Continuing: Gillian Wearing | Wearing Masks at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Featuring more than a hundred pieces, the first retrospective of Wearing’s work in North America traces the development of the British conceptual artist’s practice. Over her three-decade career, Wearing has focused equally on her own self-portraiture and on the depictions of others, testing the boundaries between the private and public, questioning fixed notions of identity, and frequently anticipating the cultural transformations wrought by social media. Throughout her works, masks serve as both literal props and metaphors for the performances each of us stage every day as individuals and as citizen
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY Info

Opening Thursday, December 16, 6-8 pm: Lydia Panos | Sleeping Beauty, exhibition and book launch  at The National Arts Club

Sleeping Beauty presents Lydia Panas' psychologically  charged color portraits of women and girls lying down or half-reclined in lush natural  settings; a metaphor for the positions, girls, and women have been placed in historically. Yet, the women and girls Panas photographed on her farm in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, look at the camera and viewer directly, with keen self-awareness.

In a catalog essay, Hyperallergic editor Seph Rodney writes, "Panas has said that this series, and indeed much of her earlier work, is concerned with her awareness that, women, especially, stay silent on matters in which they have a perspective, because they have been taught that they will be stopped. She explains that 'we learn it early and often and we follow suit.  Not that we necessarily believe it, but we are trained to stay silent.' In that vein, the women in this series are 'down' but with a wary eye, and about to 'get up.'"

The National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, NY, NY RSVP appreciated Monograph by MW Editions

Opening Thursday, December 16, 6-8 pm: Rewind, at Bruce Silerstein Gallery

Rewind celebrates the 20th anniversary of the gallery.  With select work from more than 100 exhibitions, the exhibition includes work by the many artists the gallery has shown over the years, among them Larry Silver (Bruce Silverstein's father), Mishka Henner, Brea Souders, Barbara Morgan, Frederick Sommer, André Kertész, and many others. Above: Brea Souders, French Bed and Moon, 2011

Bruce Silverstein Gallery, 529 West 20^th Street, NY, NY Info

Opening Thursday, December 16, 6-9 pm: Anita Thacher | Loose Corner

Loose Corner, the third solo exhibition of works by Anita Thacher (1940-2017) at the gallery, concentrates on an eponymous 16mm film installation, begun in 1980 and completed in 1986, employing surrealistic sensibilities and optical illusions created with analog film printing techniques to address everyday life and dreams within the domestic realm. A selection of associated photographs from a 1980 series created with optical processes, stage sets and cast of characters similar to those in the film is also on view. The exhibition follows the 16mm film component’s preservation by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences this year. Above: Shewei Cheng, Yuanming Yuan, Beijing, China, 2000

Microscope Gallery, 525 West 29th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY Info

Note from the Home Office

Opening Thursday, December 16, 6-8 pm: Group show at New York School of the Arts

I am excited to be included in this exhibition and hope you can join me for the opening tomorrow night! Or, email peggyroalfnyc@gmail.com for a one-to-one tour--until January 20, 2022. Above: Peggy Roalf, Untitled (Vulcan #1), 2021 Info @peggy.roalf

New York School of the Arts, 315 East 62^nd Street, NY, NY Info

Continuing: Lois Connor | Flat Earth, inaugural show at Penumbra’s new gallery space

Linda Conner has been photographing in Asia, Europe and America since the 1980s. Her photographs are astounding in their composition and detail, and confirm the possibility of an image that is both specific and general in regards to time, place and history.

Inspired by Chinese hand-scroll paintings and seduced by the exquisite tonal and quality reproduction of the platinum printing process, Conner’s meticulous contact-printing practice suggests simplicity. Yet it conceals the complex technical and formal decisions she makes with remarkable clarity of purpose.

Penumbra Foundation, 36 East 30^th Street, NY, NY Schedule an appointment

Extended through December 23: Matthew Brandt | Carbon, Birch, Silver, Rooms at Yossi Milo Gallery

The works in Carbon, Birch, Silver, Rooms continue Brandt’s experimental processes inspired by the natural world, and further articulate complexities within landscape picture-making traditions. Featured are black carbon prints, laser-engraved birch plywood pieces, gelatin silver prints doused in liquid silver, and a selection of reclaimed chandeliers from various rooms. Together, these works address the interrelationship of light and dark, and their influence on the subject, material, and observer.

For his Carbon series, Brandt collects the burned materials from sites devastated by recent California wildfires and uses them to explore the historic practice of carbon printing. The charred materials, mostly wood, act as the pigment, while blackout fabric is used instead of paper. Black on black, the images reveal themselves through a subtle tonality and glossy sheen. The final outcome acts like a memory: a window into a world where the subject of the work once existed.

Yossi Milo Gallery, 245 Tenth Avenue, NY, NY Info

Closing December 18: Ahmed Morsi, at Salon 94
This just in from Hyperallergic: The surrealist canon is currently undergoing a much-needed revision in the West – or, at the very least, on New York’s Upper East Side. Three exhibitions within a 20-block radius underscore the movement’s multifaceted, international character: a presentation of work by Polish artist Erna Rosenstein at Hauser & Wirth [Info]; the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s examination of surrealism in 45 countries, co-organized with Tate Modern [Info]; and, at Salon 94, New York, an intimate show of 12 paintings spanning six decades by Egyptian-born artist, poet and critic Ahmed Morsi. [Info] (The nonagenarian, a New York resident since 1974, is also featured in MoMA PS1’s quinquennial ‘Greater New York’ [Info]) Above: Ahmed Morsi, Clocks, 1996, at MoMA PS1 

Extended through February 26, 2022: Curious Devices & Other Objects, at Klompching Gallery

The exhibition brings together three artists—Jeanette May, Max de Esteban and Rebecca Hackemann—working with very different processes of photographing, but connected through their reverence for technological artifacts. One might describe them as performing a technological taxidermy, performing the role of memento mori for machines, and our connections to them, that have become obsolete and may soon be forgotten.

Klompching Gallery, 85 Water Street, Brooklyn, NY Info