The DART Board: 03.05.2025
Friday-Sunday, March 7-9: A Dance for Madalena at Folk Art Museum
A Dance for Madalena is a poetic tribute, through movement and performance, to Madalena Santos Reinbolt, a remarkable Black embroiderer and painter renowned for her vivid depictions of urban and rural life in 20th-century Brazil. Choreographer Ana Pi will engage in a dialogue with Santos Reinbolt’s work, responding to the “wool paintings” on view in the exhibition Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets. Rooted in the road between the states of Minas Gerais and Bahia, Pi will evoke the vibrant landscapes and creative spirit of the coastal and interior regions of Northeastern Brazil, where Santos Reinbolt lived, worked, and traveled. Above: Ana Pi in performance at Fondation Cartier, Paris
Pi has learned that gestures carry and connect the memories and traditions of Black communities across continents and generations. A Dance for Madalena will weave together movement, voice, texture, and color, bringing Santos Reinbolt’s textile vision to life while celebrating Afro-Brazilian experience, knowledge and spirituality. Above:"Wool painting" by Madalena Santos Reinbolt
Each performance is a 20-min solo dance, integrating a motif and gesture drawn from Santos Reinbolt’s work: Friday March 7 – 5:00 p.m. Motif 1: Eyes Closing. Saturday March 8 – 2:00 p.m. Motif 2: Final Cleaning. Sunday March 9 – 2:00 p.m. Motif 3: Inland Expanding. Free with registration
American Folk Art Museum, 2 Lincoln Square [Broadway at 65th Street, New York, NY Info
Wednesday, March 12, 6-8 pm: Anywhere but Here at Candace Madey
Anywhere but Here explores representations of both our interior and exterior environments, embracing landscape as a metaphor for a psychological or emotional space. The exhibition addresses how the landscape genre offers a form of escape and a necessary retreat, particularly in times of disorder and uncertainty, and espouses the ways in which quiet reflection can strengthen belief systems, embolden ideals, and generate new possibilities for world-building. Above: John Houck, Dreamer, 2025
Featuring works by Aglaé Bassens, Rodney Graham, Edgar Heap of Birds, Adam Henry, John Houck, Dana Lok, Bridget Mullen, Joan Nelson, Barrow Parke, Emily Mae Smith, Joan Snyder, Elif Uras, Dylan Vandenhoeck, Lulu Varona, Stacy Lynn Waddell, and Tim Wilson
Candice Madey, 1 Rivington Street, New York, NY Info
Thursday, March 13, 6-8pm: Affinities | Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Paul Klee at David Zwirner
This exhibition, curated by Nicholas Fox Weber (executive director of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation), presents the work of three artists who overlapped at the Bauhaus during the 1920s and early 1930s and who greatly respected one another’s work. The exhibition features an extensive and varied selection of works by the Alberses from The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and notable works by Klee on loan from institutional and private collectors, as well as additional Klee works from the collection of Alain and Doris Klee. Above: Anni Albers, City, 1949; courtesy and copyright The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation
The exhibition will highlight early Bauhaus-era works, including Klee’s paintings and drawings, which showcase his distinct use of geometric compositions and vivid color palettes. Among the rare pieces on view will be Josef Albers’ early glassworks, featuring grid-based and stained-glass compositions that prefigure his later explorations in color theory. Also on display is Anni Albers’ "Wallhanging" (1924), one of her few surviving textile works from the 1920s, demonstrating her innovative approach to minimalist form and woven abstraction.
In addition to these formative pieces, the exhibition will explore the artists’ later years, tracing their evolutions while emphasizing the enduring aesthetic affinities between their works. Klee’s later paintings reflect a shift toward looser forms and more spontaneous arrangements, embodying a highly personal visual diary in his final years. Anni Albers’ later works—textiles, prints, and drawings—reveal her continued experimentation with geometric structures and color relationships, while Josef Albers’ celebrated "Homage to the Square" series illustrates his lifelong investigation into the interaction of color and spatial depth.
While Klee and the Alberses have been exhibited together in broader surveys of Bauhaus and modernist movements, this exhibition marks the first major show dedicated specifically to the dynamic among these three artists. The exhibition seeks to illuminate the experimental spirit, humor, and intellectual rigor that defined their work.
This presentation also precedes a major retrospective of Anni Albers’ work at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, scheduled for November 2025 to February 2026. Additionally, works by Albers will be featured in "Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction," opening at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in April 2025. With its focused exploration of three of the 20th century’s most influential artists, "Affinities" offers a rare and intimate look at the intersections of Bauhaus pedagogy, modernist abstraction, and artistic exchange, reaffirming their lasting impact on contemporary art and design.
David Zwirner, 537 West 20th Street, New York, NY Info
Saturday, March 15, 1:30-3:30pm: Workshop and tour with Ebony Bolt at Hudson River Museum
Join artist Ebony Bolt in the galleries for a discussion of her mixed media work Botanical Dreams in the Concrete Jungle, currently on view in Collection Spotlight: Cityscapes. HRM’s ongoing Cityscapes program invites discussion about the paradox of cities as places of opportunity and community while simultaneously grappling with inequality, alienation, and struggle.
Learn about Bolt’s practice of sketching people on the NYC subway and transforming them into colorful, patterned artworks. After the conversation, participate in a fun mixed-media workshop where you can hone your own people-sketching skills with the artist.
New York-based artist Ebony Bolt creates prints and patterns inspired by her experience as a CAD print designer in the fashion industry. Her sketchbook illustrations of train commuters—dubbed The Bolt Diaries—are infused with motifs drawn from the city, traditional textiles, and nature.
Hudson River Museum, 511 Warburton Avenue, Yonkers, NY Info
Continuing: Reverberations | Lineages in Design History at Ford Foundation
Reverberations transforms the gallery into an expansive educational space, reimagining design history to feature Indigenous, Black, and People of Color designers and cultural figures. Through a dazzling assemblage of historical and contemporary works of art and design, visitors are invited into a thematically organized experience tracing reverberations in design over the centuries, landscapes, and traditions they flow out of and into. Above Wael Morcos, Typographic Blanket for Beirut
The works take many ingenious forms: multidimensional maps reveal layers of experience and counter colonial flattening and erasures; varied alphabets and graphic languages transmit contours of wisdom across cultures; intricate Indigenous traditions of beadwork and textile art weave ancestral knowledge into the future; posters intertwine text and image to bring people together and drive social action; and works such as avant-garde data visualizations, vivid narrative painting amplified through poster design, and stamp design reveal facets of visual strategies deployed by Black designers past, present, and future. Poetic points of connection among these diverse artworks are highlighted by their many artistic acts of storytelling, mapping, symbolizing, teaching, languaging, and futuring. Strength and hope emerge through these lineages being carried into the future by IBPOC artists in the present.
Ford Foundation Gallery, 320 East 43rd Street, New York, NY Info
Looking Ahead
March 27, 10am-5pm: Adriana Varejão: Don’t Forget, We Are From the Tropics at Hispanic Society
The landmark solo show of the leading Brazilian artist is presented in collaboration with Gagosian. Bridging historical narratives with contemporary themes, Varejão’s exhibition features free-standing fiberglass tondos, hand-painted in oil to simulate historic palissy ceramic dishware. These richly detailed, textural works juxtapose operatic scenes of Amazonian flora and fauna with intricate Iberian and Latin American ceramic motifs drawn from The Hispanic Society’s vast collection.
The Baroque always connects two extremes, like light and shadow, in one body, one painting. History outside against a wild body inside, cultured and uncultured, cooked and uncooked, greed and expressionism, rationalism and irrationality, cold and hot.
—Adriana Varejão
In her richly diverse oeuvre, Adriana Varejão uses the Baroque tactics of simulation, juxtaposition, and parody to reflect on the mythic pluralism of Brazilian identity and the complex social, cultural, and aesthetic interactions that produced it. Varejão draws upon a potent visual legacy animated by the histories of colonialism and transnational exchange to create a confluence of hybridized forms—paintings that are both architectural and sculptural; theatrical, painted sculptures; mesmerizing multichannel videos—that expose the multivalent nature of memory and representation.
In addition, Varejão will unveil a monumental outdoor sculpture: a vividly painted fiberglass sucuri (Amazonian anaconda) coiled around Anna Hyatt Huntington’s 1927 bronze equestrian statue of El Cid on the museum’s outdoor terrace. This bold intervention challenges traditional symbols of imperialism, masculinity, and the dominance of man over nature.
Hispanic Society Museum and Library, 3741 Audubon Terrace [between. 155-156 Streets], New York, NY Info