Women’s Soccer “Forever” Stamp

With two World Cup titles along with Olympic gold medals to its name, the U.S. national women’s team is considered among the best in the world, and the odds-on favorite to win the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, which continues through August 20 in Australia and New Zeland. Growing up, illustrator Noah MacMillan was a devoted fan and player of the sport; he later did illustration work for Major League Soccer and several of its teams.

Antonio Alcalá, the art director for the stamp project, offered MacMillan the assignment after seeing his soccer-related work online. “It was clearly produced by someone who had an understanding and appreciation for the game,” Alcalá says. Taking inspiration from photos of Alcalá’s daughter, a former player, kicking a ball, MacMillan created an image that communicates the speed and dynamism of soccer even when scaled down to stamp size, and in the red, white and blue colors of the American flag. “Working with Noah was easy,” Alcalá says. “All of his ideas were strong.”  

MacMillan’s imaginative, colorful work had been featured in the American Illustration and Communication Arts and annuals, and his commercial and editorial clients included Adidas, The New York Times, Pepsi and Sports Illustrated. The artist had returned to School of Visual Arts for the MFA Illustration as Visual Essay; last summer he died of cancer at age 33. Courtesy of School of Visual Arts/Visual Arts Journal Info

Wednesday, July 26, 6pm: Street Dance/Hip Hop 50 Years at Manhattan West

Arts Brookfield partners with the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process for this free performance celebrating street dance and the 50th anniversary of hip-hop. This week you can experience UNDERSCORED, a multi-faceted project rooted in the intergenerational stories and memories of NYC underground club heads. The exhilarating journey will culminate in a dance party with DJ set by Bravo LaFortune on his birthday. (ephratasheriedance.com & instagram.com/bravobrahms) Photo ©Robert Altman

Works and Process at Manhattan West Plaza, 385 9^th Avenue at West 31^st Street, New York, NY Info  Map

Friday, July 28th, 6-8pm: Gayle Kabaker | Power + Joy at Pen + Brush

This just in from long-time DART subscriber Gayle Kabaker: Showcasing the work of Gayle Kabaker, as seen in the book Vital Voices, this exhibition of the artist’s process and womanhood loom large. Works tackle subject matter like placemaking, simplicity for simplicity’s sake, and a woman in dialogue with herself and nature. Image above from the artist's website

Kabaker celebrates women at various stages of life and through varying degrees of intimacy. In the works on view, Kabaker combines elements of more traditional painting techniques with printmaking and even digital work sans the conceptual barriers that often accompany such a combination. 

On opening night, Pen + Brush offers a Visible Women talking circle featuring:  Gayle Kabaker (8 time New Yorker cover artist), Alyse Nelson (Co-founder, President & CEO of Vital Voices, a global non-profit organization that invests in women leaders who are solving the world’s greatest challenges), Ariela Suster, (founder of fashion brand, Sequence Collection) and Dawn Delikat, Executive Director of Pen + Brush.  

Pen + Brush, 28 East 22^nd Street, New York, NY Info

Tom. Burckhardt | How We Got Into It at High Noon

While primarily known for his painting practice which has spanned almost four decades, Burckhardt has also been working on book pages for almost as long. Three years ago during lockdown, the book titles— which he used to obscure— began to drive narrative content amidst the context of national politics and the pandemic era. Books from the 30s or 40s contained daunting phrases like, “Can Fascism Happen Here?” or, “The New Fear”, welcoming the viewer to push the text into contemporary meanings. Chapter headings have a seductive, leading quality that allows the text threaded throughout the grid to become a sort of choose-your-own-adventure of refrigerator magnet poetry.

For this current exhibition, the artist has created chalk grid lines in the gallery’s long narrow space, which give a sense of visual logic to the utterly non-logical word cues. While the installation operates as an immersive whole, the works individually cut against the text, swamping and neutering it. Burckhard says,  “Old books about art, the social landscape, or self-help books have great chapter headings,” he explains, “But many don’t have any currency now. This work destroys and rescues them at the same time, giving the ideas some juice in today’s context.”  

For Hyperallergic John Yau wrote, “At once dramatic and withholding, funny and absurd, unsettling and apocalyptic, the phrases are ‘poetic’ in both an elusive and kitschy sense: NUPTIAL FLIGHT OF NEW SPERM CELLS; I PASSED AS A TEENAGER; TO THOSE WHO WILL KEEP THE STAUNCH HEART OF AMERICA ALIVE; THOSE WHO WERE NOT BORN THERE.

High Noon Gallery, 124 Forsyth Street, New York, NY Info

Special Collections of the Watson Library at The Met

One of New York’s hidden treasures is the Thomas J. Watson Library at The Met. A refuge for scholars and researchers, the library also hosts exhititions under glass: highly specific examples of unusual objects in the Watson Library’s collections. 

For the first time in three years, the Watson is presenting an overview of treasures in various categories, works in print from a 19^th-century cake catalogue to contemporary artists books. There’s also a table displaying treasures from The Costume Institute  Hours Instagram @costumeinstitutelibrary

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY