Special public preview, Thursday, April 17, noon-8pm: Rashid Johnson | A Poem for Deep Thinkers at the Guggenheim

For nearly 30 years, artist Rashid Johnson (b. 1977, Chicago) has cultivated a diverse body of work that draws upon an array of disciplines such as history, philosophy, literature, and music. This major solo exhibition highlights Johnson’s role as a scholar of art history, a mediator of Black popular culture, and as a creative force in contemporary art.

Encompassing the entirety of the museum’s rotunda, the show is Rashid Johnson’s first solo presentation at the Guggenheim, his largest exhibition to date, and the first expansive museum survey of his work in over a decade. The exhibition brings together more than ninety artworks, including an outdoor sculpture and new pieces made specifically for the show.

The exhibition's public programs include a dynamic performance and public-engagement series, developed in collaboration with both existing and new community partners. These programs will take place on a stage designed by the artist on the rotunda floor and within the monumental site-specific work Sanguine, which will occupy the building’s top ramp. A piano embedded in the installation will serve as a centerpiece for scheduled musical performances. With activations happening four days a week––from Fridays through Mondays––the Guggenheim provides a platform for both next-generation and established artists. 

Guggenheim New York, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Info

Last chance, April 19: Walton Ford | Tutto at Gagosian

In a recent interview in VOGUE magazine, Walton Ford speaks of his fascination with this extraordinary person, who owned the villa later purchased by Peggy Guggenheim, which became the setting for some of Ford’s paintings in the Tutto series.

“The idea of wealthy, somewhat debauched, but also a super-gifted artistic personality before the First World War owning cheetahs in Venice. There's a lot of visual opportunity there for someone like me. She's one of those overlooked but super-pivotal figures….The irony is that the Marchesa Casati was a wild animal that could not be tamed, but she kept wild animals and tried to tame them—she leashed them. There's a paradox there that comes with a narcissistic artistic personality, but the thing about her is maybe she saw the paradox and the irony in it. Maybe she didn't care. Maybe she tried her best to take good care of these cheetahs, but the fact is their life would not have been a good one for a cheetah. In my mind, that's just a bad idea from start to finish. Yet she did it as many, self-indulgent people do today, as we know from Tiger King, Eric's Goode's show.

“But she was an artist and she was a completely untamed spirit, and she used her cheetahs like they were costumes or bodyguards, spectacle-producing fashion accessories. I'm sure she loved them. It’s remarkable to think you're born to be a docile wife and mother and you end up as a fearsome figure with a python around your neck. What a transformation. What a courageous and unhinged and amazing story she has.”

Through April 19 at Gagosian, 522 West 21st Street, New York, NY Info

Last chance, April 18: Diana Horowitz | Light is a Place at Bookstein Projects

This exhibition features approximately thirty small paintings executed by the artist over the last four years. The paintings are all created on-site, often translating vast spaces to sizes spanning a few inches in each direction (6 x 6 inches, 5 x 7 inches).  The locations range from the 100th floor of a Manhattan skyscraper, to the saltmarshes of Cape Cod, to the high plains of Wyoming, to the hilltop towns in Italy . But whatever her subject, the artist is able to distill a quiet, often ethereal, moment in time. The dynamic effects she captures – fireworks reflections gleaming off the waters of Lago Bracciano, the sun filtering through the morning fog, or the ebbing tides of the Atlantic – are subtle, resulting in paintings both nuanced and carefully balanced. Above: Calascibetta Morning, 2023; 5 x 7”

Bookstein Projects, 60 East 66^th Street, FL3, New York, NY Info 

Judith Linhares | The river is moving, The blackbird must be flying at PPOW

Since the late 1970s, Judith Linhares’ work has been influential for many younger artists. However, the construction and style of her paintings are indebted, not only to literary and abstract painterly traditions, but to the radical, performative, and revolutionary poets of the 1950s West Coast scene. The river is moving, The blackbird must be flying marks an evolution in the artist’s practice in which the tactility and vibrancy of the paint itself takes center stage. 

Writing in Hyperallergic, Faye Hirsch says, “Linhares’s paintings, comprising just a few elements yet bodied forth in endless permutations of the paint and marks that constitute them, might at first seem an easy read. The apparent rapidity of the renderings in the 17 canvases (all 2023–24) is deceptive. Their images live mainly on or just behind the front plane and are perfectly lucid. But they are built of myriad constellations of facture — the full, sure strokes that delineate an image even as they disassemble it in facets of color; the radiant diagonals that make the childlike scenes glow with a light bred of opacity; paint laid on thickly even when it depicts translucency.

"A tight compression of flowers at the center of the still lifes gives way to a riot of patterning that opens the compositions, propelling them forward, landing directly on the nervous system. In “Freya’s Flowers [above],” the multicolored orbs of a tablecloth pattern tumble toward us like a visual rockslide as the prim cluster of blooms and neatly striped wallpaper stand in abeyance. The still life is anything but still."

PPOW Gallery, 392 Broadway, New York, NY Info