From lesser-known artists to big names, our staff and contributors compiled our favorite shows around the globe in a year of exceptional art.

The many virtues of furniture with a past, by Roy McMakin.

This year, exhibitions around the globe highlighted Blackness, celebrating the Black artistic vanguard and featuring established artists next to those early in their careers.

Based on looking at hundreds of shows in U.S. museums for December 2024.

"Anonymous Was A Woman" announces the recipients of its 2024 awards, recognizing 15 woman artists over 40 years of age who have made significant contributions while continuing to create new work

Simultaneously celestial and grounded, the artist's works invite viewers to consider a level of interconnection perhaps best articulated in the complex language of quantum physics.

In his sculptural practice, Cannupa Hanska Luger creates speculative narratives with retrieved traces of Indigeneity burdened by history.

“It’s About Love” offers a rare glimpse into the mind of an artist who has spent eight decades nurturing a world of his own where art is both a meditation and a gift. Williams' creations remind us that art, like love, can be an act of pure intuition

Future Imaginaries gathers work by a range of Native artists who are wielding fashion, technology, and sci-fi to carry ancestral knowledge forward.

The group exhibition features vibrant surrealist works by Gladys Nilsson, Catalina Schliebener Muñoz, and Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt that toy with the familiar and the obscure.

Her new paintings on view at Garth Greenan Gallery are a celebration of the lively life forces and the perpetual flux of energies that animate our planet.

Gladys Nilsson debuts monumental wall-painting, Rounding Rosie’s Ring: Dance, You Fools, Dance (2024), at Colby Museum of Art.

Melissa Cody, Jeffrey Gibson, and Kent Monkman are among the multidisciplinary makers exploring what Indigenous identity looks like in the 21st century

Abstract Weaving Is Having a Moment—Here’s Why

Currently showing at the Seattle Art Museum, Memory Map is the biggest and most comprehensive retrospective of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith's work to date.

Whitney Biennial names its ‘Dissonant Chorus’ of artists to probe turbulent times

She used installations, assemblage and three-dimensional murals in her commentary on Hollywood, fame and more. “I’ve made stuff out of everything,” she said.

Through handmade traditional textiles, Cody proposes ways of looking at geometry, function, or abstraction from the point of view of Indigenous practice

Jaune Quick-To-See Smith Continues Breaking The ‘Buckskin Ceiling’

An overdue retrospective for an artist in touch with America’s dark ‘underbelly’

‘We Get the History We Are Ready For’: Meet the Native Women Artists Claiming Their Place in New York

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith Brings Indigenous History to the Whitney Museum in a Landmark Retrospective

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith remakes America

A Painter and a Textile Artist Whose Legacies Meet in One Place

Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith, Shaped by the Land

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith Can’t Believe She’s Still the First

What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in March

Why Is a Day Job Seen as the Mark of an Artist’s Failure?

Howardena Pindell: “The Racism in the Art World Drove Me Out”

UNM's Tamarind Institute releases Emmi Whitehorse monotypes

Teepee Art as Political Protest

Doing It Their Way: Native artists are finally gaining visibility in museums and galleries—upending long-held stereotypes in the process

History Is Not an Open Book

Jan Avgikos on Gladys Nilsson

[The Burns Halperin Report] ‘It Takes Two Villages’: How the MCA Chicago Transformed Its Collection at Unprecedented Speed to Better Reflect Its Audience

Best Art of 2022

Stretched Across Time and Frame: A Review of Gladys Nilsson at Garth Greenan Gallery in New York City

Plein Air Is a Sobering Reminder of Human Impact on the Environment

Derek Boshier carved a career in pop art after dodging the butcher’s block

Tribal Ambiguity Drives Brad Kahlhamer’s Prolific Artmaking

Howardena Pindell: A New Language review – beautiful, unforgettable warnings

Howardena Pindell on art as protest, politics, and the power of DNA ancestry

Howardena Pindell review – from sheer painterly bliss to depictions of appalling racial terror

Howardena Pindell: ‘In terms of museums, I’m optimistic; in terms of the world, I’m pessimistic’

Howardena Pindell Q&A: “A white parent tried to get me expelled from university”

Cannupa Hanska Luger is Turning the Tables on the Art World

‘The Beatles? I was more a fan of the Beach Boys’: Peter Blake at 90 on pop art and clubbing with the Fab Four

The press release for Victoria Gitman’s master class of a retrospective Everything Is Surface: Twenty Years of Painting shares that the show owed its title to a line from John Ashbery’s 1974 poem, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

Esteban Cabeza de Baca with Colin Edgington

Brad Kahlhamer: Swap Meet

A Purse with a Fine-Tooth Comb: Victoria Gitman at François Ghebaly

Brad Kahlhamer's Search for His Indigenous Roots from Manhattan to Mesa, Arizona

Painter Victoria Gitman’s Meticulously Depicted Handbags Lure Viewers in With Seductive Surfaces, and Then Turn a Cold Shoulder

Brad Kahlhamer and the Amalgamations of Existence

Howardena Pindell’s Decades-Long Fight to Integrate the Art World

Yatika Starr Fields and the Imagined Barrier Between Art and Life

The Much-Vaunted American Melting Pot, Cracks and All

How The Forge Project Uses Art in Support of Indigenous Land Rights

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith Maps New Meanings

Howardena Pindell: ‘I could have died – that’s when I decided to express my opinion in my work’

A Circle Has No End: Howardena Pindell Interview

11 Influential Native American Artists

The Best Booths at ADAA’s 2021 Art Show, From Vodou Flags to Tour-de-Force Abstraction

The São Paulo Biennial Captures a Perpetually Discontinuous World 

New Myth is a good title for Luger’s exciting début at Garth Greenan Gallery

Three exhibitions to see in New York this weekend

Many Artists Began Painting Outside During the Pandemic—And They Might Never Go Back 

Layers of heritage and history in paint

In Denver, the Pandemic Deepens Artistic Collaboration

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to present a Zoom webinar and Q&A featuring gallery artist Derek Boshier and filmmaker James Scott to discuss Scott's film Fragments (2019), profiling Boshier and his artistic production.

An Artist’s Lifetime of Asking the Hard Questions

At age 83, Boshier is at once a living legend and an unsung hero of postwar British art.

Women Pop Artists Are Finally Getting Their Due

How contemporary Native artists are evading recognition and visibility for a more 'speculative indigenous futurism'

In his first solo exhibition with Garth Greenan, Esteban Cabeza de Baca shows paintings and ceramic sculptures that flicker with the colors of Southwest border towns: turquoise and marine blue, dusty terracotta, and the bloody hues of open sky sunsets.

Four Exhibitions To See In New York This March Outside The City’s Museums

These works, of boxers and wrestlers, have both the raw immediacy of a courtroom sketch artist and the slight delay of a television broadcast.

Once Overlooked, Black Abstract Painters Are Finally Given Their Due

In Conversation with Adeze Wilford and Howardena Pindell

James Luna (Luiseño) was a Native American artist whose work from the 1980s until his untimely death in 2018 shines a light on the complexities of Indigenous identity while exposing the racialized underpinnings of museum and gallery practices.

The Shed really ought to hang content-warning signs at the entrance to Howardena Pindell: Rope/Fire/Water. Not to shield the innocent from sexual or violent material but, human behaviour being what it is, to tempt more people into seeing it

It’s 2020, so forget the swimming pools, beach parties and glitzy art that usually come hand in hand with Art Basel’s end-of-year jamboree in Miami. What would have been the 19th edition of the fair is instead another Online Viewing Room (OVR: Miami Beach) — and offers art that reflects the tumultuous time.

‘I Put the Black Body in the Work.’ Artist Howardena Pindell on Her New Exhibit Shedding Light on Injustice in America

Fulfilling a legendary curator’s vision, New Museum will present an exhibition on grief in black communities

Interview with Gladys Nilsson

Art Historians Are Obsessed With Recovering Lost Names. But Are They Asking the Wrong Questions?

The People Who Profited Off the Trail of Tears

The deportation of Native Americans westward in the 1830s was fueled by busy bankers and unchecked avarice.

Let Us Now Praise Humble Artists

In this time of self-isolation and social distancing, shouldn’t the art world consider celebrating artists who don’t require expensive materials or run up high production costs?

Sweet Land, Home to Ghostly Projections of Another Time

Harrogate gallery to bring Hockney & more into people's homes with online exhibition

Cartoon Formalism at the Albuquerque Museum

The Industry 2020 Review: Sweet Land

A Mystifying Work That Asserts a Sense of Place While Challenging Notion of Opera

‘Sweet Land’s’ radical design uses Los Angeles to rethink the architecture of opera

9 Must-See Spring Exhibits in Metro Phoenix — and Beyond

PAFA presents 40 years of American printmaking in 'Making Community'

Review: An Opera Erases and Rewrites the American Myth

“Sweet Land” is a parable of, and fantasia on, Manifest Destiny, performed outdoors at a richly suggestive site.

Bringing Human Migration Closer to Home

As a global refugee crisis sped up and spread out, curators at a New Mexico museum spent two years reshaping a show about people on the move.

Feminists Arm Themselves With Art

As the U.S. election approaches, feminism takes center stage at scores of art institutions across the country.

Shows at PAFA — intimate and communal — spotlight two generations of black artists

Color Field, Then and Now

I fear that the visual culture in which these works were admired is now one of those distant “you had to be there” moments, which are impossible to reconstruct.

The Ultimate Selfies? National Portrait Gallery Eye to I Traveling Exhibition Premieres March 24

The Imagists take MMoCA

Gift from philanthropists boosts museum’s collection

Object & Thing Brings Wacky and Wonderful Works to the Independent Art Fair

Founder Abby Bangser and artistic director Rafael de Cárdenas curate another masterful show

A Celebration of Female Native American Artists

‘It’s Obviously a Really Exciting Thing’: How Native American Art Has Become a Sleeper Sensation in Museums and the Art Market Alike

The Independent art fair is taking its cue this year from "maverick" dealers who spotlight marginalized communities.

GLADYS NILSSON with Robert R. Shane
“A big belly laugh is as interesting as a twitter behind the hands.”

An Opera About Colonialism Shows How History Warps

“Sweet Land,” in a Los Angeles park, is a parable for our time about Hosts and Arrivals.

Yuval Sharon and the Industry take on the myth of America in the opera ‘Sweet Land’

Native American artists to stage event to mark 400th anniversary of Mayflower voyage

“Missoula County is Indian Country”

Here’s the 2020 Exhibitor List for the World’s Biggest Art Fair, Art Basel

The Year Ahead in African American Art: What to See and Do in 2020

Multiple Shows Featuring Women Artists @ Baltimore Museum of Art | Throughout 2020

Gladys Nilsson

What to See Right Now in New York Art Galleries

Gladys Nilsson’s “Honk! Fifty Years of Painting”; Edgar Heap of Birds and the power of text-based art; Loretta Fahrenholz’s Elsa dolls.

Painter Gladys Nilsson Got Her Start as a Member of Chicago’s Hairy Who. Now, at 79, She’s Ready to Shine on Her Own

Dual New York shows at Matthew Marks and Garth Greenan explore five decades of her wild, ecstatic paintings.

Painter Gladys Nilsson Got Her Start as a Member of Chicago’s Hairy Who. Now, at 79, She’s Ready to Shine on Her Own

Dual New York shows at Matthew Marks and Garth Greenan explore five decades of her wild, ecstatic paintings.

Gladys Nilsson Paints Like She People-Watches

Armory Show to Award $10,000 AWARE Prize to a Woman Artist

Prize at Armory Show Will Give 10K to a Woman Artist or Her Estate

The artists shortlisted for the prize, funded by French nonprofit AWARE, are Yuko Nasaka, Rina Banerjee, Aase Texmon Rygh, Alexis Smith, and June Edmonds.

A New Armory Show Prize Will Award $10,000 to an Outstanding Female Artist With a Solo Booth at the Fair

The prize is cosponsored by a French nonprofit dedicated to women in the arts.

The Wonderfully Perplexing World of Gladys Nilsson

Nilsson’s paintings come across as youthful and wise, a rare combination in any art.

Stuffed
As taxidermy moves from the natural history museum to the art gallery, how should an artist handle the political dilemma of the animal as object?

Art Project to ‘Rehumanize,’ One Bead at a Time

Heard Museum Presents its Largest Contemporary Indigenous Art Exhibition to Date

Embracing the visual overload: Los Angeles show celebrates the Pattern and Decoration movement
Museum of Contemporary art exhibition goes beyond the anti-Minimalist tagline

At 76, Howardena Pindell Is Making Deeply Personal Paintings—and Gaining Overdue Acclaim

Star Artist Derrick Adams Explains the Radical Power of Making Work About Black People ‘Just Being, Living’

Adams explains the subtle philosophy behind his work, and how he's building institutions to take his vision further.

Histories’ Mysteries: In São Paulo, Curator Adriano Pedrosa Has Started a Revolution—Within a Museum’s Walls

College Art Association Names Recipients of 2020 Awards for Distinction

Private view: must-see gallery shows opening in February
Huma Bhaba's humanoid sculptures and Hairy Who member Gladys Nilsson—the best new commercial exhibitions this month

Art sculpture nearing completion

Signs of “change” in the Arts Walk corridor

Alexis Smith
Parrasch Heijnen Gallery

She Painted With the Hairy Who. Now She’s Going Big, at 79.

Gladys Nilsson, a bold watercolorist rooted in Chicago’s surrealist ’60s art group, on finally finding solo success.

United States Artists Names 2020 Recipients of Coveted Fellowships, Including Howardena Pindell, Martine Syms, Cameron Rowland

Dick West’s Spatial Whorl (1949–50), a small oil on canvas with a swirl of earthy browns and yellows punctuated by hot pinks, sky blues, and sharp red spines, is the first painting visitors see at Stretching the Canvas: Eight Decades of Native Painting, a new long-term exhibition at the New York branch of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, featuring works from the institution’s collection. “What is American Indian about this graceful abstraction?” a label asks. The question is a trap for the essentialist viewer who would give any answer other than, “It was painted by an American Indian artist.” One could say that the elongated orange-and-red arrows seem to evoke quillwork, or that the central yellow disc suggests the Sun Dance ceremony that West depicted in other paintings—but only by cherry-picking details from the many fluid elements of the composition.

Three exhibitions to see in New York this weekend

From a sweeping survey of American Indian contemporary art to historical photographs at the Met

In the catalogue for Autobiography, her first solo exhibition since her 2018 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Howardena Pindell tells the story of how, in 1979, a car accident on Long Island left her with a long-term concussion that impaired her memory. She turned to painting as a means of recovery, incorporating more of her personal experiences into her professional practice in order to close the gaps in her recollection. (Though not included in the present show, Pindell’s video Free, White and 21, 1980, sprang from the same impulse.) To inaugurate what came to be called her Autobiography series, 1980–2005, the artist sliced up postcards and interspersed their imagery with her own brushwork—an imbrication of painting and photography that blended mechanical reproduction and manual skill along an unevenly textured picture plane.

Native American Art Breaks Free in Stretching the Canvas: Pop Art and contemporary politics energise an eye-opening show at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York

A Painter’s Playful and Profound Deconstructions

Engels the Artist doesn’t seek out these other vocabularies — he is firmly a painter, but one who employs a number of deconstructive tools in his work.

Expert Eye: Isaac Julien shares his favourite works at Art Basel in Miami Beach

From Faith Ringgold to Frank Bowling, the UK artist and film-maker shows his regard for long overlooked artists

Art Basel’s Unlimited has long been a favourite at the fair’s Swiss edition and organisers are hoping to replicate some of that magic here in Miami with the launch of Meridians, a new section devoted to performance and large-scale works. We caught up with the project’s curator Magalí Arriola, the director of Mexico City’s Museo Tamayo and the curator of Mexico’s presentation at the latest Venice Biennale, who pointed out a few highlights on our whistle-stop tour.  

Vultures ominously circle overhead as a weary gold miner, pickaxe slung over his shoulder, leads a bikini-clad woman on a donkey through a desert landscape in this large, mixed-media mural by Alexis Smith. The scene is framed by the words: “Sometimes men went crazy from the heat.” “Much of her work has to do with revisiting pulp fiction,” Arriola says of the US artist, who last exhibited this piece nearly 30 years ago at her retrospective in 1991 at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. “She often looks at how pulp fiction manipulates the clichés of what a woman should be.”

In 1988, Howardena Pindell organized Autobiography: In her Own Image, an exhibition at INTAR Latin American Gallery where she invited 18 women of color artists to present views of themselves “which may not be particularly pleasing to the dominant culture.” She described the work as “neither neutered nor devoid of personal references to gender, race, and class or paradox, conflict, and celebration.” The idea for Pindell’s exhibition came out of her own “Autobiography” series: mixed media works she created between 1980 and 1995, a selection of which are currently featured at Garth Greenan Gallery. 

The Autobiography series came about after a near fatal crash in which Pindell sustained severe injuries and memory loss. Early works from this series on view at Garth Greenan bear witness to the artist literally and figuratively piecing together fragments of her past. They testify to the pivotal roles travel, as well as her investigations into alternative philosophies and religions, played in helping heal her internal and external wounds. Prior to her 1979 accident, Pindell was making abstract paintings that were often based on a grid structure and emphasized process to explore nuanced color, light, and movement. After the accident, she made a conscious decision to create work that was more “viscerally” personal, and felt an urgency to address in her art the appalling omission and underrepresentation of women of color that she had experienced firsthand during the ’60s and ’70s. Having survived the accident, she developed a dictum for the series, “You never know. You may wake up dead.”

Wrestlers And Their Hidden Talents

Imagining Utopia, Just Over the Horizon: The final exhibition of a trilogy at the Ford Foundation gallery imagines that our best selves have yet to be. They are on the horizon and the people who have been most oppressed, most ignored, and rejected will lead us all there.

At the Wadsworth Atheneum, art by African-Americans rejoices in the sacred

See Highlights From Art Basel Miami Beach’s New ‘Meridians’ Section, Where the Fair’s Biggest (and Best) Artworks Shine

‘Generations: A History of Black Abstract Art’ and ‘Afrocosmologies: American Reflections’ Reviews: Finding a Legacy or Losing the Thread?

MCA’s record breaking night of art — and style

Why size matters at arts fairs

The curator of a new section for large-scale work at Art Basel Miami Beach discusses how she’s bringing the outdoors inside.

Cultural Exchange: Selections From the MCA Chicago Are on Display at MASP

Three Stony Brook Faculty Rise to the Rank of Distinguished Professor

MCA Benefit Art Auction raises record-breaking $6 million

“We have five generations of abstract artists represented in this exhibition,” said Alexis Assam, 2018-2019 Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellow and co-curator of The Shape of Abstraction: Selections from the Ollie Collection just ahead of the exhibition’s opening at Saint Louis Art Museum back in September.

A tour led by Assam and exhibition co-curator Gretchen L. Wagner, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow for Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, provided scale for the massive gift that is the Thelma and Bert Ollie Memorial Collection. More than 40 abstract paintings, drawings and prints by black artists take up three rooms within the Museum. The exhibit represents just about half of the 81 works of art, educational material and related memorabilia that New Jersey-based collector and St. Louis native Ronald Maurice Ollie and his wife, Monique McRipley Ollie, gifted to the institution in honor of Ronald Ollie’s parents back in 2017.

Malcolm Warner and his talented staff have given Lagunans and out-of-towners another Art & Nature extravaganza. This may not be a university town like Irvine and others, but in many ways Laguna provides us the intellectual and aesthetic stimulation of such places of learning. That was certainly the case on the evening of Nov. 8, when Dr. Alan C. Braddock, associate professor of art history at the College of William and Mary, spoke on From Nature to Ecology: The Emergence of Ecocritical Art History.

ISCP 25th Anniversary Symposium: Cultural Exchange and the Life of the Metropolis

The International Studio and Curatorial Program hosts a two-day symposium on contemporary art and cultural exchange featuring a keynote address by Holland Cotter.

Those dozing off during marathon hearings in Missoula City Council chambers have glanced from time to time at the art adorning the walls, dreaming perhaps of a better place.

The same may be said for patients waiting to see their doctor at Partnership Health Center, or a deputy at the sheriff’s department. Pieces from the Missoula Art Museum’s permanent collection at least bring color and levity to the moment, courtesy of its Art in Public Places program.

“There are hundreds of pieces around the county,” said Anne Hughes, the county’s communications director. “It’s an amazing thing.”

With roughly 200 pieces in its Missoula County Art Collection and dozens on display across the city at any given time, MAM’s Art in Public Places program has long been a staple of artistic reflection.

From Betty Woodman's Ceramics to a Robert Rauschenberg Fabric Collage, Rarely Seen Collection Works Revealed in the Whitney's 'Making Knowing: Craft in Art'

The Whitney Museum Announces Recent Aquisitions

The Whitney Museum of American Art announced today that it had acquired 88 works by 40 artists who were featured in this year’s Whitney Biennial. That tally compares with 35 works by 28 artists from the previous edition in 2017. Other recent acquisitions by the Whitney include works by artists whose works are joining the collection for the first time, including John Ahearn, Laura Aguilar, Maria Berrio, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, ektor garcia, Ajay Kurian, Wendy Red Star, Wallace & Donahue, and others, the museum said.

Review: The arc of Alexis Smith’s career in just 11 works. A smart L.A. show to see now

Representation Matters: Bringing Women’s Stories Into the Classroom Through American Art and Portraiture

The festive look of these richly textured shaped canvases—blanketed with brightly colored impasto hatching or encrusted with confetti—belie the difficulties that this artist faced in producing them. Pindell’s Autobiography series was made during a fifteen-year period following a car accident, in 1979, from which she suffered serious memory loss. Punctuating the surfaces of these handsome abstractions are seams—fissures, really—bridged by stitches resembling little teeth, and fragments of photographs and postcards. They lend the paint-toughened surfaces a pieced-together fragility and form their swirling and fanning interior structures. The found imagery, emerging from dense areas of acrylic color, includes disembodied hands, a frog, and a statue of Shiva. Neither random nor coherent, the fragments seem to represent the impressionistic puzzle pieces of partial recollection, which the compositions dynamically integrate into a meaningfully illogical whole.

Review: More is more. Why the ‘Pattern and Decoration’ show at MOCA is pure pleasure

Illuminating the Plight of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women: An exhibition in Toronto’s Gardiner Museum was created with the hope of bringing visitors face to face with the issue.

Gallery Peeping: 5 Shows to See in New York This October

Editors’ Picks: 21 Things Not to Miss in New York’s Art World This Week

Minimalist to Maximalist: Richard Van Buren’s Polyester Resin Sculptures from the 1960s and 2010s

Beginning her artistic practice as an academically trained figurative painter in the 1960s, Howardena Pindell’s turn towards abstraction was a challenge to the formalist tradition of Minimalism. While working in the curatorial ranks of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the 1970s, Pindell began transforming hole-punched temples of cardstock and manila envelopes into multicoloured constellations of mystifying depth and complexity. In 1979, however, Pindell’s practice took a sharply political turn following a series of traumatic events that changed her approach to art. Pindell began to confront historical events and address ethical issues through text and representational elements. As a woman of colour who experienced the pervasive institutional racism of the art world and the women’s movement from the inside, her autobiographical works confronted issues of genocide, HIV/AIDS and human and civil rights from a boldly critical standpoint. As the current far-right and nationalist grip on US politics strengthens, Pindell remains committed to making art that has the capacity to trigger historical memory – and to incite change. 

Taking place from 28 to 30 June, Mayfair Art Weekend returns this year with a diverse showing of painting, installation and events at a number of leading London venues. From galleries such as Hauser & Wirth and Kamel Mennour to shops including Alaïa, and all along the streets of Mayfair and St James’s, there are enough shows to keep art-lovers invigorated all weekend. Start with Gallery Hop!, an evening-long series of private views, receptions and performances, and then see where the weekend takes you… Here are Bazaar’s highlights of the sixth annual extravaganza – the culmination of a fortnight-long Art in Mayfair celebration.

In 1987, for a conference at Hunter College in New York, artist Howardena Pindell surveyed the racial demographics of artists receiving exhibitions at museums across the city. Her findings were bleak—the exhibition programs, according to her survey, were almost entirely white. “Black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American artists are, therefore, with a few, very few, exceptions, systematically excluded,” she wrote in her introduction. In tribute to Pindell’s 1987 survey, ARTnews surveyed every solo exhibition held at 30 museums across America over the past decade and broke them down by race. ARTnews’s findings are similar to Pindell’s. Still today, amid increasing calls for diversity in the art world, the exhibition programming at U.S. institutions is, on average, overwhelmingly white.

For the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), the future is female. The institution announced a year-long program of 20 exhibitions called “2020 Vision,” which will be dedicated to women and female-identifying artists. It celebrates the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, and comes at a moment when most trades—from film to technology—have been taking a stance, following the Time’s Up movement that calls for equal pay and representation for both genders.

Among the current crop of summer shows devoted to painting, “Painters Reply: Experimental Painting in the 1970s and Now” is a standout. Taking its name and conceit from a 1975 special issue of Artforum magazine, in which artists responded to a questionnaire about the state of the medium, the show, at Lisson Gallery, suggests the rich range of possibilities in which past and present experimental painting practices merge.

Retrospective exhibitions typically trace the career of an individual artist, but the format applies equally well to the lifespan of a gallery, as evidenced by “Dilexi Gallery: Disparate Ontologies” at the L.A. gallery the Landing.

Whether you find yourself in Madrid, London, or San Francisco this summer, you won't have to look far for noteworthy art exhibitions. From Andy Warhol to Jenny Holzer, these are the top 5 art exhibits to see around the world this summer.

More than a dozen exhibitions, most in and around London, are showcasing the work of black female artists this summer. Presented at museums, nonprofits, and commercial galleries, many of the shows are breaking new ground for the artists, who span generations. Faith Ringgold at Serpentine Galleries is making her European institutional solo debut and Deborah Roberts at Stephen Friedman Gallery is presenting her first-ever European solo exhibition. At Victoria Miro Mayfair, Howardena Pindell is showing for the first time in the UK. Claudette Johnson has her first solo institutional show in nearly three decades at Modern Art Oxford (about two hours from London). 2017 Turner Prize winner Lubaina Himid is featured at Hollybush Gardens and Helen Cammock, who is shortlisted for the 2019 Turner Prize, is presenting her Max Mara Prize exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery. Autograph has exhibitions dedicated to photographers Lola Flash and Maxine Walker. Meanwhile, Liz Johnson Artur’s photographs are on view at South London Gallery. Current exhibitions include the following:

9 Art Events in New York: Leonardo da Vinci, Pierre Cardin, Onyx Ashanti, and More

Howardena Pindell (b. 1943, Philadelphia) has had a long and pioneering career making art and art history. A painter and mixed-media and video artist with a unique, bifurcated practice, Pindell makes both sumptuous process-driven abstract works and pull-no-punches issue-based works that call out racism, sexism, and other injustices. She was the first black woman to work as a curator at MoMA, a founding member of the first all-female cooperative A.I.R. Gallery (Artists in Residence), and a leading light in the feminist and Black Arts Movement. In addition, she is an accomplished writer and teacher. Following her major traveling retrospective organized by Naomi Beckwith and Valerie Cassell Oliver that opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2018 and her first solo exhibition in London at Victoria Miro Mayfair, Pindell speaks about her inspirations, her methods and her current projects.

You won’t want to miss this delightfully juicy and enlightening conversation with living legend and self-described “Black Hornet”, Howardena Pindell. On this episode, Dana travels to New York for a special interview with the well-known artist and activist, who joins Bad at Sports as the first major survey of her work, “Howardena Pindell: What Remains to be Seen” ends its multi-museum run at the Rose Art Museum this month. Pindell comments on a range of topics, from the inspiration behind some of her most famous works and her history of arts activism and advocacy, to her latest and upcoming art projects.

Melodramatic and unhinged though they may at first appear, Mark Greenwold’s paintings frequently depict sexual and violent acts without actually being erotic or horrifying. Teasing the boundary between attraction and repulsion, his works are a litmus test of what you value in art. But if you allow yourself to be distracted by the grotesquery on display in this exhibition, And Now What?!, you might miss an important new direction his work has taken.

The first Whitney Annual in 1932 was transgressive. The museum was a one-year-old fledgling, set in a rowhouse on West Eighth Street. Its founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, was a collector and heiress, but also a serious sculptor. Invited artists chose what work they showed.

In 1973, the exhibition became a Biennial, and its history is the history of American modern and contemporary art. Or, at least one version of that history: one centered in New York City, one heavily white and male. That is no longer the case. This year, a majority of the show’s artists are women, and they are racially and ethnically diverse. New York, however, remains home to nearly half of them.

Until 1975, the exhibition catalogs listed the addresses of the artists who were included each year. Mapping these locations tells a story of influence and power — but also one of friendships and creative communities, of housing prices and economic change, of landscape and light. Here are some of its facets.

The first painting that I saw by Mark Greenwold was, it seemed, a kind of cozy domestic scene. Some people stand in a beautiful room before a lit fireplace, dressed as family might be while hanging around over the holidays. Greenwold himself is front and center, a self-portrait in a zipped-up cardigan and pants. Next to him, his elderly father wears a mismatched flannel robe and pajamas. Greenwold’s mother stands behind them, and a young man on the left holds his head at an alluring angle, and behind him is another guy in a sweater. But there are some things happening that maybe shouldn’t be. Greenwold’s arm passes through his father’s shoulder and comes out the front. The other man wears a black velvet dress—and hovering over his outstretched hand is a tiny ballerina in first position.

Does the shame of being human ever cease? Not for painter Mark Greenwold, whose latest exhibition of paintings and drawings at Garth Greenan bring together forty-four years of disturbing, perversely detailed, fever dream pictures that feature sex, old age, self-portraiture, the discomfort of friends, and several lifetimes of embarrassing analysand revelations the septuagenarian artist depicts with a brush the size of a needle.

There are artists who aim to shock the viewer and those who attack decorum. While the former may gain immediate attention, and generate buzz in the media, the latter might have more staying power, and for good reason. The art world believes in decorum — the display of appropriately polite behavior – which is especially apparent when you think about what gets put up in public institutions these days. You may behave or misbehave, but you must do it in an acceptable manner. You must know how to walk up to the line but not cross it. Propriety must be maintained at all costs. Titillation and smugness are fine but the truly indecorous and the blurring of boundaries are another matter.

There’s the art that took over galleries in the 1960s and ‘70s — cool, minimal, barely there. And then there’s art — eye candy a poppin’ with color and pattern, effulgent and radiantly explosive.

When, in the 1970s, Howardena Pindell was working as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York – as the first African-American woman to serve in the museum’s curatorial department – she found she wasn’t always invited to events attended by her colleagues. ‘I was somewhat marginalised,’ she tells me. But there was an upside: ‘I could go home and work. I used the time wisely.’ During these evenings and nights, Pindell had been developing her own body of artistic work, some early examples of which are currently on display at Victoria Miro in Mayfair, along with more recent pieces.

The Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at University of California, Davis, celebrates the depth and breadth of the human spirit in two new exhibitions opening July 14. Both are curated by Dan Nadel and run through December.

With major gallery shows in London, the two artists discuss their multifarious art practices

INSTALLED ON THE EIGHTH FLOOR Installed on the eighth floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, a group exhibition celebrates color. “Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s” considers the technical, formal, and substantive possibilities of painting with bold, neon, and saturated hues. Drawing exclusively on the Whitney Museum’s collection, the show brings together 18 artists working with color primarily through abstraction and in some instances figuration. Eighteen works are on display dating from 1959 to 1972.

It’s been quite a year for Howardena Pindell.

Known for making thought-provoking art and building spaces for women of color to express themselves on their own terms, Pindell is celebrating her 40th year as a professor in the College of Arts and Sciences Department of Art, where she she teaches painting and conceptual drawing. Earlier this year, Pindell received the 2019 Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement by the College Art Association. It it didn’t stop there.

Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts

For the upcoming edition of Frieze New York, Franklin Sirmans, the director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), will curate a special section of fair that will highlight artists from Just Above Midtown (JAM). The historic space served as a platform for contemporary African American artists at a time when they were struggling to find representation. Linda Goode Bryant, the then director of education at the Studio Museum in Harlem, founded the gallery in 1974, when she was just twenty-three years old.

Visiting the Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie, a visitor is struck by the stately Italianate 19th-century mansion. On the National Register of Historic Places, the John Notman-designed building opened as a museum in 1978 and is considered a jewel of Trenton. Over the years it has largely hosted exhibitions of Trenton-area artists, but its current display, From Dürer to Digital and 3-D, is possibly its most ambitious to date.

The English Pop artist, now eighty-five years old, has bitterly boycotted New York since 1962, when a show of his frolicsome whimsies hit an iceberg of local cool and sank. Cherished at home—Blake was knighted in 2002—he is known here rather exclusively for his collaboration on the cover collage for the Beatles’ 1967 album “Sgt. Pepper.” Now he relents. But will we? He has transplanted, from London, his entire ultra-cluttered, several-room studio. It’s a challenge to identify the forty-six discrete art works from among the scads of stacked, strewn, and arrayed equipment, torn-out magazine pages, boxing gloves, bric-a-brac, Elvis memorabilia, and what may merely be trash—the harvest of a kitsch-adoring, proudly mad collector for whom more seems only a rest stop en route to everything. You are apt to enjoy this show a lot if at all.

A British Pop artist and noted member of the 1960s London School, Peter Blake is best known as the author of a genuine article of pop culture: The cover design for The Beatle’s epochal LP, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. This achievement arguably overshadowed his other efforts, though his gallery debut offers visitors a chance to become acquainted with Blake’s paintings, drawings and collages, which are being presented here in an installation replicating his London Studio.

The eighth floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art, as David Breslin, the Director of the Collection, sees it, is “a place for surprises.”

Chicago Imagists was a term that began to circulate through American art criticism in the 1970s. It applied to Chicago-based artist groups of the 60s and 70s – groups such as the Hairy Who, the False Image, Chicago Antigua and Nonplussed Some, whose actors, almost without exception, met while studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A key orchestrator in this scene was the Hyde Park Art Center’s then director, Don Baum, whose freewheeling curatorship immunised artists against the demands of an emergent gallery network.

Goldsmiths, University of London, has long been an iconic part of the UK art scene—it was the school that many of the YBAs, Young British Artists, came out of in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Since last year, the university also has its very own arts institution, the Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA). Visiting it is a thrill; the gallery is located in a former Victorian bathhouse that was redesigned by Turner Prize-winners Assemble. As you wander through the airy rooms, you can see artists of tomorrow in the process of creation, since Goldsmiths students’ studios are connected to the gallery.

Elsewhere in our “One-Woman American Century” section we take a look at the life and work of Rosalyn Drexler, who has received accolades as an artist, a playwright, a novelist, and even as a professional wrestler. But Drexler (born in the Bronx, in 1926) has also worked as a journalist, and many of her articles, essays, and reviews appeared in the pages of the Village Voice. In 1978 the paper sent her uptown to cover the Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Early in the piece, Drexler lists a number of items she might choose to take along on her journey to the afterlife, including “Nike running shoes, an Olympic barbell set, a Royal typewriter … and a telephone book.” But then she wonders, “Does a skeleton need to keep in shape?”

Well, at age 92, Drexler is in good enough shape to be having a solo exhibition at Garth Greenan Gallery (through March 30). We should all be so lucky. —The Voice Archives

An unusual group of characters – three women, one sheep and a few indeterminate swine-like and elephantine figures – are grouped together on a beach. A snouted animal to the right of the frame is wearing a top hat. One of the women in sunglasses holds a chequered parasol above the sheep’s head. Intertwined yet vaguely dissociated, they are all dressed in sagging variations of the same pinstriped swimming costume – their shoulders hunched, breasts drooping to meet protruding bellies, mouths arranged in loose, gummy smiles. This cartoonish scene is Gladys Nilsson’s Rented Bathing Suits, an early ink-on-paper drawing from 1965.

For our special “One-Woman American Century” section we look at the life of artist / novelist / playwright / professional wrestler / journalist Rosalyn Drexler. You can get a sense of the never-stop intensity of Drexler’s life and work from her answer to a question from the Voice’s always insightful art critic of the 1960s, David Bourdon:

“Does the good life appeal to you?”

“I think the good life is disgusting. I still have the idea about a good life from the movies. You have marvelous lovers, you have no guilt. No artist really leads the good life. The good life implies a kind of emptiness. In art you’re always finding yourself, you’re always looking for yourself. Well, maybe that’s the really good life. But I mean maybe Dali lives the good life. He has swans in his ocean.”

More than half a century ago, Rosalyn Drexler gave the hard questions even harder answers. And going by her current show, at Garth Greenan Gallery (through March 30), she is still at it. —The Voice Archives

The art of the Chicago Imagists of the 1960s and 70s provokes spluttering questions, and answers in a similar spirit. Incarnated as the Hairy Who, the Nonplussed Some, and various other names reminiscent of niche 60s rock groups before they made it big, the artists who came to be known as the Chicago Imagists (not a bad band name itself, come to think of it, if a bit too arty) were cartoonish and clever and possessed of a wayward graphic elan. Now at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art in a Hayward travelling exhibition, this is the first UK show of their work in almost 40 years.

In pop music, there's a tradition of covering previous songs by influential artists. Many of the best covers, or at least the most memorable ones, take the raw material and re-invent it while keeping parts of the original. In jazz, too, covering standards is part of the tradition, and likewise dismantling them and making a personal statement is common.

In visual arts, it's less often that established artists directly interpret or respond to a previous artist. That was the challenge in "In Praise of Folly: Five Artists After Philip Guston," a new exhibition at the Missoula Art Museum.

Through a grant, a national foundation called Art Bridges loaned the museum a painting by the influential American abstract artist, and they in turn asked five artists to create works in response.

Howardena Pindell is an American painter and mixed media artist living and working in New York.

RBA: What do you envision the role of the arts and the art world to be in this turbulent political time?

This week I would like to direct your attention to something joyous, witty and uplifting.  No prizes for guessing why.  Coinciding with the exhibition How Chicago! Imagists 1960s & 70s opening at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art this week, Hales gallery are offering a solo showing of one of the key members of the Chicago Imagist group:  Gladys Nilsson.  I urge you to see it. Where the Goldsmiths exhibition is more of a historic survey, at Hales you get a chance to see just how good Nilsson is now.

Three exhibitions to see in London this weekend

From the collaborative creations of the Chicago Imagists at Goldsmiths CCA to the reopening of John Soane's Pitzhanger Manor

The Gibbes Museum of Art will present Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem, a major traveling exhibition organized by the American Federation of Arts (AFA) in collaboration with the Studio Museum in Harlem this spring. The exhibition presents nearly a century of works by artists of African descent. The Gibbes’ showing of Black Refractions includes over 70 works by more than 50 artists across all media dating from the 1920s to the present and will be on display at the museum from May 24–August 18, 2019. More than a dozen artists in the exhibition have lasting connections to the American South including Romare Bearden, Thornton Dial, Sam Gilliam, Clementine Hunter, Kerry James Marshall, Alma Thomas and Bill Traylor.

Opening March 29 at the Whitney, Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s gathers paintings from the 1960s and early 1970s that inventively use bold, saturated, and even hallucinatory color to activate perception. During this period, many artists adopted acrylic paint—a newly available, plastic-based medium—and explored its expansive technical possibilities and wider range of hues. Color Field painters poured paint and stained unprimed canvas, dramatizing painting’s materiality and visual force.

In 1926, the historian Carter G. Woodson instituted Negro History Week. The second-ever African-American recipient of a Ph.D. from Harvard (after W.E.B. DuBois), Woodson wanted to acknowledge the vibrant cultural achievements of African-American individuals that were rippling through the country. At the time, Harlem was brimming with poets such as Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, while Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller were developing Chicago’s jazz scene. In 1976, President Gerald Ford officially transformed Woodson’s initiative into the month-long celebration we honor to this day: Black History Month.

While it’s impossible to capture the full impact of black artists on art history, we asked prominent art historians and curators reflect on 20 living African-American artists who are making a mark on painting, photography, performance, and sculpture. Below, with the artists listed alphabetically, are their reflections.
 

In 1993 the Rose Art Museum hosted an exhibition of the then lesser-known Howardena Pindell’s work. Now, decades later, the museum is once again celebrating the now-legendary black artist with “Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen,” the most comprehensive exhibition of her career to date.

Editors’ Picks: 16 Things Not to Miss in New York’s Art World This Week

This week's picks include openings for Sarah Charlesworth, Rosalyn Drexler, Thomas Gainsborough, and Siah Armajani.

9 Art Events in New York This Week: Siah Armajani, Sarah Charlesworth, Cruising Pavilion, and More

On Saturday, March 9, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: In the Footsteps of My Ancestors will open at Tacoma Art Museum. This major exhibition, which features the artist’s diverse work, will beon view in Tacoma through June 30, 2019. The exhibition was organized by the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, Montana.

While many would guess from her chosen name that Judy Chicago came to California from Illinois, fewer would know that David Hammons did. Even fewer still could imagine that Ed Ruscha's chill, west coast detachment grew from a Midwestern, specifically Oklahoman, sobriety. But seeing his iconic TWENTYSIX GASOLINE STATIONS (1962), which recorded the petrol stops along his driving route between Los Angeles and his home state, within the context of West by Midwest gives his deadpan seriality the feel of an earnest attempt at conveying the cornfed in-betweenness that haunts the Midwestern subject rather than the ironic detachment one usually associates with these works. This exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago takes up the Westward expansion of the art world in three generations of Midwesterners, tracing the lesser-known histories of a now well-established artistic milieu in an effort to set the art historical record straight.

MUST SEE

Rosalyn Drexler

Rosalyn Drexler: The Greatest Show on Earth
February 21 - March 30, 2019 
Reception: Thursday, February 21st, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

On Saturday, March 9, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: In the Footsteps of My Ancestors will open at Tacoma Art Museum. This major exhibition, which features the artist's diverse work, will beon view in Tacoma through June 30, 2019. The exhibition was organized by the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, Montana.

Here are four terrific art openings.

The United States flag is an iconic symbol, one that elicits an immediate and powerful reaction. Howardena Pindell takes advantage of that involuntary response in her piece “Separate but Equal: Genocide AIDS.”

“Nature’s Nation,” the first art exhibit to analyze how American and Native American artists depict the environment over the last three centuries, opened on Feb. 2 at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM). The exhibit features more than 300 major paintings, photographs, works on paper, and sculptures from artists, including Ansel Adams, Winslow Homer, Dorothea Lange, Georgia O’Keeffe and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish-Kootenai).

After visiting the new Benaroya Wing at Tacoma Art Museum for the second time, I wandered through the other galleries, which featured shows I had previously reviewed, and was delighted to see how much I enjoyed revisiting these shows. Which illustrates two important things about TAM: first, that exhibitions remain on view much longer than exhibitions in commercial galleries (a full year-and-a-half, for instance, for American Artists in the American West) and second, the tremendous variety of art on exhibit in multiple galleries guarantees you'll always find something to your liking no matter how your taste runs.

The Rose Art Museum opened up to the public for the first time in 2019 last Friday. The curators chose to honor Howardena Pindell, an underappreciated Black artist who innovatively used materials such as perfume and baby powder in her art and experimented with irregular canvases and unconventional techniques. Throughout her life, Pindell persevered in the art world despite facing the Jim Crow racism of 1960s and 70s. The Rose chose to display a collection of her work which spanned nearly five decades, ranging from homages to her father to work surrounding contemporary political activism.

5 Things To Do This Weekend From A Hip-Hop Declaration To Women Artists Shattering Ceilings

There’s no reason to stay hunkered down at home this winter waiting for the first signs of spring to blossom, especially when greater Boston’s rich, varied arts scene has so much to offer. Get out there, see a show, take in a concert or visit a museum. Here are just a few of the many choices this season:

As a young girl, artist Howardena Pindell took a road trip. Somewhere in northern Kentucky, her family stopped off at a root beer stand for refreshment. There, they were handed drinking glasses marked by curious little red circles underneath.

The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina, will host “Art on Paper 2019: The 45th Exhibition,” the museum’s 45th edition of the annual show. The exhibition opens on February 3, 2019, and will be on view through May 5, 2019.

'Pick of the Pops' is an exhibition displaying an iconic collection owned by Wolverhampton Council.

Lichfield Street's Wolverhampton Art Gallery, which boasts the largest pop art collection outside of London, will welcome the exhibition back into the venue after time away on tour.

When I go to a contemporary art museum and fall in love with a work of art, the chances are pretty good that it will turn out to be by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. Although her work is often academic, intellectually challenging and carefully controlled, it is never cold or unwelcoming. On the contrary, it is passionate and asks pointed questions of the viewer: “Are you paying attention?” she demands. “Is this how you want the world to be?”

VICTORIA MIRO has announced its representation of Howardena Pindell. The UK-based gallery is working with the multidiscplinary artist in collaboration with Garth Greenan Gallery, her rep in New York. Pindell’s first exhibition with Victoria Miro is planned for June 2019 in London.

The College Art Association has revealed the winners of its 2019 awards for distinction, with Howardena Pindell being named the 2019 Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement. Pindell, who is known best for her colorful abstractions made using a hole punch and who was profiled by ARTnews in 2018, is currently the subject of a traveling retrospective due to make a stop next month at the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Artists aren’t fans of rules. After studying art history and theory for years, many creative practitioners subvert all they’ve learned in order to make something that feels fresh and new. Painters, in particular, wrestle with age-old ideas about their craft—which can be traced all the way back to when the Neanderthals brushed pigment on cave walls. Naysayers have been purporting that “painting is dead” since photography gave society a new way to freeze momentary images into everlasting art. How, then, to keep it exciting?

One way that artists address this quandary is through innovative materials and processes. Abandoning that most traditional painting tool—the brush—allows for greater experimentation and radical new gestures (though it can often run the risk of seeming gimmicky). Many of the following artists transform the physical act of painting into a violent act, often literally destroying to create.
 

For nearly five decades, Howardena Pindell has explored the intersection of art and activism. Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen features early figurative paintings, pure abstraction and conceptual works, as well as personal and political art that emerged in the aftermath of a life-threatening car accident in 1979. 

The Rose Art Museum’s presentation is a major return of the artist to the museum. In 1993, the Rose hosted Howardena Pindell: A Retrospective, 1972 to 1992. What Remains To Be Seen explores the continued arc of Pindell’s career, celebrating her singular vision and its enduring imprint on contemporary art.

In a famous essay published in the January 1971 issue of ARTnews, Linda Nochlin reiterated the question that was constantly thrown in the faces of women who dared to paint or sculpt: “Why have there been no great women artists?” For Nochlin, it seemed obvious that no effort to respond with a historical counterexample would serve. Not that Artemisia Gentileschi or Berthe Morisot shouldn’t be taken more seriously than male art historians had done thus far. But still: “The fact, dear sisters, is that there are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cézanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even, in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol,” she wrote, adding for good measure, “any more than there are Black American equivalents for the same.” The art historian’s problem in her view was to show why.

In a famous essay published in the January 1971 issue of ARTnews, Linda Nochlin reiterated the question that was constantly thrown in the faces of women who dared to paint or sculpt: “Why have there been no great women artists?” For Nochlin, it seemed obvious that no effort to respond with a historical counterexample would serve. Not that Artemisia Gentileschi or Berthe Morisot shouldn’t be taken more seriously than male art historians had done thus far. But still: “The fact, dear sisters, is that there are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cézanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even, in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol,” she wrote, adding for good measure, “any more than there are Black American equivalents for the same.” The art historian’s problem in her view was to show why...

In the first gallery of the Soul of a Nation exhibition at Brooklyn Museum one is confronted with a Manichean visual scheme. Except for Richard Mayhew’s Pastoral painting, which is itself a muted arrangement of heathery tones, this introductory room is monochrome, black made stentorian situated against shades of white, and white made vivid against ebony. How meaningful this contrast can be is illustrated by two paintings by Norman Lewis. The one that faces the viewer entering through the main doors, Processional (1965), contains a ground that is black, and an abstract array of interwoven, almost-cubist off-white figures wend across the canvas like an undulant line of figures seen through a fun-house telescope. Then, in another painting by Lewis, this one from 1960, the figures metastasize throughout the background, shrouded in white as if enrobed by it — some of them look like triangles with heads and two feet. Then there is a cross. I knew in that moment that if the story alluded to in the image played out, that cross would soon be on fire. The painting is titled America the Beautiful.

From a catalog that sheds new light on black models of mid-19th-century French painting to a collection of mid-1980s art criticism by the novelist and playwright Gary Indiana, the best art books of the past year provided a balm for turbulent times. Below, the New York Times’s art critics choose some of their favorites.

The histories of art are always in motion if you look hard enough. This year it didn’t take much looking to see waves being made by several books and catalogs that delved deeper into familiar areas or pioneered new ones, adding some euphoria to our blighted moment.

When Ronald Ollie was an engineering student at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in the early 1970s, he would take dates to the St. Louis Art Museum. “The other engineers would say, ‘Why are you taking that woman to the art museum?”’ he recalled

The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University presents the first major retrospective of eminent American artist, curator, and teacher Howardena Pindell, who for nearly five decades has explored the intersection of art and activism. Co-curated Naomi Beckwith and Valerie Cassel Oliver and organized by the MCA Chicago, What Remains To Be Seen spans the New York–based artist’s career, featuring early figurative paintings, pure abstraction and conceptual works, as well as personal and political art that emerged in the aftermath of a life-threatening car accident in 1979. On view February 1 through May 19, 2019, the exhibition traces themes and visual experiments that run throughout Pindell’s work up to the present. Howardena Pindell will be in conversation with Beckwith, Cassel Oliver, and the Rose Art Museum's Assistant Curator Caitlin Julia Rubin on February 2.

The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis Universitypresents the first major retrospective of eminent American artist, curator, and teacher Howardena Pindell, who for nearly five decades has explored the intersection of art and activism.

Co-curated Naomi Beckwith and Valerie Cassel Oliver and organized by the MCA Chicago, What Remains To Be Seen spans the New York-based artist's career, featuring early figurative paintings, pure abstraction and conceptual works, as well as personal and political art that emerged in the aftermath of a life threatening car accident in 1979.

A select group of Montana artists are being honored for their lifetime achievements as recipients of this year’s Governor’s Arts Awards at the Montana State Capitol.

ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH (ABMB) opens to the public today. The 17th edition of the art fair features more than 250 galleries from 35 countries in the newly renovated Miami Beach Convention Center. The enthusiasm surrounding ABMB has infused the entire city over the years, inspiring a slate of satellite fairs offering more accessible and diverse buying experiences and special exhibitions, programming and related events.

Representation remains wanting, but after nearly two decades, there are more opportunities to explore art by black artists at ABMB. A number of galleries are offering choice works by African American artists—selections by prominent names and promising emerging talents, new works fresh from artists’s studios, and important works by historic artists and under-appreciated figures. Many dealers are devoting displays to individual artists. Here’s an overview of where to find them:

The woman on the cover of Junctures in Women’s Leadership: The Arts is coming right at you, radiant with spirit and energy, a serpent clutched in one hand, a flowing gold-spangled blue cape in the other, her skirt flaring above her powerful thighs. The sense is that she’s breaking through barriers, leading the way, ferocious, unstoppable, the enemy of oppression and complacency (the fallen angel she’s crushing under her running shoes is “said to be” a symbol of patriarchy). 

No one, to my mind, embodied the spirit of 1960s Chicago like Penelope Rosemont. Rosemont, along with her husband and creative partner, Franklin Rosemont, was at the center of the scrappy Chicago Surrealist Group and worked with Students for a Democratic Society and other radical groups to help instigate the protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. I once had the pleasure of speaking with her about those momentous days, which she described as a heady mixture of outrage, terror, camaraderie, and high spirits — a combination that, during the convention, caught the imagination of the world. “Not bad,” she said, “for a bunch of kids.”

“Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950 to Now,” currently on view at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, is billed as the first major survey of Native American contemporary art. With that exhibition in mind, below is Robin Cembalest’s article “Native American Art: Pride and Prejudice,” originally printed in the February 1992 issue of ARTnews, with  a spotlight on a variety of indigenous artists in America and the many issues they face while trying to get their work into mainstream institutions. (The article makes use of the term “Indian,” a label used more often than “Native American” at the time.) During the ’90s, the story notes, contemporary Native American artists were faced with a decision: How much or how little should they rely on their heritage? For some, playing up their identity in their work was unavoidable. As the artist Kay WalkingStick told Cembalest, “I happen to be a native person. Of course it affects what I do.” —Alex Greenberger

“Native American Art: Pride and Prejudice”
By Robin Cembalest
February 1992

Outdated images of Indians abound in museums and the art market. As the Native American community fights to transcend those stereotypes, museum policy, scholarship, and Indian art itself are changing radically

“From Paint Brushes to Camera Lenses: Creative Women of the Great Plains” brings together 50 objects from the collection of the Great Plains Art Museum that are united only because they were all made by female artists.

Alumna and renowned artist Howardena Pindell ’67 M.F.A. will return to Yale on Wednesday, Nov. 28, to discuss her work in an event titled "Painting Free: In Conversation with Howardena Pindell.”

November is Native American Heritage Month.  Coinciding with the celebration, art enthusiasts will find a wide-ranging reassessment of Native art across the country.

The Housatonic Museum of Art is open for rediscovery.

An excellent, if remote, starting point is a painting from 1963 by the Pop artist Allan D’Arcangelo displayed at the far end of a corridor on the third floor of Beacon Hall, the second of two main buildings at Housatonic Community College.

Co-organized by the David Winton Bell Gallery and the Brown Arts Initiative, “On Protest Art and Activism” is a series of exhibits currently on display at the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts. The series “highlights the work of artists and the differing ways they engage the social and political issues of their time,” wrote Ian Russell, curator of the Bell Gallery, in an email to The Herald.

This fall, the story of our changing relationship with the natural world is being comprehensively told through a groundbreaking exhibition encompassing three centuries of American art. Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment presents more than 120 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, photographs, videos and works of decorative art, from the colonial period to the present, exploring for the first time how American artists of different traditions and backgrounds have both reflected and shaped environmental understanding while contributing to the development of a modern ecological consciousness. 
 

Between 1966 and 1969, Chicago artists Jim Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum came together to stage six group exhibitions — three in Chicago at the Hyde Park Art Center, and one each in San Francisco, New York City, and Washington, D.C. Immersive, wild, and irreverent, these shows struck a chord with the changing society and art world of the late 1960s. Calling themselves the Hairy Who, the artists subverted the group exhibition format by drawing attention to their individual talent and skill through comic-like exhibition catalogs and promotional posters. (The tongue-in-cheek name originates from the group’s discussion about WFMT art critic Harry Bouras. Wirsum, interrupting, asked: "Harry who? Who is this guy?") 

Howardena Pindell, like many of her fellow Black, female peers, has long been under-appreciated for her contributions to contemporary art, and this touring career survey covers a full fifty years of her artwork, activism, writing, and work as a curator and educator. Embedded within the exhibition is a timeline of Pindell’s life. Among the contents are two photographs of the artist, strikingly dissimilar despite the fact they were taken a mere five years apart. The first, dating to 1967, shows Pindell as a 24-year-old career woman sitting in her office at the Museum of Modern Art, looking neatly polished and professional. She sits upright with impeccable posture, hands crossed, looking demurely away from the camera. The other, taken circa 1972, shows her in the studio, sitting casually on a bucket or can, with her elbows resting on her pants soiled at the knees with the materials of her practice. The artist looks straight at the camera, with one hand raised to scratch her head, with a slightly quizzical look, as if asking “What are you looking at?”

The two photos are somewhat ancillary, but their striking juxtaposition drives home a truth about Pindell that is demonstrated over and over again in the exhibition: her life and work cover an array of modes and tenors, moving between and among artistic mediums and styles, art world factions, and activist camps. Not that Pindell comes across as a chameleon who blends into any situation to remain unseen or be readily accepted. In fact, the opposite seems to be true; despite the risks of disconnection, strife, or misunderstanding with those around her, Pindell unapologetically refuses to conform or be true to anyone but herself. She pursues her interests and concerns, disregarding the parameters of existing tribes and silos. As exhibition co-curator Naomi Beckwith states: “Before it was a term, Howardena Pindell was thinking about intersectionality… what it means to create in this world, but also be a full human being.”

Jaune Quick-To-See Smith and five Montana artists will be presented with the 2018 Governor’s Arts Award in a public ceremony at the Capitol in Helena, 3 p.m., Friday, December 7. The Montana Arts Council will host the ceremony and a reception that follows, 4:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. Everyone is welcome. 

The Chicago Imagists collective is back, for a few months at least, with 3-D Doings: The Imagist Object in Chicago Art, 1964-1980, at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery. 

The first exhibition since the late artist’s 2017 solo outing at Art + Practice in Los Angeles, this show, titled Space, Time, Light, showcases paintings and mixed media works produced by Al Loving between 1976 and 1993. Spotlighting the abstractionist’s experimentations with geometry and color, the show features Loving’s collages and fabric wall-hangings made from torn canvas, which were often made in mind of work by Romare Bearden, Henri Matisse, and Hans Hofmann.

Art is in a real sense a war on cliche, it is a way of seeing better than our first glance. And so Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art means to engage with one of the comfortably numb corners of the American scene with its new, free exhibit Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices 1950s to Now -- a look at work made by American Indian artists since 1952 that challenges (and occasionally subverts) the idea of Southwest kitsch and the aura of noble mysticism that attaches to our idea of Indian art.

Despite the prevailing notion of such art as decorative and tchotchke-ish, even a casual stroll through the current show is liable to explode notions of earnest solemnity.

So look at Monster Indian (1968) by Fritz Scholder.

Here we see a pop pastel palette reminiscent of, say, Ed Ruscha, and a heavy Francis Bacon flutter-and-wow influence. This isn't a solemn mystic or a stoic victim -- this isn't Kaw-Liga or Tonto. And no monster, either: the subject, befeathered with a bone breast plate, looks beseechingly vulnerable.

Scholder, who was born in 1937, is one of the more familiar names in this exhibit, and probably the most essential one. Or, as Coyote, a character in an imaginary play by academic Norman K. Denzin called The Traveling Indian Medicine Show (which exists in Denzin's intimidatingly titled 2013 book Indians on Display: Global Commodification of Native America in Performance, Art and Museums), called him: "... the one and only. The King. The man who helped rewrite how Native Americans have been painted by whites. The painter who painted Indians drinking Coors beer. The painter who painted drunk Indians in the back of worn-out cars. The painter who wrapped Indians in the American flag. An Indian Andy Warhol who painted flags, cats and beer cans. The painter who gave us white Indians and Indian vampires."

Visitors stepping out of the University of Michigan’s Taubman Gallery (currently paying host to a punchy and politically-charged exhibition of art of the African diaspora) who then wander in to the adjacent show, Abstraction, Color, and Politics in the Early 1970s,will perhaps find themselves in a gallery space austere by comparison, containing four allusive abstract paintings and sculptures.  It’s a highly conceptual micro-exhibition comprising works by Helen Frankenthaler, Al Loving, Sam Gilliam, and Louise Nevelson.  In spite of the show’s title, as political statements, their significance isn’t self-evident (something perhaps tacitly acknowledged by the interrogative opening line of the show introductory text: Can abstract art be about politics and identity?), but what the artists in this tactfully assembled ensemble have in common is their defiant refusal to conform to the art-world’s expectations of what their art should be.

Viewers first encounter a geometric abstraction by Al Loving (one of Detroit’s own, though he later lived and worked out of New York City). Influenced in the 1970s by the hard-edge color squares of Josef Albers, Loving’s Bowery Morning is a simple yet disorienting network of shapes which could be read variously as an ensemble of polygons or cubes.  Loving created the work in 1971, the same year he participated in the Whitney Museum’s highly controversial Contemporary Black Artists in America, a show which acquired notoriety when fifteen artists withdrew to protest the decisions made by the show’s mostly white curatorial staff.  But conspicuous by its absence in Loving’s work was any commentary on the social or political issues of his day.

Even before one steps through the doors to the new temporary exhibition at Crystal Bridges Museum, art is already on display, drawing the viewer in to the ongoing conversation of what exactly constitutes American art. Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now challenges the viewer to consider the often neglected perspective of Indigenous peoples as part of the American experience, and further, what exactly modern Native art can be in that context.

The Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery will present Faculty Exhibition 2018, featuring new work by Stony Brook University’s acclaimed Department of Art faculty. The exhibit, which will be on display through December 16, includes painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography, mixed media, video and digital work. The 18 artists engage a broad range of ideas, creating innovative new work.

Pace Gallery is exhibiting a selection of works inspired by Rosalind Krauss’ critical writing on Sol LeWitt at the ongoing Frieze Masters 2018.  Curated by Adam Pendleton, Pace’s booth at Frieze Masters 2018 brings together a selection of works that are process or conceptually oriented.

For lovers of Western culture in all of its contemporary complexity, no trip to Los Angeles would be complete without a stop in Griffith Park to visit the Autry Museum of the American West. Its wide-ranging collection has continued to grow and evolve since the museum’s founding in 1988.

In the 1970s creative anti-war musicians turned guns into guitars. And after World War II the U.S. government converted tanks into tractors.

As the Art Institute’s summer exhibit of Sargent’s Gilded Age masterpieces comes to a close, their new fall exhibit, Hairy Who? 1966–1969, pounds impatiently at the door. Hairy Who is the name of a collective of six artists whose bizarre and endlessly entertaining artworks have taken over much of the museum’s temporary exhibition space.  

If you plan on doing both Frieze fairs, I recommend seeing Masters second. Frieze London’s intensity can be exhausting; its relentless heralding of the new can rise to a cacophony. Which makes a visit to Frieze Masters soothing. Yes, it’s an art fair, but it’s the closest these events get to the pleasure of seeing art in a museum.

Since the 1960s artist Howardena Pindell has been inspiring the next generation of black women in the art world to continue breaking down barriers and creating spaces for women of color to be heard. Two black women working as curators organized an exhibit featuring her work at VMFA. Gabrielle Jones has more for Virginia Currents.

Can abstract art be about politics? In the early 1970s, that question was hotly debated as artists, critics and the public grappled with the relationship between art, politics, race and feminism. For some, the decision by women artists and artists of color to make abstract art represented a retreat from politics and protest.

Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts is an exploratory case study in institutional racism as it has manifested in the New York City art world over the past half century. Centering public protest as the platform of the oppressed—and, in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, “riot as the language of the unheard”—author Aruna D’Souza offers an uncensored look at the role black artists, activists, and their allies have played in forging more equitable practices within the field of contemporary art. In each instance—Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket (2016) in the 2017 Whitney Biennial; Artists Space’s 1979 exhibition The Nigger Drawings; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1969 exhibition Harlem on My Mind— “artistic freedom” emerges as the linchpin in arguments defending these lessons in cultural appropriation, exclusion, and fetishization. In response, D’Souza interrogates the ethical limitations of freedom,and brilliantly presents all sides of these moral arguments without slipping into an #AllSidesMatter perspective. Rather, she puts her own privilege at risk by applying her intimate knowledge and power of observation to rewrite art history through a broader lens. She adopts a clear stance as ally, defender of truth, and witness who—by her own confession—“strays from journalist to partisan to historian to protester,” as the book unfolds.

Throughout his career, Al Loving maintained that he was an Abstract Expressionist. Whether working with paint, fabric, paper collage, or mixed media, he saw his work as an ever-evolving project creating new dimensions and possibilities for personal expression. At first glance, Loving’s hard-edged abstract paintings of interlocking cubes from the 1960s might appear as anything but personal. The cube, however, held special significance for the artist, and finding new iterations of the form and, through it, new possibilities for abstraction became his chosen path for personal and artistic growth and exploration—not unlike Kazimir Malevich with his square-based Suprematism.

Are you kidding? You think I want to run a store?” That was the response, Phyllis Kind recalled in an interview more than 50 years later, that she gave her husband, Joshua, when he suggested that they open a gallery in Chicago in 1967. The space he was eyeing was located above the prominent dealer Bud Holland, and it was only $85 dollars a month. Eventually Phyllis agreed. “I said alright, primarily because I was so bored with whatever was happening to my life,” she said.

One thing about Expo Chicago, it’s ephemeral: see the 2018 edition this weekend or not at all.  
 

“Instead of the history that we were taught, let’s look at the history that was hidden from us.” – Howardena Pindell

This year’s Spotlight section at Frieze Masters – a platform for presenting the work of 20th-century artists who deserve greater attention – includes a record 26 galleries. One of these, Garth Greenan Gallery, will present work by the American Pop artist Rosalyn Drexler, whose multimedia assemblages made from bright pigment combined with cut-out magazine reproductions offered a candid comment on the problems inherent in the society she lived in. From racism and alienation to abusive relationships, Drexler was never afraid to shine a light on injustice.

Since the 1960s, multidisciplinary artist Howardena Pindell has been pushing the limits. She was one of the first women of color to curate at a major museum, an abstract painter when black artists were expected to represent their ideas figuratively, and overt about social and political issues when abstract artists where expected to produce work free of such “impurities”. She broke the boundaries of painting itself, using unconventional materials and techniques in her work from the beginning of her career. And she continues to challenge art world dogma as her career moves into its 6th decade.

Here are three things to know about Hairy Who, the subject of a major exhibition opening this week at the Art Institute of Chicago:

It was a branding exercise, rude, cheeky, and astoundingly successful.

It catapulted the half-dozen young Chicago artists who created it in the late 1960s to national and international art world attention.

And there's been a lot of confusion about it ever since.

The AIC show, "Hairy Who? 1966-1969," aims to clear up that confusion and, if its impressive catalog is any indication, will give us an encyclopedic look at the raucous, ribald, comic book-and-urban culture-inspired original work.

Decades before the invention of the emoji, artist Suellen Rocca began communicating via endearing, cartoonish signs. In her drawings and paintings from the 1960s, simple pictographs of rings, palm trees, hats, dancing couples, bananas, and ice cream cones help to obliquely reference her life as a young woman in Chicago.
 

In 1966, six students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago approached Don Baum, artistic director of the Hyde Park Art Center, with a proposal to present a group show. Adopting a name derived from an inside joke, the Hairy Who inspired other intrepid young Chicago artists to organize their own group exhibitions. A few year later, art historian Franz Schulze would dub these self-sufficient young creators “the Chicago Imagists.

In 2004, the Paul R. Jones Collection had a metamorphic effect on historic Mechanical Hall. With the help of a $4.6 million budget, Mechanical Hall became a gallery committed to showcasing African American art.

“The only way to do it was to do it yourself,” says Mark Pascale, the co-curator of an exhibition celebrating the Hairy Who, a loose collective of six artists, formed out of a desire to show their work, as there were so few galleries at the time in Chicago. The Hairy Who artists—Jim Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca and Karl Wirsum—were all former students of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and shared an affinity for the same source material, such as comics, ethnographic art and flea market finds. They created colourful, graphic work dominated by distorted, often ribald figures.

Starting when she was 8 years old, Suellen Rocca took Saturday children’s art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago.

This knee-weakening revelation presents seven monochrome paintings dating from 1957 to 1960 by Ralph Humphrey (1932-1990), then in his late 20s. They are nearly mythic to painting fans of a certain age but known mostly from photographs, or seen one or two at a time. Neither experience prepares you for the visual power and fugue-like complexity of these works, last exhibited as a group at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1960.

It’s an angry time in the world, but we aren’t fearful of or for the future. We’ll survive this as we’ve survived angry times in the past. And if history tells us anything, we’ll likely emerge from the darkest of days to find beauty delivered to us by the creative geniuses who seem to thrive in the shadows of despair.

The title “What Remains To Be Seen” aptly describes the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ new exhibition of Howardena Pindell’s five-decades-long career—i.e., more work forthcoming from the under-recognized artist. I also sensed another metaphor when I read a subtitle, “Cut, Sewn, Adorned,” in the exhibition’s first room: themes of discrimination, injustice and hope emerge from Pindell’s exploration of the intersection of art and activism.

Howardena Pindell: What Remains to be Seen (Aug. 25-Nov. 25, 2018) opened recently at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in Richmond. Howard Pindell is a trailblazer. She was the first black woman to earn an MFA from Yale University (1967). Shortly thereafter, she was hired at MoMA where she was the first black female curator.

Gladys Nilsson’s career has followed her husband Jim Nutt’s and her distinct recognition is long overdue. Both had the same coming up as BFA graduates from SAIC, were exhibitors in the original Hairy Who exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center, began teaching future generations in 1968, and received honorary doctorate degrees from SAIC in 2016. Nilsson’s figures that are often hybridized with plants and other animals bring non-human colors and patterns onto humanoid figures and take on particular resonance with the art world’s present fixation on the Anthropocene. Two exhibitions in Chicago open this September, featuring work by Nilsson in context with her beginnings: The Time Is Now! Art Worlds of Chicago’s South Side, 1960-1980 at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, and Hairy Who? 1966-1969 at the Art Institute of Chicago.

A.I.R. Gallery’s current exhibition, Dialectics of Entanglement: Do We Exist Together?, is a new take on a similar show from 1980: Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States. The original Dialectics was based on a proposal, radical for its time, by three artists — Ana Mendieta, Kazuko, and Zarina — to curate a show exclusively of “Third World” women artists at A.I.R., a women’s cooperative gallery whose membership was predominantly white. In the 1970s, the designation “Third World” was often used synonymously with “people of color,” but also linked to the radical activist work of groups like the Third World Liberation Front (a student-led group from Berkeley, California) and the Third World Women’s Alliance (founded in New York by Black women activists) that sought to organize across multiple ethnic groups for common causes. In the brief, powerful catalogue essay authored by Mendieta in 1980, she condemns “American Feminism” for its whiteness and class privilege, showing us that claiming the category of a Third World woman was a way of inhabiting a powerful “will to remain ‘other.’”

On display: Howardena Pindell’s 1980 video Free, White and 21, through Dec. 23, in which the artist appears in whiteface to convey the often-invisible racism confronting black women; The Touch of the Butterfly: Whistler and His Influence, through Dec. 16; The Character of Characters, through Dec. 23, A.D. White Professor-at-Large Xu Bing’s playful and poetic five-channel animation, included in the Cornell Council for the Arts 2018 Biennial; and Leo Villareal’s Cosmos, ongoing.

My name is Jeffrey Gibson, and I’m here to speak about Free, White, and 21, the artwork from 1980 by Howardena Pindell. I think Howardena’s video is incredibly generous, and speaking to people who would have had, and have, a shared experience with her. The idea of just speaking from your very honest, earnest, transparent biographical narrative to expose injustices and a kind of emotional restraint and intellect is something that comes through really clear with this video.

If the 50-year plight of a female artist’s career through a life of racial and gender disparities was never the topic on the fall school reading list, the season is prime to learn from Howardena Pindell’s life story.

No need for a plane ticket. Put that passport away. This story is part of a series that features regional attractions outside of the Williamsburg area that can be driven to on a tank of gas or less. Buckle up and hit the road.

If the 50-year plight of a female artist’s career through a life of racial and gender disparities was never the topic on the fall school reading list, the season is prime to learn from Howardena Pindell’s life story.

With her bright orange eyeglasses and colorful, stylish clothing, Valerie Cassel Oliver looks every part the artist as she strides through the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, even though she is a curator.

When it was founded in 1972 in SoHo, A.I.R. Gallery was the first all-women, artist-run cooperative gallery in the country. As with so many second-wave feminist groups, however, its members were almost entirely white.

Valerie Cassel Oliver grew up in a family of 10 children in Houston’s Third Ward at the close of the segregation era. As a child, she saw art museums as places with marble floors that kids were bused to, not places where she could imagine herself employed. 

They are carefully melded to the earth, absorbed into woodlands and sewn into the fabric of existing structures. Meandering the 1,200-acre UC San Diego campus, you will likely stumble upon a treasure—a giant, vibrantly colored bird embellished with a gilded crown, an oversized red shoe frolicking through the theatre district, or a secret lookout with coded messages.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of London’s Serpentine Galleries, will host his first “Interview Marathon” in the United States this fall. The event will be part of the Chicago Humanities Festival—an initiative developed in partnership with the Terra Foundation for American Art, Expo Chicago, and Navy Pier—and will take place on Saturday, September 29.

In Indian Tree, a 1994 oil and mixed media work by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, a figure, composed of whites, greens, blues and a cotton candy pink, nearly jumps to the front of the painting.

"I'm so glad I came to kite flying. I'm so glad I came to Montana," 10-year-old Logan Marsh-Lumbert of Washington said as his kite dipped and soared in the breeze at First Peoples Buffalo Jump State Park on Saturday.

I remember seeing Ferris Bueller’s Day Off on the big screen in 1986, back when I was nine. I was amused at what I was watching — and yet, I felt even then, at that young age, that the protagonist was an arrogant, bratty little shit. Kids playing hooky is nothing new, but writer-director John Hughes presents Bueller (Matthew Broderick) as more than just a typical teen playing sick so he can spend the day seeing the Chicago sights. He makes him a folk hero. He’s the most popular kid in school (“They all think he’s a righteous dude,” Edie McClurg’s secretary memorably says). When word gets around about his supposed “illness,” his home is overrun by get-well bouquets and sexually suggestive singing telegrams. “Save Ferris” soon becomes a mantra that spreads like wildfire. (A skacore band later adopted the name.) He even has the respect of both cops and criminals.

John Baldessari, co-curator of Norm Laich: This Brush for Hire at ICA LA, remarked recently of his chosen exhibition title, I think I probably said that because I watch a lot of Westerns. Anyone can chart their way through history by the big names, but for a more rewarding degree of rigour, try following the sidemen. Artist Norm Laich is the dexterous Slim Pickins to the flashier Jack Nicholsons and Clint Eastwoods of the Los Angeles art scene. Since the early 1990s, he has been the go-to guy to realize artworks requiring the precision of a classically-trained sign painter. Hence this show of nearly 20 pieces executed by Laich, including works from Amanda Ross-Ho, Karen Carson, Mike Kelley, Alexis Smith, Lawrence Weiner, and the show’s curators, Baldessari and Meg Cranston. Laich has worked with more than 50 others, among them Kathryn Andrews, Brian Bress, Barbara Kruger, Liz Larner and Lari Pittman.

The Candy Store never did sell candy. Unable to get permits from the health department in Folsom, Calif., to manufacture her family nougat recipe, Adeliza McHugh pivoted, and instead made art history.

In the late 1990s, when art dealers Pat Hearn and Matthew Marks decided to collaborate on a group show called Painting: Now and Forever, Hearn suggested they append Part I to the title. “That way,” she told Marks, “if any artist that’s not in it complains, we’ll just say you’re going to be in Part II. ”

The contemporary art market is an intensely and increasingly competitive space, especially for resource-constrained public not-for-profits looking to build relevant collections of exemplary quality to be preserved for their publics; this is a heady charge. When one adds to this equation the increasingly apparent truth that those public collections have been assembled with both conscious and unconscious gender and race-based biases as powerful determining factors, then directors and curators are faced with a doubly exhilarating challenge: to build towards a just and equitable future by looking at what’s next, while concurrently and with equal vigour looking back and correcting the sundry oversights and omissions of the past. Museums are entering slowly into a new era of heightened consciousness wherein histories and futures must be examined and presented fulsomely without the taint of prejudice.

Critics, audiences and art world gatekeepers have often reviled or marginalized folk, outsider or self-taught art. But the aim of the traveling exhibition Outliers and American Vanguard Art at the High Museum of Art is to not only give outsiders their due, but even link them in style, in method and in spirit to trained artists, with whom they often have much in common.

IN 1966, TWO BROTHERS, Alonzo and Dale Davis, set out from Los Angeles on a road trip across the United States, seeking out other artists of color like them. They meant for the trip “to broaden our limited art history experience,” Alonzo says, since African-American artists had been conspicuously absent from his curriculum at Pepperdine University, or Dale’s at the University of Southern California. “We drove from L.A. to Mississippi, up through New York and Chicago, and somewhere between all those cornfields, we thought: it’d be interesting to own a gallery.”

Pop art, op art, minimalism, fluxus, and conceptual art movements were introduced in the 1960s. Delving into their permanent collection, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMOCA) assembled art representing these historical movements into Far Out — Art from the 1960s. The exhibit features a 1960s living room and is on display in their main galleries, at 227 State St., until Sept. 2.

Art lovers will have plenty of ways to beat the heat this summer, with a plethora unusual number of contemporary art and folk art exhibits opening just in time to lure visitors into a cool respite.

Here are some thumbnail previews of the upcoming shows:

The work of groundbreaking, multidisciplinary artist Howardena Pindell will be featured in an exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts from August 25th through November 25th, the museum announced Wednesday. Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen is the first major survey of the New York-based artist’s five-decades-long career.

Alexis Smith: Hello Hollywood at Garth Greenan Gallery is currently featured on Artforum's “Must-See Shows” list, the editors' selection of essential exhibitions worldwide.

If there’s any medium that’s proven surprisingly controversial in the past ten years, it’s painting. Some have claimed painting is dead, and some have claimed the medium is particularly vital right now; some have bemoaned the proliferation of contemporary abstraction that hits the auction block, and some have energetically promoted a new crop of figurative painters; and some, like ARTnews contributor Greg Allen, have jokingly turned it into a hashtag (#painting) on Twitter.

If there’s any medium that’s proven surprisingly controversial in the past ten years, it’s painting. Some have claimed painting is dead, and some have claimed the medium is particularly vital right now; some have bemoaned the proliferation of contemporary abstraction that hits the auction block, and some have energetically promoted a new crop of figurative painters; and some, like ARTnews contributor Greg Allen, have jokingly turned it into a hashtag (#painting) on Twitter.

With its striking design courtesy of Steven Holl Architects, Virginia Commonwealth University’s Institute for Contemporary Art is not your average collegiate gallery. Its debut this spring has given art and architecture buffs new cause to visit the institute’s hometown.

When you think of an abstract artist, do you picture a lean, scruffy white guy in paint-splattered pants, cigarette dangling from lip, furiously engaged in sweeping gestures that render his guttural actions directly on a titanic canvas?

This show, titled Hello Hollywood, focuses on mixed-media collages created by Alexis Smith during the 1970s and 1980s. As the exhibition’s title suggests, the works often deal with the mythology surrounding Los Angeles, which is both the place of the artist’s birth and current residence. In the show’s titular installation, two rows of palm trees are set in the gallery alongside roadside advertisements for the now-defunct company Burma Shave, creating an ad-hoc version of a classically Southern Californian landscape.

The rag-tag group of artists known as the Imagists gained a certain notoriety in 1960s Chicago for creating art populated by monstrous cartoons, illogical landscapes, and puerile (often downright disgusting) scenes. The bright colors and garish figures take cues from comic books, folk art, and Surrealism, not so much blurring the boundaries between high and low culture but forsaking them altogether. Artists of Chicago subgroups like the Hairy Who and Monster Roster made the concurrent Pop art movement sweeping New York look like a scene from Norman Rockwell‘s Saturday Evening Post. While Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist were elevating graphic arts—and making a case for white-cube gallery acceptance—the Imagist’s work was never more polished than the comics that served as inspiration.

Howardena Pindell’s retrospective, What Remains To Be Seen, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) spans more than five decades. Pindell, who began as a figurative painter, turned to a process-oriented practice around 1967, the year she graduated from Yale, favoring abstraction and mixed-media materials, of which her hole punches are the best known. Her dot paintings, as they are often referred to, use the dots from a hole-puncher on large abstract canvases, adding texture and depth to the surface. However, as the exhibition makes evident, she has explored many materials and is a meticulous maker who also takes pleasure in repetition. She methodically repeats actions such as drawing vectors or punching holes, which in turn meditatively investigates order, calling into question the stability of systems that govern daily life and conceptions of reality. In repeating lines, numbers, etc., she calls attention to the relative trivialness of certain logics that are accepted as truth.

Multidisciplinary artist Howardena Pindell has reached an apex in her career. With the recent presentation of her work in major survey exhibitions, her art has become a phenomenon of its own. Pindell tenderly and painstakingly braids her formal artistic skills, political positioning, and personal reflections into sculptural canvases that at their most impactful seem to bloom in psychedelic colors that reach beyond the work’s surface. Pindell’s exacting rigor transforms her art into playful, eye-arresting fractals and procedural poetry. A retrospective of her work is currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago until May 20.

The artist and social activist Howardena Pindell shares the never-before-seen pointillist experiments that would go on to mark her signature painting style—now the focus of a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Two new exhibitions, both opening May 5 at St. Petersburg’s Museum of Fine Arts, couldn’t be more different. While one consists of abstract art in a colorful myriad of media, the other offers up a tight focus on stark black and white photography.

The 39th annual Venice Family Clinic's Art Walk & Auctions honors three world-renowned Venice-based artists: this year's signature artist Alexis Smith along with honorees Sam Durant and Ed Moses, posthumously. 

The final art exhibition of a two-year retrospective celebrating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the UC San Diego Visual Arts Department is open at the University Art Gallery (UAG) in Mandeville Center through May 17.

Perhaps you’ve been hearing about a certain Saudi prince lately. Since being named the successor to the throne last summer, the son of King Salman from his third marriage, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has ushered in a wave of economic and cultural reforms that include the lifting of a 35-year cinema ban, curbing the power of the religious police and granting women the right to drive. Then there was the purge of his political opponents that saw them luxuriously incarcerated – with some allegedly tortured – for several months in a Riyadh Ritz Carlton. The concerted isolation of Qatar and the ongoing catastrophe in Yemen have been all but eclipsed by MBS’s recent flashy US tour in which he hobnobbed with Oprah and Dwayne Johnson (the Rock). The millennial prince wants to modernize Saudi Arabia and the media can’t get enough.

Artist Howardena Pindell may not be a household name, but the items she applies in her work are – glitter, perfume, talcum powder.

Chelsea may be the New York art neighborhood that many people love to disdain. It also may be approaching a tipping point, where new apartment towers outnumber galleries. But the place is not monolithic. Its scores of galleries come in all shapes, sizes and annual budgets, and as usual they offer a ton of art to be seen. Here is but a small sample.

Some art exhibitions are also lessons in the history of art. Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen, a long-overdue survey of the indomitable African-American woman’s oeuvre, on view through the end of May at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, provides so many it’s hard to believe they stem from just one show and person.

There are certain shows that change one’s sense of art. Surface Work is one of them. Spread across two sites, it is nothing less than an anthology of abstract painting spanning an entire century, from early constructivism to post-digital sampling, in which every work holds its own and every work is by a woman. This is a rare and historic event.

Back in 2008, I asked a friend who worked as a senior conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a simple question: “If you could see a big retrospective of any artist who hasn’t already been given one, who would it be?”

Best known for her abstract canvases encrusted with paper chads, Howardena Pindell has addressed a broad range of aesthetic and conceptual concerns in her art, a diversity further reflected in her work as a curator, educator, activist and writer. With What Remains to Be Seen, co-curated by Naomi Beckwith of the MCA Chicago and Valerie Cassel Oliver of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the artist receives her first major travelling retrospective and a comprehensive look at a practice that spans over 50 years.

9 Art Events to Attend in New York City This Week

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, a member of the Salish and Kootenai nation, will have eight recent works on view in this exhibition, her first with Garth Greenan Gallery. Drawing inspiration from her travels around the Pacific Northwest and California with her father, a horse trader, Smith illuminates the relationship between indigenous culture and contemporary American life in her work. Four mixed-media paintings come from a series Smith began in the early ’90s that recalls her father’s stories of older Native Americans who survived colonial violence, while sculptural work framed by a canoe refers to the ongoing debates about climate change that persist today.

The poster image for Howardena Pindell’s first major museum retrospective, Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen, shows a blurred figure diving into a pool overlaid with markerdrawn numbers and arrows that seem to describe a hidden kinetic order. The photograph was made in 1975 and is one of the first iterations from her series of Video Drawings (1974 – ongoing) in which Pindell photographed drawings on acetate in front of her television screen. Many of the early Video Drawings depict athletes in motion and have a vaguely conspiratorial quality to them, as if they’re revealing urgent truths encoded in quotidian events. Without any indication of what the numbers and arrows refer to, the works resonate with implied significance that’s undampened by political specificity. More than any other works in the show, the early Video Drawings feel like questions. 

There are plenty of reasons to plan a visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art, but if you can't make the trip anytime soon, you can get a preview of one of the institution's latest exhibits at a pop-up experience in Wicker Park this weekend.

This weekend, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago officially launches MADE YOU LOOK, the first major advertising campaign for the museum in 20 years. The launch is in conjunction with the MCA's first-ever pop-up experience dedicated to the work of groundbreaking artist Howardena Pindell, whose retrospective is currently on view at the museum. This free, two-day pop-up experience takes as its theme the year 1979, which was a pivotal time in Pindell's life and work. Attendees can interact with and experience the music, art and pop culture of 1979, created by advertising agency FCB Chicago. The pop-up event takes place on Saturday, April 7 (10 am to 5 pm), and Sunday, April 8 (noon to 5 pm), at 1330 N Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago. 
 

Collectors like Beth Rudin DeWoody face an enviable problem: They own so much art, they have no place to hang it. That’s why DeWoody opened the Bunker, a new art facility in West Palm Beach, Florida, which was unveiled to select VIPs during Miami Art Week this past December.

There’s something to be said for an art fair that takes care of its own. This came to mind while scrolling through my Instagram feed to find an image of red roses a friend posted that she received as a woman exhibitor on International Women’s Day. The photo wasn’t staged by Independent: To my knowledge there was no official announcement by the fair. Independent had exercised its best judgment in treating its exhibitors with care and compassion.

Today is International Women’s Day, which feels particularly charged in 2018, given the recent Women’s Marches and the #metoo and #timesup campaigns, which have been shaking up the arts and culture industries.

Why, you might ask, does a city with one of the world’s highest concentrations of contemporary art galleries also need to host seasonal extravaganzas where hundreds more galleries pour into the city to share their wares? Good question, but there’s no time to ponder it now, because it’s Armory Week! There are a few changes to the lineup this time around: the typically concurrent ADAA Art Show happened last week; the video-centric Moving Image fair has jumped ship for Frieze Week in May; the Collective Design fair has done the opposite, joining Armory Week; and the New York Antiquarian Book Fair happened to land this week. Here’s a look at what’s in store.

The art school in south London that nurtured many a YBA in the late 1980s opens the Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art in September thanks to help from some of its most successful alumni. Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, and Antony Gormley among others donated work that raised almost $2 million at an auction held by Christie’s, covering nearly half the cost of the $5.5 million project.

Newcity Art sat down with curator Naomi Beckwith to discuss the work of Howardena Pindell on the occasion of the artist’s first major survey, opened in late February at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The Museum of Contemporary Art’s immense new exhibition, Howardena Pindell: What Remains to be Seen, is hard to describe in several paragraphs. The exhibition, which opened last Saturday, is the first major survey of Howardena Pindell’s career and spans over 50 years of work by the black artist who is too frequently overlooked in the annals of art history.

Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive, (443) 573-1700, artbma.org. Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Counterparts, A suite of new paintings by 2017 MacArthur fellow Njideka Akunyili Crosby drawing from her experience as a Nigerian immigrant. Through March 18. Phaan Howng: The Succession of Nature, in collaboration with Blue Water Baltimore, local artist Phaan Howng highlights local environmental issues through a toxic-toned immersive installation. Through Aug. 31. Spiral Play: Loving in the ’80s, Three dimensional collages in intense colors and spiral shapes by the late African-American abstract expressionist Al Loving. Through April 15. Tomás Saraceno: Entangled Orbits, Web-like clusters of iridescent-paneled modules are suspended in the museum’s East Lobby. Through June 10. Black Box: Kara Walker & Hank Willis Thomas, Salvation by Kara Walker and And I Can’t Run by Hank Willis Thomas are paired as explorations of the legacy of slavery. Through March 18. Crossing Borders: Mexican Modernist Prints, 30 prints and drawings by artists including Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Elizabeth Catlett. Through March 11. Beyond Flight: Birds in African Art, Approximately 20 works demonstrate the symbolic roles birds serve within African cultures. Through June 10. Head Back & High: Senga Nengudi, Performance Objects, 1976–2015, Performance photography and a video documenting more than 40 years of work from American artist Senga Negudi. Through May 27. Stephen Towns: Rumination and a Reckoning, Baltimore-based painter and quilting artist Stephen Towns’ large Birth of a Nation quilt is surrounded by his ongoing Story Quilts series narrating the life of Nat Turner. On view March 7-Sept. 2, conversation with Stephen Towns and Mark Bradford on March 7, 7 p.m.

For Al Loving, the 80’s were a time for a redefinition of his artwork. After years of art revolving around geometric shapes, the 80’s proved to be a sort of coming-out party for Loving, as he redefined his style and reputation as an artist. As a result, this period of work went down as Loving’s spiral era. Many of those pieces are now on display at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

On the second floor of West Pattee, nestled in the Music and Media Center, is a haven of art, culture, and history. An exhibit entitled “Home: Contemporary Indigenous Artists Responding” displays twelve indigenous artists’ pieces all based on the theme of “home.”

Howardena Pindell, the multidisciplinary artist and activist for social and political change, has finally gotten her first major museum survey.

“I look at my work sometimes as play… a kind of joyous play.

A visual arts exhibit titled Home: Contemporary Indigenous Artists Responding, will be on display through Aug. 31 in the Walter and Doris Goldstein Music and Media Center, second floor West Pattee Library, University Park campus.

At the The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, we’re eagerly waiting for the opening of the first major survey of the work by the groundbreaking, multidisciplinary artist Howardena Pindell. The show will focus on constant themes and visual experiments with textures, colors and structures that marked her career.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presents the first major survey of the work of groundbreaking, multidisciplinary artist Howardena Pindell. The exhibition spans the New York-based artist's five-decades-long career, featuring early figurative paintings, pure abstraction and conceptual works, and personal and political art that emerged in the aftermath of a life-threatening car accident in 1979. Tracing the themes and visual experiments that run throughout Pindell's work, the exhibition shows how she challenged the traditional art world and asserted her place in its history as an African-American woman artist. Pindell revolutionized painting from her early, radical explorations of color and shape to her later work that expanded to address human rights injustices such as war, famine, homelessness, racism, and the AIDs crisis. Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen is co-curated by MCA Curator Naomi Beckwith and Valerie Cassel Oliver, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and is on view from February 24 to May 20, 2018.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago aims to canonise the Color Field painter Howardena Pindell as an activist artist dedicated to her era’s social and political causes while equally committed to the serious art of abstract painting. Pindell, who emerged in the late 1960s, protested against homelessness, HIV/AIDS, racism and apartheid in the streets as well as in the studio. She was a leading voice against the exhibition in 1979 at Artists Space in New York of Donald Newman’s The Nigger Drawings, and also advocated for women’s equal representation in galleries.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago aims to canonise the Color Field painter Howardena Pindell as an activist artist dedicated to her era’s social and political causes while equally committed to the serious art of abstract painting. Pindell, who emerged in the late 1960s, protested against homelessness, HIV/Aids, racism and apartheid in the streets as well as in the studio. She was a leading voice against the exhibition in 1979 at Artists Space in New York of Donald Newman’s The Nigger Drawings, and also advocated for women’s equal representation in galleries.

Art & Soul last Saturday at PAMM raised more than $250,000 for the fund to purchase African-American art, which becomes a part of the museum’s permanent collection.

Howardena Pindell, the artist whose work will comprise What Remains To Be Seen, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s next big show, “provides another history of American art,” says curator Naomi Beckwith. Born in pre-civil rights Philadelphia to an African-American family obsessed with Jackie Robinson-era baseball, Pindell has frequently found inspiration in the movements of sports, translating them into abstract works. The new exhibition, the artist’s first major survey, invites audiences to dive into a true experimenter’s half-century journey of tackling societal ills such as sexism and racism in part through examining the deep societal bonds of sports. “Her experiments are radical art practices,” says Beckwith. “But in another way, they allow her to speak to a broader audience.” Feb. 24-May 20, 5220 E. Chicago Ave.

There is a chance one might trip on chairs at the Weisman. No, this is not some millennial slang nor some vague metaphor for a political maneuver in our fraught nation, but a frank observation of California artist Alexis Smith’s exhibit, Private Lives and Public Affairs.

It’s been quite a while since “outsider art” — the not wholly satisfactory term coined by the British art historian Roger Cardinal in 1972 — has occupied the art world’s peripheries, far from the insiders’ world of top-tier galleries, museums, and the market. Outsider art’s abiding allure is evident in the extensive infrastructure now supporting its display and dissemination, encompassing museum collections, art fairs, and foundations devoted to important figures. It’s inconceivable the significance of outsider art will ever recede from view. We can even speak of “canonical” outsider artists (Henry Darger, James Castle, Martín Ramírez) whose prominence within this art-historical rubric seems as secure as Pollock’s and De Kooning’s within Abstract Expressionism. The rise and entrenchment of outsider art and its tributaries (most notably, though most uneasily, folk art) signal that this kind of work stirs up (without necessarily satisfying) some of the fundamental desires that inform our experience of art more broadly. Clearly we want something from outsider art. But what is it?

A project inspired by the “color fields” movement has pushed some local artists out of their comfort zones.

Past Lives is the aptly named collaboration between artist Alexis Smith and poet Amy Gerstler. The 1989 installation based on an elementary school classroom features a large blackboard with cursive sentences scrolled in chalk. Each phrase, composed by Gerstler, is a possible summary of a child’s future life and each could seem credible or dubious: “Came to literature late.” Or “His journey towards anarchy was a long one.”

On November 16, 2017, an underground section of the Keystone Pipeline in northeastern South Dakota spilled over 200,000 gallons of oil. As part of the same pipeline network, the Dakota Access Pipeline had been deemed too hazardous to locate near the local water supply of Bismarck, North Dakota, and so was rerouted beneath the Missouri River upstream from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Assurances had been given that the Dakota Access Pipeline would not leak into the Missouri River and contaminate the primary source of water for the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation (or damage the multi-state Ogallala Aquifer—one of the largest in the world). Continued pipeline building led to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests that temporarily halted this construction and made visible, partly through the power of social media (#NoDAPL), both the plight and the resistance of various Native populations gathered at the site. The Dakota Access Pipeline also crossed territory preserved in perpetuity solely for its indigenous population by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. In other words, no non-Natives would be allowed to live in at least half of what is now South Dakota without the permission of the tribes occupying the land. This treaty was violated and ignored within a couple years of its signing, although in 1980, the United States Supreme Court upheld certain aspects of its legality, offering as compensation a cash settlement that the current Sioux tribes continue to reject, insisting on the return of the Black Hills in particular according to the articles of the 1868 treaty.

Upon walking into Garth Greenan Gallery in Chelsea, your first instinct may be to walk up to one of Victoria Gitman’s canvases and place your hand onto it, rubbing your palm back forth, just like you would to a fluffy dog, or an especially furry blanket. These canvases are not covered in fur, however, but oil paints, and palming one will only get you kicked to the curb.

The most compelling part of Victoria Gitman’s fantastic exhibition at the Garth Greenan Gallery is the way her paintings glow. Her eight new pictures — all highly naturalistic, close-up depictions of purses and handbags — radiate with bright colors and jarring juxtapositions. In one work, alongside a fuzzy pattern of alternating black and white fur, there is an explosive field of lush, neon green that overwhelms the picture. In another, eighteen strips of fur — one in fuschia, another in rich, golden brown, all anchored by a central strip of luminous, radioactive yellow — burst off the wood panel they’re painted on. The finest painting in the show has two patches of white fur surrounding one of deep blue, which is set back in space as if it’s emerging from behind two curtains.

DOTS, DOTS, and more dots: Punched-out paper circles accumulate in dense, nearly geologic thickets, or scatter into coruscating, anti-optical arrays on the surfaces of Howardena Pindell’s paintings. With these signature dots, the New York–based artist flouts the stringent orthodoxies of vanguard painting that dominated art schools when she was a student at Yale University in the late 1960s, opting instead for an unapologetically unconventional mode that also includes glam sprays of glitter, exuberant color, and labyrinthine passages of stitching. Abstraction, for Pindell, is a mode of contemplation, but it is also a cri de coeur, a heartfelt yearning for cohesion or resolution that is constantly thwarted or denied.

When she took up painting in the late 1930s, Janet Sobel was a housewife in Brooklyn.

Her early efforts recalled the folk art of her native Ukraine, but she soon revealed a flair for the experimental. Using enamel paints and glass pipettes, Sobel began dripping color onto her paintings in abstract patterns.

The exhibition Outliers and American Vanguard Art, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, aims to reconsider the ubiquitous but limited “Outsider” designation as an umbrella term for autodidact artists. Investigating the intersection between the mainstream US art world and artists who worked on its periphery, it includes around 250 works—taking in drawing, painting, ceramics, assemblage, sculpture and textiles—by more than 80 eclectic creators. They “reveal practices that are nuanced, complex and subtly evolving in response to experience and milieus”, says the museum’s senior curator, Lynne Cooke. For these types of artist “there is no all-embracing neutral descriptor”, she adds.

Long relegated to the margins of art history, Howardena Pindell’s work will appear this Sunday in the exhibition “Outliers and American Vanguard Art” at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. But it is hardly the only exhibition this year to feature her paintings, videos, and photo-based work—pieces are also included in “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” on view next month at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, as well as “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85,” which opens next at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. And, to top all this off, a major survey of her work will open next month at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. To look back on her career, we’ve gone through our archives, and pulled excerpts of articles related to Pindell’s art, from a review by Douglas Crimp to an excerpt of my profile of Pindell, which appears in the current issue of ARTnews. —Alex Greenberger

Attention art lovers, the Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William and Mary is opening two new exhibitions in February.

The first thing that strikes you at the glorious new exhibition of Allan D’Arcangelo’s work is the blues – vibrant, arresting tones deployed in various hues across his beguiling, bold canvases.

The exhibition brings together paintings and drawings from the late sixties to early eighties, all shown in London for the first time. The selection of works focuses on the artist’s landscape painting which, utilising the monuments of the road, is rooted in a collective American experience… Using carefully chosen iconography and repeated signs, the works ask questions about the American psyche in a modern, changing America.

Today’s show: Allan D’Arcangelo: Pi in the Sky is on view at Waddington Custot in London through Saturday, February 24. The exhibition, which includes paintings and drawings made during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s by the American artist, is D’Arcangelo’s first solo show in the United Kingdom.

Waddington Custot announced that the gallery now represents the Estate of Allan D’Arcangelo (1930–1998) and is presenting the artist’s first UK solo exhibition, Pi in the Sky. The exhibition brings together paintings and drawings from the late sixties to early eighties, all shown in London for the first time. The selection of works focuses on the artist’s landscape painting which, utilising the monuments of the road, is rooted in a collective American experience. 

A Jenny Holzer “Truism”—Abuse of power comes as no surprise—was perhaps the most cited artwork of 2017. But not being surprised didn’t mean not taking action. In January, a day after Donald Trump’s Inauguration, more than three million people in the United States staged a Women’s March to protest his Presidency. Their whimsical badge of honor, the pink “pussy hat,” has since found its way into the collections of some major museums, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London, and the New-York Historical Society, in Manhattan. (I wish I’d seen one in MoMA’s superb exhibition of wearables, Items: Is Fashion Modern?) At year’s end, women are still speaking truth to power, as the #MeToo movement rages on. Below, a short list of women who made a strong showing in 2017.

Picasso knew what he was up against – literally. He pasted it into his art, more or less inventing collage in the process. He (along with a few of his other Cubist colleagues) also played with trompe l’oeil, but he understood this wasn’t the same thing – a device rather than an actuality or contending force. This was not about gesture; this was a defining act, a new claim on reality; but also the flip side of that notion: the deconstruction of illusionism – willful, yet felicitous, witty, sardonic. Collage was on one level (but only one of many) an attempt to reconcile, to synthesize these domains (though the ‘synthetic’ description has always been spurious overreach); but above all Picasso always confronted and challenged. There’s the chair caning, the odd paper fragments, sheet music; also, teasingly, insertions of conventionally representational objects; but perhaps most significantly, newspaper fragments.

The vibe throughout 2017 — white supremacists are “fine” people, the top 5 percent need tax cuts financed by the bottom 95 percent, Vladimir Putin is a great guy — has been pretty ugly.

It’s amazing what a complete game-change results when the stretcher bars for painting go missing. Reflecting on her early optical abstract paintings, Howardena Pindell once remarked that she gave up the rectangle in favor of unstretched canvases with idiosyncratic, non-symmetrical shapes that conjured, as she once put it, “some internal intuition of nature.” In effect, she literally “othered” her paintings, which in their new form epitomized difference. That move alone probably diminished her status forever as an abstract painter of note. Add to that the social contents that overtook her field paintings of the ’70s, contaminating what could have passed for reference-free minimalist-styled grids and monochromatic fields, with collage and text references to cultural politics. That’s all before we get to the part that she is African-American, and female, and quite outspoken on issues of discrimination and social injustice. She became a de facto member of a very small group of African American artists who broke the color barrier, and the gender barrier, and who laid claim to abstraction on their own terms long before the current trend in African American abstraction (For instance, see Amber Jamilla Musser’s essay in the October 2017 Brooklyn Rail). Can we name another black woman abstract painter from mid-century who has enjoyed any semblance of recognition? Besides Alma Thomas? Not likely.

Jarrett Earnest (Rail): When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?

Lucy Lippard: When I was around twelve. Before that I wanted to be a professional rider—because I was horse-crazy and worked at a stable. I didn’t have a horse, but I imagined I had a horse. Then I thought, No, maybe I want to be a writer, not a rider. [Laughter.] My mother was a great reader and there were always books around. I read voraciously and unselectively. I read Moby Dick much too early and never really got it, but in eighth grade I got the high school prize for a story. I bought a tennis racket with the twenty-five bucks. It may have occurred to me then that I could make a living at writing. Reading just leads to writing. Isn’t that more or less how you came to writing?—Reading?

For the past few years Shandaken Projects has hosted a residency program at the Storm King Art Center in upstate New York, where as many as 20 artists spend their summer outside the city and living on the 500-acre grounds.

Last year, Andrea Bowers was in conversation with Martha Rosler at the Dia Art Foundation. The two artists discussed “If You Lived Here…,” a project about homelessness and real estate in New York City Rosler presented at the Dia in 1989. Invited to explore the Dia’s archives and select a show to discuss, Bowers said she chose Rosler’s because it “educates, activates, and organizes—everything I hope my work can do.” 

A few months back, when the city of Miami signed a deal with Art Basel Miami Beach to ensure that the fair would be held in Miami, in the Miami Beach Convention Center, for five years beginning in 2019, Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine summed it up as “comparable to locking in the Super Bowl for five years.” For an entity that has brought a sizeable lift to the city’s economy, catapulting it to another league altogether, that’s not an overstatement. At the helm of this very important fair that rounds off the calendar year with great pizzazz is Noah Horowitz, whose appointment as its director two years ago was itself breaking news. As he heads into his third edition of the fair as director, he paused to speak to BLOUIN ARTINFO about the special ecosystem of art in the city of Miami, some highlights of this year’s fair, and his plans to nurture art in the region beyond December.

Margaret Lee thanks those who have helped her gain a deeper understanding of how to be more empathetic in difficult times

In 1979 Howardena Pindell had yet to turn 37, but she was already accomplished. She was a cofounder of pioneering feminist gallery A.I.R., and was one of the first black curators at the Museum of Modern Art. And all of this while cultivating her signature painting style—abstract canvases with colorful paper circles affixed to neutral backgrounds, or occasionally covering 3-D structures, like confetti sprinkled over a city sidewalk.

Contemporary political theorist Chantal Mouffe argues that all art is inherently political in that all aesthetic forms can be politicized and all political forms can, in turn, be aestheticized. In looking through this lens, art has the potential to intervene in our social and political realities, disturbing and transgressing established hierarchies of power that govern our daily lives.

Howardena Pindell describes, in her video Free, White and 21 (1980), an afternoon during her mother’s childhood when a white babysitter was hired to care for her mother and her siblings. Her mother was the darkest among them; the sitter, who was unfamiliar with the family, thought she looked dirty and scrubbed her arms with lye. The chemical left lifelong scars.

One way to combine postmodern deconstruction of the painted surface with a feminist reclamation of craft is to sew together scraps of canvas, as Pindell does here for her knockout first show of new paintings since 2001. Using a sailmaker’s needle, she assembles her elements into irregular shapes and paints them in bright solid colors before adding her trademark hole-punched paper disks; the unstretched paintings are then further embellished with ovals and circles cut out of foam. Nautilus #1, a yellow spiral whose drifts of multicolored dots evoke ocean currents, may be the sunniest, but all the pieces radiate joy, even as their visible sutures evoke dislocation and trauma. Songlines: Labyrinth (Versailles), which is loosely rectangular and pale turquoise, is waiting patiently for a museum wall.

One of Montana's most respected artists has a homecoming in the biggest gallery at the Missoula Art Museum. A new traveling exhibition, In the Footsteps of My Ancestors, marks Jaune Quick-to-See Smith's first solo show in the Garden City since 1998.

There’s no question that Linda Nochlin, who died this past weekend at age 86, shaped the way art history looks today. Her 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” has proven essential, and her writings and teachings about Realism, in particular her essays on representations of women and class in Gustave Courbet’s paintings, are taught in universities around the world. This week, ARTnews reached out to critics, artists, and curators, and asked them to share remembrances of Nochlin, as well as remarks on her work. Their responses are printed below.

A new exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts confronts two false assumptions embedded in the art world. First, that women should make feminine art, and second, that African American artists should make figurative and “activist” art, works that confront issues of race, inequality, injustice and the long history of violence against black people.

Following a decade-long hiatus from the commercial gallery world, Howardena Pindell will debut a new body of abstract paintings and collages made in the past three years. Utilizing a variety of materials, including sequins, glitter, vinyl text, powder, and the occasional bit of hair, Pindell has created seven large-scale works as well as a number of smaller, more intricate collages for the exhibition. It opens several months ahead of a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, so it could be a preview for those unfamiliar with Pindell’s work.

The feminist art movement that emerged in the 1960s grew out of the lack of possibilities for women artists who had been excluded from the male-dominated, institutional art world. Despite their progressive goals, this movement lacked voices of color, featuring predominantly white female artists. Opening this Wednesday at the California African American Museum, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 focuses on pioneering black female artists, whose work brought to the fore their own experiences and narratives, long neglected by both the mainstream and avant-garde. Featuring a diverse selection of media from conceptual, performance, and video art, to photography, painting, and sculpture, it includes work by Emma Amos, Elizabeth Catlett, Julie Dash, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O’Grady, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and many others.

While the cultural histories of Chicago and Milan are world apart, from October 20 through January 15 the Italian super curator Germano Celant will devote every gallery of the Fondazione Prada to Chicago’s Post-war art scene. Broadly separated into three sections, Famous Artists from Chicago 1965–1975 will take place in the podium on the ground floor of the building, beyond which exhibitions focusing on the work of Leon Golub and H. C. Westermann will be presented in the North and South galleries, respectively

They are wonderfully surreal; at once still and moving, their imbedded energy both contained and flowing around the exhibition space, imbuing it with the creative spirit of their original creators.

A woman falls from heights unknown. We see her from below. She wears a blue bikini, marked by red hands on her breasts and red hearts on her pubis. Behind her in the distance, neon rays the color of sunset hours burst forth at dynamic angles into the black nothingness that surrounds them. Within these rays, which seem to emanate from the falling figure, black squares in repetitive patterns, shaped by subtle forms, morph into the shape of buildings and mountains. The woman's arms are stretched out, bracing for impact. She is alone, isolated, in this eternal descent. This is a death fall in the golden hour of earthly beauty.

I grew up in the Bronx, not far from Van Cortlandt Park, which is so big it felt like its own country then. I didn’t go into Manhattan often until I attended the High School of Music and Art, years later, though I remember visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art with my father and seeing a Jean-Simon Chardin painting of a peach, which impressed me because it looked so juicy, so perfect. That was something to aspire to – a representation of a peach so real it made you feel like you were part of the painting. Most of the artworks I saw in those days were reproductions, though; a local paper had a special offer on posters for its subscribers, at 25 cents each, so I bought a J.M.W. Turner seascape for my bedroom wall. The same newspaper offered book deals, so I built up a library – Charles Dickens, Mark Twain. We also had some strange books, like The Cardinal’s Mistress (1908) by Benito Mussolini. I would paint and draw when I was sick in bed, because my mother would bring me all sorts of colouring books and crayons to pass the time. I loved the bold outlines and bright colours of those books. The Crayolas smelled like spring to me.

“The most important and pressing questions were for myself,” Darby English said. English, professor of Art History at the University of Chicago, visited the School of Art on Monday, Sept. 25th, to discuss his book “1971: A Year in the Life of Color.” “Why hadn’t I just figured it out?”

“I cannot just do nothing,” said Rosalyn Drexler. At 90 years old, the acclaimed artist, novelist, and playwright is as busy as ever, having just opened a show at Garth Greenan in New York, her second since joining the Chelsea gallery in 2015.

New York City will soon be home to Paint School, a new fellowship initiated by the founders of The Shandaken Project, a six-year-old residency program in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Garth Greenan Gallery has announced a special one-night-only reading of Sweet Tooth, a play by Rosalyn Drexler, directed by Dustin Wills, as part of the ongoing exhibition Rosalyn Drexler: Occupational Hazard.

Come together to celebrate the exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 with artists, activists, and scholars. This daylong event honors the trailblazing artists in the exhibition, and highlights the intergenerational connections between art and activism.

Big thematic exhibitions are almost always by definition flawed propositions. A curator comes up with a concept — often a single word — and selects work by different artists that lend it substance. Untethered by style, medium or geography, such ventures can seem both arbitrary and amorphous.

I was looking forward to “Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason” at the Met Breuer, which promised to be one of the big adventures of the fall art season. In addition to having a catchy title, the sprawling group show comes with a theme that seems tailor-made for these politically warped times. The idea was to present art from 1950 to 1980 in a daring new context, and show how World War II and the post-war years inspired a generation of artists here and abroad to push their work into the realm of irrationality and even madness.

Join EXPO CHICAGO and Independent Curators International (ICI) for this exclusive public panel as part of the Curatorial Forum. Curators Valerie Cassel Oliver and Naomi Beckwith will discuss how abstraction deals with representations of blackness without or outside of figuration, using abstraction to challenge didactic ways of portraying the black body in art. Centered around the work of Howardena Pindell, a multidisciplinary African-American artist, whose work follows a historical trajectory of black representation in abstract painting, the conversation, moderated by Romi Crawford, will also trace the influence of female and queer artists, and the discourse bbetween artistic intention and critical response in shaping public response. Presented in partnership with ICI.

“I always suspected that more artists were interested in the irrational than arthistorians usually suspected,” says Kelly Baum, curator of “Delirious: Art at the Limit of Reason,” now open on the fourth floor at the Met Breuer.

Once a forgotten figure of Pop Art, Drexler has seen a major revival of her career in the past several years. This show focuses on her work since 1986.

Rosalyn Drexler, who is about to turn 91, is an unlikely grande dame of painting, but that is what she is. Her rediscovery began a little over 10 years ago when a mini-survey, Rosalyn Drexler: I Am the Beautiful Stranger, Paintings of the ’60s, Pace/Wildenstein, New York, March 16–April 21, 2007, thoughtfully curated by Arne Glimcher, opened at Pace/Wildenstein to wide acclaim. Here was an artist that the histories of Pop Art, with their focus on male painters, had left out. And yet it was immediately clear that such charged paintings as “Marilyn Pursued by Death” (1963), “Chubby Checker” (1964), and “Is It True What they Say About Dixie” (1966) more than held their own with works by Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, and, frankly, outshone works by Tom Wesselmann, Mel Ramos, and other better known figures. In 2016-17, a traveling retrospective, Rosalyn Drexler: Who Does She Think She Is?, which originated at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, co-organized by Katy Siegel and Caitlin Julia Rubin, helped elevate her to the pantheon of important artists associated with Pop Art.

As an abstract painter, Ms. Pindell destroyed and reconstructed surfaces of canvas and mixed media both formally and literally. Pushing back against the traumatic amnesia that followed a 1979 car accident, her work became more autobiographical. This is the Philadelphia-born artist’s first major retrospective. Feb. 24–May 20, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, mcachicago.org.

Rosalyn Drexler, known for her politically charged Pop art, has been exhibiting her artwork since the 1950s. In her new show, Garth Greenan is focusing on the more surreal paintings she’s been making since 1986. Many of the compositions feature menacing, often masked figures, an interchangeable cast of criminals, businessmen, and politicians.

A one-woman American Century, Rosalyn Drexler contains multitudes: paintings, novels, plays, essays. She was born Rosalyn Bronznick, in the Bronx, in 1926, three years before the Roaring Twenties crashed into the Great Depression. It is staggering to consider even a minimal list of all that she has witnessed: Hopper, Pollock, Warhol; World War II, the Cold War, the War on Terror; jazz, rock, rap; FDR, JFK, Trump; fascism, feminism, and fascism again.

Howardena Pindell, born in 1943, has been a painter from the start but one of exceptional stylistic variety. Her early abstract pictures, their surfaces sprinkled with glitter and caked with punched-out, confetti-like paper dots, were some of the most beautiful paintings of the 1970s. After a traumatizing auto accident in 1979, the work turned figurative, intensely focused on autobiography and African-American politics. For followers of her career, the changes have been fascinating, as should be evident in her first major retrospective, “Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. (Feb. 24-May 20)

A new wave of black abstract artists are exploring ways to push the language of abstraction and still retaining their cultural specificity. And they’re not doing it alone.

Art history rarely gets it right the first time, but the established accounts of American abstraction that canonized particular artists before the paint on their work was dry, is proving particularly vulnerable to criticism. Whether due to a rejection of the staggering certitude of Greenberg’s formalism, the deep veins of racism/classism/sexism running through twentieth-century criticism and curation, or the closely guarded access to institutions of art, these historical narratives are undergoing an intensive curatorial corrective.

Lowe Art Museum presents “Pop Art Prints” at their Miami venue.

Galerie Karsten Greve is currently hosting a group exhibition titled "Künstlerräume II." 

The female African-American experience is center stage in the Brooklyn Museum’s art exhibition “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85.” The exhibit, which the art website Hyperallergic described as “perhaps the most important exhibition New York has seen in recent years,” highlights the work of Black women during a period of tremendous cultural and sociopolitical upheaval.

On the heels of the Civil Rights movement, in a 1971 New York Times article, Toni Morrison made a terse assessment of the downstream effects of second-wave feminism, as observed by black women:

What do black women feel about Women’s Lib? Distrust. It is white, therefore suspect. In spite of the fact that liberating movements in the black world have been catalysts for white feminism, too many movements and organizations have made deliberate overtures to enroll blacks and have ended up by rolling them. They don’t want to be used again to help somebody gain power- a power that is carefully kept out of their hands. They look at white women and see them as the enemy- for they know that racism is not confined to white men, and that there are more white women than men in this country, and that 53 percent of the population sustained an eloquent silence during times of greatest stress.

Way before viral videos, since the invention of the medium in the 1960s, artists have made video to critique the culture around them. Howardena Pindell delivers a direct-to-camera account of the racism she experienced coming of age as a black woman in America; Martine Syms tells her characters’ stories across several screens -- from flatscreens to smartphones. Abbi and the comedian Hannibal Buress ponder the sweeping shots in Steve McQueen’s video of the Statue of Liberty. Plus, hear one of Abbi’s own video experiments from her art school days!

Less than one week before the July 22nd opening of 20/20: The Studio Museum in Harlem and Carnegie Museum of Art, curator Eric Crosby walked me through the partially hung CMOA exhibit. Over the past one and one-half years, Crosby and Amanda Hunt, at the time a curator of the Studio Museum and currently the Director of Education at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (LACMA), collaborated on the design of the show, an effort to shed light on both museums’ collections and to make them more responsive to the community.

The snappy title of this summer group exhibition—“Elaine, Let’s Get the Hell Out of Here”—comes from an anecdote relayed by Elaine de Kooning in response to Linda Nochlin’s feminist essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (both Nochlin’s essay and de Kooning’s tale were published in the January 1971 issue of Artnews). The painter recalled an incident when a boorish man at a party began to ask her and Joan Mitchell, “What do you women artists think . . . ?” Not waiting around for him to finish his query, Mitchell—as famous for her uncompromising attitude as for her take on Abstract Expressionism—grabbed de Kooning’s arm and split.

Civil rights meet aesthetics in this riveting survey of 20 crucial years of black American art and struggle.

An exhibition created through an unusual collaboration between Carnegie Museum of Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem will open this weekend with music, a family-friendly participatory artwork, food trucks, an artists’ discussion and a workshop.

Color and composition are on the menu in this multi-generational survey of geometric abstractionists—among them Minimalism pioneer Leon Polk Smith. Marina Adams, Paul Feeley and Joanna Pousette-Dart round out the exhibition, which includes artist-related ephemera (e.g, Feeley’s handmade studio calendar), as well as paintings.

For years the art world has worn blinders. In the 1960s, it seemed that only poet-critics bothered with artists who were not allied with Pop Art, Minimalism, or Color Field painting. Since then, each decade and its theorists have focused on a narrow band of “significant artists” almost to the exclusion of all else. There were those who were considered central, and everyone else was assigned a lower rank. But for various reasons, that kind of hierarchical thinking no longer holds as much sway as it once did. Artists who were ignored have gotten fresh consideration. With the recent shows of Flora Crockett, Carmen Herrera, Jack Whitten, Ed Clark, Peter Saul, Merrill Wagner, and others, the art world shows signs of cracking open even further. Everyone knows that major revisions are needed, but no one knows what to do about it except to kick the can down the road and act like everything is hunky-dory.

Lubec’s Crow Town Gallery’s first show of the 2017 season features three artists with distinctly unique visions of The Bay of Fundy and its surrounds; Shanna Wheelock, Kathrin Hilten, and Richard Van Buren. The show runs from June 29th to July 16th, with the opening reception at 7:00 pm on July 6th.

This exhibition, an early candidate for the summer’s most peculiarly titled group show, takes its name from an article that ran in the January 1971 issue of ARTnews: Elaine de Kooning’s response to Linda Nochlin’s famed essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” De Kooning recalled being at a party with Joan Mitchell, where both were asked about their thoughts on “women artists.” That’s when Mitchell said, “Elaine, let’s get the hell out of here.” Curated by Ashton Cooper, this exhibition surveys, per a description, artists who have “an attitude of refusal.” Abstraction, from both young and old artists, will play an important role. Mitchell, de Kooning, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Al Loving, and Sable Elyse Smith are among the artists in this show.

So voracious is the presence of the twelve works in this focused retrospective of Al Loving's work, set as they are against the inert framing of the white cube, that they might be better described by the activities that resulted in their making: stack, weave, layer, tear, cut, drip. The five works in the first gallery are essentially collages of interwoven spirals and grids, often brightly painted, glittered, and glossed to a gaudy, reflective shine. At once galactic and crafty, they push against orthodoxies of the medium, as they are without ground or matrix onto which the various elements are placed. In other words, they are all collage, with a happy excess of sinuous exposed edges. The largest of these works, Barbara in Spiral Heaven, 1989, carries traces of the artist’s hard-edge paintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as his groundbreaking quilted canvas constructions of the mid- to late 1970s. When one realizes that each work in this gallery was made in 1989, they perform the visual equivalent of placing exclamation points at the end of a sentence. 1989!!! Al Loving!!! 

THE VIRGINIA MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS (VMFA) named Valerie Cassel Oliver its new Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. Recognized for her ability to connect with artists and identify promising emerging figures, Cassel Oliver is expected to invigorate the department, introducing an innovative exhibition program and a broad range of new artistic voices. 

When I was a child and confined to bed with some illness, my mother used to read to me, often from Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. I particularly liked “The Land of Counterpane,” in which a child creates a world of his own. His counterpane (quilt) was the terrain on which he sent his soldiers out to do battle. I, too, created wars—between buttons from the button box: every color, every size, those no longer needed or that were never to be returned to the article of clothing from which they had fallen. I’d race them down my knees, push them from one end of a cardboard shoe-box cover to the other, my young imagination totally engaged. So now I want to return to A Child’s Garden of Verses, to recall the pleasures of being alone: perhaps digging a hole in the sand, looking out a train window, entering a bakery and keeping all the muffins for myself. Speaking of being alone, I’m also looking forward to Jonathan Lethem’s new book of essays, More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers (Melville House). His use of language and swift changes of subject still delight; his intelligence and knowledge of so many topics bowls me over. I need his humorous and informed take on life.

The Yellowstone Art Museum presents Jack Gladstone, one of Native America’s premier lyric story smiths, in a concert on Saturday, June 17, titled "Blackfeet Animal Persons: Native Perspectives of Nature."

This performance marks a highlight of Gladstone’s summer tour, and is offered in conjunction with the YAM’s exhibition "Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: In the Footsteps of My Ancestors," which is the first major exhibition of this established artist’s work in her home state in over a generation.

It’s hard to describe the surreal feeling of going to see The Future Is Female at 21C Museum and Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, at this particular moment. While it was planned before the 2016 election, the exhibition opened in its immediate wake, at a time when the idea of a “female future” seemed very far from the sure thing many had dreamed of before November 8. Yet even within the current social and political climate, the exhibition is a far cry from an elegy to feminism past. In many ways, the show is an illustration of the intersectional and interdependent issues that comprise women’s lived experiences, through which it offers hope for a feminist future that is still to come. The female future it proposes is not reserved for the coastal enclaves of New York and California, but has taken root in other parts of the United States — including the South and the Midwest — and within the global system on the whole.

Linda Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (1971) is generally considered the first major work of feminist art history. Maura Reilly, a curator, writer, and collaborator of Nochlin’s, described the work as “a dramatic feminist rallying cry.” “This canonical essay precipitated a paradigm shift within the discipline of art history,” Reilly states in her preface to Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader (2015), “and as such her name became inseparable from the phrase, ‘feminist art,’ on a global scale.” A dryly humored analysis of the values by which artists are historicized and discussed, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” posited the first methodological approach for the discipline: that instead of bolstering the reputations of critically neglected or forgotten women artists, the feminist art historian should pick apart, analyze, and question the social and institutional structures that underpin artistic production, the art world, and art history.

There’s something uncanny about walking into a corner of the past and finding it almost indistinguishable from the present. We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-1985, at the Brooklyn Museum, is ostensibly a historical exhibition about a period when outrage crystallised into fresh artistic expressions. The fluent survey focuses on a forgotten generation of committed women who joined alliances yet also lifted their separate voices above the collective shout. They formed a constellation of groups such as Spiral, the Black Arts Movement, Where We At, and Women, Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation. Now, decades later, the causes they represent remain shockingly current, and their distinct sensibilities come together in a show that is at once motley and unified.

This spring, the Met announced that it would begin including Native American art in the American Art collection. Back in February, the Feminist Art Project presented its annual conference CROSSROADS: Art + Native Feminisms, a day of panels, performances, and dialogue. The event took place at the Museum for Arts and Design, a venue that embraces both craft and art — a categorical division that has historically been used to exclude artists of native ancestry from the mainstream art market. It was a day filled with ceremonies, deeply considered conversations, and moving performances, centering female, queer, and Indigenous experiences of the art world. Videos of the event have just been released and can be found here.

We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 is a new show at the Brooklyn Museum featuring more than 40 artists, including Carrie Mae Weems, Howardena Pindell and Faith Ringgold, to highlight the work of black women who were at the crossroads of the Civil Rights, Black Power and Women's Movements during that 20-year period.

This daylong symposium features four panels on black revolutionary art practices, including talks by artists in the exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 and related scholars. Participants include Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley, co-curators of the exhibition; Anne Pasternak, Shelby White and Leon Levy Director, Brooklyn Museum; Aruna D’Souza, art historian and critic; Kellie Jones, Associate Professor of Art History and Archaeology at the Institute for Research in African American Studies, Columbia University; and Uri McMillan, Associate Professor of English at UCLA.

Allan D’Arcangelo played lightly with Pop’s emotional hardness and irony. His imagery was always imbued with a gentle affection for the modern American landscape and imagination. “Without Sound: 1974–1982,” the first exhibition of D’Arcangelo’s works in nearly a decade, features nine paintings—some never before seen—that appear to be a deft amalgamation of the Hudson River School, Kazimir Malevich, and Hanna-Barbera.

One reason for the hullabaloo around Dana Schutz’s painting of the murdered Emmett Till in the current Whitney Biennial is the weakness of the work. It looks half-baked, unresolved. Like a lot of recent “political” art, it doesn’t try for a weight suitable to, and therefore respectful of, its racially charged, morally shattering subject. The result, to use one writer’s words, is “a tasty abstraction designed purposefully or inadvertently” to evoke an image of “common oppression.”

Spiral Play: Loving in the ’80s opens this Saturday at Art + Practice and features 12 of Al Loving’s three-dimensional collages.

The N.C.A.A. brackets have come and gone, but “March Madness” prevails in the meatpacking district, where a terrific group show by that name is installed at Fort Gansevoort, an idiosyncratic gallery (and occasional barbecue joint) in a three-story town house at 5 Ninth Ave. As its title implies, the show’s theme is sports, which, on its own, is nothing novel. A quick spin through the Met will turn up figures of wrestlers painted on an Ancient Greek amphora in 500 B.C., a Mesoamerican stone carving of a ballplayer made roughly a thousand years later, and mid-nineteenth-century portraits of matadors by Édouard Manet. But Fort Gansevoort flips the script on millennia of male-dominated athletics with art works by thirty-one women made between the mid-twentieth century and now, from Elizabeth Catlett’s jubilant 1958 print of a barefoot girl jumping rope to a just-finished collage of a pigtailed boxer by Deborah Roberts, a young artist who borrows the Dadaist strategies of Hannah Höch for the era of Black Lives Matter.

Inspired by the Los Angeles-themed omnibus event "Pacific Standard Time," the Windy City will be shining the spotlight on itself in 2018 with “Art Design Chicago,” featuring some 25 exhibitions and hundreds of public programs.

Think of it as “Lake Michigan Standard Time.”

Inspired by the Los Angeles-themed omnibus event “Pacific Standard Time,” the Windy City will be shining the spotlight on itself in 2018 with “Art Design Chicago,” featuring some 25 exhibitions and hundreds of public programs.

In what one art expert described as a “deep dive,” Chicago and its own slice of art history will get the royal treatment in 2018 as part of a new  wide-ranging initiative titled Art Design Chicago, fueled largely by the Chicago-based Terra Foundation for American Art.

In what one art expert described as a “deep dive,” Chicago and its own slice of art history will get the royal treatment in 2018 as part of a new  wide-ranging initiative titled Art Design Chicago, fueled largely by the Chicago-based Terra Foundation for American Art. 

In a standout painting here titled The Dicky (1986), five pantless female figures assist a beleaguered man in slipping a pumpkin-orange false shirt-front over his head. As is typical of Nilsson’s style, wiggling limbs weave between each other pell-mell as swathes of color trifurcate the picture plane into three intertwined scenes. The effect is something like a classical frieze viewed through a kaleidoscope, not least because Nilsson’s aqueous pools of richly hued watercolor seem to hum and swish-swash around on the page. (Her virtuosity with watercolor is a subject worth writing about on its own.)

Figures big and small inhabit the stunning watercolors Gladys Nilsson made in the late 1980s. It’s unusual to see the medium deployed with the forceful colors and monumental scale of these works, ten of which, all about forty by sixty inches, were on view in this recent show. Each depicts a few central characters framed by planes of color and surrounded by dozens of smaller humanoids who perform routine activities of everyday life, albeit with absurd twists.

Select artworks from The John And Mary Lou Paxton Collection are currently on view at the Nevada Museum of Art. The exhibit is meant to honor the late actor Bill Paxton (Aliens, Weird Science), as well as to pay tribute to his family’s fine art collecting legacy. 

Members of the Museum’s Collectors’ Collaborative met at the Independent Art Fair in New York City on March 3rd. Now in its tenth year, this group of Bowdoin alumni gathers twice annually to attend exhibitions and other art-related events. Through their contributions, they also support the purchase of a contemporary artwork for the Museum. Acquisitions in recent years include works by artists such as Alyson Schotz, Leslie Hewitt, Malick Sidibe, and Mel Bochner. Last year the Collaborative helped to purchase the Museum’s first hologram, the Dutch artist Folkert de Jong’s When H2 Leaves O (2015).

A major exhibition of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s diverse art will be on view in Billings at the Yellowstone Art Museum through July 16, and will travel to Missoula and Colorado Springs, Colo.

Black artists in America during the Civil Rights movement are to be explored in a new exhibition at Tate Modern. This summer the museum will present Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, a landmark exhibition exploring how these issues played out among and beyond African American artists from 1963 to 1983. At a time when race and identity became major issues in music, sport and literature brought to public attention by iconic figures like Aretha Franklin, Muhammad Ali and Toni Morrison, ‘Black Art’ was being defined and debated across the country in vibrant paintings, photographs, prints and sculptures. Featuring more than 150 works by over 60 artists, many on display in the UK for the first time, Soul of a Nation will be a timely opportunity to see how American cultural identity was re-shaped at a time of social unrest and political struggle.​

Pop Art is perhaps best remembered for the works of Andy Warhol (whose paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans caused quite a stir) and Roy Lichtenstein. But another artist who contributed to that art movement is receiving long-overdue recognition.

Also in that category are Barbara Bloom’s mock travel posters from 1981—bearing slogans all too relevant to the current political climate—at David Lewis gallery, sold as a set of ten for $75,000 or individually for $10,000. In the next booth, Garth Greenan Gallery made the particularly inspired move of showing Howerdena Pindell’s video drawings from 1976, in which she photographed images on TV, covered them in tiny annotations and marks, and re-photographed them. These were on offer for $25,000 each, and around half had already sold within hours. 

Garth Greenan Gallery is showing 12 prints by Howardena Pindell from her Video Drawings series (1974–76). They show stills from televised sports, which Pindell has superimposed with transparencies that she’s annotated with minuscule numbers and flying arrows. There is apparently no mathematical logic to her additions, though they vaguely correspond to the action depicted: boxing, a football game, lifting weights. Her cryptic marks are like an invented language that attempts to compute these athletes’ herculean movements.

The Independent art fair may be devoted mainly to young and emerging artists, but this year, it also has some wonderful art by a giant of postwar abstraction. At Garth Greenan’s booth, works from Howardena Pindell’s “Video Drawings” series from the mid-1970s are on view for the first time publicly in New York since 1976.

Chicago and pinball go together like peanut butter and jelly. The city was once home to a huge collection of pinball machine manufacturers and, according to one estimate, more than 460 machines are still embedded throughout the city. At the height of the game’s popularity, Chicago's pinball scene even helped inspire a new kind of art. Now you can check it out—while playing vintage pinball machines—in the Chicago suburbs at a new exhibition.

Though the Kemper's exhibition largely focuses on Drexler's career as a visual artist, it is difficult to divorce her writerly and painterly sensibilities.

At 90 years old, Rosalyn Drexler is a go-getter whose prolific career as an artist, novelist, playwright, and briefly as a wrestler is featured in a new exhibition at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, on view from February 10-April 17, 2017.

This full-career survey of playwright, novelist and visual artist Rosalyn Drexler offers a rare opportunity to see the breadth of the self-taught artist’s work. Her paintings feature bright colors and figures appropriated from films and print media, which she cropped, enlarged and printed on her canvases and then painted over them. The effect is somewhere between photo-realism, pop art and the visual language of a dream. Chubby Checker depicts a large Chubby mid-twist against squared fields of scarlet and blue and yellow, with couples dancing in 45-sized circles to the left; a smaller Checker echoes the larger one to the right. Love And Violence is far more sharp, a suited man looming over a crumpled blonde woman, grabbing her chin. A triptych of blue windows beneath the tableau show the same man helping to assault a fellow in a trench coat.

Ronald Sukenik, author of Up (1968) and Out: A Novel (1973), told me that you became a writer when you reach that moment in your writing when you faced embarrassment and kept on going. This was more than thirty years ago and I am probably misremembering our only conversation, but the impression I was left with that day was that in order to be a writer you had to go past all the things that might cause you to stop, with embarrassment being one of them. Gladys Nilsson cycled past that and many other barriers long ago, but it seems the art world has not been ready to deal with it for the past twenty-five years. Maybe now it is.

The chief interest of Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-65, an important exhibition at the Grey Art Gallery in New York, is anthropological. The 200 or so paintings, sculptures, photographs and documents by around 120 New York artists are largely unremarkable, even though some are handsome. For most exhibitions, this would be fatal, and for most of the works of art in this one it is. But this show is concerned with another kind of quality: the quality of a serious discussion, which, like a picture, can be experienced aesthetically, even if one is only learning about it after the fact. These conversations in New York art circles once took place and barely do any longer because the space—literally, affordable real estate—is no longer available. 

The main attraction at the Met Breuer these days is “Mastry,” the big Kerry James Marshall retrospective that has recently moved there from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and which will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, this spring. But for those who went to see it up to the day after New Year’s, I was giving this advice: First, go upstairs to the fifth floor, where you’ll find an exhibition of some 70 works by Paul Klee, all culled from a group of 90 donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1984 by the German art dealer and collector Heinz Berggruen.

Today’s show: “Gladys Nilsson: The 1980s” is on view at Garth Greenan Gallery in New York through Saturday, February 18. The solo exhibition presents a selection of large-scale watercolors produced by the artist between 1984 and 1987, many of which have never been exhibited.

Chicago artist and Hairy Who legend Nilsson presents large-scale watercolors produced between 1984 and ’87. Each features figures limned in the artist’s signature pop-funk style.

A kiss. A punch. A body braced for impact. The paintings of Rosalyn Drexler exude uncanny stillness, anticipation and, frequently, the dread of imminent violence. Moments of intimacy and conflict are frozen, sliced and readied for examination — excerpts from narratives whose conclusions can only be guessed.

Garth Greenan Gallery has dedicated its program to championing important yet under-appreciated  artists from decades past, providing an important service to collectors and art enthusiasts who understand that new discoveries are not the sole provenance of emerging youngsters. This month, they’re exhibiting a group of (largely) never-before-shown watercolors by the painter Gladys Nilsson. 

Galerie Karsten Greve is presenting the exhibition Norbert Prangenberg – Sculpture, which – after a 2012 monographic show in its Cologne gallery space – places its focus on the artists’ sculptural oeuvre, prominently featuring Prangenberg’s large-scale ceramic works known as Figuren. 

I really have no story to tell, and as you know very well, it’s almost impossible to paint people in some fraught situation, or even in a rather benign way, and not have the viewer project meaning, narrative, story.

Rosalyn Drexler: Who Does She Think She Is? — This historic monographic exhibition celebrates Rosalyn Drexler’s multidisciplinary artistic practice and acknowledges her important contribution to pop art, on display through Sunday, Jan. 29, 2017, at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1285 Elmwood Ave., Buffalo; $. 882-8700, www.albrightknox.org

After overcoming two hours of infernal traffic, and then parking and entering Art Basel Miami Beach, the local trek felt like a personal triumph. This is the time of year when the city collapses. It shows its fragility. Its inhabitants escape or crouch down, hiding in their homes, as if facing yet another hurricane. In a way, that is what Art Basel is—even though this year one saw fewer people than in previous years, something that would be confirmed shortly after the fair wrapped up.

Nine paintings by Nicholas Krushenick are on display at Garth Greenan Gallery through January 7, 2017. Krushenick, who died in 1999, favored a bright, bold style, commingling Pop Art with abstract expressionism, minimalism, and any other number of -isms. He relished the chance to defy categorization: “They don’t know where to place me. Like I’m out in left field all by myself. And that’s just where I want to stay.” In 1965, he contributed to The Paris Review’s print series.

“Despite Fear and Uncertainty, Parts of Art Market May Benefit From a Trump Presidency, Insiders Say.” This bit of speculative reassurance, delivered by ARTnews magazine on Nov. 9, gave a good sense of where the soul of the mainstream art world — and there are many other art worlds — lies: in business as usual. Sell. Buy. Art Basel Miami Beach.

Después de remontar dos horas de embotellamiento, lograr estacionar y entrar al refrigerado Convention Center de Miami Beach para la edición 2016 de Art Basel, la odisea doméstica se siente como un triunfo personal, anónimo y compartido. Y conste que es temprano, y que es el primer día regido por estrictas disposiciones de admisión en implacables estratos que dejarían pálidos a las castas hindúes. 

Even the small talk was more solemn at this year’s edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. On opening day of what is America’s largest fair of contemporary art and Champagne-steeped hedonism, the air kisses were shadowed by the challenges the presidency of Donald J. Trump might pose to an art world that likes to imagine itself as a force for progress.