MARY HEILMANN

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  print April 2016

  Mary Heilmann

  A PRIMARY ASPECT of my experience of art is the piece itself, and then what is going on around it, physically and culturally. And so to walk outside of a gallery and down the street is a powerful part of that looking. While I’m walking, I’m daydreaming about everything: criticism, theory, art history, pretty colors, the art world.

  I remember seeing the Ellsworth Kelly show at Matthew Marks Gallery’s four spaces in Chelsea this past May. I walked into the three galleries on Twenty-Second Street—first one, then the next, then the next—and then over to Twenty-Fourth for the last room. Then

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  passages Summer 2003

  Colin de Land

  IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT, and I was standing, freezing, outside American Fine Arts, Co., when a shiny new purple pickup truck arrived with its ferocious cargo: The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. Naked save for a coat of brightly colored body paint, seven band members leaped from the vehicle and paraded into the packed gallery for their performance. Inside the space, visitors were greeted by a photo in which bandleader Kembra Pfahler was seen prancing on a bed with another naked body—that of Colin de Land, the proprietor of American Fine Arts, painted completely blue and topped with a

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  passages February 2001

  Pat Hearn

  THE PAT HEARN GALLERY on East Ninth Street and Avenue D faced a wide-open field. The concrete ruins of demolished tenements poked through tall shaggy grasses. Occasionally a dazed junkie, still swooning from a recent fix, would wander up the deserted block. Inside, the gallery blazed with sunlight. There stood Pat, high spiked pumps, high beehive hair, little print frock, talking about the art on the wall. In this case, it was Peter Schuyff’s uncanny biomorphic Op paintings. Milan Kunc showed there too, and his Eastern European Pop art fit the exotic drift. Then there was Mitchell Algus, a