Fast Forward: Painting from the 1980s, opening today at the Whitney Museum of American Art, features works by nearly forty artists, including Carlos Alfonzo, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ross Bleckner, Peter Cain, Louisa Chase, Robert Colescott, Moira Dryer, Eric Fischl, Leon Golub, Keith Haring, Sherrie Levine, Joyce Pensato, Susan Rothenberg, David Salle, Kenny Scharf, Julian Schnabel, Julia Wachtel, Terry Winters, Martin Wong, among others.

Often through exuberant work that engaged with the heroic gesture or pop imagery, these artists explored the traditions of figuration and history painting, and offered new interpretations of abstraction. Many addressed fundamental questions about art-making in their work, while others took on political issues including AIDS, feminism, gentrification, and war.

Despite painting having been declared dead, artists renegotiated their commitment to the medium in the 1980s, in the face of a media-saturated environment. The medium suddenly came to represent an important intersection between new ways of seeing and a seemingly traditional way of making art—one full of possibility and thriving as many artists actively re-imagined what painting could be.

Fast Forward: Painting from the 1980s opens today and continues through May 17th  at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, NY, NY Info Above: Eric Fischl (b. 1948), A Visit To / A Visit From / The Island, 1983; courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change opens today at the International Center of Photography. The exhibition explores the relation between the seemingly endless stream of media images that confronts us on an unprecedented scale, and the volatile, provocative, and often-violent social world it mirrors.

Perpetual Revolution continues ICP’s long-standing tradition of exploring the social and historic impact of visual culture, proposes that an ongoing revolution is taking place politically, socially, and technologically, and that new digital methods of image production, display, and distribution are simultaneously both reporting and producing social change. The epic social and political transformations of the last few years would not have happened with the speed and in such depth if it weren’t for the ever-expanding possibilities offered by this revolution.

Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change presents six of these critical issues transformed by visual culture: #BlackLivesMatter, gender fluidity, climate change, terrorist propaganda, the right-wing fringe and the 2016 election, and the refugee crisis.

Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change opens today and continues through May 7 at the International Center of Photography, 250 Bowery, NY, NY Info Above: HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, thewayblackmachine (2014). Courtesy of HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN. Text derived from press releases.