Thursday, November 9, 7-11pm: The Party at Angel Orensanz 

News from the Home Office: It's a book launch, exhibition and video salon-screening with open bar! AI-AP’s annual event is set for Thursday, November 9th, 2023 at the Angel Orensanz Foundation, just off East Houston on New York's Lower East Side

Join the creative community and celebrate with the winners in American Photography 39, American Illustration 42 and the Int'l Motion Art Awards 11.  Get more info and register here!

Angel Orensanz Foundation, 172 Norfolk Street, New York, NY Info

Wednesday, November 8: In Dialogue with Picasso at Skarstedt

Joining the global commemoration of the 100^th anniversary of Picasso’s passing, Skarstedt Gallery presents In Dialogue with Picasso. The exhibition, which includes four of the artist’s late masterwork takes a multi-thematic approach to understanding his legacy. Four of Picasso’s late masterpieces will be featured alongside works by artists such including Francis Bacon, Cristina BanBan, Georg Baselitz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, George Condo, Eric Fischl, Louis Fratino, Rachel Harrison, Jasper Johns, Martin Kippenberger, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince, and Andy Warhol.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, Picasso conducted an in-depth study of masterpieces by artists such as Eugène Delacroix, Diego Velázquez, and Édouard Manet, absorbing their compositional techniques and imbuing them with his decidedly non-traditional style. In doing so, he measured himself against their achievements, compared the strength of his imagination with their own, and assessed his position within the lineage of this host of great European painters. 

If, as John Richardson has noted, the last seven years of Picasso’s life constituted a “great late phase” in which he felt free to break his own rules and paint as he liked, then the four works displayed in the exhibition offer a similar freedom to the contemporary artists represented here.

Skarstedt Gallery, 20 East 79^th Street, New York NY Info

Wednesday, November 8, 6-8 pm: In Common | New Approaches with Romare Beardon

This exhibition highlights Romare Bearden’s work as an artist, educator, scholar, songwriter, and social activist. Part of a multitier initiative co-organized by The New School’s Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, the Romare Bearden Foundation, and The Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University Newark. Above: Romare Beardon, The Train, 1975, etching and aquatint, 28 x 33 inches. Courtesy of Nanette Bearden Trust

 Drawing from multiple collections including the Romare Bearden Foundation and The New School, In Common presents a selection of works demonstrating Bearden’s exploration of the Black experience, often taking inspiration from history, literature, the Bible, jazz, and African American communities.

His work is complemented by six leading and emerging contemporary artists—Black Quantum Futurism, Kahlil Robert Irving, Lorraine O’Grady, Hank Willis Thomas, Mickalene Thomas, and Charisse Pearlina Weston—whose work and values resonate with those of Bearden and contribute to a multigenerational dialogue on the political agency of art.

Parsons School of Design, The Sheila Johnson Design Center, 66 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Info

Thursday, November 9, 3-6pm: Works in Public at Riverside Park

The Art Students League of New York in partnership with NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks program and the Riverside Park Conservancy will unveil two new large-scale artworks next week by League artists Marco Palli (above) and Sophie Kahn as part of the 2023 Works in Public program. Under the guidance of Works in Public alumni Haksul Lee and Natsuki Takauji, alongside instructors at the League, the program supports artist-participants in every phase of the conception, creation, and installation of site-specific public sculpture, culminating in a one-year public exhibition at Riverside Park. 

Marco Palli, a Venezuela-born artist living in New York City said of his work and process: “In my studio, I work serially, experimenting with materials that lead my process accordingly. Generally, I recognize with all the objects I make very specific things about my identity, finding a relationship that become obvious pertaining to some qualities that I notice in my work..... In terms of erecting public works of art, what limist and defines the artwork itself is the result of the sum of the regulations and permits in term of public safety, funding and budget concerns, just as well as the ultimate purpose of the artwork itself. Going through the eye of the needle has made me question my motivation for wanting to do it, and revising this question has been a great gift to elevate my practice."  Read the entire feature in DART

For more information also visit: artstudentsleague.org/works-in-public

Friday,November 10, 6:30-8:00pm: Edel Rodriguez in conversation with Chip Kidd at Poster House

Join “America’s illustrator-in-chief,” Edel Rodriguez, in conversation with graphic designer and writer, Chip Kidd, for a wide-ranging conversation on Rodriguez’s new graphic memoir Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey. 

Through vivid, stirring art, Worm tells the story of a boyhood in the midst of the Cold War, a family’s displacement in exile, and their tenacious longing for those they left behind. It also recounts the coming-of-age of an artist and activist, who, witnessing America’s turn from democracy to extremism, struggles to differentiate his adoptive country from the dictatorship he fled. Confronting questions of patriotism and the liminal nature of belonging, Edel Rodriguez ultimately celebrates the immigrants, maligned and overlooked, who guard and invigorate American freedom. Books available for purchase. RSVP

Poster House, 119 West 23^rd Street, New York, NY Info

Friday, November 10: A Foreigner Called Picasso at Gagosian

The exhibition, organized as part of Picasso Celebration 1973–2023: 50 exhibitions and events to celebrate Picasso, a transnational program taking place in cultural institutions across Europe and North America to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Picasso’s death, is curated by the eminent writer, biographer, and historian Annie Cohen-Solal together with art historian Vérane Tasseau. The presntation is based on Cohen-Solal’s award-winning book published in English as Picasso the Foreigner (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), the exhibition will reframe our perception of Picasso and focus on his status as a permanent foreigner in France. 

Spanning the entirety of Pablo Picasso’s career in France from 1900 through 1973, the exhibition will feature loans of important works from private and public collections in the United States and Europe. It includes early self-portraits lent by the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as well as Cubist and Surrealist masterpieces from the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel. 

Gagosian, 522 West 22^nd Street, New York, NY info

Continuing: Kay WalkingStick | Hudson River School at N-Y Historical Society

The exhibition, places landscape paintings by the renowned, contemporary Cherokee artist Kay WalkingStick as they relate to highlights from New-York Historical’s collection of 19th-century Hudson River School paintings. This dialogue celebrates a shared reverence for nature while engaging crucial questions about land dispossession and its reclamation by Indigenous peoples and nations and exploring the relationship between Indigenous art and American art history. 

Highlights of the exhibition’s more than 40 works include two of WalkingStick’s paintings that are directly inspired by Hudson River School artists; the artist’s sole landscape referencing the Trail of Tears (a journey her Cherokee ancestors were forced to take); examples of her early painted sculptural abstractions inspired by nature; and several of her most recent paintings—like Nshow’siagara and Aquidneck After the Storm (above)—which overlay geographically specific abstract Indigenous patterns onto representational landscapes in order to re-assert an Indigenous presence long erased in European settlers’ depictions of North America as a pristine and unpopulated wilderness. Native American objectsove0 on loan from the artist and other museum collections, including woven baskets and ceramic jars, offer insight into WalkingStick’s source patterns and artistic process.

New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, New York, NY Info

Continuing: Friends and Lovers at Flag Art Foundation

Friends & Lovers looks at portraiture through the lens of Alice Neel’s assertion that she painted “pictures of people.” Just as a studio visit opens a window into an artist’s creative process, who they choose to immortalize through paint, bronze, photography, etc. similarly provides insight into who serves as their inspiration, be that a lover, partner, family member, friend, celebrity crush, or a fleeting encounter.  

Eschewing portraiture’s bourgeois associations, Neel sought to paint resonant, unheroic images of people in her life that were true to her experience of them, as seen in a bracing 1952 painting of her doe-eyed, young son Hartley. Likewise, works by fifty contemporary artists encompass a range of tender, unexpected, complex, and personal moments with and connections to their sitters, creating urgent and ultimately timeless pictures of their people. 

Flag Art Foundation, 545 West 25th Street, 9th Floor, New York, NY Info