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The DART Board: 07.31.2024

By Peggy Roalf   Thursday August 1, 2024

 

Friday, August 2, Noon-3pm JIMMY! God’s Black Revolutionary Mouth at the Schomburg

Join NYPL on James Baldwin’s 100th birthday for the opening reception for our newest exhibition JIMMY! God's Black Revolutionary Mouth. Stay for this public program featuring Yahdon Israel, Senior editor at Simon & Schuster and two-time Grammy Award-winning recording hip-hop artist and humanitarian, Che “Rhymefest” Smith, in a conversation about the critical voice of James Baldwin and the use of popular culture to further elevate important figures and ideas. Rhymefest's latest project, James & Nikki: A Conversation, is inspired by and includes clips from the historic 1971 conversation between literary icons

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture presents to the public for the first time selections from the James Baldwin Papers that highlight his literary career and legacy. The items on display—drawn largely from his personal archive, which is held at the Schomburg Center—trace his life and career from childhood to death and are presented alongside items from other research collections that illuminate the passion, brilliance, and courageous spirit of James "Jimmy" Baldwin.

Novelist, essayist, intellectual, and activist James Baldwin (1924 - 1987) is renowned as one of the world’s most influential and prophetic voices of our time. His death in 1987 sent waves of grief around the world. Amiri Baraka’s eulogy, titled “Jimmy!”, spoke of James "Jimmy" Baldwin as “not only a writer, international literary figure” but as a “man, spirit, voice”. Baraka called Baldwin “God’s black revolutionary mouth” which speaks to Baldwin’s enduring legacy of radical truth-telling. 

Organized by Barrye Brown, Curator, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division at the Schomburg Center, 515 Malcolm X Blvd. at 135th Street, New York, NY Info

  

 

Summer Chill, Continued

When you need an afternoon break and want to hit some galleries, making a plan can seem daunting, With hundreds of galleries to choose from in Manhattan alone, where to begin? I’ve developed a strategy that works for me [especially in Chelsea] when I only have a few hours: I decide on one show that’s a must-see, then hit another four or five on the same block. So here’s my list for this week. Above: Robert Kushner, Antella Curtain and Window: Wildflower Bouquet, 2023; below left: Eric Aho, Switch, 2019; both at DC Moore 

 

Continuing through August 9: Who is There at DC Moore

This is the epitome of the “summer group show”—a museum-quality installation that gives perspective on a gallery’s mission and place in the art world. In the case of Who is There, the curators have enlarged upon their mission to present the best of the Pattern and Decoration movement by including works that are, in a sense, precursors to P&D. Here, amid paintings by contemporary artists of that stripe, including Robert Kushner, Jane Wilson, JoAnne Carson and Eric Aho are a large watercolor by Charles Burchfield from 1964, along with a monotype from 1984 by Romare Bearden—offering visual context that goes far beyond words.

DC Moore Gallery, 535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY Info

 

 

Continuing through August 9: Color & Form at Pace Prints

Pace Prints presents a summer group show featuring works by Donald Baechler, Gene Davis, Peter Halley, Jenny Holzer, Robert Mangold, Kenneth Noland, Blair Saxon-Hill, Kate Shepherd, Pat Steir and Dan Walsh.

Now spanning five decadesPace Prints has been and continues to be an incubator for creativity. John Chamberlain, Francesco Clemente, Chuck Close, George Condo, Jean Dubuffet, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Mangold, Louise Nevelson, Kenneth Noland, Robert Ryman and Pat Steir are among the many artists who have been collaborative innovators. Their creative legacy now extends to a new generation of artists.  

Pace Prints exhibition spaces and production facilities continue to offer broad opportunities for collaboration in continually expanding printing techniques. Among the artists who have most recently been utilizing the wide variety of available printmaking techniques are Nina Chanel Abney, Nigel Cooke, Tara Donovan, Leonardo Drew, Tomoo Gokita, Loie Hollowell, Shara Hughes, Li Songsong, Wangechi Mutu, Yoshitomo Nara, Adam Pendleton, Robin F. Williams, and Jonas Wood. 

Pace Prints, 536 West 22nd Street, New York, NY Info

 

 

Continuing through August 23: Ray Carrocchi | August Moonrise at Harper’s

The title speaks volumes for the inherent mystery and magic of a summer landscape—here imagined by Carrocchi through observation and a bent for the sublime. Paintings from the 1980s through 2000s demonstrate the allure that Nature has exerted on this artist—now in his early 90s and still painting. Above: Sunrise-Solon Pond, 1988

These works render many of the enchanting places foundational to the artist’s long career. As if portals to faraway lands, they provoke the onlooker to relish in poetic sights—from the bewitching Adriatic Sea in Fiery Moon - Midnight Sea, to the meandering Susquehanna River in Field by a River. In the former, a blazing full moon casts iridescent shadows over the still sea. Ciarrocchi’s profound gaze thus challenges the viewer to a transcendent expedition: shining resplendent light on organic beauty, the artist venerates nature’s gifts far and wide.

Harper’s Chelsea, 534 West 22nd Street, New York, NY Info

 

 

Continuing through August 23: Elliott Green at McEnery

Artist and designer Chris Rush writes of Elliott Green’s landscape paintings: “In Western culture, landscape painting is a modern art form, just a few hundred years old. It began, some say, as a search for paradise. Paradise was once a well-watered place in the sun, a place we might actually live, if only we had the right map or could attain a certain purity of soul. Now, in much contemporary landscape painting, there seems to be a kind of nostalgia for what has been lost. Depictions of the natural world have turned misty and sentimental, touched by sadness.

“In Elliott Green’s paintings, I feel none of this. His landscapes live in the present, and at times seem to be coming to life right before our eyes. Newborn worlds are thrust into existence. Tumultuous, ecstatic, glittering with delight….Escaping the pull of nostalgia, of history—even the pull of gravity—Elliott portrays a floating world, still in flux. Skies fall, mountains rise. Rocks become rivers, oceans become clouds. These are landscapes of the mind, of the eternal present.

“While his paintings possess the grandeur and romantic sweep of the great landscape painters from centuries past, they push the form further. In Elliott’s vision, nothing is truly solid, nothing is finished. Great forces sweep his canvases, in a ceaseless game of chaos and release. He offers us an alternate Earth—and a glorious challenge to the idea of reality…. Elliott’s landscapes do not ask: What have you lost? But rather: What do you desire?” Read the entire essay here Above: Take It Home, 2023

Miles McEnery Gallery, 511 West 22nd Street, New York, NY Info

 

 

Last chance, August 11: Whitney Biennial | Even Better Than the Real Thing

The 2024 Whitney Biennial presents work by artists who focus on concepts of reality in the age of artificial intelligence and the fluidity of identity. The 81st edition of the Biennial will feature 69 artists and two collectives, and includes emerging creatives, such as the duo of Gbenga Komolafe and Tee Park, as much as storied artists, including Mary Lovelace O’Neal and Pippa Garner. 

The theme and title, focusing on ideas of “the real,” will also investigate how artificial intelligence has challenged discussions about identity—hence the inclusion of Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, whose joint work has explored the impact of A.I. on art and artists. In a joint statement, co-curators Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli called the exhibition “unharmonious in its collectivity” and a “dissonant chorus,” borrowing words from artist Ligia Lewis, who will present a dance-based film installationAbove: Carmen Winant, “Women’s blueprint for survival I and II” (2022). This installation of inkjet prints and sun-bleached construction paper gathers records from archives of domestic violence support organizations. In the Whitney Biennial, Winant is also showing “The Last Safe Abortion,” with thousands of snapshots of abortion care workers in offices or meetings.

“It is striking how many artists are contending with relationships between the psyche and the body, and the precarity of the past few years,” the curators’ statement continued. “Artists are continuing to grapple with history and identity; we have made an exhibition that unfolds as a set of relations, exploring the challenges of coming together in a fractured moment.”

The Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY Info

 


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