Charisse Pearlina Weston @ Jack Shainman Gallery, New York - 'mis-/mé- (squeeze)' Exhibition

Charisse Pearlina Weston

mis-/mé- (squeeze)

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

October 30 – December 20, 2025

Jack Shainman Gallery presents mis-/mé- (squeeze), an exhibition of new work by Charisse Pearlina Weston, marking the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery since joining the roster in 2024.

Encompassing sculpture, photography, painting and installation, this new body of work mobilizes pressure and ‘the squeeze’ to examine desire as a libidinal structure of ideological misrecognition. Through formal explorations, this series articulates the pressurized terms of displacement through which racialized recognition is constituted. For Black life, misrecognition is not abstract error but an intimate structure: a hidden compression of desire and a deformation of visibility that bears down on the interior. By warping reflective surfaces and imagery that promise clarity—the mirror, the photograph—the works in this exhibition stage how Black interior life persists in and against ‘the squeeze,’ holding open opacity, fracture and concealment as modes of resistant intimacy.

The English prefix mis- (from Old English mis-, ‘wrongly,’ ‘amiss,’ ‘astray’) and its French counterpart mé- (from Latin minus, ‘less’ and male, ‘badly’) both carry a sense of deviation. Each marks a linguistic force that bends its root off course. As such, its prefixal operation is not simply one of failure—it places its subject under duress, rendering it only ever able to receive less than what it seeks. In this sense, the very etymology of mis-/mé- enacts ‘the squeeze’: a constrictive illusion that erroneously transforms the distorted into the intelligible and the incomplete into the whole.

In Lacanian theory, méconnaissance (‘misrecognition’) occurs when a subject identifies with an image or symbol that, endowed through the subject’s desires, promises coherence but is, in fact, alienating. Althusser extends this concept through interpellation, where ideology hails individuals into subjecthood by offering identity and belonging through misrecognition. These are not passive operations: they apply pressure on the subject to conform to predetermined and often oppressive symbolic structures, pressures which are not evenly distributed. For Black life, misrecognition is never only alienation but also a violent intimacy where the demand to be seen and placed is bound to the risk of overexposed erasure.

The sculptures in this series—panes of glass pressed and held by one another and fused into precarious forms—materialize this ideological pressure and ‘the squeeze.’ The physical force exerted by the glass onto itself and the implied threat of its collapse onto the body, fix identity to incongruence. In this way, these uneasy structures echo how Black intimacy is regulated and foreclosed: spaces of tenderness and interiority are pressed to the brink of caving under the weight of surveillance and the risk of violence.

Each sculpture uses surveillance glass, whose material qualities of reflection and concealment have been deformed through differing processes and manipulations. These interventions correlate with and undo the ways in which surveillance enacts its own prefixal squeeze: where surveillance glass would otherwise frame in advance the sites at which the subject will be seen or heard, in this instance its surface becomes transparent where it shouldn’t and reflects in all directions rather than toward one focal point, never allowing the appearance of ‘wholeness’ to stabilize. Furthermore, the environmental conditions necessary for surveillance glass to operate (lighting, position, angle) are withdrawn, thus disabling it. These works gesture toward the racialized economies of visibility that shape Black life, where opacity and refusal preserve the possibility of interior life.

The works on canvas extend this inquiry. Beginning as collaged documentation photographs of earlier sculptures, they undergo recursive manipulations—etching, layering, recomposition and even literal squeezing. Each stage pushes the work further from its referent: the three-dimensional collapses into distorted photographs, which are then effaced by the actions of the hand, only to return to sculpture, now displaced and alienated from its originary self. Here, the subject and its image cannot stand still; they are caught instead in the refracting loop of desire’s racialized libidinal economies.

Through these unstable encounters, the sculptures and canvases presented in mis-/mé-  (squeeze) demonstrate the persistence of Black intimacy and interiority under duress.

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

513 West 20th Street, New York, NY

jackshainman.com

Faith Ringgold @ Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC

Faith Ringgold

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

November 14, 2025 – January 24, 2026

Jack Shainman Gallery presents Faith Ringgold, its inaugural exhibition dedicated to the trailblazing American artist, author, educator and activist. Spanning Ringgold’s extraordinary career, the exhibition foregrounds her groundbreaking and multifaceted practice in textiles—from her earliest ‘tankas’ to her iconic story quilt paintings—alongside pivotal early paintings, sculptures and rarely seen works on paper.

Restlessly creative and formally ambitious, Faith Ringgold explored the expressive potential of diverse media to create an incisive narrative about the historical sacrifices and achievements of Black Americans. Her practice emerged from the political consciousness and activism she developed during the 1960s and 1970s in Harlem, New York. Ringgold’s early paintings and works on paper from this period combine her unique and graphic approach to figuration with a bold and innovative approach to constructing space, which she would continue to explore throughout her life. Through her desire to overcome the largely white, art historical tradition, Faith Ringgold sought out forms more suitable to the exploration of gender and racial identity that she so urgently pursued, leading her to travel abroad in the 1970s, first to Europe and then to Africa.

Faith Ringgold’s experimentation with textiles began with what she referred to as ‘tankas.’ Inspired by the religious and spiritually significant Tibetan thangkas she first encountered when visiting the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Ringgold’s version manifested as paintings on unstretched canvas adorned with sewn fabric borders. It was the potential of these objects to explore the intersection of the craft and fashion traditions she inherited from her family with the history and techniques of European painting that inspired Faith Ringgold and formally initiated her investigation into the medium that would become an integral part of her practice. They additionally provided the flexibility to make art that could be easily transported around the world for exhibition, allowing her to circumvent some of the many practical and economic barriers regularly faced by women artists of her time.

Ringgold’s first tankas, the Feminist Series (1972), feature lush and vividly colored forest scenes paired with hand-painted quotations by Black female abolitionists and Civil Rights leaders. The format inspired her to create Political Landscapes and Love Poems, two series of works on paper from the same year that were odes to her experiences utilizing her own words. These were followed by the Slave Rape Series (1973), in which Faith Ringgold used the likenesses of herself and her daughters to embody the experiences of enslaved women—an act of both identification and reclamation. 

Pushing the tankas into an increasingly abstract direction, Faith Ringgold developed the Window of the Wedding (1974) series, a collaboration with her mother Willi Posey. Inspired by Kuba textiles, these abstract compositions were conceived as hanging prayer rugs intended to bring happiness and protection to married couples. Perhaps Ringgold’s most formally daring tanka works—a series of paintings with raffia fringe titled California Dah—were made in response to her mother’s passing, attempting to bridge the gap between the earthly and the afterlife.

Her experiments with textiles soon extended beyond the two-dimensional plane into painted soft sculptures and performance masks, works that merged her visual and performative sensibilities. Drawing from African sculptural traditions and her own background in theater and education, these works transformed fabric into a medium for storytelling and political expression. The Atlanta Children (1981) soft sculptures, created in response to the murders of twenty-eight Black children in Atlanta, exemplify this shift. Combining sewn and painted fabric, these haunting figures memorialize the victims while confronting the violence of systemic racism—effectively turning textile into a medium of mourning, resistance and care.

Faith Ringgold’s later development of the story quilt in the 1980s both allowed her to work at successively larger scales and to connect with a global lineage of feminine creativity. Regularly combining her autobiography with scenes and episodes from the collective history of Black life in America, the story quilts are disarmingly intimate yet historically grand. The malleability of the form gave her the freedom to move between abstract and experimental series—such as the Politically Correct Sheets and Love Letters that she made in 1987—and more narratively grounded and figuratively descriptive ones, such as the Jazz Stories quilts made between 2004-2007. 

In Politically Correct Sheets and Love Letters, Faith Ringgold melded the printmaking plates she created at Robert Blackburn’s legendary printshop with impressionistic segments of quilting surrounding it, sharply contrasting the graphic nature of the former with the painterly expressivity of the latter. The later Jazz Stories quilts, by contrast, saw Faith Ringgold draw upon her lifelong love of the genre while also centering female performers. By inverting the gendered hierarchies that historically privileged men, Ringgold proposed a vision of justice that would resonate beyond the arts.

Faith Ringgold returned to the history of slavery later in her career with the Coming to Jones Road (1999-2010) series, which recounted the imagined journey of enslaved people traveling north along the Underground Railroad. The title references Ringgold’s own move to a predominantly white suburb in New Jersey and the racial prejudice she experienced while living there at the turn of the 21st century. This fusing of personal and historically derived narratives challenged the conception of the Underground Railroad as being a linear story towards freedom and underscored the ongoing obstacles that persist at the end of a journey and alongside a new beginning.  

“The significance of Faith Ringgold’s life continues to be felt and understood in new, urgent and relevant ways, from pedagogy to artistry, from the personal to the political," said Jack Shainman. “Just as she fought tirelessly against the prevailing sentiments of racial and gendered exclusion of both her time and our own, so too did her inimitable work in textiles provide an example of how life and art—so often presumed to be separate—are in fact deeply and fundamentally intertwined. This exhibition marks the beginning of our commitment to furthering the legacy of one of this country’s most important and vital artists.”

Artist Faith Ringgold

Faith Ringgold (1930-2024) is recognized as one of the most significant cultural figures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, whose impact and influence can be seen throughout the worlds of art and activism today. Over more than six decades, Ringgold distinguished herself as an artist, author, educator and organizer, as she understood the necessity of addressing the politics of race and gender in America in more ways than one. Restlessly creative and formally ambitious, Ringgold worked in a variety of media—from quilts and paintings to performances and children’s books—to create an incisive narrative about the historical sacrifices and achievements of Black Americans.

In 2022, Faith Ringgold was the subject of a major retrospective, Faith Ringgold: American People, which opened at the New Museum, New York, before then traveling to the de Young Museum, San Francisco and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In 2019, Serpentine Galleries, London opened Faith Ringgold, which then travelled to both the Bildmuseet Umeå, Sweden and Glenstone Museum, Potomac. From 2010 to 2013, American People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold’s Paintings of the 1960s opened at the Neuberger Museum of Art, New York and traveled to the Perez Art Museum, Miami, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.

Faith Ringgold is included in numerous public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery, Washington, DC; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC; Neuberger Museum of Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Public Art for Public Schools, New York; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri; Studio Museum, Harlem, New York and The High Museum, Atlanta.

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

46 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10013

jackshainman.com

Hayv Kahraman: Ghost Fires @ Jack Shainman Gallery, New York - With a text by the artist

Hayv Kahraman: Ghost Fires

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

September 11 – October 25, 2025

Jack Shainman Gallery presents Ghost Fires, an exhibition of new work by Hayv Kahraman, the artist's fifth solo presentation with the gallery. Informed by Kahraman's longstanding exploration of displacement, this new body of work is also a response to the recent wildfires in Los Angeles and their direct effect on Hayv Kahraman and her family. In a text written specifically for the exhibition and included here in full, Hayv Kahraman reflects on the ongoing process of understanding these events andcontinuing to find meaning in the world around her:

Hayv Kahraman –

The chemical stench of the toxins left behind by the fire in my home in Altadena made it hard to breathe, but I was determined to find what I had left behind before fleeing: Etel Adnan's book, The Arab Apocalypse. Adnan once said of the sun, "Because the sun is dangerous it can kill you — burn you. But the sun is also life."

Don't look up at the sun, we are told. Our irises burned, scraped abraded-like the migrants burning their fingerprints to evade border police. Burning the traces on your fingers to circumvent erasure. Edouard Glissant comes to mind as I think of burning irises seizing the right to be illegible. The paradox is damning. This is a story that mingles in the interstices of decay and fecundity. In the unseen realms of jinn and spirit. In the Anqa; an illusory female bird who induces renewal andresurrection by burning herself in a nest of palm fronds.

One of the many erasures my body has had to contend with after becoming a refugee in the west is of an embodied connection to sentient and non sentient kin. To be connected with the ecologies I touch and to whom I am touched by. To be attuned to what Gloria Anzaldúa named as spirit and what I think of as jinn. Did the jinn originate from the flames of the sundescending on the planet to live unseen with us humans?

Depression after the fires has made my dissociation palpable and infuriating. I felt severed from my body. You stole my connection to my ancestors. To my ghosts and jinns anddreams. To my place of birth and the cosmologies it houses. To my wind. How do you paint the wind? I've been obsessing about this for many years. Wind is movement, change and life. Wind is also fire. If change is God, like Octavia Butler says, then wind is also God. To celebrate the birth of each year, we dance around fires in west Asia. My ancestors worshiped fire.

Can I be intuitive-clairvoyant-even as the rational, patriarchal voice in my head demands proof? How can I birth and be in ceremony with my painting without justifying its existence in this place? Like an asylum seeker justifying her pain to the immigration officer.

My own ghost fires began showing up in my paintings months before the fires in Los Angeles. "Nature is at war with itself," Adnan says. The womb is burning like in the story I was told as a child in West Asia. An eschatological tale of an entangled, more-than-human, cascading event ignited when a small 'pest' — the flea-slips into a tannour oven and explodes. The death of the flea affects all other sentient beings on the planet. Ending apocalyptically with the mother, sitting on ahot saj, burning her womb.

I am reminded of what my people say: we have no friends but the mountains. This is why I chose this house, because of its proximity to the mountains — that are now barren and charred. Today is the shadow of tomorrow. War refugee, climate refugee. Now what? How can I re-member my connection to this land? Can the ghost fires be generative? The womb is furiously burning like the volcano in Hawaii and it will smolder even once the fires are extinguished. Just like the endless burn pits left in Iraq releasing toxins that our windsbring to us. This is what war does. It silently haunts.

A few weeks after the fires, I returned to my house. The cacti in the yard had bloomed wildly. I had never seen them this healthy and yet, across the street, everything was ash. It became glaringly obvious to me then that this devastation also brought life, perhaps even the emergence of another world. Parallel to this nascent world are the ghost fires that haunt me as I replay the few memories my mind has chosen to keep of the war, in my body, today, in LA. They haunt me so that I re-member. For how can I dream of an emergent world if I close my eyes to the ghosts around me?

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

513 W 20th Street, New York, NY

jackshainman.com

Hank Willis Thomas: I Am Many @ Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Hank Willis Thomas

I Am Many

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

September 5 – November 1, 2025

Jack Shainman Gallery announces I AM MANY, an exhibition featuring new and recent work by Hank Willis Thomas, the artist’s eighth exhibition with the gallery and first in their newly opened Tribeca flagship location. Bringing together large-scale sculptures, retroreflective, lenticular and textile works along with a group of mixed-media assemblages, I AM MANY continues Hank Willis Thomas’ investigation into the myriad of ways that the past and present remain interwoven and interconnected. These works explore the legacies of exploitation and oppression in conjunction with new forms of community and solidarity.

Over the past two decades Hank Willis Thomas’ conceptual practice has employed a wide range of media, from photography and sculpture, to screen printing, installation and video. Drawing from both archival and contemporary imagery that references historical examples of political resistance through iconic photographs or contemporary acts of protest, Thomas regularly recontextualizes popular imagery as source material for his works. What unites Thomas’ work across media is his emphasis on the multivalent nature of historical meaning—as something that can always be reshaped and seen from different perspectives.

The exhibition takes its title from an eponymous work that references photographs from the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike which saw Black men assembled with posters all bearing the same message of ‘I AM A MAN’ and in nearly identical typeface. Hank Willis Thomas has transformed that historic message by creating new iterations that expand out from the original phrase, with retroreflective vinyl that, once activated by direct light, reveals latent, previously hidden images of historic protests. Removed and repositioned from their original context, the crowds underscore the enduring power conveyed by the written word. 

Hank Willis Thomas also uses retroreflective vinyl to staggering effect in Black Survival Guide, or How to Live Through a Police Riot (2018), a work originally commissioned by the Delaware Art Museum to mark 50 years since the occupation by the National Guard following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Thomas combined text from the historic document—originally created as a practical manual to help African Americans survive an occupation—with images taken from News Journal photographs of the time. By encouraging viewers to activate these works via flash, Thomas invites them to resurrect, recover and even save images from being lost to history, ensuring they remain visible and gain prominence in our collective memory.

Sculpture continues to be a vital mode of public engagement for Hank Willis Thomas, providing him with opportunities for building community through shared experience. His punctum sculptures take inspiration from Roland Barthes’ photographic theory which describes a detail or passage within an image—the ‘punctum’—that emotionally resonates, sticks with or ‘pierces’ a viewer. Originally sourced from archival photographs, Hank Willis Thomas has begun to use more universal gestures in his newer compositions, as in Community (2024), where isolated hands linking with arms create a circle of power that conveys love, support and connection. In E Pluribus Unum (2020), an eight-foot stainless steel arm points towards the sky with strength while incorporating viewers into its brilliant reflective surface. The nature and scale of these sculptures mirrors their varying iterations in public spaces nationwide while also speaking to Thomas’ longstanding commitment to reconciling the effects of the past on our present moment in history. 

Jack Shainman stated, "Few artists are able to interpret history in ways that provide new strategies for understanding the present. Hank Willis Thomas has done this consistently throughout his career with successive bodies of work that blend technical sophistication with metaphoric depth. Exhibiting Hank's work in our Tribeca gallery—itself embodying a beautiful but complicated period in American history—promises to be a fitting example of what we envisioned for the space, one where the past can be reanimated by contemporary visions and new material sensibilities.”

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

46 Lafayette Street, New York, NY

jackshainman.com

General Conditions @ Jack Shainman Gallery, Kinderhook, NY

GENERAL CONDITIONS

Jack Shainman Gallery, Kinderhook, NY

Through November 29, 2025

Jack Shainman Gallery presents GENERAL CONDITIONS at The School at Kinderhook, NY. Bringing together work by over two dozen artists working across a wide range of media and at scales both intimate and grand, the exhibition offers a sustained reflection on the social and political climate of our time by considering how we respond—individually and collectively—when many of the most basic components of public life can no longer be taken for granted.

Featured artists include: El Anatsui, Emanoel Araújo, Shimon Attie, Shannon Bool, Diedrick Brackens, Yoan Capote, Geoffrey Chadsey, Ifeyinwa Joy Chiamonwu, Gehard Demetz, Pierre Dorion, Donyel Ivy-Royal, Hayv Kahraman, Jesse Krimes, Deborah Luster, Richard Mosse, Adi Nes, Jackie Nickerson, Gordon Parks, Mary Ann Peters, Kenny Rivero, Rose B. Simpson, Paul Anthony Smith, Becky Suss, Alina Tenser, Carlos Vega, Charisse Pearlina Weston, Deb Willis, Jaclyn Wright, and Elizabeth Zvonar.

As artist Alina Tenser notes, the idea of ‘general conditions’ “resonates on multiple registers, all sinister but vague. In the world of construction, the term holds power precisely because of its evasiveness, allowing those in control to shift goalposts in ways that serve their interests. Its ambiguity makes it nearly impossible for the opposing or disadvantaged side to challenge, negotiate or fully grasp the terms at play. This dynamic eerily mirrors the structural changes we’re witnessing in federal policy, where language and bureaucracy are weaponized to obscure, justify and enable horrific systemic shifts. In both cases, the lack of clear definition breeds a sense of injustice and impending doom, leaving those affected with no firm ground on which to push back.” With social stability seeming to be an ideal of the past and civic norms disappearing by the day, the artists in this exhibition provide us with a bevy of new strategies for thinking about and confronting the crisis of ‘general conditions’ felt by us all.

While each of the works in GENERAL CONDITIONS stands as vivid expressions and bold aesthetic statements in their own regard, many cohere around recurring themes. For example, Richard Mosse’s Heat Map photographs examine the control and exploitation of refugees and migrants as they attempt to move safely across borders. Using a military-grade telephoto camera that can detect thermal radiation, including body heat, across great distances, Richard Mosse documented refugee camps and staging sites, seeing them as landscapes of human displacement where millions struggle for survival.

Displacement is a theme that Hayv Kahraman also considers in her multimedia works on paper, linen and flax fiber. Her pieces regularly show fragmented or disembodied pairs of eyes set within spacious compositions or, in others, hanging from the branches of trees that remain defiant within their fragile landscapes. For Hayv Kahraman, the disembodiment that her works figurally express serves as a metaphor for the psyche of refugees forced to flee their homes. Kahraman understands this experience personally, having first fled her native country of Iraq and again, more recently, as a result of having to evacuate her home and studio due to the recent wildfires in Los Angeles.

With Utah’s West Desert as both setting and subject, Jaclyn Wright combines original and archival photographs with regional maps and elements of performance to show the impact of late capitalism and settler colonization on the landscapes of the Western United States. Her photographs are composites of historical and contemporary imagery that investigate the codification of the natural world by state officials and business interests alike. Working with mediums and techniques such as, tapestry, embroidery and photograms, Shannon Bool regularly explores how hierarchy is embedded into historical narratives and their visual expressions. In his large-scale and often allegorical paintings that look to the histories of religion and the cosmos alike, Carlos Vega likewise explores the hidden structures of social life and the meanings embedded within them.

Many of the works in GENERAL CONDITIONS express moments of personal defiance and solidarity against the systems of oppression that, by keeping people in positions of uncertainty and even desperation, try to maintain a status quo of injustice and inequity. Gordon Parks’ photographs of Black communities in a still-segregated South show individuals navigating politically fraught circumstances with resolution and grace. The multi-directional colored wooden planes that Emanoel Araújo arranges in his sculpture compositions take a rigid and geometric frame as their background before transcending it through their formal expressivity. Working at a comparatively monumental scale, Rose B. Simpson’s ceramic and mixed-media sculptures of worldly yet ethereal figures, just recently on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, are specific expressions of the artist’s ancestry and cultural heritage that also uphold the value of the human spirit.

What the variety and complexity of the works in GENERAL CONDITIONS demonstrates is that no single approach for understanding the present historical conjuncture will do. Instead, these artists provide multiple strategies that we can use to better interpret, represent and hopefully seize control of the conditions around us.

THE SCHOOL / JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

25 Broad Street, Kinderhook, NY

jackshainman.com

GENERAL CONDITIONS

Jack Shainman Gallery, Kinderhook, NY, May 17 - November 29, 2025

Claudette Schreuders: Genesis @ Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Claudette Schreuders: Genesis

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Through August 1, 2025

Jack Shainman Gallery presents Genesis, an exhibition of new work by Claudette Schreuders, the artist’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery. Bringing together figurative sculptures made in both wood and bronze, Genesis reimagines scenes and characters from the suburban landscape of Cape Town that Schreuders calls home. Using the raw material of her own life as the foundation to create portraits that are equally archetypal and idiosyncratic, Claudette Schreuders explores how specific forms can convey universal truths and how personal history remains fundamentally connected to social reality. 

For over thirty years, Claudette Schreuders has made sculptures about the human figure that express a deep understanding of human psychology. Working slowly and gradually, Schreuders carefully shapes her material to create uncannily familiar subjects that invite association and comparison while at the same time resisting any single link or reference. Though the poses and arrangements of her figures are often static, straightforward and direct, Claudette Schreuders pays great attention to the subtleties of each face, where slight inflections of shape and contour, or line and color, can provide viewers with the necessary detail to see humanity in figures that might otherwise appear impersonal. Looking at the historical examples of West African and Medieval sculpture, American folk and outsider art as well, Claudette Schreuders borrows the simplicity of form and composition found in those traditions as a way of sparking interpretation and emotional investment.

The works in Genesis were made after the conclusion of Claudette Schreuders’ previous exhibition with the gallery, Doubles, in 2022. In that exhibition, Schreuders investigated the universal experience of isolation that resulted from the lockdown during COVID-19 pandemic. Her sculptural figures were rendered in joined pairs in which each seemed to hauntingly, if not exactly, mirror the other. In Genesis Claudette Schreuders returned to the confines of her own home or studio and looked at the larger world of the suburbs as a kind of idyll in itself, one that can provide the time and space to contemplate the essential structures and forms of life around us.

Like its biblical reference, the exhibition title reflects Schreuders’ sustained emphasis on creating simplistic yet original forms as a way of pursuing profound truths. In the titular sculpture in the exhibition, her partner is shown supine while reading Robert Crumb’s The Book of Genesis. The muted and relatively restrained palette that Claudette Schreuders uses to describe the scene ultimately belies its subtlety of detail and psychological implication. This dynamic is present throughout the exhibition in works that are disarmingly approachable before revealing themselves to be materially complex and narratively open-ended. In School (Emil) (2024), made in bronze, Claudette Schreuders depicts her son sitting pensively in a chair too small for his body. Though it appears to depict an exaggerated yet familiar scene, the richly detailed texture and surface of the figure suggest depths of meaning. Like Genesis (2024), Work (2024) considers the act of creation itself, as Claudette Schreuders herself is shown fixed in a moment of contemplation while she holds a newly made sculpture in her hands.

The relationship between personal experience and collective history is explored in Crucible (2025), a work originally commissioned by the University of Stellenbosch, Schreuders’ alma mater. A park bench cast in bronze is home to a whole host of indigenous birds that create a delicate balance and equilibrium between them. Schreuders uses the park bench as a formal and conceptual foundation for the work because its history remains charged by the legacy of apartheid, which saw it function as a symbol of exclusion. Claudette Schreuders allows the bench to be a site of transformation and possible harmony—it can produce something new out of an original period of trial and tribulation.

Throughout Genesis, Schreuders’ sculptures return to the commonplace and the quotidian, as they ask for a heightened attention to the world of experience that might otherwise be overlooked. With these familiar characters, scenes and moments as her subject matter, she pursues what is universal in them and relevant to all.

ARTIST CLAUDETTE SCHREUDERS

Claudette Schreuders (b. 1973 in Pretoria, South Africa) lives and works in Cape Town, where she graduated with a Master’s degree from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 1998. She was part of the Liberated Voices exhibition at the Museum for African Art in New York in 1999. From 2004-2005 her first solo museum exhibition toured the United States and in 2011 she had a solo exhibition at the LUX Art Institute in California. Claudette Schreuders has shown extensively in group exhibitions, including Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011), Since 2000: Printmaking Now, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2006) and Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art at the Museum for African Art and the Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York (2004). Claudette Schreuders’ work is included in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa and the Pretoria Art Museum, South Africa, among others.

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

513 West 20th Street, New York, NY

jackshainman.com

Claudette Schreuders: Genesis

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, June 5 – August 1, 2025

Malick Sidibé Exhibition @ Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC + A Monograph by Loose Joints

Malick Sidibé: Regardez-moi

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

April 17 – May 31, 2025

Jack Shainman Gallery presents Regardez-moi, an exhibition of photographs by the Malian photographer Malick Sidibé (1935-2016). The exhibition, the title of which translates to “Look at Me”, marks the gallery’s latest celebration of Sidibé’s unparalleled ability to capture the heartbeat of Bamako, Mali following the country’s liberation from colonial rule in 1960.

Featuring a vibrant selection of photographs — some of which have never before been exhibited — this presentation invites viewers into the bustling parties, joyous gatherings, and tender moments that defined the transformative era of a young nation relishing to establish its own national identity. In today’s cultural climate, where visibility and representation hold immense weight, Sidibé’s work and legacy remain as significant as ever.

Malick Sidibé, Painted Frames

Published by Loos Joints, 2025

Image © & Courtesy Loose Joints

Presented in conjunction with this exhibition is the publication of Painted Frames, a monograph by Loose Joints, and the first exploration of Sidibé’s synergistic painted frame photographs. In these works, Malick Sidibé collaborated with local Malian artists to blend his iconic photography with the traditional West African art of reverse-glass painting. Regardez-moi presents a selection of these painted frames; reaffirming the sanctity of African photography as a medium of memory and identity. The publication also features an essay by writer, independent researcher, and collector-archivist Amy Sall, in which she makes a case for the continued and ever-expanding importance of Sidibé’s oeuvre:

Malick Sidibé was witness to, and preserver of, a nascent, burgeoning postcolonial society in which a new modernity was being constructed by way of transcultural osmosis. From his studio to the soirées, and even to the banks of the Niger River, Malick Sidibé and his camera were at the center of it all. He was not only chronicling Malian history and culture, but making pivotal contributions to it…. The night clubs, living rooms, and courtyards he photographed were spaces of freedom and community. Sidibé’s oeuvre reflects dialectic expressions of being because he captured his subjects as their imagined and authentic selves. From his widely recognized Nuit de Noël (Christmas Eve, Happy Club) (1963) to his series Vues de dos, the framed images carry the same undercurrents of power and rebellion, tenderness and joy that flow throughout Sidibé’s entire archive.

Regardez-moi underscores Sidibé’s role as a pioneer who sculpted the visual identity of the African diaspora, offering a window into a Malian nation that boldly joined a global youth movement. His photographs transcend their historical context, speaking to contemporary dialogues about identity, agency, and the power of being seen. Sidibé’s photographs don’t just freeze time, they transform these scenes into vibrant stages where his subjects — young couples excited to be married, or older men or women reclaiming their freedom of expression — assert their presence and identity. In Dansez le Twist (1963-2010), Sidibé captures a young man and a woman in a state of joy while dancing the twist, an American rock ‘n’ roll dance that became a global cultural phenomenon from 1959 to the early 1960s, which was known for its simple yet lively steps that encouraged freedom of movement and expression. By providing his subjects with ways to be seen and celebrated, Sidibé’s lens offers a powerful counterpoint to our tech-filtered world, reminding viewers of the raw, unscripted joy of human connection. One of Malick Sidibé most celebrated series, Vues de Dos — with examples from the series held in the collections of numerous museums such as the Getty Museum, The National Gallery of Art, as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art — provides viewers with a deeper understanding of the photographer’s curatorial eye, depicting women in his studio with their bare backs to the camera against a signature backdrop of striped walls. Sidibé’s photography serves as both a reflector and a loudspeaker, magnifying the vibrant, intimate essence of Bamako’s people in the wake of gaining independence from French colonial rule. The works capture a liberated people that resonates with a contemporary urgency now more than ever.

Malick Sidibé (b. 1935, Soloba, Mali; d. 2016, Bamako, Mali) was a photographer known for his black and white images chronicling the exuberant lives and culture—often of youth—in his native Bamako, Mali. Much of Sidibé’s work documented a transitional moment as Mali gained its independence, transforming from a French colony steeped in tradition to an independent country looking toward the West, and Sidibé played a pivotal role in sculpting the fresh, global appearance of the African diaspora.

This political expression often took shape through individual and collective presentation, such as fashion, music, and dance – something made palpable by Sidibé’s rhythmic compositions. Often capturing his subjects in the midst of ceremonial action or in joyous moments of nightlife, Malick Sidibé built the narrative of a specific time and space that empowered a culture to dictate their own stories. There is a distinct sense of chronicle felt in the movement of Sidibé’s subjects, who boldly occupy both the photograph’s frame and their recently decolonized nation’s public and leisure spaces. Beyond his candid shots, Malick Sidibé ran a formal portrait studio with a deliberately dramatic décor as a backdrop. In order to capture his sitters’ characters and lives, he orchestrated them into relaxed positions encouraging them to bring along beloved personal objects, like a new motorcycle or a James Brown record. It was through his portraiture that Malick Sidibé documented the changing fashions and aspirations of generations in Bamako.

JACK SHAINMAN, NEW YORK

513 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

jackshainman.com

LOOSE JOINTS PUBLISHING

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Nina Chanel Abney @ Jack Shainman Gallery, New York - At The School - "Lie Doggo" Exhibition

Nina Chanel Abney: LIE DOGGO

The School | Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

May 18 - November 16, 2024

Jack Shainman Gallery presents LIE DOGGO, a monumental exhibition of work by Nina Chanel Abney that spans her creative practice, uniting a new series of paintings with collages, site-specific murals, an immersive digital art installation, and the debut of a new body of large scale sculpture. Paying homage to the sophisticated color theories of Matisse, continuing the legacy of cubists, Picasso and Léger, and connecting with the synesthetic sensibilities of Harlem Renaissance greats, Douglas and Lawrence, Abney brings these historical movements into contemporary pertinence. Abney’s groundbreaking influence has been the center of scholarly praise by art historian Richard J Powell. In a recent lecture, Blackbeats: Cubism Reimagined at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he noted her creative ingenuity: 

Abney’s dramatic patterns, geometric configurations, serrated fragments, and compositional convergences and disassemblings reimagine an art object’s geodesic position both to the viewer and within the canon. She proposes a reimagined Cubism where color, form, and rhythm function counterintuitively as a presence, an accentuation, and evidence of the painting’s internal pulse.

The exhibition’s title, LIE DOGGO, a phrase meaning to remain inconspicuously in wait, suggests a strategic invisibility and biding one’s time, reflecting on when to observe from the shadows and when best to act. In this body of work, Nina Chanel Abney challenges the viewer to explore the vast expanse that lies between what is said and what remains silent, eliciting self-assessment and a call to action. Abney’s visually layered and complex works explore the nuanced interplay between the explicit and the inferred, probing the tacit forces that shape global dynamics, such the impacts of global imperialism, narratives of settler-colonialism, implicit biases, and systemic inequalities. Powell sees this as, “the subtext of institutional / personal regimes of confinement [that] assume a great scrutiny in Abney’s works, especially through the painterly apparatuses of acrylic pigments and arresting colors. Abney rethinks pictorialism, weighing the value of universal signs and imaging systems and probing art’s contested identities, resulting in an artistic catalyst that usurps expectations of a caucasian benchmark.” Scrutinizing the ways in which identities and experiences are shaped by the subtleties of social cues, historical contexts, and the unspoken rules governing racial discourse, Abney highlights the intersectionality of global crises, the various forms of resilience against them, and subsequent suppression of these movements.

The lengthy walls of Nina Chanel Abney’s robust immersive mural lays the energetic groundwork for the exhibition, leading to a new series of painted aluminum sculptures that expand the artist’s visual language with cultural signals and gestures used to communicate identity and solidarity. We turn a corner to be confronted with an American flag-patterned durag; on a serving platter we see missiles that morph into a voluptuous female form; patterns of repetition invoke the commodification of identities, bodies, and violence, and in turn, the reduction of individuals to stereotypes. Through the use of repetition, Abney questions how unspoken rules and agreements influence social cohesion and control. Building on the idea of lying in wait, these works also examine resilience and strategic resistance within communities that are often marginalized or silenced. What are the subtle, everyday acts of defiance and less visible forms of protest and solidarity that are crucial to survival and change? With these works, Abney provokes the viewer to decode messages and confront their own personal interpretations.

Depicting spaces of passage and commune, the acrylic on canvas paintings highlight how locations emblematic of everyday life are imbued with complex, often unarticulated social interactions. Abney re-examines the familiar and considers the social contracts, power relations, and human emotions that animate these spaces. She is interested in the often gridded architecture behind these environments and how a collective whole of individuals is meant to be confined within a specific space. Powell continues, “Abney’s works jolt viewers’ internal sense of equilibrium towards agitation, excitement, and ultimately an inner jouissance - a suspended disbelief in equanimity.” The concept of environment as grid carries over to the printed collages on panel. These settings serve as a backdrop for exploring the world systems put in place to maintain order, while delving into the nuances of public and private life, the dynamics of power and surveillance, and the subtleties of human interaction and behavior.

Concluding the exhibition is an interactive digital art installation, the culmination of Nina Chanel Abney’s Artist-in-Residence with CryptoPunks, which signals the artists appellation of futurity. Her digital worldview reflects on virtual versus real world identities via the iconic digital collection - positing that perhaps the Western world’s so-called conflict resolution lies in an escapism of the difficult horrors of reality. In direct confrontation of the pricing differences evident between CryptoPunks’ digital avatars based on gender and skin tone (in which white, male avatars tend to generate a higher retail than their darker skinned or female counterparts), Abney has created hybridized figures that fuse racial components and blur the lines between masculine and feminine. Through these amalgamations of external signifiers, Abney challenges the notion of an inherent societal “value.” While enabling visitors to create their own virtual avatars, Abney shines a lens on a tendency to stay hidden, to remain silent, and to avoid confrontation and uncomfortable truths. This extends Abney’s commentary on the connections between surveillance culture, deliberate concealment, and the opaque self-fashioning prevalent in digital spaces and in-person interactions. Navigating the tension between speaking out and strategic silence in an era marked by online portrayals, cancel culture, and the contentious debate over free speech, Abney probes the boundaries of prevailing narratives and a fear of being ostracized, questioning the impact of these pressures on creativity and free thought.

LIE DOGGO underscores the role of art as both a veil and a window, camouflaging certain truths while revealing others. Navigating the liminal spaces between invisibility and visibility, expression and restraint, Abney engages viewers in a dialogue that extends beyond what’s immediately apparent by creating a visual space where the aesthetics of stealth, the strategies of survival, and the politics of conspicuousness converge. Through this lens, the exhibition invites viewers to ponder the unseen forces and unarticulated agreements that influence everyday life and societal structures, highlighting how much of our world is shaped by what remains unsaid or deliberately obscured. Strength, resilience, and deep rootedness echo throughout the exhibition. Abney's robust assortment of works stokes us to endure, despite systemic adversities, and to bear witness to history, standing firm against forces that seek to topple narratives of resistance.

Nina Chanel Abney (b. 1982, Harvey, IL) has been honored with solo exhibitions at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia (2023); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2023); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2022); the Gordon Parks Foundation, Pleasantville, New York (2022; traveled to Henry Art Gallery, Seattle); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2019–21); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); and the Contemporary Dayton, Ohio (2021). Additionally, her solo exhibition at the Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (2017), toured to the Chicago Cultural Center; Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the California African American Museum, Los Angeles; and the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York. Abney was recently commissioned to transform Lincoln Center’s new David Geffen Hall façade in New York, drawing from the cultural heritage of the neighborhood previously known as San Juan hill that comprised African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Puerto Rican families. Abney's recent public mural at the Miami World Center was similarly inspired by Overtown, a historic Black neighborhood in Miami. Nina Chanel Abney’s work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Bronx Museum, New York; the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; the Rubell Family Collection, Florida; the Nasher Museum of Art, North Carolina; and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; amongst others.

JACK SHAIMAN GALLERY

The 25 Broad Street, Kinderhook, NY 12106

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Artist Leslie Wayne @ Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC - "This Land" Exhibition

Leslie Wayne: This Land

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

June 4 – August 2, 2024

LESLIE WAYNE 

This Land is Your Land, 

from the Rockies to the Cascades, July 6, 2021, 1:39 PM, 2022

© Leslie Wayne, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery

Jack Shainman Gallery presents This Land, an exhibition of two kindred bodies of work by Leslie Wayne that express the nature of the American West through perception and memory. In each piece, Leslie Wayne considers different ways in which we interpret and imagine geological space, exploring landscape both as a vertical, abstracted force and a horizontal, figurative expanse. Named in homage to Woody Guthrie’s heartland ballad “This Land is Your Land,” Leslie Wayne offers a contemporary vision of Manifest Destiny—imbuing her symbolic, and experienced, westward voyages with topographies that are sensorial, memorial, and tectonic. 

In a series of dimensional abstract paintings on large, metronome-like planks, Leslie Wayne uses a dramatic and vibrant palette to mold paint so that it cascades down the wood panel in a multitude of ways. Applying the paint in heavy layers, she encourages the influence of gravity and refines her materials to their most basic form, color, and behavior. Adopting, rather than controlling the rhythm of nature, these compositions are fluid to the viewer's myriad associations with this image of momentum—be it reminiscent of the rush of an avalanche, the swell of hot lava, or the pileup of driftwood on a seashore. 

In her series entitled This Land is Your Land, she creates compact, observational paintings based on snapshots she took from her seat as she flew west over the Rocky Mountains all the way to the Cascade Range in Washington State in 2021. Creating a precise mise-en-scène by placing each painting in a frame that resembles the Boeing 737 window she peered out from, Leslie Wayne transports her viewers into a precise sensation: beholding our nation as the land settles into one continuous, harmonious expanse—stripped down to simple shapes and shades. Her portholes offer a view into a terrain of awe, reminiscence, and omniscience, a collective vision of a region fraught with, and fractured by, territories and borders. 

Extending beyond the format of the airplane-window frame, Leslie Wayne has also created two unique works inspired by the same journey. The first is a twenty-two-foot-long painted scroll entitled From the Rockies to the Cascades, in addition to High Dive, a large-format painting in which she stretches her canvas onto a frame of coiled springs—materials that simulate a bird’s-eye view of the landscape as if seen by a skydiver descending towards a trampoline. The paintings from this series are accompanied by a vitrine displaying Wayne’s special limited edition This Land, a handmade accordion book that illustrates the aerial photographs from her voyage, alongside Taylor Brorby’s poem “The Ages Have Been at Work” and the lyrics to Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.”

In German, heimat is a term used to describe not only the characteristics of a place, but the complex and interdependent physical, social, and mental associations with a homeland. For Wayne, this sentiment stretches, folds, and bends from the west coast, her childhood home, to the east coast, where she has resided since 1982. Treading across this land, psychic routes unfold, and Wayne savors “That path [which] is never straight and always various, each time opening new ways of seeing and thinking about the world we occupy, the ways we inhabit nature, and the legacies we leave behind.”        

LESLIE WAYNE (b. 1953 in Landstühl, Germany) is an artist who lives and works in New York, NY. In her practice, she explores the many ways a painting can imply all the functions, desires and associations we have for the world around us by transporting you through its artifice. She uses both trompe l’oeil and verisimilitude to explore the range of possibilities for the representation of an illusion in a multitude of ways, while still remaining undeniably within the confines of a traditional painting. Wayne grew up in Southern California and studied visual arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She took a year off to live and work in Paris, and five years to live in Israel before moving to New York where she earned her BFA with honors in Sculpture at Parsons School of Design. She was an early member of 55 Mercer, one of New York’s first artist-run cooperatives in SoHo, and following her second solo show there, joined Jack Shainman Gallery.

Leslie Wayne has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad and her work is in numerous public collections, including the Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; la ColeccionJumex, Mexico City, Mexico; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris, France; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC; the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum Smithsonian Library, New York, NY; The Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, OR; the Davis Museum of Art, Wellesley, MA; the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE; and the Parrish Art Museum, Watermill, NY, among others. 

Throughout her career she has received awards and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2017), Joan Mitchell Foundation (2012), New York Foundation for the Arts (2018, 2006), Buhl Foundation for abstract photography (2004), New York State Council on the Arts Projects Residency (1993), Yaddo Artists Residency (1992), the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation (1994) and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1985). In 2017 she was awarded a commission from the New York City MTA Arts and Design program to create windows for the Bay Parkway Station subway platform on the Culver (F) line in Brooklyn, NY. Besides being a visual artist, Leslie Wayne is also an occasional curator and writer and her reviews and interviews with artists have been published in BOMB, artcritical, and Two Coats of Paint.

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

513 W 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

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Artist Diedrick Brackens @ Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC - "blood compass" Exhibition

Diedrick Brackens: blood compass

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

April 25 – June 1, 2024

Jack Shainman Gallery presents blood compass, a solo exhibition of new work by Diedrick Brackens spanning both New York City locations, opening April 25 in Chelsea, and April 26 in Tribeca. In these weavings, the artist maps an imagined place — visualizing the internal mechanisms and symbols that animate his work while removing the anchor of direct narrative. The scenes depicted in each weaving exist out of time, suspended between a distant past and a world to come. The works in this series are set at dusk, twilight, and deep night — hours that become vehicles for ritual and interiority. The silhouetted inhabitants of this in-between realm are archetypes that Diedrick Brackens once described as ciphers, or “needles through which I slip the threads of biography and myth, and pass through a mesh of history and context.”

His figures are accompanied by an ecosystem of symbols and shapes that have recurred over the course of his practice. The animals, natural elements, and man-made objects, accrue significance every time they are cast in this ever-evolving mythology. The characters in this series are placed in dialogue with lightning bolts, waning suns, and sourceless orbs of light — open-ended devices of orientation. In these distilled arrangements, footholds for straightforward interpretation dissolve — inviting viewers to parse the compositions and uncover meaning.  

Diedrick Brackens’ semiotic language emerges from lived experience, but also through revisiting books, poems, and legends. In blood compass, some of these references — alluded to in his titles — include the novel Mind of My Mind by Octavia Butler, the poem “How you might approach a foal” by Wendy Videlock, and the Bible’s parable of the prodigal son. These stories, though dramatically diverse in genre and subject, speak to Brackens’ inclination to loop, lose, and locate oneself in that which is known, but also to shape-shift, forming new meaning from that which is “familiar.” He approaches these symbols — weighted with memory, context, and history — with fresh eyes or, as Videlock’s poem concludes, ”like you / are new to the world.”  

Diedrick Brackens (b. 1989, Mexia, TX; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is best known for his woven tapestries that explore allegory and narrative through the atapestriesrtist’s autobiography, broader themes of African American and queer identity, as well as American history. Diedrick Brackens employs techniques from West African weaving, quilting from the American South and European tapestry-making to create both abstract and figurative works. Often depicting moments of male tenderness, Diedrick Brackens culls from African and African American literature, poetry and folklore as source. Beginning his process through the hand-dyeing of cotton, a material he deliberately uses in acknowledgement of its brutal history, Diedrick Brackens’ oeuvre presents rich, nuanced visions of African American life and identity, while also alluding to the complicated histories of labor and migration. Brackens utilizes both commercial dyes and atypical pigments such as wine, tea and bleach to create his vibrant, intricately-woven tapestries that investigate historical gaps, interlacing the present with his singular magical realist worldview. Diedrick Brackens’ scenes intentionally lack any sort of moralizing tone, allowing his subjects the freedom of living life on their terms. Jack Shainman Gallery is proud to represent Diedrick Brackens in collaboration with Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA / Dallas, TX / Seoul, KR.

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

513 W 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

46 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10013

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Richard Mosse @ Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC - "Broken Spectre" Exhibition

Richard Mosse: Broken Spectre

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

January 12 – March 16, 2024

Jack Shainman Gallery presents Broken Spectre, an immersive video installation by Richard Mosse filmed in the Amazon Basin. Understanding the urgency of sharing Mosse’s seminal piece in the United States, this will be the first exhibition housed in the gallery’s new TriBeCa location—situated in a multi-story 20,000 square-foot space at 46 Lafayette Street, in the historic Clocktower building—which is slated to complete renovation in the fall of 2024. Opening for a limited preview on the occasion of exhibiting Mosse’s critical work for the first time in New York, this special presentation is an exciting glimpse into the gallery’s greatly anticipated restoration, and a fulfillment of Shainman’s commitment to activate the expansive site to platform the ambitious and prescient work of the artists they represent without delay.

Capturing the methodical and intentional destruction of the Amazon from 2018-2022, Broken Spectre bears witness to a catastrophe that is playing out before our very eyes. Over the last fifty years, mass deforestation, willfully carried out by millions of people, has wiped out more than one-fifth of the original forest. Presented on a 60-foot-wide LED screen, this chimerical audiovisual installation shifts dramatically in scale and media to create a visceral and emotional connection with the world’s largest rainforest, the world’s last great reservoir of biodiversity, being devastated on multiple fronts for corporate profit. Mosse employs three discrete film media, each at a specific scale and wavelength, to articulate simultaneous spheres of rupture, on levels microscopic, interpersonal, and colossal. To reveal systematic environmental damage, Richard Mosse films from the air using a multispectral video camera, emulating those carried in remote sensing satellites. The human scale was filmed using 35mm black-and-white infrared film, evoking the Western film’s fraught iconography. The non-human is unveiled using ultraviolet microscopy, showing the bristling biodiversity of only a few square inches on the forest floor.

Filmed and edited in collaboration with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten, then scored with field recordings from the Amazonian biosphere interspersed with a foreboding musical composition by Ben Frost, these scales of destruction flicker from diptych to quadriptych, and at times, span into a solitary panoramic view. The installation will be shown alongside a suite of still photographs shot at various sites in the Amazon before, throughout, and in the aftermath of Broken Spectre.

The film’s title is a macabre mutation of the concept of the Brocken spectre: the bleary and spectral shadow of an observer that is cast onto a cloudrange if backlit by bright sunlight. As an observer of the grave consequences of the anthropocene, Mosse does not aestheticize the topographies he captures, but rather visualizes the coexisting awe and terror enmeshed in sites of ecological devastation. Smoke-laden skies, encounters with Indigenous communities, agricultural technologies, acts of illegal deforestation, and rainforest-floor flora ripple together through satellite, motion-picture, and macroscopic lenses. Drawing parallels between the three modalities, Mosse unveils the exploitative distortion of both cinematic and documentary images—capturing the intricate complexities of the Amazon’s birds eye view and square foot.

Broken Spectre offers a metaphysical dialogue with the surrounding architecture that mirrors Richard Mosse’s enduring pursuit of what he describes as “aggravated media''—the appropriation of technology designed for economic, militaristic, or surveillance systems to facilitate complex expressive and conceptual frameworks for his work. Designed by McKim, Mead & White and erected around 1898, the building was the former home of the New York Life Insurance Company—a site of American capital in an epoch of urban industrialization. With its marble-column flanked clerestory and Italian Renaissance Revival moldings, the building’s pristine preservation imposes with sharp contrast to the vibrant ultra-sensory footage and photography of the Amazon’s blistering and burning landscape. Ushering the American landmark into a contemporary context, the gallery aspires to activate the space to platform essential ecological and Indigenous restitution.

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

46 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10013

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El Anatsui, Lyne Lapointe, Garnett Puett @ Jack Shainman Gallery, New York - "Echoes of Circumstance" Exhibition

Echoes of Circumstance

El Anatsui, Lyne Lapointe, Garnett Puett

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

January 11 – March 2, 2024

Jack Shainman Gallery presents Echoes of Circumstance, a group exhibition featuring work by El Anatsui, Lyne Lapointe, and Garnett Puett. Within Anatsui, Lapointe, and Puett’s art exists a cycle of metamorphosis through which local sources, ancestral practices, and biological phenomena are expressed through found objects, biomorphic compositions, and fractal patterns. Composing work that extends across continents, languages, and methods, this presentation considers the creative philosophy of material ecology. As explained by Neri Oxman, material ecology is an approach to design in which “Material is not considered a subordinate attribute of form, but rather its progenitor. Such is the story of form told from the point of view of matter, and it begins, naturally, with form’s predicament.” Considered within the framework of artistic practice, Anatsui, Lapointe, and Puett enumerate how natural methodology can synthesize structures of a built environment and vice versa.

El Anatsui’s sculptures are composed with recycled aluminum—from bottle caps to cassava graters and printing plates—flattened into tiles that are stitched together with copper wire to form colossal and glimmering wall-based metal sculptures. Seemingly weightless, each gently swaying work is laden with the impacts of consumption, capitalism, and international trade on African society. Lapointe’s figurative and abstract ink-on-paper compositions capture the anima of the body, layering form with intricate and raw found materials from fossilized beehives, to shells, hemp, and mica. Excavating the perpetual transformation of the human vessel as it molds through shifts in identity, gender, and dysmorphia, her subjects absorb and transcend the societal traumas of racism, sexism, and segregation. Invoking his family’s multigenerational apiary tradition, Puett forges hammered steel sculptures that he treats with beeswax—introducing local honeybee colonies that build hives along the surfaces of the armature. Encouraging nature to take its course, he delicately melts portions of the honeycomb, emphasizing the simultaneous fragility and eternity contained in the architecture of honeycomb. As a species that has existed for millions of years, Puett understands bee colonies’ ingrained collaborative cohabitation and restorative pollination as a model for humanity’s conservation efforts in the face of climate collapse.

As with fractals that exist in nature—organisms like snowflakes whose particle mirrors its whole—each artist experiments with scaling and situating interdependent systems that for Anatsui are global, for Lapointe are corporeal, and for Puett are microcosmic. Attuned to their surrounding environments whether in Ghana, Nigeria, Quebec, New York, or Hawaii, they are able to identify potential and texture in circumstance. Ritually creating work with familiar materials reveals itself to be the control from which diverse and infinite artworks take shape. With practices rooted in the handwrought, analog, and grown, it is possible to hear the echo of nature’s patterns amidst the cacophony of the industrial world—to soften manufactured materials into organic forms. The frontier of the modern world necessitates reimagining the existing, and through these artists we consider the elemental units from which invention is formed.

El Anatsui (b. 1944 in Anyako, Ghana; lives and works in Nsukka, Nigeria and Tema, Ghana) transforms simple materials into complex assemblages that create a distinctive visual impact. Anatsui’s choice of these materials reflects his interest in reuse, transformation and an intrinsic desire to connect to his native continent of Africa while transcending the limitations of place. His style combines the world history of abstract art with his local aesthetic traditions. Much of his work interrogates the legacy of colonialism, drawing connections between consumption, waste and the environment, but at the core is his unique formal language that distinguishes his practice. Anatsui is particularly well-known for his large-scale sculptures composed of thousands of folded and crumpled pieces of metal sourced from local recycling stations and bound together with copper wire. His intricate works are both luminous and weighty, meticulously fabricated yet malleable. One of the conceptual underpinnings of much of the work is that the sculptures take different forms each time they are installed. In morphing to activate various spaces, they challenge long-held views of sculpture as something rigid and insistent, which opens up his work to exist on its own terms. In 2023, the Tate Modern commissioned Anatsui to create a sculpture for the museum’s Turbine Hall. The installation, Behind the Red Moon, will be on view through April 14, 2024.

Lyne Lapointe (born in 1957, Montreal, Quebec) is a multidisciplinary artist who has, for over four decades, been creating a robust and magical array of pictorial and mixed-media works that combine her interest in popular and historical sources—and her fascination with animal imagery and human figures—with the use of collage techniques and extraordinary craftsmanship. Lyne Lapointe studied history and visual arts at the University of Ottawa before returning to Montreal in the early 1980s. She soon made a name for herself as one of the most intriguing artists of her generation with her ground-breaking site projects created over a period of about fifteen years with critic and artist Martha Fleming. Studiolo, a retrospective and accompanying book covers this collaborative work, recognized as a chapter in the history of alternative art, feminist thought and community activism. In 1997, following a near-death accident, Lapointe moved to the country near Mansonville, Quebec, where she lives and works today. Lapointe’s work has been shown at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City; The New Museum, New York; the National Gallery of Canada and Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa; the Musée national des beaux-arts de Québec; and the Musée de Joliette. In 2002, a major mid-career survey exhibition of her solo production, The Blind Spot, was organized and toured by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal with venues across Canada and abroad, at the Musée de la Rochelle in France.She has been the recipient of the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award in 1997 and the Graff Prize in 1998.

Garnett Puett (b. 1959 in Haria, GA; lives and works in Kona, HI) is a contemporary sculptor and fourth-generation beekeeper, utilizing his bees, in part, as his artistic collaborators. This unique, reciprocal relationship results in what he calls his apisculptures—api is the Latin for bee—in which sculpture, performance and insect partnership coalesce. Puett conceived this original method of working during his graduate studies, when he discovered his interest in art working in conjunction with nature instead of against it. To create an apisculpture, Puett covers his specially designed structures—made out of welded steel armatures—in beeswax, imagining the eventual comb they will build, before providing sugar water and the essential queen bee for a colony. Puett employs as many as 90,000 honeybees per sculpture, which simultaneously live within and shape the structure for the duration of the sculpting process. While Puett cannot fully control the forms that the bees choose for their honeycombs, he does manipulate their work by melting and removing parts of the form. When Puett determines that the sculpture is finished, which can take anywhere from a few weeks to a month, he transplants the bees to an ordinary beehive and cleans the honey from the comb. If the wax sculptures are properly preserved, they can last for thousands of years, bearing the marks of the joint performance between nature and human creativity. Through these works, Puett also educates the public on the fascinating lives of bees and the crucial role they play in our environment.

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

513 W 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

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Michael Snow: A Life Survey (1955-2020) @ The School | Jack Shainman Gallery, Kinderhook, NY

Michael Snow 

A Life Survey (1955-2020)

The School | Jack Shainman Gallery, Kinderhook, NY

May 21 – December 16, 2023

Jack Shainman Gallery presents Michael Snow: A Life Survey (1955-2020). In a career that defied categorization in medium or genre, Snow’s work embodied originality over novelty, the cerebral over the conceptual, and evolution over conclusion. It is with this expansive vision that A Life Survey is mounted, offering an intricate and dynamic portrait of hael MicSnow’s life and work.

Born in Toronto in 1928, Michael Snow showed an early affinity for creative experimentation. Throughout his youth, he played piano in local jazz bands and received prizes for his early paintings. This led him to the Ontario College of Art where he studied from 1948 to 1952. When declaring his major from rigidly divided academic departments, he chose Design, comprehending that it was the “common aspect of all disciplines.” Fascinated by pushing the limits on ways of seeing, Snow was influenced most by Modern artists who made work on their own terms, including Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Marcel Duchamp, Willem De Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Yves Klein, and Mark Rothko. In these early years, he described embarking on a “try this, try that” period through which experiences from his professional career, daily life, and jazz improvisations inspired pieces like A to Z, 1956, Drawn Out, 1959, and The Drum Book, 1960.

Jack Shainman Gallery has represented Michael Snow since 2004. Previous solo exhibitions held at the gallery include Michael Snow: A Group Show (2015); Michael Snow: In the Way (2012); Michael Snow (2006); and Michael Snow: Powers of Two (2004). Snow was also included in several group exhibitions at the gallery including Stressed World (2022); Parking on Pavement (2018-2019); Home Room: A Multimedia Group Exhibition (2017); Winter In America (2015-2016); Mise En Scène (2014); Works on View (2009), -poiesis (2006); Imposition (2005); and A Charge to Keep (2004). 

The School | Jack Shainman Gallery

25 Broad Street, Kinderhook, NY

jackshainman.com

Leslie Wayne @ Jack Shainman Gallery, New York - The Universe is on the Inside

Leslie Wayne 

The Universe is on the Inside 

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York 

May 20 – July 3, 2021 

I’ve been gazing out the window a lot this past year, reflecting on the collision of events in this moment…Sometimes it feels like all I can muster, just gazing out the window. And yet it feels like precisely the right thing to do, to take a moment to reflect, looking inward as I gaze outside… 

Leslie Wayne, 2021  

Jack Shainman Gallery presents The Universe is on the Inside, an exhibition of new work by LESLIE WAYNE. This series explores the powerful relationship between ourselves and the objects that support and sustain us in our daily lives during a year of complex, unavoidable isolation and ambiguity. At the core of the work is Leslie Wayne’s interest in exploring how we imbue these everyday objects, once inanimate and inert, with subjective meaning and purpose. This poignant and introspective presentation underscores Leslie Wayne’s personal and deeply intimate perspective on the creative process. 

Grounded in play between trompe l’oeil and verisimilitude, her pieces hover between abstraction and representation as the shape of each painting takes on the contours of the objects they represent. From utilitarian worktables and loft windows in disrepair to personal medicine cabinets and cracked mirrors, each object stands witness to and reflects on the artist’s intimate, daily life and state of mind. 

Go Ask Alice takes the form of a partially opened cabinet and brings to the fore the artist’s striking ability to challenge our perceptions of form in space through an idiosyncratic distortion of perspective. As the artist suggests, “while our eagerness to participate in this suspension of disbelief is duly challenged by the painting’s irrefutable materiality, the seduction of verisimilitude keeps that disbelief suspended. This hovering between the two is for me the fascinating part of perception, where the brain, and the mind as a realm of the senses, pushes and pulls our faith in what we see and what we choose to believe.” 

Loft presents a picture of Leslie Wayne’s crumbling old studio window. Like many of her pieces that serve as portals —windows, doors, cupboards— the viewer is positioned inside of the space, looking to an outside world that is muddled and unidentifiable, suggesting a place that is visually, metaphorically, and physically unattainable, yet still anticipated and tangible. Other windows in the exhibition confuse our reading of the viewer’s position, offering the perspective of looking in from the outside, but with the internal view being the night sky filled with stars or the crepuscular sky with passing clouds, rather than an architectural interior space. 

Created during what Leslie Wayne calls the “seemingly never-ending pandemic,” The Universe is on the Inside offers unexpected form to the redefining, collective experience of transformation, anxiety and ultimately hope. With the weight of uncertainty dominating the days and months of this past year, Leslie Wayne reflects on the instability of our current socio-political moment and the all too ubiquitous and undeniable divisions systemically rooted in our day-to-day experience. 

LESLIE WAYNE lives and works in New York City and has been showing at the gallery since 1993. Her influences are rooted in the West Coast landscape of her youth and, along with California’s Light & Space and Craft movements as inspiration, she has cultivated a unique sensibility with her material and with the contemporary practice of painting. In recent years she has continued to push the boundaries of composition, texture, color, and scale in her practice, further developing and challenging the relationship between abstraction and representation. 

Concurrently on view is a group show featuring Lyne Lapointe, Hayv Kahraman, Nick Cave and Carlos Vega at our 20th Street space. Upcoming exhibitions include Feedback, a group show at The School | Jack Shainman Gallery in Kinderhook, NY, opening June 5th, 2021.

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

524 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011 

jackshainman.com

Jackie Nickerson @ Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC - Field Test

Jackie Nickerson: Field Test 

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York 

February 25 – April 3, 2021 

Jack Shainman Gallery presents Field Test, a new body of work by JACKIE NICKERSON. With photographic compositions that are almost sculptural in nature, there is a stunning materiality to these anonymous portrait-like photographs, in which faces are shrouded, shielded, perhaps suffocated – both literally, by the vibrant, textured plastics that wrap each figure, and metaphorically, by the consumerism of the modern world.

At the core of this series is Jackie Nickerson’s engagement with the socio- and psychological stress of technology and the effects its ever-present byproducts have on the human body. From the industrialization of plastic to the rapidly changing, abstract digital realm, these images respond to the readily evident fact that technology is reshaping the world, and those who inhabit it.

While Jackie Nickerson’s photographs have historically explored synthetic and natural materiality, Field Test extends beyond their incorporation, implicitly questioning the corporeal form and materials as obstructions, masks, and even protective barriers. She draws on her strong methodology, researching and choosing the exact components of each image prior to arranging them compositionally. There are mostly single individuals, each draped, obscured, and even constricted by tape, plastics, and other synthetic materials. Though human, each is neutralized, and one step further removed from more signifiers of identity such as race, personality, and gender. Her use of these inorganic resources is reminiscent of medical protective gear, if not a disguise or a means of avoiding recognition, suggesting an attack on the human body by an inhuman source and, above all, underscoring the lengths we must go to become “digitally anonymous.”

Rather presciently, Field Test was completed before the Covid-19 pandemic. While the work’s preoccupations are particularly pertinent to the post-Covid-19 world, they have their roots in a much broader range of concerns, of which the pandemic is but one symptom. What we see in Field Test emerges from the inner logic of Jackie Nickerson’s development over a number of years. In a natural progression from her most recent series, Terrain, Field Test operates on a far more abstract level. Rather than drawing from the natural world, Jackie Nickerson explores the “made world” and questions the frequency with which we relinquish control to technology and allow it to govern our daily lives. The materials in use range from the agricultural to the medical, and while they vary in their functionality, their commonality lies in Jackie Nickerson’s subtle decontextualization. In metamorphosing the body into a nebulous figure, one void of identity and facial recognition, each portrait is no longer just that, but rather an anonymous representation of who we have become the wake of globalization and commercialization.  

Jackie Nickerson brings sense of anonymity and formalism in works such as Pink Head, leaving only one strand of hair out of the paper material and tape masking the person beneath. With Hybrid, we are drawn to consider the dynamic relationships between plastics and the human body, which has become dangerously closer and more dependent with time. Drawing on the titular phrase, Field Test is an exploration of all that is visible and invisible, relative to what we believe we know and see.

JACKIE NICKERSON currently divides her time between London and rural Ireland. Her photographs are held in many collections including Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, KS; Pier 24, CA; the Vatican Museums, Italy; the Rubell Collection, FL; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; and have been featured in numerous museum exhibitions, including solo shows at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; the Accademia d’Arte, Bologna, Italy; the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, OH; and group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; among others. Jackie Nickerson was commissioned by TIME to travel to Liberia to photograph the 2014 Person of the Year, The Ebola Fighters, and was recently awarded Best Fashion and Beauty Cover by the American Society of Magazine Editors for her cover of Lupita Nyong’o for Vanity Fair.

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

524 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

jackshainman.com

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