Closing Sunday, November 14: Maya Lin | Ghost Forest, at Madison Square Park

Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest, a towering stand of forty-nine dying white cedar trees, is a newly-commissioned public art work that brings Lin’s artistic vision and her agency as an environmental activist into play. This project, which imbues the park with a collective memory of germination, vegetation, and abundance becomes a harsh symbol of the devastation of climate change. 

The height of each tree, around forty feet, overwhelms human scale and stands as a metaphor for the outsized impact of a looming environmental calamity. “In nature, a ghost forest is the evidence of a dead woodland that was once vibrant,” says Lin. Atlantic white cedar populations on the East Coast are endangered by past logging practices and threats from climate change, including extreme weather events that yield salt water intrusion, wind events, and fire. The trees here were collected from New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, which the artist explored several years ago with writer/environmental activist John McPhee.

Read the feature about Maya Lin in WSJ Magazine

Maya Lin | Ghost Forest, Madison Square Park, Fifth Avenue between 23^rd and 27^th Streets, NY, NY Info

Opening Friday, November 12: Ruby Neri | Leveled, at Salon 94

On the frontier between utopia and dystopia, Ruby Neri creates a world exclusively populated by wildly animated women. The artist states that the works in this show were materialized from our current political moment, with reproductive rights under attack. Leveled explores the artist’s thinking about women against women, and women for women. “I wanted to create a world outside the male gaze,” Neri explains.

A dozen figures are fashioned from clay, then glazed in her signature airbrushed and sprayed glaze technique—gesturing to her early years as a graffiti artist in San Francisco. Her distinctive palette of pinks, yellows, and blues plays off the strong chromatic qualities of her materials—including various types of clay with different intrinsic hues, plus glazes.

In addition to the figures, Leveled also includes a applied she applies to a panel whose surface is then dusted with more dry clay and dry pigments. Neri then scores the painting’s surface to define images, recalling the ancient technique of sgraffito. The resulting works present multifigure scenes of nude bodies rendered with raucous urgency, further animating the forms of the three-dimensional works. Read the feature in WSJ Magazine

Betty Woodman | House of the South is concurrently on view.

Woodman (1930–2018) was an early pioneer in the world of ceramics who for over sixty years created a hybrid of sculpture and painting that was highly inventive and unmistakably contemporary. House of the South (1996) spans over twenty feet of wall and comprises dozens of vessels in the round, as well as flat relief cutouts. The swirl of flattened and deconstructed vase forms suggests a room shaped by columns and balustrades that also serve to shape the gallery space. House of the South was featured in Woodman's groundbreaking exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2006, The Art of Betty Woodman, which was the artist’s first major exhibition in the US and The Met’s first solo presentation dedicated to a living woman artist; this work has not been publicly seen since.

Ruby Neri | Leveled and Betty Woodman | House of the South, Salon 94, 3 East 89^th Street, NY, NY Info. Make your appointment here

Continuing through January 9, 2020: Suzanne Valendon | Model, Painter, Rebel, at the Barnes Foundation

From a childhood marked by poverty to a career as an artist’s model for luminaries such as Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Suzanne Valadon (born Marie-Clémentine Valadon, 1865–1938) asserted her independence to defy the odds of becoming a successful artist in fin de siècle France. The first self-taught woman to exhibit at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, in 1909, she challenged behavioral codes with her art and lifestyle, breaking new ground with her unapologetic portraits and nudes—and her bohemian lifestyle. Above: Suzanne Valendon, The Blue Room; Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York; RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource

Once she did start painting, says Will Heinrich in the NYTimes, Valendon exhibited widely, and sold enough to support her unconventional family. But in the longer term her art was overshadowed by her son Maurice Utrillo’s career, diminished by the usual misogyny and obscured by prurient interest in her lifestyle. The show at the Barnes is a formidable display of her portraits, nudes, still lifes and drawings. Read the feature in The New York Times.

Suzanne Valendon | Model, Painter, Rebel continues through January 9, 2020 at The Barnes Foundation, 2025 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, Pa. Info

Online Public Programs:

Wednesdays, November 10-December 8, 6-8 pm Posers: A History of the Artist’s Model in European Painting 

Martha Lucy and Kedra Kearis; Wednesdays, November 10–December 8, 6 – 8pm 
This online course explores the behind-the-scenes realities of the artist’s model across time, focusing especially on the class and gender dynamics of the 19th-century studio.

Artist Bash: Vagina Chorus
Friday, November 12, 7 – 10pm 
Althea Rao’s Vagina Chorus speaks to key themes within the exhibition—desire, the female gaze, and a woman’s relationship with her body. This world premiere performance, presented through a unique partnership with Women’s Way, is an immersive audiovisual experience.

Continuing through December 5, 2021 | Two Generations of Women Printmakers: Atelier 17 and The Art Students League at The Art Students League of New York

The exhibition explores the intertwined histories of The League and the renowned avant-garde printmaking studio Atelier 17, which formed during interwar Paris in the late 1920s. Established by Stanley William Hayter (1901-1988), the studio, together with The League, produced some of the most accomplished female printmakers of the twentieth century. Above: Worden Day, The Great Divide, 1969. Woodblock print, 23” x 28”. Permanent collection of The Art Students League 

Atelier 17’s founder, Stanley William Hayter, took his first printmaking lessons in 1926 from Mary Huntoon (1896-1970), who had spent several years mastering the graphic arts at The Art Students League of New York. Huntoon’s instruction carried forward the pedagogy of her own teacher, Joseph Pennell (1857-1926), who had established a rigorous program at The League whereby students executed all aspects of the printmaking process themselves and were encouraged to test new technical approaches. Hayter emphasized this same technical proficiency and experimentation at Atelier 17, upon its founding only a few years after studying with Huntoon.

Featuring works by twenty-four artists, the exhibition spotlights the rich possibilities that printmaking presented to women across two generations of artists, the exhibition also traces the networks of sisterhood that these women built at The League. These relationships, both personal and professional, helped artists advance their careers in an art world that was frequently less supportive of entrepreneurial women. The final gallery space features prints and sculpture by Louise Nevelson and Dorothy Dehner, who met at Atelier 17 during the 1950s and continued to support one another’s art.

Two Generations of Women Printmakers: Atelier 17 and The Art Students League, organized by curator Dr. Christina Weyl, continues through December 5th at The Art Students League of New York, Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery, 215 West 57th Street, NY, NY Info

Chashama presents Home Room | Live and In Person 

The group exhibition Home Room  expands opportunities for artists to explore the evolution of their practice in a post-pandemic environment. The exhibition features installation work, performance art, new media, painting, photography, and more, giving expression to the often unfamiliar, hybridized environment that has become the norm post-March 2020 in New York City and beyond.Artists include Sato Yamamoto, Jacki Davis, Rebecca Poarch, Tom Bogaert, Shana Crawford, Ligia Bouton, Kahori Kamiya, Barbara Lubliner, Caito Stewart, and Katina Bitsicas. Monoprint, right, by Barbara Lubliner

Home Room | Live and In Person continues through December 6 at Chachama’s newest UES space at 1285 Second Avenue between 67/68^thStreets, NY, NY Info 

Thursday, November 11, 6:00 pm: Rosalind Fox Solomon and Lynne Tillman in conversation about Fox Solomon's new book The Forgotten, at Rizzoli Bookstore

On the occasion of her new book and solo exhibition at Foley Gallery, photographer Rosalind Fox Solomon will join writer Lynne Tillman in conversation to discuss her remarkable photographic career and the startling investigation into the relentless pursuit of power as seen in Fox Solomon's latest book 'The Forgotten’(MACK, 2021).

Rizzoli Bookstore, 1133 Broadway, NY, NY Register Above: Rosalind Fox Solomon, South Africa, 1990; courtesy of the artist and Foley Gallery

Solomon’s solo show of the same title continues at Foley Gallery through December 5th, at 59 Orchard Street, NY, NY Info

Read Christopher Bonanos' profile on Rosalind Fox Solomon in New York Magazine

Online

Continuing: Mostly Monochrome at WoartBlog.com

An online exhibition featuring artists using a mostly monochromatic approach to the creation of their work. Curated by Christina Massey, Founder of WoArt. Above: Monoprint in Flower Shadows by @loisbenderart 

Monday, November 15, 6:30-7:45pm: Riccardo Vecchio | 31 Degrees, Brooklyn Public Library
Join Riccardo Vecchio as he launches 31 Degrees, a public, multi-site mapping and mural project which draws attention to ecological inequalities in NYC neighborhoods. 31 Degrees [rendering below] gives visibility to environmental injustice through disparities in tree coverage and sets out to work with City agencies, organizations and communities to plant trees in neighborhoods that need them most.

After the presentation, Vecchio will be joined by Navé Strauss, Director of Street Tree Planting at the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation, and BPL Environmental Justice Coordinator Acacia Thompson, who also is a community greening activist leading Greenpoint Tree Corps. Info   Register

Notes from the Home Office

Thursday, November 11, 7-11' pm: The Ai-Ap Party, LIVE

We’re excited to bring the creative communities back to celebrate the winners in this year’s launch of the American Illustration 40 and American Photography 37 - along with last year’s American Illustration 39 and American Photography 36 books – and  the Int'l Motion Arts award.

Angel Orensanz Foundation
172 Norfolk, (off E. Houston), NYC. Map

More here