Looking ahead: In October, The Morgan Library & Museum will open the exhibition, David Hockney: Drawing from Life. The show will focus on his portraits on paper as well as an exploration of his drawing practice. Featuring about 100 drawings, the exhibition will trace a trajectory from Hockney’s early works as a student, to his Ingres-like portraits of the 1970s, and his return to the sketchbooks in the early 2000s. 

The exhibition will be unique in exploring Hockney’s practice on paper through a small group of sitters he has depicted repeatedly over the years: his muse and confidante, the designer Celia Birtwell; his mother; his friend and curator Gregory Evans, master printer Maurice Payne; and the artist himself. Each of these individuals have been important to Hockney. Over time he has rendered them in different forms: pencil, pen and ink, pastel drawings, etchings, photo-joiners, camera lucida, iphone and ipad drawings. In re-visiting these people over decades, Hockney gives us a unique insight into how his practice has evolved over time. 

David Hockney: Drawing from Life is scheduled to open on October 2 and run through May 30, 2021. The Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, NY, NY Info The exhibition is  organized by the National Portrait Gallery, London, in collaboration with the artist and the Morgan Library & Museum.

Top: David Hockney, My Parents and Myself, 1976, © David Hockney, courtesy of the David Hockney Foundation; from David Hockney: Drawing from Life, which accompanies the exhibition. Right: David Hockney, Self Portrait 26th Sept., 1983

Kerry James Marshall, who has been engaged in a dialogue with six centuries of representational painting, at the center of which is critical recognition of the conditions of invisibility long ascribed to Black figures in the Western pictorial tradition, is now featured on David Zwirner Gallery’s Studio page.

Two  new paintings introduce a planned series of works by the artist that reference John James Audubon’s nineteenth-century magnum opus, The Birds of America, and expand the creation of what Marshall calls a “counter-archive” to bring the Black figure back into the narrative of the Western canon.

His first two canvases officially debut Thursday in an online show, “Studio: Kerry James Marshall,” at David Zwirner Gallery.

Reported in The New York Times, Helen Molesworth, who was a co-organizer of a 2016-17 retrospective of Mr. Marshall’s work, “Kerry James Marshall: Mastry,” when she was chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, said that his foregrounding of birds was significant.“He’s known as a figurative painter, but in these he has left the human figure out,” said Ms. Molesworth, who has seen photographs of the new paintings.

“His paintings have been filled with birds all along,” she added. “If you wanted to go birding in a Kerry James Marshall show, you could. People were paying so much attention to the human figure in his work, the birds may have gone unexamined.” Above: Kerry James Marshall, “Black and part Black Birds in America: (Grackle, Cardinal & Rose-breasted Grosbeak),” 2020, copyright © and  courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner.

Seattle artist Joseph Rossano uses the spectacle of art to disarm an audience, as he mines his materials and scientific data to explore truths about man and nature. On the surface, it appears as though he is manufacturing representational art; the hidden reality, however,  is quite different.

Through the use of contextually significant materials, the artist’s work relates an environmental truth hidden in plain sight. Using an artistic rendering of the fossil record, past, present, and future, the "Ivory.125" exhibition, at Seattle's Pilchuck Gallery, reveals how our legacy as a species is inexorably tied to a value system designed to insure familial survival. Towards the transmission of this reality, Ivory exposes viewers to the global trade in illegal animal parts, it's flawed connection to power, and its devastating effects. 

Joseph Rossano | Ivory.125 opens July 30, 2020 at the Pilchuck Gallery, 240 Second Avenue South, Suite 100, Seattle, WA. The exhibition is organized in partnership with Traver Gallery. Info Learn more at rossanostudio.com 

This just in from The Seattle Times: Within days of being informed that the parent company of the Seattle Art Fair has not only pulled the plug on the 2020 iteration, but has also closed the division that presents the fair, 40 local galleries have banded together to create the Seattle Deconstructed Art Fair. This DIY version of the summer’s major art event, which reportedly draws between 15,000 and 22,500 people each year, might be the crest of the post-Pandemic art wave.The idea is simple and barely a week old: galleries will announce their own decentralized fair (each gallery hosting its own show in its own space for the month of August), build a group website, then do whatever they like. 

A deconstructed, at-home art fair has other advantages over the more institutional kind: Gallery directors don’t have to apply (or suffer rejection letters), don’t have to travel or ship artwork back and forth, don’t have to play by art fair rules (like how much work they can cram into a booth). And it cost less.

Pioneer Square galleriest Greg Kucera, who floated the proposal in July, after he and fellow director John Braseth (Woodside/Braseth Gallery) had kicked around the idea for a few months. says, “I’ve got a beautiful painting by Helen Frankenthaler we’ll be able to show more gracefully,” Kucera said. “The art fair’s lighting is only so good, their walls are scrappy — our walls are not scrappy and our light is not crappy.” (Kucera will also show work by Humaira Abid, Chris Engman and Anthony White, among others.)

L.E.S. Summer Night: As New York City galleries cautiously re-open—mostly by appointment—The Lo-Down announced that on Thursday, 24 galleries on the Lower East Side will be open late to celebrate current exhibitions throughout the neighborhood. An interactive map of the participating galleries can be viewed at this link. Callicoon Fine Arts, at 49 Delancey Street,  announced that this will be the last day of the current exhibition, which features. Kahlil Robert Irving, Spring streets & stars | Rose Memories & foil (To: Jack), 2019, above.