Thursday, March 2: Wangechi Mutu | Intertwined at the New Museum

Prolific and visionary, Wangechi Mutu has been transforming visual media for more than 25 years. The New Museum brings together more than 100 works by the artist in a major solo exhibition that connects her current art to the fantastical depictions of contemporary realities and future possibilities she’s been creating for decades.

Representing the full breadth of her practice, this presentation will encompass Mutu’s painting, collage, drawing, sculpture, film, and performance. The artist first gained acclaim for her collage-based practice exploring camouflage, transformation, and mutation. She extends these strategies to her work across various media, developing hybrid, fantastical forms that fuse mythical and folkloric narratives with layered sociohistorical references.  

Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined will trace connections between recent developments in the artist’s sculptural practice and her decades-long exploration of the legacies of colonialism, globalization, and African and diasporic cultural traditions. At once culturally specific and transnational in scope, Mutu’s work grapples with contemporary realities, while proffering new models for a radically changed future informed by feminism, Afrofuturism, and interspecies symbiosis.

The New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, NY Info Click for upcoming public programs, 

Thursday, March 2, 6-8 pm: Edel Rodriguez | Apocalypso at CCM Art Gallery

The work in this exhibition, by long-time DART subscriber, Edel Rodriguez, is a collection of paintings, drawings and published materials which examine the tides and undercurrents that have led to our present-day cultural and political moment. Themes of war, migration, and unsettling extremism are mixed with poignant personal reflections in CCM Gallery, Masten Learning Resource Center, County College of Morris, 214 Center Grove Road, Randolph, NJ Directions

Closing Sunday, March 5: Hopper’s New York at the Whitney

Edward Hopper’s New York presents more than 200 paintings, watercolors, prints and drawings Hopper made of the city during the six decades he made his home here. Iconic images such as Early Sunday Morning, 1930 (above), from the Whitney’s collection, are joined by loans from public and private collections across the country. The power of his influence on contemporaneous taste can be seen in a work from a private collection in Wichita, Kansas, Sunlight on Brownstones, 1956 (below).

The show can be considered a demonstration of what it took for Hopper to become what LIFE called the “major artist of the century.” And this did not happen overnight. Although Hopper went to art school, he also educated himself through his three brief visits to Paris between 1906 and 1910, as well as through his work as noted illustrator and printmaker. 

For a time between 1915 and the mid-1920s, he continually made etchings, often drawing onto his copper plates on location, rather than in the studio. And he purchased his own press to have access to the finished sheets in his own time. This practice, a form of self-education on rendering light and shadow abstractly informs his mature paintings as much as the sumptuous handling of the paint itself. A small gallery, off to the side, presents etchings and on-site drawings in which Hopper tried out compositional variations for the figures, rocks and trees that populate his sparsely delineated scenes, and the light that falls upon them. Above: Night Windows, 1928. The Museum of Modern Art, New York; gift of John Hay Whitney Read the entire DART feature here

The Whitney Museum, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY Info

Thursday, March 2- Sunday, March 5: Outsider Art Fair at 

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, art director Claire Iltis stumbled upon a stack of drawings in an antique shop that was about to close for good. They looked like other-worldly collages, or stained glass postcards, all with a maroon-black metallic gleam. Preserved in fading photo albums, each was labeled with a looping, cursive signature: Dorothy F. Foster. Intrigued by their formal qualities, she wondered: could she make them the next big thing? A chance discovery has the Outsider Art world "going goo-goo". 

The journey that followed, in which Foster’s drawings went from dusty storage bins in upstate New York to being featured on the posters of Outsider Art Fair’s annual show this year, is a testament to the powerful reputation of Fleisher/Ollman, the Philadelphia gallery where Iltis [now] works as an associate director.

The gallery built its formidable reputation on so-called “outsider art.” A term perhaps as much about marketing as it is descriptive, outsider art is made by self-taught artists, people who didn’t show their work professionally and sometimes lived on the fringes of society. “This work is really fresh-looking and untainted,” said Andrew Edlin, who owns Outsider Art Fair, the industry’s biggest trade show, in New York. “They’re just not informed by this art world dialogue.”

Outsider Art Fair, Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 West 18^th Street, New York, NY Info

Tuesday, March 14, 7 pm: Figure Drawing at the Print Center

In conjunction with Nicole Eisenman: Prince, the first exhibition in New York focused on the artist’s deep engagement with printmaking in more than 10 years, the Print Center offers live figure drawing, free and open to the public. Inspired by the central role that the figure plays in Eisenman’s practice, this special hands-on program allows visitors to draw from a live model inside the exhibition Nicole Eisenman: Prince. Seating and drawing boards will be provided and visitors should bring their own materials. All experience levels are welcome. RSVP is required More information about public programs is available at printcenternewyork.org/public-programs or email: ema@printcenternewyork.org

Celebrated for her painting and, more recently, her work in sculpture, Eisenman has also produced a significant body of prints since 2010, in various mediums including lithographs, etchings, woodcuts, and monotypes. These works evidence the voracious range of references, imagery, and styles for which the artist is known. They also show how Eisenman has pushed these mediums, engaging materials, surfaces, and mark making in unexpected ways. Made in close collaboration with the New York–based print workshops Harlan & Weaver, Jungle Press, and 10 Grand Press, the works in Prince demonstrate how printmaking has been a generative space for experimentation within Eisenman’s broader practice. Above: Drinks at Julius, 2012.

Print Center NY, 535 West 24^th Street, New York, NY