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