Last Chance, June 14: Martha Cooper | Streetwise at BDC Annex

Long before the art world sanitized New York’s streets into destination gallery districts, photographer Martha Cooper was out there, capturing the precise moment the Hip Hop subculture was born. For decades, her lens has been trained on the raw, kinetic energy of New York City. With Streetwise, at the Bronx Documentary Center, we are treated not just to a retrospective, but to a masterclass in visual ethnography that defies standard photo world categorizations. Above: TATS Cru with their World Trade Center Mural, 2002

What has always set Cooper apart—from her early days as the first female staff photographer at the New York Post to her legendary underground excursions—is her lack of distance. She doesn’t look at her subjects; she works with them. This exhibition is a vibrant testament to that mutual trust. Affixed to the walls with magnets instead of formal frames, these 100+ images burst forth with the color, rhythm, and unapologetic joy of a city constantly redefining itself. Streetwise reminds us that Cooper’s eye has always extended far past the iconic spray-painted subway cars that filled the pages of Subway Art. Here, her scope expands to reveal the full breadth of these taggers’ ingenuity:

Save thd date, June 11, 7-10pm: Screening an talk, Cheryl Dunn, director, Everybody Street; Martha Cooper. Free with RSVP

Bronx Documentary Center, BDC Annex, 364 E. 151st Street, Bronx, NY Info

Continuing: Fairfield Porter | What Everyone Knows at Art Students League

There is a quiet, radical intimacy in the way Fairfield Porter painted the world. It is the texture of afternoon light raking across the edge of an unmown field, or the structural poetry found in a simple domestic interior. Now, in a long-overdue homecoming, the Art Students League of New York presents Fairfield Porter: What Everyone Knows—the artist’s first major New York City exhibition in a quarter-century.

It is a fitting return. Before Porter became one of the twentieth century’s most formidable figurative painters and art critics, he was a student there, arriving in 1928 to study under Thomas Hart Benton. While history often fixates on the concurrent rise of the Abstract Expressionists—many of whom Porter championed in print—this exhibition shifts our gaze back to his own defiant, luminous realism.

Described by John Ashbery in 1983 as “perhaps the major American artist of this century,” Porter (1907–1975) remains an essential if still under-recognized figure whose paintings of shaded lawns, uncleared tables, and briny coasts are both lush and challenging, each motivated by Porter’s fundamental claim: “the real is specific.” Bringing together over 35 masterful loans from the Parrish Art Museum, the Whitney, and private collections, together with several works from the League’s permanent collection, the show reveals an artist who bypassed the noise of the avant-garde to capture something far more enduring: the profound mystery of the everyday. For anyone who loves the intersection of paint, place, and deep observation, this is one of the summer's essential views.

The Art Students League of New York, Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery FL2, 215 West 57th Street, New York, NY Info

Continuing: Bruce Nauman | No Mistakes at Konrad Fischer

When you draw with your eyes closed, there are no mistakes to be made—Bruce Nauman

For decades, Bruce Nauman has ruthlessly dismantled our expectations of what art-making should be, replacing the myth of the "masterpiece" with the raw truth of the studio. Now 84, the legendary iconoclast returns to  Tribeca’s Konrad Fischer Galerie with No Mistakes. In this compelling new exhibition, the octogenarian titan of conceptual art tackles an elegant, deceptively simple premise: drawing completely blind. Born out of an exchange with Eric Fischl on the mechanics of art-making, the show pairs large-scale, slowed-down 3D video projections of Nauman working in his studio with the actual, physical metalpoint drawings generated from those sightless sessions.

When asked by Fischl, ‘How do you hold your pencil?’, Nauman explained: “I really hadn’t thought about it, and I asked my daughter to make a video over my right shoulder while I was making a silverpoint drawing. (…) That got me thinking: How do I work? How do I draw?” Presenting a body of work that emerged from this deceptively simple question, Nauman and his assistant Ellen Babcock have made over sixty slow-motion, 3D videos of the artist drawing still-lifes, self-portraits, and of scenes of thumb wrestling.

Swapping his signature neon and abrasive video loops for the delicate scratch of gold and silver metalpoint, Nauman strips away the ego to focus on the poetry of muscle memory. For an artist who once proclaimed that "the true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths," No Mistakes proves that Nauman is still doing exactly that—by revealing his own vulnerability.

Konrad Fischer Galerie, 9 White St. New York, NY Info

Continuing: Jasper Johns | Copy/Trace at Zwirner

If you’re looking for the flashy, pop-inflected targets that catapulted Jasper Johns into the art-world stratosphere, you won’t find them here, Instead, the quietly profound exhibition Jasper Johns: Copy/Trace takes a close view of the artist’s five-decade obsession with mechanical reproduction. Curated with a keen analytical eye by Jeffrey Weiss, this highly cerebral gathering of drawings and prints bypasses massive painterly gestures to focus squarely on the raw, tactile mechanics of tracing translucent supports, repeating prior motifs, and capturing physical body imprints.

Eschewing the lush, boisterous colors prevalent in many neighboring summer shows, it is fundamentally an exercise in deep looking and patience. The works require sustained, physical engagement, pushing back against the era of instant visual consumption. Featuring drawings, prints, and rare works from the artist's archive, the show is an intense, monastic exercise in deep looking that reveals a master artist stripping down the very act of making to uncover how memory, cognition, and identity warp every time we try to reimagine the past.

David Zwirner, 537 West 20th Street, New York, NY Info

Continuing: David Byrne/Saul Steinberg: Influence and Affinity at 125 Newberry

There is a precise kind of graphic alchemy that happens when an artist stops trying to replicate the world and starts trying to decode it. In the landscape of illustration and design, few have ever parsed the absurdities of modern life quite like Saul Steinberg. His weapon of choice was always a clean, analytical line that doubled as a philosophical instrument.

It makes sense, then, that David Byrne—a creature of perpetual, multidisciplinary observation—cites Steinberg as a vital compass. For anyone who has ever tracked how a single stroke of ink can deconstruct human behavior, the pairing of these two at 125 Newbury is essential viewing. Here, Steinberg's sharp, mid-century architectural satires find a symbiotic partner in Byrne’s new, emblem-heavy textile banners and pandemic-era drawings. It is a cross-generational conversation about the fragile scaffolds of common sense, told by two master draftsmen who know exactly how to let a line do the talking.

The 125 Newbury gallery, 395 Broadway, New York, NY Info