Author: aryanahmad313@gmail.com

Greg Sholette’s Insurrection (1984/2021) involves a short text repeatedly silkscreened on four adjacent panels that remain half concealed under a lush thicket of synthetic flora native to Latin America. The phrase is from an 1858 treatise by archaeologist and onetime United States chargé d’affaires in Central America E.G. Squier, who promoted the white supremacist ideology of Manifest Destiny via the tropes of evolutionary naturalism, calling US colonization nothing more than assistance to a fate that would otherwise unfold at a slower pace: “Deus Vult it is the will of God!” Insurrection was first exhibited at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York as part of…

Alexandra Metcalf, silent forms of interspecies panic, 2024, oil and decoupage on linen, 66 7⁄8 × 51 1⁄8″. “Every father wants a pink dress and bows on their little girls,” said a young female punk rocker sitting in the audience during a mid 1980s episode of Phil Donahue’s talk show. The subject for discussion was outrageous youth fashion. Up on stage sat Serena Dank, founding member of support group Parents of Punkers, who during that decade became a spokesperson for all of the parents horrified by their children’s anarchic taste in fashion and music.  I sought out this grainy recording on YouTube…

How do you want to die? My response to this question, posed during a death workshop organized by Le’Andra LeSeur in conjunction with her recent exhibition, was startling: lying in a windowed room, surrounded by family, with no regrets. This vision showed me not only what I want at the end, but what I’d like more of now. Thinking about dying is thinking about living, the artist said. The idea that confronting death can lead to a more meaningful present grounds “Monument Eternal,” an exhibition that ignites from the outset with an invocation of jazz musician Alice Coltrane’s 1977 autobiography…

Too often, a retrospective comes too late. Such is the case with “Just Beyond,” a survey of works by late Trinidadian Canadian painter Denyse Thomasos at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Carefully pieced together, the exhibition of acrylics on canvas, works on paper, and archival materials (personal photographs, sketchbooks) follows the artist from her student work and early ventures in allegorical figuration to her murals and later bold formalist abstractions. While the career-wide selections of “Just Beyond” do illuminate key stylistic developments, Thomasos’s subjects particularly the architecture of cages, boats, and scaffolding flow through these classifications. Throughout her career, Thomasos revisited…

On a plane in 1967, singer Joni Mitchell read a passage from Saul Bellow’s novel Henderson the Rain King in which Henderson, also on a plane, looks out the window and marvels at how, having looked up at the clouds as a child, he had now “dreamed at the clouds from both sides as no other generation of men has done.” Mitchell followed suit, dreaming down at the clouds, studying the scene through the porthole with renewed attention. On that flight, she began writing “Both Sides Now”: “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now From up and down and still somehow It’s…

One November night in 1974, a boisterous crowd spilled out onto 57th Street in Manhattan as a new gallery opened in what was then the center of the art establishment and its elite power brokers. Linda Goode Bryant, a 25-year-old single mother fueled by a vision and some debt, opened the space to support an emerging group of Black conceptual artists whose work strayed from the representational mode celebrated in Harlem the city’s Black art Mecca while going unrecognized by New York’s white art world. At the gallery known as Just Above Midtown, they found a home. The gallery is…

The Jack Hanley Gallery is set to close in New York’s TriBeCa neighborhood after thirty seven years in operation reports. The gallery was established in Austin, Texas, in 1987 as Trans Avant Garde Gallery; founding dealer Jack Hanley moved the business to San Francisco in 1990, changing its name to the current one. Hanley for a short time in the 2000s ran a second space in Los Angeles but closed both California galleries in 2008 and set up shop in New York. From its inception, Jack Hanley Gallery sought to elevate little known artists, in the 1990s giving future heavy hitters such…

Lately, art fans in the three biggest cities in the US (and no doubt elsewhere) have found themselves surrounded by ceramics. At museums, galleries, and fairs, artists working in this ancient medium are showing work ranging from classic forms like cups and vases to figurative and abstract sculpture. Allow us to start with a litany of such shows, in no particular order. In New York, Kathy Butterly’s diminutive pieces sold out at James Cohan at $45,000 each. Nicole Cherubini’s show at Friedman Benda nearly sold out at prices up to $65,000. Ruby Neri’s work was on view uptown at Salon 94,…

An Artemisia Gentileschi painting entered the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., marking the first work by the artist to join the museum’s holdings. The painting, titled Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy (ca. 1625), was thought to be lost until it resurfaced in 2011 in a French private collection. In 2014, it headed to auction at Sotheby’s, where it sold for $1.1 million, at the time notching a new auction record for Gentileschi. In the 12 year long interval between that Sotheby’s auction and the present, Gentileschi has achieved mainstream recognition especially following the #MeToo movement of the late 2010s, when her paintings of…

San Francisco’s Rena Bransten Gallery, known for championing BIPOC and female artists since 1975, will close on November 22, along with its current Oliver Lee Jackson exhibition. The operation will shift its focus to remote programming and collaborative exhibitions at various venues. “The economics of running a brick and mortar gallery once supported by a steady flow of sales, institutional partnerships, and walk-in engagement has shifted, asking us to consider new models,” wrote gallery owners Rena and Trish Bransten in a press release. “As John Waters observed when told we were closing our space, ‘It is the end of an era.’”…