Sana Musasama: Returning to Ourselves centers around a series of dolls, based on African-American topsy turvy dolls. Musasama uses this formal structure to juxtapose figures drawn from the global Black diaspora. Returning to Ourselves is rounded out by a series of ceramic houses she began early in her career and returned to during the pandemic.

In conjunction with the exhibition Godzilla: Echoes from the 1990s Asian American Arts Network.

Moderated by Ryan Lee Wong, with Helen Oji, Charles Yuen, and Bing Lee. Held in conjunction with the exhibition Godzilla: Echoes from the 1990s Asian American Arts Network. On view at Eric Firestone Gallery, 4 + 40 Great Jones Street, New York, through March 16. 

A second panel discussion in conjunction with the exhibition will be held on March 9 at 3:00 PM, details to come. 

We are pleased to announce that Shirley Gorelick’s Family II (1973) has been acquired by the Brooklyn Museum as part of the museum’s permanent collection.

We are pleased to announce that Pat Passlof’s Ile Fra (1960) has been acquired by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art as part of the museum’s permanent collection.

held in conjunction with the exhibition Elise Asher: The Vintage Years Paintings of the 1950s and '60s

This exhibition is the first of two consecutive installations featuring the closely related techniques of collage, assemblage, photomontage, and found object sculpture. The diverse selection of artworks by leading national and international artists, drawn from Mia’s collection and local private collections, emphasizes the museum’s commitment to modern and contemporary art. The exhibition examines the resurgence of interest in these art forms during the postwar period and ensuing decades, highlights both formal and conceptual experimentation, and demonstrates how these interrelated techniques are particularly suited to exploring social, political, cultural themes and content.

Each year, the popular "Meet the Artists" event allows visitors to the fair to learn more about exhibitor presentations from artists whose work is on view and from experts associated with historical presentations. 

Blum & Poe, Los Angeles is pleased to present “Pictures Girls Make”: Portraitures, an exhibition bringing together over fifty artists from around the world, spanning the early nineteenth century until today. Curated by Alison M. Gingeras, this prodigious survey argues that this age-old mode of representation is an enduringly democratic, humanistic genre. 

The power of an artwork is often amplified when in dialogue or debate with another. It Takes 2: Unexpected Pairings explores the resonances and dissonances that arise when unrelated objects are set side by side.

University at Buffalo Art Galleries is pleased to present FUTURA2000: Breaking Out, a retrospective of artist FUTURA2000 that will span both University of Buffalo Art Galleries locations; UB Center for the Arts and the UB Anderson Gallery. 

Over his career span of five decades, FUTURA has built a reputation and continues to be an unrelenting innovator. He has inspired and influenced multiple generations of creative purists and polymaths while intersecting his enigmatic oeuvre with various disciplines and remains at the forefront of the cultural zeitgeist. FUTURA2000: Breaking Out is a comprehensive survey featuring paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, studies, collaborations, and archival paraphernalia. The exhibition will also feature new site-specific works. Breaking Out examines one of New York's most-loved artists' essential themes and polyphonic output.

At their core, creating and looking at works of art are acts of care, from the artist’s labor to the viewer’s contemplation and appreciation. Storage, conservation, and display are also ways of tending to art. This exhibition invites visitors to explore how contemporary artists trace and address concepts of care through their materials, subjects, ideas, and processes

What Has Been and What Could Be: The BAMPFA Collection inaugurates a year-long presentation of the BAMPFA collection, bringing a contemporary perspective to the museum’s global art holdings.

Jeanne Reynal, A Good Circular God, 1948–50, is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in 2023. 

This exhibition—the first in the Museum’s history to have been fully developed and curated by an undergraduate student—features more than 50 contemporary artworks by women artists, with an emphasis on works created with unusual techniques or media.

Nina Yankowitz takes over an entire gallery to literally offer alternate perspectives for experiencing art: Reclining lounge chairs invite viewers to look up at works by Tara Donovan, Rashid Johnson, Louisa Chase, Mary Heilmann, and Vija Celmins; a 7-foot platform allows a view from above of a visual sound score woven into a rug. Seated in a heavy chair with tiles, viewers confront Chuck Close‘s self-portrait, while small works hang at tilted angles in the distance. Yankowitz chose works relevant to life in America today, including Jackie Black’s Last Meal (Series), 2001–2003, 24 photographs of meals requested by death-row inmates, paired with Yankowitz’ uncanny sculptural paintings of body parts protruding from the wall to imagine “what’s on the other side.”

David Zwirner's group exhibition So let us all be citizens too explores and celebrates the legacy of post-war American artist Bob Thompson (1937–1966) and his dynamic figurative style and use of colour. Bringing together contemporary international artists of several generations whose aesthetic affinities to Thompson are both discernible and surprising, the exhibition includes paintings and works on paper by Emma Amos, Michael Armitage, Betty Blayton, Vivian Browne, Beverly Buchanan, Lewis Hammond, Cynthia Hawkins, Marcus Jahmal, Danielle Mckinney, Cassi Namoda, Chris Ofili, Naudline Pierre, George Nelson Preston, Devin Troy Strother, and Peter Williams.

One of only a few African American participants in the abstract expressionist movement, Thomas Sills (1914–2000) has been largely overlooked until recently. Donated by John Pappajohn to the National Gallery of Art, the painting Flagship (1963) epitomizes the distinctive style and technique Sills developed to create elegant abstractions with a limited palette and disciplined forms.

Moderated by William J. Simmons | with Judith Brodsky, Carrie Moyer, Komal Shah, and Lisa Wainwright.

Held in conjunction with the exhibition Miriam Schapiro: The André Emmerich Years Paintings from 1957–76

Moderated by Elissa Auther | with Joyce Kozloff, Melissa Meyer, Beau R. Ott, and Mira Schor.

Held in conjunction with the exhibition Miriam Schapiro: The André Emmerich Years Paintings from 1957–76

Presented by K11 MUSEA and K11 Art Foundation, City As Studio, China’s first major exhibition of graffiti and street art, will showcase the breadth and depth of the graffiti and street art scene across generations, styles and geographies.

Featuring over 100 works by more than 30 artists, City As Studio traces the global history of graffiti and street art from its emergence in the subway yards and parking lots of 1970s New York to its rise as a worldwide phenomenon. It begins with the movement’s pivotal innovators such as Fab 5 Freddy, FUTURA and Jean-Michel Basquiat who were part of the dialogue and the Downtown art scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and goes on to highlight artists such as Barry McGee, Mister Cartoon and OSGEMEOS, and the groundbreaking styles they created in San Francisco, East Los Angeles and São Paulo. The exhibition also documents the emergence and evolution of artists such as KAWS and AIKO who represent a younger generation of New York street artists.

"Too Much Is Just Right: The Legacy of Pattern and Decoration" features more than 70 artworks in an array of media from both the original time frame of the Pattern and Decoration movement, as well as contemporary artworks created between 1985 and the present.

The Addison Gallery of American Art at the Phillips Academy, Andover, MA

Comprised almost entirely of works from the collection—including Jeanne Reynal's Servants of the Sun, 1950—this exhibition explores how women have deployed the visual language and universal formal concerns of abstraction—color, line, form, shape, contrast, pattern, and texture—to create works of art across a wide variety of media (including paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, ceramics, textiles) from the 18th century to the present day.

The Houston Museum of African American Culture presents Ellsworth Ausby: Odyssey, a posthumous exhibition of paintings by the artist Ellsworth Ausby who died in Brooklyn in 2011. The HMAAC exhibition primarily focuses on the Afrofuturist abstract painter's work on cut canvas from the 1970s which embodies his vibrant geometric forms that reflect his achievement of liberating the canvas from rigid structures, allowing them to float freely on the walls and spaces they occupy.

Spirit in the Land is a contemporary art exhibition that examines today’s urgent ecological concerns from a cultural perspective, demonstrating how intricately our identities and natural environments are intertwined. Through their artwork, thirty artists show us how rooted in the earth our most cherished cultural traditions are, how our relationship to land and water shapes us as individuals and communities. The works reflect the restorative potential of our connection to nature and exemplify how essential both biodiversity and cultural diversity are to our survival.

I use color and an outsider’s point of reference in my paint handling, creating an immediacy and a response that endows the work with a sense or feel of currency. … While it is painful, for some, that I bring a state of offensive literature, I think we are also deserving of a critique by looking at representations of race and representation. — Peter Williams

Moderated by curator and critic Larry Ossei-Mensah, this panel discussion meditates on the legacy of Peter Williams (1952–2021) whose punk-pop paintings such as My Culture is Yer Freight (2019) evoke the complex experiences of Black Americans in the contemporary age. Organized in conjunction with Peter Williams: Nyack on view at Eric Firestone Gallery, this program brings together artist Dominic Chambers; artist Jameson Green; curator and gallerist Ebony L. Haynes; and poet and critic John Yau. 

This panel discussion at 40 Great Jones Street will be followed by a reception at 4 Great Jones Street in the concurrent solo show Abigail DeVille: Original Night, also on view through December 23, 2022.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) announces Gratiot Griot, the first solo museum exhibition of mixed media collage artist Judy Bowman. This exhibition will present new works alongside older collages by the artist that invite viewers to engage with the rich cultural tapestry of life across the African diaspora. Gratiot Griot will be on view at MOCAD from October 29, 2022 – March 25, 2023.

Born and raised in Detroit’s legendary Black Bottom neighborhood, just off of the iconic Gratiot Avenue, Bowman creates visual works inspired by stories of African American life. Collaged images depict and highlight the intimate landscape of neighborhoods, homes and gathering places – the iconic Belle Isle, cozy and colorful living rooms and popular street corners filled with small local businesses – that encouraged Bowman’s development as a griot. In West African tradition, a griot is a storyteller who, through creative performance, preserves and shares the cultural legacy and histories of their people. Gratiot Griot highlights Bowman’s extensive career as a storyteller.

In the spring of 1963, the New York Art Committee for Tougaloo College established Mississippi’s first collection of modern art at Tougaloo, a historically Black college located north of Jackson. As civil rights protests swirled across the fiercely segregated state, the College became an unlikely hub of European and New York School modernism and a place that the collection’s founders envisioned as “an interracial oasis in which the fine arts are the focus and magnet.” Co-organized by the American Federation of Arts and Tougaloo College, Art and Activism traces the birth and development of this significant and distinctive collection. With approximately thirty-five artworks by artists such as Francis Picabia, Jacob Lawrence, and Alma Thomas, the exhibition brings renewed attention to a complex American collection established at the intersections of modern art and social justice.

Curator Alexandra Schwartz, who recently organized Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art (2022) at the Museum of Arts and Design, will moderate a conversation with Nina Yankowitz, Joyce Kozloff, and Meg Lipke regarding their daring approaches to abstract painting. This discussion will consider how each artist has moved beyond painting’s traditional form. Often leaving behind the conventional stretched canvas support, these practitioners have embraced handicraft techniques or alternative materials while intervening in space in novel ways. 

This program is organized in conjunction with Yankowitz’s solo exhibition of unstretched paintings from the 1960s and ‘70s at Eric Firestone Gallery.

To register for the Zoom link, visit the link below:

REINVENTING ABSTRACT PAINTING | A PANEL DISCUSSION AT ERIC FIRESTONE GALLERY

After thirteen years and twenty-one exhibitions, rennie museum announces our final presentation in the historic Wing Sang building. The exhibition opens August 13 and concludes November 12, 2022.

Featuring fifty-one artworks by thirty-seven prominent artists from A(bdessemed) to Y(iadom-Boakye), the farewell exhibition breaks the museum’s self-imposed rule of not titling its shows. 51 @ 51 references the number of artworks in the exhibit as well as the address of the museum—51 East Pender Street.

Mostly New: Selections from the NYU Art Collection presents modern and contemporary artworks, the majority of which have entered the New York University Art Collection over the last decade.

The founding of the NYU Art Collection followed A. E. Gallatin’s Gallery (later, Museum) of Living Art, which operated from 1927 until 1942 in the same space the Grey currently occupies. As the first American institution to exhibit living artists, Gallatin’s Museum provided an important forum for contemporary visual expression and access to original works for NYU students. Initiated in 1958, the NYU Art Collection grew quickly through the mid-1960s, with many sculptures, drawings, prints, and photographs installed throughout the campus. In 1975 Abby Weed Grey donated some 700 works from the Middle East and Asia dating primarily from the 1960s—a magnanimous contribution that also established the Grey Art Gallery as NYU’s fine arts museum. The collection will again expand significantly with Dr. James Cottrell and Joseph Lovett’s promised gift of approximately 200 artworks—a number of which are on view here—by downtown New York artists.

The project was born of necessity. When Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro began the Feminist Art Program at CalArts, the school’s new Valencia campus was not complete, so they had to work off-site. They decided to use a soon-to-be-demolished 17-room house in Hollywood with broken windows, no plumbing and no heat as their studios and exhibition hall. Students worked together for weeks clearing rubbish, replacing and glazing windows and painting walls, while also developing their art and their confidence as artists. With group sessions that Chicago calls content-searching and others call consciousness-raising, the programme was so physically and psychologically demanding that alumnus Mira Schor compares it to boot camp. “It was very intense—unlike anything I had ever experienced before,” she says, “and I made sure never to experience exactly that again.”

Organised by Anat Ebgi gallery called Womanhouse 1972/2022 (18 February-2 April) exploring the Feminist Art Program, its origins and its legacy.

Unbound brings together a multigenerational group of artists whose work takes an inventive and experimental approach to abstraction.

The MFAH presents the U.S. tour of Afro-Atlantic Histories, an unprecedented exhibition that explores the history and legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. The exhibition comprises more than 130 works of art and documents made in Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe across 500 years, from the 17th century to the 21st century.

Afro-Atlantic Histories dynamically juxtaposes works by artists from 24 countries, representing evolving perspectives across time and geography through major paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, photographs, time-based media art, and ephemera. The range extends from historical paintings by Jean-Baptiste Debret, Frans Post, and Dirk Valkenburg to contemporary art by Melvin Edwards, Ibrahim Mahama, and Kara Walker.

The exhibition premiered at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) in Brazil, and the U.S. tour builds on the presentation through the overarching theme of histórias—a Portuguese term that can encompass both fictional and non-fictional narratives of cultural, economic, personal, or political character. The term is plural, diverse, and inclusive, offering viewpoints that have been marginalized or forgotten. Afro-Atlantic Histories unfolds through six thematic sections that explore the varied histories of the diaspora.

Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 foregrounds how visual artists have explored the materials, methods, and strategies of craft over the past seven decades. Some expand techniques with long histories, such as weaving, sewing, or pottery, while others experiment with textiles, thread, clay, beads, and glass, among other mediums. The traces of the artists’ hands-on engagement with their materials invite viewers to imagine how it might feel to make each work.

This two-year reinstallation of the museum’s contemporary art collection examines the ways artists have produced new forms of knowledge about the world. Nearly 100 works made primarily by Black and female artists—and many new to the collection—will reframe the museum’s holdings and follow artists in their expansive thinking and prismatic explorations of social, historical, and environmental perspectives. Among the themes explored in the exhibition are care, progress, wayfinding, witnessing, reckoning, and legacy. Grouped within and across these interrelated subjects are dynamic works across media by Robert Colescott, Paul Chan, Jadé Fadojutimi, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rashid Johnson, Gisela McDaniel, Meleko Mokgosi, Martine Syms, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Kay WalkingStick, Wilmer Wilson IV, and many others. The BMA is committed to telling stories that reflect the true spectrum and diversity of voices and experiences in our world. The reinstallation of the contemporary wing speaks to the museum’s commitment to sharing narratives that expand the art historical canon. As this story is continually evolving, nearly half of the works will change every six months during the two-year presentation.

The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, investigates the aesthetic impulses of early 20th-century Black culture that have proved ubiquitous to the southern region of the United States. The exhibition chronicles the pervasive sonic and visual parallels that have served to shape the contemporary landscape, and looks deeply into the frameworks of landscape, religion, and the Black body—deep meditative repositories of thought and expression. Within the visual expression, assemblage, collage, appropriation, and sonic transference are explored as deeply connected to music tradition. The visual expression of the African American South along with the Black sonic culture are overlooked tributaries to the development of art in the United States and serve as interlocutors of American modernism. This exhibition looks to the contributions of artists, academically trained as well as those who were relegated to the margins as “outsiders,” to uncover the foundational aesthetics that gave rise to the shaping of our contemporary expression. The exhibition travels to the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, Oct. 23, 2021-Feb. 6, 2022; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Ark., March 12-July 25, 2022; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, Sept. 2022-Feb.

In February 1971, the newly formed Delaware organization, Aesthetic Dynamics, Inc., presented its first major undertaking: the exhibition of over 130 works of art—drawings, prints, photographs, paintings, and sculpture—by 66 African American artists. Numerous factors led to artist Percy Ricks’ founding of Aesthetic Dynamics and their ambitious inaugural exhibition, most notably the trauma suffered from the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the subsequent nine-month National Guard occupation of Wilmington and Ricks’ desire to emphasize the influence of African American artists in Wilmington.

Now at its 50th anniversary, Aesthetic Dynamics, Inc. and the Delaware Art Museum are collaborating to revisit this momentous exhibition. Afro-American Images 1971: The Vision of Percy Ricks will include most of the artists who participated in the 1971 show, many known locally—Humbert Howard, Simmie Knox, Edward Loper, Sr., and Edward Loper, Jr.—as well as those recognized nationally including Romare Bearden, Sam Gilliam, Loïs Mailou Jones, Faith Ringgold, Alma Thomas, and Hale Woodruff. By rehanging the show as accurately as possible, the partnering organizations hope to examine the exhibition’s role in the Black Arts Movement as well as question why this seemingly successful event was largely neglected by historians in the decades that followed.

Öyvind Fahlström (1928–1976) was one of the most innovative and mercurial artists of the 20th century, who produced a truly innovative and boundary-defying oeuvre. This unique exhibition includes visual art, poetry, theatre, literature, music, dance, and film, and will reflect the great diversity of expression within the large international network of artists who inspired and were inspired by Öyvind Fahlström.

Sven-Harrys’ party for Öyvind brings together many of the most influential artists of the era, including Alexander Calder, Andy Warhol, Barbro Östlihn, Carl Johan De Geer, Christer Strömholm, Claes Oldenburg, Cy Twombly, Dennis Hopper, Ernest Cole, Faith Ringgold, Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss, Jean Tinguely, John Cage, Kiki Kogelnik, Lee Bontecou, Lena Svedberg, Marie-Louise Ekman, Marisol, Merce Cunningham, Mimi Gross, Niki de Saint Phalle, Patty Oldenburg, Peter Weiss, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein. And, of course, Öyvind himself.

Party for Öyvind reflects an age that was shaped by the challenges of the post-war era, but which also offered unique opportunities for a new kind of openness and playfulness, as a younger generation sought to throw out the old and find their own way of life that would focus on their lust for life and hope for the future, as well as the right to own one’s identity, sexuality, and expression, in art, music, literature, and poetry.

The name of the exhibition comes from the invitation that Patty and Claes Oldenburg sent their friends to a celebration of Öyvind Fahlström’s birthday and his first solo exhibition at the legendary Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1967. The party was a huge affair, with several hundred guests, many of whom are also participants in the exhibition.

In the early 1980s, Leonard McGurr's name was often uttered in the same breath as those of his artist friends Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Known then as Futura 2000, he was a rising star of New York's graffiti scene, his celebrated subway murals bridging the gap between graphic street art and abstraction. But then, as galleries began merging street art with fine art — an evolution that would propel some of his contemporaries to multi-million-dollar stardom — he grew disillusioned with the establishment. "I got sour," he recalls.

In the decades that followed, he moved beyond walls, canvases and aerosols, finding new mediums for an aesthetic that nods to particle physics and the space age. With two children to support, McGurr shunned exhibitions in favor of graphic design and, later, edgy brand collaborations with the likes of Comme des Garçons and Nike. We meet in the labyrinthine basement of Hong Kong's upscale Landmark mall, where McGurr's "Futuraland" sculptures, mobiles and streetwear are available via a pop-up store that counts Dior and Gucci as neighbors. In the atrium above, his largest work to date — a 20-foot-tall stainless-steel rocket — regularly shoots clouds of smoke over passing shoppers.

This exhibition invites viewers to consider how size and repetition can be interpreted as political gestures in the practices of many women artists.

Taking Space: Contemporary Women Artists and the Politics of Scale examines the approaches of women artists for whom space is a critical feature of their work, whether they take the space on a wall, the real estate of a room through sculpture and installation, engage seriality as a spatial visual practice, cast a wide legacy in art history or claim the space of their body. This exhibition invites viewers to consider how size and repetition can be interpreted as political gestures in the practices of many women artists.

Featured artists include Mequitta Ahuja, Polly Apfelbaum, Jennifer Bartlett, Maria Berrío, Chakaia Booker, Emily Brown, Joan Brown, Tammy Rae Carland, Squeak Carnwath, Vija Celmins, Elizabeth Colomba, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Eiko Fan, Louise Fishman, Audrey Flack, Mary Frank, Viola Frey, Hope Gangloff, Judy Gelles, Nancy Graves, Guerrilla Girls, Ellen Harvey, Clarity Haynes, Orit Hofshi, Barbara Kruger, Winifred Lutz, Vanessa Marsh, Ana Mendieta, Leah Modigliani, Elizabeth Murray, Wangechi Mutu, Alice Neel, Dona Nelson, Louise Nevelson, Ebony G. Patterson, Liliana Porter, Debra Priestly, Ana Vizcarra Rankin, Faith Ringgold, Mia Rosenthal, Brie Ruais, Betye Saar, Miriam Schapiro, Mira Schor, Alyson Shotz, Sylvia Sleigh, Becky Suss, Mickalene Thomas, Stacy Lynn Waddell, Marie Watt, Dyani White Hawk and Deborah Willis.

Featuring works from the permanent collection, including many recent acquisitions, Taking Space is one of three exhibitions at PAFA in 2020–2021 celebrating women artists in honor of the 100th anniversary of the passing of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which granted women the right to vote.

A pioneering painter and street artist, Futura has exhibited at institutions like the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, collaborated with Louis Vuitton and Supreme, and created album art for The Clash. Now he’s teaching you his signature, kinetic approach to abstract art. Learn how to express yourself and paint with color, dimension, and detail. All you need to create art is an idea and a can of spray paint.
15 video lessons (2h 33m)

Where Art Might Happen: The Early Years of CalArts focuses on the legendary founding years (1970–1980) of the California Institute of the Arts, which has produced numerous well-known artists. This wide-ranging group exhibition presents a variety of perspectives on the school: parallel movements from the milieus of Conceptual Art, feminism, and Fluxus as well as the school’s radical pedagogical concepts will be brought together for the first time.

Body Language: Picturing People
July 18, 2019 —June 2020

This exhibition considers how the pose, the gesture and the body in motion are used by artists to convey meaning. Figural artworks from the CU Art Museum’s collection are brought into conversation across cultural geographies and historical eras. Whether in presenting portraits of individuals or fictional personages, or in picturing religious icons, artistic depictions of the body speak volumes about personality, character and the values of a time or place.

Exhibition curated by Hope Saska.

Encapsulating the moment of the arrival of the Pilgrims, both from their perspective and the perspective of the native tribes (primarily the Nauset and Wampanoag), this exhibition will feature life-sized figures, a to-scale Mayflower, and proportional sea and sky, turning one PAAM gallery into the shores of Provincetown as it existed 400 years ago. It will also highlight the concept of water – both the idea of water as a mover, and as a necessary source of nourishment, exploring the absence of water as among the reasons the Pilgrims left Provincetown.

“In her proposal for the exhibition, the bow of the Mayflower is seen crashing through the wall, intruding on an established society. It’s a thoughtful consideration of the arrival of the Mayflower in what is now Provincetown, with its implications of the arrival for the land and the Native population, as well as for the Pilgrims themselves. The story is presented uniquely through the artist’s eyes–one who understands the complexities and historical inaccuracies this occasion conjures,” curator Breon Dunigan told Provincetown Arts Magazine.

My paintings don’t let the onlooker glance over them, but rather take them deeply into them and let them out—many times by differ­ent routes,” artist Joe Overstreet once said, describing viewing experiences that can be variously harrowing and exhilarating. “These trips are taken sometimes subtly and sometimes suddenly.”

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power shines a bright light on the vital contribution of Black artists to an important period in American history and art. Featuring the work of 60 artists and including vibrant paintings, powerful sculptures, street photography, murals, and more, this landmark exhibition is a rare opportunity to see era-defining artworks that changed the face of art in America.

One late night in the spring of 1979, a man wearing high-waisted white corduroy pants on the corner of First Avenue and East Fifth Street immediately caught 
Keith Haring’s attention. “He was so eccentric looking that I knew I had to meet this person,” Haring wrote in his journals. “I ended up sort of cruising him, but then we became friends.”

The Bronx Museum of the Arts is pleased to announce Henry Chalfant: Art Vs. Transit, 1977-1987, the first U.S. retrospective of the pioneering photographer, on view from September 25, 2019 to March 8, 2020. Recognized as one of the most significant documentarians of subway art, Chalfant’s photographs and films immortalized this ephemeral art form from its Bronx-born beginnings, helping to launch graffiti art into the international phenomenon it is today. The historic exhibition looks back at a rebellious art form launched in the midst of a tumultuous time in New York City history.  Chalfant’s graffiti archives are a work of visual anthropology and one of the seminal documents of American popular culture in the late twentieth century.

The internationally acclaimed exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power will travel to San Francisco this fall. Celebrating the works that African American artists created during two pivotal decades in American history (1963–1983), the exhibition—organized by Tate Modern, London—examines the very purpose of art and the role of artists in society. 

In 1898, the renowned Russian author Leo Tolstoy wrote: “Real art, like the wife of an affectionate husband, needs no ornaments, but counterfeit art, like a prostitute, must always be decked out.”

When the acclaimed touring exhibition Solidary & Solitary reaches the BMA, it will significantly expand to more than 80 paintings, sculptures, and mixed media works and take on a new title, Generations:  A History of Black Abstract Art. The exhibition offers a sweeping new perspective on the contributions black artists have made to the evolution of visual art from the 1940s to the present moment. Artists featured include pioneers of postwar abstraction once overlooked by history, such as Norman  Lewis, Alma W. Thomas, and Jack Whitten, as well as artists from a younger generation such as Kevin Beasley, Mark Bradford, Martin Puryear, Lorna Simpson, and many others.

With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 is the first full-scale scholarly survey of this groundbreaking American art movement, encompassing works in painting, sculpture, collage, ceramics, installation art, and performance documentation. Covering the years 1972 to 1985 and featuring approximately fifty artists from across the United States, the exhibition examines the Pattern and Decoration movement’s defiant embrace of forms traditionally coded as feminine, domestic, ornamental, or craft-based and thought to be categorically inferior to fine art. 

Ornament as Promise was the premise of the Pattern and Decoration movement in the United States (1975–1985). In this exhibition, mumok presents the rich collection of works from this movement of Peter and Irene Ludwig, in the largest presentation of Pattern and Decoration in German-speaking Europe since the 1980s.

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power shines a bright light on the vital contribution of Black artists made over two revolutionary decades in American history, beginning in 1963 at the height of the civil rights movement. The exhibition examines the influences, from the civil rights and Black Power movements to Minimalism and developments in abstraction, on artists such as Romare Bearden, Barkley Hendricks, Noah Purifoy, Martin Puryear, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Alma Thomas, Charles White, and William T. Williams.

Rarely seen works and recent additions to the museum's permanent collection.

This exhibition explores the personal vision of iconic artists of the 1950s and 1960s. Many artists of the mid-twentieth century felt that academic traditions and the societal conventions they implied had become obsolete.

Painting and fiber art—artwork made with woven or nonwoven natural or synthetic fibers—have traditionally been viewed as distinct genres. This installation questions that division. It includes works by fiber artists whose formal art studies first centered on painting. There are also works by painters, some who have influenced fabric design, and others who have paid close attention to textile patterns and the relationship of clothing to the female body. Featuring many new additions to Mia’s collection, this display illustrates how artists often think and create outside the categories of art that museums generally like to employ. Among the thirteen artists included are Sheila Hicks, Yayoi Kusama, Marcia Marcus, Elizabeth Osborne, Christina Ramberg, and Shinique Smith.

Iconic Figurative Artists Featured in Exhibition at Shirley Fiterman Art Center
On May 23 in the Shirley Fiterman Art Center, a reception will celebrate the opening of Double Portrait: Mimi Gross and Marcia Marcus. Gross and Marcus are innovative figurative painters whose work from 1958 to 2012 will be on display

Art after Stonewall, 1969–1989 is the first major exhibition to examine the impact on visual culture of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) liberation movement sparked fifty years ago with the Stonewall Uprising. The show includes works by openly LGBTQ artists such as Scott Burton, Vaginal Davis, Lyle Ashton Harris, Greer Lankton, Catherine Opie, and Andy Warhol. Also considered are the practices of straight-identified artists such as Alice Neel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lynda Benglis, and Kiki Smith in terms of their engagement with the newly emerging queer subculture. Divided in two parts, the show is on view at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, which primarily presents works from the 1970s, while here at the Grey Art Gallery, art from the 1980s is featured.

When an international art star curates an exhibition revisiting one of the most dynamic eras in American art history, expect fireworks. Eric Fischl, master of the loaded group portrait, has been the curatorial advisor for a stunning show featuring more than a hundred works by all the great personalities of the Eighties, beginning with him and his wife April Gornik, along with Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Ross Bleckner, Bryan Hunt, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Jenny Holzer, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annette Lemieux, Charlie Clough, Tseng Kwong Chi, Jonathan Lasker and others. The show also features a “hall of fame” of music and sports memorabilia, including Michael Jackson’s glove, Prince’s fashion, Madonna’s jewelry, and autographed items from the Islanders, Mets and the 1980 Olympic hockey team.

From 1979-1981, over twenty-eight children and young adults were abducted and murdered in the city of Atlanta. Collectively known as the Atlanta child murders, the killings drew the attention of the nation and altered daily life in the de facto capital of the South. The city imposed curfews. Some parents withdrew their children from school and forbade them from playing outside. On June 21, 1981, Wayne Williams was arrested and ultimately convicted of two murders and sentenced to two consecutive life terms. This past March, the Mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Bottoms, reopened the cases hoping to use modern technology to lead to further convictions. Williams maintains his innocence.

Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design brings together works in painting, sculpture, ceramic, dance, furniture design, and more that privilege decoration, pattern, and maximalism.

Borrowing its attitude from architect Robert Venturi’s witty retort to Mies van der Rohe’s modernist edict “less is more,” Less Is a Bore shows how artists, including those affiliated with the Pattern & Decoration movement of the 1970s, have sought to rattle the dominance of modernism and minimalism. Encouraged by the pluralism permeating many cultural spheres at the time, these artists accommodated new ideas, modes, and materials, challenging entrenched categories that marginalized non-Western art, fashion, interior design, and applied art.

The medium of fiber is also weighted with gendered, socio-political signifiers that are imparted onto the final work of art.  To put it plainly, fiber is feminine. Weaving, embroidery, knitting and sewing are thought to be the domain of women, whose productions in these areas have long been relegated to the status of “decoration.” Objects described in these terms traditionally do not fall into the rarefied, male-dominated Pantheon of “Fine Art,” which has long been the province of painting, drawing, sculpture and printmaking.  But given the shift of values in contemporary culture, does this distinction hold true today?

Forty-some years ago, Henry Chalfant trained his camera on the graffiti artists who turned New York’s streets, trains, and underground stations into their own personal canvases. Now, the photographer is returning to the Bronx—the place where it all began—for his biggest institutional outing yet.

In June of 2015, Miriam Schapiro, the pioneering feminist artist and founding member of the Pattern and Decoration movement, passed away at the age of ninety-one. Surprisingly, given her status as the elder stateswoman of the feminist art movement, the tremendous impact of her oeuvre on contemporary art has yet to be fully acknowledged or critically assessed. This exhibition seeks to redress this gap in the history of American art through an exploration of Schapiro’s signature femmages, the term she coined to describe her distinctive hybrid of painting and collage inspired by women’s domestic arts and crafts and the feminist critique of the hierarchy of art and craft.

Slab City Rendezvous, whose title comes from a 1964 painting by Red Grooms, features the work of a group of young New York-based avant-garde artists who in the years following World War II discovered the pleasures of summering and working in Maine. They became some of the most successful and important artists of their generation, charting new directions for contemporary art. Their work presented a return to realism and figuration in the face of Abstract Expressionism, the style then dominating the increasingly important center of international contemporary art in New York. Their accomplishments formed another chapter in the story of Maine’s ongoing role in American art.

The exhibition will include works by Rudy Burckhardt, Lois Dodd, Rackstraw Downes, Red Grooms, Mimi Gross, Yvonne Jacquette, Alex Katz, Neil Welliver, and Bernard Langlais, among others.

Taking inspiration from Mia’s recent acquisition of Frank Bowling’s map painting False Start(1970), “Mapping Black Identities” challenges the notion of Black identity as monolithic. Championing the diverse experiences of artists from America, Africa, and the diaspora, this exhibition seeks to amplify underrepresented voices and create connections around the concept of Blackness in contemporary art across time and place.

MAMCO examined in this large group exhibition the “Pattern & Decoration” movement, formed in the 1970s and that enjoyed international success in the 1980s, before fading in the decades thereafter. 

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power shines light on a broad spectrum of Black artistic practice from 1963 to 1983, one of the most politically, socially, and aesthetically revolutionary periods in American history. Black artists across the country worked in communities, in collectives, and individually to create a range of art responsive to the moment—including figurative and abstract painting, prints, and photography; assemblage and sculpture; and performance.

Patchworks and decorative patterns on the one hand and a political-emancipatory claim on the other – the Pattern and Decoration movement combines apparent contradictions. In the mid-1970s, the movement developed in the USA as one of the last art movements of the 20th century, brought forward by as many female artists as no other movement before. It was supported, among others, by feminist artists such as Joyce Kozloff, Valerie Jaudon, Robert Kushner and Miriam Schapiro. 

The period covered in the exhibition and film tells the story of Jean-Michel’s early work, peers, and creative community in gritty, pre-AIDS, downtown New York—before the rise of the 80s art and real estate juggernaut. It was a time when decay, drugs, and dissolution fueled a boom in creativity where the definition of fame, success, and power was not based on money, Facebook likes, and self-promotion. For these creators, to be a penniless published poet or a musician gigging at CBs was the height of success. In the rawness of the work, the focus on street art and graffiti, and the experimentation and cross-pollination of styles and disciplines, the era has become a flash point for younger generations seeking to learn about and understand the authenticity, closeness, and community expressed in the work of the artists in Zeitgeist.

Born on January 2, 1940 in Sewicley, Pennsylvania, Chalfant is a renowned and acclaimed photographer and cameraman dedicated to urban culture, renowned for his graffiti and photography and films about breakdancing. Distinguished by his knowledge of hip hop and underground culture, his photographs are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Joseph Overstreet is the 2018 recipient of the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts presented by the Mississippi Arts Commission. Born in Conehatta, Mississippi, in 1933, Joe Overstreet is an artist with a record of accomplishments as an artist, arts promoter, and activist that spans 60 years. 

The Menil’s growing collection, while not encyclopedic, spans the prehistoric era to the present day. Particular areas of strength include Byzantine art, West and Central African art, Surrealism, and 20th and 21st century American and European art. On September 22, 2018, the museum reopened with a year-long permanent collection initiative featuring many of the museum’s most well-known paintings and sculptures, as well as recent acquisitions and other works and promised gifts that have never before been on view in the museum. The installations will be changed several times over the course of the year-long period.

The opening installation in the African art galleries features more than 60 masks, figural sculptures and shrines, and vessels from regions of West and Central Africa. Introducing the galleries is a new presentation of paintings, works on paper, and sculptures that explore the shared histories Africa and Europe after 15th century.

Nothing in art is more powerful than color. From Matisse to Mark Rothko and Frank Stella, and onward to the huge Color Field canvases and pulsing neon sculptures of today, color as a means of expression is the keynote for this wildly exuberant show.

Featuring work by thirty-six global artists, Women House challenges conventional ideas about gender and the domestic space. The exhibition is inspired by the landmark project Womanhouse, developed in 1972 by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. With works that disrupted traditional ideas about the home as a feminine realm, Womanhouse was the first female-centered art installation to appear in the Western world. In the new exhibition, Women House, women artists from the 1960s to today examine the persistence of stereotypes about the house as a feminine space.

Way Bay is a sweeping exploration of the creative energies that have emerged from the San Francisco Bay Area over the past two centuries. An innovatively organized exhibition of art and film, plus poetry, performance documentation, and archival materials, Way Bay features nearly two hundred works that reveal the depth and diversity of artists’ engagement with the region’s geographic, social, and cultural landscape.

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power shines a bright light on the vital contribution of Black artists to an important period in American history and art. Featuring the work of 60 artists and including vibrant paintings, powerful sculptures, street photography, murals, and more, this landmark exhibition is a rare opportunity to see era-defining artworks that changed the face of art in America.

The East Village of the 1970s and 1980s continues to thrive in the global public’s imagination. Located in the basement of a Polish Church at 57 St. Marks Place, Club 57 (1978–83) began as a no-budget venue for music and film exhibitions, and quickly took pride of place in a constellation of countercultural venues in downtown New York fueled by low rents, the Reagan presidency, and the desire to experiment with new modes of art, performance, fashion, music, and exhibition. A center of creative activity in the East Village, Club 57 is said to have influenced virtually every club that came in its wake.

Western art history is often viewed as a neat succession of individual artists and their singular masterpieces. This narrative runs parallel to the American story of westward expansion, propelled by the idea of individualism and independence. West by Midwest offers a messier alternative—one that illuminates the ways that contemporary art practices spread and develop by tracing the intersecting lives of artists who have migrated from the American Midwest to the West Coast since the mid-20th century. Lured by career opportunities, warmer weather, and the prospect of a better life promised by the postwar boom, artists in this exhibition attended art schools together, shared studios, exhibited work in the same galleries, collaborated on projects, engaged in activism, and dated. Following these crisscrossing lines of kinship, West by Midwest reveals social, political, artistic, and intellectual networks of artists and their shared experiences of making work and making a life.

The show opens in 1963 at the height of the Civil Rights movement and its dreams of integration. In its wake emerged more militant calls for Black Power: a rallying cry for African American pride, autonomy and solidarity, drawing inspiration from newly independent African nations.

Between the apex of Abstract Expressionism and the rise of Pop Art and Minimalism, the New York art scene was transformed by artist-run galleries. Inventing Downtown presents works from fourteen of these crucibles of experimentation, highlighting artists’ efforts to create new exhibition venues for innovative works of art—ranging from abstract and figurative painting, assemblage, sculpture, and works on paper to groundbreaking installations and performances.

Whitechapel Gallery presents a major exhibition of 150 paintings from an overlooked generation of 81 international women artists.