Continuing at Brookfield Place, acclaimed sculptor Jean Shin’s Floating Maze suspended above the grand staircase in the Winter Garden  engages its audience in a conversation about plastic waste, dietary choices and environmental stewardship. The installation consists of recyclable green plastic soft drink bottles (above). The Last Straw presents three macro and micro views of plastic waste, featuring different configurations and perspectives of colorful straws and reflective material.  Both works encourage viewers to contemplate their own plastic consumption and question the ecological impact of consumer behavior in contributing to plastic pollution.

Floating Maze and The Last Straw are curated by Kendal Henry for Arts Brookfield. Henry is an artist and curator who has specialized in the field of public art for nearly thirty years, and the Director of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Percent for Art Program.

Jean Shin is recognized for her monumental installations that transform everyday objects into elegant expressions of identity and community engagement. Her work has been widely exhibited in over 150 major museums and cultural institutions. Info

River To River, LMCC’s annual summer festival, continues through August, and currently features  Asiya Wadud’s ECHO EXHIBIT, in the Seaport District. Wadud, a multidisciplinary writer/dancer/performance artist recorded one-on-one telephone conversations between community members and writers, building poems using the words or themes of the conversation between individuals under quarantine as the content. 

Scattered throughout the Seaport District and Pier 17, you will find these poems as they continue to be unveiled during the coming weeks. See the map of poems for info

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Yesterday, Pace Gallery announced the launch of Superblue, a new enterprise pioneering an unprecedented model for artists to present their work—and for audiences to engage with it—outside of the traditional frameworks of museums and commercial galleries. The new enterprise was featured in an article published yesterday in The New York Times. Above: “Universe of Water Particles on a Rock Where People Gather,” a kinetic installation at teamLab Borderless, in Tokyo. Photo courtesy of teamLab and Pace Gallery

“Artists conjure up extraordinary universes that provoke new ideas about ourselves and make us reimagine our relationship with each other and the world,” stated Marc Glimcher, President and CEO of Pace Gallery. “We’ve been working with artists creating immersive, boundary-breaking experiential art for decades, and now, with the rapidly growing number of artists working in these media and their accelerating popularity, it became clear that a totally new kind of enterprise was needed to both advance their practices and respond to growing public interest in them. Superblue represents a necessary evolution and disruption of the arts ecosystem, providing artists with the resources they need for realizing their most ambitious ideas and engaging the public in the ways they envisioned.....”

Superblue works with artists who are among the pioneers and leading practitioners of experiential art and who reflect a wide range of artistic practices and experiences. They include: Nick Cave, Mary Corse, Es Devlin, DRIFT, Simon Heijdens, Jeppe Hein, Studio INI, JR, Koo Jeong A, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Kohei Nawa, Carsten Nicolai, Risa Puno, Random International, Michal Rovner, Jacolby Satterwhite, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Studio Swine, teamLab, James Turrell, and Leo Villareal. Superblue’s premiere experiential art center will launch in Miami, in the Allapattah neighborhood directly across from the Rubell Museum. More

El Museo del Barrio presents Popular Painters and Other Visionaries, the museum's first online exhibition to examine the work of 30 self-taught artists from the Americas and the Caribbean. Curated by El Museo's Chief Curator, Rodrigo Moura, and originally planned as an in-person experience, the exhibition was adapted as a virtual presentation that opens tomorrow and continues through November 8, 2020. 

The show departs from the term "popular painters", states the press release, to identify artists working on the margins of modernism and the mainstream art world between the 1930s and 1970s, and will feature nearly 30 works from El Museo's Permanent Collection, several of them presented for the first time. 

Popular visual sources provide the narrative thread of the exhibition, which is divided into thematic sections around labor and daily life; festivities; black Atlantic religion; vernacular architecture; and bodily representation. To view the online exhibition as of Thursday, August 6th, please visit El Museo's website. Above : Heitor dos Prazeres, Sem titulo (Jogo de Poker) [Untitled (Poker Game), 1963.

On Saturday evening, August 1, a group of 15 local artists in Portland, Oregon, participated in the “Wall of Artists,” a live painting action organized by the Portland-based painter Jonny Luczycki, reports Hyperallergic.

The artists placed their easels and art equipment at Chapman Square in downtown Portland,  where protesters have been bombarded by tear gas, rubber bullets, and other anti-riot ammunition on a nightly basis incited by Trump-ordered federal agents who were sent to the city to suppress protests for the past two months.

Luczycki said “People who read articles in the media have no idea what’s going on in Portland,” reported Hyperallergic. “They don’t see the injustice of how police have been responding to protests, the violence, the tear gas, and how First Amendment rights are being violated.”

Luczycki, who has been painting during protests for the past two weeks, said that he was tear-gassed by federal officers while making his art. In spite of this, he kept returning to the protests with his easel.

One of Luczycki’s paintings is based on a hospital mugshot of Donavan La Bella, a 26-year-old protester was severely injured after federal police shot him in the head with a rubber bullet. Luczycki created the painting next to a sidewalk that was still stained with La Bella’s blood. More