Beverly McIver, Black Beauty (2024). Photo courtesy of People For The American Way

A group of artists including Shepard Fairey and Carrie Mae Weems has been enlisted by the advocacy organization People For The American Way (PFAW) to create art encouraging U.S. citizens to vote against former President Donald Trump ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

“People For The American Way is giving talented artists a voice to express their political beliefs because there are not enough outlets to do so,” Fairey said in a phone interview. “Political commentary is frowned upon because art is portrayed as an escapist luxury for rich people who don’t want to think about injustice. It doesn’t need to be that way.”

The art created for the Artist For Democracy 2024 campaign will be released to the public through prints, merchandise, radio and digital ads, celebrity videos, and bus wraps. PFAW has launched a Kickstarter fundraiser for billboards in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona with the hope of expansion to North Carolina and Georgia. And the group seeks to spur texting and boots-on-the-ground efforts.

Janice Biala, Homage to Piero della Francesca, 1984, Oil on canvas, Berry Campbell, New York.

“Janice Biala: Paintings 1946–1986,” at Berry Campbell, New York (through April 13): The paintings of Janice Biala occupy that open space between abstraction and figuration, much as this artist freely cross-registered between the School of Paris and the New York School. Born Schenehaia Tworkovska in 1903 in Bia?a Podlaska, a city in Russian Poland, Biala came to the United States in 1913 and, in order to distinguish her work from that of her artist brother, Jack Tworkov, eventually took the name of her birth town. An exhibition at Berry Campbell, New York, now brings together thirty of Biala’s paintings and works on paper, beginning with her return to France in 1946 and spanning the next forty years of portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. Living until the age of ninety-seven, crossing paths with artists on both sides of the Atlantic, Biala straddled most of the twentieth century with work that absorbed and reflected the wide influences of her remarkable bohemian milieu. —JP

Artists often work in close contact with one another as a way to encourage their artistic and creative innovations, forming clubs, schools, and colonies that have produced some of our most groundbreaking art. All of the couples presented in this exhibition were brought together by art, and chose to join their domestic and family life with their creative output and profession. Examining the influences within these partnerships, differing arrangements can be seen, from deliberately collaborative to unexpectedly subconscious. Mary Nimmo and Thomas Moran together established East Hampton as a burgeoning artist colony with the creation of their home, The Studio, in 1884. He taught her to etch, and she conquered the medium to become internationally recognized. Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock retreated to their remote Springs studio in 1945 where gestural painting was pushed to its limits, and where Krasner decided that Pollock’s genius was the one to promote and support, even after his death. Judith and Gerson Leiber, over the course of a remarkable 70 year marriage, guided one another to success on the national stage in both the fashion and art worlds, poetically passing away just hours apart on the same day in 2018. These historic couples established Long Island as a place that nurtures artistic partnerships, and contemporary pairs continue this tradition, including Bastienne Schmidt and Philippe Cheng, Lautaro Cuttica and Isadora Capraro, and Jeremy Dennis and Brianna L. Hernández. This exhibition features over 50 artworks comparing and contrasting the work produced by 14 artist couples of Long Island, from the Morans in the 1880s through contemporary couples working today.

Janice Biala, The Studio (1946). © Estate of Janice Biala / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Courtesy of Berry Campbell, New York.

by Artnet Gallery Network
March 21, 2024

Moving seemingly intuitively between abstraction and representation, the synthesis of elements from both the School of Paris and New York Abstract Expressionism is unmistakable. The exhibition of her work at Berry Campbell, which includes paintings dated from across a 40-year period, lets viewers visually accompany Biala through the trajectory of her artistic experiments and evolution. In early works like The Studio (1946), perspectival space is distorted but still very much discernable, offering a charming view into a green studio room. In works such as Red Interior with Child (1956) from a decade later, the depiction of space is largely relegated to the title of the painting, and the composition is overrun with swaths of vibrant pigment, with only the suggestion of a child on the right edge of the canvas. Her investigations into abstraction also didn’t stop with paint, as Casoar (The Cassowary) (1957) shows, made from collage comprised of torn paper with oil on canvas. The show is a testament to Biala being poised for not only reappraisal within the context of the art historical canon, but her singular contribution to the narrative and development of 20th-century Modernism.

Now at New York’s Galleries, ‘Everything in the World’ and More

By Mario Naves
Friday, March 22, 2024

“Janice Biala: Paintings, 1946-1986,” an exhibition curated by Jason Andrew at Berry Campbell Gallery, fills out a byway of American modernism with expansive and, at moments, head-snapping aplomb. Biala (1903-2000) was the sister of an undersung New York School painter, Jack Tworkov, the inamorata of the novelist Ford Madox Ford, and the student of Edwin Dickinson, a painter of uncanny power and ghostly portent. This is the fullest accounting of Biala’s work mounted at New York City.

As an overview, the Berry Campbell show is bumpy in momentum — there’s a lot of ground covered here — but, then again, the momentum never flags. A significant chunk of the gallery is dedicated to canvases painted after an extended stay at Paris. “I’d have no use for Paradise,” Biala wrote to her brother, “if it wasn’t like France.” She hung with the in-crowd while living at the City of Light, and their influence was decisive, particularly that of Matisse. 

Among the most striking pictures are a suite of interiors painted during the early 1970s, each of which imbues a strain of intimisme with a brash and distinctly American sense of scale. “Pompeii Interior” (1972) offers a gutsy juxtaposition of finely tuned details and brusque swaths of color, while “Homage to Goya” (circa 1975) is a tour-de-force of oblique patterning and the color black employed with rare acuity. “Paintings, 1946-86” is peppered with such moments, and if those don’t qualify it as a must-see, then I don’t know what does.

Installation View, Larry Zox: Gemini, Berry Campbell, New York, 2024.

Harmon Siegel for Artforum
March 2024

Why do some “Gemini” paintings succeed where others fail? As I study a given example from Larry Zox’s 1967–69 series of concave polygons, I feel that I know when one is working, but not necessarily why. It would satisfy no one to shrug, “I just like it,” or to cite some personal preference for a particular color combination. To apply standards enumerated in advance or derived from encounters with other artists’ work would also be misguided. Perhaps I should simply refrain from any qualitative judgments, disavow my initial instincts and restrict myself to neutral description. Yet their seriality invites––even demands––assessment, for it follows such tightly defined parameters that each canvas is directly comparable to the others. We are then left with the question: What criteria do the paintings themselves pose to help us evaluate them on their own terms?

Zox (1937–2006) named his series for its principal figure: his riff on the astrological sign. The eponymous shape is eight-sided and hard-edged, as though someone had pinched each side of a Bicycle playing card to form an obtuse angle. One so-called gemini molds four triangles in its negative space. Each composition thus comprises five figures with which the artist can try unique color combinations. As a whole, the series assays this configuration’s pictorial properties, testing its possibilities. In some of the earlier works on display, horizontal stripes cut across the central shape, while later ones distilled the artist’s project into a finite number of core variables.

The figure can be more or less symmetrical along one or both axes. Very slight unevenness among the four angles has an outsize effect on overall balance. Zox also played with contour, whether and how much to outline the edges. A slight white border amplifies figure/ground ambiguity between the gemini and the oblique triangles to each of its four sides. A thicker band does the opposite, thrusting the design off the surface, especially when bisected by a thin stroke of vibrant color. The acute angles that form the gemini’s points are usually congruent with the corners of the canvas, enhancing its graphicness. But when they seem to slip out of bounds or stop short of the edge, the whole surface becomes painterly. To that end, the artist varied his application, either embracing a housepainter’s uniformity or disavowing it via subtle gradations of opacity. 

More dramatic effects come with color, number, and size. Zox claimed that he chose his hues randomly. Whether or not that is true, the juxtapositions usually feel well-calibrated to the gestalt. They can play a compensatory role, offsetting imbalances in geometric structure or perceived weight, as in Palanpup [sic], 1967, in which mauve and terra-cotta triangles seem to stop the airy, robin’s-egg Gemini from floating away. Or they can exaggerate the gestalt, as in one of the untitled works from 1969, where dusky surroundings intensify the void-like darkness of the center form. That year, Zox also experimented with repetition, placing double and triple Geminis laterally on horizontal canvases. Where their corners meet, the facing triangles form a diamond, amplifying figure/ground oscillation to the point of optical illusion. When the central motifs are all the same tone, the frame feels arbitrary, as though the pattern could continue ad infinitum. When the motifs are differently colored, the work enforces internal unity, dynamized by ineluctable imbalances.

While scale is relatively constant, the dimensions of Zox’s paintings can range from fifteen by fifteen inches to more than seven by seven feet. The difference prompts wildly disparate forms of bodily engagement. When more uneven design combines with points in the corners, the largest works evoke biomorphic forms. The points become tacks pinning the gemini in place, its span recalling the slaughtered oxen of Rembrandt or Chaim Soutine. 

So why do some geminis work better than others? Because each is an experiment. As Zox modulated the series’ constitutive variables, he produced a series of singular results. Counterintuitively, the invariant parameters yielded unusual risk, for the success of each work teetered on the slightest adjustment to each element. The paintings thus gestated in a medium of uncertainty, resolved only when the last mark was made.

Reinvented Tradition
Glenn Gissler Design

A vibrant canvas by the late American abstract impressionist painter John Opper takes pride of place in the apartment’s gracious living room. Two deep-seated sofas are upholstered in lush blue velvet, with a pair of club chairs covered in a Zak & Fox textile and two Regency-style benches covered in paprika-hued velvet. The curtains were tailored from a Cowtan & Tout floral fabric.