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The DART Board: 09.07.2022

By Peggy Roalf   Wednesday September 7, 2022

Just in from the Rubell Museum of Art: The inaugural exhibition for its new museum opening in Washington, DC, What’s Going On, is deducated exclusively to contemporary art. The Rubell Museum DC will reinvigorate the 1906 building of the former Randall Junior High School, a historically Black public school in Southwest DC that ceased operations in 1978. The museum will serve as a place for the public to engage with the most compelling national and international artworks of our time. What’s Going On draws its title from the groundbreaking 1971 album by Randall Junior High School alumnus Marvin Gaye that provided a powerful condemnation of the Vietnam War and the destructive realities of social injustice, drug abuse, and environmental negligence. Above: Kehinde Wiley, Sleep, 2008

“The museum’s historic setting in a place of learning invites the public to explore what artists can teach us about the world we live in,” said Mera Rubell. “As a former teacher, I see artists and teachers playing parallel roles as educators and in fostering civic engagement. With the preservation of this building, we honor the legacy of the Randall School’s many teachers, students, and parents.”

What’s Going On brings together more than 190 works by 37 artists who are responding to pressing social and political issues that continue to affect society today, including Natalie Ball, Cecily Brown, Maurizio Cattelan, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Leonardo Drew, Chase Hall, February James, Rashid Johnson, Josh Kline, Cady Noland, Richard Prince, Christina Quarles, Tschabalala Self, Sylvia Snowden, Vaughn Spann, Hank Willis Thomas, Mickalene Thomas, John Waters, Carrie Mae Weems, Kehinde Wiley, Kennedy Yanko, and Cajsa von Zeipel, among others. A centerpiece of the exhibition is Keith Haring’s Untitled (Against All Odds), 1989 (above)—a series of 20 ink and gouache drawings Haring said he completed in one day while listening to music by Gaye and Bob Marley. Made shortly before Haring died from Aids-related complications in February 1990, central themes of the series include environmental destruction, war, oppression and discrimination.

Rubell Museum DC, opening in October at 65 I Street, Washington, DC Info

  

Armory Arts Week openings this week

 

Thursday, September 8: Enrique Martinez Celaya | The Foreigner’s Song” at Miles McEnery Gallery

‘We speak of a sense of place, but we only ever mean a sense of ourselves,' as the introduction to Cuban artist Enrique Martínez Celaya's exhibition reads. In Celaya's paintings, the map denotes not any place, but the search for an elusive self.

Born in Cuba in 1964, Martinez Celaya immigrated to Spain as a child, then to Puerto Rico as a teenager, and subsequently moved to the United States in the early 1980s for college, where he has remained.

Formerly a physicist, Celaya has said poetry and literature have been major sources of inspiration that inform his understanding of the world. This search for meaning carries over to The Thin Line, 2022 (above), an expansive oil and wax on canvas, in which a man walks down a red path beneath a starry sky, framed by large floral forms on both sides.

Currently based in Los Angeles, Martinez Celaya's exhibition, The Foreigner's Song features new paintings and works on paper that, as he explains, explore “the foreigner’s dual longing for a future that can redeem the dislocation of the past and a present that can provide a sense of belonging.”

On view at Miles McEnery Gallery, 515 West 22nd Street, New York, NY Info

 

Thursday, September 8, 6-8 pm: Jordan Casteel | In Bloom at Casey Kaplan

in bloom, presents nine figurative and landscape-based oil paintings, completed in 2022 amid the artist’s relocation to rural New York State. This body of work invests in the reciprocity between painter and subject through a renewed approach to community engagement and a poignant vantage point of self-reflection. 

In a departure from the comforts of an inbuilt community, as portrayed in previous works ranging from the sidewalks of Har- lem to the classroom at Rutgers University-Newark, the transition to a more secluded, sylvan landscape prompted a period of inner-contemplation that necessitated a new approach. Casteel took to social media to initiate an online discourse to connect with and act as a connector for people of color who resided in the area. The resulting forum encouraged discussion and mutual engagement, in turn, introducing the artist to the people who would later become the subjects of her paintings. 

Read the interview on the occasion of Casteel being awarded a 2021 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Through October 22 at Casey Kaplan, 121 West 27th Street, New York, NY Info

 

Thursday, September 8, 6-8 pm: Hank Willis Thomas | Everything We See Hides Another Thing” at Jack Shainman Gallery

Hank Willis Thomas presents a selection of large-scale sculptures, mixed-media textile works, and his unique retroreflective prints, their latent imagery activated by the flash of your cell phone camera. The show also features Thomas’s ongoing “Falling Stars” series, of massive blue flags featuring one embroidered star for every U.S. death from gun violence in a year—14,916 in 2018, 15,433 in 2019, and 20,923 in 2021.

Through October 29 at Jack Shainman Gallery, 513 West 20th Street and 524 West 24th Street, New York, NY Info

 

 

 

Thursday, September 8-Sunday, September 11: Armory Week

With over 240 galleries from 30 countries, the 2022 Armory Show features solo exhibitions of international artists at 16 galleries; FOCUS: Landscape Undone, curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates,  presenting artists that examine the intersectionality of issues surrounding the environment, focusing on personal and political climates as they interact with race, gender, and power. 

This year The Armory Show has partnered with Cristea Roberts Gallery to show a special presentation of Paula Rego's Abortion EtchingsThe exhibit will be on view in the Crystal Palace of the Javits Center. The 2022 edition of  Platform, curated by Tobias Ostrander, the Estrellita B. Brodsky Adjunct Curator, Latin American Art at Tate, London, is dedicated to large-scale installations and site-specific works under the theme of Monumental ChangeAbove: Robert Motherwell, The Studio, 1987; courtesy Bernard Jacobson Gallery

Read the entire feature, with info about all the art fairs on for Armory Arts Week here

  

September 9, 6-8 pm: Astrid Terrazas | La Jardinera at P·P·O·W

Taking the form of mixed media painting and ceramic sculpture, Terrazas’ illustrative, highly detailed, and symbolic practice re-writes the artist’s life experiences. Influenced by surrealist artists such as Remedios Varo and folk artists such as Minnie Evans, Terrazas’ paintings are filled with transient, often zoomorphic figures, idiosyncratic iconographies, and illogical narratives. With unflinching vulnerability, Terrazas merges dreamscapes, Mexican ancestral folklore, memories, and unearthly transfigurations to create spaces for communal healing, protection, and metamorphosis. Featuring a new series of paintings and Terrazas’ first ever large-scale ceramic fountain, La Jardinera presents an alternative, sacred space honoring duality and upholding ideals of empathy and reciprocity.

For Terrazas, painting is “a process of finding and burying” akin to incanting, a way to cast spells and weave new remedial narratives to transmute histories. Throughout the exhibition, Terrazas employs the symbol of a fountain to challenge the traditional power structures directing the flow of giving and restricting individual capacity for reciprocity and regeneration. Looking specifically at the Rio Grande’s natural divide between the United States and Mexico, Terrazas questions what could have been if such a waterway had been used to nurture both countries instead of sowing divisiveness. Drawing a direct parallel to this body of water, Terrazas highlights the way fountains in cities become symbols of power and access for the few through the exploitation of resources intended for all. 

Through October 15 at P·P·O·W, 392 Broadway, New York, NY Info

  

 

September 9, 6-8 pm: Esther Pearl Watson | The Guardian of Eden at Andrew Edlin 

In his 1959 book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things in the Skies, psychoanalyst Carl Jung considered the significance of UFOs in rumors, dreams, and art. “They behave not like bodies, but like weightless thoughts,” he wrote. “Such an object provokes, like nothing else, conscious and unconscious fantasies.” 

Winking with aluminum foil, stick-on mirrored tiles, and craft glitter, the prominently placed UFOs in Esther Pearl Watson’s paintings evoke everyday scenes inspired by her childhood. Watson grew up in a string of small Texan towns, watching her father attempt to build a functional flying saucer in the yard. The amateur engineer, who might also be characterized as an outsider artist, hoped to sell his homegrown spacecraft designs to NASA and use the earnings to alleviate financial hardship. In this light, the allocation of funds to roll after roll of aluminum foil, instead of groceries, declared a belief in the American dream.

Through October 22 at Andrew Edlin Gallery, 212 Bowery, New York, NY Info

 

 

September 9, 6-8 pm: A Maze Zanine, Amaze Zaning, A-Mezzaning, Meza-9” at David Zwirner

David Zwirner teams up with Performance Space New York on this show, billed as a “living exhibition,” that bridges performance and painting. Organized by Ei Arakawa, Kerstin Brätsch, Nicole Eisenman, and Laura Owens, it features artists, including Lorraine O’Grady to Jamian Juliano-Villani and Wade Guyton, to name a few. Above: Kerstin Brätsch, Unstable Talismanic Rendering_Psychopompo (with gratitude to master marbler Dirk Lange), 2017 (detail)

Through October 15  at David Zwirner, 519 West 19th Street, New York, NY Info

 

Friday, September 9, 6-9pm:  Fran Beallor | Self at PS109 

Consisting of a self-portrait drawn each day in 2020 during the COVID period, SELF 2020 / 366 portraits, documents the life of one artist. Begun in a mood of introspection, the series quickly morphed into something bigger: giving way to a more universal concept as lockdown in March was soon followed by Black Lives Matter protests, worldwide wildfires fueled by climate change, an election unlike any in history, and deadly vaccine issues.

American Arts Quarterly writer Meredith Bergmann comments, “The iPhone series emerged from two opposite places. Beallor tried to balance a feeling of ‘Drowning in Tech’ with gratitude for a vital tool to quickly document what was going on while staying connected to the world when we had to stay distant. The Box series was a visceral reaction to being boxed in [together with] delivery boxes becoming our lifeline to the outside world during lockdowns.”

Save the date: Artist Talk / Rolinda Ramos in conversation with Fran Beallor: Sun, September 18, 3:30pm. 

Through October 1 at El Barrio’s Art Space PS 109, 215 East 99th Street, New York, NY Info

 

Friday, September 9, 6:30: Lynsey Addario in conversation with Kathy Ryan

On the occasion of “The Masters Series: Lynsey Addario” exhibition and award, SVA will host a conversation between acclaimed photojournalist Lynsey Addario and Kathy Ryan, director of photography at The New York Times Magazine. Friday, September 9, 6:30 – 8:30pm. SVA Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street. Info


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