Thursday, January 11, 6-8pm: Mika Tajima | Energetics at Pace

Through her multidisciplinary practice spanning performance, sculpture, painting, and installation, Mika Tajima takes up questions of identity and agency in a world increasingly influenced and mitigated by technology. Drawing on various points of reference—from physics, philosophical writings and biology—the artist imbues her work across mediums with scientific and philosoculturalphical import. 

The exhibition takes its title from a segment of physics focused on flows and transformations of energy. Enactments of glowing, burning, blooming, and dying will recur across the gallery space, which, in Tajima’s hands, becomes a stage for spiritual and physical transfigurations, traversing digital and ancient temporalities. With these new works, the artist invites questions of what it means to be an individual within this deep time continuum and, in this contemporary moment, amid the inexorable rise of big data.

Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY Info

Thursday, January 11, 6-8pm: Book Vitrine | Charles Ritchie Drawings at Bravin Lee

The drawings of Charles Ritchie find inspiration in the artist's suburban home which is rigorously recorded over extended periods in various states. His views are usually small in size and frequently created in series. The primary media used are watercolor, pen and ink, graphite, and various charcoals, chalks and crayons. Note: very little info available prior to opening, but this work looks very inviting.

BravinLee Programs, 526 West 26th Street #211, New York. NY Info

Thursday, January 11, 6-8pm: Desert Coast | Seven Elder Aboriginal Painters at Salon 94

Desert + Coast celebrates the dynamic contemporary art practices that persist and advance from across the Australian continent. Indigenous women pioneered a new, co-created era of painting in Australia in the late twentieth century, and the works in this exhibition—each pushing the boundaries of scale and color, tradition and depiction—are rich examples of the vanguard of Aboriginal painting, memory, and narration.

From the deserts, Pitjantjatjara women Betty Muffler and Maringka Burton work from—and heal—the arid, sun-scorched Aangu Pitjantjatjara Yankuntjatjarra (APY) Lands, while Pintupi artists Mantua Nangala and Yukultji Napangati paint stories belonging to women in the remote communities where they live and work. By contrast, the rich traditions and coastal landscapes of northern Arnhem Land are reflected in the colorful, expressive paintings of Yolu artists Dhambit Munugurr and Nogirra Marawili on eucalyptus bark and board, while Kaiadilt artist Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori feverishly painted her relationship to her traditional home of Bentinck Island in an unprecedented outburst of creative energy and aesthetic reconfiguration.

Salon 94, 3 East 89^th Street, New York, NY Info

Closing Saturday, January 13: Cynthia Lahti | Little Storms at Fuentes

Reviewed in the New York Times: There’s a contrary beauty to Cynthia Lahti’s gloopy ceramic figures, like some romantic ideal chewed on and emerging gnarled, but more emotionally recognizable for it. Her figures appear like dazed Meissen porcelains, jolted from their lives of leisure into messier, more honest ones. Their poses are a taxonomy of anxiety — hunched, slumped, sheltering a cigarette against a nonexistent gust — with expressions that strain legibility, though whether a face is pinched in pain or perturbation is mostly a matter of degrees. “Green Lady” (2011), its mottled coloring closer to oxidized metal, is either overcome by anguish or shielding her eyes from the sun. Either way, she’s not having a nice time.

James Fuentes, 55 Delancey Street, New York, NY Info

Closing Monday, January 15: Ruth Asawa | Through Line at the Whitney

For Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), drawing served as a center of gravity—the activity she described as her "greatest pleasure and the most difficult." Although now widely recognized for her wire sculptures, Asawa drew daily. Her exploratory approach to materials, line, surface, and space yielded an impressive range of drawings that speaks to her playful curiosity and technical dexterity as well as her interest in the aesthetic possibilities of the everyday.

Organized thematically and inspired by her inquisitive approach to making art, the presentation comprises more than one hundred works, many of which have never been exhibited. Together, they capture the boundless energy and generous spirit of Asawa, who believed that "art is not a series of techniques, but an approach to learning, to questioning, and to sharing."

Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY Info

News from the Home Office: Save the Date, Thursday, January 18, 6-8m, Center for Book Arts

Please join me on Thursday, January 18 from 6 to 8pm for the opening of Hello Thank You Come In: 50th Anniversary Members Exhibition at the Center for Book Arts. I am thrilled to be joining this stellar group of book makers including Rosaire Appel, Biruta Auna, Roni Gross, Barbara Mauriello, and Buzz Spector, to name a few. Above: @peggy.roalf,  Stryker, 2023 

The interior pages of this book, “Stryker” are done with Sumi ink on fine newsprint. The covers are Sumi ink on double layers of Japanese rice paper, glued together and ironed. See a video of the entire book here

Center for Book Arts, 28 West 27^th Strteet, New York, NY Info

Closing Sunday, January 28: Henry Taylor | B Side at the Whitney

This is the first exhibition to survey the career of leading contemporary artist Henry Taylor (b. 1958). Through painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation, this retrospective, with over 150 works, celebrates an artist widely appreciated for his unique aesthetic, social vision, and freewheeling experimentation. 

Taylor’s figurative work, populated by friends, relatives, strangers on the street, athletes, politicians, and entertainers, showcases an imagination that encompasses multiple worlds. Informed by experience, his work conveys fundamental empathy through close examination and sharp social criticism. 

Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY Info