A celebrated American artist whose vibrant works explore themes of Black identity, joy, and culture, blending powerful social narratives with bold esthetics, Derrick Adams’ market value is steadily climbing.

The annual global art fair in Miami featured a heady mélange of artists, gallerists, A-list celebrities, luxury brands and Mad Libs-esque collaborations among many of them.

A century ago, the scientist and inventor George Washington Carver filed two patents related to his new method for making paints and stains from Alabama’s clay...over the past three years, the Chicago-based artist and architect Amanda Williams has been reviving Carver’s blue with the help of researchers and scientists.

November in Chicago: By now, Lake Michigan has shifted from the vivacious teal of summer into a churning mass of taciturn gray – and it is a crapshoot whether the first snow has blanketed our streets. Meteorological variables aside, one thing remains certain: the heat and exhibitions are most certainly on. Ranging from explorations of the banal to the sublime, political liberation or its abnegation, many galleries and institutions are meeting the discursive and lived challenges of today with gusto. Peppered across the city are seven new and noteworthy shows to make the shortening days feel fuller.

Pity the poor chair. Name another piece of furniture so vexed with symbolism. The bed? A lumpy theater of sex and death. The kitchen table? A schmaltzy metaphor for family. But it’s the humble chair that hums with the voltage of our messy human lives—so much so that when its occupant is gone, an empty chair is unbearably literal. Small wonder that artists as varied as Scott Burton, David Hockney, and Vincent van Gogh have exploited this object’s emotional potential.

It’s the end of an era in Chicago: Rhona Hoffman, who has been a gallerist in the city for nearly five decades, will close her space in Chicago’s West Town area and cease to operate as a traditional gallery beginning in May 2025.

Rhona Hoffman Gallery announces a significant program change following EXPO Chicago and its concurrent gallery exhibit. The gallery will continue working actively with artists, galleries, collectors, and institutions, but will leave its West Town Chicago exhibition space at the end of May.

Brian Maguire’s new exhibition at Hugh Lane Gallery documents his activism and the shape-shifting nature of war, including its devastating impact, as explained by curator Michael Dempsey and the artist himself...

New York Contemporary artist Jacob Hashimoto builds complex orlds from a range of handmade modular components. These modular components, referred to as "kites," came about when he was trying to find his artistic voice.

Even the best museums, galleries, critics, and auction houses cannot talk about art without their names. Derek Adams, Refik Anadol, and Nicolas Party visited Korea. The artists I met in person were as considerate and gentle as their works, full of respect for their roots, nature, and things that will disappear.

The protagonist of Gagosian Gallery’s first pop-up exhibition in Korea is artist Derek Adams, who has been visually exploring black identity for a long time. His new work, filled with colorful mannequins, contains stories of all people beyond nationality and skin color.

Video interview with 2024 ACC Gold Medalist Anne Wilson. Interview and videography by Chikara Motomura.

A transcribed conversation between Amanda Williams and Alteronce Gumby, moderated by Jordan Carter at EXPO Chicago earlier this year. Published in tandem with Gagosian's two-part exhibition, Social Abstraction.

Kicking off Seoul Art Week, American artist Derrick Adams opened a flashy show of his work at the headquarters of world-renowned Korean beauty company Amorepacific. Titled “The Strip,” it marks the artist’s debut in the city and Gagosian’s first presentation in Seoul outside of the fairs. 

The North View Gallery, with support from the Regional Arts and Culture Council, will be hosting a screening of Sada (regroup) commissioned by documenta fifteen in the MAHB Auditorium in the Cascade campus. Sada artists Ali Eyal and Bassim Al Shaker will attend and speak about their work after the screening.

Organized by Associate Professor Charles L. Davis II, this exhibition and accompanying symposium highlights artist-led interventions into the Black home that provide a new model of architectural practice and broaden our understanding of the built environment.

Ahead of two shows in Seoul, the artist, famed for his colorful figurative work, reflects on urban aesthetics, Black joy and turning the quotidian into the sublime.

Part of an Impossible Task presents work by Michael Rakowitz that examines the role of cultural artifacts on how individuals and societies define power. What have monuments meant to people in the past and what do they mean today? How can artists and viewers dismantle the heroic narratives associated with many historic monuments to inspire more nuanced readings of the past?

Far beyond the hustle and bustle of Manhattan, where office buildings turn into Dollar Trees and commuters become residents, you’ll find the studio of the artist Derrick Adams. The 54-year old artist works out of a Brooklyn warehouse space to make art that reflects life, but that’s not intended to be trite.

Last August, when Gagosian revealed that it had tapped the veteran Seoul art dealer Jiyoung Lee to run its operations in South Korea, speculation mounted about the mega gallery’s plans. A bevy of blue-chip foreign dealers have set up branches in the country in recent years. Would Gagosian be next?

Gagosian has announced Social Abstraction, a two-part exhibition in Beverly Hills and Hong Kong curated by Antwaun Sargent.

Social Abstraction in Beverly Hills will feature work by Kyle Abraham, Kevin Beasley, Allana Clarke, Theaster Gates, Cy Gavin, Alteronce Gumby, Lauren Halsey, Kahlil Robert Irving, Devin B. Johnson, Rick Lowe, Eric N. Mack, Cameron Welch, and Amanda Williams. It will be followed this fall by a second iteration in Hong Kong.

In this excerpt, Amanda Williams, a visual artist and an architect by training, is interviewed by Lauren Halsey, her mentee-turned–visual artist peer. 

A little over a year since ‘Sunny’ opened at Denny Gallery, New York, Rhona Hoffman presents an exquisite selection of Judy Ledgerwood’s large-scale paintings in Sunny Redux. It’s hard to write about Ledgerwood’s works in relationship to one another without getting caught up in formalist underpinnings of abstraction, interpretative language, or trying too hard to set out to contextualize the artists’ engrossment with color, form, and pattern. Initially, it was the intensity of play, how Ledgerwood teases both theory and history through the pleasurable (dare we say beautiful) translation of form and color, that felt like one possible route to entering the show. Yet, it felt like a disservice to the demand of the work, specifically at this time. 

There are some artists who, after sustaining a successful practice for over forty years, are inclined to rest on their laurels. Judy Ledgerwood is not one of them. In “Sunny Redux,” a small exhibition of new works now on view at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Ledgerwood returns to the formal language she has built, this time using it to imbue a new tension into a suite of six oil paintings.

Remember when architects made drawings? A new exhibition at the MIT Museum brings us back to a time when those works were considered a hot commodity. Tucked away in a small, upper-floor gallery, Drawing After Modernism is the first exhibition dedicated to architecture in the decades-old Cambridge, Massachusetts institution’s new space.

It might be in its 11th edition, but EXPO Chicago is embarking on a new chapter.

Gordon Parks' portrait of government worker Ella Watson is among the most renowned portraits in history, but few know that it was part of a larger body of work that will now be shown in a new book and exhibition.

Maharam has released "Beyond and Midair," the first woven textiles designed with the New York-based multimedia artist.

In "Sanctuary," currently on view at the Middlebury College Museum of Art, Brooklyn-based artist Derrick Adams, known for work that explores his Black identity, takes inspiration from the ingenuity and resilience necessary for people of color to travel safely in the Jim Crow era.

“With war comes destruction, the loss of thousands of years of human history,” reads a quote from Iraqi archaeologist Selma Al-Radi that perfectly encapsulates the essence of “Michael Rakowitz: Listening back to Fragments.” The exhibition, uniquely combining two of Rakowitz’s projects, “The invisible enemy should not exist” (2007-ongoing) and “Radio Silence” (2018), offers a profound exploration of cultural memory, loss and reclamation.

Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts will kick off Women’s History Month with an opening reception for multidisciplinary artist Martha Tuttle’s site-specific public installation “the bear that longs to touch the ocean.”

This winter, Maharam introduces Beyond and Midair by Jacob Hashimoto, the first woven textiles designed with the New York-based multimedia artist and longtime Maharam Digital Projects collaborator.

Episode No. 640 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Judy Ledgerwood and curator Lisa Volpe. 

EXPO CHICAGO reveals the participating exhibitors for the 2024 edition, taking place April 11 – 14, 2024 at Navy Pier’s Festival Hall (600 E. Grand Ave).

Expo Chicago has named the 170 galleries set to take part in the fair’s 2024 edition, its first held under the leadership of Frieze, which acquired the event alongside the Armory Show last year.

The artist's "The Last Resort Artist Retreat," in partnership with Tiffany Atrium, hosted its first 5-day symposium, focusing on growth, sustainability, and impact.

The High Line today announces that two vibrant works by Derrick Adams are now on view on the High Line – Moynihan Connector Billboard, which overlooks the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel from its location on Dyer Avenue between 30th and 31st Streets.

“Dialogues,” on view at Patron Gallery, serves as a microenvironment displaying not only individual works but also the symbiotic call-and-response relationships that build Chicago’s rich art world. The five featured artists invited one or multiple artists with whom they turned on a faucet within their respective practices. Collectively, the paired works display the hidden dialogues these artists have shared.

Near the beginning of his film I’m good at love, I’m good at hate, it’s in between I freeze, 2017/2023, Michael Rakowitz reads a missive to Leonard Cohen (1934–2016): “Dear Leonard, I hope this letter finds you well.

Because it's so easy on the eyes and served up in a nicely digestible serving size, you might be tempted to breeze right through the new paintings survey at Milwaukee Art Museum. But, '50 Paintings,' which opens Friday, Nov. 17, is like a fine wine or a great chef's most heavenly creation. It should be savor

The Conscientious Artist

SIGHTLINES increases the visibility of African art, bringing metal arts from the 19th and 20th centuries together with works by contemporary African artists.

Chicago artist Michael Rakowitz’s solo exhibition, “The Monument, The Monster and The Maquette” at Jane Lombard Gallery in New York City

Where's Marty? Taking a look at the work of Derrick Adams ahead of this weekend's Artscape festival

Highlights from New York galleries and the art magazines from the last few weeks.

It’s an interesting moment for artist Jacob Hashimoto. For nearly three decades, his kite-constructed works have captivated viewers with a fusion of meticulous hand-craftsmanship and the optical effect of digital pixels

The fall art season is buzzing and galleries have opened new shows coinciding with the most recent Armory fair.

Derrick Adams is serious about leisure. His jubilant, candy-colored paintings depict Black subjects in repose, in the midst of revelry, and surrounded by the creature comforts of home.

Bassim Al-Shaker’s first exhibition at Rhona Hoffman Gallery confronts difficult memories — and represents a distinct new style for the Iraqi-born artist.

The Iraqi-American artist on recreating the Hanging Gardens for asylum seekers in Gateshead

Bassim Al Shaker paints from experience in a war zone 

Michael Rakowitz’s The Waiting Gardens of the North presents a dream of public space as a place to think, play, be

"Sanctuary," a tribute to Victor Hugo Green and his travel guides, is now on view at Detroit's Wright Museum.

The Baltimore artist conjures a canvas out of his hometown.

A living installation at the Baltic Centre in Gateshead uses horticulture to send a political message while also offering solace

Olalekan Jeyifous and Amanda Williams’s design for the Shirley Chisholm Monument will be built following approval from the New York City Public Design Commission last week.

The Iraqi-American’s intricately-labelled planters and models form a repository for stories on everything from the destruction of Palestinian olives to homesick migrants

New York City is getting a new monument dedicated to the late pioneering Brooklyn congresswoman Shirley Chisholm following the approval on Monday, July 17, of a sculpture designed by artists Olalekan Jeyifous and Amanda Williams.

It took officials more than four years to say yes to the towering lattice steel statue by Amanda Williams and Olalekan B. Jeyifous.

Whether in his studio art, public commissions, or community-minded initiatives, the artist embraces a vision of connection, empowerment, and joy

Painting as a repertory of gestures.

Opening this week at Studio La Città, Verona, Hashimoto's solo show 'Noise' will feature the debut of a new body of works on canvas.

At Barbara Wien, Berlin, the artist reevaluates his love of Leonard Cohen in light of the musician’s stance on Palestine

The exhibition law of the land presents a selection of paintings from two of Brian Maguire’s recent bodies of work: Missing and Murdered Indigenous People (M&MIP), and The Remains, Arizona. Both series depict scenes of murdered or missing individuals, representing the voices of marginalized groups whose stories are not widely disseminated.

"home / work : paintings, picture-thinking & notes in progress”

Six months ago, artist Amanda Williams and a crew of volunteers planted the tulip bulbs to highlight systemic disinvestment. Now, the work, titled “Redefining Redlining,” is blooming.

Neighbors gathered on Tuesday at a “Blooming in Bronzeville” block party to marvel at the stunning bloom of 100,000 bright red tulips planted last fall by MacArthur Genius Grant Recipient and artist Amanda Williams as part of her ‘Redefining Redlining’ installation.

Vivian Johnson lived in a six-flat at 52nd and Prairie in the Washington Park neighborhood until age 6. The building was destroyed and is today the site of a work by South Side artist Amanda Williams, but Johnson, 88, can still recall what it was like before.

Anne Wilson interviewed by Aimee Resnick for the Northwestern Art Review.

No matter what was happening with the outside world, everything was alright in Chicago last week — especially as digital public art program ART on THE MART inaugurated its fifth season last Friday night by unveiling a short, bright animated feature from Derrick Adams amongst the balmy weather welcoming EXPO CHICAGO. Adams showed work at the art fair with West Town-based Rhona Hoffman Gallery, and installed another “Funtime Unicorn” on Navy Pier, where it went down.

The tulips were planted by local residents and volunteers in October as part of a public work by Chicago artist Amanda Williams meant to redefine redlining. Six months later, they’re lighting up the previously vacant lots.

In the warmth of Saturday's springtime sun, artist Amanda Williams and her daughters looked over several brownfield lots in the Washington Park neighborhood that had been laid waste for years by the racist federal practice known as redlining but now were carpeted with tulips in bloom, painting the cityscape a soft and buoyant red.

One might go to an art fair anticipating spectacle, but what I found at Expo Chicago was much more heartening, and deeply Midwestern.

The core of visual artist Derrick Adams' work is Black joy, showcasing vibrant images and installations that represent a life of leisure that our community deserves. This is best displayed in his famous Funtime Unicorn series celebrating Black joy, love and play. Now the work will be blown-up in a larger-than-life display at Chicago's ART on THE MART.

Irish artist Brian Maguire travelled to the Amazon as research for his latest show in Dublin's Kerlin Gallery which runs until April 8th, 2023.

The artist discusses the politics of representing Black leisure and play in his 'Motion Picture Paintings' series, currently on view at The FLAG Art Foundation, New York 

Gagosian has taken on the global representation of Derrick Adams, one of today’s most beloved artists. Adams will have his first show with Gagosian at the gallery’s location in Beverly Hills, California, in September.

His latest exhibition at Rhona Hoffman gallery, titled “…and friends,” as a reference to a range of early educational TV programming usually meant to teach compassion and friendship, features paintings showcasing a Black child with a puppet. Adams reflects on the inflated, abstracted nature of contemporary American and African American reality as seen through television and media—their influence takes center stage whether concealed or unapologetically in-your-face.

“It has to deal with strife and challenges and trying to be optimistic in the face of adversity. And you take all those things into your studio, and you try to do something with them, as an ingredient.”

In her world, there is no detritus and everything (everyone) is charged with potential.

His new paintings, with their perfect planes of color, expand on the theme of “Black Joy,” proving that delight and humor are their own form of resistance.

Spencer Finch is interested in shifting light, both as a subject and as an artistic method. He is fascinated with changes in light at different times of the day and year, from one location to another, and with how light shifts as it is refracted through atmosphere, clouds, and windows, or reflected in different surfaces. To explore these changes in his work, he employs a variety of transparent, tinted, translucent, reflective, and diaphanous materials that alter or shift the quality of light. Ultimately, he wants to create what he calls “constantly changing optical events,” where light is continually shifting.

What distinguishes Ledgerwood’s work from the earlier generation of women artists working in the domain of Pattern and Decoration is its bluntness and humor.

Nature’s Revenge, a new exhibition at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, showcases drawings by architect and artist James Wines.

Stirring away from modernist seriousness, architect, artist and environmentalist James Wines has been creating controversial masterpieces for decades.

In her exhibition Sunny, Judy Ledgerwood has bold intentions. She began working on the paintings last January when she was searching for color during many gray days

Grand Lobby includes 24 TSA security lanes, immersive displays, art installations

There’s simply not enough time to see all the art in the world. In CULTURED’s new monthly column, Duly Noted, New York contributing arts editor Jacoba Urist cuts through the noise to tell you about the most important art shows and why you need to see them

Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz's request for the museum to return an Assyrian sculpture follows a larger, decades-long struggle to gain repatriation.

The artist says he will share custody of his replicas with an Iraqi institution

CBS2's Dave Carlin profiles a visual artist whose work is now seen in several New York City neighborhoods.

Iraqi American artist Michael Rakowitz has called on the British Museum to return an artifact to Iraq in exchange for the donation of a large-scale work by him.

Sculptor Michael Rakowitz says he will give his fourth-plinth bull to Tate Modern if Iraq can share custody

Inside the busiest train station in America, taking a moment to slow down can feel unnatural. But new artwork inside Penn Station combats that feeling by bringing the natural world inside. 

Want to see new art in New York this weekend? Start in the Lower East Side to see a tense group show about women, then head to Chelsea for Spencer Finch’s show at the Hill Art Foundation. Then slide over to Brooklyn to explore Nöle Giulini’s art made from kombucha.

Celebrating the richness and vibrancy of Black culture and community.

The Davis Street Drawing Room is Anne Wilson's new experimental and public facing art project. Textile parts, excavations from years of Wilson’s art-making, form an archive displayed over multiple horizontal surfaces and walls in her studio (now drawing room) in Evanston, Illinois. The organization of lace fragments, linens, worn cloth, and glass bobbins is based on textile properties: rolls, stacks, layers, piles, balls, and cones. This art project transforms Wilson’s studio into a site for close observation.

The city’s reigning artists, gallerists, curators, and community builders have created a style all their own

Themes explored in next summer’s temporary exhibi5on may include diaspora, migra5on, displacement and civic gathering.

The artist’s The invisible enemy should not exist… at Green Art Gallery, Dubai is a sensitive reconstruction of ancient Iraqi history that offers something beyond nostalgia.

Black visual artists may not be a topic that comes up in everyday conversation. But with more and more bright minds creating mixed media that expresses the Black experience, it's a subject that you may want to brush up on for your next dinner party. Here is a crash course on seven Black visual artists whose work you should know—from the color-drenched realism of Jordan Casteel to Gordon Parks black-and-white cultural snapshots—so you can drop a few gems of knowledge between courses.

Two new books and one expanded edition of the photographs of Gordon Parks look at the work of the famed photographer from three decades of his career: the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Taken together, the books show that Parks’ humanistic commitment to exposing the effects of race and class in America never wavered.

While preparing for "Sweet Spot," his upcoming show at LGDR & Wei in Hong Kong,​ the artist made the time to create Cultured​'s​ next commemorative anniversary cover.

"It's huge and it seems surreal, but it’s also like you can stand here and see it," mused artist Amanda Williams on a brisk Oct. 15 morning as she watched volunteers plant 100,000 red tulip bulbs across several vacant Washington Park lots.

Ahead of unveiling a new commission at the IFPDA Print Fair in New York, Derrick Adams invites us inside his Brooklyn studio.

By spring, the intersection of 53rd Street and Prairie Avenue will be awash in a sea of red tulips — 6 acres of them to be exact, planted Oct. 15 by artist Amanda Williams, 2022 MacArthur grant recipient, South Side residents, and the Emerald South Economic Development Collaborative.

The Iraqi-American artist brings his 'The invisible enemy should not exist' exhibition to Green Art Gallery.

CHICAGO (CBS) -- Visionary artist and architect Amanda Williams has been named a MacArthur Fellow, one of three Chicagoans who received a so-called "Genius" grant this year.

Earlier this week, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced the prestigious fellowships known as “genius grants” that recognize society-changing people whose work offers inspiration and insight.

The 25 recipients of the $800,000 stipend include an author of a banned memoir, a creator of community art installations and a scientist obsessed with trash.

We owe it to Brian Maguire to be as blunt in describing his exhibition as he was in painting it: this show deals with death. “North and South of the Border” (at Rhona Hoffman Gallery) commits to displaying loss in three distinct forms. With so much variety in such a small space, it runs the risk of a cheap ploy relying on morbid fascination.

For the final installment of our social-practice series, we speak to Derrick Adams about his community work beyond the studio.
This is the final interview in a four-part series by Folasade Ologundudu featuring Black artists across generations who work with social practice.

The masterful painting in Brian Maguire's work, the subject of a new exhibition at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery, is so beautiful that it takes a minute to process the sadness depicted—the aftermath of violence and the toll it exacts on the human condition. Whether it's the large building in Aleppo, Syria, a once-thriving structure now left in ruins by war, or the skulls and human remains left decaying in the Arizona desert, the casualty of our war on immigration, the only glimpse of hope we can find is the blue sky, a reminder that nature carries on with or without us.

In the suspended worlds of upstate New York-based artist Jacob Hashimoto, a multitude of undulating forms and layers begin with a single element: a kite.

“Gentle Content,” a group exhibition at Rhona Hoffman, has a visible challenge: how to show four artists with very different practices whose new works also happen to be almost entirely wall-based. Instead of interlacing works by different artists to knit a unifying curatorial vision, which is what curators of small group shows sometimes do for a gallery setting, curator Julia Birka-White has chosen to assign a wall to each artist, allowing space for each to vignette their own distinct style and narrative. This strategy works for this exhibition in interesting ways.

“If the U.S. cultural present were a color,” Anna Watkins Fisher writes in her new book, “it would be Safety Orange.” The highly visible hue is the subject of a new 98-page volume, Safety Orange, which came out in January as part of the University of Minnesota Press’s reliably good “Forerunners” series. The book considers the color as an emblem of neoliberal “responsibilization.”

In American industrial hubs during World War II, what’s known as the “arsenal of democracy” rapidly manufactured the materials to support the Allied military efforts overseas. This largely invisible labor included a diverse workforce producing everything from steel and ammunition to the grease that lubricated tanks, airplanes, and weapons.

5. Gentle Content: Through painting, sculpture and drawing, the artists in this group show take on some of the most pressing political issues of today using disparate approaches.
Through August 6

Several cities leap to mind when discussing contemporary art galleries in the U.S.: Los Angeles, with its recent influx of East Coast spaces opening West Coast outposts. Palm Beach, as growing populations and support for the scene have turned seasonal locales into year-round ventures. New York, always ubiquitous. But Chicago seems perennially overlooked.

“We are thrilled to introduce the Tiffany Atrium platform, creating a centralized hub for our continued journey in the worlds of diversity, equity, and inclusion,” said Anthony Ledru, the Chief Executive Officer of Tiffany & Co. To celebrate this monumental moment for Tiffany & Co., the House collaborated with American visual artist and community-builder Derrick Adams to design original artwork called “I Shine, You Shine, We Shine.”

The Manhattan flagship of luxury jewelry giant Tiffany & Co. became the scene for a benefit art auction preview and the launch of a new initiative focused on fostering a more diverse and inclusive jewelry industry through commitment, leadership, and learning. Amid the cases of dazzling precious metals and gemstones, the real glow emanated from the morning's focal point: Derrick Adams' I Shine, You Shine, We Shine, the genesis for the Tiffany Atrium logo.

Amanda Williams is the recipient of the 2022 Public Art Dialogue Award for achievement in the field of public art. To mark the occasion, in February 2022, PAD member and scholar TK Smith conducted an interview with the artist. Together, they discussed Williams’ recent public art projects, the value of color and material, and the body in its absence.

Kaldor and LeWitt maintained a friendship until the artist’s death in 2007. Now, Kaldor is bringing LeWitt’s work to Australia for a third time, with Sol Le Witt: Affinities and Resonances opening at AGNSW, where LeWitt’s vibrant Wall drawing #955: loopy doopy (red and purple), 2000, is being painted onto the same southern wall of the John Kaldor Family Hall that carried LeWitt’s first Australian wall drawing 45 years ago.

As a longtime working artist, Natalie Frank has seen her fair share of visitors in and out of the studio. She’s come to realize that “people generally come to the studio with really good intentions,” she said. “It’s always important to remember that these people have complete lives and things going on that you have no idea about; that their schedules are insane and that you have their attention for a selection of time; and that it’s often not personal.”

Some months back, I received a kind invitation on your behalf: would I take a look at your Three Skulls (Trois Crânes)—the watercolor’d one—to note some thoughts and then, prospectively, to further shape my “seeing” for intended publication? My “yes” confirmed: it would be an honor and a privilege. 

Jasmine Sanders addresses the economic, architectural, and chromatic roots of Amanda Williams’s new paintings.

The unicorns have arrived at Rockefeller Center for their summer residency. Last week Derrick Adams was on hand for the unveiling of his delightful public art installation, “Funtime Unicorns,” located within Rock Center’s Channel Gardens. The work spoke to an eager and younger demographic than most of his gallery exhibitions: children.

The Art Production Fund and Rockefeller Center present “Funtime Unicorns,” an interactive sculpture show by New York-based visual artist Derrick Adams set in Channel Gardens and on view through September 9. Adams’s multi-disciplinary art practice has always centered the Black experience through a lens of pop culture, self-image, and humanity, and this newest show—being the debut production of his venture Derrick Adams Editions—invests this idea of Blackness with a mythical, colorful, and playful dimension in an urban setting.

Derrick Adams is broadening his artistic practice through a new venture eponymously dubbed DERRICK ADAMS EDITIONS. Launched yesterday, the first release on the site draws from his Floater series of paintings, by bringing the black unicorn character to life.

When Brian Maguire, an Irish painter, talks about his work, he sounds more like a documentary filmmaker or a war correspondent. He wants to depict the plights of “people who are invisible, people that were put down,” he said. “I want to tell their story. We are storytellers." His exhibition at the Missoula Art Museum, “In the Light of Conscience,” draws on work from his travels across the world: Mexico and Arizona, Europe and Syria.

It has been more than 65 years since Gordon Parks came to Mobile to shoot photos for a Life Magazine article on segregation, but his work continues to reverberate. Just last week, the Gordon Parks Foundation honored a woman featured in one of those photos. The story spans decades, but the latest chapter began last year, when an exhibition of Parks’ iconic “Segregation Story” photos finally came to Mobile, courtesy of the Mobile Museum of Art.

In New York City, five must-see exhibitions are dedicated to Amanda Williams, Vivian Browne, Shikeith, Alberta Whittle, Alanis Forde, and Akilah Watts. The artists work in a variety of mediums, most prominently painting.

Concurrent to her fascination with color theory, the artist took it upon herself to use this knowledge in order to reclaim for the people spaces decalred unworthy, employing her own personal theory of color to find a common ground.

Michael Rakowitz featured in Contemporary Art Daily

Can race and color be separated? Deeply concerned with the way that color shapes our world, Chicago-based architect and artist Amanda Williams has long engaged with this question in her practice. Williams’s ongoing fascination with color is rooted in a quest to unearth the possibilities and limits of racialized—both theoretical and real—readings of color.

In the late 1940s, Life magazine published a multipage photo spread titled "Harlem Gang Leader," depicting the gang wars that had taken control of the New York neighborhood. Through contemplative, yet often violent portraits of the gangs, photographer Gordon Parks captured the complexity and nuance of an area that was often misjudged.

At a time when the country is spinning in circles trying to make sense of race, ward off inhumanity and define social justice, Parks’s artistic heirs are uniquely positioned to shed light, offer guidance and question the status quo. They’re doing so with heartening audacity and blessed urgency.

How can it be that America’s greatest photographer produced a striking, original and insightful body of work highlighting an important aspect of the most dramatic event in the nation’s history and those pictures are almost unknown? Ironically, the photos were commissioned by one of the largest corporations in the world specifically for the purpose of promotion.

Using food packaging and newspapers as materials, US artist Michael Rakowitz brings back treasures Iraq lost to ISIS – and to Western museums.

A photo on display at the Carnegie Museum of Art shows a dozen workmen looking out from a dingy freight elevator, their eyes trained directly at the camera. Their faces show resolve. The year is 1944 and these men work in the Pittsburgh Grease Works, a hulking operation that took up two whole blocks in the Strip District and was the largest lubrication manufacturing facility in the world.

To call Gordon Parks (1912–2006) a Renaissance man would be a massive understatement. A photographer, filmmaker, writer, musician/composer, and painter, Parks enjoyed an extraordinary career that landed him everywhere from Hollywood to the front lines in the battle for Civil Rights.

After two long years of virtual celebration, last night, the Gordon Parks Foundation’s annual gala has returned stronger than ever. At the height of evening traffic, art aficionados, curators, activists, and more entered the doors of Cipriani 42nd Street for a night celebrating social justice and the arts in the name of Gordon Parks.

Collection of 244 Works, Organized into 15 Study Sets, Advances Opportunities for Scholars and Students to Engage with Parks’s Legacy through Research, Exhibitions, and Multidisciplinary Curricula

Michael Rakowitz is a US American-Iraqi artist who gained recognition for his project “paraSITE” in the early 2000s. The editorial team at Parasite Art reached out to him, as one of the first artists in our knowledge to use the concept of the parasite in his work.

Michael Rakowitz and Heather Phillipson among those selected to create new works through Imperial War Museums' 14-18 NOW Legacy Fund

A group of 252 works spanning the influential Black photographer’s long career will be housed at the Washington HBCU’s research center.

Michael Rakowitz and Cathy Wilkes are among the artists creating brand new works for the Imperial War Museums’ 14-18 Now Legacy Fund.

Gagosian is pleased to present CANDYLADYBLACK, an exhibition of new paintings by Amanda Williams from the series What Black Is This, You Say? (2020–). Williams’s painting What black is this you say?—Although rarely recognized as such, ‘The Candy Lady’ and her ‘Candy Store’ provided one of your earliest examples of black enterprise, cooperative economics, black women CEOs and good customer service”—black (07.24.20) (2021) was included, along with earlier works in the series, in Social Works II at Gagosian London in 2021. CANDYLADYBLACK is her first solo exhibition at the gallery.

In his 1956 segregation series, Parks paired Black women's elegance with pain. Their strength inspired me to discover my own.

Gordon Parks was the 15th of 15 children, grew up poor in rural Kansas when Jim Crow held sway, was on his own by the time he was 15, and at one point was playing piano in a brothel to get a few dollars in his pocket. Yet, despite these inauspicious beginnings, Parks became one of 20th-century America’s most accomplished Renaissance men.

One of his most striking new works is a towering form built of artifacts with direct ties to torn-down memorials of Robert E. Lee.

Kemper Museum’s ‘Natalie Frank: Unbound’ exhibit finds truth in fairy tales. Who was the real Big Bad Wolf, with teeth gleaming, poised to sink into pale young flesh? Why did Sleeping Beauty drift into that deep, anesthetized slumber? Was the ever-gentle Cinderella who graced our childhood TV screens the same one who had birds peck out the eyes of her stepsisters on her wedding day?

Throughout her career, Rubins has used industrial and found objects as the raw materials for her sculptures and drawings. In her most recent “Fluid Space” series, she uses fragments of ready-made cast metal animals, breaking apart the animal forms and composing the fragments into new forms that sprout from tables and stools.

Context is everything in Derrick Adams: Sanctuary, now at the African American Museum in Philadelphia. At a glance, the works are lighthearted—deceptively so, because they were inspired by a practical response to racism.

Derrick Adams moved to New York from Baltimore nearly 30 years ago because there weren’t many opportunities for him as an artist. Now Adams, 52, whose work has been recognized worldwide, wants to create spaces for Black artists in Baltimore, so they won’t have to leave home to find success.

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Relic
(Arts+Public Life)
Curator Ciera McKissick investigates which Black artifacts of today might inform the future in this concise group exhibition.
Through May 27

In Looks, artist Derrick Adams references the immense potential of a wig to alter an appearance and construct a persona. The exhibition, which is on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art through May 29 alongside a survey of art and fashion photography titled The New Black Vanguard (opens May 8), shows nine of Adam’s portraits rendered in the artist’s distinct geometric style evocative of “Benin heads, Kwele masks, Kota reliquary figures,” and other West African masks and sculptures, he says in a statement.

An in-depth Carnegie Museum of Art exhibition of photography by Gordon Parks brings Pittsburghers inside a bustling grease plant — where your relatives may be waiting. The photos Parks took captured the difficulty of the work and quietly illustrated persisting labor divisions, including those that ran along racial lines. 

New Mexico-born multi-media artist Martha Tuttle presents her show “Geologies,” on display through July 10 at Guesthouse JH.

The biennial’s 2023 edition will feature more than 140 artists including Kader Attia, Hassan Hajjaj, Mona Hatoum, Lubaina Himid and Carrie Mae Weems

When visitors step into artist Jacob Hashimoto’s abstract worlds at the University of Mississippi Museum and Historic Houses, he hopes that they can see faint reflections of the world they know and use them as a gateway to new ideas and perspectives.

Within “The Other Sun,” the artist’s exhibit at the museum, thousands of small, simple kites hang from the ceiling. Together, however, these jungles of paper pieces meld into sweeping abstracted landscapes.

The UM Museum is hosting a digital artist reception and lecture from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. Tuesday (April 19) in the museum’s Speaker’s Gallery. Refreshments will be available alongside a gallery walkthrough, with Hashimoto delivering his talk via Zoom at 2 p.m.

I am still processing Martha Tuttle’s exhibition at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, “An ear, a hand, a mouth, an offering, an angel.” Revisiting the images in my phone’s camera roll, I zoom in on a patch of tufted hand-spun wool or the taught seam where it connects with a swath of painted silk, creating a crisp silhouette of the aluminum stretcher bar just behind. I smile at a photo of an adult and child crouching low to examine the titular installation which consists of small natural(ish) objects—quartz, stones cast into steel, a nut casing—arranged lovingly, meticulously in the gallery corner. (What makes one material more “natural” than another? Tuttle might ask).

The archive will catalogue local achievements in art, entrepreneurship, and other areas.

After two dormant COVID years, Chicago’s art market has come roaring back to life with the return of EXPO, the Midwest’s largest art fair.

CHICAGO — Late last month Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said she “fully expects” to return a controversial statue of Christopher Columbus to its former pedestal in Grant Park.

That was concerning news to members of the mayor’s committee reviewing Chicago monuments, emails obtained by the Chicago Tribune show.

University of Illinois at Chicago art history professor Lisa Lee sent an email to the committee and city officials on March 29, saying she “was surprised/astounded/perplexed/flummoxed/distraught by the Mayor’s comments about the Columbus statue ... and I am wondering if you might be able to give us an update about the status of the report or any other insights if possible?”

What’s your favorite fairy tale? Do you like modern-day kids’ versions, or the old adult stories, filled with sex and violence? If you’re reading The Pitch, we’re fairly certain we know the answer.

LeWitt is recognizable as a true artist not only by his works but by his heartfelt words. The best way to convince any creative person of LeWitt's legitimacy and importance as an artist might be to hear what he had to say to his peers.

Fish’s artworks elude every attempt to enclose them in language, and they resist explanation. They become something only a painting can be.

by Brandon Reintjes, Senior Curator and Carey Powers, Marketing and Communications Coordinator

In 2020, Irish artist Brian Maguire was invited by MAM to participate in the Emily Hall Tremaine Curatorial Research project investigating how the museum might present an exhibition around the issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People (MMIP).* MAM is planning a juried exhibition of contemporary Native artists who are engaged with this issue in addition to an exhibition of Maguire’s work featuring portraits of those who have gone missing. Maguire was in Missoula from May to September 2021, a rare artist-in-residency for the museum. Maguire came as a 2021 Fulbright Scholar, a prestige that allowed him to travel from Ireland specifically for this project.

Two paintings that each span at least 12 feet in width at the Missoula Art Museum depict the carnage of bombings in Aleppo, Syria, during its civil war.

They’re from a series Irish artist Brian Maguire has titled, “War Changes Its Address.”

“I think it's probably the simplest, most poignant way to talk about how these scenes are replayed over and over again,” said Carey Powers, the MAM’s communications and marketing director.

It will open in Chicago's Willis Tower

The interactive exhibition Color Factory, known for its photogenic displays and massive ball pits, is opening its third permanent location, inside Chicago’s Willis Tower.

The 25,000-square-foot space—the Color Factory’s biggest to date—will feature artists from around the world, including Camille Walala, Yuri Suzuki, Tomislav Topic (of the artist duo Quintessenz)  Liz West, Anne Patterson, Christine Wong Yap, Harvey and John, and Michele Bernhardt, as well as four artists with ties to Chicago in Edra Soto, Akilah Townsend, Adrian Kay Wong, and Emilie Baltz.

A Smithsonian traveling exhibition powerfully dismantles corrosive myths with triumphant portraits and the stories of African American men

In the Midwest in the 1930s, Gordon Parks was a young railroad porter who would gather magazines that passengers left behind and study the photographs carefully.

He’d focus on images of migrant workers, taken by Farm Security Administration photographers documenting the social and economic plight of Americans during the Depression.

“I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs,” Parks later recalled. “I knew at that point I had to have a camera.”

Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912, the youngest of 15 children, Parks grew up on his family’s farm and then moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, to live with an older sister, leaving high school before graduation.

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Black American artists often have portrayed racial injustice through images of conflict and suffering. Derrick Adams, a highly acclaimed mid-career New York artist, whose work is the subject of an elegant and seductive exhibition on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, has taken a different path.

The 52-year-old multidisciplinary artist portrays Black life through images of ravishing beauty that are steeped in his deep knowledge of art history and a commitment to highly polished visual thinking and object-making.

EXPO Offers Limited Edition Derrick Adams Print

EXPO CHICAGO will offer an exclusive print edition by acclaimed artist Derrick Adams in celebration of the fair’s in-person return to Navy Pier, April 7-10. “Silver Lining” is an edition of one hundred and is printed by Tandem Press, publisher of fine art prints, in collaboration with Rhona Hoffman Gallery. “We renewed a tradition of the early Chicago fairs in 2019 by collaborating with artists Nick Cave and Bob Faust and Landfall Press, to publish a limited edition print that commemorated the exposition and supported EXPO CHICAGO’s Curatorial Initiatives programming,” Tony Karman, EXPO president-director says in a release. “We are extremely proud to celebrate the return of our in-person 2022 exposition with this extraordinary new print.” The print is available for advance purchase here and on-site at EXPO CHICAGO.

EXPO CHICAGO the international exposition of contemporary and modern art, today announced an exclusive print edition by acclaimed artist Derrick Adams in celebration of the fair's in-person return to Navy Pier, April 7-10.

Maguire (b. 1951, Dublin) is an Irish artist whose work stems from his involvement in the civil rights movement of Northern Ireland in the 1970s. In his work, Maguire draws attention to marginalized voices by occupying a role as facilitator, which he is uniquely careful not to exploit. This overview of Maguire's human rights-focused paintings include important loans from Christian Groenke and Gulia Bruckman, the TIA Foundation in Sante Fe, New Mexico, the Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin, the Fergus McCaffery Gallery in New York City, and Gallerie Christophe Gaillard In Paris.

The threads connecting Nashville InternaAonal Airport’s arAsAc redesign reflect the state’s peaceful rolling hillsides, its tranquil glimmering rivers and, of course, popular country music. There’s even a reference book outlining Tennessee’s most beauAful features for the designers and architects recreaAng the expanding 1987-era terminal. The terminal centerpiece will be a $900,000 shimmering hanging sculpture made of 8,000 fiberglass rods that mimic the many colors of the Tennessee sky and clouds.

The work of Michael Rakowitz (b. 1973, Long Island) interrogates the history of museums and their historical complicity in extractive and colonial legacies. His practice aims to establish a new dynamic of reparation and accountability. Born into a Jewish-Iraqi family, the American artist explores the transformations brought about by exile and finds ways to resuscitate images, forms, or architecture(s) that have disappeared, or are about to be erased.

Whether you want to call it Black History Month or as Ye has suggested, Black Future Month, we’d like to take each and every day to promote the incredible work being made by Black creators from around the globe. From the legendary prose of acclaimed novelist, Toni Morrison, Lubaina Himid’s theatrical compositions, to Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s disruptive portraiture — we picked our top exhibitions by prominent and emerging Black artists to see in 2022.

From photography by Gordon Parks to new watercolours by Madeline Hollander, the APAA (Association of Professional Art Advisors) share their top picks from the Frieze Los Angeles 2022 edition.

Celebrated for his documentary photography of civil rights issues and poverty throughout the United States, this work by Gordon Parks stands out for the considered composition and thoughtfulness captured on both subjects faces, and the architecture we find them in. 

The conceptual artist Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) is best known for his programmatic wall drawings and modular structures, but alongside these works he generated thousands of lithographs, silkscreens, etchings, aquatints, woodcuts, and linocuts. Strict Beauty: Sol LeWitt Prints is the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s printmaking to date, including single prints and series, for a total of over 200 individual prints.

Dealers want to control the artists’ narrative and pricing, but investors want to leave it to the market

Chicago gallery owner Rhona Hoffman has three or four collectors she won’t sell to again.

“They broke the rule,” says the contemporary art dealer.

That commandment to collectors: If you later decide to sell your artwork, consign it back to the gallery—do not put it up at auction.

When buyers ignore this rule and auction off recently purchased pieces, it’s called flipping.

American artist Michael Rakowitz (b. 1973) grew up in an Iraqi family in New York, and lives and works in Chicago. Across two decades, his practice has focused on highlighting the invisibility of Iraqis beyond images of conflict, either through food, archaeological artifacts or other narratives. In “Réapparitions,” on view from February 25 to June 12, 2022 at FRAC in France, the artist recreates or “re-appears” the missing and destroyed artifacts taken from the National Museum of Iraq after the American invasion in the early 2000s.

Conversation between Marina Adams and Martha Tuttle, published in the print issue of BOMB Magazine, Winter 2022.

Yale has acquired some of the Black photographer’s best-known images.

INDIVIDUALLY, THE PHOTOGRAPHS GORDON PARKS produced during his long and storied career are iconic: Ella Watson, Park’s own American Gothic, posed stoically in front an American flag with a broom and a mop; Muhammad Ali, up close, his head bowed in contemplation; an unnamed Black family in Shady Grove, Alabama, waiting for ice cream at the “colored” window. But taken together, says curator Melissa Barton, the impact is overwhelming. “It is so moving to be able to see all these photographs all at once,” she says. “It’s so powerful.”

Recently, I had the pleasure of working with my friend Kyle Simon, who has started Farrington Press outside of Joshua Tree, California. The press is off-grid, meaning it functions on solar power, and the water and materials Kyle brings in strapped to his pickup truck.

Black history: These African American figures deserve to be celebrated.

There are a number of hidden heroes that are rarely discussed in classrooms, or around the dinner table, and while their names might not sound immediately familiar, these famous figures have shaped history and deserve the spotlight. 

A free community screening of the film “A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks” is planned as part of Black History Month at the Oceanside Museum Of Art.

Tifrere hopes to add Sam Gilliam and Frank Bowling to her collection this year.

Curator and art advisor Mashonda Tifrere has been collecting art since she was 18, when she signed her first music publishing deal in 1999. Highlights of her music career include being a featured performer on a Jay-Z single and a role as part of the original cast of VH1 reality show Love & Hip Hop: New York.

A wonderful assortment of extras pays tribute to Gordon Parks’s breakthrough film.

Based on Gordon Parks’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, The Learning Tree unfolds through the eyes of the teenage Newt (Kyle Johnson) as he experiences his first pangs of love and struggles to retain his self-respect and ideals in the face of rampant prejudice. While it’s hardly a radical film in its racial politics, the small-scale, deeply personal drama is compelling in its specificity whenever it homes in on the more quotidian aspects of black lives in rural America that, even today, are rarely glimpsed on screen.

Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville was born into a rich family in the fall of 1652. At thirteen, she was wed by her mother to the middle-aged Baron d’Aulnoy, who had purchased his title. Three months pregnant that same year, in the summer of 1666, she inked a jinx in the margins of a fifteenth-century religious play from their library:

It has been almost 200 years since this book was made, and whoever will have this Book should know that it was mine and that it belongs to our house. Written in Normandie near Honfleur. Adieu, Reader, if you have my book and I don’t know you and you don’t appreciate what’s inside, I wish you ringworm, scabies, fever, the plague, measles, and a broken neck. May God assist you against my maledictions.

Madame d’Aulnoy would bear six children. (The first two died young.) But she’d also become the mother of a best-selling genre in early modern France: the literary fairy tale, in which her curses would be very much at home.

For his solo exhibition “Pleat,” Richard Rezac transformed the gallery into a cabinet of wonders. All fourteen of the objets d’art on display—two mobiles, two stabiles, and ten wall pieces—were curious constructions, at once eccentric and rarefied. His sculptures occasionally call to mind pieces by Alexander Calder in their formal inventiveness, but are more gnomic and, of course, less monumental. Each work is crafted from an ingenious combination of contradictory materials, such as hard inorganic metal or cement (aluminum, bronze, Hydrocal) and soft organic wood (cherry, maple, pine), the dialectical conundrums suggesting the inherent absurdity of art by reason of its alienness to lived experience, its remoteness from reality.

There is something reassuring about living in a city stretched along a lake. In Chicago, once you figure out where you are in relation to Lake Michigan, your sense of direction crystallizes. Streets snap against a grid whose point of origin is downtown at the intersection of State and Madison. Addresses increase or decrease from that center, with odd numbers on the south and east sides of the streets, and even numbers to the north and west. A longtime graphic designer who grew up here once told me that he could determine exactly where he was in the city just by looking at the addresses. That might seem mundane—and we do of course now have Google Maps—but I believe this sense of order in Chicago has a grounding effect in subtle ways that can be specific and unexpected and diffusely felt.

Michael Rakowitz’s work in Istanbul is of momentous significance, as his solo show, ‘The invisible enemy should not exist,’ offers locals and travelers a window into his epic vision of repatriation

Derrick Adams’s studio in a partially converted Brooklyn warehouse is a bright, tidy space: white walls, a pair of white sofas. In September, a painting hanging on one of the walls is a peephole into another world altogether: a museum gallery is decked out for a party. There are balloons, and a “Happy Birthday” banner. On the museum wall, in this tableau, is a painting of the movie poster for Mr. Soul, the 2018 documentary about groundbreaking TV producer and talk show host Ellis Haizlip and his program SOUL!, which ran on public television from 1968 to 1973, and threw a spotlight on the Black Arts Movement. In the center of the gallery are two sculptures: the late artist Elizabeth Catlett’s 1955 Target, the bust of an African American man from the collection of the High Museum in Atlanta, and a sculpture of a powerful female figure by Mali’s Bambara people. Both are wearing party hats, and the Bambaran sculpture has a blowout noisemaker in its mouth. The sole human guest at the festivities is a museum security guard, a Black woman, who blows a bright pink celebratory bubble of gum. The piece exudes joy; it is itself a celebration of Black culture.

Shaft, the pioneering blaxploitation film directed by Gordon Parks, came out fifty years ago. To commemorate the anniversary, Howard Greenberg Gallery has mounted an exhibition of Parks’s photographs from 1948 through ’67 that purportedly exemplify a “cinematic approach” to the medium and thus foretell the artist’s successful crossover. This conceptual framework is a slippery one—after all, the look of mainstream cinema changed dramatically over that period—but the curatorial gesture is nonetheless productive. Some purists might prefer to keep the artist’s exquisitely composed and carefully printed documentary photographs, many of which he created on assignment for Life magazine, separate from his later sojourn into popular entertainment. This show asks, at least in theory, what we might learn by reappraising the canonical in relation to the mass cultural.

From overhyped Banksys to Keith Haring lookalikes, artists weigh in on their pet peeves (and what they admire, too).

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but artists often see things differently from the rest of us. A masterpiece to a layperson’s eye might only make an artist roll theirs. On the other hand, we might be too quick to overlook an extraordinary work hiding in plain sight.

We asked six artists what they think are the most underrated and overrated works throughout art history. Here’s what they said.

Anthology Film Archives screens a near-complete retrospective of the photographer’s films, including the bio-pic “Leadbelly” and the private-eye thriller “Shaft.”

The photographer Gordon Parks was the first Black director to make a major-studio feature: “The Learning Tree,” from 1969, an autobiographical drama about growing up in Kansas in the nineteen-twenties. It’s screening in Anthology Film Archives’ near-complete retrospective of Parks’s films (through Dec. 11). Also included are the TV movie “Solomon Northup’s Odyssey,” the bio-pic “Leadbelly,” the personal documentary “Moments Without Proper Names,” and, of course, the Harlem-based private-eye thriller “Shaft.”

The “Slave Play” actress and the Chicago-based artist discuss generational gaps, success and the art that brought them each acclaim.

The painter Brian Maguire’s latest show, Remains, tells a story that none of us can turn our back on.

"It will take a minimum of 18 days to walk to Phoenix. You will need a minimum of three gallons of water per day per person.” That’s 54 gallons of water. It’s too much to carry, but without it anyone who tries to cross the Mexico-US border by walking through the Arizona-Sonoran Desert will die. These figures come from an enlarged poster pasted to the wall and stretching to near ceiling height at the Crawford art gallery in Cork as part of the Irish painter Brian Maguire’s latest show, Remains.

Through sculptural light installations, drawings and site-specific installations, Spencer Finch investigates ephemeral experiences and transforms them into sequences of color and light. Informed by his travels to various countries and by his own sensorial experiences of nature, music, and literature, Finch translates his observations of the world into two- and three-dimensional objects. In the spirit of scientific inquiry, Finch studies light and color, filtering his impressions through a personal cultural and historic lens. Finch’s work often reflects this dual approach of empirical study and subjective interpretation.

“Accesso” at Alfonso Artiaco was curated by art historian Christian Malycha and includes the work of six German artists.

Every month, hundreds of galleries showcase new exhibitions on the Artnet Gallery Network—and every week, we shine a spotlight on the exhibitions we think you should see. Check out what we have in store, and inquire more with one simple click.

What You Need to Know: Curated by art historian and writer Christian Malycha, “Accesso” at Naples Alfonso Artiaco gallery brings together works by three generations of German artists, namely André Butzer, Albert Oehlen, David Schutter, Jana Schröder, Raphaela Simon, and Ulrich Wulff. The exhibition is essentially broken into six solo exhibitions, and the artists have arranged their works within individual rooms in the gallery. Passing from the expressive freedom of Albert Oehlen’s works through to the contemporary visions of Jana Schröder and Raphaela Simon, the exhibition offers an open conversation about shifting artistic approaches across generations. 

Nathaniel Mary Quinn recently captivated audiences through a striking series of portraiture in “NOT FAR FROM HOME; STILL FAR AWAY,” held at the Gagosian‘s 980 Madison Avenue location. 

To follow, Quinn spoke about the development of the exhibition with Amanda Hunt, director of public programs and creative practice at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. The conversation probed how the artist draws on his own tragic life experiences to speak on the relationship between perception and memory.

This documentary celebrates how the work of the great photographer Gordon Parks brought a nuanced fidelity to Black experience.

In one of Gordon Parks’ photographs from 1942, a Black woman named Ella Watson stands erect, staring wearily into the lens. Watson, a widow supporting herself and two grandchildren, is pictured at her place of employment, where she cleans offices. She holds an upright broom in one hand, a mop by the other, in a stance echoing Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” painting. Rather than a rural house behind her, offering support and shelter, she stands before an American flag — the symbol of a country that has slighted her.

Anderson Cooper speaks with LaToya Ruby Frazier and director John Maggio about the new film detailing the life of legendary photographer Gordon Parks.

Instead of romanticizing military heroism, Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz’s sculpture acknowledges the atrocities and senselessness of war.

After previously looking at the issue of kidnapped women in Mexico, the Irish artist's exhibition at the Crawford highlights the dangerous journey by migrants crossing the border to the US 

The work of minimalist conceptual artist and SVA alum Sol LeWitt (1953 Illustration) can now be explored in a whole new way, thanks to a recently released app from Microsoft. In partnership with the tech giant and close collaboration with the late artist’s estate, New York–based curator and LeWitt expert Lindsay Aveilhé and experience-design agency ADA have created an immersive virtual experience of LeWitt’s singular works that allows users to take a deeper dive than ever before. 

Isabella Lauria, Associate Vice President, Head of Post-War to Present Sales and Specialist of Christie’s, speaks about Brooklyn-based artist Derrick Adams’ art market.

The artist dedicates this site-specific installation to “the perseverance of Black Americans in their pursuit of happiness.”

The Milwaukee Art Museum exhibition On Site: Derrick Adams features a multimedia wall mural and sculptural installation the artist created specifically for the museum. Featuring important sites of Black culture in Milwaukee, “Our Time Together” (2021) celebrates everyday life on a monumental scale.

For more than a decade, Razor House, the stunning cliffside mansion by architectural designer Wallace E. Cunningham in La Jolla, California, has alternately been described as a “magnum opus,” an “architectural masterpiece,” and “America’s coolest home.” But since purchasing the modernist gem in 2019, Grammy Award–winning singer Alicia Keys and her husband, renowned music producer Kasseem Dean (a.k.a. Swizz Beatz), have preferred to call the home where they and their two sons, Egypt and Genesis, now reside “Dreamland.” Explaining the name, Keys says the expansive, nearly 11,000-square-foot residence, which overlooks the Pacific Ocean and is rumored to be the inspiration for Tony Stark’s futuristic bachelor pad in the Iron Man movies, is “a place to create dreams and to be bold enough to dream your wildest dream—for us to even be here is a wildest dream.”

A panoramic view shows the entirety of the "Our Time Together mural" at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Derrick Adams' mural, inspired in part by "The Green Book," celebrates the rituals of everyday Black life and leisure.

Martha Tuttle’s paintings can be defined by belonging, in that they are seriously invested in a material process that takes the craft of the medium as part of its subject. The spinning, weaving, and dyeing necessary to structure these objects forms their image, so the compositions are fixed inside the substrate, rather than constituting separate layers. 

Six new exhibits will open at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center Saturday, Oct. 23, including solo exhibitions by Natalie Frank, William Ransom, B. Lynch and Michael Abrams and group shows featuring work by members of the Guild of Vermont Furniture Makers and the Vermont Glass Guild.

For its 40th anniversary, the Howard Greenberg Gallery is exhibiting works from Parks’s time at Life magazine documenting the Black experience.

Hill west architects unveils a first look at the interiors of its ‘olympia’ residences in DUMBO. the tower gently twists above the historic brooklyn neighborhood to look out across the east river waterfront toward lower manhattan. the thoughtful exteriors are occupied by 76 hand-crafted homes with interiors design by workstead. the team notes that its residences ‘reimagine luxury as craftsmanship and materiality that is rooted in the context of its location.’ the dwellings are services by over 38,000 sq ft of indoor and outdoor amenities to introduce ‘olympia’ as a dynamic and vibrant new community all on its own.

Whether you want to learn from the experts or stay ahead of knotty food politics: if you like cooking, there’s a podcast for that

Charles Le Brun’s drawing manual on human emotions has been used for centuries by artists and students as a model for depicting facial expressions. In David Schutter’s work, Le Brun’s manual is set to a different direction—a series of abstract drawings recalling vestiges of the human face animated by emotion. But Schutter’s drawings are neither copies nor portraiture. Rather, they are reflections on how Lebrun’s renderings were made.

For millenniums, the airborne objects have mesmerized cultures around the world. Now, a new generation of artists is taking their creation to new heights.

Recent recording of Anne Wilson's Artist Talk with Nneka Kai, moderated by Senior Curator Francine Weiss of The Newport Art Museum in conjunction with the exhibition “Hair Stories.”

Rubins’s remarkable, nearly five-decade practice is built on a series of contradictions.

Her monumental sculptures are simultaneously organic and otherworldly, fluid and static, exploding and imploding. Uniting the worlds of art and engineering, Rubins creates her works by amassing found everyday objects—mobile trailers, canoes, airplane parts, playground equipment—and assembling them into objects where time and space collide, pushing the bounds of what seems possible.

A newly commissioned large-scale wall mural and sculptural installation will be unveiled October 29 at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Created by Brooklyn-based artist Derrick Adams, Our Time Together will be a 93-foot work that reframes historical Black narratives.

“In Our Time Together, I highlight Milwaukee by representing commercial and social spaces known within the Black community,” said Derrick Adams. “These dwellings, and those who occupy them, are essential to the cultural, political and creative growth of American society, which is then spread out to a global audience. The installation reflects my respect and admiration for the perseverance of Black Americans in their pursuit of happiness and speaks to transformation, belonging and normalcy.”

The Artists’ Legacy Foundation today announced that Nancy Rubins (b. 1952)—celebrated for her innovative sculptural practice—is the recipient of its 2021 Artist Award. The unrestricted merit award of $25,000 is given to a visual artist whose primary medium is painting or sculpture in recognition of their professional achievements. Each year, ten artists are proposed for the Award by five anonymous nominators. Like the nominators, the jury of three comprises art-world peers who make the final decision.

RECORD has announced the 2021 winners of its Women in Architecture Design Leadership awards, which recognize and promote the role of women in the profession in the U.S. across five categories: Design Leader, New Generation Leader, Innovator, Activist and Educator. Now in its eighth year, the award’s winners for 2021 are Design Leader Annabelle Selldorf, New Generation Leader Amanda Williams, Innovator Julie Bargmann, Educator Deborah Berke, and Activist Tamarah Begay. Through their efforts in design and in tackling broader social challenges, these five women have proved to be inspiring leaders in the field of architecture and beyond.

At the heart of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum’s mission is the promise to commemorate the 2,983 killed as a result of the 9/11 and February 26, 1993 attacks. The Memorial and the Museum fulfills this sacred responsibility in many ways—through memorialization, through education and, in some cases, through artistic expression.

New and overlooked artists shine at the Armory Show, New York’s largest in-person fair since the pandemic, and other shows across the city.

The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) reopened its doors during the COVID epidemic on August 27, 2020. The entrance was taken over by a series of physical controls to guarantee the health of the few visitors that would be allowed in. Only a hundred guests were allowed each hour. In fact, the total capacity was capped at a quarter of the usual number. This experience—of being at the museum almost on our own—allowed for a different phenomenology of being there.

Green Art Gallery has announced that it has signed Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz to its stable. An exhibition of new works from the internationally well-regarded artist is scheduled for the autumn of 2022 at the gallery in Alserkal Avenue.

By Charles L. Davis II

The espousal of the doctrine of Negro inferiority by the South was
primarily because of economic motives and the inter-connected

political urge necessary to support slave industry; but to the watch-
ing world it sounded like the carefully thought out result of experi-
ence and reason; and because of this it was singularly disastrous for

modern civilization in science and religion, in art and government,
as well as in industry. The South could say that the Negro, even
when brought into modern civilization, could not be civilized, and
that, therefore, he and the other colored peoples of the world were
so far inferior to the whites that the white world had a right to rule
mankind for their own selfish interests.

– W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America

Chicago-based artist Amanda Williams – tipped by architect Frida Escobedo as one of 25 creative leaders of the future in Wallpaper’s 25th Anniversary Issue ‘5x5’ project – uses colour to dissect politics, urban landscapes and Black social space.

Richard Rezac, an artist in his late sixties, practices in Chicago. In 2018, the Renaissance Society, a space under the auspices of the University of Chicago, held a retrospective of three decades of the artist’s work, to considerable acclaim. In “Pleat,” the artist’s show now up in New York, Rezac’s work defies easy description, being a complex amalgam of truly ordinary materials placed as wall works, with one or two pieces hanging from the ceiling, which are all resolutely abstract. One looks for obvious influences without much success; the art may be a consequence of looking at minimalist sculpture, but this presupposes a concern with modernism, which Rezac shows little interest in. Instead, these are assemblages made of everyday materials, in which the substance and the theme are oriented toward a sophisticated populism, in today’s culture not a paradox in terms.

There's been a resurgence in recent years of artists using materials like textiles and ceramics in siting domestic settings as creative spaces, a nod to the influence of the 1970s Pattern and Decoration (P & D) art movement.

THE BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART (BMA) recently made a major acquisition announcement. The museum has received a promised gift of 90 works of art by nearly 70 artists from museum patrons Nancy Dorman and Stanley Mazaroff, alongside 175 purchases and gifts made during winter and spring 2021. 

Three architects, three journalists and two designers gathered over Zoom to make a list of the most influential and lasting buildings that have been erected — or cleverly updated — since World War II. Here are the results.

The eight participating artists are Diana Al-Hadid, Benny Andrews, Julian Charrière, Tau Lewis, Grayson Perry, Michael Rakowitz, Cammie Staros, and Yinka Shonibare CBE.

Critics of Rego's work have failed to engage with it on a meaningful level.

Each month, we’re spotlighting an artist we love—and whose work is currently live for bidding on Artnet Auctions. This month: Derrick Adams.

Embark on an outdoor art tour along England’s South East coast through our curated guide to the Waterfronts commissions.

Want more evidence that your professional career need not define you after you move on? These retirees — among them a former lawyer, a marketer, a teacher and a therapist — have become successful artists who have had major gallery showings or won prestigious awards, or both, with their “second act” of self-expression. To them, creativity and the passion to express it were always there; they just lay dormant, waiting for the right time to emerge.

What does it mean to watch and move through space, in dance and in life? As we emerge from the pandemic, we still have a moment to hold on to all that’s slow.

Baltimore-born, Brooklyn-based artist Derrick Adams is recognized for his portraits of scenes from everyday life celebrating Black culture and self-determination. I discuss with Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, founder of Salon 94, about his art market. Her New York City-based art gallery has represented Adams since September 2019. 

The artist's latest exhibition, “Only the Hand That Erases Writes the True Thing,” is now on view at Lisson Gallery, London.

Sara Softness reflects on a new series of sculptures by Nancy Rubins, Fluid Space (2019–21), “visual poems” that hint at the invisible and the unknown.

We’re living through a Gordon Parks renaissance. Parks achieved many firsts as an acclaimed Black photographer, writer, musician and film director, making him an obvious figure to celebrate as the art world reckons with racial injustice. 

Amanda Williams’s ‘Embodied Sensations’ at MoMA; Matthew Wong’s ink drawings; and installations by Cameron Rowland take on policing.

An in-depth podcast conversation on the artist's big influenced, from T.S. Eliot to Leonard Cohen.

On April 28, 2021 Design in Dialogue welcomed Amanda Williams, an artist whose work questions the ways that context changes the perception of the material culture of the built envionment. 

The new Waterfronts exhibition – part of the England’s Creative Coast project – brings contemporary sculpture to seaside towns to attract, and challenge, visitors

The Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz is best known for remaking lost artifacts out of food packaging. He talks to Apollo about his anti-war memorial for Margate and about mining history for new meanings. 

Esteemed by museums, curators, collectors, and fellow artists alike, Derrick Adams’s art is now the subject of a booming market, making him one of the most sought-after contemporary artists.

Growing up among the ‘onion fields and big skies’ of rural america, artist jacob hashimoto collected an open and abundant perspective. ‘It makes you see culture and cultural patrimony through an oddly shaped lens,’ he shares with designboom in this exclusive interview. 

“April is the cruellest month.” A century after TS Eliot immortalised a pavilion on Margate beach by writing The Waste Land there — “on Margate Sands I can connect nothing with nothing” — another American takes the poem’s opening lines as the title of his new public sculpture for this bleakly beautiful, socially troubled stretch of coast, and teases out many difficult global connections.

Artist Michael Rakowitz describes himself as someone who creates encounters, structures, and objects—his sculptural practice is “as an exertion of pressure,” he recently told Brooke Jaffe for “ARTnews Live,” our ongoing IGTV series featuring interviews with a range of creatives.

One of the challenges of talking coherently about Michael Rakowitz’s exhibition at the Wellin Museum is coming to an understanding of what the work is: Is it a memorial to lost cultural heritage, an act of historical recovery, a collective bereavement, or a model for survival? Perhaps this essay is my attempt at answering this question.

Ideas pour from Derrick Adams, and what’s surprising is how many of them work out. A couple of years ago, around the time that he was making his Floater paintings, depicting Black people lounging on swimming-pool inflatables, he thought, Why not start a creative persons’ retreat where the only obligation would be to appreciate leisure? 

Moon Dust (Apollo 17) transforms the BMA’s majestic Fox Court, evoking in viewers a sense of wonder. For the next seven years, museum visitors can enjoy the sublime light installation by Spencer Finch. For this episode of Art Matters, the New York-based artist spoke with BMA Director Christopher Bedford about Moon Dust and how the installation’s 447 lights and 150 fixtures are a scientifically precise representation of the chemical composition of moon dust gathered during the Apollo 17 mission. Listen to the Five minute interview by clicking here. 

It is difficult to explain the erasure of the Black body in imagery linked to American recreation and to expound on the psychological damage of not seeing oneself reflected in the world one inhabits. So much of the experience of being Black in America is born of escape—escaping slavery and servitude and systemic persecution, escaping the pain of generational trauma—that Adams’ paintings feel like an American Dream rendering unabashed Black joy in full saturation. Black joy is the primary aesthetic of the work and it begins a conversation on who is afforded leisure in America, and why. Cleverly, Adams constantly reminds us how race, gender, politics and power dictate our visual culture, and how ecstatic joy only exists in relation to the extremity of violence. But this is not the sole aim of “The Last Resort.”

 Music meets the art of Derrick Adams in a recent project from Tandem Press and UW-Madison student composers.

Northwestern art Prof. Michael Rakowitz seeks to explore the diaspora between Iraq and Iraqi immigrants through his work recreating lost artifacts and reliefs from the ancient Iraqi city of Nimrud. Watch the video (Click here).  Closed captions available.

A new collective of Black architects and artists, formed out of a show now at MoMA, aims to “reclaim the larger civic promise of architecture.” The MoMA show was organized by Sean Anderson, an associate curator at the museum, and Mabel O. Wilson, an architect, Columbia University professor and author, among much else, of “White by Design,” which describes the Modern’s failure to display and collect works by Black architects and designers.

March 7 marked 15 years since Gordon Parks' passing. The photographer, musician, film director and activist will always be remembered as "one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century". Born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912, Parks was drawn to photography as a young man when he saw images of migrant workers in a magazine. After buying a camera at a pawnshop, he taught himself how to use it. He once famously said: "I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs. I knew at that point I had to have a camera."

Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot will join the Mayor’s Office of Community Engagement and other City leaders for a celebratory virtual event to commemorate Black History Month by honoring 20 Black community leaders for their commitment to supporting and advocating for Chicago’s dynamic Black residents.

The artist’s brightly painted houses return forgotten sections of Chicago’s south side to vibrant life.

Drawing upon his Iraqi-Jewish heritage, Michael Rakowitz critiques ongoing systems of colonization in his sculptural and participatory work. The artist recounts a formative memory from his childhood, when his mother took him to see reliefs depicting the lion hunt of Ashurbanipal in the Assyrian galleries at the British Museum and posed the question, “What is this doing here?” For Rakowitz, this moment crystalized his understanding of museums as places of extraction, colonization, and crime. In his work today, Rakowitz explores ways to subvert the imperialist role of museums, interrogate the value they place on objects over people, and create ongoing systems for repair and accountability.

Because this year marks the 50th anniversary of his groundbreaking 1971 film, “Shaft”; because two fine shows of his pioneering photojournalism are currently on view at the Jack Shainman galleries in Chelsea; because a suite from his influential 1957 series, “The Atmosphere of Crime,” is a highlight of “In and Around Harlem,” now on view at the Museum of Modern Art; and because, somehow, despite the long shadow cast by a man widely considered the pre-eminent Black American photographer of the 20th century, he is too little known, the time seems right to revisit some elements of the remarkable life, style and undimmed relevance of Gordon Parks.
 

Usher, Jim Carrey, Bruno Mars, Marilyn Minter, and David Hockney are among the more than 100 creative stars who have made artworks in memory of Black women killed by the police. The works will appear in “Show Me the Signs,” an exhibition and auction benefiting the womens’ families.

The proceeds of the sale will go to the #SayHerName Mothers Network, run by the African American Policy Forum.

“Black women and girls do not fit the most accessible frames of anti-Black police violence, and because of that, it’s difficult to tell their stories in a way that people recognize and remember,” said #SayHerName founder Kimberlé Crenshaw in a statement. “By working with the families of slain Black women, AAPF’s #SayHerName campaign resists Black women’s invisibility by telling their stories.”

Participants were asked to make work in the spirit of solidarity and empowering love, and the results vary widely. Starting bids range from just $1—for the Haas Brothers’ cardboard sign that encourages bidders to “do more than bidding on a sign”—to up to $20,000 for works by Rashid Johnson and Nancy Rubins.

This essay was written in March 2020 after the exhibition Julia Fish : bound by spectrum closed at the DePaul Art Museum.

Now, six months later, our lives have been dramatically altered and constrained. Wracked by devastating losses from the COVID-19 pandemic, the challenges posed by current political realities and perilous climate changes, many of us, limited to virtual screens,
have sheltered in place. During days of self-quarantine, our surroundings have become spaces of confinement and refuge. Julia Fish’s attentive representation of domestic realities
and infinite, even metaphysical transformations become imaginative models for how we might experience this elongated moment.

Paradoxically, looking at these artworks, based on spectral precision and poetic revision, we are compelled to consider existence beyond the frames.
Fish’s gorgeous thresholds, always prescient, are even more urgent.

The relevance of object-image to Rezac’s works is spot-on. What should be frivolous in his art is not, because the object’s physical properties forge a connection through strong antinomies. The image comes into sharp enigmatic focus through an unapologetic assertion of difference.Take  Soliloquy (2019) for example. In some parallel universe, a carpenter’s workbench and underground grain vaults cohabit, and the resulting tool plays a practical role.

Raffi Khatchadourian offers a comprehensive profile for The New Yorker about Michael Rakowitz and the legacy of his political work. 

Forbes contributor Chadd Scott speaks to Derrick Adams and Hudson River Museum Director Masha Turchinsky about pervasive images of blackness within Western art and the importance of representing black leisure. 

Amanda Williams responds to Blackout Tuesday, a viral Instagram movement in reaction to recent police brutality and racism, with her new series: What Black Is This, You Say? 

“My beginning of the series was actually a little bit of a pushback both of the need for people to think there has to be an immediate answer, usually not a well thought out answer, and simultaneously that Blackness is monolithic,” Williams said. “So, all Black people need to get on board with subscribing to a certain way of expressing Blackness, or frustrations with injustice. And there’s less and less tolerance for more than one way to do that.”

The Washington Post offers a beautiful and attentive review of Gordon Parks' new book of photography The Atmosphere of Crime: "Parks’s photographs present a more insightful, delicate and disinterested view. They remind us that an atmosphere is not the same as a narrative. One is complex, pervasive, inchoate and, like a fog, it can lift. The other is linear. Like an obsession, it keeps corkscrewing ahead, leaving all kinds of damage in its wake."

Beautiful review of Martha Tuttle's new installation: a stone that thinks of Enceladus, at Storm King Art Center in the Hudson Valley.

"Ms. Tuttle has gathered boulders from Storm King’s property, most of them about knee-height, and placed them around the clearing with a contrapuntal casualness; resting on each boulder are delicate sculptures of rocks, crafted in the artist’s studio from milky glass or solid marble, and arranged with the same tossed-off elegance as the boulders themselves. These humble cairns conjoin “real” and “artificial” stones, not to mention the lichens growing on the boulders’ surfaces and the grass beneath your feet into a poem of vibrant matter."

ARTFORUM contributor Erica Rawles interpretes Torkwase Dyson's intricately layered and richly textured paintings through the lens of the Plantationocene, alligning her material choices whitin the space of her canvases with the experiences of Black Americans navigating the inequal and oppressive infrastructures of American cities. "Dyson’s melds of overwhelmingly precise delineations with fluid grounds, sometimes punctuated by arrow-like forms, seem to be encrypted guides to a way out of the boundless tumbling problems of the Plantationocene," Rawles closes her review, "Or maybe her work merely reminds us of the possibility that such a path might exist."

Artnet news reviewed Derrick Adams: Buoyant on view at the Hudson River Museum. Buoyant is the first museum exhibition of Adams’ Floaters series and debuts We Came to Party and Plan (extended through October 18), new related works the artist created during his summer 2019 Rauschenberg Residency. Adams' Floaters depict a world where joy, love, leisure, and even prosaic normalcy play central roles, methodically filling the many voids and omissions in popular visual culture depicting African Americans.  

In lieu of her Open House Lecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design scheduled for April 2, 2020 that was cancelled due to the Covid-19 outbreak, Williams speaks with Sala Elise Patterson about her work, purpose, and path. 

Brandon Sward beautifully reviews Michael Rakowitz's 2017-2018 survey show at the MCA, Backstroke of the West, in print and online in Issue 04 of Full Bleed Journal.  

"As a whole, Backstroke of the West demonstrates that history is not just what is remembered, but also what is forgotten, and is composed of not just what is present, but also what is absent. In this way, there’s much resonance between Rakowitz and Benjamin, who similarly understands translation as attending to both what is and is not on the page. It’s as if language is a room, and a text is a voice reverberating through it; the bigger the room, the more influential the voice, the smaller, the weaker."

John Yau of Hyperallergic reviwes Julia Fish's recent survey at the DePaul Art Museum, bound by spectrum. Yau celebrates Fish's keen observation and rigorous commitment to the "small sensations" of her physical space. He notes the uniqueness of her practice which "collapses the long-held fiction that painters paint and conceptual artists think." Fish's steadfast mapping of her own domestic space is ever more relevent during quarantine, Yau explains, as her work questions: "how far does any one of us have to go in order cross the threshold from one space (or world) to another? What does it mean to pay attention to what is underfoot, to our passage in the familiar, ever-changing spaces of everyday life? How does invention differ from production?"  

Inspired by the recent Netflix Documentary, The Last Dance, which follows the Chicago Bulls' 1997-'98 season, journalist Cason Sharpe investigates the aesthetic and cultural legacy of Michael Jordan. Sharpe features a 2018 Nathaniel Mary Quinn portrait entitled, Jordan, and discusses its departure from the artist's signature style of Francis Bacon-esque distortions. Quinn's portrait of Jordan is painted with an "admiration that’s evident in the cartoon-like exaggeration of Jordan’s jawline and neck, with the white gleam in his eyes echoing the white of his handsome smile." 

Caroline Kipp, Curator of Contemporary Art at The Textile Museum in Washington D.C., speaks with Anne Wilson about art and life during quarantine. Anne discusses conceptual and material processes behind recent work prepared for her exhibition, If We Asked About the Sky, which will be held at Rhona Hoffman Gallery once restrictions are lifted:

"The work proposes both smallness and vastness, and inhabits a space of contemplation between the mortal world and a celestial universe that is infinite and unknowable. With the proliferation of media images of death, destruction, and injustice that constantly surround us, this work is a meditationon living in and through loss. How does one recognize and respect a life? What is the space between living and dying? Can a drop of blood be placed in a galaxy beyond the trauma of mortality?" 

Heading up the long driveway to Nancy Rubins’s Topanga Canyon studio, I saw heaps of crumpled airplane parts and accumulations of rusted-out playground equipment before I saw the artist herself. The metal scraps piled up under persimmon trees and next to constellations of purple and chartreuse cacti. Some idled, waiting and untouched, but others had been bound together in ecstatic masses that resembled gnarled asteroids or colossal mold spores. The forms existed in that liminal, mesmerizing place between grotesque and gorgeous, primordial and futuristic.

Derrick Adams collaborates with the late fashion designer, Patrick Kelly, by juxtaposing materials from Kelly's archive with his own abstract collages and sculptures. In this exhibition Adams seeks to “talk about fashion, talk about the form, talk about the body without using the figure.”

A.O. Scott of The New York Times discusses the context and the legacy of Gordon Parks' film The Learning Tree (1969). "The Learning Tree is something else...an absolutely personal film, entwined with its creator’s own experiences, that lays authoritative claim to a place in the American mainstream. At Life (and before that at the New Deal-era Farm Security Administration), Parks was known for his intensive, intimate portraits of housing projects, working-class neighborhoods and poor, rural towns, and there was always a risk, given the institutional whiteness of the Time Life Corporation, that those images could be misinterpreted as exotic. But his aesthetic rigor — the beauty and integrity of those images — ensured that Parks was doing more than explaining black life to white America. He was, like his exact contemporary Ralph Ellison (who grew up one state south of Parks, in Oklahoma, and who like Parks eventually went north) committed to the grand midcentury project of explaining America to itself.

Through various motifs, Rezac questions and addresses the problems of articulation and elision within formal and metaphorical relationships. One favored theme is based on framings, moldings, and enclosures; another involves the interactive pairing of volumetric forms on tables. Several works in the show relate to the Baroque architect Francesco Borromini and others Rezac studied during a recent residency at the American Academy of Rome. Rezac’s aesthetic logic appropriately resists clear, easy conclusions. His affinity for structure and artisanal materiality leads to distilled syntheses of form, prompting us to assess his intriguing propositions with engaged, extended looking.

Richard Rezac at Luhring Augustine Highlighted on Spectrum News NY TV 1

A review of Derrick Adams: Buoyant at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York.  Though the museum is temporarily closed due to COVID-19 viewers can engage virtually with Adams' exhibition on the museum's website.   

Pace Gallery has initiated a weekly broadcast series on Instagram to offer some respite during quarantine. "Listening and thoughtful reflection is one answer to the sometimes contradictory chatter and noise of the day. To speak out loud, to listen, and to ask questions of our current times is to be alive and present. This is also one of the roles of art and artists, to create visionary futures and voice our common goals. This series is on hand to ask the questions that keep us awake at night, but also attempt to answer them, delivering live broadcasts and curious, engaged, and informed thinking from our house to yours." Tune in today, April 3 at 5 PM EDT @pacegallery for a conversation between Torkwase Dyson and Hans Ulrich Obrist.  

Art in America review of Soil, Seed, and Rain, Nathaniel Mary Quinn's latest exhibition at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.   

A discussion of the emotion behind Nathaniel Mary Quinn's new works on paper and paintings on view at Rhona Hoffman Gallery until March 28.  

Derrick Adams: Transformers is on view at Luxembourg & Dayan in London through April 4.

A review of Gordon Parks: This Land is Your Land at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.  

An interview with the artist on the occasion of his show at Luxembourg & Dayan Gallery in London, on view through April 4, 2020.  

"Organized by the National Gallery of Art and the Gordon Parks Foundation, the traveling exhibit Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940-1950, sifted fact from fiction to present a portrait of the photographer as a young man on his way to becoming a revered artist the power of whose work continues to widely influence new generations, from artists to activists to every day people who continue to see themselves reflected in his work."

Amanda Gluibizzi reviews Rakowitz' current exhibition The invisible enemy should not exist, currently on view at Jane Lombard Gallery through February 22, 2020.  

An exhibition of formative works by Gordon Parks is now on view through April 26, 2020 at the Addison Gallery of American Art at the Phillips Andover Academy.  

John Preus Discusses his upcoming project at The Keller Center at The University of Chicago, opening January 30, 2020.

On a clear October evening, a full house gathered at the Newberry, Chicago’s world-renowned independent research library, to listen to a conversation between author, photographer and former Sun-Times architecture critic Lee Bey and visual artist Amanda Williams.

In his new book, Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago’s South Side, Bey documents the physical attributes of significant architecture with striking photographic images portrayed at their best under the bright, blue skies of morning light. Throughout the book he thoughtfully weaves a cultural and social narrative elevating these environs to their rightful importance while criticizing forces and policies that have ignored the South Side’s rich architectural heritage. Echoing Bey’s visual cues, architecture-trained visual artist Amanda Williams’ foreword sets a joyful tone comparing the exuberance of Bey’s work to the happy crescendo of one of her favorite musical pieces: Native Chicagoan Donny Hathaway’s 1970 hit “This Christmas,” with its heartfelt message, “I’m gonna get to know you better,” resounds with the camaraderie and experiences both she and Bey have had with South Side culture.

To put the significance of this book project in perspective, Bey’s ascribed South Side represents an area that makes up more than half the city’s land mass. Approximately bounded by Cermak Road, 138th Street, Lake Michigan and Western Avenue, the area is vast and includes work by architecture and design luminaries, businesses run by notable black entrepreneurs, pioneering artists and a South Side community representing over thirty neighborhoods and a population of nearly 800,000.

A Review of Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940-1950, currently on view at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

Review of the Artist's show at the Columbia University's Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery.

Review of the artist's show Bound by Spectrum at the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, IL. 

Torkwase Dyson was named the winner of the 2019 Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, which recognizes the artistic achievements of African American artists who demonstrate great innovation, promise, and creativity.

Adam Szymczyk discusses the historical and philosophical underpinnings of David Schutter's Liebermann Suite, which "offers a possibility to overcome the normative, institutional protocols of forgetting through a tentative rendition of what stands in for whatever cannot be seen or told."

Review of Torkwase Dyson's current show, 1919: Blackwater, on view at Columbia GSAPP through December 14.   

Discussion of Rakowitz' ongoing project "Beneath the Date Palms," and his contribution to the secnd LA Triennial, Current: LA: Food.  

A studio visit and interview with the artist on the occasion of his Gagosian Beverly Hills show, Hollow and Cut.

As a student in the 1970s, Nancy Rubins made igloo-like structures out of mud, concrete and straw, a contrast to the industrial objects she became known for appropriating into large-scale sculptures. Her practice consistently reflects a fascination with found objects, which have included mobile homes, aircraft, and boats. Rubins initially scavenged for domestic appliances at charity shops around San Francisco, collecting nearly 300 television sets for one piece.

Adams discusses Where I'm From, his first solo show in his native Baltimore, and his plans to create a "bed and breakfast" artist residency in Baltimore's Waverly neighborhood.  

Brian T. Leahy from Artforum delves into the philosophical underpinnings of Martha Tuttle's recent show Dance of Atoms at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.   

An interview with the artist on the occasion of his Gagosian Beverly Hills show, on view until October 19. 

The artist discusses her new show, 1919 Black Water, on view at Columbia GSAPP until December 14.

Quinn discusses the psychology behind his portraits in the exhibition Hollow and Cut, on view at Gagosian in Beverly Hills through October 19.

Review of The Dance of Atoms at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

Review of Amanda Williams' Colored Theory series and surrounding work.

The prize recognizes artists who “elevate the understanding of sculpture and its possibilities.” Rakowitz is the fifth recipient of the honor.

Review of Where I'm From, at the Gallery in Baltimore City Hall.

Michael Rakowitz's work will be featured as part of the Oriental Institute's centennial celebration, opening September 28. 

Review of Natalie's newest body of work in “Paint, Porcelain and Pulp: Amy Bessone, Francesca DiMattio, and Natalie Frank” at Salon 94.

Michael Rakowitz' new cookbook - A House With A Date Palm Will Never Starve - continues his ongoing project on the literal and metaphorical significance of Iraqi dates. 

Review of Michael Rakowitz's retrospective at Whitechapel Gallery.

Gelare Khoshgozaran reviews Rakowitz' exhibition Dispute Between the Tamarisk and the Date Palm

Review of Nancy Spero: Paper Mirror at MoMA PS1

Megan N. Liberty reviews Deana Lawson's monograph recently published by Aperture.

A review of Michael Rakowitz's first European retrospective at Whitechapel Gallery, London.

Lori Waxman reviews HUTOPIA, a group exhibition at the Neubauer Collegium featuring work by Preus.

Review of the latest event in the Brooklyn Museum’s regular series “Breaking the Canon,” which addresses the institution’s collecting of African-American art.

A look at how the photographer translated his humanistic view of urban crime to the silver screen.

Amanda Williams’s Cadastral Shaking (Chicago v1), which depicts a redlined map of Chicago that has been rearranged in effort to imagine how the city’s rampant inequality could be reconfigured, is currently on loan to newly inaugurated Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

Review of Dispute Between the Tamarisk and the Date Palm at REDCAT. 

Amanda Williams and Olalekan Jeyifous won the inaugural commission for She Built NYC with their monument proposal for Prospect Park.

Interview with Anne Wilson in light of the release of the publication Vitamin T: Threads and Textiles in Contemporary Art.

Review of Mr. President... Mr. President... at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

Review of New Icons at Mary Boone Gallery.

Review of Derrick Adams: Interior Life at Luxembourg & Dayan, New York.

Review of Paper Mirror at MoMA PS1, New York.

Inspired by the drawings of Natalie Frank, Grimm Tales opens Friday at Ballet Austin, Texas.

Review of Dimensions of Citizenship at Wrightwood 659.

Review of Derrick Adams: Interior Life at Luxembourg & Dayan, New York.

Torkwase Dyson named the Spring 2019 Robert Gwathmey Chair at The Cooper Union. 

The Susan E. Cohen and William S. Johnson Creativity Project is being catalogued and made public.

Review of Dimensions of Citizenship: Architecture and Belonging from the Body to the Cosmos at Wrightwood 659, Chicago.

An interview with Martha Tuttle in her Brooklyn studio.

Review of Julia Fish: Floret at David Nolan Gallery.

Review of Nancy Spero: Unbound at the Colby College Museum of Art.

Review of America's Playground at Miami Beach's Faena Hotel.

Review of Deana Lawson at Sikkema Jenkins.

Review of Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940-1950 at the National Gallery of Art.

The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art celebrates the tenth anniversary of its exhibition, Sol LeWitt: a Wall Drawing Retrospective, by adding another decade to its long-term presentation. 

Arthur Lubow profiles Deana Lawson in The New York Times.

Interview with the artist in light of his newest exhibition The Land at Salon 94.

Review of The Dark Isn’t the Thing to Worry About at SITE Santa Fe.

Natalie Frank’s drawings transformed into a new ballet at Ballet Austin.

Solo exhibition of works by artist Torkwase Dyson opens October 4th at Colby Museum of Art, Maine. 

Review of Clouds and Chaos at The Crow Museum of Asian Art.

Spencer Finch opens Fifteen stones (Ryōan-ji) at Kyoto's “The Temple of the Dragon at Peace” as part of a program of artistic interventions at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion.

Jacob Hashimoto presents two major installations of public art at Governors Island, New York. 

Artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn's recounts his own life story.

Review of A Color Removed at FRONT, a new art Triennial in Cleveland.

Review of Soundtrack at M+B gallery.

Interview with the artist in light of her exhibition Natalie Frank: O at Half Gallery.

Review of the United States Pavilion Dimensions of Citizesnship at the Venice Architecture Biennale. 

Profile of Amanda Williams by Ted Loos.

Study of Gordon Parks's photograph American Gothic.

Profile of Deana Lawson by Zadie Smith.

Review of Address at the Renaissance Society.

Review of Far From the Tree at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

Interview with the artist in light of his new body of work.

Review of Far From the Tree at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

David Schutter is a recipient of a 2018 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship in the Fine Arts category. 

Review of the artist's Fourth Plinth commission The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist.

The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts reveals the five creative professionals inaugurating its fellowship program.

Review of I long and seek after at Tilton Gallery.

In July of 2014 the American artist Nancy Rubins opened an exhibition of sculptures at Gagosian in New York with the name “Our Friend Fluid Metal.” The naming was accurate because in an art practice now spanning over four decades, she has been able to get by with a little help from a lot of her friends, which have included small appliances, television consoles, mattresses, playground animals, airplane parts, canoes, sailboats and kayaks, various kinds of cake and dense layers of graphite. Her material friendship has allowed her to find that “little speck of territory that nobody has really looked at before,” which is how she defines “originality,” a quality she seeks out. Her practice has never been predictable, and the large-scale sculptures and drawings that have emerged from it have captivated and vexed viewers from the beginning.

Review of Backstroke of the West at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Review of a hand well trained at Rhona Hoffman Gallery by Susan Snodgrass.

Nancy Rubins amazes and bewilders with her first UK solo show, while fellow west coast artist Craig Kauffman radiates pure joy.

The Los Angeles-based artist says that being a half an inch shorter than Richard Serra was never going to stop her from making her mark as a sculptor in metal.

Review of I Am You | Part 1 at Jack Shainman Gallery.

Review of Martha Tuttle and Henry Chapman at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

Review of Night Work at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

Interview with the artist by Jude Stewart.

Review of The Creative Act: Performance, Process, Presence at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. 

Review of Dancers and Dominas at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

David Schutter in Conversation with Dieter Roelstraete.

Review of Live and in Color at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

Torkwase Dyson writes about ways to center black subjectivity through artistic abstraction.

Luis Gispert and Jeff Reed discuss their project Stereomongrel at the Whitney Museum.

Review of SPOLIA at Istituto Centrale per la Grafica, Rome.

Review of Mapping Vienna, a year-long site-specific project in Austria's capital. 

Review of Saturated Light at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

Review of Martha Tuttle at Tilton Gallery.

Review of In the Cosmuc Fugue at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

Review of Aqua Regia at OHWOW Gallery.

Interview with the artist by Laura M. Mettam.

Review of Wind/Rewind/Weave at Knoxville Museum of Art.

Review of Edaphology of a Superterrestial Panmictic Population at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

Review of Thread Lines at The Drawing Center, New York. 

Review of Thread Lines at The Drawing Center, New York. 

Review of What is Not Clear is Not French at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

Review of David Schutter by Josephine Halvorson.

Review of Signal at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

A look into Natalie Frank's studio in light of her upcoming exhibitions at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago and The Drawing Center, New York.

Review of What is Not Clear is Not French at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

Review of Robert Heinecken retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Review of Dispersions at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

Review of Sensing the Technologic Banzai at Cherry and Martin Gallery.

Review of Sol LeWitt and Fred Sandback at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

Review of Susan Hefuna at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

Review of Decepción at Mary Boone Gallery.

Review of Chromatic Paintings for Chicago and Blob Paintings at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

Review of Luis Gispert at at MOCA North Miami.

Profile of Nancy Spero by Phoebe Hoban.

Review of Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

Review of Threshold II at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

Review of Between: Stairs and Landings at Rhona Hoffman Gallery

Review of Recent Sculpture at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

Review of H2O at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

Interview with the artist by Saul Ostrow.