Art Basel Miami Beach

For the 2024 edition of Art Basel: Miami Beach, Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to present a selection of works by Melissa Cody, Paul Feeley, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Gladys Nilsson, Howardena Pindell, Fritz Scholder, Jaune Quick-to- See Smith, and Emmi Whitehorse. The presentation features standout historical and contemporary works from the multi-generational group of artists.

In Dopamine Regression (2010), fourth-generation Navajo/Diné weaver Melissa Cody balances tradition, history, and contemporaneity by recombining traditional patterns into sophisticated geometric overlays and haptic color schemes. This presentation follows both her debut solo-exhibition at Garth Greenan Gallery, as well as her major solo-exhibition at MoMA PS1, Melissa Cody: Webbed Skies, co-organized with the Museu de Arte de São Paulo.

Paul Feeley’s Untitled (January 17) (1962) quivers with energy as the hand-painted blue and orange fields trace each other, creating mesmerizing figure-ground ambivalence, and sensuously deviating from hard-edge perfection. In Feeley’ later paintings, the forms gradually solidified into jacks and other familiar forms. Despite their solidity, the shapes bleed and quiver at their edges: the tension between mechanical precision and human imperfection was always central to his work.

The presentation also features a number of vibrant sculptures by Cannupa Hanska Luger. Two towering speaker stack sculptures—National Guard and Youth Summit (both 2023)—recently featured in his solo exhibition Speechless at the Nevada Museum of Art, which will travel to the Nasher Museum in February 2025. The stunning, sci-fi regalia of Midéegaadi: Lighting Bison (2022) is a standout example from the artist’s ongoing Future Ancestral Technologies series. Another work from this series appeared in this year’s Whitney Biennial.

Ape Place (1971) numbers among just a few large-scale paintings by Gladys Nilsson. These historical works demonstrate her penchant for dense, winding imagery, as well as her ribald humor, pathos, and use of hierarchical scale. Nilsson first rose to prominence through a series of now iconic group exhibitions by the self-titled “Hairy Who.” Though examples of Nilsson’s large works are scarce, she recently completed an expansive mural for Colby Museum of Art’s Alive & Kicking, which closed on November 11, 2024.

Howardena Pindell’s monumental diptych, Deep Undersea (2024), debuts in this presentation. The expansive yellow and purple gradient is punctuated by colorful dots suggestive of bioluminescence and microbiota. The artist first began spraying paint through hole-punched cardstock in the early 1970s and recently introduced vibrant colors and complex geometries to her spray-dot paintings. In her Tesseract series, these organic compressions and rarefactions coalesce into platonic forms. Concurrent solo exhibitions of Pindell’s work will take place at Garth Greenan Gallery (October 24–December 14, 2024) and White Cube Hong Kong (November 20, 2024–January 8, 2025). The artist’s work will be shown alongside ancient and historical holdings in a large-scale exhibition set to open at the Asia Society Museum, New York in February, 2025.

Fritz Scholder’s frustration with cliched, romanticized depictions of Native Americans led him to his iconic series of visceral and, at times, brutal portraits that forever changed the genre. While the unflinching works express an intense political valence, many simultaneously capture an unsentimental dignity: in Indian on Red Horse (1969), Scholder deftly renders an Indian cowboy holding an American flag. Set against a stark white ground, the painterly gesture and pop-art sensibility combine with the extreme valence of the Native American subject. Scholder’s direct, political subjects always threatened to overshadow the artist’s focus on materiality, paint, and technique; a similar double bind continues to confront artists of marginalized identities to this day.

In I See Red: Indian Heart (1993), Jaune Quick-to-See Smith juxtaposes cartoons with found images and newspaper clippings so that texts and images form temporary and spontaneous associations. “Find the environmentalist” sits above a historical image of Native Americans in tribal dress. “Dead People” forms a wry sentence with the nearby “Will Make History.” Smith’s composition is dissonant, ambiguous, and polyvocal, yet rich in insights that take shape from the fragments of text and image. Characteristically, Smith’s humor bursts through the work’s heaviness. Her use of red gestures to its many symbolic roles: in racial persecution and affirmative Native identity; in blood itself, symbolic of both a vital life force and inevitable mortality. Works from the pivotal I See Red series appeared in Smith’s 2023 retrospective at the Whitney Museum.

Emmi Whitehorse’s historical works pair with contemporary examples like Mirage (2023), illustrating how her concrete forms have gradually dematerialized into increasingly ephemeral substrates. Whitehorse’s intimate, intuitive compositions consciously reference the Navajo philosophy of Hózhó, which seeks harmony in life, mind, body, and nature. Light and meditative, her works are animated by abstract gestural marks that organize vaporous fields of color, a feature maximized in her most recent pieces. Her work recently featured in the 2024 Venice Biennale.

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent Melissa Cody, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Gladys Nilsson, Howardena Pindell, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Emmi Whitehorse, as well as the estates of Paul Feeley and Fritz Scholder.

The exhibition will be on view at Art Basel Miami Beach, Booth E4, from December 4–8, 2024.