Lucy Williams: Radiant City Exhibition @ Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco + Book

Lucy Williams

Radiant City

Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco

November 6, 2025 – January 8, 2026

Berggruen Gallery presents Radiant City, an exhibition of new work by London-based artist LUCY WILLIAMS. This exhibition will mark the gallery’s third solo presentation with the artist

Williams’s works are fastidiously engineered to produce uncanny miniature worlds suspended between the second and third dimensions—facades that are simultaneously industrial and tactile. Drawing on modernist buildings and interiors, Lucy Williams redefines collage through intricately crafted mixed-media bas-reliefs. Her sleek, serene scenes of period architecture ripple with texture and aqueous reflections. She simulates the tiled surfaces of swimming pools, the austere facades of Brutalist buildings, and the regimented rows of libraries and bookcases. Painstakingly hand-crafted, Lucy Williams constructs her works in ascending layers of varying materials such as paper, Plexiglas, wood veneer, fabric, piano wire, and thread.

Beginning with a full-scale pencil drawing, Lucy Williams creates a digital copy from which she laser cuts the structural base and hand-cuts colored paper to form curtains, blinds, books, vases, pots, and lampshades. Each piece is laid on top of the drawing until she is ready to collage within a shallow space, adding paper home furnishings as she builds the work. Panels are over-stitched with thread, and a Perspex layer is used to replicate the windows, all of which have been etched and hand-painted to add further detail. Of her process, she says: “You have to give it as much time as possible, it’s really important, because in time is the transformation.”

Through embroidery and a warm tonal palette, Williams’s work exploits the tension between the humane, intimate spaces she produces and the hard-edge geometric buildings she references. The perceived depth and inherent flatness of the work occupy the liminal space between painting and sculpture. “Her work resonates with the textures and geometries of Anni Albers and Jean Arp, Alexander Calder and Ruth Asawa—not just in their forms, but in the energy, dedication, and intentionality they brought to their work,” said Joseph Becker, Curator of Architecture and Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The exhibition title Radiant City comes from Le Corbusier's unrealized architectural proposal for a utopian megalopolis that would seamlessly integrate humankind with nature and the technological innovations of the twentieth century. The concrete apartments—composed of modular units, imposing towers, and symmetry—were conceived to address urgent housing needs and to use modern architecture as a tool for societal reform. While Radiant City itself was never realized, its principles came to life in the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. The patchwork play of color and light across the façade of what might otherwise have been a monotonous expanse resulted in one of modern architecture's most iconic designs. In Radiant City, Lucy Williams captures the delicate balance of materiality, shape, and color that made Unité d’Habitation so visually resonant. She does this through multiple iterations, probing the tension between social egalitarianism and a dehumanizing uniformity.

Radiant City features both representational and abstract works by Lucy Williams. During the pandemic, she began experimenting with non-representational compositions to explore the rhythmic, repetitive visual qualities of form. This experimentation allowed her to develop new threading techniques, which she then brought into her representational works, along with miniature versions of the abstractions themselves. “Slate, aubergine and rose triangles float over vertical threads of different colours and thicknesses, adding a lyrical stringed element to the already dynamic forms. In these, Lucy Williams controls space like the modernists Naum Gabo and Barbara Hepworth before her,” said art critic Charlotte Mullins. Though the figure never appears in her work, one need only view it in person to experience the narrative power of her spaces—how they draw the viewer in, both baffled by their fabrication and longing to occupy their meditative worlds.

Lucy Williams was born in Oxford, England, in 1972. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art from Glasgow School of Art in 1996 and her Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art from Royal Academy Schools in 2003. The artist has since exhibited her work internationally, with solo shows including Pavilion at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London (2012), Festival at McKee Gallery, New York (2014) and Pools at Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco (2017). Lucy Williams’s work has also been represented in major group exhibitions, such as Painting the Glass House: Artists Revisit Modern Architecture at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut (2008), After curated by Marjolaine Levy at Galerie Mitterand, Paris (2013), and Cut & Paste | 400 Years of Collage at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (2019). Lucy Williams currently lives and works in London.

Lucy Williams – Radiant City

By Lucy Williams

Contributions by Ben Street, Salena Barry, Kathryn Lloyd 

and Charlotte Mullins / Edited by Matt Price / 

Foreword by Joseph Becker

Published by Hurtwood Press Ltd 

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

Book Cover courtesy of  Simon & Schuster

264 pages featuring 160 illustrations (colour and black & white)

Hardback, 290 x 245 mm portrait

Available at Berggruen Gallery or on its Website

The exhibition coincides with Lucy Williams’s new publication, Radiant City. The gallery will host an artist discussion, moderated by Joseph Becker, Curator of Architecture and Design at SFMOMA, and a book release event at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 6, 2025, followed by an opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m. 

BERGGRUEN GALLERY

10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

www.berggruen.com

Domenico Zindato @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, NYC - 'On the Dotted Line' Exhibition + A Book offering the most comprehensive view of his recent work to date

Domenico Zindato: On the Dotted Line

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York

November 7 – December 20, 2025

Andrew Edlin Gallery present On the Dotted Line, an exhibition of recent paintings by Domenico Zindato—his fifth with the gallery and the first solo presentation in our new space in Tribeca. A hardcover publication dedicated to the artist accompanies the exhibition, offering the most comprehensive view of his recent work to date. A Kabinett presentation of Zindato’s work will be held at Art Basel Miami Beach (December 5–8).

Domenico Zindato: On the Dotted Line

Published by Andrew Edlin Gallery, 2025

Book Cover courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery

The accompanying monograph provides critical context for the exhibition with an essay by Julián Gómez Sánchez, a conversation between Zindato and Gallery Director Aurélie Bernard Wortsman, more than 30 full-color plates, and archival materials that reveal the artist’s influences and process. As a lasting record of this pivotal moment in his career, the book underscores Zindato’s shift from drawing to painting and places his work within a broader Latin American arthistorical and cultural framework.

Domenico Zindato (b. 1966, Reggio Calabria, Italy) is known for his intricate, trance-like compositions rooted in ritual, intuition, and meditative mark-making. For decades, he concentrated on detailed drawings in ink and pastel on paper, producing labyrinthine works that tread between the ecstatic and the contemplative. In this new body of work, he expands into painting on both canvas and dried leaves. Although he first experimented with canvas in the 1980s, Domenico Zindato did not return to the medium until 2020, this time working with acrylic paints and Flashe—a process he likens to acupuncture: “where the skin is activated by needles—I use my fingers to touch the blank canvas, delineating lines and shapes that I intuitively develop.” This tactile method has been central to his work since the early 1990s, when, while in Paris, he received a box of soft pastels from the legendary Sennelier store. Rubbing pigment directly with his fingers became a formative gesture—bridging body and surface, energy and image.

Based in Mexico since the late 1990s, Domenico Zindato draws deeply from the country’s visual culture: the radiant hues of Oaxacan textiles, the geometric patterns of Zapotec temples, and the visionary palette of Huichol yarn paintings and beadwork. These influences intertwine with his own experiences with peyote and the vivid inner imagery inspired by its use. His small paintings on dried leaves, collected from his surroundings, evince a reverence for nature imbued with fragility and impermanence—these intimate works seem to breathe with life. Across both large canvases and delicate leaves, Zindato’s compositions pulse with organic patterning, recurring symbols, and motifs that stretch beyond the frame, evoking mythological cycles and the interconnectedness of ecosystems.

A highlight of the exhibition, …..each one its special radiance….., is a large-scale painting that incorporates an excerpt from Marcel Proust’s Time Regained. Handwritten in Zindato’s signature cursive script, the words—“Instead of seeing one world only, we see that world multiply itself, and we have many worlds, each one with its special radiance”—undulate across a dense, foliage-like ground. The phrase resonates as both a reflection on perception and a metaphor for Zindato’s art: a vision of worlds multiplying, expanding, and connecting. 

Scholar Julián Gómez Sánchez places his visual language within a broader continuum of Latin American artists engaged with themes of transcendence and interconnectedness, drawing a parallel with Shipibo-Conibo artist Sara Flores, whose kené designs embody flora, fauna, and spiritual realms. Zindato’s work, too, emerges as a meditation on the unseen threads that bind us—to one another, to the natural world, and to the sacred.

Discovered in the 1990s by the maverick art dealer Phyllis Kind (1933-2018), Domenico Zindato has been represented by Andrew Edlin Gallery since 2009. His work has been featured in major exhibitions including As Essential as Dreams: Self-Taught Art from the Collection of Stephanie and John Smither at The Menil Collection (2016) and The Hidden Art: Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Self-Taught Artists from the Audrey B. Heckler Collection, co-published by Rizzoli and the American Folk Art Museum (2017). A previous gallery publication, Domenico Zindato: Recent Drawings (2013), includes an essay by critic Edward M. Gómez. His works are held in the permanent collections of the American Folk Art Museum (New York), The Menil Collection (Houston), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the North Dakota Museum of Art, and the Whitworth Gallery (Manchester, UK).

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY 

392 Broadway, New York, NY 10013

www.edlingallery.com

Nicole Wittenberg @ Acquavella Galleries, NYC - 'All the Way' Exhibition + Book

Nicole Wittenberg: All the Way

Acquavella Galleries, New York

October 16 - December 5, 2025

“I think good paintings are moving images, because they’re not static. Great paintings move.”

—Nicole Wittenberg

Acquavella Galleries presents All the Way, Nicole Wittenberg’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and her first at Acquavella’s New York location. Wittenberg’s return to Acquavella follows the artist’s three solo museum exhibitions over this summer: Maison La Roche, Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris; the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, Maine; and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine. Several works from Wittenberg’s museum exhibitions in Rockland and Ogunquit  appears in All the Way.

All the Way explores painting’s ability to capture the sensation of a singular moment extended over time. Nicole Wittenberg's painting practice takes scenes, elements, and encounters with the natural world as its subject matter. Her landscapes and twisting florals explore the medium’s ability to capture temporal moments as impressions that retain the energy of the experience.

The paintings in this exhibition give the viewer the somatic sensation of immersion—to be in a world within the painting. In this respect, Nicole Wittenberg draws on the work of Paul Cézanne and the Post-Impressionists, as well as the Fauvist challenge to traditional color. For Wittenberg “white is not as bright as yellow or certain shades of orange or even certain shades of green or pink. They’re brighter than white. I wanted light that was just as intense as daylight to replicate the sensation of actual light and actually being there.”

Wittenberg’s process often begins with pastel drawings, small oil paintings and ink studies, which display an economy of gesture and an expert handling of the relationship between light and color. Both her drawings and her paintings show a resistance to perspective and a tension with figuration.

Art historian Suzanne Hudson connects Wittenberg's approach to the work of Venetian colorists, such as Veronese: “Sometimes the grounds are exposed more fully, and at others, outline other forms in residual slivers of crackling intensity, further elaborating color ranges and relations.”

Artist Nicole Wittenberg (b. 1979)

Nicole Wittenberg is an artist, curator, professor, and writer who was born in San Francisco and is currently based in New York City. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003.

In 2012, Wittenberg received the coveted John Koch Award, presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters to a young artist making figurative work. From 2011 to 2014, she served as a teacher at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture and the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, and in 2017, she was a professor in the Critical Theory department at the School of Visual Arts.

Wittenberg’s works are included in prominent collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Albertina, Vienna; the Portland Museum of Art, Maine; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut.

Nicole Wittenberg

Texts by Suzanne Hudson, David Salle, Devon Zimmerman, 

and an interview by Jarrett Earnest

Published by Monacelli, 2025

256 pages, 250 illustrations

Hardback, 29 cm x 25 cm

ISBN: 9781580936811

Photo courtesy of Phaidon

www.phaidon.com

The artist’s first comprehensive monograph was published this summer by Monacelli Press, coinciding with her recent solo exhibitions in Maine and France.

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES, NEW YORK

18 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075 

www.acquavellagalleries.com

Austin Martin White @ Petzel Gallery, NYC - "Tracing Delusionships" Exhibition

Austin Martin White

Tracing Delusionships

Petzel Gallery, New York

September 4 – October 18, 2025

Petzel presents Tracing Delusionships, an exhibition of new largescale paintings and works on paper by Philadelphia-based artist Austin Martin White. The show marks White’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. This exhibition corresponds with the release of Austin Martin White’s first monograph. 

Austin Martin White draws on various references to excavate the ways in which history can be bent, reassembled, or hallucinated. Among the most ambitious in scale White has completed to date, the artist debuts a new series which interprets etchings by 18th century Italian architect, artist, and archaeologist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who fused real monuments and fictive views from antiquity. White probes the inspirational potential of a collapsed, classical past, summarized by Piranesi’s concept of “speaking ruins”: a description for architecture that conjures a world beyond its remains.

Interested in how these images traffic through time as empires decline and global powers shift, Austin Martin White warps, stretches, and splices Piranesi’s reproductions, investigating ruins as arbiters of historical memory. Crumbling arches and labyrinthine stairways, once etched in ink, are fractured and extruded by White through his signature process. Drawing from archival sources, he translates imagery into digital drawings, laser-cuts vinyl stencils, and pushes latex paint through mesh screens from behind. He renders his “Ruins” in maze-like, snaking estuaries of paint. Surfaces appear ridged and vascular, as if oozing from a primordial core.

Monumental in scale, these paintings conjure visions of fantastical follies—structures made not for function but for wonder—while also signaling scenes of industrial collapse or cities devastated by war. Saturating the present yet overlapping with centuries past, White’s images of wreckage become sites of projected anguish, longing, delusion, and desire.

Austin Martin White also turns to the legacy of Bob Thompson, an artist who reimagined the formal and conceptual boundaries of classical painting. Through his “After Thompson” works, White references La Mort des Enfants de Bethel (1964/1965), Thompson’s gouache rendering of the biblical Massacre of the Innocents. White distorts Thompson’s composition further, reframing the plight of the innocents in a present tense. Figures appear ghost-like, as if excreted from the surface, and landscapes buzz with volatile, chromatic intensity—an afterlife of an image that resists repose.

Returning to artists like Thompson and Piranesi, Austin Martin White explores how both destabilize their sources—sometimes reverently, sometimes destructively. White embraces the fragment, sitting in the tension between structure and breakdown, past and present, image and aftermath.

Artist Austin Martin White

Austin Martin White (b. 1984, Detroit, Michigan) is an artist living and working in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He holds a BFA from The Cooper Union and earned an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

Working with a variety of mediums including rubber, acrylic, spray-paint, vinyl, 3m reflective fabric and screen mesh mediums, White creates paintings and works on paper that investigate representations of historical memory, drawing on archival research that addresses issues of identity, race and postcolonialism.

White’s work has appeared in numerous publications including Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Flash Art, 032c and The Observer, among others.

Austin Martin White was included in the group exhibition Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration at the Jewish Museum, New York in 2024, marking his first institutional presentation. Austin Martin White had his first solo exhibition at Petzel’s Upper East Side location.

PETZEL GALLERY

520 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.petzel.com

Matthew Rolston - Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits @ Fahey / Klein Gallery, Los Angeles + Other Venues in LA + Special limited-edition monograph on Nazraeli Press

Matthew Rolston

Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits

Fahey / Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

September 25 - November 8, 2025

Photographer and artist MATTHEW ROLSTON, in partnership with Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, ArtCenter College of Design, Daido Moriyama Museum / Daido Star Space, and Leica Gallery, present a multi-venue Los Angeles exhibition of his latest series Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits, alongside the release of a special limited-edition monograph on Nazraeli Press.

Four individual works will be on view in a solo exhibition at Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, which will display the most extensive presentation of the Vanitas series, including the monograph’s cover photograph. 

At ArtCenter College of Design, Rolston will further present a triptych of the Vanitas work as a wall-sized installation at the College’s South Campus, curated by Julie Joyce, Director, ArtCenter Galleries and Vice President, Exhibitions. This presentation will be the only triptych on exhibition; the central panel appears on the clamshell cover of the forthcoming Vanitas monograph, a signature of the series. These three works, hung in ArtCenter’s Mullin Transportation Design Center, comprise two images of mummified children flanking one of an elderly adult, brought together in the style of an altarpiece, where the sacred and mundane, youth and elder age, collide. 

A single work will be shown at a solo exhibition that will open with a book launch and artist signing at Daido Star Space in downtown Los Angeles on September 30, 2025. Organized in collaboration with the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation in Tokyo, the presentation echoes the institution’s interest in cross-cultural approaches to photography. 

Leica Gallery, Los Angeles, will present another solo exhibition of an additional single work from Vanitas, accompanied by a public artist talk and book signing. At a venue rooted in the technical and material traditions of photography, this presentation will highlight the painterly, craft-driven aspects of Rolston’s Vanitas project. 

Together, these four distinct presentations introduce Vanitas as a ‘mostra diffusa’, an exhibition intentionally distributed among multiple venues. This multi-venue presentation across Los Angeles reflects a conscious departure from the contemporary conventions of exhibition production, recalling art historical traditions in which singular works were presented in isolation. 

All works, regardless of exhibition venue, will be available exclusively through Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, which will also offer an artist-signed edition of the exhibition’s accompanying monograph. 

MATTHEW ROLSTON 

Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits

Nazraeli Press, Mid-September 2025

A special edition of 500 copies 

presented in a custom clamshell case

Hardcover: 12.5 x 18 x 1.5 inches, 

118 pages, 50 four-color plates

ISBN: 978-1-59005-588-5 - $225.00

Book Cover Courtesy of Nazraely Press

FAHEY / KLEIN GALLERY

148 North La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90036

www.faheykleingallery.com

James Bidgood: Dreamlands @ CLAMP, New York + 2025 Monograph from Salzgeber + 1971 film "Pink Narcissus"

James Bidgood | Dreamlands 

CLAMP, New York

Through August 29, 2025

James Bidgood

“Richie Backstage, Sleeping Portrait,”

 mid-1960s/printed later

Digital C-print 

© Estate of James Bidgood

Courtesy of CLAMP, New York

James Bidgood, Dreamlands, Salzgeber, 2025

Book Cover Courtesy of Salzgeber

160 p., 24 × 32 cm - English / Deutsch

ISBN 978-3-95985-718-5

CLAMP presents “James Bidgood | Dreamlands,” an exhibition of photographs marking the launch of the monograph of the same title from Salzgeber, in addition to recent screenings of the artist’s cult classic film, “Pink Narcissus,” at theaters across the United States and Europe.

The book combines iconic motifs from the artist’s oeuvre with many previously unpublished images. The exhibition at CLAMP includes twelve of these new photographs selected from the estate archives, along with a large-scale print of “Pan”—the monograph’s cover image.

“Pink Narcissus,” James Bidgood’s film from 1971, described as a “kaleidoscopic fever dream of queer desire,” was recently restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and has been playing at theaters since late 2024, including MoMA (New York), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), BAM (New York), Metrograph (New York), and other screens in London, Bologna, San Francisco, Seattle, Provincetown, Tucson, St. Louis, etc.

James Bidgood passed away in 2022 at the age of 88. A New Yorker for over 70 years, he was adored and admired by generations of artists and cinephiles alike.

When James Bidgood first came to New York from Wisconsin in the 1950s, he worked as a drag performer and occasional set and costume designer at Club 82 in the East Village. After studying at Parsons School of Design from 1957 to 1960, James Bidgood found jobs as a window dresser and costume designer.

He then went on to work as a photographer for men’s physique publications and began creating his own personal photographs and films that greatly benefited from his talents in theater design and costume construction. It was during this period in the early 1960s that James Bidgood began working on his masterpiece—the 8mm opus “Pink Narcissus.”

In his tiny apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, he handcrafted sets using humble materials to create a theatrical dreamland in which artifice became transcendent. With hand-tailored clothing, saturated lighting, and lots of glitter, James Bidgood built a cosmos of queer belonging, populated with angelic figures of male beauty—including Cupid, Pan, and other mythological gods, along with harlequins, soldiers, firemen, hustlers, drag queens, altar boys, and more.

Bidgood’s confined domestic production speaks to both necessity and liberation—”a queer creative spirit refusing to be constrained by material limitations.” In fact, the artist and his models would eat, sleep, and frolic within the sets until it was time to tear them down and begin building the next scene.

Within this space, and in front of his lens, the homosexuals that were ostracized by larger society could be beautiful, glamorous, complex, silly, or simply themselves.

CLAMP 

247 West 29th Street, New York, NY 10001

clampart.com

James Bidgood | Dreamlands

CLAMP, New York, July 10 – August 29, 2025

Steina: Playback @ Buffalo AKG Art Museum

Steina: Playback 

Buffalo AKG Art Museum

Through June 30, 2025 

Steina: Playback surveys the work of pathbreaking media artist Steina Vasulka (Icelandic, active in the United States, born 1940) whose career traverses video, performance, and installation. Since cofounding The Kitchen in New York City in 1971, Steina has created works shaped by her experimental approach to electronic processing tools, persistent explorations of what she called “machine vision,” and an enduring ethos of play. A classically trained violinist, Steina took up video in 1970, bringing to her new instrument—initially a Sony Portapak—a musician’s attention to the “majestic flow of time.” Unlike many of her peers working in video in its early decades, the Iceland-born artist did not consider television culture in the United States as a central force against which her video activity was defined. Instead, human perception was a key site of confrontation as she sought the exuberant and even utopian possibilities of an “intelligent, yet not human vision.”

Steina also shaped the avant-garde media arts environment that characterized Buffalo in the 1970s. Steina: Playback represents a homecoming for the artist, who taught at the Center for Media Study, SUNY at Buffalo for the majority of that decade, and exhibited at the 1978 Albright-Knox Art Gallery exhibition, The VASULKAS / Steina: Machine Vision, Woody: Descriptions.

With more than a dozen single-channel works and multi-channel environments, this focused retrospective surveys Steina’s fearless DIY approach to new media and her pioneering synthesis of the electronic and the natural. While Steina’s early collaborative works with her life partner Woody Vasulka centered largely around the pair’s obsession with video’s signal and the custom-designed hardware that could distort and manipulate it, her independent works from 1975 onward probe the limits of human perspective and pursue non-anthropocentric modes of visualizing the natural world.

“This exhibition not only offers a revolutionary new view of Steina’s work, but it serves as a compelling reminder of the depth and richness of the media arts environment in Buffalo more broadly,” said Helga Christoffersen, Curator-at-Large and Curator of the Nordic Art and Culture Initiative at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. “Steina was a key figure in the arts community in Buffalo in the 1970s and the breadth of her influence is evident in this immersive, evocative exhibition.”

Throughout her career, her works were continually shaped by her shifting environments: from downtown New York’s avant-garde and Buffalo’s experimental media arts scene of the 1970s, to the vast landscapes of New Mexico and Iceland. In her works from the 1990s onward, new projection technologies allowed her video environments to become even more immersive: flows of river, waves, light, and wind spatialize what the human eye cannot see and seem to offer analogues to the electronic flow of video and audio signals. With her distinctive translation of musical modes, like polyphony, into the visual realm and her effort to exceed human perception, Steina reveals an electronic sublime and attunes us to the vibrant, invisible energies inherent to both video and natural phenomena.

STEINA - BIOGRAPHY

Steina, born Steinunn Briem Bjarnadottir, in Iceland in 1940, lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She trained as a violinist in Reykjavik and Prague, and she emigrated to New York City in 1965 with her life partner Woody Vasulka. Initially working as a freelance musician, she began to focus on video in 1970 and, in 1971, cofounded The Electronic Kitchen (later The Kitchen), the legendary alternative art space in New York City. After moving to Buffalo in 1973, Steina helped develop the production lab at the Center for Media Study at SUNY Buffalo. She moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1980 where she has lived and worked ever since. Steina has exhibited at leading institutions internationally, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh (now the Carnegie Museum of Art); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Important collections with her work include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Julia Stoschek Foundation; Tate, London; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary; and ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. Awards and grants include: Rockefeller Foundation and NEA grants (1982); the Maya Deren Award (1992); the Siemens Media Arts Prize from ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany (1995); as well as an honorary doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute (1998).

STEINA

MIT List Visual Arts Center, MIT Press, 

and Buffalo AKG Art Museum, 2025

238 pp., Hardcover, 8 1/4 x 12 1/4 in.

ISBN: 978-0262551625

Accompanying the exhibition at MIT List Visual Arts Center and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum is the new monograph, Steina, which brings renewed recognition to the artist, tracing her oeuvre from early collaborative works with her partner Woody Vasulka to her independent explorations of optics and a liberated, non-anthropocentric subjectivity. The book is the first comprehensive monograph on the pioneering video artist in more than a decade. Contributors include scholars Gloria Sutton, Joey Heinen, and Ina Blom, who consider how Steina's generative sense of play gave way to methods of processing and computation; contextualize Steina alongside a group of her peers who shared an obsession with the electronic signal; and argue for her interest in video as a proto-virtual space. 

Steina: Playback is organized by MIT List Visual Arts Center in collaboration with the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and is curated by Natalie Bell, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center and Helga Christoffersen Curator-at-Large and Curator, Nordic Art and Culture Initiative, Buffalo AKG Art Museum. 

BUFFALO AKG ART MUSEUM

1285 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York 14222

buffaloakg.org

Steina: Playback @ Buffalo AKG Art Museum, March 14 - June 30, 2025

Alec Soth: Advice for Young Artists @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Alec Soth: Advice for Young Artists

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

April 17 – May 23, 2025

ALEC SOTH

Katherine’s Drawing, 2024 

© Alec Soth, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

Fraenkel Gallery presents Alec Soth: Advice for Young Artists, an exhibition exploring the cultivation of creativity through playful and surprising photographs made at undergraduate art programs. Rather than offering the guidance promised by the show’s title, the series presents reflections on artmaking at different stages of life, exploring the connections between photography, time, and aging. Inspired in part by Walker Evans’s Polaroids of young people, the photographs range from bright still lifes made from art department props to enigmatic images of students and oblique self-portraits.

The series grew from Soth’s interest in portraits that Walker Evans made towards the end of his life, depicting young people at colleges and universities. Best known for his Farm Security Administration-era documentary work, in the 1970s Walker Evans began working with the new Polaroid SX-70 camera, recording signs and lettering among other subjects. Many of Evans’s celebrated Polaroids depict the vernacular subjects for which he was best known. But for Soth, “the work I love are his portraits of young people made while visiting universities,” he writes. The Polaroids “sparked something,” Alec Soth notes, and looking for similar encounters, he began visiting art departments around the U.S. Rather than giving lectures, Soth met with students and classes in exchange for access, writing that he “liked just hanging around and pretending I was an art student.” 

With humor and humility, Soth’s images sometimes suggest an unbridgeable distance between himself and the art school world he records. Artist Lecture presents Soth’s view of a lecture hall seen from the podium. The photograph captures seats filled with students and faculty, recording their amused, bored, or distracted reactions to Soth’s camera. In Katherine’s Drawing, pictured on the monograph’s cover, a pencil sketch of Soth’s face is framed behind cracked glass. Drawn by Soth’s intern at his request, the work’s shattered surface undermines any authority or self-seriousness it might otherwise embody.

Alec Soth: Advice for Young Artists

MACK, September 2024

Embossed linen hardcover

72 pages, 61 plates, 10.5 x 10.75 inches

ISBN 978-1-915743-76-3

More often, the images find Alec Soth at play, reclaiming the freedom and experimentation that belongs to beginners in any pursuit. Still lifes depict unexpected configurations of materials used to teach drawing and painting. In Still Life II, a colorful assembly of objects includes red apples and a scowling bust, and Alec Soth himself hidden at the back of the classroom. In a number of portraits, Alec Soth photographs art students framed by their work and their tools, peeking from behind canvases or holding a shutter release cable. In Ameerah, a young woman poses on a stool with her hands clasped. A study in blues, greys, and browns, the image also doubles as a self-portrait, with Soth’s own reflection visible in a smudged mirror.

ALEC SOTH is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Recent solo exhibitions include Alec Soth: A Room of Rooms at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, and Alec Soth: Reading Room at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, on view through May 4. His photographs have been featured in solo survey shows organized by Jeu de Paume, Paris; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and MediaSpace, London. In 2008, Alec Soth created Little Brown Mushroom, a multi-media enterprise focused on visual storytelling. His work is in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others. The artist’s monographs include Sleeping by the Mississippi, NIAGARA, The Last Days of W, Broken Manual, Gathered Leaves, Songbook, I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating, and A Pound of Pictures. Soth has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013. He is a member of Magnum Photos. 

FRAENKEL GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108 

fraenkelgallery.com

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

loosejoints.biz

Amy Sherald: American Sublime @ Whitney Museum of American Art, New York - A Major Exhibition

Amy Sherald 

American Sublime

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

April 9 – August 10, 2025

Amy Sherald 

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, 2018 

Oil on linen, 72 1/8 × 60 1/8 × 2 3/4 in. (183.1 × 152.7 × 7 cm) 

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

The National Portrait Gallery is grateful to the following lead

donors for their support of the Obama portraits:

Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg; 

Judith Kern and Kent Whealy; 

Tommie L. Pegues and Donald A. Capoccia. 

Courtesy of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery

Amy Sherald 

Breonna Taylor, 2020 

Oil on linen, 54 × 43 × 2 1/2 in. 

The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, 

Museum, purchase made possible by a grant from the

Ford Foundation; and the Smithsonian National

Museum of African American History and Culture, 

purchase made possible by a gift from Kate Capshaw 

© Amy Sherald. Photograph by Joseph Hyde

The Whitney Museum of American Art presents Amy Sherald: American Sublime, the artist’s debut solo exhibition at a New York museum and the most comprehensive showing of her work. American Sublime considers Amy Sherald’s powerful impact on contemporary art and culture, bringing together almost fifty paintings spanning her career from 2007 to the present. This exhibition positions Amy Sherald within the art historical tradition of American realism and figuration. In her paintings, she privileges Black Americans as her subjects, depicting everyday people and foregrounding a population often unseen or underrepresented in art history. The exhibition features early works, never or rarely seen by the public, and new work created specifically for the exhibition, along with iconic portraits of First Lady Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor—two of the most recognizable and significant paintings made by an American artist in recent years.

Amy Sherald places her work within the lineage of American realism and portraiture, alongside artists like Robert Henri, Edward Hopper, Alice Neel, and Andrew Wyeth—all represented in the Whitney Museum’s collection. The early American realists sought to capture the ethos of American places and people. However, there is an evident absence of Black Americans in theserepresentations. Deeply committed to expanding notions of American identity, Sherald’s compositions center her subjects, inviting viewers to meet them eye to eye and empathetically step into their imagined worlds. Employing props and iconography—a tractor, a beach ball, the American flag, a toy pony, or a teacup—the artist crafts universally relatable narratives, illuminating her subjects’ idiosyncrasies and their unique life experiences. By including symbols that resonate with common ideas of American identity and history, these portraits offer a more complete view of the complexity of twenty-first-century American life. The resulting body of work attests to the multiple facets of American identity, reinforcing Sherald’s profound belief that “images can change the world.”

Amy Sherald 

If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It, 2019

Oil on linen, 130 × 108 × 2 1/2 in. (330.2 × 274.3 × 6.4 cm)

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2020.148 

purchase with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee, 

Sascha S. Bauer, Jack Cayre, Nancy Carrington Crown, 

Nancy Poses, Laura Rapp, and Elizabeth Redleaf

© Amy Sherald. Photograph by Joseph Hyde

Amy Sherald 

What's precious inside of him does not care to be known by 

the mind in ways that diminish its presence (All American), 2017 

Oil on canvas, 54 × 43 × 2 1/2 in. (137.16 × 109.22 × 6.35 cm) 

Private collection, courtesy Monique Meloche Gallery 

© Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Photograph by Joseph Hyde

Amy Sherald 

Planes, Rockets, and the Spaces in Between, 2018 

Oil on canvas, 100 x 67 x 2 1/2 in. (254 x 170.1 x 6.35 cm) 

Baltimore Museum of Art, Purchase with exchange funds 

from the Pearlstone Family Fund and partial gift of 

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., 

BMA 2018.80. 

© Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Photograph by Joseph Hyde

“It is a great honor to work with Amy Sherald, one of the most compelling, generous, and impactful artists of our time,” said Rujeko Hockley, Arnhold Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum. “Her unwavering dedication and commitment to what she has called the ‘wonder of what it is to be a Black American’ is deeply felt, and I am thrilled to share her visionary work with our audiences.”

“American Sublime is a salve,” said artist Amy Sherald. “A call to remember our shared humanity and an insistence on being seen.”

“Few contemporary artists make images as gripping and indelible as Amy Sherald. Each of her paintings distills the essence of an individual while also conveying a broad sense of humanity,” said Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney’s Alice Pratt Brown Director. “Over the years that I’ve been in dialogue with Amy, we’ve visited works in the Whitney’s collection by Paul Cadmus, Barkley Henricks, and Edward Hopper, among so many American painters whose legacy she both inherits and extends. I can think of no better home for this important exhibition, which we’re honored to present.”

Amy Sherald 

They Call Me Redbone, 

but I'd Rather Be Strawberry Shortcake, 2009

Oil on canvas, 54 × 43 × 2 1/2 in. (137.16 × 109.22 × 6.35 cm) 

National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, 

gift of Steven Scott, Baltimore, in honor of the artist and 

the 25th anniversary of National Museum of Women in the Arts 

© Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. 

Photograph by Ryan Stevenson

Amy Sherald 

The Rabbit in the Hat, 2009 

Oil on canvas, 54 × 43 × 2 1/2 in. (137.16 × 109.22 × 6.35 cm) 

Green Family Art Foundation,

courtesy Adam Green Art Advisory 

© Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth 

Photograph by Christina Hussey

Amy Sherald 

Hangman, 2007

Oil on canvas, 100 × 67 × 2 1/2 in. (254 × 170.18 × 6.35 cm) 

Collection of Sheryll Cashin and Marque Chambliss 

© Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth 

Photograph by Kelvin Bulluck

Amy Sherald: American Sublime – Exhibition Overview

American Sublime explores the work of one of the most preeminent artists of our time. Arranged chronologically, the exhibition begins with Amy Sherald’s poetic early portraits and leads into the distinct and striking figure paintings for which she is best known. In her intentional privileging of Black Americans as her subjects, Amy Sherald tells stories of a population underrepresented in traditional portraiture. Influenced by her childhood fascination with family photographs—a black-and-white portrait of her grandmother in particular—Sherald aims to portray Black people in quiet, authentic moments. She chooses subjects who vary in age, gender, and identity, placing them in scenes from everyday life to share perspectives she wants to see depicted in the world.

Amy Sherald identifies as an American realist. She tells stories of the American experience through her paintings, much like artists Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth. It wasn’t until she saw a painting with a Black person in it at a museum as a child that she realized she hadn’t yet seen herself represented in art history—a pivotal moment that continues to impact her career. Sherald’s portraits contribute new narratives to the collective American story by recasting figures in archetypal American roles, like a cowboy, a beauty queen, or a farmer. While Amy Sherald acknowledges the political dimension of her work, she wants her impact to reach beyond that. Amy Sherald invites viewers to challenge established preconceptions about race and engage with the universal stories told in her portraits, revealing the richness and complexity of humanity. Her signature gray palette for skin tones deemphasizes the focus on race, expanding her subjects’ narratives and demonstrating that there is more to an individual than can be contained in a single image or facet of their identity.

Amy Sherald 

Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance), 2014

Oil on canvas, 54 × 43 × 2 1/2 in. (137.16 × 109.22 × 6.35 cm) 

Private Collection 

© Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth 

Photograph by Joseph Hyde

Amy Sherald 

The Bathers, 2015 

Oil on canvas, 72 1/8 × 67 × 2 1/2 in. (183.2 × 170.2 cm) 

Private Collection 

© Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Photograph by Joseph Hyde

Amy Sherald 

A Midsummer Afternoon Dream, 2021 

Oil on canvas, 106 × 101 × 2 1/2 in. (269.24 × 256.54 × 6.35 cm)

Private Collection 

© Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Photograph by Joseph Hyde

Photography is an important element of Sherald’s creative process, serving as her sketchbook and the foundation for her compositions. With the exception of her two commissioned portraits of First Lady Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor, the artist selects each sitter based on their inherent qualities, such as poise, style, or wit—what she calls their “ineffable spark.” During photoshoots, Amy Sherald allows her models to pose organically, allowing for the synergy to build between them so that she can authentically capture their essence. She curates each scene and styles the subjects in clothing that speaks to the narrative she wishes to craft, creating a sense of magical realism. In titling her paintings, Amy Sherald often draws inspiration from Black women writers and poets like Toni Morrison and Lucille Clifton, reinterpreting their poetry to develop different contexts around the interior worlds of her subjects. Through her explorations, Amy Sherald redefines common beliefs about American identity, weaving a broader visual story of history and belonging. Ultimately, she portrays everyday Black people as individuals, not in contention or inherently politicized, but simply existing.

In addition to the paintings on view in the galleries, Amy Sherald presents work on the facade of the Horatio Street building across from the Museum. The newly commissioned work, Four Ways of Being, brings together four portraits by the artist—some never before seen in New York—and explores the intersection of past, present, and future with each capturing a distinct way of existing in the world. 

The Whitney presentation of this exhibition is organized by Rujeko Hockley, Arnhold Associate Curator, with David Lisbon, curatorial assistant. Amy Sherald: American Sublime is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and curated by Sarah Roberts, the former Andrew W. Mellon Curator and Head of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA

Amy Sherald: American Sublime is accompanied by a publication—the artist’s first comprehensive monograph—representing the broad sweep of Sherald’s painting practice and her key influences and inspirations. Contributors include exhibition curator Sarah Roberts, Elizabeth Alexander, Dario Calmese, Rhea Combs, and Deborah Willis. Amy Sherald: American Sublime is published by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in association with Yale University Press.

THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

99 Gansevoort Street, New York City

whitney.org

Verne Dawson Exhibition @ Karma, NYC - "Crystal Springs" Exhibition + Monograph Publication

Verne Dawson: Crystal Springs

Karma, New York

January 8 – February 28, 2025

Karma presents Crystal Springs, an exhibition of new paintings by VERNE DAWSON on view at 22 East 2nd Street, New York.

Verne Dawson’s recent paintings center around a spring near the artist’s home in the Blue Ridge Mountains in western North Carolina. As depicted by Dawson, whose approach, unmediated by contemporary technology, foregrounds the primacy of subject, artist, and paint, the spring becomes a place outside of time, at once enchanted and very real.

In Karma’s new monograph on Verne Dawson, critic Jennifer Krasinski hones in on the artist’s atemporal ambitions, writing that “he devoted himself to painting because it offers ‘the much-desired possibility to escape time,’ eluding the dupe finitudes (like now and then) and instead calling attention . . . to time’s suppleness.” His monumental canvas Saluda Crystal Springs (2025) invites the viewer to step into the utopic spaces of the spring and painting itself. While the location is specific, the temporality is an open question. Across nearly fourteen feet, swaths of oil swirl and curlicue, together forming a fantastical landscape populated by a number of nude figures in pairs—without clothes to ground us in a particular era, we are further dislocated from time. Vines snake up trees; the waters are vibrantly blue and yellow; the sun bounces off of the top of a distant mountain. As in the monumental landscape paintings from the Song and Yuan dynasties that are among Dawson’s wide-ranging inspirations, the artist hopes to emphasize humans’ diminutive scale in the face of expansive nature. 

The calligraphically forested Pot Shoals (2024) focuses on one couple as they wade through the springs’ clear water, its aquamarine hue mirrored in the sky above. In the dense trees that frame them, Dawson’s use of the complementary colors orange and green creates a firework-like pop of leaves and vines. Through the Forest (2024) represents a procession of figures walking down to the waters in a style that borders on abstraction; clouds and trees billow above and around them in elemental, gestural whorls redolent of Abstract Expressionism. Through his impassioned renderings of the Crystal Springs, Dawson channels a love of nature and a respect for our place in it.

In the rear gallery, the trompe-l’œil Steampunk (2015/2024) bridges Verne Dawson’s enveloping, out-of-time paintings of the springs with a selection of smaller works of urban and technological subjects—21st Street (2015), Friday Night (2024), and Bi-Plane (2013). A painting of a painting of a jet and a biplane flying over a verdant forest encircled by a stream, Steampunk comments at once on the asynchronicity of modern life and the constructed nature of Dawson’s medium. A painted Post-it note inscribed with the work’s title beside the canvas at the center of the composition pulls the viewer out of the fantasy of painting as a portal into another world, returning them to the reality of the present.

Verne Dawson

To hear a story to its end

Texts by by Jennifer Krasinski, 

Deborah Solomon, Verne Dawson

Karma, New York, 2025

384 pages, 10 1⁄4 × 11 in.

KARMA

22 East 2nd Street, New York City

karmakarma.org

Martha Diamond @ The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield - "Deep Time" Exhibition

Martha Diamond: Deep Time 

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum,  Ridgefield 

November 17, 2024 - May 18, 2025 

MARTA DIAMOND 

Untitled, 1973 

Acrylic on canvas, 84 x 72 inches 

Collection of Jasper Campshure 

Photo: Jason Mandella 

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presents Deep Time, a traveling survey of five decades of work by MARTA DIAMOND, marking the artist’s first solo museum presentation in thirty-six years. Martha Diamond: Deep Time is accompanied by the artist’s first major monograph. 

Martha Diamond’s ties to The Aldrich extend back to 1972 when Larry Aldrich, the Museum’s founder, visited the artist’s Bowery studio and purchased the sevenby-six-foot acrylic on canvas painting, Untitled, 1972, marking her first museum acquisition. This painting was included in Martha Diamond’s debut exhibition, Contemporary Reflections 1972-73, an annual series at the Museum that spotlighted emerging artists with no gallery representation. Aldrich bought another painting from Martha Diamond a year later, Untitled, 1973. It would be included in three more exhibitions throughout the 1970s and 1980s at The Aldrich. Now in the Museum’s 60th anniversary year, Untitled, 1973 makes its return as the earliest work in Deep Time. 

Martha Diamond, who passed away in December 2023, is among the most perceptive painters of the last five decades. Her work’s formal concision and painterly bravado reflect an inner dialogue with generations of abstract artists, and the results are exceptional: an inimitable handling of gesture and space that reimagines the landscape tradition while deftly sliding between abstraction and representation. Encompassing paintings, works on paper, and monotypes, this focused survey of Diamond’s career proposes “deep time” as a new way of understanding her contribution to American painting. 

Deep time is a concept used to explore thousands of years of human civilization and billions of years of planetary history. In conversation with ancient monuments and the modern skyscraper, the exhibition emphasizes Martha Diamond’s commitment to capturing the emotional character of built space, tracking throughlines across mediums and methods to reveal a process that combines spirited experimentation with perceptive observation. Martha Diamond’s relationship to the built landscape of New York was surely informed by her more than 50 years spent maintaining her studio in the Bowery, demonstrating her tremendous perseverance as an artist and her rootedness in a single place over time. 

The exhibition is accompanied by the artist’s first major monograph, an amply illustrated catalogue that includes an original essay by the exhibition’s co-curators, a chronology, and texts reprinted from some of Diamond’s most insightful critics: New York poets steeped in the visual arts. Martha Diamond: Deep Time documents the inspirations that converge in, and are transformed by, Diamond’s enigmatic and utterly original work. 

Martha Diamond: Deep Time is co-organized by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and the Colby College Museum of Art, and co-curated by The Aldrich’s Chief Curator, Amy Smith-Stewart and Colby’s Katz Consulting Curator, Levi Prombaum. 

MARTHA DIAMOND (1944-2023) received a BA from Carleton College in Minnesota in 1964 and, after a period of living abroad in Paris, an MA from New York University in 1969. She was an active participant in New York’s art and poetry scenes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Her work has been shown at major New York galleries and institutions from the mid-1970s on, including solo exhibitions at Robert Miller Gallery, Brooke Alexander Gallery, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, and the New York Studio School, and important group shows at Skarstedt, the Hill Art Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She also had concurrent solo exhibitions in 1988 at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, and the Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Her work is in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine; the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Her work was in the former collection of The Aldrich and was exhibited at the Museum in group exhibitions in 1973, 1974, 1985, and 1988. She is currently represented by David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles and New York. 

ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877

www.thealdrich.org