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

Sana Musasama @ Eric Firestone Gallery, NYC - "Raised Earth" Exhibition

Sana Musasama: Raised Earth

Eric Firestone Gallery, New York

September 5 – October 18, 2025

Sana Musasama in her studio, 2023

Photograph by Grace Roselli, Pandora’s BoxX Project

Sana Musasama

House Series #17, 2023

Glazed earthenware, 25 x 16 x 11 in.

© Sana Musasama, courtesy Eric Firestone Gallery

Eric Firestone Gallery presents its first solo exhibition of the internationally recognized ceramic artist Sana Musasama. The exhibition is a dynamic installation of Musasama’s formative House series: vertically stacked ceramic sculptures, like abstracted small-scale temples, exploring multicultural connections to home and community. The work is inspired by the artist’s time living in adobe houses in West Africa in the mid-1970s, her recurrent travel to Cambodia, and time spent in the American West.

The slab-formed ceramics are multi-planar, touched and textured structures with deep color areas and repeated oval shapes that can be read variously as eyes, leaves, or vaginal forms. They are etched with intricate sgraffito marks suggesting body adornment, weavings, flora, and fauna. Elements extend from the planes: rings suggesting jewelry and grids like open baskets or seed pods. In her House series, Sana Musasama uses both earthenware and stoneware and accomplishes her vivid colors through various ceramic glazes, often finishing her works with salt or soda firing to create exquisite surfaces that contrast with the red-brown clay she prefers.

Sana Musasama

Tuscarona (House Series #4), 1983-1984

Glazed earthenware, 64 x 14 x 10 in.

© Sana Musasama, courtesy Eric Firestone Gallery

Sana Musasama first began her House series in the late 1970s, and they were the subject of a 1985 exhibition at the Studio Museum, following her 1983–84 residency with the museum. She decided to revisit these works 45 years later, creating what she called “siblings” to the original works in response to the isolation of 2020. Over the past two years, the artist has worked across the globe to create about twenty significant new House sculptures. This will be the first time work from the two periods are joined into a solo, survey exhibition.

Sana Musasama (b. 1951, New York, NY) is a Black activist feminist artist and global citizen, whose time spent living with women and girls in village societies in Cambodia, South America, Asia, and West Africa has shaped her artwork, developed alongside her humanitarian work. She defines her practice through the motto "Inspire, Commit, Act."

Sana Musasama grew up in St. Albans, Queens, and continues to live and work in her childhood home. She received her BA from City College, City University of New York in 1974, and her MFA from Alfred University in 1987. Musasama’s first formative trip was to Sierra Leone in the 1970s, where she lived amongst the Mende people. Musasama notes that traveling around the world centered and grounded her, making her understand the differences between what she grew up with, and how others around the world grew up and lived.

During her travels, which often involved living in village societies, she would first get to know people and the culture by going to markets, which were dominated by women. Sana Musasama came to understand how women look out for other women. Young girls—the daughters of these women—often became her guides, as she learned the language, how to shop, prepare food, and use tools.

She also came to appreciate how clay is everywhere, and that “it comes in as many different colors as we do.” The landscape and the decorative arts were inspirations for her work. The patterns of rice paddies in Vietnam found their way onto the surfaces of her ceramics, as did the sgraffito lines of the temples of Burma. She understood that baskets—which were often lined with clay or mud—were the origins of pottery, and incorporated the patterns of their weaving. Cinnamon plants sold on the side of the road informed leaf patterns. The sight of rows of cabbages inspired her to experiment with walls of clay conveying compression. Abstract signs and symbols were everywhere: in adornment practices, markings of identity, and clothing that signified specific societies. Sana Musasama combined these visual forms with her expertise in ceramics.

Sana Musasama recognized that her travels were joyous but also could be uncomfortable, scary, and dangerous, and these feelings were embedded into the forms. Her small-scale temples explore healing from multi-generational trauma through the touch of clay.

Through an article in Glamour in 2006, Sana Musasama learned about the Somaly Mam Foundation, which rescued teenage girls and young women who were victims of sex trafficking. She traveled to Cambodia to volunteer for a program that used artmaking and craftwork as a healing modality from this trauma. After her first experience, she knew that she would spend the rest of her life working with these Cambodian girls on beading and textiles. She developed the entrepreneurial “Apron Project” to give girls who lacked education an extra way to make income through their creations. On her first trip to Cambodia, Sana Musasama was dismayed to realize she had never been taught about the Cambodian genocide. She began to make ceramic work reflecting the images and remains she saw.

Musasama’s self-stated goal is to create art “for us,” centering her experience as a Black woman, to tell cultural and historical stories which are often suppressed. Her work often moves past its racist, historical narrative. They speak of cultural pride and self love. From early in her career, Sana Musasama has been committed to spaces that highlight Black artists and celebrate multiculturalism within New York. In addition to the Studio Museum, she had a residency and exhibitions at the Jamaica Arts Center (where she has taught since 2008), and showed at Cinque Gallery in the 1980s.

Sana Musasama is the recipient of an Anonymous Was a Woman Grant (2002) and the Outstanding Achievement Award (2018) from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) for her years of teaching and her humanitarian work with victims of sex trafficking in Cambodia. In 2024 she was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY, and became the first recipient of the NCECA Innovator Award. Musasama's work is held in the collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH; the Museum of Art and Design, New York; Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; Mint Museum of Craft and Design, Charlotte, NC; the European Ceramic Center in Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands; the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York.

Eric Firestone Gallery began working with Sana Musasama in 2022, presenting an in-depth solo installation of her work at the 2023 New York edition of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair. Over the past two years, Sana Musasama has participated in a series of residency programs: the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Edgecomb, ME; Township10, Marshall, NC; The New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, NY; Penland School of Craft, Mitchell County, NC; the Archie Bray Foundation, Helena, MT; and most recently the Shangyu Celadon Modern International Ceramic Center in Zhejiang Province, China.

Her work will be included in the exhibitions Re-Union: Syd Carpenter, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Judy Moonelis, Sana Musasama, and Winnie Owens Hart at the Frances M. Maguire Art Museum and Clay Has Memory: Generational Knowledge from Africa at the Princeton University Art Museum, both opening in 2026.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Patricia Spears Jones.

ERIC FIRESTONE GALLERY

40 Great Jones Street, New York, NY 10012

www.ericfirestonegallery.com

Emma Amos @ Alison Jacques, London - Exhibition spanning a period of nearly five decades of work

Emma Amos

Alison Jacques, London

10 July – 9 August 2025

EMMA AMOS 

Dancing in the Streets, 1986 

© Emma Amos

Spanning a period of nearly five decades of work, this is the first UK solo exhibition of pioneering African American artist EMMA AMOS (b.1937, Atlanta, Georgia; d.2020, New York). In the 1950s, Emma Amos lived in London, studying at the Central School of Art and Design.

Emma Amos combines painting, textiles, and printmaking, often incorporating African fabrics, photo transfers, and vibrant colours. Her work is politically charged and addresses themes of race, gender and identity.

Though under-recognised during much of her career, Emma Amos has gained widespread attention in recent years. Her work was included in the landmark 2017 exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern, which travelled to Crystal Bridges, Brooklyn Museum, The Broad, LA, and MFA Houston. In 2021, Amos’ major retrospective Emma Amos: Color Odyssey was exhibited at the Georgia Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

An original member of the Guerrilla Girls, art and activism were inseparable for Emma Amos. She was on the editorial board of the feminist publication Heresies, and was the youngest and only woman member of Spiral Group, the significant African-American collective, alongside artists and activists Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis and Hale Woodruff.

Before embarking on her career in New York, Emma Amos studied at Central School of Art and Design in London, and completed a diploma in etching. Here, she experienced a cultural and artistic freedom that she was not afforded in the US. She honed her mastery in printmaking and weaving, two mediums that became essential tools in her artistic language, and discovered the pictorial possibilities of Abstract Expressionism and Action Painting. ‘In London, as an art student’, Emma Amos stated, ‘I had that wonderful feeling of release’.

Born to an established family in segregated Atlanta, Georgia, Amos’ artistic talents were encouraged. She graduated with a degree in Fine Art from Antioch College, Ohio in 1958. Her development as an artist was predicated on her contention that, as a Black woman artist, putting brush to canvas was ‘a political act’.

By layering pigment, print, textiles, African wax prints, photo-transfers and applying paint to unstretched fabric, Emma Amos creates visually rich and conceptually experimental works which grapple with her nation’s complex past, and her personal stake in it. Many of the exhibited works are from Amos’ ‘Falling’ series – dynamic scenes which stage physical and social upheaval. Through such paintings, bell hooks observes, ‘freedom of expression is made more inclusive… In this free world, identities are not static but always changing. Crisscrossing and crossbreeding become mutual practices, and the power to explore and journey is extended to all.’

Emma Amos’ work is held in prominent museum collections including: Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; British Museum, London; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arkansas; The Getty, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; MoMA, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; SFMOMA, California; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

ALISON JACQUES

22 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG

alisonjacques.com

Ben Shahn @ Jewish Museum, NYC - 'On Nonconformity' - A Retrospective Exhibition + Catalogue

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity

Jewish Museum, New York

May 23 — October 12, 2025

The Jewish Museum presents the first U.S. retrospective in nearly half a century dedicated to social realist artist and activist BEN SHAHN (1898-1969). Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity examines the prolific and progressive artist’s commitment to chronicling and confronting crucial issues of his era, spanning from the Great Depression to the Vietnam War, as well as his exploration of spirituality and Jewish texts. Featuring 175 artworks and objects from the 1930s to the 1960s, including paintings, mural studies, prints, photographs, commercial designs, and ephemera, the exhibition highlights the enduring relevance of Shahn’s art across media, while revealing new insights into the complexity of his aesthetic and his decisive shift from documentary to allegorical and poetic styles in pursuit of a visual language that would resonate widely.

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity extends the Jewish Museum’s history of exploring Shahn’s far-reaching ideas and deep impact of the artist. The exhibition is organized by Dr. Laura Katzman, guest curator, in collaboration with Dr. Stephen Brown, Jewish Museum curator, and is drawn from the recent retrospective curated by Dr. Katzman at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.

“Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity showcases the extraordinary work of a pioneering artist whose commitment to social justice across ethnic, class, and racial divides could not have greater relevance today,” said James S. Snyder, Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director. “There is no better place for this timely exhibition than the Jewish Museum, which presented Shahn’s last U.S. retrospective in 1976. The affirmation of shared universal humanity in his art parallels the Jewish Museum’s own mandate to explore the cross-cultural connectedness of Jewish experience throughout the global diaspora over 3,500 years.”

The exhibition draws its title from Ben Shahn’s credo of “nonconformity,” which the artist asserted as an indispensable precondition for both significant artistic production and all great societal change. This philosophy is centered in the exhibition as the foundational thread that runs through the artist’s oeuvre, which investigates issues such as unemployment, discrimination, authoritarianism, and threats to freedom of expression, while championing labor, civil, and human rights. Shahn’s later spiritual work, which embraces the Hebrew language and biblical stories, also reflects his exploration of a tradition of social justice activism within Jewish culture.

Born to a Jewish family in Russian-controlled Lithuania, Ben Shahn immigrated to the United States with his family in 1906. He began his career as a lithographer, mastering drawing, engraving, and typography, before expanding and experimenting across a vast array of mediums. The exhibition demonstrates Shahn’s rejection of a strict hierarchy among mediums, based on a belief in the power of images in all forms to stir the conscience of the public.

“Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity offers a reappraisal of the artist through a contemporary lens,” said Dr. Laura Katzman, guest curator. “Shahn’s understanding of art’s critical role in the perpetual struggle for a more just future resonates powerfully today. The exhibition invites visitors to examine the issues that were important to Shahn through our modern understanding of social justice. It also uplifts the richness and complexity of his aesthetic, which drew inspiration from various artistic movements in the postwar era—from abstract expressionism to conceptual art—and capitalized on the reach of mass media, raising commercial production to a high art.”

“Ben Shahn is one of the great American artists of the twentieth century who believed in the value of dissent and the essential function of art in the life of a democratic society,” said Dr. Stephen Brown, Jewish Museum curator. “The first major presentation of his work in the U.S. in decades, the Jewish Museum exhibition is something of a homecoming for Shahn, who has been part of our collection since 1947 and who was educated and politicized in New York City.”

The exhibition includes artwork and ephemera from throughout Shahn’s career, on loan from more than 30 museums, galleries, and private collections. Across seven sections, Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity explores the artist’s multifaceted use of photography and mass media, his inventive re-purposing of imagery across media, and his layered interrelations of word and image. The sections are organized thematically around the most pressing issues of Shahn’s time, including:

— Art and Activism encompasses Shahn’s earliest social realist work from the 1930s, highlighting the artist’s response to high-profile injustices perpetrated by the American judicial system;

—- A New Deal for Art presents Shahn’s powerful photographs, posters, and mural studies made for U.S. government art projects that championed programs aimed at alleviating the devastation wrought by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Also on view are Shahn’s “personal realist” paintings, which dignify the ordinariness of everyday life that he encountered on his photographic travels for New Deal agencies;

— The Labor Movement features Shahn’s mass-produced posters and graphics that speak to his commitment to the cause of labor and to promoting the dignity of manual labor, executed in the mid-1940s when he led the Graphic Arts Division of the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ Political Action Committee;

— War and Its Aftermath explores Shahn’s work created both during and after World War II: propagandistic posters commissioned by the Office of War Information, which confront the horrors of war, and more reflective paintings that grapple with wartime destruction and postwar liberation;

— Age of Anxiety: The Cold War includes the works Shahn made during the era of McCarthyism and the emergent Atomic Age, which both protest America’s anti-communist hysteria and warn of the looming nuclear threat both at home and abroad;

— The Struggle for Civil Rights reflects Shahn’s fervent support of the nonviolent movements for civil rights in the U.S. and for the broader resistance movements against colonialism that were rising up around the world in the 1950s and 1960s;

— Spirituality and Identity—the final section of the exhibition showcases Shahn’s return to the biblical stories and Hebrew texts he grew up with as a child, illuminating how re-engagement with his Jewish roots was yet another lens through which he commented critically on history and society.

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity builds on the Jewish Museum’s long history of presenting Shahn’s work to American audiences. In 1976, the Museum hosted a major Ben Shahn retrospective, and in 1998, to mark Shahn’s centenary, organized Common Man, Mythic Vision: The Paintings of Ben Shahn, focusing on the role of allegory in the artist’s later, lesser-known paintings. Twenty-two years later, in 2020, the conceptual artist Jonathan Horowitz curated We Fight to Build a Free World, which situated Shahn’s work at the heart of an exhibition that examined how artists responded to cultural and political challenges with art primarily from the early 20th century to 2020.

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity

Laura Katzman 

Contributions by Beatriz Cordero Martín, 

Christof Decker and John Fagg

Published by the Jewish Museum, New York and 

the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 

in association with Princeton University Press

288 pages, 8 x 10.5 in., 290 color illus.

ISBN: 9780691273112 - Published: June 3, 2025

Book Cover image courtesy of Princeton University Press

Publication: The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue, published by the Jewish Museum, New York, and the Museo Nacional Centro Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, in association with Princeton University Press. Drawing on media studies, cultural studies, and museological approaches, the catalogue brings international perspectives and new insights to the work of artist Ben Shahn. With a foreword by James S. Snyder, the book is authored by Laura Katzman, Professor of Art History at James Madison University, with contributions by Beatriz Cordero Martín, Professor of Art History at Saint Louis University, Madrid; Christof Decker, Professor of American Studies at Ludwig-Maxmilian University, Munich, Germany; and John Fagg, Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Cultures at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom.

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity was organized by Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, and adapted by the Jewish Museum, New York. The New York exhibition is curated by Dr. Laura Katzman, Professor of Art History at James Madison University, in collaboration with Dr. Stephen Brown, Curator at the Jewish Museum. Dr. Katzman also served as guest curator of the recent Ben Shahn exhibition in Madrid. 

JEWISH MUSEUM, NEW YORK

thejewishmuseum.org

Updated Post 24-10-2025

Noah Purifoy @ Tilton Gallery, NYC - "Poetry as Politics: Seeing Beyond the Object - Noah Purifoy and Kindred Spirits" Exhibition

Poetry as Politics: 

Seeing Beyond the Object 

Noah Purifoy and Kindred Spirits 

Tilton Gallery, New York 

March 20 - May 24, 2025 

Tilton Gallery presents an exhibition of works by NOAH PURIFOY (1917-2004) and a few of his contemporaries who were kindred spirits in their attitudes and philosophy towards art making. The exhibition centers on Purifoy’s signature assemblages and include works never before exhibited in New York. Works range from his important early 1965-66 Watts Remains from the rare group of works made for the exhibition 66 Signs of Neon in response to the 1965 Watts Rebellion to indoor and outdoor works from his period in Joshua Tree. 

Additional artists include John Outterbridge, David Hammons, Timothy Washington, John Riddle, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Varnette Honeywood, Betye Saar and Donald Stinson. Many of these works also have rarely, if ever, been shown.

Noah Purifoy and the artists in his circle in Los Angeles from the mid-sixties on, many of whom worked primarily in assemblage, believed in the power of art, the poetry of art to effect change and to propel thought that went beyond the art object to move attitudes in real life and political thinking. 

Noah Purifoy has stated: “When you do art, you see beyond the object. That effort of seeing beyond the object is also present in human relations.” He believed that art is a powerful tool for social change and that creativity and activism go hand in hand. John Outterbridge also spoke often about the wrongs of the world and the power of art to touch people and shape change. These artists turned philosophy into the poetry of art. 

Works were rarely overtly political, but the artists wove their understanding of history and of their present world, their beliefs and their hopes into constructions and sculptures and collages made from discarded fragments. Materials include found pieces of metal, carved wood, fabric and repurposed objects and partial objects of every kind. 

Never didactic, much was left up to the viewer, allowing the strength of the artworks to speak for itself. Direct activism was reserved for real life and channeled into impacting arts education and creating institutions and cultural centers for their community. 

Noah Purifoy was Founder and Director of the Watts Towers Arts Center from 1964 to 1975 where he created programs in the arts for the youth of the Watts community. He then sat on the California Arts Council for ten years from 1976 to 1987, promoting the arts and art education around the state. 

John Outterbridge (1933-2020) was Co-Founder and Artistic Director of the Compton Communicative Arts Academy in nearby Compton from 1969 to 1975. It was not only a haven for the community, but a center for art, poetry, music, dance and theatre. He then succeeded Noah Purifoy as Director of the Watts Towers Arts Center from 1975 to 1992. He was a panelist for the California Arts Council and for the National Endowment for the Arts and a member of the Advisory Committee for the Getty Institute for Arts Education, all in 1978 to 1980. Other artists participated in different degrees in the activism of the times. 

This group of artists worked at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Arts Movement and impacted their contemporaries and generations to come. Not only did many of these artists teach formally, but they were generous in sharing their beliefs and many younger artists were impacted by their elders’ deep thinking. Their influence continues to the present; the Hammer Museum’s most recent Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living, found inspiration in the work and life of Noah Purifoy.

TILTON GALLERY

8 East 76 Street New York, NY 10021

www.jacktiltongallery.com

Retrospective exhibition Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies @ Brooklyn Museum, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Art Institute of Chicago

Elizabeth Catlett  

A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies 

Brooklyn Museum 

September 13, 2024 – January 19, 2025

National Gallery of Art, Washington  

March 9 – July 6, 2025 

Art Institute of Chicago 

August 30, 2025 – January 4, 2026

The retrospective exhibition Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies showcases the enduring legacy of ELIZABETH CATLETT (1915–2012) as a visionary artist and an unwavering activist. As the most comprehensive presentation devoted to Catlett in the United States, it features more than 150 works, including well-known sculpture and prints, rare paintings and drawings, and important ephemera. The exhibition is co-organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and presented in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago.

Elizabeth Catlett was an avowed feminist, lifelong activist, and deft formalist. Coming of age as an artist during the 1930s and 1940s, an era marked by the Great Depression and global economic turmoil, she witnessed class inequality, racial violence, and U.S. expansionism, which continue to shape the world today. Elizabeth Catlett passionately addressed these injustices through her politically engaged art. Her prints and sculptures draw on organic abstraction, American and Mexican modernism, and African art, centering the trials and triumphs of Black American and Mexican women.

For nearly a century—from Jim Crow segregation to the McCarthy era and the Cold War to President Obama’s first term—Elizabeth Catlett dedicated her life to the pursuit of formal rigor and social justice, which she understood to be mutually reinforcing. A transnational artist, Elizabeth Catlett worked in Washington, DC, Chicago, and New York before settling in Mexico, where she lived and taught for more than sixty years. She embraced a political radicalism that merged the goals of the Black Left in the United States with the lessons of the Mexican Revolution. Through her dual practices in sculpture and printmaking, Elizabeth Catlett remained committed to depicting the strength and struggles of both Black American and Mexican communities.

Organized chronologically and thematically, the exhibition traces Elizabeth Catlett’s career of creative artistry and bold political activism. From protests she staged while in high school against lynchings in Washington, DC, to her academic pursuits at Howard University and the University of Iowa, Catlett’s path was marked by a dedication to developing rigorous formal excellence and progressive social politics that deftly brought together issues of race, gender, and class. After becoming the first-ever recipient of a master of fine arts degree at the University of Iowa, Elizabeth Catlett continued her education studying ceramics at the Art Institute of Chicago, and honing her practice in lithography at the South Side Community Art Center.

Elizabeth Catlett then spent four years in New York, where she studied the tenets of modernist European sculpture and became a part of a community of artists and intellectuals who coalesced around Popular Front politics. Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies includes a number of Catlett’s early paintings and sketches from this period, defying notions that she was exclusively a printmaker and sculptor and underscoring her versatility as an artist.

Elizabeth Catlett's early interest in art and politics was cemented in 1946 when she went to Mexico City to pursue printmaking at the highly regarded Mexican artist collective Taller de Gráfica Popular. Catlett ultimately became a Mexican citizen and an active participant in leftist cultural circles in Mexico City and Cuernavaca. While raising a family and teaching in Mexico, Elizabeth Catlett never lost sight of the Black liberation struggle in the United States. As she told Ebony magazine in 1970, “I am inspired by Black people and Mexican people, my two peoples.”

Through bold line work in prints and voluptuous forms in sculpture, Elizabeth Catlett draws parallels between the female experience in the United States and Mexico. In Homage to My Young Black Sisters (1968) and her public monument, Floating Family (1996), Elizabeth Catlett examines intersectional feminism and familial bonds through the medium of sculpture, referencing Brancusi, Henry Moore, historical African and Mesoamerican sculpture. The exhibition includes a selection of Elizabeth Catlett’s most iconic prints, from the Sharecropper and Black Woman series of the 1940s and 1950s to works such as Watts/ Detroit / Washington / Harlem / Newark, inspired by radical political activism of the 1960s and 1970s.

“Elizabeth Catlett’s artistry and activism resonate powerfully in today’s world, reminding us of ongoing national and international struggles against inequality and injustice. The exhibition not only celebrates Catlett’s contributions to the art world but also brings a historical voice into the present—showing how generations of Black feminists continue to inspire us to fight for a more equitable and just society,” says Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum.

“In honoring Elizabeth Catlett’s legacy, we hope that her work will resonate as a poignant reminder of art’s power to ignite change and unite communities in the ongoing struggle for equality and liberation. A Black revolutionary artist, Catlett made real, material sacrifices—including nine years of political exile—to speak truth to power and to make art for all. Her political conviction was matched by her aesthetic principles. She was capacious in her artistic influences, and while she loved abstraction, she loved her people more,” says Dalila Scruggs, Augusta Savage Curator of African American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The exhibition title takes inspiration from a talk Elizabeth Catlett gave in 1970, following a decade of exile from the United States in response to her political activism in Mexico. Elizabeth Catlett said: “I have been, and am currently, and always hope to be a Black Revolutionary Artist and all that it implies.” Her impassioned speech highlights the exhibition’s core themes: a commitment to formal rigor, Black empowerment through progressive activism, and a belief that everyday people deserve access to fine art. The works throughout the presentation are evidence of Elizabeth Catlett’s enduring legacy of driving social change, both through her contributions to the art world and the movements she championed.

After the Brooklyn Museum, the exhibition will be on view at the National Gallery of Art and at the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Elizabeth Catlett  

A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies 

Edited by Dalila Scruggs

304 pages | 240 color plates | 9 x 11 | © 2024

Accompanying publication: The traveling retrospective is accompanied by a book of the same title, edited by Dalila Scruggs and distributed by the University of Chicago Press. The 304-page publication offers a revelatory look at Catlett and her nearly century-long life, highlighting overlooked works alongside iconic masterpieces. Essays address topics including Catlett’s early development as an artist-activist, the impact of political exile on her work, and the diverse influences that shaped her practice. 

Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies is organized by Dalila Scruggs, Augusta Savage Curator of African American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum; Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum; and Mary Lee Corlett, Associate Curator of Modern Prints and Drawings (retired), National Gallery of Art; with Rashieda Witter, Curatorial Assistant, National Gallery of Art, and Carla Forbes, Curatorial Assistant, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition is organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago.

BROOKLYN MUSEUM

200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York 11238 

www.brooklynmuseum.org

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

6th Street and Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20565

www.nga.gov

ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60603

www.artic.edu

Claudia Andujar: The End of the World - Exhibition @ Deichtorhallen Hamburg - PHOXXI. The Temporary House of Photography

Claudia Andujar: The End of the World 

Deichtorhallen Hamburg

PHOXXI. The Temporary House of Photography

Through 11 August 2024

CLAUDIA ANDUJAR

Opiq+theri, Perimetral norte - da série Sonhos Yanomami

[Opiq+theri, Perimetral norte - from the Yanomami Dreams series], 2002

© Claudia Andujar. Courtesy Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo

CLAUDIA ANDUJAR

Sem Título - da série Sonhos Yanomami

[Untitled from Yanomami Dream series], 2002

© Claudia Andujar. Courtesy Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo

CLAUDIA ANDUJAR

Casulo humano (rito mortuário) - da série Casa

[Human Cocoon. Mortuary Rite from The House series], 1976

© Claudia Andujar. Courtesy Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo

CLAUDIA ANDUJAR

«Self Portrait», photo Claudia Andujar, Catrimani, RR, 1974

© Claudia Andujar. Courtesy Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo

The Swiss-born Brazilian photographer and activist CLAUDIA ANDUJAR (*1931) serves as a role model for many politically motivated artists today. She is not only an outstanding photographer but also an activist who uses her artistic voice to draw attention to social injustices and defend the rights of indigenous communities. Her political commitment is reflected in her photography, which is not only artistically documentary but also carries a clear political message.

After fleeing the Nazis, she decided to pursue a career as a photojournalist and became involved in the fight against dictatorship and violence in her new home of Brazil. From the early 1970s, she documented not only the daily life of the Yanomami indigenous community in the Amazon in northern Brazil, but also the conflicts they faced due to mining, land disputes, and diseases. Claudia Andujar henceforth dedicated her life and work to the struggle for the rights of the Yanomami, a community she joined. 

As part of her five decades of dedication to the protection of the Yanomami, Claudia Andujar has taken over 60,000 photographs. She has advocated for the Yanomami through her art and has also become a vehement supporter of their rights. Her efforts helped to draw international attention to the threats they face. Many indigenous activists today refer to Claudia Andujar’s impactful work over the past decades. 

Today, Claudia Andujar is considered one of the most important figures in photography in South America. Her works have been exhibited in renowned museums and galleries around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. She has received numerous awards and recognitions for her artistic and social work.

The exhibition is produced by the Deichtorhallen Hamburg.

Curator: Viktor Hois (Research Associate, House of Photography, Deichtorhallen)

DEICHTORHALLEN HAMBURG

PHOXXI, THE TEMPORARY HOUSE OF PHOTOGRAPHY 

Deichtorplatz 1, Hamburg

www.deichtorhallen.de

CLAUDIA ANDUJAR: THE END OF THE WORLD - 9 FEBRUARY – 11 AUGUST 2024 

PHOXXI, THE TEMPORARY HOUSE OF PHOTOGRAPHY, DEICHTORHALLEN HAMBURG 

Judy Chicago: Revelations @ Serpentine, London - Judy Chicago largest solo presentation in a London institution

Judy Chicago: Revelations

Serpentine Galleries, London

23 May – 1 September 2024

Serpentine presents Revelations, an exhibition of trailblazing artist, author, educator, cultural historian and feminist JUDY CHICAGO (b. 1939, Chicago, USA); lives and works in New Mexico, USA). Named as one of Time Magazine's most influential people in 2018, she has garnered an enduring stature. Born Judy Cohen, and know biefly after her first marriage as Judy Gerowitz, Judy Chicago attented the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1970, the artist adopted the surname 'chicago' and initiated the United States' first Feminist Art Programme at California State University, Fresno. The exhibition Revelations, on view at Serpentine North, is Judy Chicago’s largest solo presentation in a London institution.

Judy Chicago came to prominence in the late 1960s when she challenged the male-dominated landscape of the art world by making work that was boldly from a woman’s perspective. An artistic polymath, Judy Chicago’s work is defined by a commitment to craft and experimentation, either through her choice of subject matter or the method and materials she employs.

Throughout her six-decade career, Judy Chicago has contested the absence and erasure of women in the Western cultural canon, developing a distinctive visual language that gives visibility to their experiences. To this aim, Judy Chicago has produced both individual and collaborative projects that grappled with themes of birth and creation, the social construct of masculinity, her Jewish identity, notions of power and powerlessness, extinction, and expressed her longstanding concern for climate justice.

Judy Chicago: Revelations charts the full arc of Judy Chicago’s career with a specific focus on drawing, highlighting rarely seen works. Several immersive, multi-media elements, including an AR app, a video recording booth, and other audio-visual components, set this show apart from previous surveys of Judy  Chicago’s work. With never-before-seen sketchbooks, films and slides, video interviews of participants from The Dinner Party (1974–79), audio recordings, and a guided tour of The Dinner Party by Judy  Chicago herself, this novel approach to exhibiting Judy Chicago’s work makes the artist’s presence felt throughout the gallery.

The exhibition takes its name from an unknown illuminated manuscript Judy Chicago penned in the early 1970s which will be published for the first time in conjunction with the exhibition by Serpentine and Thames & Hudson. Titled Revelations, this visionary work is a radical retelling of human history recovering some of the stories of women that society sought to erase, and one that Judy Chicago never imagined would be published in her lifetime. Audio excerpts from the book can be heard in each of the galleries through an accompanying audio guide, seamlessly creating a link between visual art and written word that has occupied the artist’s practice since the 1970s.

"Revelations, both the exhibition and book, expresses my lifelong commitment to gender equality and my deeply held belief that people must come together to change the patriarchal paradigm, which–at this point in history–has become lethal to all creatures, human and nonhuman, as well as to the planet" - Judy Chicago

Organised thematically and inspired by the chapters of the manuscript as its framework, the exhibition opens with In the Beginning (1982) which measures a staggering nine metres in length. Executed in Judy Chicago's signature Prismacolor pencils, the work reimagines the Genesis creation myth from a female perspective. As a benchmark representation of Judy Chicago's foundational philosophy, In the Beginning attempts to dismantle patriarchal structures but also draws on the ways in which feminism intersects with ecology, making this the perfect work to open both the exhibition and accompanying manuscript, which also serves as the exhibition's catalogue.

In the mid-1960s, Judy Chicago developed a significant body of abstract and minimalist drawings, paintings and sculptures that explored colour and form. Revelations brings together a focused sélection of works on paper from this period. By the late 1960s and 1970s, Judy Chicago began to expand on what she termed 'central-core' imagery whilst also developing her expertise in the male-dominated discipline of pyrotechnies. Works such as The Great Ladies Transforming Themselves into Butterflies (1973) and Peeling Back (1974} combine text and image and explicitly reflect on her experience of being "a woman, with a woman's body and a woman's point of view." An immersive video installation of footage from Judy Chicago's celebrated site-specific performances, Atmospheres (1968-74), that combined coloured smokes and fireworks is presented in one of the historic powder rooms of Serpentine North. As one of several digital and online experiences presented in the exhibition, visitors are also encouraged to interact with Rainbow AR (2020), a free downloadable app commissioned by LAS Art Foundation, Berlin, Germany, which allows visitors to create their own smoke pieces.

One gallery draws on the significance of Judy Chicago's monumental installation The Dinner Party that celebrates and symbolises the heritage and achievements of 1038 women. Here, rarely seen drawings, studies and sketchbooks reveal the working process and components that led to this installation, now permanently housed at Brooklyn Museum, NY. Interviews with luminaries such as Maria Grazia Chiuri, Kevin Kwan, Roxane Gay and Massimiliano Gioni contextualise the relevance of The Dinner Party today.

Also featured in the exhibition is Judy Chicago's séries, the Birth Project (1980-85), for which the artist studied creation myths from numerous cultures to chart history's transition from matriarchal to patriarchal societies. Struck by the lack of imagery related to the subject of birth in Western art, she collaborated with over 150 needleworkers who translated her drawings, paintings and designs into tapestries, petit points, crochets and more. Central to these works is the image of the Goddess figure which has been reworked across Judy Chicago's career to present the idea of 'the divine' being female.

Whilst still engaged with Birth Project, Judy Chicago explored the cultural construction of gender and masculinity. Drawing on her continued commitment to challenging the patriarchal structures that govern society, Prismacolor studies and paintings on Belgian linen covered cavasses from PowerPlay (1982-87) highlight how the artist appropriated and reversed the male gaze. In a new drawing made especially for the manuscript, And God Created Life (2023) Judy Chicago seeks to challenge the conception of God as male and instead presents a figure that sits beyond the racial and binary gender spectrum.

The exhibition also highlights Judy Chicago's enthusiastic interest in the relationship between ecological justice and feminism. Among the works presented are a selection of mixed média drawings from the séries Thinking About Trees (1993-96) as well as studies from The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction (2015-16) that reflect on the plight of animals. Stranded (2013), depicting a polar bear, was the subject of #CreateArtforEarth, an ongoing global campaign that brought together Judy Chicago with the artist Swoon, Jane Fonda and her environmental initiative Pire Drill Friday. Alongside other partners, this project encouraged individuals to submit art or messages that respond to the climate crisis and inspire action for protecting our planet. For Revelations, visitors are invited to continue contributing to the global campaign. This is one of three ways that people Worldwide can collaborate with the artist to create change via digital projects including the most recently conceived participatory project in the exhibition, What If Women Ruled the World? (2022).

What if Women Ruled the World? was developed in close collaboration with Pussy Riot founding member Nadya Tolokonnikova, and DMINTI (a leader in the industry that curates, produces, and positions innovative works and experiences at the intersection of art and technology). The project was first imagined in 1977 and realised for Dior's Spring-Summer 2020 Haute Couture show at the invitation of the fashion house's first female creative director, Maria Grazia Chiuri. Visitors are invited to enter a participatory booth to provide a video response to a series of questions. Each response becomes part of a growing international archive that is underpinned by a proof of participation token powered by Tezos, the open source project and a scalable, energy efficient, public blockchain chosen by artists across the world for their creative projects. This is the latest project in the multi-year partnership between the Tezos Foundation and Serpentine which celebrates the Serpentine Arts Technologies Team's endeavors to foster artist-led blockchain projects and educate the public, alongside the Tezos ecosystem's dedication to innovation and creativity in the arts and culture sector.

Revelations is curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director; and Chris Bayley, Associate Exhibitions Curator; with Liz Stumpf, Assistant Exhibitions Curator; and produced by Halime Özdemir-Larusso, Production Manager.

Judy Chicago: Revelations 

Co-published by Serpentine and Thames & Hudson

Alongside the illuminated manuscript, the publication features an introduction by Judy Chicago as well as contributions from Serpentine Associate Exhibitions Curator Chris Bayley and scholar Martha Easton whose research centres on illuminated manuscripts, gender and medievalism. It also includes a conversation between Judy Chicago and Serpentine's Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist that traces the beginnings of Revelations and the ways in which it, unbeknownst to Judy Chicago until recently, was foundational to the work she would conceive over the following four decades. It is designed by Jessica Fleischmann (Still Room) and Phil Kovacevich.

Judy Chicago: Revelations is published in hardback by Thames & Hudson in collaboration with Serpentine and on sale in the UK on 30 May 2024 and in the US on 18 June 2024.

 

Limited Edition: To celebrate the exhibition, a special Judy Chicago Limited Edition will be available via the Serpentine Shop. All proceeds directly support the Serpentine's Exhibition, Architecture, Design, Education and Digital programmes.

SERPENTINE Galleries London

Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA

www.serpentinegalleries.org

Maya Lin @ Pace Gallery, Seoul - Nature Knows No Boundaries

Maya Lin: Nature Knows No Boundaries

Pace Gallery, Seoul

January 20 – March 11, 2023

MAYA LIN 

Silver Tigris & Euphrates Watershed, 2022 

© Maya Lin

Pace Gallery presents an exhibition of work by artist, architect, and environmental activist MAYA LIN at its arts complex in Seoul. The presentation, titled Nature Knows No Boundaries brings together new and recent installations and sculptures emblematic of the artist’s style. The exhibition, which marks the artist’s first solo show in Korea, focuses on Maya Lin’s longstanding artistic investigations of water and her ongoing environmental activism.

Maya Lin—who is known for her critical engagement with notions of site and place through a multidisciplinary, ecologically minded practice— rose to prominence in the United States after winning a nationwide design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. in 1982. Other major public commissions by the artist include the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, created in 1989, and the Women’s Table at Yale University, completed in 1993. In 2021, Lin presented her acclaimed public installation Ghost Forest, which comprised 49 towering Atlantic white cedar trees, in New York’s Madison Square Park. The artist, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by US President Barack Obama in 2016, has been commissioned to create a sculpture for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, expected to open in 2025. Most recently, she was chosen to design a new performing arts studio building for the Fisher Center at Bard College in New York state. In 2022, TIME magazine named Maya Lin one of the year’s most influential people.

Maya Lin's exhibition at Pace’s Seoul arts complex features several of her sculptural, topographical studies of rivers, which she began producing in 2007 as meditations on the ways that natural resources defy and transcend human constructs—namely, imposed borders separating nations and states. The artist’s understated but deeply resonant sculptures of water and bodies of water merge the past and present, situating the climate crisis within the arc of natural history. Maya Lin’s show in Seoul includes her new recycled silver work Silver Tigris & Euphrates Watershed (2022) alongside Pin Gang - Imjin and Han (2022), created with stainless steel pins, and the glass marble piece Marble Han River Dam (2022), both of which center on the movements and makeup of the Han River, an important body of water in Korea. These sculptures, whose materials mimic the visual and textural traits of water, reflect the delicacy of line drawing in their elegant and elaborate contours. Maya Lin’s sculptural rivers also exemplify her ability to experiment with and use varied media in her work. Among the other works in the presentation are Dew Point 8 (2007), a lyrical blown glass sculpture, and 52 Ways to See the Ocean (2008), a Richlite sculpture that seems to undulate and shape shift as viewers navigate around it. Maya Lin brings questions of scarcity, accessibility, and climatic precarity to the fore of these dynamic sculptures, which will be displayed across the gallery’s walls and floors.

MAYA LIN (b. 1959, Athens, Ohio) acclaimed work encompasses large-scale environmental installations, intimate studio artworks, architectural projects and memorials. Her artwork interprets the world through a twenty-first century lens, utilizing technological methods to study and visualize the natural environment. In her sculpture and drawing, Maya Lin merges rational order with notions of beauty. Blurring boundaries between two- and three-dimensional space, Maya Lin sets up a systematic ordering of the landscape tied to history, time, science and language.

Her numerous awards include receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Nation’s highest civilian honor, in 2016 from President Barack Obama, the 2009 National Medal of the Arts conferred by President Obama and the 2014 Gish Prize for her contributions to art and social change. She is at work on her final memorial, What is Missing?, raising awareness about habitat loss and biodiversity.

Maya Lin’s work is held in numerous public collections worldwide, including the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Columbus Museum of Art; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Minneapolis Institute of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Toledo Museum of Art; Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida, among others.

The artist is also working on a permanent installation, An Ecological Primer, at Oberlin College, where one of three proposed elements has already been installed. Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes, organized by the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, Seattle, traveled to Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2006–09). In 2009, three major works from the traveling exhibition were presented in Maya Lin: Three Ways of Looking at the Earth, Selections from Systematic Landscapes at Pace, New York. Lin has been the subject of exhibitions at venues including Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2012); Dayton Art Institute (2012); Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York (2014); Nevada Museum of Art, Reno (2014); Ivorypress Art and Bookspace, Madrid (2014); and Orlando Museum of Art (2015).

Maya Lin has been commissioned to create major art and earth works by organizations around the world. A selection of her earth works include Eleven Minute Line (2004) at Wanås Foundation, Wanås, Sweden; Storm King Wavefield (2009) at Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York; and A Fold in the Field (2013) at Gibbs Farm, Kaipara Harbour, New Zealand, among others.

Notable art commissions include Women’s Table (1993) for Yale University, New Haven; Above and Below (2007) for the Indianapolis Museum of Art; Pin River – Yangtze (2007) for the American Embassy in Beijing; Where the Land Meets the Sea (2008) and What is Missing? (2009) for the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco; and Colorado River (2009) for Aria Resort & Casino, Las Vegas, among others. Committed to advocating sustainable design solutions in all her works, Maya Lin’s architectural projects include Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts (2015); the Museum for Chinese in America in New York City (2009); the Riggio-Lynch Interfaith Chapel in Clinton, Tennessee (2004); and Langston Hughes Library in Clinton, Tennessee (1999). Recently, the construction for her redesign of the Neilson Library at Smith College was completed in 2021. Holding degrees from Yale and the Yale School of Architecture, Maya Lin’s architectural designs create a close dialogue between the landscape and built environment.

PACE GALLERY SEOUL

1F, 267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

www.pacegallery.com

Emma Amos: Self-Portraits @ Ryan Lee Gallery’s booth @ Frieze London

Emma Amos: Self-Portraits

Ryan Lee Gallery’s booth @ Frieze London

October 12 – 16, 2022

EMMA AMOS

Work Suit, 1994

© Estate of Emma Amos, courtesy RYAN LEE

RYAN LEE presents Emma Amos: Self Portraits, a selection of landmark paintings by the pioneering artist and activist EMMA AMOS (b. 1937—d. 2020). A celebrated artist, Amos was known for her experimentation in both subject matter and material throughout her work. She was an original Guerilla Girl and the only female member of the influential African American artist group Spiral, alongside Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Hale Woodruff. Emma Amos, whose work ranged from graphic, to expressionist, to figurative, has always understood that, as she put it, “to put brush to canvas as a black artist was a political act.”

A dynamic painter and masterful colorist, Emma Amos’s commitment to interrogating the art-historical status quo yielded a body of vibrant and intellectually rigorous work. In each painting presented in RYAN LEE’s booth, Emma Amos uses her own likeness to demonstrate her longstanding interest in making art that reflected the experience of black women, even when such art elicited little to no response from her male peers and critics. Spanning three decades, these works place Amos’s body hurtling through space, donning a likeness of Lucian Freud’s wrinkled white body, clothed in her own hand-woven cloth, mourning a friend, and overlaid with photo transfer images of enslaved children. These works are simultaneously defiant and radiating with anxiety at the black woman artist’s tenuous position in society. Throughout her oeuvre, Emma Amos intentionally painted her figures in a range of skin tones in order to combat the reductive notion of blackness being propagated by a white male-dominated New York art world.

According to critic bell hooks, Emma Amos “moves into history, becoming at each stage of her life artist, subject, more and more a woman of power, decolonized in that no group of people determines and contains her will to paint, to represent. That’s why there’s such a sense of history being made visible in her work.”

Born in Georgia, Emma Amos spent most of her life and career in New York City. In 1959, she was introduced to the vivid gestural lines of Abstract Expressionism while studying at London’s Central School of Art, this early influence remained with the artist throughout her entire career. Further, she had a background in weaving and textile design, and often included fabric elements in her work. The sumptuous and colorful African cloth both grounds the images and reestablishes a connection to one aspect of Emma Amos’s cultural roots.

This is both RYAN LEE Gallery and Emma Amos’s debut exhibition at Frieze London. The landmark paintings on view in the gallery’s booth have never been exhibited anywhere in Europe before. Emma Amos’s works were recently on view in a major retrospective organized by the Georgia Museum of Art, which traveled to the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in late 2021. The retrospective was accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Lisa Farrington, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Laurel Garber, Kay Walkingstick, and Phoebe Wolfskill. Emma Amos’s work was first shown in London in the important exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern. 

Emma Amos (b. 1937 Atlanta, GA - d. 2020 Bedford, NH) was a pioneering artist, educator, and activist. A dynamic painter and masterful colorist, her commitment to interrogating the art-historical status quo yielded a body of vibrant and intellectually rigorous work. Influenced by modern Western European art, Abstract Expressionism, the Civil Rights movement and feminism, Amos was drawn to exploring the politics of culture and issues of racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism in her art. “It’s always been my contention,” Amos once said, “that for me, a black woman artist, to walk into the studio is a political act.”

An artist known for pushing technical and thematic boundaries, Emma Amos unabashedly made art that reflected the experience of black women, even when such art elicited little to no response from her male peers and critics. She was profoundly influenced by the civil rights and black movements that pushed for recognition in the art world. Amos became a member of Spiral, an important African American collective in 1964 and joined various underground feminist collectives, including Heresies from 1982 to 1993, and the trailblazing Guerilla Girls group after its founding in 1985. Emma Amos’s vivid and powerful paintings are frequently a celebration of the black body, consistently reminding the viewer, the critic and the art world at large of the undeniably important presence of the black and female body that has so often been overlooked.

Emma Amos graduated from Antioch College in Ohio in 1958 and the Central School of Art in London in 1960. She subsequently moved to New York and became active in the downtown arts scene, working alongside prominent Spiral artists such as Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff, Norman Lewis, Alvin Hollingsworth and Charles Alston. In 1965, she earned her Masters in Arts from New York University and taught art at the Dalton School in New York. She is a former Professor and Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University where she taught for 28 years.

In 2016, Emma Amos received Georgia Museum of Art’s Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson award and was honored by the Studio Museum in Harlem as an Icon and Trailblazer, along with Faith Ringgold and Lorraine O’Grady.

Emma Amos’ paintings have been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions including the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s (2019); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’s With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 (2019); and the Brooklyn Museum’s We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 (2017). In 2021, the Georgia Museum of Art organized the landmark retrospective Emma Amos: Color Odyssey, which traveled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Munson Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in New York. This year, Emma Amos is included in Just Above Midtown, 1974 to the Present at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Out on the Streets: Modern Life and Diversity in US Art (1893-1976) at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Brazil, among others.

Her work is held in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Birmingham Museum of Art; British Museum, London; Bronx Museum of Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum of Art; James F. Byrnes Institute, Stuttgart, Germany; Museo de las Artes, Guadalajara, Mexico; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Minneapolis Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Newark Museum; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, among others.

RYAN LEE Gallery represents Emma Amos since 2016.

RYAN LEE GALLERY

515 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

ryanleegallery.com

Updated 20/10/2022

Brian Maguire @ Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago - North and South of the Border

Brian Maguire 

North and South of the Border

Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago

September 16 – October 22, 2022

Rhona Hoffman Gallery presents North and South of the Border, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Irish painter and social activist BRIAN MAGUIRE. The exhibition is comprised of a selection of portraits and landscapes from three different bodies of work: Missing and Murdered Indigenous People (M&MIP), Montana; The Remains, Arizona; and The Aleppo Paintings, Syria. Spanning depictions of scenes and individuals from Montana, Mexico, Central America, Arizona, and Aleppo, Syria, Brian Maguire’s paintings represent the voices of marginalized groups whose stories are not widely disseminated. 

The M&MIP painted portraits, the most recent body of work in the exhibition, was created while Maguire participated in a residency at the Missoula Art Museum in Montana. Missoula is a city near both the Flathead Reservation and the Blackfeet Reservation and proved an apt location for the project. Throughout parts of the United States and Canada, an epidemic is quietly transpiring wherein thousands of Indigenous peoples have disappeared or have been murdered. Brian Maguire’s memorial portraits are rendered from photographs that the family members select, the finished painting being an intimate rendition capturing the likeness and spirit of the subject. There are ultimately two paintings created, one for public exhibitions and one for the family. 

Regarding his The Remains (Arizona) paintings - the second body of work reflected in this exhibition - Brian Maguire says: “...it is the death I record or memorialize in this project. No family would like to retain this image of a loved one, except as needed by a process of seeking justice. My work since 1997 has become increasingly focused on lives lost, often with a political perspective on the event of the loss.” These gestural paintings of skulls in the dirt or a splayed face-down body, as is the case in Arizona 6, reference the migrant crisis at the US/Mexico border, specifically the annual fatalities of Central Americans in the deserts around Tucson, Arizona. The Remains (Arizona) paintings confront issues of migration, displacement, and the dangers forcing those to risk their lives to relocate. 

Aleppo 5 is a commanding painting from Brian Maguire’s The Aleppo Paintings series. Depicting a crumbling and dilapidated building in Aleppo, Brian Maguire first photographically documented the structure during a 2017 visit to Syria before replicating it in his studio. His interest in covering migrant crises through his art transcends specific locations to address the global and widespread issue of forced migration, made more pervasive now due to war, social upheaval, and climate change. The ongoing Syrian Civil War, which officially started in 2011, prompted millions of Syrians to seek refuge in Europe and other surrounding areas, resulting in a major humanitarian emergency. The desolate setting of Aleppo 5 with an isolated passing figure is representative of the trauma inflicted on Syrians and their culture - architecture, infrastructure, art, and history.

Brian Maguire’s investment in social activism stems from his involvement in the civil rights movement of Northern Ireland in the 1970s. He remains committed to making artwork that responds to humanitarian catastrophes, hoping to promote dialogue and support for those afflicted.

BRIAN MAGUIRE (b. 1951 Dublin, Ireland) lives and works in Dublin and Paris. Solo exhibitions have been mounted at institutions and venues such as The Missoula Art Museum (Montana); The Crawford Art Gallery (Cork, Ireland); The United Nations Headquarters (New York); The Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at Texas University (El Paso, TX); Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez (Mexico); and The Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, Ireland). His artwork is in the collections of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Museo de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; Dublin City The Hugh Lane, Dublin; Arts Council Collection, Dublin; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland; Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council, Dublin; National Portrait Collection, Limerick Office of Public Works, Kilkenny Art Gallery Collection, Kilkenny, Ireland; Trim, Ireland; Openbaar Psychiatrisch Zorgcentrum, Geel, Belgium; Trinity College, Dublin; University College, Cork and Dublin; Wicklow County Council, Ireland; Tia Collection, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague-Netherlands; Jyvaskyla Art Museum, Finland; Liverpool University, UK; and Wolverhampton Art Gallery, UK.

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