Renoir Drawings @ The Morgan, NYC - Exhibition of drawings, watercolors, and pastels of the French Master of Impressionism

Renoir Drawings

Morgan Library & Museum, New York

October 17, 2025 - February 8, 2026

Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919)

Portrait of a Girl (Elisabeth Maître), 1879

Pastel on Ingres paper

The Albertina Museum, Vienna – The Batliner Collection, DL535

While the paintings of Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) have become icons of Impressionism, his drawings, watercolors, and pastels are far less widely known. In fact, drawing remained central to his artistic practice even as his interests and ambitions changed over the course of a long career. This exhibition explores the ways in which Auguste Renoir used paper to test ideas, plan compositions, and interpret both landscape and the human figure.

Thematic sections cover the full span of the artist’s career, ranging from academic studies he made as a student, to on-the-spot impressions of contemporary urban and rural life, to finished, formal portraits, to intimate sketches of friends and family completed late in life. In-depth case studies of favored themes and preparatory work for landmark canvases further illuminate Renoir’s practice of drawing.

Inspired by the major gift to the Morgan of a large-scale preparatory sketch for one of Renoir’s most significant paintings, The Great Bathers, this exhibition is the first in a century to explore the artist’s works on paper in depth. Organized by the Morgan Library Museum and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Renoir Drawings brings together nearly one hundred drawings, pastels, watercolors, prints, and a small selection of paintings, enabling visitors to engage with Renoir’s creative process while offering insights into his artistic methods over five decades.

Organized by Colin B. Bailey, Katharine J. Rayner Director, and Sarah Lees, Research Associate.

THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM

225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016

www.themorgan.org

Nigerian Modernism @ Tate Modern, London - This Major Exhibition traces the development of modern art in Nigeria with 50 artists and 250 artworks across 50 years

Nigerian Modernism 

Tate Modern, London

9 October 2025 - 11 May 2026

Uzo Egonu 

Stateless People an artist with beret, 1981

© The estate of Uzo Egonu. Private Collection

Ben Enwonwu

The Durbar of Eid-ul-Fitr, Kano, Nigeria, 1955

© Ben Enwonwu Foundation. Private Collection

Bruce Onobrakpeya,

The Last Supper, 1981

© Reserved. Tate Collection

Tate Modern presents the first UK exhibition to trace the development of modern art in Nigeria. Spanning a period from indirect colonial rule to national independence and beyond, Nigerian Modernism will celebrate an international network of artists who combined African and European traditions, creating a vibrant artistic legacy. The exhibition presents the work of over 50 artists across 50 years, from Ben Enwonwu to El Anatsui. They each responded to Nigeria’s evolving political and social landscape by challenging assumptions and imagining new futures, reclaiming Indigenous traditions to create a new African vision of Modernism. Featuring more than 250 works, including painting, sculpture, textile, ceramics and works on paper from institutions and private collections across Africa, Europe and the US, it offers a rare opportunity to encounter the creative forces who revolutionised modern art in Nigeria.

Nigerian Modernism - List of artists: Jonathan Adagogo Green, Tayo Adenaike, Jacob Afolabi, Adebisi Akanji, Justus D. Akeredolu, Jimo Akolo, El Anatsui, Chike C. Aniakor, Abayomi Barber, Georgina Beier, Alexander “Skunder” Boghossian, Jimoh Buraimoh, Avinash Chandra, Nike Davies-Okundaye, Ndidi Dike, Uzo Egonu, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Afi Ekong, Erhabor Emokpae, Ben Enwonwu, Sir Jacob Epstein, Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu, Okpu Eze, Adebisi Fabunmi, Agboola Folarin, Buraimoh Gbadamosi, Sàngódáre Gbádégesin Àjàlá, Yusuf Grillo, Felix Idubor, Solomon Irein Wangboje, Ladi Kwali, Akinola Lasekan, Jacob Lawrence, Valente Malangatana, Naoko Matsubara, Demas Nwoko, Olu Oguibe, Rufus Ogundele, J.D Ojeikere, Emmanuel Okechukwu Odita, Simon Okeke, Uche Okeke, Olowe of Ise, Asiru Olatunde, Lamidi Olonade Fakeye, Oseloka Okwudili Osadebe, Aina Onabolu, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Ben Osawe, Muraina Oyelami, Ru van Rossem, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Gerard Sekoto, Twins Seven Seven, Ahmad Shibrain, F.N. Souza, Ada Udechukwu, Obiora Udechukwu, Etso Clara Ugbodaga-Ngu, Susanne Wenger.

Ben Enwonwu 

The Dancer (Agbogho Mmuo - Maiden Spirit Mask) 1962 

© Ben Enwonwu Foundation, 

courtesy Ben Uri Gallery & Museum

The exhibition begins in the 1940s amid calls for decolonisation across Africa and its diaspora. With the Nigerian education system under British governance, many artists trained in Britain, adopting European artistic techniques and witnessing Western modernism’s fixation on African art. The balance between Nigeria’s Indigenous traditions, colonial realities and calls for independence was evident in the practices of artists, many of whom became involved in arts education and reform. Aina Onabolu pioneered new figurative portraits of Lagos society figures, whilst Akinola Lasekan depicted scenes from Yoruba legends and history. Globally celebrated artists of the period, Ben Enwonwu and Ladi Kwali, combined their Western training with Nigerian visual art traditions. Drawing upon his knowledge of Igbo sculpture, Ben Enwonwu adapted his Slade School education to celebrate the beauty of Black and African culture. Meanwhile, Ladi Kwali who trained under British potter Michael Cardew at Pottery Training Centre in Abuja, developed a new style of ceramic art that synthesised traditional Gwarri techniques and European studio pottery.

Jimo Akolo 

Fulani Horsemen, 1962

© Reserved. Courtesy Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu

Elemu Yoruba Palm Wine Seller, 1963

© Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu. Hampton University Museum

National independence on 1 October 1960 inspired a sense of optimism throughout the country, with artistic groups creating art for a new nation. The exhibition will look at the legacy of The Zaria Arts Society whose members included Uche Okeke, Demas Nwoko, Yusuf Grillo, Bruce Onobrakpeya and Jimo Akolo. Encouraged by teachers like Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu, they developed independent creative styles centred around a concept of ‘Natural Synthesis’, merging Indigenous forms with modern expression. In the 1960s amid an economic boom, Lagos became a dynamic cultural hub, inspiring tropical modernist architecture, public art commissions and nightclubs filled with Highlife music. Meanwhile in Ibadan, The Mbari Artists’ and Writers’ Club founded by German publisher Ulli Beier, offered a discursive space run by an international group of artists, writers and dramatists including Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Malangatana Ngwenya. The Mbari Club was closely associated with the influential Pan-African modernist journal Black Orpheus, which will be displayed at Tate Modern.

During this period, many artists reflected on Nigeria’s rich cultural and religious heritage as home to more than 250 ethnic groups. The late 1950s saw the emergence of the New Sacred Art Movement, founded by Austrian born artist Susanne Wenger who drew on Yoruba deities and beliefs to explore the ritual power of art. The group led the restoration of the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove where ancient shrines were adorned with cement sculptures and carvings. In parallel, The Oshogbo Art School emerged out of series of influential workshops at Duro Ladipo’s Popular Bar providing a space for experimentation among untrained artists and performers including Nike Davies-Okundaye, Jacob Afolabi and Twins Seven Seven who explored Yoruba cultural identity and personal mythologies in their work.

Obiora Udechukwu 

Our Journey, 1993 

© Obiora Udechukwu. Hood Museum of Art

The outbreak of the Nigerian Civil War in 1967 caused a cultural and political crisis for many artists. The post-independence feeling of optimism and unity were replaced with division, and later a desire to reconnect across Nigeria’s diverse ethnic groups. The exhibition looks to the revival of ‘uli’ - linear Igbo designs which can be decorative or represent natural elements and everyday objects. Historically passed down between women, artists like Uche Okeke who had inherited this knowledge from his mother, and those from the Nsukka Art School including Obiora Udechukwu, Tayo Adenaike and Ndidi Dike, adapted this visual language as a modernist art form, reclaiming an element of ancestral culture and reflecting on the struggles of conflict during the war.

Uzo Egonu

Northern Nigerian Landscape, 1964

© The estate of Uzo Egonu. Tate

Uzo Egonu 

Women in Grief, 1968 

© The estate of Uzo Egonu. Tate

The exhibition ends with a spotlight on Uzo Egonu, exploring how artists towards the end of the 20th century began to respond to global Nigerian identities. Living in Britain since the 1940s, Uzo Egonu’s work was informed by his perspective as an expatriate, creating works imbued by his childhood memories and feelings of nostalgia, as well as his response to current events, observed from overseas. The exhibition brings together Uzo Egonu’s Stateless People paintings, the first time these works have been reunited in 40 years. Begun in 1980, the series reflects on questions of nationhood and cultural identity. Depicting a single figure in each painting - a musician, artist and writer - Uzo Egonu represents the growing visibility of Nigeria’s diaspora around the world. The series sums up the tension between national identity and artistic independence which shaped Nigeria’s story of modern art.

Nigerian Modernism is curated by Osei Bonsu, Curator, International Art, Tate Modern and Bilal Akkouche, Assistant Curator, International Art, Tate Modern.

TATE MODERN

Bankside, London SE1 9TG

www.tate.org.uk

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, Edited by Lucia Pietroiusti and Filipa Ramos, Hatje Cantz + Serpentine

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish

Edited by Lucia Pietroiusti and Filipa Ramos

Hatje Cantz + Serpentine

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish

Edited by Lucia Pietroiusti and Filipa Ramos

Hatje Cantz + Serpentine

Serpentine announces the launch of The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, a book edited by Lucia Pietroiusti, Head of Serpentine Ecologies and curator and lecturer at the Academy of Art and Design of Basel Filipa Ramos. The launch event of the publication, which includes 100 contributors across the arts and sciences, will take place in London at the Royal College of Art on 27th October 2025.

 

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish is a publication that brings together interventions across the arts, the humanities and the sciences to investigate the history and cutting-edge of more-than-human theories, from animal, plant and fungal intelligence, consciousness and affect, machine sentience and interspecies communication. This publication is an important landmark in Serpentine’s long-term research project of the same name, begun in 2018 to inaugurate Serpentine’s General Ecology project.

 

The publication includes original conversations, essays, interviews, meditations, poems and artwork representations by 100 of the most celebrated environmental thinkers and creatives across disciplines – anthropologists, artists, biologists, ecologists, gardeners, musicians, philosophers, theologians and more, including Sophia Al-Maria, Ted Chiang, Emanuele Coccia, Peter Gabriel, Tim Ingold, Elizabeth A. Povinelli and Karrabing Film Collective, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Himali Singh Soin, Merlin Sheldrake, Superflex, Jenna Sutela, Anna L. Tsing, Chris Watson and many more.

 

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish is arranged in five chapters. The first, titled Worlds, focuses on principles of symbiosis and coevolution, anthropological approaches to more-than-human beings; and radical reimaginings of the planet. The second, Beings, presents more-than-human beings as collaborators, co-thinkers, and interlocutors – from the sound of a forest stretching and shifting to the swarming messiness of the soil, through to the body language of animals. The third, entitled Grounds, hosts debates concerning more-than-human and planetary life within the social and political entanglements of anthropocentrism, and calls for more-than-human and environmental practices of justice. Odes, the fourth chapter, brings to the fore an understanding of mythology, storytelling, and meaning-making as planetary manifestations, tracing human/more-than-human relations across deep time. In Oracles, the book’s closing chapter, the spiritual realm and advanced technologies (human and non-human) meet at the porous and uncertain edges of planetary computation and complexity.

 

Publication launches are planned internationally throughout 2025, including at IMMA Dublin on 14th September and then a launch at the Royal College of Art, London, on October 27th 2025, which will feature a Serpentine Cinema programme as well as the presentation of Filipa Ramos’ latest monograph, The Artist as Ecologist (London: Lund Humphreys, October 2025), which discusses the ways in which contemporary artists embrace practices of environmentalism. The London event will include a lecture performance by Elizabeth A. Povinelli. The first launch of the publication took place at E-WERK Luckenwalde, Germany as part of the festival’s sixth iteration, subtitled Love and Lament, and presented by Schering Stiftung, Berlin.

 

Art Direction by Giles Round. Contributors: Andrew Adamatzky; Yussef Agbo-Ola/Olaniyi Studio; Sophia Al-Maria; Allora & Calzadilla; Saelia Aparicio; Chloe Aridjis; Heather Barnett; Antoine Bertin; Lynne Boddy; Elizabeth-Jane Burnett; Vivian Caccuri; Mariana Caló & Francisco Queimadela; Federico Campagna; Teresa Castro; Alex Cecchetti; Vint Cerf; Ted Chiang; Sean Cho A.; Nicola Clayton; Emanuele Coccia; Revital Cohen; & Tuur Van Balen; The Coven Intelligence Program; Marisol de la Cadena; Michela de Mattei; Onome Ekeh; Cru Encarnação; James Fairhead; Adham Faramawy; Simone Forti; Claire Filmon; Rosalind Fowler; Peter Gabriel; Elaine Gan; Jay Gao; Sabine Hauert; Daisy Hildyard; Amy Hollywood; Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser); Tim Ingold; Derek Jarman; Alex Jordan; Karrabing Film Collective; Leah Kelly; Asim Khan; Kapwani Kiwanga; Dominique Knowles; Bettina Korek; Simone Kotva; Daisy Lafarge; Hannah Landecker; Yasmeen Lari; Long Litt Woon; Annea Lockwood; Thandi Loewenson; Miranda Lowe; Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe; Marcos Lutyens; Carlos Magdalena; Michael Marder; Alex McBratney; Natasha Myers; Nahum; Rasmus Nielsen/ SUPERFLEX; Hatis Noit; Hans Ulrich Obrist; Angelica Patterson; Lucia Pietroiusti; Elizabeth A. Povinelli; Maria Puig de la Bellacasa; Filipa Ramos; Asad Raza; Diana Reiss; Tabita Rezaire; Ben Rivers; Giles Round; Merlin Sheldrake; Kostas Stasinopoulos; Jenna Sutela; bones tan jones; Phoebe Tickell; Anaïs Tondeur & Germain Meulemans; Laurence Totelin; Anna L. Tsing; Oula A. Valkeapäa & Leena Valkeapäa; Sumayya Vally; Kim Walker; Chris Watson; Elvia Wilk; Rain Wu & Mariana Sanchez Salvador.

 

Published by Hatje Cantz, The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish is distributed worldwide as well as on Serpentine’s website.

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish 

History of the programme

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish began as a multi-year symposium, podcast and research project investigating consciousness and intelligence across species and beings and was launched in 2018 at the London Zoo. Since 2018, it has welcomed over 10,000 audience members and viewers and been a pioneer in environmental and ecological convenings.

 

2018 at the London Zoo: PART 1 LANGUAGE: On interspecies communications, with Ted Chiang, Vint Cerf, Peter Gabriel and more.

 

2018 at Ambika P3: we have never been one: On Gaia theory and micro-organisms, with Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Sophia Al-Maria and more.

 

2019 at EartH Hackney: with plants: on plant consciousness, plant intelligence and communication with the vegetal world, with Tabita Rezaire, Chris Watson and more.

2020 online: the understory of the understory: on land, earth, soil, fungi, with Elizabeth A. Povinelli and Merlin Sheldrake and more. This event marked the launch of Sheldrake’s landmark publication, Entangled Life.

 

2022, Galeria da Biodiversidade, Porto, Portugal: The Shape of a Circle in the Dream of a Fish: on dreams in the non-human world, with Alex Jordan, Onome Ekeh, Federico Campagna and more.

2025, E-WERK Luckenwalde/Schering Stiftung: The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish: Love and Lament: on grief and intimacy in a more-than-human world, with Aslak Aamot Helm, Antoine Bertin, Kapwani Kiwanga, Michael Ohl, Alejandra Pombo Su, Elizabeth Povinelli, Claudia Rankine, Asad Raza, Giles Round, Jenna Sutela, Jovana Maksic, Staci Bu Shea and Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen.

 

In addition, releases on Serpentine Podcast’s series: “On General Ecology” and collaborations with renowned environmental podcast Future Ecologies brought together some 60,000 listeners to dive deeper into the ideas and experimentations of the series.

About Serpentine Ecologies

Since 2014’s Extinction Marathon with artist Gustav Metzger, Serpentine has been at the forefront of environmental action and thought. Since the establishment of the General Ecology project in 2018,  the Ecologies initiatives nurture Serpentine’s ongoing engagement with ecology, climate breakdown, more-than-human consciousness, environmental justice and complexity in a changing world. Stretching across all of Serpentine’s activities, infrastructures and networks, Serpentine Ecologies takes a speculative and active stance towards embedding alternative narratives and deep ecological principles into the everyday. Ecologies’ initiatives manifested with projects such as Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes: The British East India Company on Trial in April 2025, Back to Earth, (2020- 2022), Infinite Ecologies Marathon in 2023, and Daisy Ginsberg’s Pollinator Pathmaker in Kensington Gardens among many other projects. As part of Serpentine’s Back to Earth project, Serpentine and Penguin Press published 140 Artists’ Ideas for Planet Earth, a book inviting artists to re-think the climate emergency.

SERPENTINE GALLERIES

www.serpentinegalleries.org

Claes Oldenburg @ Pace Gallery, Tokyo - "いろいろ / This & That" Exhibition

Claes Oldenburg 

いろいろ / This & That

Pace Gallery, Tokyo

July 17 – August 23, 2025

Claes Oldenburg 

Geometric Mouse--Scale B, 1970-72 

© Claes Oldenburg, courtesy Pace Gallery

Claes Oldenburg

Miniature Soft Drum Set, 1969 

© Claes Oldenburg, courtesy Pace Gallery 

Pace presents This & That, an exhibition of work by American artist CLAES OLDENBURG, at its Tokyo gallery. Bringing together sculptures and prints that exist in series created by the artist between the 1960s and mid 2000s, this lively survey showcases the importance of multiplicity in Oldenburg’s practice, inviting visitors to immerse in the artist’s madcap world and uncover resonances and touchpoints to Japanese culture. Curated by Pace CEO Marc Glimcher and Maartje Oldenburg—daughter of Claes Oldenburg and his wife and longtime collaborator Coosje van Bruggen, and head of the artists’ estates—the exhibition is organized as part of the gallery’s 65th anniversary year celebration. It is also be Pace’s first major presentation of Oldenburg’s work since the gallery announced its global representation of the Claes Oldenburg estate, the Coosje van Bruggen estate, and the Oldenburg and van Bruggen estate, continuing its commitment to sharing the intertwining legacies and individual achievements of the two artists with its global

audience. 

The Japanese title of the gallery’s presentation is いろいろ (“Iroiro”), which roughly translates to “various,” “variety,” or “miscellany.” Suggesting a mixed-bag or a hodgepodge, “Iroiro” can also be written as 色々, which comprises a repetition of the Kanji character 色 (“Iro”). “Iro” literally means “color,” but it typically refers to the color or hue of things. It can also suggest an object’s general appearance, and even more metaphorically, can refer to the sensuality of a thing (as in the occasional English usage of the word “colorful”). “Iroiro” thus echoes Oldenburg’s almost passionate involvement with banal objects, the way he lovingly coaxed a vast array of ordinary, miscellaneous things from their humdrum existence in the normal course of life—the "this and that”—into subject-matter for serious artistic inquiry.

In a broad sense, Pace’s show sheds light on Oldenburg’s fascination with multiplicity, the act of artistic reproduction, and the mutability of imagery. Widely known for the monumental artworks he realized around the world with Coosje van Bruggen, he also created many domestically sized objects across a wide variety of media throughout his career. “The multiple object,” he once said, “was for me the sculptor’s solution to making a print.”

This exhibition in Tokyo is the first major presentation of Oldenburg’s work in the Japanese capital since 1996. The artist’s only other solo show in the city took place in 1973 at Minami Gallery. Notably, he debuted his large-scale Giant Ice Bag (1970) sculpture, which is animated by mechanical and hydraulic components, in the US Pavilion at Expo 70 in Osaka. Since 1995, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s large-scale sculpture Saw, Sawing has been on public view outside the Tokyo International Exhibition Center. Oldenburg’s sculptures Inverted Q (1977–88) and Tube Supported by Its Contents (1983) can be found in the collections of the Yokohama Museum of Art and the Utsunomiya Museum of Art, respectively.

Claes Oldenburg—who presented his first solo exhibition with Pace in 1964—was a leading voice of the Pop Art movement who, over the course of more than six decades, redefined the history of art with his sculptures, drawings, and colossal public monuments that transform everyday objects into idiosyncratic entities. He rose to prominence in New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when he was among the artists staging Happenings—a hybrid art form incorporating installation, performance, and other mediums—on the city’s Lower East Side. Collaborative and ephemeral, these environments included The Street (1960) and The Store (1961)—his first solo presentation with Pace featured works from The Store. Following his work with props in these Happenings, Claes Oldenburg began creating his iconic soft sculptures, which charted new frontiers in the medium, upending its traditional contents, forms, and materials.

Claes Oldenburg and Pace’s Founder and Chairman Arne Glimcher maintained a friendship for 60 years, working closely from the early years of the artist’s career up until his death in 2022. Since the 1960s, Pace has presented Oldenburg’s work in some 30 exhibitions and produced seven catalogues dedicated to his practice. The gallery also supported Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s creation of the large-scale sculptures Typewriter Eraser, Scale X (1998-99), which is part of the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Balzac Pétanque (2002), which is in the collection of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and Floating Peel (2002) at the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, among many other projects.

Claes Oldenburg

N.Y.C. Pretzel, 1994 

© Claes Oldenburg, courtesy Pace Gallery

Among the works in the gallery’s Tokyo show are some 60 multiples of Oldenburg’s painted cardboard sculpture N.Y.C. Pretzel (1994)—these works will be presented in a vending machine vitrine near the entrance of the gallery space. Other multiples in the exhibition include the artist’s cast plaster Wedding Souvenir (1966), his painted aluminium and brass Profiterole (1989–90), and his sewn canvas Mouse Bags (2007–17), all of which speak to his engagement with the quotidian, from the food we eat to pop cultural icons like Mickey Mouse.

In the way of larger-scale sculpture, This & That features Tied Trumpet (2004), a knotted bright yellow trumpet rendered in aluminum, plastic tubing, canvas, felt, and foam, and Miniature Soft Drum Set (1969), a set of nine sewn screen-printed elements on canvas. Another highlight is Knife Ship 1:12 (2008), an aluminum and mahogany wood reprisal of the monumental Knife Ship that Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen presented as part of their legendary 1985 performance Il Corso del Coltello (The Corse of the Knife) in Venice, Italy—this storied, site-specific project, realized by the artists in collaboration with curator Germano Celant and architect Frank Gehry, centered around a boat in the shape of a Swiss-army knife, which was floated down the city’s canals.

Claes Oldenburg 

Alphabet in Form of a Good Humor Bar, 1970 

© Claes Oldenburg, courtesy Pace Gallery

A 1976 screenprint of the Knife Ship superimposed onto the image of the Guggenheim Museum in New York—an artwork that predates the performance—is also be included in This & That. Other prints on view at Pace in Tokyo will be Alphabet in Form of a Good Humor Bar (1970), which renders the alphabet in the shape of an ice cream bar; The Letter Q as Beach House, with Sailboat (1972), where Claes Oldenburg imagines the letter ‘Q’ as a towering waterfront home; and the artist’s Apple Core prints, each representative of one of the four seasons, from 1990.

Through his iterative and elastic process of translating imagery from one medium to another—and suggesting innumerable possible transformations as part of that process—Claes Oldenburg expanded the possibilities of art by inviting the viewer to look again. Taken together, the works in this exhibition reflect his uncanny ability to render the familiar strange, and to imbue magic and wonder into the most mundane of subject matter.

Maartje Oldenburg is the daughter of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen and is the head of the artists’ estates. A writer, editor, and lawyer, Maartje Oldenburg formally studied Japanese language, literature, and history for many years. She lived and worked in Japan in the 1990s.

Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929, Stockholm; d. 2022, New York) is renowned for his sculptures, drawings, and colossal monuments that transform familiar objects into states that imply animation and sometimes revolt. A leading voice of the Pop art movement, Oldenburg came to prominence in the New York art scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s. His seminal installations The Street (1960) and The Store (1961) launched his career, subverting artistic and institutional conventions while creating a backdrop for happenings and performances under the production name Ray Gun Theater. Initially conceiving of monumental works based on everyday items in drawings and collages, Claes Oldenburg installed his first realized outdoor public sculpture, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks (1969–74), during an antiwar protest at Yale University in 1969. He subsequently collaborated for over three decades with Coosje van Bruggen to create largescale projects across the world. Conflating notions of art and banality, and high-brow and low-brow, the investigation of objecthood spans Oldenburg’s earliest production to his work today.

PACE GALLERY TOKYO

1F; Azabudai Hills Garden Plaza-A

5-8-1 Toranomon, Minato-ku, Tokyo

www.pacegallery.com

Summer House @ Pablo’s Birthday Gallery, NYC - Exhibition Curated by Thea Smolinski with Alex Becerra, Mark Ryan Chariker, Gabrielle Garland, Brice Guilbert, Gala Knörr, Amy Lincoln, Maud Madsen, Nat Meade, Koichi Sato, Tony Toscani, Lorena Torres

Summer House

Alex Becerra, Mark Ryan Chariker, Gabrielle Garland, Brice Guilbert, Gala Knörr, Amy Lincoln, Maud Madsen, Nat Meade, Koichi Sato, Tony Toscani, Lorena Torres

Curated by Thea Smolinski 

Pablo’s Birthday Gallery, New York

26 June - 1 August 2025

Pablo’s Birthday presents Summer House organized by curator and advisor, Thea Smolinski. The presentation features work by Alex Becerra, Mark Ryan Chariker, Gabrielle Garland, Brice Guilbert, Gala Knörr, Amy Lincoln, Maud Madsen, Nat Meade, Koichi Sato, Tony Toscani, and Lorena Torres. Smolinski borrows the title from a tradition of urban escapism, with all the implications of cooler breezes, slower paces, and endless afternoons; as if the warmer weather suddenly authorizes spontaneity, cheer, and idleness - and the occasional dubious decision. 

With lusciousness comes both the drought and rain, the exhibition brings together artists whose main themes tend to reflect this summer agenda; our bodies desperate to reconnect with nature, our sudden amusement with mundanity, sweating in a collective revelry, and the ultimate authorization to be lazy. In Summer House, figures indulge in this nothingness; basking in apathy, appearing blissful in the slow passing of time, or posing together in celebration. Outdoor scenes evoke the awesomeness of nature and playfully use color tuned into the vibrancy of the season. 

A quiet, heat-laden stillness permeates many of the works in Summer House. In Lorena Torres’ UNA VEZ EN ABRIL (2025), a man rests in a hammock, suspended in languor, while in Tony Toscani’s Where She Waits, a woman perches in airy summer clothes. Gala Knörr’s La fiesta terminó, larga vida a la fiesta (2024) drifts into the surreal, with a green face lost in ecstasy.  Maud Madsen’s Pillow Fort (2022) introduces a playful mystery, cloaked in hues of blue. Nat Meade and Alex Becerra offer male figures immersed in summer reverie—whether caught in ocean waves or shaded beneath a brimmed hat. Nature comes alive in the dreamy, almost otherworldly color palette of Amy Lincoln’s Pink and Green Storm Clouds (2020), to the explosive volcanic light in Brice Guilbert’s Fournez. Gabrielle Garland paints an idyllic summer escape, while Koichi Sato and Mark Ryan Chariker create tender, reflective scenes that gently remind us of the joy—and strangeness—of being together again.

CURATOR THEA SMOLINSKI

Thea Smolinski is an advisor, collection manager, and curator who believes wholeheartedly in the power of providing a platform for art and artists. She has a BA in Art History from Georgetown University, and completed an MA and doctoral exams at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She has held positions in various sectors of the arts, including museums (The Wolfsonian-FIU), galleries (Michael Werner and Shaheen Modern and Contemporary Art), advisories (Allan Schwartzman), private collection management, and research (the great Linda Nochlin). She has only mild regrets about not taking that internship with Phillips in 2005, and knows more about international shipping regulations than she ever expected to. Recent curatorial efforts with the Jane Club (Los Angeles), the Pit (Palm Springs), Shrine (Los Angeles), Massey Klein (New York), Future Fair (Los Angeles), and Mrs (New York) reflect an ongoing interest in women, networks, and labor. She lives in Los Angeles with painter Craig Kucia and their two children.

ARTIST ALEX BECERRA

Alex Becerra (b. 1989, lives in Los Angeles, CA) has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Timonier, New York, NY; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, IL; Karma International, Beverly Hills, CA and Zürich, Switzerland; Weiss Berlin, Germany, and One Trick Pony, Los Angeles, CA. Selected group exhibitions include VETA by Fer Francés , Madrid, Spain; Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Kunstraum Potsdam, Germany; Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; The Journal Gallery, New York, NY; Richard Telles Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI; M+B Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Journal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Ben Maltz Gallery, Westchester, CA; and more.

ARTIST MARK RYAN CHARIKER

Mark Ryan Chariker (b. 1984, Spartanburg, SC) currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in Boston, MA. Chariker’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions, including Ojos de perro azul, Marinaro, New York; Lost Hours, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, UK; I have an idea!, 1969 Gallery, New York, NY; Platform, presented by David Zwirner Gallery, New York, NY; Red Root, Green Root, The Valley, Taos, NM. Mark Ryan Chariker has completed residencies at PM/AM Gallery in London, RAiR Foundation in Roswell, New Mexico, SÍM in Reykjavik, Iceland, and NES in Skagaströnd, Iceland. Chariker’s works are in the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Miami, FL Center of International Contemporary Art, Vancouver, Canada, and Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, New York, NY; Paris, France. His paintings have been featured in Artforum International, Artnet News, and Art of Choice.

ARTIST GABRIELLE GARLAND

Gabrielle Garland (b. 1968, New York, NY) received her Master of Fine Arts at the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL.Gabrielle Garland has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Pit LA, Los Angeles, CA; Taymour Grahne Projects, London, United Kingdom; Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, IL; The Brent and Jean Wadsworth Family Gallery, Lewis University, Romeoville, IL; Hap Gallery, Portland, OR; and DOVA Temporary, Chicago, IL. Recent group exhibitions have been held at The Pit LA, Los Angeles, CA; The Hole, New York, NY; Weinberg/Newton Gallery, Chicago, IL; DeVos Art Museum, Northern Michigan University, Marquette, MI; 1969 Gallery, New York, NY; and Campbell Project Space, Sydney, Australia. Over the last decade she has been working on a series of images based in, on, and around architecture, portraits of apartments and houses featuring uniquely American interiors and exteriors. These paintings utilize a wide range of mark-making devices and an elastic perspective that draws out the specific personality of each domicile.

ARTIST BRICE GUILBERT

Brice Guilbert (b. 1979, Montpellier) lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. Guilbert’s work has been shown in a number of exhibitions including Mendes Wood DM, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, Island, Brussels, Belgium, Corrida, Ghent, Belgium, Théâtre National, Brussels, Belgium, Johannes Vogt, New-York, Louise 186, Brussels, Belgium, Super Dakota, Brussels, Belgium, MNAC Anenda, Bucharest Romania, Hunchentoot, Berlin, Germany, and We-Projects, Brussels, Belgium, among others.

ARTIST GALA KNORR

Gala Knörr (b. 1984, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain) received her BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons Paris The New School in 2007, and an MA Fine Art from Central Saint Martins in 2011. She has been the recipient of Generación 2020 - Fundación Montemadrid, the Basque Artist Program Grant from the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, and the Cultura Resident Artistic Research Fellowship from the Consorci de Museus GVA. Gala Knörr was the Education Department Assistant at the Saatchi Gallery in 2014, and appointed the 2018-2019 Artist-Researcher in residence at Centre for Postcolonial Studies at Goldsmiths University in London. She has also done residencies at Tabakalera International Centre of Contemporary Culture in San Sebastian, Cité Internationale des Arts Paris, AIR Wro in Breslau, and Fundación Bilbaoarte Fundazioa in Bilbao. She currently lives between Vitoria-Gasteiz and Marbella.

ARTIST AMY LINCOLN

Amy Lincoln (b. 1981, Bloomington, Indiana) completed her MFA at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in 2006 and her BA at University of California, Davis in 2003. Lincoln’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Sperone Westwater (2024; 2023; 2021), Taymour Grahne Projects, London (2022), Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York (2018; 2016) and Monya Rowe Gallery, Saint Augustine, FL (2016), among others. Her work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions including Johansson Projects, Oakland, CA (2024), Columbus Museum of Art, OH (2023), The Hole, New York (2022), Sargent’s Daughters, New York (2018), and Regina Rex, New York (2017), as well as internationally at Galerie Valerie Bach, Brussels, Belgium (2020) and Taymour Grahne Projects, London (2022; 2021). Lincoln has been awarded residencies at the Wave Hill Winter Workspace program, the Inside Out Art Museum Residency in Beijing, and a Swing Space residency from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Columbus Museum of Art and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.

ARTIST MAUD MADSEN

Maud Madsen (b. 1993, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Maud Madsen earned a BFA from the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, in 2016, an MFA from the New York Academy of Art, New York, NY, in 2020. Recent solo exhibitions include Dog Days, Half Gallery, New York, NY (2023); Daisy Chain, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY (2022); Maud Madsen, Half Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2022); and Maud Madsen: Three Paintings, 1969 Gallery, New York, NY (2021). Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including A Crack in Overton’s Window, The Ranch, Montauk, NY (2023); Painters of Modern Life, Ibiza, Spain (2023); Up All Night, Frederick & Freiser, New York, NY (2023); Come a Little Closer, DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY (2023); Women of Now, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX (2022); Stiltsville, Half Gallery, Miami, FL (2021); among others. Maud Madsen is the recipient of the 2022 Canadian Women Artists’ Award, New York Foundation for the Arts.

ARTIST NAT MEADE

Nat Meade (b. 1975, Greenfield, Massachusetts) received his BFA from the University of Oregon and his MFA from Pratt Institute. His work has shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally, and has been reviewed in publications such as Art Forum, Juxtapoz, The Boston Globe, and Hyperallergic. Meade is an instructor of painting and drawing at Pratt Institute, where he also serves as the Assistant Chairperson of Fine Arts.

ARTIST KOICHI SATO

Koichi Sato (b. 1974, Tokyo, Japan) is a self-taught New York City based artist. Having grown up influenced by the abundance of images in television and sports, his paintings generally focus on the playful reinvention of these images in bold stylization, pattern, and color. Sato has been the subject of solo exhibitions at NANZUKA in Tokyo, Jack Hanley in New York and East Hampton, Bill Brady Gallery in Miami, Woaw in Hong Kong, and the Hole, New York. Selected group exhibitions include Bortolami, New York; Stems Gallery in Brussels; the Parco Museum in Tokyo; Jeffrey Deitch in both Los Angeles and New York; and Galerie Nagel Draxler in Cologne.

ARTIST TONY TOSCANI

Tony Toscani (b.1986, Abington, PA) received his BFA from Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, and his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2011. He has exhibited in solo exhibitions with Carl Kostyal, London, UK; Stems Gallery, Brussels, BE; and Massey Klein Gallery, New York, NY. Recent group exhibitions include Volery Gallery, Dubai, UAE; Massey Klein Gallery, New York, NY; Here Arts Center, New York, NY; Knee Pits Gallery, Miami, FL; Gowanus Ballroom , Brooklyn, NY; Gesamtkunst Workshop, Brooklyn, NY; Field Projects Gallery, New York, NY; Barrett Art Center, Poughkeepsie, NY and Stillhouse Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Tony Toscani currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

ARTIST LORENA TORRES

Lorena Torres (b. 1991, Barranquilla, Colombia) holds a BFA in Visual Arts from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá. Her most recent solo exhibitions include Huxley-Parlour, London, 2024; Weinstein Hammons, Minnesota, 2024; Pablo’s Birthday, New York, 2023; and SGR Galeria, Bogotá, 2023. Torres recently completed a residency at Casa Santa Ana in Panama City and will be an upcoming resident at the Thread residency in Sinthian, Senegal, a collaboration between the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and Le Korsa. Lorena Torres lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia.

PABLO'S BIRTHDAY GALLERY

105 Hudson Street, #410, New York, NY 10013

pablosbirthday.com

Trevor Paglen @ Pace Gallery, NYC - "Cardinals" Exhibition

Trevor Paglen: Cardinals

Pace Gallery, New York

June 26 - August 15, 2025

Trevor Paglen 

Near Lichau Creek (undated), n.d. 

© Trevor Paglen, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents an exhibition of work by TREVOR PAGLEN at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. This focused presentation features photographs of novel aerial phenomena captured by the artist in the American West over the last two decades. Bringing together a selection of prints and polaroids, this show will explore the relationships between UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) sightings, Artificial Intelligence, and the rise of disinformation in today’s media environment—which has all but obliterated the notion of ‘truth.’ As Trevor Paglen has said, we live in “a historical moment wherein our relationships to text, images, information, and media are being entirely upended,” and UFOs, deployed by the US military and intelligence agencies as psychological instruments since the 1950s, “blur lines between perception, imagination, and 'objective' reality, whatever that may or may not be.”

The artist, whose rigorous practice spans photography, sculpture, video, and installation, is known for his investigations of invisible phenomena and forces, including technological, scientific, socio-political, and historical subjects. Through his work, Trevor Paglen has explored Artificial Intelligence, surveillance, data collection, and militarism in America, meditating on the ways these issues influence modes of perceiving and relating to the natural world—from the landscapes of the US to the cosmological realms beyond the Earth.

“UFOs live in the latent space between the material, the sensible, and the perceptual,” Trevor Paglen said of his enduring interest in the history of UFO photography. “They inhabit the crossroads of fear, desire, logic, and hope. They produce communities of believers and debunkers, and dreams of divine salvation, endless energy, impossible physics, dark conspiracies, and existential fears.”

The otherworldly, entirely undoctored photographs on view at Pace in New York this summer depict diminutive UFOs amid sprawling landscapes near US military test sites and training bases in California and Utah, including one near Robert Smithson’s seminal land artwork Spiral Jetty. Trevor Paglen has been capturing his UFO images since 2002, often while carrying out research and site visits for other projects. Exploiting the hyper memetic qualities of the UFO, he insists on the mysteries of his images by withholding information about what exactly he has captured—in some cases, the contents of these photographs are unknown to the artist as well.

He produced these photographs with various cameras: a Phillips Compact II 8x10, a Wista 4x5 field camera, a Pentax medium-format handheld, a Canon 35mm, and two digital medium-format cameras, one modified to shoot infrared. Most of the works in this series were shot on analog Kodak Portra, T-Max, or Fuji FP Instant film.

Paglen’s UFO photographs can be understood in conversation with his body of images of “unids,” or “unidentifieds”—the many hundreds of unknown objects in orbit around the Earth that are monitored and tracked by the US military—which he captured using infrared telescopes in remote locations. Atmospheric and mysterious, these skyscapes, which figured in Paglen’s 2023 solo show with Pace in New York, show the light trails of “unids,” drawing out the abstracted, textural qualities of the cosmos.

Concurrent with his exhibition of UFO photographs at Pace, Trevor Paglen is presenting work in the group exhibition "The World Through AI", on view at the Jeu de Paume in Paris through September 21, 2025.

TREVOR PAGLEN (b. 1974, Camp Springs, Maryland) is known for investigating the invisible through the visible, with a wide-reaching approach that spans image making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines.

The clandestine and the hidden are revealed in series such as The Black Sites, The Other Night Sky, and Limit Telephotography in which the limits of vision are explored through the histories of landscape photography, abstraction, Romanticism, and technology. Paglen’s investigation into the epistemology of representation can be seen in his Symbology and Code Names series which utilize text, video, object, and image to explore questions surrounding military culture and language. Among his chief concerns are learning how to see the historical moment we live in and developing the means to imagine alternative futures.

Trevor Paglen has had numerous one-person exhibitions, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2019); Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2015); Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing (2015); Protocinema Istanbul (2013); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2013); and Vienna Secession (2010). He has participated in group exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2008, 2010, 2018); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2014); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2012); Tate Modern, London (2010), and numerous other institutions.

PACE NEW YORK

540 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Suresh Prandi @ Maroncelli 12 Gallery, Milan - "Spirit and Spectres in Suresh's colour​​" Exhibition

Spirit and Spectres in Suresh's colour​​

Maroncelli 12 Gallery, Milan

Through September 26, 2025

Maroncelli 12 gallery presents the Suresh Prandi’s debut on the art scene and the power of his painting. “Spirito e spettri nel colore di Suresh / Spirit and Spectres in Suresh’s colour” is curated by art historian Bianca Tosatti. This is the first ever exhibition of this young artist. 

The exhibition will continue at the Gliacrobati gallery in Turin, in June-July 2026. 

Suresh Prandi’s works move emotions: the artist’s vision breaks the canonical scheme of perspective, in a dense carpet of pasty chromatic fields, supported by black strokes that allude to forms of human features. Suresh Prandi’s creative process is born from a meditative state during which the lines become tangled on a chromatic base stratified on many levels: in fact, as in the gymnastics that the artist systematically practices, spiritual understanding cannot be seen unless one learns the right techniques. And in this mass of matter, the eye emerges - more eyes - that attract the viewer and like magnets suck him into "lakes" of color. 

"And at once I find the eye that is looking back at me: extraordinarily large, fixed and enquiring - writes Bianca Tosatti in the critical text in the catalog -; a vortex sucking me inward, amplifying the tremors of my mental terrain; an outward explosion of my existence whose forms it shakes. And so the work becomes a subject-gaze situated in the field of the Other, because it is the image that looks at the subject".

Suresh Prandi was born on June 9, 1998 in Bangalore (India), where he spent his early years with his parents. At the age of eight he was adopted by the Prandi family and moved to Campogalliano, a small village in the province of Modena, where he still lives. He regularly attended elementary, middle and high school, graduating from the professional institute of Correggio (Reggio Emilia) in “Services for Agriculture and Rural Development”. Thanks to his idol, Cristiano Ronaldo, Suresh Prandi first became passionate about football and then about gymnastics, developing a true cult for the body, around which all his days now revolve. In 2018 Suresh Prandi began his placement at the day center of the Nazareno cooperative in Carpi, in the province of Modena (an association for the reception, care and rehabilitation of people with disabilities), where he began to express himself through drawing. Noticing his natural talent and the benefits he derives from it in terms of relationships and personal well-being, in 2024 it was decided to permanently include him in Manolibera painting atelier, where he works every day. 

The artist often uses oil pastels to create a chromatic mosaic that almost entirely covers the previously created drawing; he is a master in the combination of color that never fades into the next shade but it is placed next to it as if the hues and combinations were innate. And speaking of “Landscape with Angel”, Bianca Tosatti writes: “The colour is approached in a circumspect and yet ambitious way; weighed and divided like the cones of pigment on an Indian market stall, arranged by a wise seller so that the emotional value of each one can be perceived”. 

MARONCELLI 12 GALLERY

Via Maroncelli, 12 – Milan

maroncelli12.it

Spirit and Spectres in Suresh's colour​​

Maroncelli 12 Gallery, Milan, May 28 – September 26, 2025

Shahzia Sikander: The Last Post @ SAAM - Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Shahzia Sikander: The Last Post

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington

July 3, 2025 – July 12, 2026

Shahzia Sikander 

The Last Post, 2010

Single-channel HD digital animation, color,

5.1 surround sound; 10:00 minutes 

Music: Du Yun 

Smithsonian American Art Museum, 

Museum purchase through the 

Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment,

 in partnership with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, 2025.11

© 2025, Shahzia Sikander. 

Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles

Shahzia Sikander’s iconoclastic multimedia explorations encompass drawing and painting, mosaics, sculpture and video. She initially trained in an illustration tradition—classical Indo-Persian miniature painting—that was bounded by frames, borders and precise architecture. From this, she developed her unique, disruptive style.  

Through precisely inked and animated scenes, Sikander’s video animation “The Last Post” (2010) critically considers the legacy of British colonialism in Asia, using her signature approach of infusing Indo-Persian manuscript compositions with a contemporary perspective. “The Last Post” centers a European gentleman in a red waistcoat, a symbol of British imperial power, based on miniature paintings from the late 18th century depicting British East India Company officials. Indian court architecture, Chinese cut-paper silhouettes and a watercolor map of South Asia all dissolve and reconfigure around him as electronic beats by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun explode on the soundtrack.  

“The Last Post” was acquired in 2025 by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The work is presented in a dedicated gallery for immersive media art installations that opened in 2023 on the museum’s third floor. The 10-minute film runs continuously and can be entered at any time. The presentation is organized by Saisha Grayson, curator of time-based media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

SAAM - Smithsonian American Art Museum

8th and G Streets, NW, Washington, DC 20004

americanart.si.edu

Lavett Ballard, Amber Robles-Gordon, Evita Tezeno @ Driskell Center, University of Maryland, College Park - "Solace and Sisterhood" Exhibition

Solace and Sisterhood

Lavett Ballard, Amber Robles-Gordon, Evita Tezeno

Driskell Center, University of Maryland, College Park

September 10 - December 10, 2025

Evita Tezeno 

True Sistahs, 2024 

Acrylic and mixed media collage on canvas, 48 × 48 in. 

Courtesy of Luis de Jesus Los Angeles and the artist

The Driskell Center announces the exhibition Solace and Sisterhood, a group exhibition featuring the work of contemporary artists Lavett Ballard, Amber Robles-Gordon, and Evita Tezeno. 

Solace and Sisterhood brings the powerful dynamic of sisterhood to the forefront by showcasing the work of three prominent Black female artists: Lavett Ballard, Amber Robles-Gordon, and Evita Tezeno. Curated by Dr. Lauren Davidson, this exhibit explores the depth of Black sisterhood, highlighting the strength, resilience, and bond that unites these women, both individually and as a collective.

Through their artwork, Ballard, Robles-Gordon, and Tezeno invite viewers into their personal and shared experiences, offering a window into the powerful friendships and sisterhood they have cultivated over the years. Drawing from their own histories and the broader African American and African diasporic narratives, the artists use a diverse range of media — including painting, collage, photography, and mixed media — to reflect on themes of self-identity, Black female beauty, spiritual awakening, and the impact of shared cultural traditions. Their work transcends simple categorizations, questioning conventional perceptions of Black womanhood and challenging stereotypes in both contemporary and historical contexts.

Each artist brings a unique perspective to the exhibit. Lavett Ballard's work explores themes of spiritual and cultural connection, using visual storytelling to reflect on the power of faith and the transformative nature of Black womanhood. Amber Robles-Gordon blends abstraction with personal symbolism, creating intricate and thought-provoking works that delve into the complexities of Black female identity and empowerment. Evita Tezeno's vibrant and layered collage works engage with the intersection of history, race, and Black joy, offering a reflective vision of Black womanhood that celebrates its quiet beauty and strength in the face of societal challenges.

Solace and Sisterhood has been guest curated by Dr. Lauren Davidson, an independent curator and scholar, who notes, “Sisterhood is more than a familial bond — it’s a vital, necessary force for survival and affirmation in the lives of Black women. The work of these three artists goes beyond mere friendship and becomes a manifestation of this sisterhood: a way to reframe narratives, challenge societal expectations, and assert our rightful place in the world.” Works in this exhibition have been generously loaned by the artists, private collectors, Luis De Jesus Los Angeles Gallery, and Morton Fine Art, L.L.C. has been guest curated by Dr. Lauren Davidson, an independent curator and scholar, who notes, “Sisterhood is more than a familial bond — it’s a vital, necessary force for survival and affirmation in the lives of Black women. The work of these three artists goes beyond mere friendship and becomes a manifestation of this sisterhood: a way to reframe narratives, challenge societal expectations, and assert our rightful place in the world.” Works in this exhibition have been generously loaned by the artists, private collectors, Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, and Morton Fine Art, L.L.C. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication — available for free — with essays by the curator and Dr. Jordana Saggese, as well as full-color images of the works. This exhibition was originally organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Arlington, VA, and is supported in part by the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) and the University of Maryland's Arts for All initiative. It is part of the NEXTNow Fest.

ARTIST LAVETT BALLARD

b. 1970, East Orange, NJ

Lives and works in Willingboro, NJ

Lavett Ballard’s work is in public and private collections, including the US Embassy in Kambala, Uganda, the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University, Stockton University Art Collection and the collections of ABC Studios, CBS Studios, and NBC/Universal Studios. Ballard created two commissioned covers for TimeMagazine: one in March 2020 for the 100th anniversary of Women’s Suffrage and a second in February 2023 to accompany Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson’s essay about her book CASTE: Origins of our Discontent.

Lavett Ballard holds a BA in Studio Art and Art History from Rutgers University and an MFA from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia and is an adjunct professor at Rowan College of South Jersey. Ballard is represented by Galerie Myrtis in Baltimore.

ARTIST AMBER ROBLES-GORDON

b. 1977, San Juan, Puerto Rico

Lives and works in Washington, DC

Amber Robles-Gordon is an Afro-Latina interdisciplinary visual artist whose creations are visual representations of her hybridism: a fusion of her gender, ethnicity, cultural, and social experiences. Her assemblages, large sculptures, installations, and public artwork, emphasize the essentialness of spirituality and temporality within life.

Robles-Gordon’s work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the American University Museum (Washington, DC), Morton Fine Art (Washington, DC), Derek Eller Gallery (New York, NY), and the August Wilson African American Cultural Center (Pittsburgh, PA), among other venues, and in group exhibitions across the United States and internationally. She was a resident at the American Academy in Rome in 2019 and a semi-finalist for the Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize in 2022. She holds an MFA from Howard University and a BS from Trinity College.

ARTIST EVITA TEZENO

b. 1960, Port Arthur, TX

Lives and works in Dallas, TX

Evita Tezeno’s collage paintings employ richly patterned hand-painted papers and found objects. They depict a cast of characters in harmonious scenes inspired by her family and friends, childhood memories in South Texas, personal dreams, and moments from her adult life and influenced by the great 20th century modernists Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, and William H. Johnson.

Tezeno’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Pérez Art Museum (Miami, FL), the Dallas Museum of Art, African American Museum of Dallas, Figge Art Museum (Davenport, IA) Embassy of the Republic of Madagascar; and Pizzuti Collection (Columbus, OH) among many others. She is the recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and, in 2012, the Elizabeth Catlett Award for the New Power Generation. She is represented by Luis de Jesus Los Angeles.

CURATOR LAUREN DAVIDSON

Dr. Lauren Davidson is an independent art curator and founder of Museum Nectar Art Consultancy, L.L.C. Her research interests include Black cultural aesthetic theory, visual culture, and the influence of place and geographical migration throughout the African Diaspora. Recent curatorial projects include Collecting Community:Millenium Arts Salon at 25 (co-curated with Jarvis Dubois), Chosen Family, The Ties That Bind and Zero Dollar Bill: The Prints of Imar Lyman (co-curated with Jarvis Dubois), and Bria Edwards: More Time in A Day.

DRISKELL CENTER

The David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora

University of Maryland - College of Arts & Humanities

1214 Cole Student Activities Building, College Park, MD 20742

driskellcenter.umd.edu

Eric Dever @ Berry Campbell Gallery, NYC - "Points of Interest" Exhibition

Eric Dever: Points of Interest 

Berry Campbell Gallery, New York

3 July - 15 August 2025

Berry Campbell Gallery presents its fourth exhibition of paintings by contemporary artist ERIC DEVER. Eric Dever: Points of Interest is an exploration into the temporal dimensions of plant life and the ecological impact of climate change. Eric Dever lives and works in Water Mill, New York, and often looks to his studio garden for inspiration. His “points of interest” further extend to Water Mill’s surrounding watershed, regional travel to arboretums and botanical gardens, nature reserves, and notable historic vistas, reflecting a sustained engagement with natural and cultivated environments.

Eric Dever’s paintings teeter between representation and abstraction balancing these two modalities with ease. In some works, Eric Dever renders botanical forms in clear frontal depictions that are immediately recognizable; in others, plant forms dissolve into expansive abstractions that appear to spill over the edge of the canvas. This interplay of styles unfolds across the nineteen works in this exhibition, many of which are Dever’s largest and most ambitious paintings to date.

As Dr. Giovanni Aloi states in the exhibition catalogue: “In Eric Dever’s paintings, time is neither background nor metaphor: it is substance. Just as the garden stages a choreography of slow unfolding, Dever’s canvases are accumulations of temporal gestures, each brushstroke a pulse in the continuum of material and spiritual becomings.”

Eric Dever recently had a painting acquired by the Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, New York, which was included in The Rains are Changing Fast: Acquisitions in Context. He was also included in Seeing Red: From Renoir to Warhol at the Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, New York, along with Parrish Perspectives curated by Alicia Longwell at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York. Additionally, Eric Dever has participated in the United States Art and Embassies program loaning paintings to Hong Kong, Macau, and Helsinki. Dr. Gail Levin and Margery Gosnell-Qua have written about Dever’s paintings, and Helen Harrison and Patrick Christiano have interviewed the artist. In recent years, Eric Dever was the recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts residency in Montauk, New York. Eric Dever is preparing for a solo exhibition at the Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina, in 2026.

BERRY CAMPBELL GALLERY

524 W 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

berrycampbell.com

Group Show @ Skoto Gallery, NYC. Artists including Uche Okeke, Lula Mae Blocton, Juliana Zevallos, Trokon Nagbe, Afi Nayo...

Group Show

Skoto Gallery, New York

May 29 – July 26, 2025

Afi Nayo, Ahmed Nosseir, Bernard Guillot, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Cathy Lebowitz, David Rich, Diako, Fathi Hassan, Katherine Taylor, Khalid Kodi, Lula Mae Blocton, Michael Marshall, Olu Amoda, Piniang, Rosemary Karuga SoHyun Bae, Sophie Leys, Trokon Nagbe, Uche Okeke, Wosene Kosrof, Juliana Zevallos 

Skoto Gallery presents Group Show, an exhibition that brings together works by a diverse group of established and emerging artists working in a variety of media including painting, drawing, photography and sculpture.

With a mix of abstraction and sensitive realism that combines technical accomplishment with strong aesthetic appeal, the artists in this exhibition work across different time-periods and styles. Each of the artists re-imagines history, inheritance and vast possibilities in their work through the lens of individual and collective experiences, offering fresh perspectives that reflect the complexities and realities of contemporary identity. Each artist utilizes a particular rigor and economy which encourages a clarity of intent and simplicity of execution.

Afi Nayo’s (b. 1969, Lome, Togo) work is intensely personal and displays a blend of fragility, modesty and refinement. She uses pyro gravure and mixed media technique on wood panel to create pictures that consist of fantastic dream images, wit and imagination as well as overtones of fantasy and satire. They are dense with sensual surfaces, formal rigors and color harmonies that demonstrate a playful openness to art historical influences, while simultaneously encouraging multiple layers of meanings. She uses a complex language of symbols and signs drawn from the unconscious to obtain a poetic amalgam of abstraction and reality. She presently divides her time between Paris, France and Lome, Togo.

Trokon Nagbe draws on themes of memory, migration, history and the passage of time through the filter of personal experience. Firmly rooted in a framework of references that reflect his African heritage, he strives to push the bounds of his aesthetic while exploring intricate, and often paradoxical, relationship between the material and the spiritual, collective and the individual identity as well as the interior and the exterior. The visual resonance in his work is undeniable, attesting to his ability to seamlessly fuse ancient and modern concepts and aesthetic on new and innovative modes of representation while still contesting the meanings of the post-modern encounter between tradition and modernity.

Juliana Zevallos uses a wide range of media including her background as a versatile printmaker to create complex and poetic works layered with meaning and surface texture where some overlapping forms are fully present while other forms are partially obscured. They are simple, serene and as mature as thought. Closely viewed, her work is an invitation for contemplation that strives to reconcile intelligence and sensibility, knowledge and intuition as well as matter and spirit.

Lula Mae Blocton is an African American artist and painter. Color is her passion. What she has been dealing with is the quality of color, looking at it and perceiving it as transparent. Throughout her career she has tried to identify herself through the use of color relationships and structure. Her work can be seen as specific stages of developing towards these goals. Lula’s early work consisted of overlapping geometric patterns creating transparent combinations of color, much like weaving cloth to create a pattern.

Uche Okeke (1933-2016) Renowned for his immense contribution to the development of modern Nigerian art and pioneering visual experimentations with traditional Igbo Uli mural and body design, Uche Okeke’s early drawings in graphite, charcoal or ink are pure meditations upon the nature of line itself. A master of lyrical and sensitive lines, he uses resplendent curves and fluid lines to convey the true harmonies of his artistic vision. His work is in several permanent collections including the National Gallery, Lagos, Nigeria, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Newark Museum, Newark, NJ; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; The High Museum, Atlanta, GA, Iwalewa Haus, Bayreuth, Germany. He was included in the exhibition Stranieri Ovunque-Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa at the 2024 Venice Biennale, Venice Italy.

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Bienvenue: African American Artists in France @ Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York

Bienvenue: African American Artists in France 

Michael Rosenfeld, New York

Through July 25, 2025

“There is a breadth, a generosity, an obsolete cosmopolitanism about her [France's] recognition of the fine arts, which bars no nationality, no race, no school, or variation of artistic method. All she asks is that the art shall be true, in other words that it shall set forth life.”—Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1908 [1]

“Life in Paris offers me the anonymity and objectivity to release long-stored memories of sorrow, and the beauty of the difficult effort to release and orchestrate in form and color a personal design. Being in France gives time for reflection. One never leaves home if one was never there.”—Beauford Delaney, 1966 [2]

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presents Bienvenue: African American Artists in France, a historical survey of seventeen Black American artists who lived and worked in France from the late nineteenth century through the present. Complementing the landmark exhibition Paris Noir: Artistic circulations and anti-colonial resistance, 1950–2000, on view at the Centre Pompidou through June 30th, Bienvenue offers an expanded look into the presence of Black American artists in France, many of whom were seeking respite from the systemic racism that limited their opportunities for education and the recognition of their work in the United States. Where Paris Noir encompasses artists of the larger African diaspora working in the second half of the twentieth century, Bienvenue: African American Artists in France focuses specifically on American artists, and spans nearly eight decades in its chronological scope, beginning with a 1912 painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937) and ending with a 1989 sculpture by Barbara Chase-Riboud (b.1934).

Bienvenue: African American Artists in France features works by Richmond Barthé (1901–1989), Barbara Chase-Riboud (b.1934), Ed Clark (1926–2019), Robert Colescott (1925–2009), Harold Cousins (1916–1992), Beauford Delaney (1901–1979), Herbert Gentry (1919–2003), Sam Gilliam (1933–2022), Palmer Hayden (1890–1973), Richard Hunt (1935–2023) William H. Johnson (1901–1970), Augusta Savage (1892–1962), William Edouard Scott (1884–1964), Albert Alexander Smith (1896–1940), Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937), Bob Thompson (1937–1966) and Hale Woodruff (1900–1980).

Widely regarded as the patriarch of Black American artists, Henry Ossawa Tanner remains a foremost painter of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the first Black American artist to achieve international fame. His relocation from Philadelphia to Paris in 1891 set a precedent that would inspire future generations of Black American artists to train, reside, or sojourn in France, including Harlem Renaissance master William Edouard Scott, who studied under Tanner from 1910–13. Likewise, Palmer Hayden, Augusta Savage, and Hale Woodruff each sought an audience with the elder master during their time in France in the 1920s and 1930s. In addition to invaluable advice on navigating the mores of French society, Tanner also provided guidance on painting techniques and openly shared his understanding of art. In a 1970 issue of The Crisis, Hale Woodruff recalled his formative encounter with Tanner in 1928. Traveling to the small town in Picardy where Tanner lived in semi-retirement, Woodruff introduced himself to “a remarkable man of profound intelligence and scholarship,” who welcomed the young artist into his home. Upon asking who had most inspired him in the Parisian museums, Woodruff recalled Tanner’s nomination of Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne as the most important painters of the modern age, elaborating:

“Remember that light can be many things: light for illuminating an object or for creating a mood; for purposes of dramatization as in a theatrical production. For myself, I see light chiefly as a means of achieving a luminosity, a luminosity not consisting of various light-colors but luminosity within a limited color range, say, a blue or blue-green. There should be a glow which indeed consumes the theme or subject. Still, a light-glow which rises and falls in intensity as it moves through the painting. It isn’t simple to put into words.”[3]

Though the country was not free of racism, France generally afforded Black artists and intellectuals greater respect and more opportunities than the United States during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such was the environment that prompted James Baldwin to make Paris his home in 1948, and he spent the ensuing years encouraging his good friend Beauford Delaney to join him. Delaney eventually agreed, moving from his Greene Street loft in Greenwich Village to Montparnasse in 1953. Delaney would remain in the vicinity of Paris for the remainder of his life, composing a singular body of gestural, chromatically nuanced abstractions and a celebrated series of portraits that reflect the creative and spiritual inspiration he felt in the European capital. “I left New York for Paris in 1953, and I have painted with greater freedom ever since,” Delaney wrote some ten years after leaving the United States. “I tried to paint light, different kinds of light, and my painting has been associated with ‘abstraction.’ But there are no precise limits for me between ‘abstract’ and ‘figurative’ paintings and I have always continued to paint portraits of friends.”[4] Beauford Delaney is a particularly strong presence in Paris Noir, which features twelve paintings by the artist, eight of which are on loan from Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.

While Paris has always been a cultural hub for creatives and intellectuals, many artists featured in Bienvenue traveled to the countryside or coast to paint, following the tradition of the Impressionist and modernist masters that inspired them. The exhibition offers key examples of this tradition, including maritime paintings by Palmer Hayden and a coastal scene by Tanner executed along the coast of Brittany; a seminal painting by William H. Johnson depicting the idyllic coastal town of Cagnes-Sur-Mer; a landscape portraying the island of Port-Cros off the French Riviera by Delaney; and a scene of the Eure river by Woodruff executed in Chartres.

The cosmopolitan hub of Paris was a natural attraction for Black American artists, who found the city’s architecture, social spaces, and creative circles to be rich sources of inspiration. Several works in the exhibition feature distinctly Parisian subjects, including Richmond Barthé’s iconic sculpture of Senegalese cabaret dancer Feral Benga; William Edouard Scott’s transcendent portrayal of Notre Dame; and a classic rendition of the Pont Neuf by Hale Woodruff. Parisian nightlife is likewise a recurring theme of the exhibition; in addition to Barthé’s bronze portrait of Benga, drawings by Robert Colescott and Albert Alexander Smith depicting cabaret performances are also on view.

Opportunities for education and art training were another primary draw for many artists, particularly in the postwar era. The exhibition features two abstract paintings by Ed Clark, who enrolled at L'académie de la Grande Chaumière in 1952; major sculptures by Harold Cousins, who studied at Ossip Zadkine’s studio in 1949; and a quintessential abstract painting by Herbert Gentry, who likewise studied under Zadkine and at L'académie de la Grande Chaumière in the late 1940s. Four paintings by Bob Thompson are also on view; executed during his first trip to Europe in 1961–62, these works testify to the hours Thompson spent at the Louvre and Paris’ many other museums, soaking up the compositional devices of the Old Masters and translating them into thoroughly contemporary paintings using his own unique expressionist voice.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is recognized for modern and contemporary art. Since its founding in 1989, the gallery has been committed to expanding the canon of American art by championing artists who have made vital contributions to surrealism, social realism, abstract expressionism, figurative expressionism, and geometric abstraction. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery’s dedication to presenting the work of nineteenth and twentieth century Black American masters is as longstanding as the gallery itself; in addition to dozens of solo exhibitions focused on Black American artists, the gallery organized the renowned annual exhibition series African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks from 1993–2003.

Notes:

[1] Henry Ossawa Tanner quoted in Dewey F. Mosby, Across continents and cultures: The Art and Life of Henry Ossawa Tanner (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1995), 7–8

[2] Beauford Delaney quoted in John Ashbery, “American Sanctuary in Paris,” ARTnews Annual vol. 31 (1966): 146

[3] Tanner quoted in Hale Woodruff, “My Meeting with Henry O. Tanner,” The Crisis (June 1970), reprinted in Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris, 1945-1965, exh. cat. (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1996), 11

[4] Beauford Delaney, artist statement, “Beauford Delaney - Career as a Creative Artist,” c.1963, Beauford Delaney collection, Sc MG 59, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library, New York, NY

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Bienvenue: African American Artists in France 

Michael Rosenfeld, New York, May 10 – July 25, 2025

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