Opening March 3, 6:00-8:00 pm: Willie Birch | Chronicling Our Lives at Fort Gansevoort

The exhibition features large paintings on paper and painted papier-mâché sculptures created between 1987 and 1996, complemented by a new monumental, mural-like work executed in black and white. Together, the thirty works on view reflect Willi Birch’s perspective on the beauty and complexities of the human experience. He writes, “We’ve been through disasters most of our lives and keep moving forward…. “You’ve got these old raggedy funky-looking houses but yet there’s something very beautiful in terms of their resilience,” he continues, noting that the families in his neighborhood often go back six or seven generations. “You realize the history and the ghosts that are in these houses and how these people survived.” Above: Willie Birch, CashRules Everything, 1994

Birch, who relocated from Brooklyn to his childhood neighbohood in 1994, dismantles the artificial construct of race and points to commonalities between visual and cultural forms throughout the world. While both the artist and his work are closely identified with his native New Orleans, the works on view at Fort Gansevoort were made predominantly while Birch lived in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1980s and early 1990s. The colorful, narrative paintings from his Folkloric series and text-driven paintings from his Dialogue series depict his impressions of city life and current events in crisp forms and vibrant hues. The figurative papier-mâché sculptures on view, likewise created during this period, metabolize material culture and historical references into three-dimensional expressions of human resilience in the face of hardship. Above: Keeping Up With the Iran Contra Hearings, 1987

Fort Gansevoort Gallery, 5 Ninth Avenue, New York, NY Info

Opening March 4, 5:00-8:00 pm: Coming Down to Earth at Candela Gallery

This just in from subscriber Anne Arden McDonald: Works by 11 artists weave a lyrical study around the subterranean garden, both real and imagined. Featured artists include Alanna Airitam, Jasmine Clarke, Paul Guilmoth, Justine Kurland, Gita Lenz, Anne Arden McDonald, Justin James Reed, Patricia Underwood, D.M. Whitman, Iwase Yoshiyuki, and Susan Worsham.

rough a series of literal and conceptual narratives, Coming Down to Earth examines and challenges the viewer’s perception of the landscape. Through a series of cameraless processes, Anne Arden McDonald [above] bears witness to nature's miraculous phenomenons. The botanical surveys by D.M. Whitman speak to present-day climate concerns. While the lush vegetation and microscopic slides of Susan Worsham and the abstract vintage studies by Gita Lenz poetically explore the relationship between science and the photographic process. The resulting works - part documentation and part fiction - are a visual exploration of the imagined places, the passage of time, and how our perceptions of the landscape inform us.

Candela Gallery, 214 W. Broad Street, Richmond, VA Info

Live online March 8, 10:00-11:00am EST: Ed Kashi | Abandoned Moments on VII Insider

In this Book Club event, Ziyah Gafic speaks with Ed Kashi about his new book Abandoned Moments – A Love Letter to Photography. According to the publisher’s blurb:“If the decisive moment reflects reality in tune with the photographer’s intuition, flawlessly combining composition and timing, then the abandoned moment is the consequence of a fractional instant of surrender. This collection, made over a 40-year period by renowned photographer Ed Kashi, reveals imprecise glimpses of transitory events filled with frenetic energy – the chaos of everyday life. Embodying photography’s intrinsic power, they preserve moments that can never occur again in exactly the same time and space.” Register here

Ed Kashi is a renowned photojournalist who uses photography, filmmaking, and social media to explore geopolitical and social issues that define our times. He is also a dedicated educator and mentor to photographers worldwide and frequently lectures on visual storytelling, human rights, and the world of media. In 2002, in partnership with his wife, writer, and filmmaker, Julie Winokur, Ed founded Talking Eyes Media. Ed has been a member of the VII Agency since 2010.

Live online March 11, 5:00-6:00 PT: Photograper David Butow and Berkeley Journalism Prof. Ken Ligh in conversation

This conversation expands upon work shown in the exhibition, Brink, currently on view in the Reva & David Logan Gallery for Documentary Photography, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, North Gate Hall Info. Register here

On the afternoon of January 6, 2021 I was standing on the west steps of the Capitol watching something so surreal, dramatic and terrible, for a few seconds, or maybe it was minutes, I lowered my camera and just tried to process what I was seeing through the foggy view of my gas mask. The next few weeks at the Capitol were unrecognizable, as young National Guard troops carrying loaded machine guns stood on patrol behind miles of razor wire, protecting U.S. democracy from its own citizens.—David Butow

Continuing though March 12: Two shows at SVA Gramercy Gallery This just in from SVA: Galleries are now open to the general public with proof of Covid vaccination.

The Museum of Extraordinary Things | An exhibition of work by 16 students in the MFA Illustration as Visual Essay program inspired by the book of the same title by Alice Hoffman. The exhibition is curated by faculty member and chair of BFA Illustration and BFA Cartooning Viktor Koen. Through the exploration of Hoffman’s rich text, the artists in this exhibition found ways to strengthen their visual voices and open the door to a haunted house, prompting us to venture down the corridors of this universe of oddities and leading us to realize what it means to be different, tortured and one-of-a-kind [above]. Info

The Book Show | An exhibition from the MFA Illustration as Visual Essay class of 2022, curated by department chair Marshall Arisman and Anna Raff. Unsurprisingly, the artists represented here worked valiantly through their isolation. And what emerges is a collection of outstanding books that, in one way or another, express the power of connection. Info

SVA Gramercy Gallery, 209 East 23rd Street, New York, NY I

Continuing through March 12: Cairo Modern at The Center for Architecture

Subscriber Wendy Byrne recommends: Cairo Modern, which showcases works by Egyptian modernists from the 1920s to the 1970s, half a century of rich architectural production that complicate our present understanding of global modernism. The exhibition introduces audiences to key architects from the period such as Sayed Karim, as well as examples of their works commissioned by the state and the city’s burgeoning bourgeoisie. Modernism in Cairo reflected the aspirations of the new classes that formed after Egypt’s 1919 Revolution and who embraced the Modernist house or apartment as the materialization of new notions of class, identity, and modernity. Above: Villa Badran designed by Gamal Bakry

The exhibition accompanies the publication of Cairo Since 1900: An Architectural Guide, the first comprehensive survey of the city’s modern constructions including 226 buildings in 17 geographic areas built from 1900 to the present. See the feature in Metropolis magazine here

The Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place, New York, NY Info

Continuing through May 14: This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–1975 at Americas Society

Part II of this major exhibition explores the work of a generation of migrants who created and exhibited in New York City during a period of upheaval and social change. Curated by Aimé Iglesias Lukin, director and chief curator of Visual Arts at Americas Society, the exhibition presents works exploring topics of migration, colonialism, exile, and nostalgia, with Part II focusing closely on the body as a site of identity politics and cultural contradictions. Above: Marta Minujín, “Kidnapping,” (1973), photographic and ephemera documentation of Happening (courtesy of Marta Minujín Archive and Herlitzka + Faria)

Writing in Hyperallergic, Billy Anania says, “While the 1965 Immigration Act opened the United States for expanded Latin American immigration, the decade that followed found migrant artists — many of whom fled US-backed dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Paraguay — actively involved in political struggles for representation. This history forms the basis of the Americas Society’s widely heralded two-part exhibition This Must Be the Place.

It's easy to see why the show has received attention in the press, they continue. “Cultural reckonings around museums, and American politics more generally, have reinvigorated discussions of how imperial nations stigmatize racial identity and suppress liberation movements abroad — and, furthermore, how museums capitalize on this crisis to preserve their monopoly on culture. This Must Be the Place deals with these contradictions carefully, resisting overt political commitment in favor of objective documentation. Paintings, sculptures, installations, photography, video art, and archival materials cover the walls of three galleries, revealing the proliferation of new visual languages that developed between 1965 and ’75.” More here

Americas Society, 680 Park Avenue, NY, NY Info

Continuing through June 15: Angela Davis — Seize the Time, at Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers

In 1969, Angela Davis, a twenty-six-year-old black activist, was fired from her teaching position at UCLA, accused of involvement in a shootout that resulted in the deaths of four men, put on the FBI’s Most Wanted List, and spent several months as a fugitive. In October, she was arrested in New York and returned to California to stand trial. Above:Wadsworth Jarrell, “Revolutionary” (1972); courtesy Lisbet Tellefsen Archive, © Wadsworth Jarrell)

Her image became the focus and the tool of an unprecedented international effort to free an incarcerated black woman. Her trial and acquittal, in 1972, made her a lightning rod for fears and hopes on the right and left about revolutionary change, and she has remained an active agent of change in the years since.  

The exhibition is inspired by an archive in Oakland, California, collected and curated by Lisbet Tellefsen. Witlh some 220 objects, the exhibition not only examines her arrest, incarceration, trial, and the national and international campaigns to free her but also positions her as a continuing touchstone for contemporary artists. Info

Zimmerli Art Museum, 71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, NJ