Thursday, November 30, noon-6pm: Artists Against the Bomb In Conversation at Judd

A series of conversations organized by Artists Against the Bomb on denuclearization, disarmament and atomic culture with artists Rachel Bronson, Lyndon Burford, Stephanie Dvareckas, Petuuche Gilbert, Adam Jonas Horowitz, Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky, Pedro Reyes, and Eric Schlosser. This event is free and open to the public, no reservation required. 

The Artists Against the Bomb poster campaign calls for universal nuclear disarmament, and is comprised of historical and newly commissioned posters that range across the fields of graphic arts, film, photography, sculpture, music, poetry and fiction and more. The exhibition  is accompanied by a publication that features all participating works. Order the publication. 

Judd Foundation, 101 Spring Street, New York, NY Info

Continuing: Pablo Picasso | 14 Sketchbooks at Pace

Each of the fourteen sketchbooks in the show is connected to well-known bodies of work by the artist, from his youthful experimentations in Spain and France around 1900 through the revolutionary developments of his time in Paris, and his final years in the South of France. These sketchbooks—exhibited alongside related ceramics, paintings, photographs, and archival materials—shed light on Picasso’s approach for many of his major works, including his iconic painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon(1907), part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Dora Maar in an Armchair (1939), part of the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and his large-scale War and Peace murals, completed in 1952. 

In addition to the works themselves, monitors installed atop the tables in the gallery space show images of all the pages from the sketchbooks in the exhibition, with each monitor running on its own loop to allow visitors to experience every sketchbook from cover to cover. A film about the making of the artist’s War and Peace murals in the French city of Vallauris will also be presented in the exhibition alongside his drawings for the project.

Pace Gallery, 540 West 22^nd Street, New York, NY Info

Continuing: Melvin and Rose Smith at Ft. Gansevoort

This presentation features a selection of key works from the vast, ongoing, collaborative project the visionary Minnesota-based artist couple Melvin Smith and Rose Smith refer to as Rondo, which consists of painted portraits made by Rose, and collages of urban scenes along with architectural sculptures made by Melvin. Initiated in the 1990s, Rondo documents the artists’ memories of civic life in their vibrant Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul, Minnesota as it existed prior to being bulldozed in the 1960s for construction of the Interstate 94 highway

The Smiths’ ongoing grand opus currently comprises over 150 individual artworks, a small fragment of which will be presented at Fort Gansevoort. The paintings, sculptures, and collages on view in Recollections of Rondo memorialize and celebrate a lost American place while raising urgent questions about the human toll extracted by the impact of eminent domain—a story echoed in cities across the United States. 

Rather than relying solely upon photographs and archival source materials, the Smiths create their work by drawing largely upon their own memories of place and personage to document and examine their recollections of the Rondo community. With the construction of Interstate 94 between 1956 and 1968, the Smiths witnessed first-hand the systematic leveling of their community and its culture—the process of so-called “urban renewal” that James Baldwin dubbed “Negro Removal.”   

Fort Gansevoort, 5 Ninth Avenue, New York, NY Info

Continuing: Friends and Lovers at Flag Art Foundation

Friends & Lovers looks at portraiture through the lens of Alice Neel’s assertion that she painted “pictures of people.” Just as a studio visit opens a window into an artist’s creative process, who they choose to immortalize through paint, bronze, photography, etc. similarly provides insight into who serves as their inspiration, be that a lover, partner, family member, friend, celebrity crush, or a fleeting encounter.   

Eschewing portraiture’s bourgeois associations, Neel sought to paint resonant, unheroic images of people in her life that were true to her experience of them, as seen in a bracing 1952 painting of her doe-eyed, young son Hartley. Likewise, works by fifty contemporary artists encompass a range of tender, unexpected, complex, and personal moments with and connections to their sitters, creating urgent and ultimately timeless pictures of their people. 

Flag Art Foundation, 545 West 25th Street, 9th Floor, New York, NY Info

Continuing: Kay WalkingStick | Hudson River School at N-Y Historical Society

The exhibition, places landscape paintings by the renowned, contemporary Cherokee artist Kay WalkingStick in conversation with highlights from New-York Historical’s collection of 19th-century Hudson River School paintings. This dialogue celebrates a shared reverence for nature while engaging crucial questions about land dispossession and its reclamation by Indigenous peoples and nations and exploring the relationship between Indigenous art and American art history. 

Highlights of the exhibition’s more than 40 works include two of WalkingStick’s paintings that are directly inspired by Hudson River School artists; the artist’s sole landscape referencing the Trail of Tears (a journey her Cherokee ancestors were forced to take); examples of her early painted sculptural abstractions inspired by nature; and several of her most recent paintings—like Nshow’siagara and Aquidneck After the Storm (above)—which overlay geographically specific abstract Indigenous patterns onto representational landscapes in order to re-assert an Indigenous presence long erased in European settlers’ depictions of North America as a pristine and unpopulated wilderness. Native American objectsove0 on loan from the artist and other museum collections, including woven baskets and ceramic jars, offer insight into WalkingStick’s source patterns and artistic process.

New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, New York, NY Info

Continuing: Amazonia at Pratt Manhattan

Amazonia, a group exhibition at Pratt Manhattan Gallery, offers an opportunity to explore the Amazon through artwork that shows, moves, sounds, and speaks. Amazonia artfully highlights the region’s native inhabitants, its colors, sounds, and textures — and its erasure.

Curator Berta Sichel and assistant curator Patricia Capa have amassed a group of artworks spanning across cultures and generations. Sichel and Capa began working on the exhibition in 2019; the concept behind Amazonia has been evolving ever since, first taking shape in the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain in 2021. “It is a very spontaneous process,” says curator Berta Sichel of planning the exhibition. “An exhibition is not like hanging some works on the wall, it is like writing a text with images and making all those  images work together and talk to each other to give the meaning.” And Amazonia is just that: a carefully crafted organism of an exhibition that derives its meaning from the communal discourse and exchange between each artist’s work. Amazonia asks us, in vivid color and texture: once intimately confronted with the Amazon’s reality, how are we, as witnesses, complicit in its extinction

The works in Amazonia rely on a balancing act between historical and contemporary contexts and sensory stimuli, highlighting the capacity of art to inspire a nuanced, ecological analysis of the Amazon. Throughout the exhibition, the region is materialized, unfurling through color and texture, while also calling upon us to confront a grave reality: the imminent danger of extermination. 

Pratt Manhattan Gallery, 144 West 14^th Street, New York, NY Info

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