Nicole Eisenman’s exhibition What Happened currently on view at the MCA Chicago is reviewed in Whitehot Magazine.

“Nicole Eisenman’s What Happened transcends mere exhibition; it stands as a profound testament to the artist’s ability to provoke and inspire introspection. Through her nuanced manipulations of narrative and character, Eisenman compels viewers to delve beyond her canvases, and extrapolate meaning from the complex human experiences she documents or otherwise constructs — no matter how delusionally radical or unrealistic they may seem.”

By Clare Gemima – 11 July 2024

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Math Bass’ solo exhibition Full Body Parentheses at the lumber room in Portland, Oregon is reviewed in Variable West. The exhibition is on view through July 13th.

“From the corner, standing inside the distant hold of curved towers, nearly the whole gallery is in my purview. Looking out it feels as though the sculptures are looking back. While today’s treatment of presence limits people with no time for leisure or whose energies are perpetually spent, Bass’ hoards of feeling are a reminder that presence is in the air already acting on you. It’s like the weather or a persistent sound that has become silence. All it takes to feel it is a moment of liberation from being essential.”

By Kaya Noteboom – 10 July 2024

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Arlene Shechet is profiled in Art in America on the occasion of her major exhibition Girl Group on view at Storm King Art Center through November 10, 2024.

“Art in America’s Summer 2024 “Icons” issue features a profile of Arlene Shechet, a sculptor known for her modestly scaled mixed-media works. As Glenn Adamson writes in his story, Shechet’s breathtaking exhibition of monumental sculptures now on view at Storm King Art Center in Upstate New York (through November 10) is “only the latest, if possibly the greatest, evidence of Shechet’s insatiable curiosity.” The show, cheekily titled “Girl Group,” features heavy-metal sculptures made of aluminum and steel redefined by bold colors like emerald green, chartreuse, and orange.”

By Christopher Garcia Valle – 27 June 2024

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Jared McGriff featured in The Art Newspaper by José da Silva.

“There is a long history of depicting pugilism in many art forms, from George Bellows’s gestural brushstrokes to Martin Scorsese’s monochrome masterpiece, Raging Bull. Here, the Miami-based artist pairs the sport’s violence with a title seemingly borrowed from a physics book.  The work is a departure for the artist, who is more of a portraitist.”

By José da Silva – 13 June 2024

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Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s forthcoming publication published by Aperture “Dark Room A-Z” is featured in Dazed’s “8 Photo Books For Your Radar This Summer”.

Since 2016, Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s Dark Room series has unsettled the formal and conceptual foundations of portrait photography, and teased the unstable meaning of “dark room”, a word that refers to the site of photographic processes and to spaces of sexual intimacy. Situating “queerness and blackness as starting points for looking at photography from the ground up”, Sepuya takes the studio as his subject. Through his intricate choreographies of bodies, mirrors and photographic equipment, he stages sensory melodramas between artist and subject, reflection and gaze, constantly pushing new visual possibilities.

Dark Room A-Z offers a deep dive into the dense web of methodologies, strategies, and co-creators behind this prolific body of work. It contains both new and previously published critical texts, sources of inspiration, and Sepuya’s own reflections on his thematic preoccupations.

Published by Aperture and available in August.

By Madeleine Pollard – 12 June 2024

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Paul Mpagi Sepuya is featured in the article “Queer photographers’ most radical act? Turning the lens on themselves” by Eva Recinos in the Los Angeles Times.

“Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s Darkroom Mirror (_2070386), (2017) plays with our sense of closeness and distance, of seeing and not seeing. Sepuya “creates images that hold you,” novelist Justin Torres wrote in The Times’ Image magazine. They “give pause and invite reflection … very much like catching someone else, someone you care for, gazing into the mirror.”

Sepuya uses the mirror to explore the unknown, while nodding to the staged nature of the artist’s studio. His portraits are intentionally, and understandably, queer.

In “the queer subjectivity that I was thinking about,” Sepuya said, “there is not a need to have specific boundaries.” Definitions are “fluid.””

By Eva Recinos – 06 June 2024

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Mickalene Thomas: All About Love on view at The Broad through September 29th is reviewed in the Los Angeles Times by Christopher Knight.

“Then there’s her trademark use of craft-store rhinestones, which is multipurpose. Hair, body contours and facial features are often lined with the glittery paste, sometimes multicolored. The pictures’ flatly painted skin and two-dimensional patterning in textiles and wallpaper are set into shimmering visual motion. The paintings become performers, like entertainers on TV or the stage.”

By Christopher Knight – 01 June 2024

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Hayv Kahraman interviewed in BOMB magazine on the occasion of her solo exhibition Look Me in the Eyes at the ICA SF.

“Hayv Kahraman’s figures take on different roles in each body of work. They might be contorted in poses resembling acrobats or torture subjects, or they might be bound by black, intestinal shapes. In her largest solo museum exhibition to date, this “army of fierce women,” as she once described them, is entwined with a vegetal motif. Titled Look Me in the Eyes, at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, the exhibition includes new paintings, sculptures, and an audio work. In some scenes, the women lack irises; in others, bodiless eyes sprout from the ground like saplings.”

By Will Fenstermaker – 18 May 2024

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Hayv Kahraman interviewed in Art in America by Francesca Anton speaks about her solo exhibition Look Me in the Eyes at the ICA San Francisco.

Featuring all new work, the exhibition continues the powerful visual and conceptual elements that have been tenets of Kahraman’s practice, while also marking a momentous new phase of the artist’s career. Alongside new paintings and never-before-seen large-scale sculptures constructed in layers of marbled brick with painted eyes, Kahraman is introducing her first ever audio installation—a deeply personal work about her family’s refugee experience.

“The figures seem to be not only persistent—there is a kind of anger to them. I was always taught to be an obedient little girl who performed well. Even as an immigrant in school, I had to prove myself worthy and never show anger, never protest. These figures are the complete opposite. They’re channeling resistance.”

By Francesca Aton – 15 May 2024

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Aly Helyer’s solo exhibition Everything is Borrowed reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot in Artillery magazine!

“In the arresting painting On Your Side (2024), a person and their cat canoodle in twinned profiles that make it seem like they share an eye—and that’s not even the strangest thing about it. The main figure, shirtless and with glowing minty-pistachio skin, has glossy, deep indigo hair and a serene countenance anchored by a wide, deep blue, orange-ringed eye in a thousand-yard stare. A long, graceful lavender arm reaches across to touch their shoulder, but whose arm? The cat—bright orange, lanky, and intent—stares off into an indeterminate area of vintage-style wallpaper. While utilizing an art historically conventional format—central figure, important object or companion, schematic but familiar background—in its lyrical, extraterrestrial, hyperchromatic actuality, the work of English painter Aly Helyer is anything but.”

Everything is Borrowed is on view through May 18th.

By Shana Nys Dambrot – 09 May 2024

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Nicole Eisenman’s What Happened at the MCA Chicago reviewed in Galerie Magazine by Shelby Black.

“Going deeper into the exhibition, Eisenman’s small and large-scale canvases adorn the museum’s walls, where her trademark whimsical figures are introduced to audiences through environments ranging from bustling pubs to personal bedrooms. A number of the artist’s paintings depict social settings, where crowds typically gather around one central character washed in vivid color. Despite the rowdy atmosphere, feelings of isolation and loneliness practically seep from the canvases, as seen in artworks such as The Drawing Class (2011) and Beer Garden with AK (2009), but in nearly all of Eisenman’s work, there’s something to pull you back into fantasy.

“When you’re looking at a figure, you can feel a sense of distance, but there’s always something else to laugh at because she doesn’t take it too seriously,” says Collingwood. “So even when someone is staring off and with this really kind of despondent gaze, they’re holding a blackberry in their hand. So it kind of pulls you out of that seriousness of the moment.””

By Shelby Black – 29 April 2024

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Arlene Shechet’s solo exhibition Girl Group at Storm King Art Center featured in The New York Times by Nancy Hass.

“Shechet intended for Girl Group to nod to Storm King’s midcentury ethos of muscular hand-hammered minimalism set incongruously amid edenic surroundings, but the sculptures also play with the gender assumptions that often accompany works of such size and materials. “I wanted to fit in but I also wanted to stand out,” she says. They stand as well as a comment on the collection itself, which is, like public sculpture, dominated by men.”

The exhibition will open May 4th and run through November 10th.

By Nancy Hass – 27 April 2024

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Mickalene Thomas and her upcoming solo exhibition Mickalene Thomas: All About Love at The Broad featured in a New York Times article written by Robin Pogrebin. The exhibition opens in Los Angeles on May 25 and will be on view through September 29.

“Well before the current market craze over Black figuration, Thomas was exploring the Black female figure. “It’s difficult to understand from where we are now how radical her work was when I first showed it,” said the Los Angeles gallerist Susanne Vielmetter, who gave Thomas one of her first solo shows in 2007. “I cannot think of a single artist who at that time was making portraiture of female Black figures from a perspective of female desire.”

“The museum’s show features more than 80 works made over the last 20 years and bills itself as the artist’s “first major international tour.” But Thomas did not want to call it a retrospective or a survey.”

“It seems so finite, so definite — closed and fixed,” she said over a shrimp Caesar salad at the Edition hotel. “I like things open-ended. My career is still young.”

By Robin Pogrebin – 26 April 2024

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Hayv Kahraman’s exhibition The Foreign in Us at The Moody Center for the Arts is reviewed in the Brooklyn Rail.

“While The Foreign in Us asks audiences to recognize difference, Kharaman does not assign a narrative. There’s repetition and a clear message behind the exhibition’s crown of symbols—steely, contortionist femmes, grenades, bacteria-ridden torshi, antibodies—but Kahraman refrains from feeding her viewers neat ideology. Stunning yet impenetrable, Kahraman’s army of women engages as much with selfhood as with the other; an ode to, rather than a manual for, living with difference.”

By Rosa Boshier Gonzalez – April 2024

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Nicole Eisenman’s What Happened featured in The Washington Post!

“Eisenman, 59, is our most inventive and irreverent — and often times our most startlingly intimate — contemporary painter. Her style is really several styles, across several media — not just painting but also printmaking, collage and sculpture.”

Her paintings and brilliant sculptural ensembles are totally alive — sometimes almost maniacally so. But they’re also continually collapsing into a stunned stasis. When they emerge again, it’s into states of bafflement as the artist tentatively gropes after community, which she tenderly, gratefully celebrates.”

By Sebastian Smee – 19 April 2024

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Celia Paul is interviewed by Dian Parker for Artnet News!

“When she paints, she moves into a hypnotic state and becomes what she is painting. Whether it is her four sisters, a vase of flowers, or the sea, she is at one with it all. She gets inside the work until canvas and subject merge and even she disappears. Perhaps that is why there is no mistaking a Celia Paul painting: the layers of paint, the muted tones, the Payne’s grey of dreams, the portraits with internal faces.” Writes Dian Parker.

“The sea is a symbol of movement and stillness—the water constantly shifting, always in flux, yet contained, controlled. By thinking about water and waves, my inner weather can find a resonance. My flower paintings are almost always about renewal. My favorites are roses and peonies, the infolding, the lushness combined with discreteness, the heavenly scent. I want to convey their exquisite perfume with my paint-marks.” Says Celia Paul.

By Dian Parker – 06 March 2024

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Whitney Bedford and Andrea Bowers were named in the Association of Professional Art Advisors’ Top 10 Picks from Frieze Los Angeles Viewing Room 2024!

“In Veduta (Vuillard Jardins Publics), Whitney Bedford has taken a classic work of art and melded it into a contemporary work with sensitivity and care. The mood is gentle and serene, just as you experience with a Vuillard. I like the use of color—unexpected and even violent—but it meshes easily with the overall work.” Says Clarice Pecori Giraldi.

“This subtle, detailed, pencil and pastel drawing by artist and activist Andrea Bowers, The Dead Silence of Extinction (Moloka’i Creeper, last confirmed sighting 1963, HI, scientific specimen preserved at Auckland Museum’s Natural History Collection), draws from images of extinct bird specimens from the aforementioned museum’s collection to illustrate the precarious nature of our present world. Having just viewed similar poignant drawings in Bowers’ exhibition “Exist, Flourish, Evolve” at MoCa Cleveland, where the artist tackles environmental concerns head on (Bowers grew up on Lake Erie, OH), I could not help but be inspired and hope for a brighter world. The fragile nature of our ecosystem and the impact on wildlife are a continued throughline in Bowers’ work, beckoning us all to take urgent note and care for our planet.” Joanne Cohen writes.

By Frieze Staff – 26 February 2024

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Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s Nottingham Contemporary exhibition Exposure, featured in Frieze Magazine by Reuben Esien.

“A hand peeks from the upper-left corner of a photograph, holding a dusty black backdrop; at its centre sits a camera on a tripod. The arresting Daylight Studio Mirror (0X5A1511) (2021) is one of many works containing the apparatus of their making in ‘Exposure’, the first European institutional exhibition of Los Angeles-based artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya. The piece is an apt starting point for a show that continuously reveals what is usually unseen in the photographic process: the detritus and scenery of the artist’s studio, his image-making factory.

Sepuya’s practice seemingly inserts itself into a lineage of self-reflective portraiture – including Diego Velazquez’s painting Las Meninas (1656) and Jeff Wall’s photograph Picture for Women (1979) – in which the artists and their instruments appear within the scenes they’re creating. Sepuya’s works seem to subvert Susan Sontag’s description in On Photography (1977) of the dominance of the shooter over their subject and the camera as ‘a predatory weapon’. By turning the camera upon itself (and upon himself), to lay bare the workings of the studio, he appears as much at risk as his sitters from what Sontag described as the ‘camera/gun’.”

By Reuben Esien – 15 February 2024

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Andrea Bowers’s solo exhibition at MoCA Cleveland is featured in Inside Climate News by Katie Surma.

“Exist, Flourish and Evolve provokes visitors to confront philosophical arguments behind the rights of nature movement: principally, that nature is not a thing, or merely human property as conventional law treats it. Rather, Earth and its ecosystems are complex living communities to which humans belong. Modern science confirms this fact and legal systems ought to catch up to that reality, advocates argue.

The exhibition takes place across two locations. The first, a giant red, green and blue neon sculpture installed outside Cleveland’s lakefront Great Lakes Science Center and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame declares: “Lake Erie Has the Right to Exist, Flourish, & Naturally Evolve.”

The second, at MoCa, holds Bowers’ drawings, additional neon light installations, a documentary film and activists’ posters and campaign paraphernalia, including a sign boldly asking the question: “If Corporations Have Rights, Shouldn’t Mother Nature?”

By Katie Surma – 04 February 2024

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Yunhee Min and Tam Van Tran featured in The Brooklyn Rail.

“I like to think of visual abstraction as an invitation. An invitation for a chance experience and as a resistance to meaning or interpretation. I approach abstraction as a relational dynamic, hence always involved in some sense of movement and time. In studio, making abstraction is anything but abstract. This making involves physical and bodily entanglement with materials and processes that evolve over time.” – Yunhee Min

“While my current practice has figurative elements, I am never far from the belief that abstraction is inseparable from selflessness and the sensation of groundlessness.” – Tam Van Tran

The Brooklyn Rail – July 2022

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Celia Paul Life Painting is reviewed in The Observer by Dian Parker.

“The self-portraits in the show are interwoven with seascapes, water paintings, and flowers, all of which were done from memory. “The sea paintings are almost like passages of music, suggesting the passing of time,” Paul said. “The flowers stand for renewal. There are also two paintings of buildings in the exhibition, both 20 by 20 inches. My Father’s House is the house where my father died in 1983 when I was 23. At his death, my father was the Bishop of Bradford. After my father’s death, my mother and my four sisters had to leave the house (it went with the job). I have depicted the young apple trees in the garden in front of the house. They represent my mother, my sisters and me.”

By Dian Parker – 01 February 2024

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Hayv Kahraman’s exhibition Look Me in the Eyes at the ICA SF is featured in Vogue.

“The women are agents of rebellion, standing their ground amid swirling marbled seas. They seem hungry, even angry, desirous of what’s theirs for the taking. Call them women on the verge of getting what they want. In the evocative Love Me Love Me Not (all works are from 2023), three women hover around a flower-like object, plucking off eyeballs as if they were petals. The central figure slurps one into her mouth, a faint trickle of paint running down her chin. In Eyeris, a riveting, stormy scene, one figure appears ready to pop a loose eyeball into her own socket, like a contact.”

By Grace Edquist – 29 January 2024

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Pope.L and his exhibition Hospital at the South London Gallery featured in Ocula by Stephanie Bailey.

“As a Black man in America, Pope.L said he could never experience race as simply personal—a reality that differed from the experience of white people he knew. ‘They don’t see it as a larger political context that you have people who are empowered and people who are not,’ he told The Guardian in 2021.

All of which relates to how Pope.L dealt with race and class throughout his practice. ‘We are born into whiteness,’ he told performance artist Martha Wilson in 1996. ‘On the surface, it seems wholly to construct us, and the degree to which we may counter-construct sometimes seems very limited. But, I believe we can be very imaginative with limitations.'”

By Stephanie Bailey – 25 January 2024

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“William Pope.L was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1955 and spent much of his early career between that area and New York City, attending Montclair State and Rutgers University and participating in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. With a background in theatre, he was most widely known for his durational, public performance-art interventions, including several “crawls”, but his broader practice spanned photography, painting, drawing, installation, found-object assemblage and video.

I interviewed the artist William Pope.L in October before he passed away on December 23, and our conversation delved into his visionary practice, discussing conceptual and physical nuance as well as his current exhibition. Sitting in his studio at the University of Chicago, where he was a professor, I quickly realized that my questions would not be met with direct answers. He responded with open-ended, circuitous thoughts — similar to the ambiguous atmosphere that reverberates throughout his body of work, and in his new show at South London Gallery.

As we continued talking, it became evident that Pope.L was not interested in “showing” his work but in creating an atmosphere for the visitor to negotiate and orient themselves. “It’s really fascinating what people do, and of course it has to do with what you put in the room and where you put it . . . I try to set up a mystery or mysteries for them.””

By Geravis Marsh – 5 January 2024

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Todd Gray’s solo exhibition Rome Work is reviewed by Jody Zellen in Visual Art Source!

“The current exhibition featuring Los Angeles-based photographer Todd Gray is comprised of work made during a 2022-23 residency at the American Academy in Rome. Rome Work features images of iconic architecture, statues and churches in Rome combined with images from previous bodies of work, some shot in Ghana, others a selection of self-portraits, many of which depict the artist’s head covered with swaths of white shaving cream. Gray is a master of juxtaposition and has devised a way to creatively layer his images, encasing each element in its own (glassless), often oval frame so the finished works have dimensionality.

In his Rome series, Gray beautifully brings together photographs of the Eternal City that speak to darker times, wealth and poverty, construction and destruction. While Rome is a city full of ruins, Gray injects new life into his depictions. His images are an attempt to weave a path through different periods in history as a way to suggest that the evils of the past connect to the present. His evocative and thoughtful juxtapositions combine art, architecture with personal imagery to create new Black narratives that expose and explore legacies of colonialism in Africa and beyond.”

By Jody Zellen – 20 December 2023

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Kambui Olujimi’s exhibition All I Got To Give at Vielmetter Los Angeles is reviewed in Hyperallergic by Gregory Volk.

“These marathons have long been a potent theme for Kambui Olujimi, whose eclectic work spans sculpture, installation, performance, painting, and other mediums. The eight engrossing paintings (all watercolor, ink, and graphite on paper) and two ceramic sculptures (all works 2023) in his memorably titled exhibition All I Got to Give — his first with Susanne Vielmetter gallery — turn dancing couples, admission tickets, trophies, and, more implicitly, audiences into complex, extremely pertinent meditations on endurance, fragility, care, resistance, transcendence, and — importantly — race.”

By Gregory Volk – 18 December 2023

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Deborah Roberts’s work is featured in the NY Times article “Piecing Together a Black Identity, and a Whole Black World” by Margaret Renkl on the exhibition Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary Collage currently on view at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville through December 31st. The exhibition also features the work of Genevieve Gaignard, Wangechi Mutu and Mickalene Thomas.

“In her depictions of Black children, for example, the Austin-based artist Deborah Roberts has made use of not just magazine and internet images of Black children but also the eyes of James Baldwin and the fist of Muhammad Ali. In such works, Ms. Roberts is commenting on more than just the “otherness” she discusses in an artist’s statement on her website. She is commenting on more, even, than the failure of the white world to recognize Black beauty and the damage that this failure does to children.”

By Margaret Renkl – 11 December 2023

April Bey is featured in María Elena Ortiz’s highlights from Art Basel Miami Beach for The Art Newspaper.

April Bey is “really interested in the beauty” of the Black figure, “but also traditions of Black culture”, Ortiz says. “Here, she has featured Royal Crown, a product that some Black women use in their hair—and, of course, the title speaks of colonialization”.

By María Elena Ortiz – 08 December 2023

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We are thrilled to present Jared McGriff’s work in our booth at Art Basel Miami Beach. McGriff is featured in the NY Times spotlight on the Miami art scene by Brett Sokol.

“His Instagram handle, @watercolorbrother, perfectly captures the engrossing fugue state his paintings can inspire — ethereal scenes of Black life suck the viewer in, only to reveal deeper layers and troubling narratives. Yet his brushwork remained largely hidden from public view, until 2017 when he finally “pulled the plug” on his old life and moved to Miami.”

Visit us at Booth A16 to see McGriff’s newest work.

By Brett Sokol – 06 Decemeber 2023

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Pope.L interviewed about his recent South London Gallery exhibition, Hospital, featured in The Art Newspaper!

“Pope.L may not call himself one of the most influential performance artists working in the US today, but he has been known to pass out business cards declaring he is “the friendliest Black artist in America”. Known for his provocative and often absurdist works that deal with race, economic systems and language, the Chicago-based artist and educator works across multiple disciplines, from installations and film to painting and writing.”

When asked: “What can absurdity offer as a tool of resistance and liberation? Are not recent political figures (both in the US and the UK) also often branded as absurd, and how might absurdity now be a facet of fascism rather than liberation?”

Pope.L answers saying “The final word of James Joyces’s Ulysses is “yes”. The last words of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is “They do not move”.”

By Margaret Carrigan – 23 November 2023

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Kambui Olujimi interviewed in Black Art and Design by Christopher Okereke-Cox.

The New York based artist talks about his latest exhibition All I Got to Give, at Vielmetter Los Angeles, which takes us on a journey through the enduring spirit of historic dance marathons.

“This exhibition marks Olujimi’s first solo venture in Los Angeles and is the culmination of a decade-long exploration in which the artist immersed himself in the history and cultural impact of the 1920s and ’30s dance marathons. These marathons, emerging during the Great Depression, transcended entertainment to become intense endurance contests where participants, driven by desperation and the lure of prize money in economically hard times, danced for hours, days, or even months on end.

In All I Got to Give, Kambui transcends the boundaries of time and space, creating a mythic realm where the past and present converge. Through his art, he invites viewers to contemplate the complexities of human interactions, the strength found in community, and the enduring power of the human spirit in the face of adversity. This exhibition is not just a display of Olujimi’s artistic prowess but a testament to his profound ability to connect historical events with contemporary themes, making him a significant voice in today’s art world.”

By Christopher Okereke-Cox – 28 November 2023

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Paul Mpagi Sepuya interviewed in Document Journal by Ryan McNamara.

“In the studio photographs that Sepuya has been producing over the past few years, which nod to the format’s rich history, the artist appears alongside friends and lovers whose relationships to him and to the camera never seemed fixed. They’re performing together on a stage of his own making, but one whose improvisatory conditions he doesn’t fully control. That stage has grown more inviting with the addition of black velvet drapes, oversized pillows, an armchair, and other props which may recall the studio of Carl van Vechten, who photographed the artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance nearly a century ago. The mirror is still a frequent presence, as if to suggest that what we’re seeing isn’t intended for an outsider’s gaze.”

Text by Evan Moffitt. Interview by Ryan McNamara – 01 November 2023

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Deborah Roberts’ SITE Santa Fe exhibition Come walk in my shoes reviewed in Hyperallergic by Eric Joyce.

“Roberts centers the beauty and vulnerability of Black children, which is often seized from them at a young age via systemic violence in the United States.

Roberts’s sculpture “trumpet of consciousness” (2019) is an assemblage composed of a wooden box, a metal car jack, and a stack of books. The work, whose title refers to a speech given by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, engages with the history of violence against Black boys by invoking the story of George Stinney, a 14-year-old boy who was wrongfully accused and convicted of murdering two White girls in South Carolina in 1944. Stinney was subsequently sentenced to death by electrocution after a three-day trial. Due to his small frame, the boy’s body did not fit the scale of the electric chair, forcing him to sit on a stack of books. The sculpture itself is situated in the far corner of the gallery, slightly isolated from the figural depictions of the children. The books, four copies of Black Boy by Richard Wright, are squished and seemingly exploding from their spines from the pressure of the car jack. While the two-dimensional works in the show are more nuanced and subtle in their message, “trumpet of consciousness” explicitly confronts the assumed criminality of Black children through structural racism.”

By Eric Joyce – 23 October 2023

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Deborah Roberts’ Come walk in my shoes at SITE Santa Fe reviewed in Culture Type.

“The figurative works by Deborah Roberts focus on Black youth. Roberts assembles the collage works with found images – an eclectic mix of facial features, limbs, and colorful and patterned clothing – finishing the compositions with painted details. The complex, dynamic portraits speak to the individuality of her subjects and ask viewers to consider the societal assumptions thrust upon them. 

Originally, the Austin, Texas-based artist focused exclusively on girls. In recent years, she began portraying boys, too, further exploring preconceived notions around race, gender, beauty, masculinity, and vulnerability when it comes to Black children, and the tenuous innocence all too many of them experience.”

By Victoria L. Valentine – 16 October 2023

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Nicole Eisenman’s What Happened exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery featured in The Art Newspaper.

“Eisenman used humour in a very raucous way at the beginning to make new kinds of representations of lesbian life,” Godfrey says. “They weren’t that common in contemporary art.” Later works, like Morning Studio (2016), show domestic scenes. “You can see her engagement with lesbian life in New York with queer couples throughout the exhibition, in different, simple ways—like how she might present a pair of people relaxing, how she presents romance,” Godfrey says.”

By Catherine Hickley – 10 October 2023

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Featuring Megan Fox Kelly, Founder of Megan Fox Kelly Art Advisory; Susanne Vielmetter, Owner and Director of Vielmetter Los Angeles; and Alain Servais, Collector and Founder of Servais Family Collection—moderated by Eileen Kinsella, Senior Market Editor of Artnet News.

Tectonic shifts are being felt across the art market. From the expansion of digital mediums and the movement towards ultra-contemporary art, to new generations of buyers and the ascent of mega-galleries, the arts landscape is undoubtedly undergoing rapid and monumental change. This panel will discuss the future of the art market in broad strokes, considering key forces behind these major movements.

Click link below to listen on Spotify

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Nicole Eisenman’s current exhibitions featured in The Guardian.

“We’re at Nottingham Contemporary, where Eisenman is co-curating a group show. Just opened, it’s called Ridykeulous: Ridykes’ Cavern of Fine Inverted Wines and Deviant Videos – and it’s as much of a blast as its name suggests. But I’ve come to interview the artist about something even more monumental: her career retrospective at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, which is opening this week.

What Happened covers a momentous 30 years, going from jokey lesbian subversions of cartoons (in one, Wilma and Betty from The Flintstones get it on) to self-portraits, political paintings and public statues. So impressive is her output that, eight years ago, the French-born American was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant” for restoring “cultural significance to the representation of the human form”.”

By Claire Armistead – 09 October 2023

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“I’ve seen many artists whose artistic ventures employ beauty to entice the viewer. Genevieve Gaignard’s work is probably my favorite. A delightful multimedia artist who creates photographs, installations, collages, and other mediums, her artwork tells the story of America’s history of color blindness, and its eager violence upon Black people, women, and everything in between. Pretty pinks and bushy hairdos, florals, and red-lined lips cleverly conspire together, deconstructing the intricacies of race and cultural identity.”

Interview by Shaquille Heath / Portrait by Charlsie Gorski, Juxtapoz FALL 2023 Quarterly

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Nicole Eisenman featured on the cover of October’s Frieze magazine along with a feature article “Nicole Eisenman’s Literary Inclinations,” written by Isabel Waidner.

“Paintings like Beer Garden with A.K. (2009) are populated by New York-based queer and trans contemporaries and friends, in this instance gathered around the artist A.K. Burns. It makes sense that Eisenman’s engagement with literature should not be limited to canonical works but should include, if not centre, contemporary literary communities and live literary production. ‘Eisenman loves literature and writers,’ Myles noted in frieze in relation to the painting Weeks on the Train (2015), in which the writer Laurie Weeks, laptop on lap, is reading and taking up space while travelling.”

By Isabel Waidner – 04 October 2023

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Wangechi Mutu’s solo exhibition Intertwined at the New Museum is reviewed in Artforum by Darla Migan.

“Mutu has embraced the spiritual necessity of splitting her studio practice, like a serpent’s tongue, between New York and Nairobi, Kenya, learning from nature, myriad cultures, and her Pan-Africanist roots. The artist, who also studied anthropology, recognizes and claims the similarities happening between various folk-tale traditions—from Kikuyu lore to the Brothers Grimm and the stories of Br’er Rabbit that move between African-descended peoples of the Caribbean and the American South—and is deeply sensitive to the ways that beliefs about ourselves, our neighbors, and our species underlie all the actions that go into the creation of our world.”

By Darla Migan – October 2023

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Karl Haendel’s “Hand Holding Scribble,” is Artillery Magazine’s “Picture of the Week”!

“And then I was suddenly confronted by “Hand Holding Scribble” in Karl Haendel’s Daily Act of Sustained Empathy, his show of large scale drawings in pencil and ink on paper that opened Saturday afternoon at Vielmetter Los Angeles, and it was as if a mystery of the universe was unfolding before me.

A Karl Haendel Scribble has its own wave or fluid dynamic, geometry, maybe even logic; and this one was of a complexity that took it onto a different plane (okay I’m not talking about the paper), a different sphere or domain, even a different universe.  The universe.”

By Ezrha Jean Black – 30 September 2023

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The monumental immersive painting, titled This is the thing they call life, wraps around sections of the building’s exterior from ground level to its 70-foot-tall central silos and through its interior spaces. A natural extension of Cain’s established practice, which questions the seriousness of art, This is the thing they call life includes both her bold geometrics and fluidly painted marks throughout.

“It was a really great, fluid process,” Cain said, after seeing a shift in the logistics of her practice during the work. “To let go of control and have help was pretty mind-blowing,” she said, adding, “I learned a lot and it was really a dream project.”

The efforts of a team of artists from the community, who will continue to maintain the work, helped bring this yearlong project together.

The public is welcome to visit Cain’s work on the OBM campus at 250 North Hartford Avenue.

By Francesca Aton – 28 September 2023

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Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade’s “interstellar chamber opera” Star Choir will be presented by acclaimed experimental opera company The Industry inside Mt. Wilson’s largest observatory on Sept. 30 and Oct. 1. The opera features six singers and six instrumentalists (horn, harp, synthesizer, cello, contrabass, and percussion). Gaines, the Industry’s co-artistic director, composed the music for Star Choir and Segade wrote the libretto.

“Audiences will embark on a cosmic mission, as a starship crew seeks refuge on the hostile Planet 85K: Aurora. Once there, the colonists encounter intelligent life imperceptible to their all-too-human awareness. As the planet defends itself from their invasive presence, the humans evolve to become a part of the Holobiont, a queerly multi-species organism that covers this world. STAR CHOIR offers a meditation on the challenges and pleasures of mutual coexistence, reimagining humanity as a porous category that must transform to survive.

STAR CHOIR features an ensemble of eight singers, with performances by company members Kelci Hahn, Sarah Beaty, and Jon Lee Keenan. The Industry’s Music Director, Marc Lowenstein, leads an orchestra of six musicians, featuring board and company member Lucy Yates. Choreographer Milka Djordjevich joins the creative team as movement director and the sci-fi video elements are designed by Daniel Leyva.

Through fantasy and critique, STAR CHOIR asks urgent questions facing humanity amid our era’s confluence of natural and political crises, evoking scenes of disaster migration, fugitivity, and colonization as they are entwined with our difficult histories and our best visions of a potential future.”

Gaines and Segade are members of My Barbarian, along with Jade Gordon.

By Catherine Womack – 01 September 2023

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Genevieve Gaignard is featured on the cover of the third issue of Space on Space magazine along with a feature article “Genevieve Gaignard’s Ecosystem of Collecting” by Emily Logan.

On the cover is a new collage by Gaignard “My Funny Valentine | The Magician,” which will be featured in the upcoming group exhibition “Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage” at the Frist Museum opening next month.

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Nicole Eisenman’s solo exhibition “What Happened” at the Museum Brandhorst, Munich is reviewed in ArtReview by Christian Egger! The exhibition is on view in Munich through September 10, 2023 and subsequently travels to the Whitechapel Gallery, London opening October 11, 2023 through January 14, 2024.

Eisenman’s work is currently on view at the gallery in our group exhibition “Perpetual Portrait”  through August 18, 2023.

“What Happened at Museum Brandhorst, Munich, begins with Heading Down River on the USS J-Bone of an Ass (2017). This painting, of a mandible like vessel sailing dangerously close to sending its all-male crew over a waterfall, is an appropriately scabrous starting-point for this show, with its roughly 100 works drawn from three decades of the American artist’s predominantly painterly practice and embedded social commentary. (That said, Eisenman’s latter-day recognition as a significant sculptor is attested to by the presence of Procession, 2019, a multifigure sculpture staging an ambiguous parade or protest, originally shown at that year’s controversy-shadowed Whitney Biennial and, in the present context, a kind of mysterious backdrop.) The paintings, shown across multiple rooms, are loosely organized into categories: ‘Heads’, ‘Being an Artist’, ‘Coping’, ‘Against the Grain’, ‘Protest & Procession’, ‘In Search of Fun and Danger’ and ‘Screens, Sex & Solitude’. This last focuses on Eisenman’s ongoing, decade-long pictorial engagement with present-day communication gadgets: projectors, laptops, drones, iPhones, etc. That viewers are going to photograph the work, and publish it on social media, seems factored into the artist’s reflexive thinking.”

By Christian Egger – 31 July 2023

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Karla Klarin’s exhibition “Big Pink” is reviewed in Artillery by Jody Zellen!

“The works that comprise “Big Pink” explore Klarin’s memories of a pink-hued house that belonged to her neighbor Natalie. In the series’ earliest paintings, Klarin combines architectural precision with broad, washy brushstrokes to depict a typical Los Angeles tract home; a one-story house with an attached garage and low-pitched roof. Klarin’s illustrations appear as arrays of rectangular, textured shapes filled with swirling lines. The house’s particular pink color works as a point of departure for Klarin’s subsequent paintings.

In her later paintings, Klarin delights in abstraction—allowing the planes of architecture to morph into a more expansive landscape of interlocking triangles and trapezoids in shades of gray against a light pink sky. While she creates both small and large paintings, it is the larger works (more than 90 inches across) like Big Pink LA 1 (2017), Big Pink LA 2 (2016), and Big Pink LA 4 (2021) that evoke the sprawl that characterizes the terrain of Los Angeles.”

By Jody Zellen – 21 June 2023

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"Breasts become weapons in less literal ways in other works. The woman in “Boob Gold,” an oil painting on wood from 2018, stares defiantly back at us as she tugs open her dress to expose a coin slot, the kind you might find on a donation box, at the center of her chest. The work addresses what Kahraman sees as the exploitative dimensions of humanitarian aid. “Your body becomes a spectacle,” she says. “But on the other side, she’s exuding this power.” Sexual objectification may be an unavoidable condition of being a woman, especially one seen as exotic by the West, but Kahraman suggests it comes with its own forms of strength."

By Zoe Lescaze – 16 May 2023

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“Drawing on Grimm fairy tales, Haitian Vodou and Catholic ritual practices, and the objectification of women’s bodies in media, each piece and collection of works tells a story. The large scale of many of her mature collages lends itself to a closer reading of all its many aspects.”

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“The characters in the Mutu cinematic universe are a sexually assertive, menacing and athletic bunch. They leap, twist and spring, often backwards and in heels, like Ginger Rogers. The retrospective is titled Intertwined and, sure enough, her figures are constantly putting down roots or bursting free of them, moulting and germinating in a frenzy of tangled growth.”

By Ariella Budick – 15 March 2023

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“Paul Mpagi Sepuya crafts pictures that feel as intimate and warm as they do formal and intellectual. His photos do what art does best: Offer an immediate jolt of both recognition and disorientation, and point toward a singular perspective — a voice, a vision. I’m tempted to say they are arresting images, or captivating, but then the involuntary connotations of those adjectives don’t seem to fit; better to say that Sepuya creates images that hold you. Images that give pause and invite reflection — not so much like looking in a mirror but very much like catching someone else, someone you care for, gazing into the mirror.”

By Justin Torres – 15 March 2023

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“Like Braithwaite, Sepuya, Gaignard, and McMillian work against photography’s extractive legacy, in which white men used their cameras to further harmful stereotypes, expand their colonial prospects, and otherwise reinforce systems of power. Instead­­, they sustain photography’s parallel legacy as a mechanism of collective agency and liberation.”

By Erin O’Leary – March 2023

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“Hybrid creatures populate both the artist’s extravagant collages and startling sculptures, variously merging human and animal (or plant), alien and earthling, and female and male into assertive female-leaning beings. An interest in fusing opposites is suggested in the show’s title, “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined,” taken from a 2003 watercolor collage of two dance club habitués — young, scantily clad women with the heads of wild African dogs on the second floor.”

By Roberta Smith – March 2023

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"This humorously paired presentation includes glazed ceramic sculptures by Arlene Shechet and graphite figurative drawings by Nicola Tyson. Shechet’s gravity-defying sculptures seem to contort, tilt, bend and melt. They appear to be set in motion even while static. Her work embraces the duality of clay which is malleable yet holds still, and fragile yet strong, conveying the humor and pathos of bodily existence. Tyson describes her work as “psycho-figuration” because her misshapen figures have unexpected proportions. These amusingly freakish, androgynous figures are beyond gender identification, yet they have an obstinate individuality even without detailed faces."

By Lita Barrie – February 2023

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““It’s Time” is an exhibition of works by Kwesi Botchway, Genevieve Gaignard, Rodney McMillan, Wangechi Mutu, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya in conversation with works by legendary New York-based photographer Kwame Brathwaite. Anchored by Brathwaite’s influential images, the exhibition creates a cross-generational dialogue that posits an exploration of the photographer’s influence and the continuing investigation of portraiture and representation of the Black body by artists today.”

By Mousse Magazine Staff – 18 February 2023

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