It’s a good time for complexity in art. In both conceptual and material terms, our favorite shows of the moment refuse to take the easy route. While younger artists Nengi Omuku and Rachel Martin challenge the conventions of genre and media, established names like Laurie Simmons and Nan Goldin (plus the late Arshile Gorky, in a newly discovered painting!) continue to innovate within their signature styles, and a number of artists play with perception and tactility. Other exhibitions ask us to question ingrained attitudes and unearth layers of meaning, on topics such as diasporic identity, how we physically navigate the world, and what the American flag represents — and the late, under-recognized painter Bernice Bing pushed both aesthetic and cultural boundaries. The Brooklyn Museum, in particular, shines with the expansive inaugural Brooklyn Artists Exhibition and a recently opened retrospective of Elizabeth Catlett. A trailblazing artist in a class of her own, Catlett’s show is not to be missed. —Natalie Haddad, Reviews Editor
Bernice Bing: Bingo
Berry Campbell Gallery, 524 West 26th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
Through October 12
She’s the Bay Area Abstract Expressionist who was written out of the history books by a field that didn’t know what to do with a lesbian Chinese American artist who also founded SOMarts, among other accomplishments. Her 2022 retrospective at Asian Art Museum, curated by Abby Chen, was eye-opening for all who were fortunate enough to see it, and this smaller gallery show is sure to help expose her work to a city that should’ve known not to overlook such a talented artist. Bing studied with artists Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn, and Frank Lobdell, and each of their styles has clearly left a mark, but overall her wide-ranging gestures are more diverse than early influences would suggest. Her weirdly wonderful “Velasquez Family No. II” (1961), and later works like “Burney Falls” (1980), show that she’s in dialogue with the history of 20th-century abstract painting, while unique ink drawings like “Untitled (scroll)” (c.1986) demonstrate her refusal to limit herself. I spent extra time studying her late 1960s/early ’70s painting “Figurescape” (1971), a rare painting that renders a loving embrace between women at the hands of an Asian-American lesbian artist. Bing, lovingly called Bingo by those who knew her, refused to conform. Maybe the world is finally ready to take a close look at what she created. —Hrag Vartanian
Hard Ground
MoMA PS1, 22–25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
Through October 14
When I visited PS1 recently, I didn’t expect a show about “erosion, subtraction, and compression” to be the one that stuck with me. While the online synopsis is somewhat dry, emphasizing technical processes, the works in Hard Ground are surprisingly alluring, some even seductive in their tactility. The show’s muted palette and subtle objects surround viewers with an array of textures and a push-pull between soft and hard. It’s this complication of materiality — embodied in objects whose organic forms challenge their hard surfaces, or whose presence is imbued with a sense of absence — that’s lost in the matter-of-fact title.
Jerry the Marble Faun’s limestone carvings dusted in green moss evoke artifacts from distant pasts and cultures, while Maria VMier’s gnarled, wall-mounted bronze sculpture has a creatural quality that belies its solidity, and Amina Ross’s globs of black, cast glass, sitting in blown glass vessels filled with rainwater, look like gelatinous specimens or meteorites. On the other end of the material spectrum, pale rubbings on black sandpaper from Dora Budor’s Love Streams series create ghostly patterns that seem to dissipate like smoke into air, and Gianna Surangkanjanajai’s Polaroid of what looks like a swirling marble surface transforms an everlasting medium into an ephemeral moment. Hard Ground is a quiet exhibition filled with riches. —NH
Abbey Williams: Natural Sound
Broadway Gallery, 375 Broadway, Tribeca, Manhattan
Through October 19
Grief has a mind of its own. It’ll grip you, sink you, ebb for a while, then sneak back in sharp bursts without notice. In this video collage, Abbey Williams shuffles through various film, music, and art references as she heals from the trauma of stillbirth. A recurring shot in the video shows the artist’s fingers tracing the horizon lines of landscape photos in nature books. Her hands reach out to someone who can’t be touched. Another sequence features news reports about a grieving mother orca who carried the body of her dead calf for 17 days across the Pacific Ocean. Scientists called it a “tour of grief.” —Hakim Bishara
Kemar Keanu Wynter: Rücken–
Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, 87 Franklin Street, Ground Floor, Tribeca, Manhattan
Through October 19
The “visual patois” of Kemar Keanu Wynter’s paintings, as he describes it, are hard to translate in online images. My immediate sensation when visiting the works in his studio at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program was of scent, followed by a desire to run my fingers along their colorful textures, and then, finally, motion, as I moved from side to side and along the length of these giant works to experience them in different angles and light. Wyner’s patois draws from his Caribbean, New York, and global sensibilities, and titles like “Awash in Copper (Tiramisu)” and “The Sun’s Gaze (Marinated Leeks)” only add to the synesthetic delight. The show’s title references Rückenfigur, or back figure, most famously represented by Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog”(c. 1818). Each painting is displayed from the back, hung without a frame or canvas, an invitation to join the artist in the fog. —AX Mina
Magdalena Suarez Frimkess: noW girls allowed
Kaufmann Repetto, 55 Walker Street, Tribeca, Manhattan
Through October 19
Admittedly, the prospect of seeing the Peanuts gang, Felix the Cat, and other cartoon characters in ceramic tableaus drew me to this show. And it is rife with charm. But as the title suggests (note the capital W), there’s more to noW girls allowed than cute characters — more wisdom, more attitude, more darkness, more of all those qualities that girls, and children in general, are so often denied. Despite the pop culture references, the Venezuelan artist’s rough-hewn vessels and imprecise renderings share little with the slickness of Pop art. Instead, they strategically recall children’s creations. And, like Charlie Brown visiting Lucy van Pelt’s five-cent psychiatric booth, their apparent naïveté veils a subtext of insecurity and existential unease. On one side of ceramic box with a bulky Felix the Cat towering on its lid is the character in a defensive posture, glancing nervously at another figure. And a drawing on a handmade tile shows Lucy and a Charlie Brown-ish kid at that psychiatric booth. The analysand says, in a speech bubble, “I need to have someone around who can tell me when I’m doing the right thing.” The depth of feeling should make this show relatable to anyone who’s ever experienced life’s hardships. —NH
Nan Goldin: You never did anything wrong
Gagosian, 522 West 21st Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
Through October 19
The path to the deepest, clearest reservoirs of beauty and the sublime is often rugged and muddy, teeming with monsters and parasites. That is to say, it takes a certain amount of pain, loss, and sacrifice to recognize true beauty and be transformed by its light. In this exhibition of photography and video works, Nan Goldin invites you to walk down this seldom-trodden path, at your own risk.
The centerpiece of the show is Stendhal Syndrome (2024), a slideshow that juxtaposes the artist’s photos of friends, family, and lovers with masterpieces she has encountered at museums across the world, among them the Louvre and Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Against these convincingly compatible images, Goldin narrates six Ovid myths (including Pygmalion, Diana and Actaeon, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Narcissus) that seem to resonate with the stories of her real-life subjects. Another video, shot in Super 8 and 16mm, is a quiet contemplation of the natural world during a total solar eclipse. Both are propelled by love and tenderness, housed in structures designed by Lebanese-French architect Hala Wardé and accompanied by scores composed by Soundwalk Collective and Mica Levi. The 19th-century French novelist known as Stendhal collapsed before the beauty of the art of Florence’s Basilica of Santa Croce; Nan Goldin lost herself in the museums of Paris; and you, too, can be transported, if you’re ready for it. —HB
Nengi Omuku: Wild Things and Perennials
Kasmin Gallery, 509 West 27th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
Through October 24
Aso oke, a handwoven cloth that originated with the Yoruba people in Western Africa, finds its most luxurious form in the sanyan style, which is composed of indigenous wild silk and cotton threads and used in traditional garments for special occasions. After receiving an MA from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2012, Nengi Omuku returned home to Nigeria where she recognized the revered fabric as an opportunity to integrate her cultural heritage into her artistic practice. While she began by sourcing vintage sanyan dress sets and meticulously deconstructing and restitching the garments into flat canvases, she now has the cloth made by a Nigerian collective. Omuku’s oil paintings are lush and impressionistic, situating figures within flattened, Fauvist vegetation or against dramatic cloudscapes. Her palette is bright and pleasing (often cued by the colored threads running through the vintage fabric) and softened by her light brushwork — hazy dreamscapes of harmonious coexistence. —Natalie Weis
Arshile Gorky: New York City
Hauser & Wirth, 134 Wooster Street, Soho, Manhattan
Through October 26
Few figures are as enigmatic and influential in 20th-century art as Arshile Gorky. A painter’s painter, he worked through his Armenian genocide trauma in one of the only ways he probably could – by painting the shit out of art history. This is a small but solid show, with a few lovely drawings and a couple of wow paintings. The work that longtime lovers of the Surrealist/Abstract Expressionist artist may find most interesting is “Untitled (Virginia Summer)” (c.1947–48), which was discovered under another painting, “The Limit” (1947), only a few years ago. To think another painting has been added to the artist’s oeuvre is pretty incredible, and the Arshile Gorky Foundation thinks there may be others. Why he covered the oil painting with another painting is any psychologist’s guess, but the mystery only adds to the allure of an artist who once said, “When something is finished, that means it’s dead, doesn’t it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting – I just stop working on it for a while.” —HV
Flags: A Group Show
Paula Cooper Gallery, 521 West 21st Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
Through October 26
The American flag has been fodder for art since the founding of this country. Yet in this exhibition it is transformed by contemporary artists with complicated attitudes toward this distinctive symbol of the world’s most powerful nation state. One of the show’s focal points is David Hammons’s iconic 1990 African American Flag, which has become a widely recognized marker for Black American identity. A flag-covered example of Sonya Kelliher-Combs’s incredible Idiot Strings series hangs at the center of the show, and older works by Claes Oldenburg (represented by four pieces) and Jasper Johns — arguably the most famous contemporary artist to render the flag into art — expand the conversation, incorporating traditional ideas around patriotism that allow us to reflect on how things have changed. Some artworks appear to stray from the theme but most stay on track and offer a playful and critical take that speaks to our complex feelings toward belonging. Among the standouts are Jaune Quick-To-See Smith’s “Red, White, and Brown” (2018), Benny Andrews’s “Sexism Study #5” (1973), and Kiyan Williams’s “An object made into flesh, bound to its own annihilation” (2024). The only painfully cheesy work is Sol Lewitt’s “Wall Drawing #408 B: Star with five points…” (1983); it reminded me of his very uncritical commission for the US embassy in Berlin, and that American contemporary art is often lockstep with state power, or challenges it only in the most pedestrian ways. Thankfully, most of the art on display is far more nuanced and raises questions around what it means to be part of a nation state and how we can be critical of our own citizenship and complicity. —HV
Laurie Simmons: DEEP PHOTOS/IN THE BEGINNING
56 Henry, 105 Henry Street, Two Bridges, Manhattan
Through October 27
In 1976, Laurie Simmons began constructing tiny rooms, staging them with dollhouse furniture, and photographing them in a way that could render them believable as life-size interiors; she was excited about the idea that a photograph could lie. In the five decades that followed, she has continued to excavate new ideas about reality, artifice, mass culture, gender roles, and the domestic in photography, video, and sculptures that employ dollhouses, dolls, ventriloquist dummies, humans who look like dolls, and, most recently, AI. In this compact show, Simmons pillages from her own props department, borrowing furniture and set pieces from previous projects to fill five white wooden boxes, confounding the idea of a diorama by playfully subverting expectations of scale, perspective, and material within a single work. Four suburban domestic settings contrast with the fifth, a murky river navigated by G.I. Joe-armed watercraft. In person, the pieces are obvious contrivances; in my iPhone photos, they’re more difficult to disbelieve — perhaps we are now a part of the (digital) pictures generation. —NW
Rachel Martin: Bending the Rules
Hannah Traore Gallery, 150 Orchard Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through November 9
Linework brings me a sense of peace. I love a precisely executed sketch, and white charcoal on toothy, tinted paper is my balm of choice. But nothing could have prepared me for Rachel Martin’s monumental compositions that both satisfy and destabilize conventional rules of drawing in her first New York solo show. Martin flexes her wit through a feast of meticulous collage and pencil works, like “Whale Watcher,” and the centerpiece of the show, “if our table could talk” (both 2024), nodding to traditional Northwest Coast formline figuration, and her own reinventions therein. Rife with exquisite detail, judicious color, and irreverent assertions of feminist selfhood, Bending the Rules rewards you for close looking and showcases an imagination in bloom. —Lakshmi Rivera Amin
The Appearance: Art of the Asian Diaspora in Latin America & the Caribbean
Americas Society, 680 Park Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through December 14
An exhibition of artists of Asian descent affiliated with Latin America shown in New York City is an admittedly complex premise, but this is the exact type of curatorial work we need to illuminate a conceit as slippery as diaspora. Tie Jojima and Yudi Rafael’s masterful curation makes it impossible to ignore our own positions within larger systems, whether they be the physical space of the exhibition — your feet poised to trip over Esvin Alarcón Lam’s video work placed inconveniently on the floor, for instance — or the ways in which race is read, misread, or unreadable depending on the relation between the viewer and the object. Speaking for myself, the embroidered floral iconography of Mimian Hsu’s “No. 1674, Sección Administrativa, Version 1 & 2” (2007–24) is viscerally familiar — I had stitched those same flowers with my grandmother as a child — but I had to rely on a nearby label to translate the Spanish text stitched into it, affirming how vexed cultural translatability is even between diasporas that share a homeland. —Lisa Yin Zhang
to hold a we
BRIC, 647 Fulton Street, Fort Greene, Brooklyn
Through December 22
This show of 14 early-career disabled artists should make you believe in a better world. Alex Dolores Salerno’s mushroom-like wood sculptures — made from burl wood, which grows on hurt trees to heal them — bloom from various walls across both floors of the exhibition, as if tending an unseen injury. Other highlights for me were Steven Anthony Johnson II’s spare triptych portraying queer elders, which you can gaze at from a church pew, and Pelenakeke Brown’s printed digital drawings, in which text snakes around the page like ruminating thoughts.
The exhibition asks a lot of a certain kind of viewer — that is to say, one unfamiliar with the experience or literature of disability — but offers generous resources to bring them up to speed, and boasts curatorial interventions that I hope become more common in the art world, such as audio descriptions of artworks and large-print, plain-text labels. To hold a we made me want more from the world outside — with its casual indifference toward the range of body types and mobility levels — when I left. —LYZ
Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
Through January 19, 2025
This may be the best exhibition in New York City at the moment, and not only because Catlett is largely unknown to large swaths of art lovers. It is full of surprises that illuminate her role as a politically engaged artist who staged a visual war against American Imperialism while eagerly speaking to a public that often dismissed more conceptual or experimental art. Her printmaking, including the incredible The Black Woman series from 1946–47, orient you in the retrospective. This leads us to her dynamic sculptural work in wood and stone, and finally to her later-in-life public art projects in cities across the country. The City of Chicago even loaned the visually stunning “Floating Family” (1995–96), which normally hangs in the Legler Public Library, and it’s a joy to behold it in the context of this robust display. —HV
The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
Through January 26, 2025
As its title suggests, this open-call exhibition features 216 Brooklyn-based artists, selected from thousands, on the occasion of the Brooklyn Museum’s 200th anniversary. Replete with excellent work by artists at various stages of their careers, the show exudes a strong sense of community. I recommend it, though I wish there were room for even more participants. —HB
