Tomás Saraceno, Silent Autumn (Installation View), via Tanya Bonakdar

On view this month at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York, artist Tomás Saraceno presents a body of new works that invite participants to attune to the intricacies of our entanglement with human, nonhuman and elemental forces. Across a spectrum of perceived realities and through works that connect differently with other beings and phenomena, Saraceno highlights how a considered co-existence encourages new ways of living together, while giving space to existing equitable collaborations with the atmosphere and wider environment. Read More »

Sayre Gomez, Halloween City (2022), via François Ghebaly

Currently on view at François Ghebaly’s Los Angeles exhibition space, artist Sayre Gomez continues his recent exploration of a unique approach to the cognitive mapping of late America, seen through the cultural and topographic specificity of Southern California’s urban sprawl. Continuing the exploration and depiction of ads, abandoned buildings, and other landscapes and scenes, Gomez’s work here, in Halloween City, takes on a particularly dark and dreary turn.  Read More »

H. R. Giger, HRGNYC (Installation View), via Lomex

Among the more hotly anticipated shows of the winter calendar in New York, Lomex is currently hosting a survey of works by  the renowned Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, opening in the gallery on January 29, 2022. The largest exhibition of Giger’s work in New York in nearly three decades, HRGNYC draws from the breadth of his entire career and displays his manifold talents in a vast array of media. Read More »

Eddie R. Aparicio, Holbein En Crenshaw (Washington Blvd. and Crenshaw Blvd., LA, CA) (2018), all images via Aidan Chisholm for Art Observed

Hauser & Wirth presents “The New Bend,” a group exhibition exploring the intergenerational legacy of quilting as a gendered, raced and classed mode of social practice. Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, the exhibition brings together twelve contemporary artists engaging with the Gee’s Bend Alabama quilting tradition: Anthony Akinbola, Eddie R. Aparicio, Dawn Williams Boyd, Diedrick Brackens, Tuesday Smillie, Tomashi Jackson, Genesis Jerez, Basil Kincaid, Eric N. Mack, Sojourner Truth Parsons, Qualeasha Wood, and Zadie Xa.

Tomashi Jackson, Among Fruits (Big Shane and the Farmer) (2021)

The New Bend renders apparent the enduring influence of the Gee’s Bend quilters, underscoring the weighty historical role of Black American women including Sarah Benning (b. 1933), Missouri Pettway (1902-1981), Lizzie Major (1922-2011), Sally Bennett Jones (1944-1988) and Mary Lee Bendolph (b.1935). Rooted in the hamlet of Gee’s Bend along the Alabama River in Wilcox County, this textile tradition extends from the 19th and 20th centuries to the present era, with contemporary artists mining the visual rhetoric and technical framework of quilting, while paying homage to the collective ethos of the communal practice. “The New Bend” highlights contemporary engagement with the Gee’s Bend legacy to posit the centrality of this tradition within Modernist art historical narratives of abstraction.

Coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the pivotal exhibition “The Quilts at Gee’s Bend” at The Whitney Museum of Art (2002-2003), “The New Bend” attests to the continued relevance of this textile practice in the context of twenty-first-century digitization. Russell evokes the rhetoric of digitization and computation to understand the cooperative networks enacted through quilt-making today, in this era of the Web 2.0 marked by the proliferation of participatory platforms within the decentralized internet domain. “The New Bend” does not position textile art as a reversion to the handmade in our digital era, but rather harnesses the rhetoric of computation and coding to appreciate the layered dynamics of quilting as simultaneously personal and communal, conjuring collective memories while perhaps envisioning alternate futures. In Qualeasha Wood’s work, the artist reflects upon the dynamics of surveillance and control within non-neutral digital infrastructures to explore the polemics of hypervisibility of Black female subjectivities.Ctrl+Alt+Del (2021), views the dynamics of surveillance and control within non-neutral digital infrastructures to explore the polemics of hypervisibility of Black female subjectivities.

Qualeasha Wood, Ctrl+Alt+Del (2021)

The gallery statement underscores the legacy of Gee’s Bend extending beyond art historical discourse: “What the quilters of Gee’s Bend reveal via their transformative cooperative work is that they are both artists and technologists, contributing simultaneously to art history, as well as to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) practice. This duality exists in the work of each artist featured in this exhibition and many more beyond who continue to grow in this tradition.”

Anthony Akinbola, Jubilee (2021)

Basil Kincaid, Four Eyes One Vision (2021)

Entering the intimate, second-floor space of the Chelsea gallery, viewers encounter Dawn Williams Boyd’s The Right to (My) Life (2017), a mixed media tapestry capturing an anti-abortion rally. This vibrant figurative work situates textile art as a mode of political intervention, conjuring the legacy of quilting as a mode of political conscious-raising amidst the Civil Rights Movement, particularly following the emergence of The Freedom Quilting Bee in Rehoboth, Alabama in 1966. Anthony Akinbola builds upon the sampling tactics of Gee’s Bend quilters through his use of the Du Rag, a vernacular emblem of Black American culture, in his Jubilee (2021). From the architectural paneling of Eric N. Mack’s boy on the edge of the shoreline in DES HOMMES ET DES DIEUX (2018) to the incorporation of soil from a former potato field in Tomashi Jackson’s Among Fruits (Big Shane and the Farmer) (2021), the vibrant works in “The New Bend” are enmeshed within a creative network encapsulating rich cultural heritage.

Dawn Williams Boyd, The Right to (My) Life (2017)

Diedrick Brackens, survival is a shrine, not the small space near the limit of life (2021)

– A. Chisholm

Related Links:
Exhibition Page [Hauser & Wirth]
Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers [Souls Grown Deep Foundation]

Ashley Bickerton, 0°36’06.2″N, 131°09’41.8″E 1 (2022), via Lehmann Maupin

This month, Lehmann Maupin presents Seascapes at the End of History, artist Ashley Bickerton’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery, continuing the artist’s bold and expressive use of sculpture and natural iconographies to create striking, illusory effects. Posed as a reappraisal of the seascape genre, the exhibition features work first conceived of while living in New York City prior to the artist’s relocation to the Indonesian island of Bali in 1993. An avid surfer, Bickerton’s work here draws on resin, fiberglass, corten steel and other materials to blend industrial material with natural iconographies.  Read More »

You Find Yourself Alone in the Middle of a Forest, curated by Nora Lucia Boyd and featuring Opal Mae Ong and Tyler Krasowski

Continuing its own intriguing and honed perspective on booth its surroundings in Los Angeles and on the model of the art fair, SPRING/BREAK has once again made arrived in the California city, launching a supplementary event that offers an ample supply of artists and galleries presenting in a concept that stands as a stark contrast to the traditional fair model. Launching this year in a new location in Culver City that continues the fair’s collaboration with the Skylight group of properties, the new space continues the scrappy, raw atmosphere of past years in a location that places the fair in closer proximity to the goings-on at Frieze Los Angeles Read More »

Tony Matelli at The Ranch, all images by Art Observed

As Frieze opens up shop for the week on the West Coast, the bevy of satellite fairs and event openings are underway across the city, including the always hotly anticipated Felix LA Art Fair, the brainchild of collector Dean Valentine that spreads works across the halls and rooms of the iconic Hollywood Roosevelt hotel. The show allows a unique mixture of intimate exhibitions and adventurous concepts that felt well-suited to the well-heeled patrons of the contemporary art market, both looking for a good piece of work and a unique experience while buying it.

Cynthia Talmadge at 56 Henry

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Chris Burden at Gagosian, all images via Art Observed

With the sun setting over the sprawling expanse of the Californian metropolis, the early hours of the third Frieze Los Angeles Art Fair are in the books, marking a much anticipated return after several years marked by logistical issues and the challenges of the pandemic. Opening this year at a new location on Wilshire Boulevard, the fair has doubled down on its vital engagement with the city, and with its thriving art scene, launching another strong event.   With strong sales reported and an energetic atmosphere across the fair, it would seem that the small-scale and focused approach of the fair had once again seen the fair brand making its case as an arbiter of thoughtful, curated approaches towards the market and its participants. Read More »

Pedro Coronal, Galeria de Arte Mexicano, all images by Anfisa Vrubel for Art Observed

The post-pandemic edition of ZonaMACO, the largest art fair in Latin America, came back this year with a revitalized and vibrant energy. Its location, Mexico City, has become a focal point in the art world and a haven for artists looking for creative possibilities. The Art Week brought together a dynamic assortment of art world insiders—emerging galleries and established cultural institutions, young artists and designers, and the usual cool kids on the scene. Surrounding the fair, the satellite events were bursting with activity, from gallery and museum openings to performances and parties, and the classic lunches at Contramar. Read More »