Analyze Lovers by Les Levine at Ulrik

People have been complaining about how the art market [fueled by wealth and power] is ruining art since the Renaissance—when Vasari noted that there were beginning to be too many portraits of patrons in paintings meant to persuede the converted. Today it’s mostly about how art fairs and AI are ruining things every which way. Above: Video Still

Back in the 1980s, Les Levine (B. 1935 Dublin), one of the pioneers of media arts, responded to the boom of the auction market and the rise of the blockbuster exhibition. In September 1984, van Gogh in Arles opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art “with the excitement of a christening and with security precautions elaborate enough to satisfy a bank” and on November 11, 1987 van Gogh’s Irises, painted in 1889 just after the artist had entered an asylum, sold for over fifty-three million dollars, this less than a month after the Black Monday stock market crash. So when Levine was asked to make a project in the Netherlands, he turned to van Gogh not only as the irresistible cliché (which is to say something immediately intelligible) but also as an emblem of current thinking about the figure of the artist and their place in society (both mad and monetized).

Unable to talk to van Gogh himself since he had died a hundred years earlier, in 1890, at the age of thirty-seven, Levine enlisted the strawberry blonde art critic and poet John Perreault to carry on his spirit, creating a made-for-TV documentary in which he interviewed the artist alongside a host of art world figures, including dealer Jeffrey Deitch, PS1 founder Alanna Heiss, curator Jan Hoet, journalist Grace Glueck, and painters Malcolm Morley and Julian Schnabel, in addition to spiritual authorities (a real priest and Tibetan lama).“Analyze Lovers”by Les Levine continues through January 25 at Ulrik, 175 Canal Street, FL3, New York, NY  Info

Gary Simmons | Thin Ice at Hauser & Wirth

Gary Simmons, known for his decades-long exploration of issues that haunt our national psychè—race, representation and collective identity—debuts a new body of work including sculpture, paintings and drawings. The artist continues to draw from Bosko and Honey, a pair of racist cartoon characters first created in 1928, as avatars of institutionalized racism for a sequence of canvases that isolate and re-purpose archetypical racialized imagery and a site-specific wall drawing referencing one of the most iconic films of the 1960s—to capture the instability and disorientation of the current American moment

Simmons’ art skates deftly between abstraction and representation via his signature technique of erasure. This formal conceit upends the viewer’s sense of certainty; by degrading familiar icons, he exposes latent meanings and ugly truths lurking just behind the surface of popular images.

Bosko reappears in ‘Thin Ice’ but with a new and unmistakable urgency. The exhibition opens with a painting that depicts him as a fiddle player frenetically sawing away at his strings. This work signals the start of a performance that will unfold across several successive canvases in which Bosko glides on ice skates to execute a single disjointed pirouette—an expressive tactic that induces a vicarious sense of dizziness in the viewer.

Continuing through January 11 at Hauser & Wirth, 134 Wooster Street, New York, NY Info

Somewhere to Roost at American Folk Art Museum

Featuring over 60 works including paintings, textiles, photographs, and sculptures, Somewhere to Roost  explores the ways that artists evoke and construct ideas of “home.”  The exhibition’s title is drawn from an artwork by Thornton Dial, Sr. (1928–2016), “Birds Got to Have Somewhere to Roost,” which is among the works on view and continuing through January 26. Above, L-R: Thornton Dial, Birds Got to Have Somewere to Roost; Deborah Goldsmith Below: Throop (1808–1836), Portrait of Lucretia Goldsmith Boon, Sister of the Artist, 1829; Joseph W. Clapp (1825–?), Birdcage, Eastern Massachusetts, c. 1858–1875.

The embedded brutality endured by African Americans during their quest for justice through historical phenomena such as the civil rights movement, as well as the victory of their oral culture are among the subjects that informed the work of Thornton Dial (dates). In his later works, such as Birds Got to Have Somewhere to Roost (1912), these inflammatory topics take a more philosophic tone, instead referencing individual experiences of home, such as a pervasive Southern phenomenon called the “yard show,” a West African custom that became symbolic of tenacity, survival, and rebirth among abandoned things. Those ever changing installations by Dial, symbols of tenacity, survival, and rebirth reference the comfort that the idea of home implies. A prototypical piece of his later works, it refers to agriculture, rural communities, and relationships between people, animals, and nature. The exhibition, which takes its title from this seminal work, meditates on the relationship between refuge and stability across 60 paintings, textile works, photographs, and sculptures.

American Folk Art Museum, 2 Lincoln Square, New York, NY Info

Making Home at the Cooper Hewitt

Going home for the holidays can be a turbulent affair—but this series of 25 site-specific installations reminds us that home can be a space of constant remaking and reinterpretation. Featuring 25 site-specific, newly commissioned installations, Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial explores design’s role in shaping the physical and emotional realities of home across the United States, US Territories, and Tribal Nations. The exhibition is the seventh offering in the museum’s Design Triennial series, which was established in 2000 to address urgent topics of the time through the lens of design.

“Going Home” (ground and first floor) considers how people shape and are shaped by domestic spaces. Through reinterpretations of diverse home environments that traverse interior and exterior spaces, this section explores the historical and personal factors that influence home design and its profound impact on people’s experiences, behaviors, and values.

“Seeking Home” (second floor) addresses a range of institutional, experimental, and utopian contexts that challenge conventional definitions of home. Installations examine the idea of home through the lenses of cultural heritage, the human body, imagined landscapes, and refuge.

“Building Home” (third floor) presents alternatives to single-family construction models, expanding and redefining home to embrace community space, cooperative living, land stewardship, decolonial practices, and historic preservation. Large-scale installations explore building typologies grounded in regional histories and cultural specificity, and address contemporary issues such as housing precarity, environmental advocacy, memory, and aging.

Continuing through August 10, 2025 at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 2 East 91^st Street, New York, NY Info