dancers.  The dancing imagery references the Taoist phoilosophy that "it is our human nature to dance" (who knew Taoists were such partyers?!).

Lee, a Professor of Art at Chung-Ang University in South Korea, mentions in his artist statement—"I try to show profiles of the modern time of 'cosmopolitanism,' where multi-cultures coexist beyond the collision of eastern and western cultures..."  The warm, orange-tone, dotted images of cityscapes and iconic figures "dissolve" into one another in a blur of Lee's "ideas about the fusion of cultures."  Learn more at whiteboxny.org and at the aritst's website gilwoolee.com.  Through February 27th.

Dance in Nature III

Manhattan (Grand)

Manhattan Michael Jackson

Dance in Nature Michael Jackson III

Dance in Nature II

Clockwise from top left: Children series: "Dreams" IV; Children series: "Dreams" 1; Children series: "Dreams" II; Children series: "Dreams" III

Children series: "Dreams" II, close-up

Kenny Scharf | Paul Kasmin Gallery

Kenny Scharf is everywhere!  The artist currently has two shows on view at the Paul Kasmin galleries, a mural up on the wall on the northwest corner of East Houston and Bowery, and assorted spray-can paintings adorning various storefront shutters around NYC.  NATURAFUTURA at Paul Kasmin's 293 Tenth Ave space features new large-scale paintings inspired by the nature surrounding Scharf's studio in Bahia, Brazil.  The works "explore the richness of this landscape and humankind's multilayered connections to it," (from the press release).  The vibrant jungle and ocean scenes are populated by Scharf's cartoonish cast of widely grinning, anthropomorphized flowers, fish, crustaceans, bugs, bears, and oil spots.  The aptly titled Oil Painting is the longtime rainforest activist's response to the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill that occured while Scharf was working on this series of paintings.  Sinister-looking oil splotches overwhelm a deep blue sea — a completely contradictory scene compared to his other works showing happy, Disney-on-acid-like characters in their unpolluted habitats.

Around the corner at 511 West 27th Street is THREE DOZEN!, thirty-six of Scharf's "signature donut paintings."  The canvases each show a single doughnut floating before a surreal sky, showcasing "the artist's trademark wit and fascination with optimistic fantasy."  THREE DOZEN! brought out the Homer Simpson in me and made me wish there was a Doughnut Plant nearby.  Mmm, doughnuts...

Directly across the street from 511 West 27th are two of the one hundred roll-up, storefront shutters that Scharf will be covering with his lively, magical creatures.  The Mediacy Group enlisted Scharf to create spray-can paintings on 100 metal grates around Manhattan for its Gatescapes program.  What a wonderful way to brighten up the city! 

And finally, the wall on East Houston and Bowery that displayed the Shepard Fairey mural last year is now home to a vivacious mural by Scharf.  Jam-packed with cheerful, blob-like faces, the wall definitely warms up the drab corner during this brutal, snowpocalyptic winter.  Check out all of Scharf's charming, energetic works around town for a surefire pick-me-up from the winter blues.  Learn more at Paulkasmingallery.com and at the artist's website Kennyscharf.com.  NATURAFUTURA and THREE DOZEN! run through February 26th. 

Swamp Style, 2010

Oil Painting, 2010

Daze-E-Bugz, 2010

Bear Jungle, 2010

Picnic, 2010

Left to right, starting from top-left:  Chocolate Frosted at Sunset, Pink Frosted Donut!, Glazed Cruller in Space, Crumb in the Sun, Chocolate Chocolate!, Glazed in Space, Chocolate Frosted Cruller on a Cloudless Day, Glazed Donut Galaxy, all 2011

Cream Filled + Calm, 2011

Gatescapes painting on West 27th Street

Gatescapes painting on West 27th Street

Mural on East Houston at Bowery

Mural on East Houston at Bowery

Mural on East Houston at Bowery close-up

Todd Knopke | Feature Inc.

CEC, the title of Todd Knopke's current exhibit at Feature Inc., is an acronym culled from a sentence that the artist feels should be the motto for today's world—"changing everything carefully," (from show's press release).  The artist explains the phrase and his work as "Taking parts of a preformed whole to create a new clearer idea/vision/world.  CEC sounds like 'seek' but also contains double vision, in the form of two Cs (pronounced see).  With (E)cstasy in between.  It seems like art's goal." 

The Los Angeles-born, Brooklyn-based artist creates elaborate, flexible sculptures bursting with color and detail from fabric and found or second-hand clothing.  Scoring fancy materials like cashmere and silk from a friend's fabric store and repurposing used clothing and linens from friends and family, the artist machine sews it all together composing trippy, ambiguous, often unsettling scenes.  Regarding the materials he uses, the artist states, "Cutting into a pair of cords my brother wore at age 10 that still has a note in the pocket, or my sister's 11th-grade prom dress that literally smells of 1988, folds time and enriches the work."  Knopke claims to have once sacrificed a shirt off his back for a work "because it was the right green to make a grassy patch."  On his use of found articles he says he likes the idea of "taking the discarded and making it into something meaningful." 

Knopke's works are dynamic clashes of colors, lines and patterns, revealing surreal worlds filled with dark skies, lightning, birds, assorted body parts, jars filled with mysterious contents, and cryptic narratives.  Learn more at featureinc.com and at the artist's website Toddknopke.com.  Through January 16th.

Will (left), 2010, Ghost (right), 2009

Drive (a back and forth through time to save lives), 2010

Cardinal, 2010

Like Lightning (on ceiling), 2010

Not Here Now, 2010

Loop, 2009

Afterimage, 2010

Inside, 2009

Inside (close-up), 2009

Foundation for Contemporary Arts Benefit | Lehmann Maupin

Lehmann Maupin's Lower East Side gallery is hosting Painting and Sculpture, a benefit exhibition for the Foundation for Contemporary Artists (FCA).  Founded in 1963 by Jasper Johns and John Cage, the non-profit arts organization provides grants to artists and arts organizations. The FCA's mission is to "encourage, sponsor and promote innovative work in the arts created and presented by individuals, groups and organizations."  Unrestricted grants are awarded to artists and organizations focusing on dance, music/sound, performance art/theater, poetry, and the visual arts via a nomination process.  The foundation also maintains a fund to assist artists undergoing unexpected emergencies.  In 2010 alone, the FCA has given out $450,000 in grants.

Organized by an impressive group of artists,Lehmann Maupin's Painting and Sculpture exhibit features over 180 works of art for sale.  Proceeds will go to the FCA's grant programs.  The exhibit is jam-packed with great works generously donated by a slew of today's top contemporary artists.  Go to Lehmannmaupin.com to learn more.  Through January 9, 2011.

Left to right:  Josephine Meckseper, Drawn and Quartered, 2010; Mia Pearlman, Hemitrope, 2008; Tara Donovan, Untitled, 2009

Julian Opie, The Ortega Family, 2008

Jian'an Wu, Golden Tree, 2006

Heather Rowe, Untitled, 2010

Cecily Brown, The Torment of St. Anthony, 2010

Peter Sacks, Migration 5, 2006-2010

Nate Lowman, Monkey in the Middle, 2010

Sean Mellyn, Fat Cat, 2010

James Nares, Untitled, 2010

Laddie John Dill, Light Trap, 2010

Damien Hirst, Beautiful Two Paths Painting with Butterflies, 2007; Debra Pearlman, Pause, 2007 (bottom left); Martin Kline, Little Blue Heart, 2010 (bottom right)