Continuing through August 20 at Pace Gallery, NYC

Alicja Kwade | TransForm

Alicja Kwade transforms materials and environs into immersive laboratories where viewers are encouraged to question their understanding of the universe that surrounds them—as she did last summer for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Commission. What defines an object in Kwade’s scenarios is based on the subjective interpretation of the viewer, including societal value, language, and function. Kwade imagines the unimaginable by illustrating her deepest existential questions revolving the nature of perception and illusions.

The symbolism and sensory experience of the objects featured in Kwade's TransForm suggest that with the transformation of material, geological time is contained in the objects on view that evoke a solar system.

Alicja Kwade: TransForm | Hiding in Plain Sight, through August 20 at Pace Gallery. 540 West 29^th Street, NY, NY. Info

Continuing through October 24 at Redcat, Los Angeles, CA

Aria Dean, Suite! 

A newly-commissioned video and installation by Los Angeles-born and New York-based artist Aria Dean, Suite! stars a chorus line of Kudzu plants accompanied by an original score. The work’s choreography combines the artist’s motion-captured movements with online video content, including a range of traditions such as Broadway musicals, 20^th-century avant-garde dance, ballet, and pop choreography. Above: Photo © Brica Wilcox

Using Kudzu as a proxy, Dean models a weird porosity between the artist’s role as a maker, a product, as well as a subject. Kudzu—an invasive plant species that dominates the southeastern United States, both in its landscape and its cultural imaginary—overtakes the sides of roads and buildings throughout the region; the species also appears frequently in Southern Gothic literature, rendered as a structural parasite that smothers all other plant life. The only way to kill it is to burn it. As Dean proposes, people, landscapes, objects, and concepts are connected by death and haunting as in the Gothic tradition and contemporary allusions to the walking dead. Dean’s interest in Kudzu lies in its resonance with Blackness as a sort of viral force capable of reproducing without any system of classification, as well as its capacity to provide an inhuman, pseudo-organic proxy object for the artist’s digital presence within the work.

Aria Dean, Suite continues through October 24, 2021 at Redcat; 631 West 2^nd Street, Los Angeles, CA Info

Opening reception, August 21, noon-5 pm at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, NYC

Don’t Shut Up | Group show, 47 artists

Don’t Shut Up 2021 was conceived as a response to the silencing of women and for the need to raise women’s voices as in #MeToo #NeverthelessShePersisted #DontShutUp #TimesUp. Writer, historian and activist Rebecca Solnit says: “Having a voice is crucial.… By redefining whose voice is valued, we redefine our society and its values.” Don’t Shut Up presents the work of 47 woman-identifying artists from across the US and Canada who are working to challenge and disrupt the status quo through their ongoing artistic practice. This multimedia exhibition provides a platform for those voices. 

DART subscriber Barbara Lublilner writes, The pieces in my series reference flowers, women's lips, female energy, and gender politics. Each one is a "snapshot" of a woman's reaction to sexism, injustice, and/or abuse. Together they form an album of responses: don’t bristle silently, don’t swallow a bitter pill, don’t self-censor, don’t hold back. Above: Barbara Lubliner, Soft Petal, one of  eight works included

Don’t Shut Up is free and open to the public with registration requestied. Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden, 1000 Richmond Terrace, Staten Island, NY Info Online discussions

Opening reception Thursday, August 12, 6-9 pm at El Barrio's Artspace PS109, NYC
Second Annual Women Celebrate Women | Group show, 71 Artists 

Curated by New York-based mixed media artist, teaching artist and jewelry designer, Yvonne Lamar-Rogers, the exhibition includes works by 71 local artists working in all disciplines to celebrate and honor diversity in New York’s female visual arts community. Lamar-Rogers says the mission of this year’s Women Celebrate Women exhibition is to celebrate and honor women of all backgrounds, quoting Black feminist playwright Ntozake Shange: “Where there is a woman, there is magic.”  Left: Peggy Roalf, SSP #8, 2020, one of three pieces by yrs truly in the show / @peggy.roalf

The public is invited to view the works at El Barrio’s Artspace PS109, a previously abandoned public school building that was transformed into a community housing/studios complex for artists. The circa-1899 landmark building offers beautiful space for the arts as well as important cultural programming in the East Harlem community. 

Second Annual Women Celebrate Women, opening Thursday, August 12, 6-9 pm, at El Barrio’s Art- space PS109, 215 E. 99th Street, New York, NY 10029. The exhibition will remain on view through August 25th. 
For more information about Women Celebrate Women and El Barrio’s Artspace PS109,
please email women.celebrate.women21@gmail.com and elbarriosartsspace@gmail.com. You can also find them on Instagram @ylamarrogers and @elbarrios_artspace. 

Looking ahead: 

September 3 | Nellie Mae Rowe at the High Museum

During the last fifteen years of her life, Nellie Mae Rowe (1900–1982) lived on Paces Ferry Road, a major thoroughfare in Vinings, Georgia, and welcomed visitors to her “Playhouse,” which she decorated with found-object installations, handmade dolls, chewing-gum sculptures, and hundreds of drawings. Really Free is the first major exhibition of Rowe’s work in more than twenty years and the first to consider her practice as a radical act of self-expression and liberation in the post-civil rights-era South. Above: When I Was a Little Girl, 1978

The exhibition will offer a close view of how she cultivated her drawing practice later in life, starting with colorful and at times simple sketches on found materials and moving toward her most celebrated, highly complex compositions on paper. Through photographs and reconstructions of her Playhouse created for a documentary on her life, the exhibition puts her drawings in direct conversation with her art environment.

Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe, September 3-January 9, 2022. High Museum of Art, 1280 Peachstreet Street NE, Atlanta, GA. Info

Opening September 4 | SFMOMA, San Franscisco

Joan Mitchell: A Retrospective

Joan Mitchell explores the artist’s evolution as she sought to unify physical experience with the psychological and emotional. A sense of place imbues Mitchell’s paintings, from remembered vistas of Chicago, New York, Paris and the Mediterranean coast, to Vetheuil, the village outside of Paris where the artist eventually made her home. Above: To the Harbormaster, 1957

The exhibition contextualizes the ways in which social dynamics shaped perceptions of and possibilities for Mitchell and her work. Throughout her life, the artist grappled with the conflict between the social roles prescribed by her gender and social status and her desire for true creative freedom. The transnational nature of Mitchell’s existence is yet another way she defies easy categorization. Over the years, both New York and Paris claimed her, and vividly different perceptions of her work in the U.S. and France developed. Joan Mitchell examines these diverging views and reconciles them into a cohesive portrait of a complex individual and the outstanding art she produced.

Photographs of views that inspired Mitchell will be shown alongside her painterly responses, capturing the way she maintained a connection to the natural world and to everyday life. Sketchbooks, drawings, letters and other archival materials will shed further light on the artist’s process and perspective. Above: Untitled, 1992

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published in association with Yale University Press. Presenting groundbreaking research and a variety of perspectives on her art, life and includes artistic and literary responses to Mitchell’s work by writer Paul Auster, composer Gisèle Barreau, poet and essayist Eileen Myles, artist Joyce Pensato and painter David Reed in dialogue with conservator Jennifer Hickey.  Info

Joan Mitchell: A Retrospective, September 4, 2021-January 17, 2022. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), 151 Third Street, San Francisco, CA Info

Opening September 22 at the Austrian Cultural Forum and Undercurrent, NYC 

un/mute

What do communication and collaboration mean in a time of uncertainty and isolation? How is the artistic process impacted by going “fully remote”? In un/mute, artists from 10 countries were paired to explore these questions. Recognizing that effective communication requires active engagement of all the senses and an openness to diversity, interpretation and digitalization, they ask: What does that look like in practice? The project challenged teams to overcome the limitations of lockdowns as they connected across artistic mediums, language, culture, generations and time zones to find new forms of expression and meaning within art.

un/mute is the physical manifestation of online conversations among strangers who became collaborators. What began as abstract, ephemeral and digital are now 14 tactile, analog and concrete artworks presented across two locations. The artists confronted the parameters imposed by the lockdowns and each team found creative solutions that we might all learn from. The common thread that runs through the sculptures, installations, films, drawings, photographs and performances is the importance of language

un/mute, September 22, 2021 through January 7, 2022 at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, 11 East 52nd Street, New York, NY Info ; and Undercurrent, 70 John Street, Brooklyn, NY. Info

EXHIBITING ARTISTS: Eren Aksu (Germany), Anna Bera(Poland), Aaron Bezzina (Malta), Alex Camilleri (Malta), Mariella Cassar-Cordina (Malta), Saddie Choua (Flanders, Belgium), Sanne De Wilde (Flanders, Belgium), FOQL (Poland), Gabriel Gervickait (Lithuania), Nicola Ginzel (Austria), Justyna Górowska(Poland), Kris Grey (NYC), Kyle Hittmeier (NYC), Ada Van Hoorebeke (Flanders, Belgium), Olesja Katšanovskaja–Münd(Estonia), Mo Kong (NYC), Yi Hsuan Lai (NYC), H. Lan Thao Lam(NYC), Marie Lukáová (Czech Republic), Sheila Maldonado(NYC), Ieva Mediodia (Lithuania), Emmanuel Massillon (NYC), Alex Mirutziu (Romania), Luisa Muhr (Austria), Barbara Maria Neu(Austria), Emily Shanahan (NYC), Sydney Shavers (NYC) and Terttu Uibopuu (Estonia).