picks October 20, 2021

Barbara Hammer

This presentation of Barbara Hammer’s work and archive, “Tell me there is a lesbian forever…,” begins in 1968, when the experimental cineast discovered 8-mm film. A few years later, she discovered women: A handwritten note on display here reads “COMING OUT”. Lovemaking was intertwined with artmaking, and Hammer’s partners appear in many of her photographs and films from the 1970s. Combining still and moving images, the film Double Strength, 1978, charts the arc of Hammer’s romance with aerialist Terry Sendgraff. At its exuberant heights, the two naked women soar on trapezes while the pair, in

print October 2021

“Creating Community: Cinque Gallery Artists”

This past summer, the Art Students League of New York held the first historic exhibition dedicated to Cinque Gallery, an artist-led nonprofit that operated between 1969 and 2004. The brainchild of Romare Bearden, Ernest Crichlow, and Norman Lewis, Cinque was founded to exhibit and promote the work of marginalized, primarily Black artists, while also serving as a training ground for young arts administrators of color. Cinque was to some extent an outgrowth of the Spiral group, which met regularly from 1963 to 1965 to debate the role of Black artists in the struggle for civil rights. The gallery

picks July 09, 2021

Jon Pylypchuk

While grappling with grief after the death of a close friend, Jon Pylypchuk cast a number of bronze “ghosts,” which are currently haunting Petzel’s soigné townhouse space on the Upper East Side for the Winnipeg-born, Los Angeles–based artist’s solo exhibition “What have we missed.” Pylypchuk, a multidisciplinary bricoleur who is known for crafting pitiable creatures from poor materials such as mangy fake fur, bits of plywood, and copious amounts of hot glue, first explored metal casting in 2008. Made in 2020 and 2021, the pedestal- and wall-mounted sculptures on view, largely untitled, are cast

print May 2021

Jeanne Reynal

In 1958, Clement Greenberg penned a short essay that posited aesthetic parallels between Byzantine art and modernism. Despite their differences, he said, these movements were united by an emphatic pictorialism, their transcendent qualities tied up with a shared repudiation of illusionism. In this text, the critic cited the work of certain painters, such as Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, as examples. “This new kind of modernist picture,” Greenberg wrote, “like the Byzantine gold and glass mosaic, comes forward to fill the space between itself and the spectator with its radiance.”

picks April 23, 2021

Carrie Moyer

During Net art’s heyday, Dyke Action Machine!, a lesbian interventionist public-art project cofounded by graphic designer and painter Carrie Moyer and photographer Sue Schaffner, released an interactive Web-based work titled Gynadome, 2001. Riffing on the 1970s womyn’s land movement popular among lesbian separatists, Gynadome imagined a post-digital world where “women are Women, the men have been put out to pasture, and computers are just Big Paperweights.”

“Analog Time,” an exhibition of colorful, biomorphic acrylic paintings and collages Moyer made over the past year, likewise plays with the

picks September 28, 2020

Toyin Ojih Odutola

Nigerian American artist Toyin Ojih Odutola is a master of the epic narrative. Her breakout 2017 solo show at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art chronicled a marriage between two men from fictitious aristocratic families in Nigeria. And her debut exhibition in the United Kingdom, currently on view at London’s Barbican Centre, spins a yarn about a Nigerian autocracy run by female warriors who oppress male workers—a tale that spans forty sequential drawings and took the artist more than eight months to formulate prior to execution.

In Ojih Odutola’s presentation here, the artist explores

picks April 25, 2020

Nate Lewis

Over the nine years that he spent working as a critical care nurse, Nate Lewis grew intimately familiar with medical imaging via X-rays, ultrasounds, electrocardiograms, and other diagnostic tools. He watched bodies externalize their internal forms and rhythms, demanding they be seen, scrutinized, and cared for—with the caveat that clarity was a possibility but never a promise. It is a preoccupation with these vital images that inspired and informed Lewis’s turn to artmaking. “Latent Tapestries,” his first solo show in New York City, opened at Fridman Gallery in March but has since migrated

picks February 03, 2020

Madeline Hollander

From 1931 to 1964, the traffic lights along Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue were topped with bronze statuettes of Mercury, the Roman god of transportation. In “Heads/Tails,” choreographer and artist Madeline Hollander’s exhibition at 55 Walker—a new project space shared by Andrew Kreps Gallery, Bortolami, and kaufmann repetto—a figurine of Mercury gazes out the window over the congestion at Walker Street and Broadway, just beyond the gallery. For an ambitious installation filling two long walls, Hollander shunted data from the intersection’s traffic signals into hundreds of disembodied, gemlike head-

Cassie Packard