Continuing through January 29, 2022: Meghann Riepenhoff: Ice, Haines Gallery

Meghann Riepenhoff, whose work was most recently seen in NYC at the New York Public Library,  in 2019, lives and works in Bainbridge Island, WA. She creates her camera-less cyanotypes in collaboration with the elements, placing paper coated with homemade emulsion directly within the landscape. As they make contact with photographic materials, weather and water work together to produce lush, complex surfaces that invite us to consider the power and grace of the natural world. Ice features works from Riepenhoff’s latest series of the same title, which she began in 2015. Expanding on her earlier bodies of work—Littoral Drift and Ecotone—Riepenhoff creates her Ice cyanotypes in freezing waters, from the snow banks of Aspen to remote creeks in western Washington. Above: Meghann Riepenhoff, Ice #144, 2020 

“The work expresses how water moves through topographies,” the artist explains, and “how we are disrupting the surface.” A photographic record of the changing states of water and its constant motion, Ice and Ecotone invite us to meditate on the passage of time, and on our impact on the environment, as we change the earth’s temperatures and topographies. 

This exhibition is complemented by the release of Riepenhoff’s second monograph, jointly published by Radius Books, Santa Fe and Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, with text by Rebecca Solnit. Info

Haines Gallery, 49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA Info3

Currently on view: Calligraphy by Tong Yang-Tze, M+ Museum

Over a long career spanning four decades, Tong Yang-Tze has received critical acclaim for her large-scale, unrestrained cursive script. Now her work can be seen at the M+ Museum, which opened last week in Hong Kong. Info

Now in her late 70s, she is considered one of Taiwan’s foremost calligraphers and artists. Tong began her study of calligraphy at the age of eight with the practice of copying ink rubbings from ancient stone inscriptions. Recognized early on for her exceptional talent, she earned a degree in fine arts from National Taiwan Normal University, and then pursued further visual art study in the United States. After returning to Taiwan, her experimental approach fused Western theories of painting with the traditional lines and brushstrokes that form the foundation of Chinese calligraphy. In recent years, the artist has promoted the ancient art of Chinese script in experimental ways that cross disciplines of design, visual art, digital media, and performance to resonate in the modern world. Image above courtesy of M+ Museum

Continuing through December 18: Chioma Ebninama | Lay all your love on me!, Salon 94

For the works in lay all your love on me, Chioma Ebinama (b. 1988, Maryland, USA) washes watercolor with Sumi ink and ground coffee to form intuitive and intricate symbolic designs often haunted by hybrid creatures and kindly spirits—on handmade cotton rag paper. The ephemeral materiality of these delicate works seems to suspend the elements of a lyric tale in three dimensions. Alluding to representational forms, the artist’s rhyme between the loosely coiled twines of hair crowning a suite of nymphlike beings (nchekwbe [hope], and iwe iwe [bitterness], both 2021) and the latticed limbs of a climbing hedge studded with thistle and crimson blossoms (gol o bol bol, 2021) also set the scene for an allegory or epic to unfold off the page. Info

Salon 94, 3 E 89th Street, NY, NY Info

Continuing through December 18: Sites of Knowledge | Contemporary Works on Paper, Jane Lombard Gallery

Featuring artworks by Jane Bustin, Squeak Carnwath, Sarah Dwyer, Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens, Teppei Kaneuji, T.J. Dedeaux-Norris, Lucy & Jorge Orta, Enrico Isamu Oyama, Dan Perjovschi, Lucas Reiner, Stefan Saffer, Elizabeth Schwaiger, Howard Smith and Courtney Tramposh, this exhibition highlights the relationship between artist, medium and surface, and the marks made in the process.

Despite their differences in approach, each artist has in common the use of paper as a mechanism for intimate experience. Whether in the form of words, lines, shapes, splatters, or sprays, marks exist as echoes of collision points, traces of response, artifacts of substance, form, volume, and surface. They embody the applied energy of their maker through gestural changes of rhythm and help communicate emotion through visual sequence in an intimate way. Left: Enrico Isamu Oyama, FFIGURATI #343, 2021; courtesy Jane Lombard Gallery
Jane Lombard Gallery, 58 White Street, NY,NY Info

Continuing through December 31st:  Bridget Conn | Language Acquisition: Evolution, Averitt Center for the Arts

"Language Acquisition is an exploration of gesture, symbolism, intuitive mark-making, and written language through the medium of chemigrams, the artist writes. "Created without a camera or negatives, chemigrams are made by exposing silver gelatin photo paper to light and traditional darkroom chemistry. The variety and possibility for color, texture, value, shape, and line is nearly infinite, creating a state of mystery that mirrors my investigations into the ambiguity, and sometimes failure, of verbal communication. I use gesture to invent my own vocabulary, and also deconstruct letterforms to embed the power of words into abstracted photographic collages and sculptures.

"For Subliminal Motion, I envisioned creating a gesture that would distill the concept of the handmade mark of the artist into a simple, universal form. I find the creation of the repeated mark meditative, as well as the process of creating dozens of chemigrams all united by the same variable of the circle / swirl form."

Averitt Center for the Arts, 33 East Main Street, Statesboro, GA Info

Continuing through January 9, 2022: Really Free | The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe, Hight Museum of Art

Really Free is the first major exhibition of Nellie Mae 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. Rowe created her first works as a child in rural Fayetteville, Georgia, but only found the time and space to reclaim her artistic practice in the late 1960s, following the deaths of her second husband and her longtime employer. Above: Nellie Mae Rowe, When I Was a Little Girl, 1978, crayon, oil pastel, marker, colored pencil, and pencil on paper.

The exhibition offers an unprecedented view of how she cultivated her drawing practice late in life, starting with colorful and at times simple sketches on found materials and moving toward her most celebrated, highly complex compositions on paper. Drawn from the High’s substantial collection of her work, the exhibition is also the first to put her drawings in direct conversation with her art environment. Info

High Museum of Art, 1280 Peachtree Street NE, Atlanta, GA 

Live Online

Saturday, November 20, 2021, 2pm: Nathaniel Mary Quinn and Arthur Lewis in conversatio, The Broad, Los Angeles

Each of us is a cacophony of experience. Not just a seamless self.
—Nathaniel Mary Quinn

In his collage-like composite portraits derived from sources both personal and found, Nathaniel Mary Quinn probes the relationship between visual memory and perception. Fragments of images taken from online sources, fashion magazines, and family photographs come together to form hybrid faces and figures that are at once neo-Dada and adamantly realist, evoking the intimacy and intensity of a face-to-face encounter. Left: Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Diane, 2014; charcoal, oil pastel, paint stick and gouache on Lenox paper; courtesy of Gagosian Gallery

Also see the YouTube video featuring a raw musical performance by Raphael Saadiq; an intimate conversation between Nathaniel Mary Quinn and Amanda Hunt, director of public programs and creative practice at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles; and insightful commentary from writer and curator Ekow Eshun.

Saturday, November 20^{th, 2:00 pm}: Martin Parr, Maurizio Cattelan, Pierpaolo Ferrari on ToiletMartin PaperParr Book

Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore and Damiani invite you to an online book discussion with the artists, who will discuss their longtime collaboration and their current Villa Medici exhibition in Rome, art directed by Stourdzé and inspired by the ToiletMartin PaperParr Book. In this volume, Martin Parr’s ironic, full-color images combine perfectly with the irreverent and poignant wit created by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari. Presented back to back, the 120 vibrant images included in this compelling volume are sensually and visually appealing, as well as reflecting reality. Register