Bernice Bing, “Quantum 2,” 1991-92, acrylic and mixed media on paper.Credit...via the Estate of Bernice Bing and Berry Campbell, New York

Bernice Bing, Burney Falls, 1980.

Elena Clavarino for Airmail News

Bernice “Bingo” Bing’s youth wasn’t a waltz. She was born in 1936 in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and when she was six her American mother died. From then on it was foster care and orphanages, though there were times she stayed with her grandmother. Bing performed poorly in school but won an art award that took her to the California College of Arts and Crafts. There she was taught by Richard Diebenkorn and Saburo Hasegawa, who introduced her to Zen Buddhism and Chinese philosophy. In the 1970s, Bing began combining ancient calligraphy traditions with abstract spiritual imagery. When she died of cancer in 1998, only 62, she was not yet widely recognized. This exhibition, the first solo show on the artist in New York, brings Bing’s gorgeous paintings into the spotlight. —Elena Clavarino

‘An Artist Truly at Peace’: The Trail-Blazing Abstractionist Bernice Bing Finally Gets Her Due

The Bay Area-artist was overlooked in life. Now, 30 years after her death, the mid-century artist is having her powerful New York solo debut.

by Katie White September 24, 2024

Installation view, Ida Kohlmeyer, “Cloistered” at Berry Campbell Gallery, New York, 2024. Image courtesy of Berry Campbell, New York.

Ida Kohlmeyer: Cloistered (1968-1969) At Berry Campbell Gallery, NYC (Review)

by Rosetta Cohen

“Cloistered,” the small but dazzling exhibit of Ida Kohlmeyer paintings at Berry Campbell presents a lesson to all young artists struggling to break free of the influence of their mentors and teachers: The arc of an artist’s career is often a long one, and the influences that define you today will likely be different from the ones that mark your work in the future. Kohlmeyer’s work underwent a long series of stylistic transformations throughout her life. The exhibit at Berry Campbell (a reprise of a similar show from 2020) focuses on two pivotal years, 1968-1969. The five large paintings and one sculpture here represent a transitional moment in Kohlmeyer’s search for her own mature style.

Artist Bernice Bing in her North Beach studio, c. 1958-1961.
© Estate of Bernice Bing. Courtesy Berry Campbell, New York

Nearly 30 Years After Her Death, a Bay Area Great Gets a Towering Solo Show in New York

By Grace Edquist

September 18, 2024

The late Bay Area artist Bernice Bing was 25 years old when she had her first solo show, at San Francisco’s edgy but short-lived Batman Gallery, in 1961. Her abstract paintings were a hit; San Francisco Chronicle critic Alfred Frankenstein said Bing had a “remarkable gift for fluid line,” among other bits of praise. Not bad for a recent MFA grad. “People were somewhat surprised at my work because I hadn’t made a lot of noise at school,” Bing once reflected. “So, when I had that exhibition, people were rather taken aback by it. I liked that; I like surprises!”

Sixty-three years later, Bing is the subject of another astonishing debut: her first-ever solo show in New York. “Bernice Bing: BINGO,” on view at Berry Campbell gallery through October 12, brings together more than 30 works spanning from 1961 until 1998, the year Bing died of cancer at age 62. It’s a long-overdue moment for an artist whose ferocious paintings rank right up there with the other greats of mid-century American art.

In her lifetime, Bing had a whole lot stacked against her: She was gay, Chinese American, orphaned, abused, a woman. And she was an Abstract Expressionist living some 2,500 miles away from the center of that scene. But she persisted, plumbing art history, the lush California landscape, and her own complex history in her searing paintings.

While she was well-known in Bay Area artistic circles, wider acknowledgement of her work was limited—as was the case for so many non-white, non-male artists of that era. “She was this incredible artist who’s been hidden because people were too afraid to go there with her,” says Martha Campbell, who, along with Christine Berry, founded Berry Campbell in 2013.

LINK TO FULL ARTICLE

Overlooked Bay Area Abstract Expressionist Bernice Bing is featured in her first solo New York exhibit, at Berry Campbell gallery until Oct. 12. Works on view are from 1961 until her death in 1996 and the show comes as her market has heated up in recent years, following relative obscurity during her lifetime, beyond a cult following concentrated in the West Coast. [The Art Newspaper]

Bernice Bing around the year 1961.Photo by Charles Snyder. Courtesy Berry Campbell, New York

Bay Area Abstract Expressionist ‘legend’ Bernice Bing gets her first New York solo show

Nearly 30 years after her death, the market for Bing’s work is thriving

Carlie Porterfield
13 September 2024

Bernice Bing, the long-overlooked artist born in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1936, has had a cult following largely concentrated on the West Coast for decades. While Bing's contemporaries in the Bay Area art scene included artists like Joan Brown and Jay DeFeo, Bing’s art career never took off in the same way during her lifetime. On Thursday (12 September), Bing's first solo show in New York opened at Berry Campbell, the Chelsea gallery founded by Christine A. Berry and and Martha Campbell in 2013.

Bernice Bing: BINGO (until 12 October) spotlights Bing’s work from 1961 until her death from cancer at age 62 in 1996, nearly the full span of her career. Bing’s market is stronger now than it ever was when she was alive. It’s part of a broader demand for work by the women associated with Abstract Expressionism, like Lynne Drexler and Grace Hartigan, themselves long written off as the wives and friends of more high-profile artists. The market for Drexler’s work in particular skyrocketed in 2022, with seven-figure results at auction.

National Academy of Design Announces 28 artists and architects elected as National Academicians

New York, NY– The National Academy of Design is delighted to announce that 28 artists and architects from across the United States have been elected as National Academicians in the Class of 2024. This year's class of newly elected Academicians are recognized for their contributions to contemporary American art and architecture. This year’s class of newly elected Academicians includes: Beverly McIver, Sheila Pepe, Maren Hassinger, Amy Sherald amogost many others. Watch the induction ceremony online on October 22, 2024.

September 9, 2024

New York – On Sunday, September 8, The Armory Show concluded its 30th edition, marking a landmark year as the first under the helm of its new director, Kyla McMillan and entirely within the Frieze network. Despite lingering concerns about the state-of-the-art market over the past year, the mood at Thursday’s VIP preview of The Armory Show in New York was surprisingly upbeat. Dealers, advisors, and collectors shared a sense of optimism, with many viewing the event as the start of the fair season for the US market’s annual cycle of fairs and auctions.

The Attendees were eager to see how the season would unfold. This edition welcomed an array of international exhibitors, collectors, curators, artists, and guests, totalling over 50,000 attendees. The VIP Preview was held on September 5, and the fair opened to the public from September 6–8. The fair’s impact reached beyond its location at the Javits Center, encompassing installations and events across New York City.

Christine Berry and Martha Campbell, Berry Campbell Gallery, “We had a fantastic start to the fair, and that momentum continued through the weekend, selling work by Lynne Drexler, Bernice Bing, Dorothy Dehner, Janice Biala, Perle Fine, Yvonne Thomas, Nanette Carter, and more. Collectors attending the fair have discerning tastes and want to acquire high-quality work with market potential. The Armory Show is our hometown fair and has given us an excellent platform to continue our work of championing important historical and contemporary women artists.”

Gangs of New York

The art world has taken Manhattan, bringing with it some surprises that have provided insight into what’s really taking place in the market.

Marion Maneker for Puck
September 8, 2024

Art fairs are like political conventions—highly orchestrated events designed to project confidence while nevertheless revealing enough anxiety to remain interesting. This week’s Armory Show in New York, for instance, isn’t a high-stakes venue, and sales aren’t make-or-break for dealers. The draw for the Armory Show, which also includes the offsite Independent 20th Century and Art on Paper fairs, is simply a foothold in Manhattan for galleries that don’t normally have access to the city’s customer base. But there is a sense this year that some on-the-bubble galleries really need to get money in the door or there might be serious consequences.

Throughout the first two days, there were the usual complaints about timing (the end of the summer, beginning of the school year, etcetera), and the long shadow of the U.S. Open. In many ways, the Armory Show is now the gateway to the back half of the art calendar, teeing up all the familiar narratives and questions. Alas, there’s always commentary that the fair should be pushed back a week, as if Frieze, the fair’s new owner, had any choice when negotiating with the Javits Center.
_____________ 

"Berry Campbell Gallery, which has made its name representing mid-century female abstract painters, sold a Lynne Drexler painting from the late ’70s, Autumn Twilight, for $450,000, and one from Yvonne Thomas for $125,000."

Market Uncertainty Didn’t Dampen Sales at This Year’s Armory Show

Armory Show VIP Day Kicks Off the Fall Season with Sales of Works by Walton Ford, Lynne Drexler, and More

Daniel Cassady
ARTnews
6 September, 2024

The Chelsea-based gallery Berry Campbell sold a never-before-seen painting by Lynne Drexler, Autumn Twilight (1977) for $450,000. Despite her being generally lesser-known, Drexler’s market has reached record highs in the past two years, with one of her paintings even selling for $1.38 million at auction last year. It seems as though there’s still a lot of interest in her art. Berry Campbell, which specializes in art by female painters of the postwar era, also sold Yvonne Thomas’s Blue Green (1964) for $125,000 and Nanette Carter’s Cantilevered #14 (2014) for $22,000.

What Was Selling at the Armory Show’s 2024 VIP Preview?

After a quiet summer, there are signs the market is coming back to life.

Eileen Kinsella
Artnet
September 5, 2024

Berry Campbell, which has carved out a dynamic niche focusing on postwar American painters—especially formerly under-appreciated Abstract Expressionist women painters—reported several solid sales. These included a newly released, never-before-seen painting from the archive of Lynne Drexler, Autumn Twilight (1977), sold for $450,000 to a private collection. And a painting by Yvonne Thomas, Blue Green (1964), sold for $125,000, while an oil on mylar by Nanette Carter, titled Cantilevered #14, (2014), was reportedly whisked away for $22,000.

PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

BERRY CAMPBELL TO PARTICIPATE IN THE ARMORY SHOW 2024 

NEW YORK, NEW YORK, August 13, 2024–Berry Campbell is pleased to announce its participation in The Armory Show 2024. Located at booth 119 at the Javits Center, Berry Campbell Gallery will present a modern take on Women Choose Women (1973), the first large-scale museum exhibition devoted solely to women artists and curated by a committee of women artists at the New York Cultural Center, for The Armory Show 2024.

Inside, an art collection curated in partnership with Berry Campbell Gallery showcases works by Ethel Schwabacher, Yvonne Thomas, and Dan Christensen, all available for purchase. The pieces are complemented by a striking installation crafted from repurposed Lucifer lighting components. This sculptural work, visible from the street, transforms from a sphere into an array of suspended, illuminated elements as one moves closer. The ground floor also features a selection of artworks—curated by Lucifer Lighting director and former gallerist Suzanne Mathews—from the family’s collection, including pieces by Francisco Toledo and Jim Sullivan.

New abstraction or old genre 

by Dana Gordon 
August 8, 2024

The New York art exhibitions to see in August

Read our pick of the best New York art exhibitions to see in August, from Voyage à Paris at Findlay Galleries to Paul McCartney's 'Eyes of the Storm' at the Brooklyn Museum

The Imaginary Made Real

Berry Campbell Gallery until 16 August 2024

Featuring 31 individual artists, The Imaginary Made Real, curated by New York-based artist and writer Paul Laster, is a celebration of the centennial of Surrealism. Through sculpture, ceramics, painting, drawing, mosaics and more, the exhibition explores ways of thinking and creating something abstract which embraces spiritual and psychological viewpoints. With pieces displayed at different scales you journey through a dreamlike landscape which can be seen from inside and outside the gallery. berrycampbell.com

Writer Tianna Williams

NC painter Beverly McIver wants to make art that makes a difference

By Vivienne Serret

When you walk into Beverly McIver’s art studio in Chapel Hill, the smell of oil paint fills the room and the eyes of her portraits follow your every move.

Her studio is a sacred space. Sometimes she finds herself painting till the early-morning hours. Other times she enters when her emotions overwhelm her and she needs to unwind. On a corner lies a bed; behind it, paintings inspired by McIver’s own struggles. In one self portrait her hair wraps around her eyes, her hands covering her face.

On her palette, you may find a cherry pit in paint, what’s left of a favorite snack to fuel on when she’s focused on her work.

To McIver, a 61-year-old Greensboro native and art professor at Duke University, art is a way to reach out and educate younger generations on the political state of the world. Her work has been featured in over 40 exhibitions and is in over 10 collections, including the N.C. Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

“All the rights that my generation and my mother’s generation fought for are slowly being taken away from women by men,” McIver said.

In a Season of Abstract Painting at New York Galleries, These Two Artists Stand Out

With their current shows, Josette Urso and Jill Nathanson, veteran abstractionists both, have come up with their most ambitious and adventurous pictures to date.

By Mario Naves
Tuesday, July 23, 2024 12:57:50 pm

Berry Campbell has mounted “Jill Nathanson: Chord Field.” This is the gallery’s fourth showing of the artist’s studiously turned variations on Color Field painting, a mode of art-making in which expansive areas of color are applied through means that are “hands off.” Painters like Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, and Jules Olitski opted for techniques that emphasized process over touch. Of course, “touch” manifests itself in a variety of ways. In Ms. Nathanson’s case, it is through the deliberate pouring of acrylics. The resulting scrims of color take on a waxy tactility that radiates a muffled and elusive light.

Writing in the accompanying catalog, David Rhodes mentions how “The Death of Actaeon” (1559-76) by Titian is pivotal in understanding Ms. Nathanson’s art. What, you might wonder, does a Venetian Master have to do with a contemporary artist and her buckets of paint? Mr. Rhodes mentions “discord and unease” inherent to the Titian. Ms. Nathanson points to how its “coloristic action … has been and continues to be totally gripping.” What Ms. Nathanson and Signore Tiziano share is the drama that can be generated through fraught delicacies of form.

Hosted by the Parrish Contemporaries Circle Committee

RSVP: info@berrycampbell.com

Wednesday, July 17, 6:00pm till 8:00pm

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANNA PETROW.

Have you dreamed of sipping rosé with Matisse or dining with Duchamp? It’s all possible at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art’s Cafe Sebastienne. The cafe itself is a piece of art, and the dining hall and its patrons are an integral part of the art installation. 

The Cafe Sebastienne dining room is lined from floor to ceiling with paintings by the late American artist Frederick J. Brown, who died in 2012. The installation, called The History of Art, features 110 oil paintings, each representing an important movement or figure in art throughout the ages. The works cover the cafe’s seven irregular walls, and they can cleverly be identified via a “map” found on the back of the menu. Dining in the cafe is an immersive experience.

“The series reflects the words of my mentor Willem de Kooning, who once told me, ‘Remember that art is a very old profession—it began with a shaman in a cave,’” Brown said at the time of the permanent installation in 1999.

The organizers of Art Basel have announced the 283 galleries set to participate in this year’s Miami Beach fair, slated to take place at the Miami Beach Convention Center December 6–8, with preview days December 4 and 5. Hailing from thirty-four countries and territories, the exhibiting galleries include thirty-two first-time participants, the most since 2008. The Americas are strongly represented, with nearly two thirds of participants coming from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Guatemala, Peru, and Uruguay; countries appearing for the first time include Indonesia and Romania.

The show will be divided into several sections: Galleries, the main section; Nova, which features young galleries showing work created in the past three years by up to three artists; Positions, devoted to solo showcases of emerging galleries or artists; and Survey, which focuses on work created before 2000. This year’s Meridians sector, which centers atypical projects, is being curated by Yasmil Raymond, until recently the director of Portikus and the rector of the Städelschule Academy of Fine Art, both in Frankfurt. The Kabinett section, focused on curated displays presented by galleries in a portion of their main booths, will return, as will the fair’s Conversations program, organized this year for the first time by arts writer and educator Kimberly Bradley. 

Dorothy Dehner 

June 21, 2024 by Kay Whitney
New York
Berry Campbell Gallery 

My introduction to Dorothy Dehner’s sculpture came via a tiny photograph in a catalogue of David Smith’s work. Indeed, it has been Dehner’s fate until recently to exist as a footnote to Smith’s career. In a Smithsonian oral history from the 1960s, she described their 23-year marriage as both violent and loving; she also stated that it was impossible for two sculptors to exist in the same household. Her career didn’t begin until she was 56, after her divorce from Smith. And it is only now that her work—under-appreciated and rarely displayed despite its presence in major museum collections—is receiving the treatment it deserves in a sprawling and inclusive retrospective (on view through June 22, 2024) that reveals the scope of her talents.

By Jessica Lack
July 4, 2024

Christian Levett on creating Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins (FAMM): ‘I needed the collection to tell a story, and that story is the birth of modern art’

The British collector explains how and why he decided to move on from antiquities to establish a museum for 19th- to 21st-century female artists — and why it made the mayor of Mougins cry.

There may come a time when a museum devoted entirely to female artists will be redundant — as strange as a museum for right-handed artists. However, in a world where modern art by women still makes up only about 11 per cent of major museum acquisitions, and where their paintings still cost a fraction of what their male contemporaries can command, the newly opened Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins (FAMM) is a vital addition to the canon.

Situated in the picturesque hilltop village of Mougins in the south of France, once home to Picasso and Francis Picabia, the privately owned FAMM is housed in a former museum of classical antiquity. More than 100 paintings and sculptures by more than 80 artists, spanning the period from 1870 to the present day, are closely spaced on four floors, creating an intimate atmosphere in which to see works by the likes of Berthe Morisot, Leonora Carrington, Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, Shirin Neshat and Carrie Mae Weems. 

Film Screening & Discussion:

“Kindred Spirits: Artists Hilda Wilkinson Brown and Lilian Thomas Burwell”

On Saturday, June 29^th at 12:00pm, join us at the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum for a screening and discussion of the documentary film, “Kindred Spirits: Artists Hilda Wilkinson Brown and Lilian Thomas Burwell,” about the lives and work of two accomplished but unsung Washington-based African American artists who were united by their love for each other, their dedication to their art, and their passion for teaching. Hilda Wilkinson Brown (1894-1981) graduated from M Street High School (later known as Dunbar), earned her BA from Howard University and MA from Columbia University, and then served as head of art education at Miner Teachers College for nearly 40 years. Her niece Lilian Thomas Burwell (1927-) attended Dunbar High School, Pratt Institute, DC Teachers’ College, and Catholic University, and later taught in the DC Public Schools, including at Duke Ellington School of the Arts.

The film will be followed by a discussion with:

• Cintia Cabib, filmmaker (“Kindred Spirits”; “A Community of Gardeners”; “Bird Walk”)
• Richard Timpson, family member and artist agent of Lilian Thomas Burwell & Hilda Wilkinson Brown
• Gail Shaw-Clemons, artist/printmaker/activist and longtime friend of Lilian Thomas Burwell
• moderated by Dr. Samir Meghelli, Senior Curator at the Anacostia Community Museum

Saturday, June 29^th
12:00pm-2:00pm
Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum
1901 Fort Place SE, Washington, DC 20020

REGISTER HERE (recommended, but not required): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/film-screening-discussion-kindred-spirits-tickets-917410187567

 

Four Overlooked Women Abstract Expressionists Are Spotlighted in London

The exhibition shows how the principles of Abstract Expression

Perle Fine 

Perle Fine in her New York studio in c. 1963. Photo: Maurice Berezov, courtesy of Perle Fine Estate and Gazelli Art House, © AE Artworks.

Born in Boston in 1905 to Russian immigrant parents, Fine showed an early interest in art and moved to New York in her early twenties to pursue an education at the Art Students League. There she opted to study under the renowned German-born artist Hans Hofmann, who was instrumental in developing the formal breakthroughs that defined European movements like Cubism into a more gestural, expressive style. Over time, Fine cultivated a number of high-profile collectors including Museum of Modern Art founding director Alfred Barr, art director and publisher Emily Hall Tremaine, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright, but also supported her practice by working as a gallerist.

By 1945, Fine had developed an interest in nonrepresentational art and joined the American Abstract Artists group. Five years later, Willem de Kooning nominated her to join “the Club,” a members-only meeting place on 8th Street where a tight-knit community of artists met to socialize, plan, and debate. The group selected her to participate in the historic Ninth Street Show, which featured artists like Philip Guston, Elaine de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, and Barnett Newman; the show established Abstract Expressionism as a major American art movement. Fine exhibited in all six of the subsequent annual invite-only exhibitions until 1957.

After many years living with Alzheimer’s, Fine died of pneumonia aged 83 on May 31, 1988.

FULL ARTICLE LINK

View of the Armory Show, New York, 2023. Photo: Vincent Tullo/The Armory Show.

The Armory Show announces 235 leading international galleries exhibiting in the 2024 edition, representing 35 countries. New York’s Art Fair will return for its fourth year at the Javits Center September 6–8, with a VIP Preview on September 5.

On left: Eric Dever, "Moorlands," 2022. Oil on canvas

THE RAINS ARE CHANGING FAST: NEW ACQUISITIONS IN CONTEXT

March 23, 2024 - September 1, 2024

he Rains are Changing Fast highlights new acquisitions alongside artwork that has long anchored The Heckscher Museum collection. Meredith A. Brown, Consulting Curator of Contemporary Art, is Co-Curator of the exhibition. Here, Brown provides insight into the concept behind the show, and one example of the themes of  “paired” artworks, both newly acquired and mainstays of the collection.

Abstract Expressionist Alice Baber Advocated for Women Artists. At Long Last Her Own Work Is Taking the Spotlight

"Reverse Infinity" at Berry Campbell in New York marks the first major exhibition of works by Alice Baber in over 40 years.

Alice Baber lived, by her own account, as an artist out of sync with her times, navigating the downtown New York art scene of the 1950s and ‘60s as both insider and outsider. Her life, as she described it, existed in the “slightly uncomfortable feeling of not belonging to any place.”

A new exhibition at “Reverse Infinity” New York’s Berry Campbell aims to change that (through May 18). The exhibition is the first large-scale showing of Baber’s work in over 40 years and features a remarkable ensemble of the artist’s luminous, auric abstractions made in thin veils of radiant color. The paintings on view span from 1960 to 1982—these last works are intimate, elegant watercolors made just months before Baber’s untimely death from cancer at the age of 54. The Embarcation (1960), the earliest work in the show, meanwhile, is a stain-like almost botanical vision of purples and blues imbued with hazy atmospheric quality. Early canvases give way to more mature works, such as Blue Flotilla and Time of Day, both from 1966, platelet-like discs of colors, in deeper, often jewel-toned hues. These works can seem biomorphic or even vegetal—like looking at a plant very close up.

Montagne

RSVP: Berry Campbell

On view in the Titelman Gallery, Vero Beach Museum of Art:

Lynne Drexler, Untitled, ca. 1967. Crayon on paper, 13 ¾ x 7 in. and Lynne Drexler, A Blossom, 1967. Oil on linen, 68 x 49 ¾ in. Private Collection, USA. 

Alice Baber: Reverse Infinity
Art Forum Must See

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / A striking feature of the paintings and works on paper of Janice Biala (1903–2000), now on view at Berry Campbell in a show craftily curated by Jason Andrew, is their seamless reconciliation of civilizational clutter and spatial order. Fixing that notion is the earliest painting, The Studio (1946), arraying the artist’s active workspace and establishing her intent to embrace the world through it. (Coincidentally, Vera Iliatova’s “The Drawing Room” at Nathalie Karg gamely recaptures and updates kindred impulses.) Biala’s work here, spanning the immediate postwar period almost to the end of the Cold War and blending the New York School and the School of Paris – she lived in both cities – also bears the considerable weight of twentieth-century history, art and otherwise, with extraordinary grace and weightless cohesion, free of the strain of obvious contrivance.

(New York, NY – April 2, 2024) – The Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) today announced the addition of 11 new member galleries: Berry Campbell (New York), Cavin-Morris Gallery (New York), Hales Gallery (New York), Nina Johnson (Miami), Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery (New York), Magenta Plains (New York), Charles Moffett (New York), Sargent's Daughters (New York and Los Angeles), William Shearburn Gallery (St. Louis), Louis Stern Fine Arts (West Hollywood), and Timothy Taylor (New York). These eleven galleries join the ADAA’s contingent of over 200 members, each of which is admitted after an evaluation of their exhibition and programming history, established expertise, and intellectual rigor, ensuring that each member is emblematic of the very best that the American art market offers. The Association will support these exemplary institutions by providing information essential to navigating the current art market, as well as technical, legal, and business resources. 

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.

PARRISH ART MUSEUM
March 8, 2024
6 pm

As the Parrish celebrates International Women’s Day, join us for a conversation with artists Renate Aller, April Gornik, and Susan Vecsey, each on view in Beyond the Horizon: Interpretations of the Landscape from Women in the Permanent Collection, moderated by Assistant Curator Brianna L. Hernández. The exhibition includes mural-sized representational oil paintings, expressionistic watercolors and pastel drawings, and intimate mixed-media abstractions, from the unique visual language of women artists from the Parrish’s permanent collection. In a conversation centered around the exhibition, visual styles experiences of the landscape, the program celebrates and recognizes the accomplishments of women artists within the Parrish collection and across the East End.

REGISTER HERE

$10 Members | $20 Adults | $18 Seniors | $15 Member’s Guest | Free for Students & Children

LISTEN HERE: https://cerebralwomen.com/2024/03/06/episode-191-a-conversation-with-christine-berry/

Ep.191 | Christine Berry earned her Bachelors of Art in Art History from Baylor University and her Masters in Art History and Museum Studies from the University of North Texas. She began her career at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and continued on to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Twenty years ago, she shifted from the non-profit sector to the commercial art world.

In 2013, Christine Berry and Martha Campbell founded Berry Campbell Gallery in Chelsea. The gallery has a fine-tuned program representing artists from Postwar American art, who have been overlooked due to age, race, gender, or geography. This unique perspective has been increasingly recognized by curators, collectors, and the press.

Over the last ten years, Berry Campbell has doubled its roster, staff, and footprint. In 2022, the gallery moved from its original venue to its current 9,000 square foot gallery space at 524 West 26th Street. The gallery represents 34 artists and estates including Lynne Drexler, Perle Fine, Bernice Bing, Frederick Brown, Lilian Thomas Burwell, Nanette Carter, Beverly McIver, and Frank Wimberley.

Janice Biala (1903-2000) La Seine: Paris la Nuit, 1954, Oil on canvas, 18 x 36 3/8 in (48.3 x 92.4 cm) Collection of the Estate of Janice Biala, New York

AMERICANS IN PARIS:
Artist Working in Postwar France, 1946-1962

March 2-July 20, 2024

The Grey Art Gallery

New York University
100 Washington Square East
NYC

Following World War II, hundreds of artists from the United States flocked to the City of Light, which for centuries had been heralded as an artistic mecca and international cultural capital. Americans in Paris explores a vibrant community of expatriates who lived in France for a year or more during the period from 1946 to 1962. Many were ex-soldiers who took advantage of a newly enacted GI Bill, which covered tuition and living expenses; others, including women, financed their own sojourns.

Showcased here are some 130 paintings, sculptures, photographs, films, textiles, and works on paper by nearly 70 artists, providing a fresh perspective on a creative ferment too often overshadowed by the contemporaneous ascendency of the New York art scene. The show focuses on a diverse core of twenty-five artists—some who are established, even canonical, figures, and others who have yet to receive the recognition their work deserves. A complementary section dubbed the “Salon” combines works by French and foreign artists that the Americans would have seen in Parisian galleries or annual salons, alongside examples by compatriots who likewise spent at least a year residing in France during this time.

While the U.S. art scene was dominated by the rise of Abstract Expressionism, Americans working in Paris experimented with a range of formal strategies and various approaches to both abstraction and figuration. And, as the esteemed writer James Baldwin—a longtime French resident—saliently observed, living in Paris afforded expats the opportunity to question what it meant to be an American artist at midcentury. For some, Paris promised a society less constrained by racism and the exclusionary power structures of the New York art world.

American artists also encountered undercurrents of nationalistic tension, as French critics sought to maintain Paris’s artistic preeminence. By 1962, the year that concludes the exhibition, many felt that the once-inspiring atmosphere had diminished. That same year, Algeria achieved independence from France after many years of demonstrations and riots, and, ultimately, war. Many Americans opted to return to the U.S., which was experiencing a burgeoning civil rights movement, and in particular to New York, where there were more opportunities to exhibit, due in part to the rise of artist-run galleries. Others chose to remain abroad. Whether they returned or remained in Paris, the Americans’ encounters with French collections, artists, critics, and gallerists significantly impacted the development of postwar American art.

"I always look forward to seeing the paintings brought by Berry Campbell, which represents the estates of historical female artists. I am inspired by Alice Baber, who organized exhibitions of women artists, Including Color Forum fo 1972 at the University of Texas in Austin." - Catalina Gonzalez Jorba (Collector and Founder of Dondolo)

Beverley McIver, Truly Grateful, 2011, oil on canvas, North Carolina Museum of Art, Gift in memory of Janet Martin Lampkin, former member of the executive committee of the Friends of African and African American Art

BEVERLY MCIVER (b. 1962)

A notable presence in American contemporary art, Beverly McIver has charted new directions as a Black female artist. With breathtaking honesty and virtuoso painting, her works tackle difficult themes about the human condition such as depression, racism, poverty, disability, and death. A recent article in Forbes compared her works both to “Frida Kahlo’s heart wrenching self-portraits,” and the “publicly exposed raw autobiography with the likes of Sylvia Plath poetry.” She has received numerous awards and honors and has been the subject of eleven museum exhibitions.

Born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina, McIver grew up in a single-parent household. Her mother worked tirelessly to make ends meet to support McIver and two sisters, one of which, Renee, has developmental disabilities. Despite these challenges, McIver pursued her artistic inquiry through her education, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in Painting and Drawing from North Carolina Central University and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting and Drawing from Pennsylvania State University. Her artistic journey serves as a testament to her perseverance and the complexities that shape her identity such as stereotyping, self-acceptance, family, otherness, illness, death and, ultimately, freedom to express one’s individuality.

See more works by Beverley McIver: https://www.berrycampbell.com/artist/Beverly_McIver/works/

Esperanza and Irwin welcome artist Mike Solomon. Mike had an extraordinary childhood, growing up as the son of Syd and Annie Solomon. Syd was part of the Ab-Ex movement, and while he was a painter of great renown, the salons Annie hosted in her home were legendary. Mike, who is an important painter in his own right, shares the stories of what went on in the East Hampton in 1960's and 70's East Hampton.

LISTEN HERE: https://ourhamptonspodcast.com/

Eric Dever, Moorland, 2020, oil on canvas, 30 x36 in, The Heckscher Museum of Art

The Heckscher Museum of Art
THE RAINS ARE CHANGING FAST: NEW ACQUISITIONS IN CONTEXT

March 23, 2024 - September 1, 2024

The Rains are Changing Fast highlights artwork recently acquired by The Heckscher Museum of Art alongside a selection of key works long held in the Museum’s collection. For over a century, the Heckscher has been collecting and presenting art that explores the landscapes and social issues of its place and time. This exhibition, which takes its title from a 2021 video by Christine Sciulli, features new and beloved works of art that together reveal the diverse ways in which artists contend with environmental and cultural change. Created over a span of 175 years by 39 artists, the works are united by shared engagements with landscape, allegory, and abstraction. Some, like Richard Mayhew’s Pescadero (2014) or George Inness’s The Pasture, Durham, Connecticut (c. 1879), present luminous, if precarious, visions of the American landscape. Others, including Deborah Buck’s They Had Stars in Their Eyes (2020) and Dorothy Dehner’s Landscape (1976), employ modes of abstraction that speak to issues of gender and materiality. The resulting visual conversations emphasize the Museum’s ongoing commitment to social concerns, environmental issues, and Long Island’s diverse communities.

Turner Contemporary
Beyond Form: Lines of Abstraction, 1950 - 1970

Saturday 3 February – Monday 6 May 2024
Guest curated by Dr Flavia Frigeri.

This spring, Turner Contemporary will present Beyond Form: Lines of Abstraction, 1950 – 1970, a group exhibition presenting abstraction as a radical global language shared by women artists in the twenty years following World War II. Guest curated by Dr Flavia Frigeri, the exhibition will bring together the works of more than 50 artists to examine how, through abstract forms, materials and modes, women pushed the boundaries of artmaking while tackling seismic cultural, social and political shifts. Comprising over 80 artworks, predominantly sculpture, the exhibition will trace how the language of abstraction developed on a global scale.

Beyond Form will re-evaluate how art, gender and the act of making intersected in the post-WWII period, when men often eclipsed women’s artistic contributions. It will highlight the pioneering efforts of women artists in the development of abstraction, asserting their vital role in the discourse of the times.

In the 1950s and 1960s, women actively resisted the pressure to return to domestic roles, instead capitalising on their substantial wartime work experiences. By embracing abstraction, these artists leveraged a form of expression that resonated with the era’s proto-feminist sentiments. Through employing techniques like hanging, stacking and weaving they subverted established art-craft hierarchies and challenged entrenched gender norms. Their innovative use of sculptural materials allowed them to investigate critical social topics and explore themes concerning the human form, political discourse and more. 

Looking beyond the Western canon, Beyond Form will present abstraction as a constellation of interconnected stories. It will celebrate artists from Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, positioning them as central figures in the history of abstraction and will bring to light many works that have previously gone unseen.

BEYOND THE HORIZON:
INTERPRETATIONS OF THE LANDSCAPE FROM WOMEN IN THE PERMANENT COLLECTION

Spanning mural-sized representational oil paintings, expressionistic watercolors and pastel drawings, and intimate mixed-media abstractions, Beyond the Horizon will take viewers on a journey through visual styles and thematic experiences of the landscape. Featured women artists from the permanent collection capture the essence and tone of the environment through their own unique visual language.

Large-scale works by Renate Aller, April Gornik, and Jane Wilson will demonstrate how these women artists masterfully composed mural-sized works, countering the common association of large-scale with the masculine. A selection of paintings by Jennifer Bartlett, Nell Blaine, Edith Prellwitz, Susan Vecsey, and Jane Wilson expand techniques to include expressionistic mark-making and atmospheric washes of color across meadows, forests, and mountain ranges. Collages, relief works, and textured surfaces by Darlene Charneco, Sandi Haber Fifield, Laurie Lambrecht, and Michelle Stuart will celebrate abstraction and conceptual interpretations of the land and nature. Throughout the galleries, visitors will be immersed in the landscape and experience how each artist transforms their view of the natural world.

Nanette Carter, Untitled, 1989, multicolored woodcut on Arches Paper, 48 x 35 in.

The Church Examines Nuanced Art of Printmaking in Sag Harbor

BY Oliver Peterson

Open through February 25 at The Church in Sag Harbor, Master Impressions: Artists and Printers on the South Fork (1965 – 2010) is a sort of master class in demonstrating how the art of printmaking is far more complex, interesting and creative than simply duplicating an existing image on paper. The exhibition not only pays close attention to the 26 featured artists who have spent time working on the South Fork, it recognizes the role of the printers who helped bring their creations to fruition and the techniques used to do it.

Each print in the show was selected by The Church Workshop and Residency Manager Samuel Havens, who is a printmaker in his own right, along with Chief Curator Sara Cochran, who says the younger staff member has experience working with a number of printers and he teaches the craft to others. - continue reading

MASTER IMPRESSIONS: Artists and Printers on the South Fork (1965 - 2010)

January 14th - February 25th

Opening Reception:
Saturday, January 13th
6 PM - 7:30 PM

We are delighted to announce our first exhibition of 2024: Master Impressions: Artists and Printers on the South Fork. Featuring approximately 20 works dating from 1965-2010 by artists who have made art on the South Fork of Long Island, the exhibition highlights ways in which artists of the region have masterfully explored varied techniques of the medium. Prints are a testament to the collaborative potential of the creative process and demonstrate how artists, printers, and the press working together can achieve results that surpass individual expertise.

For press information and more details, please contact info@thechurchsagharbor.org.

Dave Popkin/American Jazz Museum

As the old line goes, "Jazz was born in New Orleans, but it grew up in Kansas City," so it was appropriate that in 1997, the American Jazz Museum opened its doors at one of the most important jazz crossroads in the world- 18th and Vine in Kansas City. The museum serves as a vibrant performance, exhibition, education, and research space. The day I attended there was a wonderful art exhibit of Frederick J. Brown, featuring his oversized oil portraits of legends like Big Joe Turner, Thelonious Monk, and Etta James. - continue reading

Next month, Berry Campbell Gallery (524 W 26th Street in Chelsea, New York) will present the annual Postcards From the Edge Exhibition and Benefit Sale. Martha Campbell and Christine Berry (see photo) are proud to open their 9,000 square-foot exhibition space for this meaningful event.

On Friday, January 19th from 6-8pm, you can attend the In-Person Preview (plus early online access to see the art inventory) and a silent auction at Berry Campbell. On-line sales opens January 20, 2024. The exhibition is on view Jan-21, 2024.

For more information about the Visual Aids event, CLICK HERE.
For more information about Berry Campbell, CLICK HERE.

If you are a patron of Kansas City's art or jazz community, then you have seen the painterly work of the late artist Frederick James Brown. Two large, elegant portraits, one of Charlie Parker and the other of Count Basie, permanently adorn the atrium interior at the American Jazz Museum in the 18th and Vine District. Halfway across the city, Cafe Sebastienne at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art contains an intimate dining room with a floor-to-ceiling installation of more than 100 paintings by Brown expressing his rendition of art history.

In 2002, a traveling exhibition of Brown's work, focusing on his portraits of jazz and blues luminaries, premiered simultaneously at Kemper Museum and the American Jazz Museum. Titled "Frederick J. Brown: Portraits in Jazz, Blues, & Other Icons," the exhibit then traveled to the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Born in Georgia and raised in Chicago, Brown graduated in 1968 from Southern Illinois University Carbondale with a degree in art. He lived and worked in the SoHo district of New York City for decades. Along the way, he taught at various colleges including one in Beijing, China. His 1988 retrospective of mo works at the Museum of the Chinese Revolution made Brown one of the earliest Western artists to exhibit in China. Brown passed away in 2012, at the age of 67.

In October, Brown's "Energy is Jazz" exhibition, co-curated by the American Jazz Museum and Bentley Brown of the Frederick J. Brown Trust, opened at the American Jazz Museum. While the world has changed in innumerable ways since Brown's last exhibition at the AJM, the sheer energy collected, refined and expressed in Brown's work continues to astound. - continue reading

Postcards From the Edge: A Benefit for Visual AIDS

Berry Campbell, New York
January 19 - 21, 2024

Since 1998, Visual AIDS has produced the annual Postcards From the Edge exhibition and benefit sale of original, postcard-sized works on paper by established and emerging artists.

Known within the art world as the most exciting and affordable way to add to a collection, Postcards From the Edge offers a unique opportunity for buyers to acquire original, postcard-sized artwork for ONLY $100 EACH. Offered on a first-come, first-served basis, each piece is exhibited anonymously, and the identity of the artist is revealed only after the work is purchased. With the playing field leveled, all participants can take home a piece by a famous artist, or one who's just making their debut in the art world. Nonetheless, collectors walk away with something beautiful, a piece of art they love!

By participating in Postcards From the Edge artists and collectors support the activities of Visual AIDS, enabling the organization to produce contemporary art programs and provide supplies and assistance to artists living with HIV/AIDS, many who are unable to continue producing work without such support. All Postcards From the Edge proceeds support the programs of Visual AIDS.

(From the left: Stanley Boxer, Sosoughtbloomnaught, 1976; Frederick J. Brown, Jacques Lipchitz, 1992-1993; John Opper, Untitled (#16), 1969; Stanley Boxer, Softlashtendercombs, 1976)

"Throughout the room, anniversary collection fabric, carpet and furniture frames came together in signature Young Huh style. The designer and her team debuted the iconic Tree of Life pattern as a wallcovering. Artwork from Berry Campbell, fireplace accessories from Chesneys and florals from Diane James Home completed the luxe ambiance." - continue reading

Ethel Schwabacher, Woman: Red Sea, Dead Sea, 1951, oil on canvas, 31x37 in

Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction, 1940 - 1970
Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany
December 2, 2023 - March 3, 2024

Kunsthalle Bielefeld presents an extensive global show that for the first time in Europe focuses on the work of female artists and their role in the development of abstraction after 1945. The movement we now describe as “Abstract Expressionism” officially began in the mid-20th century in the United States. But around the world, artists* explored parallel approaches to abstraction through materiality, expressivity, and gesture, from Informel to Arte Povera, from calligraphic abstraction and Gutai in East Asia to experimental, deeply political practices in Central and South America, North Africa, and the Middle East.

Perle Fine, Painting No. 56, c. 1954, Oil on canvas, 60 x 56 in 

Action, Gesture, Paint, Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940–70
Whitechapel Gallery, London
February 9 - May 7, 2023

"Perhaps the most dramatic was at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, where the curators of Action, Gesture, Paint defenestrated the aggressively white American male domain of Abstract Expressionism to champion an entire generation of 81 international artist women. We’re not talking second-rate copycats: painters like Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Perle Fine and Judith Godwin were a respected part of the New York scene, promoted alongside Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock by the painter and gallerist Betty Parsons." - continue reading 

https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/female-artists-take-centre-stage-in-2023/

Frederick J. Brown, Portrait of Etta James, American Jazz Museum

OPENING OCTOBER 26, 2023: Energy is Jazz, an exhibition of works by American artist, Frederick J. Brown

The American Jazz Museum presents Energy is Jazz, an exhibition of works by esteemed American artist, Frederick J. Brown. The exhibition has been co-curated between The American Jazz Museum and Bentley Brown of the Frederick J. Brown Trust. The exhibit will explore Brown's career and his depiction of jazz artists in portraiture, in addition to the energy and feeling of jazz through visual representation.

Louis Carlos Bernal Gallery, Pima Community College

January 29 - March 8, 2024
Reception: February 15, 5-7 p.m.

“Portraits” is a captivating gallery exhibit showcasing paintings, photographs, drawings and prints by renowned artists such as Louis Carlos Bernal, Beverly McIver, Alejandro Macias, Papay Solomon, Gerard Beringer, Vincent Desiderio, Craig Cully and more. The diverse collection explores themes of identity, culture and the human condition. Bernal’s photographs capture the familial ties of Chicano life, while McIver examines issues of race and gender. Macias combines the Latino culture and identity through his use of self-portraits with Mexican and Western influences, Solomon’s hyperrealist portraits celebrate the African diaspora, and Cully’s realist paintings delve into the complexities of identity. “Portraits” invites viewers to experience the power of portraiture in connecting and inspiring. 

Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2023 at 6:00pm 

Hosted by the Art Students League of New York

Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery, 2nd Fl 215 W 57th Street, New York

This panel discussion will bring together artists who have both studio and pedagogical practices to discuss abstraction and its teaching today. Participants include League instructors Jill Nathanson and James Little, as well as Carl E. Hazlewood, Harriet Korman, and John Mendelsohn. Moderated by Mario Naves.

Event tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/painters-talking-what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-abstraction-tickets-754042339937?aff=oddtdtcreator 

Beverly McIver, Norman Lear, 2022, oil on canvas, 30x30 in. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Beverly McIver, an artist and professor of art history and visual studies at Duke University, remembers watching Lear’s shows every week as a child. Growing up in a housing project in Greensboro, N.C., she identified with J.J. Evans, the teenage aspiring artist who grows up in Chicago public housing, portrayed by Jimmie Walker on “Good Times.”

“These shows gave me hope that I could rise out of the project, not continue the cycle of poverty, and that I could be an artist,” she said.

Tim Jaeger, director and chief curator of galleries and exhibitions at Ringling College of Art & Design, poses next to Syd Solomon's 1982 triptych Trishades in the Lois and David Stulberg Gallery.

"Fluid Impressions: The Paintings of Syd Solomon" Opening Reception Friday, Nov. 10, 5-8 p.m. Exhibit runs through March 25, 2024. Stulberg Gallery, Ringling College of Art and Design, 1188 Dr. Martin Luther King Way. Visit RinglingCollege.Gallery.

"Charlotte Park: Gathering," a focused exhibition of paintings by the Abstract Expressionist artist, is at the Berry Campbell Gallery in Chelsea through Dec. 22. 

Berry Campbell is pleased to announce exclusive representation of Beverly McIver (b. 1962).

Ethel Schwabacher, Untitled, c. 1950. Oil on linen

If this year’s Frieze Masters in London is any indication, enthusiasm for the rediscoveries of historically overlooked women artists is as strong as ever. A section of the fair entitled “Modern Women” is devoted to just these stories, bringing together a curated selection of artists who worked between 1880 and 1980. Curated by AWARE (Archive of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions), the section’s solo exhibitions bring together both unfamiliar names and artists who have earned acclaim in recent years, including Faith Ringgold, Vera Molnar, and Tarsila Do Amaral.

Gachot Studios transformed a coastal home into a retreat for two art-loving city dwellers

On View November 6, 2023 – March 25, 2024 
Opening Reception + Art Walk: Friday, November 10 from 5 to 8pm 

The Ringling College Galleries + Exhibitions Department, along with the students enrolled in the Role of the Curator class within the Business of Art and Design Department, are pleased to present Fluid Impressions: The Paintings of Syd Solomon; an immersive collection featuring expressive, storytelling paintings from Abstract Impressionist, Syd Solomon.

One of Sarasota’s most influential artists, Syd Solomon, created abstract paintings that distinctly capture the essence of natural elements shaped by his surroundings and life experiences. His artistic sensibilities proved invaluable during the early days of WWII. Even years following his passing, the enduring impact of one of the city's most influential artists still persists. 

This exhibition was led by a student curatorial team who applied, and were selected, to participate in a semester-long class titled Role of the Curator. The students were provided a hands-on overview of how to successfully produce a blue-chip exhibition as well as other related arts disciplines that included business practices and entrepreneurship. This exhibition features not only Solomon’s visually stimulating paintings, but also bridges together the important stories from Sarasota’s history while preserving Solomon’s legacy in the art world.  

Fluid Impressions was made possible by the generous loan of three dozen paintings from the private collection of Dr. Richard and Pamela Mones. 

Dan Christensen's Little Egypt is featured in Rainbow Country at VSOP Projects, opening September 23, 2023, 6-8pm. The exhibition will be at VSOP Projects' "Very Special" location at 200 Main Street, Greenport, NY 11944.

There's no perfect way to assess sales performance at an art fair. Galleries are under no obligation to report sales, and they're incentivised to report strong interest, making their artworks seem more covetable. The success of sales also depends on context. In a down market—which auction sales suggest is already here—average sales look good.

At this year's Armory Show (7–10 September), sales got off to 'a bustling start' according to The Art Newspaper, though they also said some smaller galleries reported 'a slow start'.

Here's what caught our eye during last week's crush of art fairs in New York City.

New York gallery Berry Campbell had a standout booth, a curated presentation of 12 postwar women artists. The gallery has a distinct focus on re-examining underrepresented women artists of the 20th-century. Gallery owner Christine Berry called it “an incredible day,” noting high demand for artists including Alice Baber, Bernice Bing, and Lynne Drexler.

Works by Drexler sold for $885,000 and $200,000; the artist, who has been drawing intense interest, will likely be the subject of a traveling institutional retrospective at some point in the near future. A work by Baber went for $200,000—Berry Campbell hopes to mount a solo show of the artist next year.

Later on in the day, the gallery let Artnet News know that a painting by Ethel Schwabacher had been sold for $195,000.  

Following their onsite conversation, "Art and Architecture: Tips for Designing your Dream Home," at this year's Intersect Aspen, art advisor Laura Smith Sweeney and architect Alex Klumb select their favorite works from the fair. If you missed it in-person, watch the full Laura and Alex's full conversation here, and read on for their selections.

Proving that no force is stronger than girl power, Frampton Co and Berry Campbell present Women Choose Women at Exhibition The Barn.

_{Libbie Mark, Untitled, 1960s, Acrylic and paper collage on linen, 44 x 36 1/4 in.}

Women and Abstraction: 1741–Now at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts closes July 30th.

Women are on full display at Intersect Aspen, at least figuratively speaking. The 2023 edition of the fair features female powerhouse artists, all with dynamic works on view, and exciting projects in progress in their studios and around the world.

Berry Campbell is opening Day and Night, its fifth solo show with Susan Vecsey. In 15 new oil paintings, luminous nocturnes set where the sea meets the sky, Vecsey continues her exploration of the optical sublime.

Like all her works, Vecsey’s recent series of poured paintings is inspired by the topography of eastern Long Island, and the ever-changing effects of light, air, and water on human perception. Stained in soft-edge shades of blue, orange, gray, and white, Vecsey’s soft-edge abstractions hover at the edge of pure form and illusion.

Take a look inside Susan Vecsey's studio and artistic process as she prepares for her fifth solo show with the gallery, 'Susan Vecsey: Day and Night'

It's hot, the streets are dusty: the sun was just before its summer turning point and had set glisteningly, aligned exactly with the street grid, at the end of the high-rise canyons. "Manhattanhenge" is what people in New York call it, they push themselves to the busy intersections, fearless in traffic, to shoot the perfect picture. Then the sooty, tawny smoke from Canada's wildfires swept across the streets, turning the city into an eerie backdrop: the end of the world seemed imminent. He didn't come, for now. Instead, you saw something blossom; a vision, or at least a possible promising future. With a seismographic flair, the art scene takes a look beyond the current situation. In the museums and galleries of the metropolis: female and diverse perspectives, self-determination.

Mike Solomon, the Founding Director of the Alfonso Ossorio Foundation, examines the shared artistic aims and the unlikely affinity between the wealthy, worldly, Harvard-educated Filipino-American artist Alfonso Ossorio and Jackson Pollock, son of an Iowa farm family and high school dropout.

The Art of Relationships is a series of Zoom talks in conjunction with the exhibition “Creative Exchanges: Artists in Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner’s Address Books” on view at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center through July 30, 2023.

Date: 06/11/2023

Time: 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Please click here to register for this event on Zoom.

It’s been 30 years since Ethel Schwabacher had a proper solo show in New York City. But in the 1950s, she was at the forefront of the Abstract Expressionist movement, showing vibrant canvases with bold colors, fluid brushstrokes, and even snippets of poems at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York.

“Ethel was a poet as well, so she would put lines of her poetry in her paintings—which for the 1950s was way ahead of its time,” Christine Berry, cofounder of New York’s Berry Campbell Gallery, told Artnet News.

If you’re invited to spend the weekend in Sag Harbor, you’ve just won summer’s golden ticket. This Hamptons hamlet is what getaway dreams are made of. A two-square-mile village on the outstretched fringe of New York City, it was once an international whaling port, a remote place where writers like John Steinbeck could rent solitary bungalows on the cheap to pound out legendary novels on portable typewriters.

A mural for Lima jazz legend Joe Henderson has already been created downtown, and on April 27, Lima schools will add another posthumous honor to add to Henderson’s legacy.

"Artists Choose Parrish: Part 1", featuring Nanette Carter and Frank Wimberley, is listed as one of 29 must-see museum exhibitions to see this Spring and Summer. 

"Artists Choose Parrish: Part 1" at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, NY, April 16-August 6, 2023 & April 30-July 23, 2023.

The Parrish Art Museum is commemorating its 125th anniversary this year with a three-part series called “Artists Choose Parrish” in which contemporary artists with ties to the East End have chosen works from the museum’s permanent collection to be shown alongside their own recent artwork.

Berry Campbell hosted a reception and artist meet and greet with Lilian Thomas Burwell on February 25, 2023.

Eric Dever's mural-size diptych, "October 10th," is on view at the U.S. Embassy residence in Helsinki, Finland, as part of the State Department's Art in Embassies program.

The history of Black artists on Long Island is rich, deep and still being written. Sometimes, with help, history repeats itself. This month offers chances to revisit pivotal exhibitions of previous decades and witness the cultural significance of Black artists in the area.

Women artists make a radical mess at the Whitechapel Gallery

Parrish Celebrates 125 Years

The Parrish Art Museum will celebrate its anniversary with a program that includes artists, such as Nanette Carter, choosing works from the permanent collection to show alongside their own art, in this case, "Cantilevered #53 (Teetering)," an oil on Mylar piece from 2020.

The Southampton Arts Center will celebrate its 10th anniversary with the seventh iteration of East End Collected, an exhibition organized annually by the artist Paton Miller to reflect the diversity of the East End’s art community. Opening Saturday with a reception at 5 p.m., the show will include a series of public programs and works by more than 40 artists.

The Church in Sag Harbor is celebrating the village’s legacy of Black artists with a new exhibition, Return to a Place by the Sea featuring Frank Wimberley, Nanette Carter, Gregory Coates and the late Al Loving — four abstract artists with local roots and a shared past.

Lynne Drexler Saw the World Through Kaleidoscope Eyes

The art establishment ignored Lynne Drexler in life and, for more than two decades, also in death. But suddenly, the brilliantly colored canvases she kept piled in her ramshackle Monhegan home are fetching millions. Who was the enigmatic painter, and why is her immense talent only beginning to get its due?

Will Grunewald for Down East, February 2023

Berry Campbell Gallery is listed by ARTnews as an exhibitor at the 15th annual Dallas Art Fair.

Intersect Palm Springs Returns with Art and Activism in the Desert

The art fair will be on view at the Palm Springs Convention Center February 9-12 with a slew of exhibitions, events, and a special focus on female talent.

The art and design fair Intersect Palm Springs returns for its second edition from February 9 through 12 this year, welcoming a dynamic mix of over 50 contemporary and modern galleries.

Elizabeth Osborne's Passage, 1971 is highlighted by The Baer Faxt in a recent Instagram post discussing Intersect Palm Springs 2023.

These last years have been crucial for readdressing the gender imbalance in art history, unveiling powerful and inspiring stories of female artists. Today’s edition of Artland’s Lost (and Found) Artist series, which unveils the stories of artists who were once omitted from the mainstream art canon or who were largely unseen for most of their careers, explores the renaissance of Abstract Expressionist painter Lynne Mapp Drexler (1928-1999). Probably overshadowed by her husband (also a painter) and her male contemporaries, she experienced the vibrant and tumultuous New York art scene of the mid-20^th century but overwhelmed by it, and struggling with her career, left for the peaceful Monhegan Island, off the coast of Maine. As is often the case, after her death in 1999 and especially in recent years, Drexler is eventually gaining the attention she would have merited, and (as some had anticipated) her paintings are now being sold for millions.

The history of Black artists on Long Island is rich, deep and still being written. Sometimes, with help, history repeats itself. This month offers chances to revisit pivotal exhibitions of previous decades and witness the cultural significance of Black artists in the area.

WHAT "Return to A Place by the Sea"

WHEN | WHERE Through May 27, 12-5 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday, The Church, 48 Madison St., Sag Harbor

INFO Free; 631-919-5342, thechurchsagharbor.org

Art advisors Irene Papanestor and Steven Sergiovanni, Palm Springs Life magazine editor-in-chief Steven Biller, and BoxoPROJECTS Founder and Director Bernard Leibov make highlight selections from the upcoming Intersect Palm Springs 2023 art fair.

A newly resurfaced archive of Mary Dill Henry’s photographs, sketches, and correspondence at the Illinois Institute of Technology reveals an artist always in motion.

Following its debut at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 2021, the group exhibition Black American Portraits travels to Atlanta’s Spelman College Museum of Fine Art.

A Return to a Place By the Sea

February 5 - May 27, 2023

Opening Reception February 4 | 6-7:30PM

Return to A Place By the Sea revisits and recontextualizes the 1999 exhibition A Place By the Sea that celebrated the work and friendship of four African American artists: Nanette Carter (b. 1954), Gregory Coates (b. 1961), Al Loving (1935-2005), and Frank Wimberley (b.1926). Initially organized in 1999 by Jim Richard Wilson at the Rathbone Gallery of the Russell Sage College in Albany, the show traveled to Christine Nienaber Contemporary Art in New York and the Arlene Bujese Gallery in East Hampton. This February, thanks to the combined curation of The Church's Co-Founder April Gornik and Chief Curator Sara Cochran, we will explore the type of art these artists were making in the 1990s and update this conversation by exploring their more recent work. Our goal is to deepen the understanding of these influential artists, who have only begun to receive international acclaim for their work. The show also delineates a more inclusive history of abstract painting in New York in the late 20th century and looks beyond the historical standard of race and gender. Uniting some works from the original show with recent paintings, works on paper, and sculpture, Return to A Place By the Sea highlights the relevancy of each artist of "The Eastville Four." Given that for a time, all four artists lived part of the year in the Eastville/ SANS neighborhood to the east of Sag Harbor, this exhibition further honors the tradition of Sag Harbor as a maker's place of diverse art, industry, and craft practices.

Carter, Coates, Loving, and Wimberley shared a deep kinship. They were committed to abstract painting and shared an appreciation of jazz music with its vitality and basis in spontaneity and experimentation. Their lives and work were intertwined by their associations with The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Cinque Gallery in New York where they showed their work, and the Eastville Community where they have summer homes and found space to work and relax. The exhibition will feature programming that spotlights each artist and new video interviews with Carter, Coates, and Wimberley.

Join us for the opening on Saturday, February 4th, from 6-7:30 PM.

Pioneering non-figurative work by women from all over the world gets its due in an exuberant London exhibition.

Join us for a virtual conversation that delves into the artistic practice of Frederick J. Brown with noted American art historian and curator Lowery Stokes Sims, who contributed a new essay to Frederick J. Brown: A Drawing in Five Parts, and the artist’s son, Bentley Brown, Adjunct Professor of Art History at Fordham University and PhD Fellow, NYU Institute of Fine Arts. The conversation is moderated by Director and CEO Masha Turchinsky.

Register

Mary Dill Henry, Here Comes the Sun, 1972, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 72 inches.

ArtTable
Private Tour & Reception at Intersect Palm Springs
Saturday, February 11, 2023
11:00 AM

Please join us for a day at Intersect Palm Springs! Current and prospective members and guests are welcome to join for a special private tour of the fair with Liza Shapiro and Georgia Powell, Co-Founders of CURA Art. Afterwards, stick around for a meet-and-greet with ArtTable’s Lila Harnett Executive Director, Jessica L. Porter, and learn more about ArtTable’s mission and how you can get more involved with the organization.

Intersect Palm Springs is an art and design fair that brings together a dynamic mix of modern and contemporary galleries, and is activated by timely and original programming. It is one of three annual cultural events produced by Intersect Art and Design, in addition to Intersect Aspen and SOFA Chicago. Each event connect galleries with art lovers and collectors, highlighting art and design locally, regionally, and globally. Overseen by Managing Director Becca Hoffman, the Intersect team is committed to building community and connectivity in the locations of the fairs. Through cultural partners, programming, and curatorial vision, Intersect offers year-round opportunities for dialogue, engagement, and inspiration.

Register

Art Talk: Mike Solomon
Arts Advocates Gallery, Sarasota, Florida
January 27, 2023
4:00 - 6:00 PM
More Information

10 x 10: Ten Slides, Ten Speakers
January 26, 2023
Reception: 5:30 - 6:00 PM
Presentations: 6:00 - 7:00 PM
Sarasota Art Museum, Florida

Art, Music & Feminism in the 1950s

Following our unorthodox cover last week, the January 13, 2023 cover of Dan’s Papers features a piece by late East End painter James Brooks (1906–1992).

The Missouri-born, Texas-raised and New York-settled painter is best remembered for his 1940 mural in the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport, for his status as one of the Irascible 18 abstract expressionists who protested a 1950 modern art show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and for his home/studio in Springs, once shared with his artist wife Charlotte Park, that’s now considered one of America’s 11 most endangered historic places.

The art on this week’s cover, a 1982 painting titled “Eastern,” was provided to us by the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, long ahead of the painting’s inclusion in the upcoming exhibition James Brooks: A Painting Is a Real Thing, scheduled to debut at the museum on August 6.

Guest curated by Dr. Klaus Ottmann, the exhibition will be a “comprehensive survey of significant scope comprised of some 50 paintings drawn from public and private U.S. collections,” according to the museum’s website.

The show offers an overdue retrospective of the artist’s fascinating four-decade career and diverse range of art styles, as well as an insightful 125-page catalogue featuring a chronology, bibliography and interpretive essays by Ottmann and other experts.

We spoke to Ottmann about the cover art, Brooks’ career and the August exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum.

Mary Dill Henry: The Gardens (Paintings from the 1980s)
Artforum Must See

Lilian Thomas Burwell
Photo: Lexey Swall

The Tom Brady of Other Jobs
Meet the people as old in their jobs as Tom Brady is in his: the oldest 1 percent of the work force, across a range of professions.
By Francesca Paris
Dec. 24, 2022

In the National Football League, Tom Brady is a very old man. When he takes the field Sunday night — with his Tampa Bay Buccaneers still hoping to make the postseason — he will be 45.4 years old, six years older than the next-oldest starter in the N.F.L. and the oldest starting quarterback in the league for the seventh season in a row.

In a league where most quarterbacks last about four seasons, Mr. Brady is in his 23rd. It is safe to call him the top 1 percent in terms of age for starting quarterbacks, or even the top 0.1 percent. He is, himself, the end of the distribution.

There are many ways to contemplate Mr. Brady’s age, but the best one may be to look outside the sports arena, comparing him with aging workers still going strong in other professions.

Starting at quarterback at 45 is akin to being a family doctor well into his ninth decade. It’s like being an emergency medical technician — a job that requires running up stairs and lifting bodies on stretchers — at age 70. Or an artist in her 90s, a logger in his 80s or a biologist in her 70s.

We know this because the Census Bureau publishes detailed data about the composition of the American workforce, including age and occupation. Using this information, we set out to find a group of American workers who occupy the same part of the age distribution in their professions as Mr. Brady does in his.

We found nine such people from around the United States, and we asked them why, like Mr. Brady, they can’t seem to quit.

Of course, there is no such thing as a Super Bowl of baking, or an All-Pro team of the country’s logging foremen. There is no Most Valuable Bean Biologist award, though perhaps there should be. We do not claim that these workers are the greatest of all time at what they do. On the other hand, having talked extensively with them, we cannot rule it out.

Meet them, and decide for yourself:

Lilian Burwell recently had an exhibition in New York that drew so much attention that, as she puts it, she’s been making “real money.”

“I can’t keep up with myself anymore!” she said.

At 95, that’s how so many things in her life feel, including her art: still new, after all this time.

“It’s like it comes through me,” she said. “Not from me.”

She knew as a child in New York City during the Great Depression that she had to follow her instinct to create art.

Her parents thought she had lost her mind.

“They said, ‘You can’t make a living like that!’ Especially because of the racial prejudice,” she recalled.

“And I said, ‘But that hasn’t anything to do with it.’”

They compromised. She became an art teacher, then a teacher of art teachers. Each day, she hurried home from work to make her own art, which has since been exhibited from Baltimore to Italy. If creating was magical, teaching might’ve been even more delightful: It was like “throwing a pebble in the water,” with the result — her students’ lives — out of her control.

Overlooked Bauhaus painter Mary Dill Henry gets her due

Mary Dill Henry’s legacy is a rich one, spanning paintings influenced by the Geometric Abstraction movement and joyful murals that continue to grace Hewlett-Packard’s Silicon Valley headquarters. And yet, the late Pacific Northwest artist’s name is widely unknown. Henry’s multifaceted oeuvre, represented by the Berry Campbell Gallery in New York, is finding the much-deserved spotlight now that the Hauser & Wirth Institute has processed and digitized the archive pieced together by her family. Located in the Paul V. Galvin Library at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the New Bauhaus school where Henry studied under László Moholy-Nagy in the 1940s, the archive’s sketchbooks, photographs, letters, and magazine clippings provide intriguing insight into an under-the-radar talent. 

Lynne Drexler: The First Decade

By William Corwin

In Lynne Drexler: The First Decade, simultaneously at both Berry Campbell and Mnuchin Galleries, we come across a voracious and novel form of late Abstract Expressionism. It’s a path that runs parallel to color-field painting, and in playing with discreet nodes of color owes as much to Klimt, van Gogh, and Seurat, as it does to Drexler’s mentor and teacher, Hans Hofmann. The paintings in these two exhibitions test out how best to manipulate the viewer’s response to associations of almost-pixelated color units, singular forms which attain a mosaic-like quality: working together but retaining their independence. This causes almost as much visual agita as it creates harmonic compositions. But Drexler enjoys this game, pushing us into musical associations, as with the fiery and seething Gotterdammerung (1959), which displays her obsession with Wagner; or reminding us of the luminaries of late nineteenth/early twentieth century painting. The paintings are slyly referential, and at times almost charts or repositories of leitmotifs, gorgeous but slightly too practiced. It is at the moments when the gestures themselves begin to get out of hand that we begin to really enjoy Drexler’s chaotic energy.

The selection of paintings at Mnuchin Gallery range from 1959 to 1964, and very literally trace the path of an artist growing out of the influence of Hofmann, with whom she had studied in 1956 in New York and Provincetown. In Erratic Water (1963), Untitled (1962-64), and Leaning Trees (1964), impassive squares and rectangles stand guard over miasmatic flows of smaller quadrilaterals. Drexler plays constantly with how to orient her precise strokes: in Erratic Water, long blue, gray, and lilac striations branch and intersect like geologic formations, while in Rosewell (1959-62), the artist gives her lively little forms some breathing room, and they float in an erratic but discernable formation, like a chemistry textbook illustration of the process of diffusion. The thick stratigraphies of color, as well as pointillist pods of flickering dots recall Klimt’s The Park (1910) or Bauerngarten (1907), but Drexler seems to be seeking a controlled chaos, much like Wagner’s swirling string passages connoting the movement of the Rhine or dancing magic fire in his “Ring” Cycle. This she achieves in the pale Untitled (1960), given pride of place in Mnuchin’s rotunda, a breeze of mint green, orange, and burgundy brushstrokes which ebb and flow like a cloud of particles constantly changing size and orientation. In Untitled, Drexler conducts a visual musical passage solely through brushstroke, perhaps thinking, and certainly reminiscent, of Monet’s Les Nymphéas.

Drexler’s innovation in terms of presenting color was quickly recognized by both Hofmann and her other mentor Robert Motherwell: she was steering in a direction that contained the raw emotional energy of action painting but was not following the path of watery skeins of color of her contemporaries like Helen Frankenthaler or bold juxtapositions of form and texture, such as Perle Fine or Willem de Kooning. At Berry Campbell, whose selection of works dates from 1965-1969, Drexler’s fastidious arrangements of strokes or units become much tighter and thicker, and the earlier open fields of color and brushstrokes yield to denser accumulations. These canvasses offer more textural variety; works such as Flecked Sun (1966), Grass Fugue (1966), and Harmonic Sphere (1966), map-like, have distinct zones of more square strokes painted in clear distinction to longer curvy marks. The artist clearly recognizes that certain motifs dominate, but she works hard to balance their presence against that of the other motifs: the feather-like curvy marks do coalesce into wing-like forms (which also look like van Gogh’s cypresses and wheat fields), and these she tries in different colors. Drexler allows these wings to take over the canvas in Harmonic Sphere, the curling wing is pink, in Grass Fugue it is green. In South Water (1965) and Plumed Bloom (1967), and it is in these paintings, and the paintings of 1967-69, that she allows this powerful gesture to grow and destabilize the visual equation of her paintings. In Burst Blue (1969), Towards Twilight (1968), Egg Plume (1967), and Untitled (1968-69), Drexler becomes enchanted by her writhing plumes of diaphanous color. These formations are far from benign or sedate; they expand and weave their way across the canvas: it’s as if Vincent’s cypresses have decided to barrel diagonally upwards across the canvas in Egg Plume, checked only by a resolute red dot in the upper left corner. Towards Twilight is the most unsettling and intriguing of Drexler’s paintings in both exhibitions: a vibrating, revolving mass of beiges, pinks, and blues—overall, fleshy in color—expands outwards, swallowing masses of ellipses and circles, and pushing flattened yellow rectangles to the borders of the picture plane. The brooding AbEx postwar angst has been concentrated into this scintillating mass, and it is both devouring and shoving aside the artist’s selection of considered Modernist signifiers. It is exciting to see a relatively short period in an artist’s life covered so thoroughly at both galleries, and to watch her tweak and experiment up to a point of jarring and poignant originality.

Art Basel’s 2022 edition in Miami Beach closed on Saturday, December 3, 2022, following a week of solid sales across all market sectors and throughout the show. 

The Fair celebrated its landmark 20th-anniversary edition in Miami Beach, signalling two decades of growth and impact by Art Basel as a cultural cornerstone in South Florida, across the Americas, and beyond. The 2022 edition – Art Basel’s largest to date in Miami Beach – brought together 282 premier galleries from 38 countries and territories, including 25 galleries participating in the Fair for the first time and multiple international exhibitors returning to the show after a brief hiatus.

Photo Clayton Calvert © Artlyst 2022

Art Basel continued to draw an attendance of unparalleled global breadth and calibre. Leading private collectors from 88 countries across North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East visited the Fair, as well as museum directors, curators, and high-level patrons from over 150 cultural organizations, including: Art Gallery of Ontario; Aspen Art Museum; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Denver Art Museum; Detroit Institute of Arts; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (Malba); Museum of Fine Arts Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; The New Museum, New York; Oklahoma Contemporary; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Serpentine Galleries, London; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, reinforcing the Fair’s commitment to showcasing exceptional art from the region, nearly two-thirds of this year’s participating galleries had locations in North and South America, with a powerful presence of galleries from the United States, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. The show also featured standout presentations by galleries from Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Uruguay, including newcomers Herlitzka + Faria from Barrio Norte, Paulo Kuczynski from São Paulo, and Rolf Art from Buenos Aires.

In celebration of its 20th anniversary, Art Basel launched a Gift-Giving Campaign with a lead donation to the STEAM + program, whose mission is to bring active artists into the seven public schools of the city of Miami Beach. Founded in 2018, the program engages 5,000 children and teenagers every year. It is administered by The Bass Museum of Art, working with many other local institutions, including Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami City Ballet, New World Symphony, The Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU, Young Musicians Unite, and The Wolfsonian-FIU. In addition, UBS, Ruinart, La Prairie, Chateau D’Esclans, Valentino, Knight Foundation, and DRIFT generously support this philanthropic campaign. The fundraiser will run until the end of 2022 when the total sum collected will be announced. 

Where would Miami be, when it comes to art and culture, had Art Basel never planted the seed in 2002? Would The Magic City still be living under the shadow of its Miami Vice/Cocaine Cowboy past? Over two decades ago, auto mogul, art collector, and philanthropist Norman Braman and his wife Irma had a bigger vision for both Miami Beach and the art world. Although there’s been challenges and victories along the way, Art Basel Miami Beach’s 2022 edition is bigger, better, and stronger.

"We found our life partner and 20 years ago we met our significant other in Art Basel," said Dan Gelber, Mayor of Miami Beach.  "It would not have happened without Norman and Irma Braman."

New Beginnings

It was recently announced that Marc Spiegler would step down as Global Director after 15 years at the helm. Noah Horowitz, after leaving Art Basel as Director Americas to work at Sotheby’s, fittingly returns to step into Spiegler’s shoes. The transition should be seamless, and Horowitz will bring new energy and vision to the show. 

"It is incredibly exciting to step into this role, not only the fairs but try to open a new chapter of what we can do as far as broader innovation in the art ecosystem and market," comments Horowitz.  "I think there is extraordinary untapped potential in Basel and that is what I’m most excited about."

He continues, "I love Art Basel because of its mission and supporting galleries and arguably more so coming out of Covid. That power of coming together is transformative."

Largest Show to Date

Following a pandemic hiatus in 2020 and a challenging 2021, Art Basel Miami Beach returned full throttle boasting its largest edition to date. There are 282 premier galleries from 38 countries and territories. 25 are first-time participants.

Success from the Start

While gallery sales have yet to be released, it was an exciting first time exhibiting at Art Basel Miami Beach for Berry Campbell Gallery (Survey). The New York gallery presented Lynne Drexler: Nature Sparked, a focused exhibition featuring Drexler’s groundbreaking works created between 1959 and 1967. 

"It is an honor for Berry Campbell to participate as a new gallery in the 20th anniversary Art Basel Miami Beach fair. We are grateful to Art Basel for their inclusivity and for their willingness to include galleries with new ideas and unique perspectives," commented Christine Berry and Martha Campbell. The gallery had a hugely successful fair selling out the booth. The largest canvas, titled Mutinous Water from 1964, sold for $1.2 million. Continue Reading

Lynne Drexler: Nature Sparked
Art Basel Miami Beach
December 1 - 3, 2022

Purchase Tickets
Online Catalogue

Berry Campbell is pleased to present Lynne Drexler: Nature Sparked, a focused exhibition featuring Drexler’s groundbreaking works created between 1959 and 1967. On October 23, 2022, an article by Ted Loos appeared in the New York Times with the heading, “Out of Obscurity Lynne Drexler’s Abstract Paintings Fetch Millions.” The article was published on the occasion of the opening of a joint show of the work of Drexler’s first career phase (1959–1969) at the Mnuchin Gallery on the Upper East Side and Berry Campbell in Chelsea, which represents Drexler’s estate. An Abstract Expressionist painter and student of both Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell, Drexler established a distinctive stylistic idiom through vibrantly contrasting hues, applied in swatch-like patches with a Pointillist dynamism. Never offered before, these paintings reveal the significant contributions she made to post-war abstraction and reveal works alive with an intense physical vibrancy and an incomparable and innovative style.

Even With Seven-Figure Sales, Sanity Prevailed During an Un-Frenzied VIP Preview at Art Basel Miami Beach

Dealers reported strong opening-day sales, but observers noticed collectors were taking the time to think about the works on offer.

Older Female Artists Shine in the ‘Survey” Section
The event’s “Survey” section, which features historical projects by 16 galleries, is particularly strong this year—especially for presentations of work by older female artists, including Lynne Drexler at Berry Campbell, Lois Dodd at Alexandre Gallery, and March Avery—the daughter of the famous American modernist painter Milton Avery—at Switzerland’s Larkin Erdmann gallery.

Erdmann sold out his booth of paintings by March Avery, at prices that ranged from $35,000 to $65,000, telling Artnet News he was “overwhelmed” by the response of collectors. “It is so great that these important paintings are now finally being recognized by collectors and institutions alike,” he said.

Berry Campbell also sold out its “Survey” booth. Prices for Drexler’s paintings ranged from $450,000 to $1.2 million, while her works on paper were priced at $95,000.

Alexandre sold 14 of its 16 Dodd panel paintings, priced between $26,000 to $32,000, along with ten “flashings” (smaller works), priced at $8,700. The buyers were all based in the U.S. “The booth was very busy today, with lots of engaged collectors,” said Phil Alexandre. Continue Reading

Art Basel Miami Beach 2022: Advisory Selections

As we hurtle towards the new year, Art Basel Miami Beach prepares to open its doors to exuberant fairgoers in the East Coast city. This year's edition will be the first since Noah Horowitz was appointed CEO of the fair on 7 November 2022, and with 282 exhibitors—almost double the number of galleries shown in the fair's first edition—he plans to deliver the biggest edition of the fair to date.

Art Basel Miami Beach always presents some outstanding art along with a good dose of art world gossip and glam, but the sheer number of galleries showing means the mass of art on display will most definitely be overwhelming.

Having previewed what the galleries have to offer, to ease the load, we have identified some exceptional works to look out for in advance. Our highlights include work by spearheads of contemporary art Mark Bradford, Nan Goldin, and Sigmar Polke.

Lynne Mapp Drexler at Berry Campbell Gallery
Lynne Mapp Drexler's brightly coloured composition reveals the American artist's mastery of Abstract Expressionist painting. Inspired by her life-long observation of East Coast landscapes, Drexler's remarkable work features a depth of mark-making made from planes of thick impasto rendered in kaleidoscopic colour.

'Drexler's best paintings achieve that quality rarely found in abstraction, by which our initial perceptual reaction begins to slowly unravel, revealing memories wrought from the natural world whilst stirring the inner parts of our subconscious', remarked Ocula Advisor, Rory Mitchell.

Drexler's presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach coincides with the display of her work in the exhibition Lynne Drexler: The First Decade (27 October–22 December 2022) at Mnuchin Gallery and Berry Campbell Gallery in New York.

Continue Reading

Nanette Carter
Destabilizing #2, 2022
Oil on Mylar
26 1/2 x 28 inches
View Works by Nanette Carter

Judith Godwin Included in WE FANCY: A Legacy of LGBTQIA+ Artists at the League
Curated by Eric Shiner
Art Students League of New York
October 27 - November 27, 2022
View Works by Judith Godwin

Installation view, In Your Eyes: Experiment Like ESTAR(SER), Frye Art Museum.

In Your Eyes: Experiment Like ESTAR(SER)
September 28 - October 15, 2023
View Works by Mary Dill Henry

Ophir and Friends: A Tribute to Ophir Agassi
Curated by Karen Wilkin and Christine Kee
November 6 - December 18, 2022
View Works by Jill Nathanson

Women and Movement: Women and the American Art World
Debra J. Force (Debra Force Fine Art), Peg Alston (Peg Alston Fine Arts), Christine Berry (Berry Campbell Gallery), Linda S. Ferber (New-York Historical Society), Barbara Haskell (Whitney Museum of American Art), and Eileen Kinsella (ArtNet)

Tuesday, November 15, 2022
3:50 – 4:50 p.m.

IAC’s 27th Annual American Art Conference
The Cosmopolitan Club
122 E 66th St.
New York, NY

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In 2022, artist Lynne Drexler's work exploded on the art market. An artist who had briefly shown in the early 1960s in New York, she continued to work on a remote island in Maine until her death in 1999. Two decades later, she became the artist of the moment. Sukanya Rajaratnam and Christine Berry have collaborated on a dual-gallery show of Drexler's work from her first decade, 1959-1969, The shows at Berry Campbell and Mnuchin have drawn in new audiences and further burnished Drexler's reputation. In this podcast, Christie's Julian Ehrlich joins Berry and Rajaratnam to tell the story of Lynne Drexler's extraordinary year.

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In New York and beyond, this month and next yield many wonderful things for the art enthusiasts among us to see. Beginning with the beyond, a new show opening on the West Coast offers a worthy reevaluation of the midcentury art scene, while some blockbuster East Coast events (Alex Katz, Edward Hopper) are already bringing in crowds. 

“Lynne Drexler: The First Decade”

Sprawled across two galleries, “The First Decade” includes oil and gouache paintings made by Drexler between 1959 and 1969. A student of Robert Motherwell and Hans Hofmann, she developed a body of densely colorful, mosaic-like work in New York and, after 1971, on Monhegan Island, Maine, where she died in 1999. Through December 17, 2022, at Berry Campbell and Mnuchin Gallery.

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POLLOCK-KRASNER HOUSE AND STUDY CENTER: ART IN FOCUS
Lynne Drexler, A Forgotten Abstract Expressionist, Gail Levin, Ph.D.

Tuesday, November 1, 6 p.m.
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After studying in New York in the 1950s with Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell, Lynne Drexler (1928-1999) escaped from an art world rife with competition and her struggle to find herself. She landed on Monhegan Island, Maine, where she lived happily ever after, painting, though forgotten, for the rest of her life. Her paintings have recently commanded attention, and are now on view in “Lynne Drexler: The First Decade,” at Berry Campbell Gallery in Manhattan. Her story is that of a woman artist whose colorful and engaging pictures speak for themselves, though they don’t necessarily reveal the drama of her life, which this lecture by Gail Levin, author of the exhibition catalog, will illuminate. 

Female Artists Fight for Equality. It’s Not a Pretty Picture.

On Thursday, Mnuchin Gallery and Berry Campbell Gallery in New York City will both launch shows dedicated to the work of Lynne Drexler, a painter whose trajectory follows a now-familiar narrative when it comes to women artists: though Drexler kicked off her career to much acclaim, even being compared to van Gogh, she languished in obscurity for most of her life.

It took until 2022 for her works to be reevaluated and command impressive auction results—estimated to sell for $40,000 to $60,000 at Christie’s in March, one of her paintings went for around $1.2 million. Drexler can’t enjoy her success, because she died in 1999.

“The art world loves old ladies and young bad boys,” Marilyn Minter, a deeply cool chronicler, in paintings and photographs, of the sensual mundanities of a woman’s life, told The Daily Beast on Tuesday, “and even if they love you, you’re not gonna succeed on the market over the most mediocre white male."

“There’s never, ever been a female artist that has hit the white heat of somebody like Damien Hirst or Julian Schnabel, where they can’t do anything wrong,” Minter said.

Minter was featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, made a film that was displayed in Times Square and has been featured in several solo exhibitions, achieving an impressive level of prestige. Still, the same market restrictions endlessly echo and reverberate, like ripples in an infinite ocean: the most Minter’s work has ever sold for is $269,000.

“I don’t pay attention to the high end of the market because I’m not one of the players, so it’s better for me to not even look at all,” Minter said. “But I’m one of the lucky ones, because I can make a living from my work.”

Earlier in October, contemporary artist Caroline Walker set a new personal auction record at the Frieze London auctions when her painting Indoor Outdoor (2015) sold for $598,081 over an estimate of $67,519–$90,047, Artsy reported last week.

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Lynne Drexler: The First Decade (1959-1969)
In Collaboration with Mnuchin Gallery
October 27 - December 17, 2022

Artforum
View Exhibition

Lynne Mapp Drexler is the historical artist everyone is talking about now.

Mnuchin Gallery and Berry Campbell Gallery are opening their major exhibition, Lynne Drexler: The First Decade in their respective New York spaces this week, which focuses on work produced between 1959–1969.

This comes hot on the heels of Amy Cappellazzo's Art Intelligence Global group show in Hong Kong, Shatter: Color Field and the Women of Abstract Expressionism (3 October–2 December 2022), which includes three of Drexler's paintings.

Lynne Drexler's tale shares some traits with other women artists of her time, and indeed much of the 20^th century. She moved to New York in 1956, where she studied under Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell, and even showed at the prestigious Tanager Gallery in 1961.

The following year she married the painter John Hultberg, under whose shadow she lived for some time. The couple often spent summers on the remote Monhegan Island in Maine, but eventually separated. Drexler lived alone on Monhegan throughout most of the 1980s—still painting prolifically—up until her death in 1999.

Drexler's estate clearly still holds a great deal of material from the later period, but works from the 1960s are rare and have seen some spectacular auction results recently.

Herbert's Garden (1960) sold for 1.5 million USD at Christie's in May this year, and there is buoyant confidence in these prices continuing to soar given the players involved.

The speed at which things have moved, and the clear strategy in place to create the market from next to nothing, has drawn skepticism from some quarters—but I would argue that Drexler's paintings from this period point towards something exceptional.

There is no doubt that the Virginia-born artist stands up to some of the great abstract painters of the postwar period. Not unlike Joan Mitchell, there is a subtle yet clear debt to artists such as Monet, Derain, and Bonnard, as well as the Pointillists. Drexler's mark-making also draws parallels with the style of her better-known contemporary, Alma Thomas, who was actually the subject of Mnuchin's major exhibition in 2019.

Drexler's paintings exude the atmosphere of the East Coast landscapes, which she inhabited throughout much of her life in Maine.

Her rich tones are beautifully composed in subtly differing shades, with each brushstroke varying in direction. Combined with variations in the thickness of impasto and the size of marks, Drexler's resulting compositions possess a layered depth, and still are able to breathe with precisely articulated areas of negative space.

Drexler's best paintings achieve that quality rarely found in abstraction, by which our initial perceptual reaction begins to slowly unravel, revealing memories wrought from the natural world whilst stirring the inner parts of our subconscious. Nature is prevalent in her works, but there is something else unknown and magical that renders Drexler's paintings remarkable.

After a derailed career, Ms. Drexler became a “hermit” painter on an island. Decades later, piqued public interest can earn her work seven figures.

When two paintings sold for far higher than their estimates at auction last spring, by an artist very few people had ever heard of, a signal pierced the art market: The artist, Lynne Drexler, might merit more attention today than she ever received in her lifetime.

Both works are mosaiclike fields of bright colors. “Flowered Hundred” (1962) was estimated to sell at Christie’s New York for $40,000 to $60,000. It sold for just under $1.2 million in March.

The iron was hot; a couple of months later, some 20 buyers scrambled for “Herbert’s Garden” (1960) when it came up for auction for $70,000 to $100,000. It sold for $1.5 million.

Ms. Drexler (1928-99) began with a promising career in the New York art scene — one reviewer compared her work to van Gogh’s — but she spent the last decades of her life as a self-described “hermit” on Monhegan Island, a remote spot off the coast of Maine. At one point, she was painting seascapes for tourists to make ends meet.

“I knew there would come a time when this would happen,” said Michael Rancourt, the owner of Ms. Drexler’s estate. “But I didn’t know what the extent would be.”

Two New York galleries are working together to mount a joint exhibition that opens this week: “Lynne Drexler: The First Decade” is the first solo show of Ms. Drexler’s work in the city in 38 years.

The show, running Oct. 27 to Dec. 17, is a mix of works that are for sale and those only on loan; some in each category are from the estate. Mnuchin Gallery, on the Upper East Side, will concentrate on the period from 1959 to 1964 with works that include “Rose Nocturne” (1962), dominated by pink shades.

Berry Campbell, which represents the artist’s estate, will show works at its Chelsea gallery that were made from 1965 to 1969. They will include “Smoked Green” (1967), a piece that shows her abstract work moving toward more defined blocks of color, a direction that picked up speed over time.

Ms. Drexler’s work is back at auction this fall, too, with “Tropical Calm” (1963) going on the block Nov. 18 at Christie’s, estimated at $60,000 to $80,000.

“It feels like a true rediscovery,” Sukanya Rajaratnam, a partner at Mnuchin, said of the artist’s renaissance. “Sometimes there are artists who are hiding in plain sight.” She noted that it was relatively unusual for a backward glance to produce such interest today. “Not every forgotten artist deserves to have their story told,” she said.

Among those who do merit it, “there’s a resurgence of women artists right now,” said Christine Berry, Berry Campbell’s co-founder, noting that women and overlooked artists from the mid-20th century were the focus of her and Martha Campbell’s gallery.

“We’re all interested in being more inclusive about who we add to the canon,” Ms. Berry added.

In the case of Ms. Drexler, a reputational rescue by the marketplace has an irony at its heart. “She hated the art world,” said Tralice Bracy, formerly a curator at the Monhegan Museum in Maine who organized a show of Ms. Drexler’s work there in 2008.

That enmity stemmed from having a promising career derailed. Ms. Bracy, a former Monhegan resident who got to know Ms. Drexler in the last years of her life, met her around 1994 when a friend said, “‘You should meet this artist, she’ll be in the books someday,’” Ms. Bracy recalled.

Ms. Drexler’s experiences were reflected in the paintings and enriched them, she added. “When you look at her life’s work, you see the humanity,” Ms. Bracy said. “They are lyrical, joyful, intense paintings. And then her life gets more complicated.”

Raised near Newport News, Va., Ms. Drexler received a fine arts degree from the Richmond Professional Institute and later went to New York to study separately with two influential painters of the age: Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell. Though unknown at the time, she was in the thick of the action among downtown artists.

“She mingled at Cedar Tavern,” Ms. Rajaratnam said, referring to the watering hole of Jackson Pollock and other avant-garde artists.

After much painting and networking, she got her first solo show in 1961 at the prestigious Tanager Gallery, a co-op whose members included Willem de Kooning and Alex Katz. But she did not sell any of the works. That year she met a fellow painter, John Hultberg (1925-2005), whom she married in the spring of 1962, beginning a tumultuous relationship with that better-known artist.

When Mr. Hultberg’s dealer, Martha Jackson, helped him buy a house on Monhegan Island, 12 miles off the coast of Maine — partly as a respite from the art world and the heavy drinking he was struggling with — it became a getaway place for the couple, and later their full-time home.

As the two moved around the country, teaching and showing their work, Ms. Drexler had some sales and good reviews. They settled back in New York in 1967.

“Sure, she was overshadowed by her male contemporaries — that’s how this story goes,” said Sara Friedlander, the deputy chair of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, who worked on the spring sales that brought big prices for Ms. Drexler’s work. “But I want to complicate this idea that she was overlooked. She had some commercial success as an artist, and how many people can say that?”

Health problems, Mr. Hultberg’s alcoholism and a changing art world frayed the couple’s relationship, and they moved to Monhegan full time in the early 1980s, separating soon after.

“Life was falling apart,” Ms. Bracy said. “They couldn’t afford the city anymore. They were kind of exhausted.”

But Ms. Drexler never stopped painting.

“She couldn’t get solid gallery representation, but she made art every day and persevered,” Ms. Berry said.

When Ms. Drexler died in 1999, stacks of paintings were found in her house. Mr. Rancourt said that the estate included many paintings and works on paper from the 1950s to the 1990s. “She was an avid painter,” he said. “There are enough works to keep me busy for the rest of my career.”

The early abstract works seem to be gaining more interest in the marketplace, he added, “but she got better as she went along.”

In the 1990s, when Ms. Drexler was living on her own as a full-time resident of Monhegan, her work followed a course that had begun in the previous decade, more clearly depicting real things — landscapes, tabletop items — in a highly stylized way.

“She produced a late group of upbeat representational pictures in warm palettes that manage to transcend their ordinary subject matter and morph into quite captivating compositions,” wrote the art historian Gail Levin in the catalog for “Lynne Drexler: The First Decade.”

Ms. Bracy said she thought she knew how Ms. Drexler would feel about being appreciated anew: “She would be giddy.”

At First Light: Two Centuries of Artists in Maine
Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine
June 25 - November 6, 2022
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View Works by Lynne Drexler 

Frank Wimberley Acquired by the Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina

Frank Wimberley (b.1926)
Sphere (Thelonius), 2012
Acrylic on canvas over shaped wood
45 x 45 inches

View Works by Frank Wimberley

LACMA has added two American portraits: a full-length Robert Henri Spanish Dancer and Frederick J. Brown's portrait of L.A. art patron Dr. Leon Banks.

Abby and Alan D. Levy pledged the Henri to LACMA on the museum's 40th anniversary (2005), and the gift was made official this year. Henri's series of Spanish dancers against velveteen backgrounds show his admiration for Velázquez and Goya. Measuring 85 by 44-5/8 in, it joins a set of Ash Can School works at LACMA that includes three smaller Henris and George Bellows' Cliff Dwellers.

The Metropolitan Museum bought one of Henri's Spanish subjects (not nearly so compelling as the Levy picture) out of the 1913 Armory Show. Within a few years Henri's Spanish naturalism had been overtaken by the modernism of Picasso and Miró.

Frederick J. Brown (1945-2012) was a Chicago-born African-American artist who moved in New York's avant-garde circles of visual art, jazz, and blues. The portrait of Dr. Leon Banks is a study for Brown's monumental Last Supper (1984), a painting honoring men important to the artist's life and career. Dr. Banks is a retired Los Angeles pediatrician, co-founder of the California African American Museum, and a former MOCA board member. He's also known as the subject of several David Hockney portraits. The Brown painting was purchased this May from Berry Campbell Gallery, New York, with funds from the Modern and Contemporary Art Council Acquisitions Endowment.

Cinque Artists Program

Named after the Cinque Gallery, a non profit established in 1969 by Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis and Ernest Crichlow, the Cinque Artists Program continues the gallery’s legacy in supporting artists through various stages of their careers, and by offering opportunities to engage in conversation and networking.Primarily geared to practicing artists and art students, the events are always open to the general public and enthusiasts.

The Cinque Artists Series welcomes multimedia artist Nanette Carter, for a conversation about her newest series and video work. Register for the link through Eventbrite: https://bit.ly/3rxo2FS Artist Talk Nanette Carter seeks

Wednesday, October 12, 2022
5 p.m.
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ARTRA VIDEO | 艾瑞克·æˆ´å¼—üšç¹èŠ±ä¸€çž¬ | A Private Visit to Berry Campbell Gallery: Eric Dever "To Look at Things in Bloom"

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Lynne Drexler (1928-99), a second-generation American abstract painter, began to attract market attention this year when Christie’s made her auction record of $1.2mn for a 1962 painting sold by the Farnsworth Art Museum in Maine. The work had been estimated at $40,000-$60,000, already a toppy level for a painter whose work had not sold publicly for more than $10,000 before 2020, according to Artnet.

Now two New York galleries are collaborating on a show to cement Drexler’s re-emergence. Berry Campbell, which began representing the estate this year, has joined forces with the big-league Mnuchin Gallery to show 10 years of Drexler’s early work. The Upper East Side’s Mnuchin Gallery will show works from 1959 to 1964, while Berry Campbell in Chelsea takes the following five years.

Drexler was taught by Robert Motherwell and produced dense, colourful paintings during what the galleries are calling her “first decade”. Married to a then more acknowledged artist, John Hultberg, and latterly reclusive, Drexler’s relative obscurity was the same old story, says Sukanya Rajaratnam, partner at Mnuchin. “It’s hard to imagine that Lee Krasner [married to Jackson Pollock] was overlooked for so long, but she was,” Rajaratnam says. Drexler “holds her own, and not only among female artists”. Both exhibitions run from October 27 to December 17 with works priced between $500,000 and $2.5mn.

Berry Campbell Gallery announces Lynne Drexler: The First Decade––a landmark exhibition presented in collaboration with Mnuchin Gallery, which will survey the seminal paintings Lynne Drexler (1928-1999) created between 1959-1969. A second-generation Abstract Expressionist and student of both Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell, Drexler established a distinctive stylistic idiom through vibrantly contrasting hues, applied in swatch-like patches with a Pointillist dynamism. Mnuchin Gallery will feature works produced between 1959-1964, while Berry Campbell will feature those between 1965-1969. This chronological presentation aims to highlight Drexler’s significant contributions to post-war American abstraction in demonstrating the innovative and signature style she honed over this pivotal decade in her career spent primarily in New York. On view from October 27 - December 17, 2022, Lynne Drexler: The First Decade will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue authored by Gail Levin, with contributions by Lois Dodd and Jamie Wyeth.  We are grateful for Art Intelligence Global’s participation in this collaborative venture.

Berry Campbell is located at 524 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. - 6 p.m, or by appointment.

Mnuchin Gallery is located at 45 East 78th Street, New York, NY 10075. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. - 6 p.m, or by appointment. 

"Eric Dever: To Look at Things in Bloom" Featured as a Must See on Artforum Artguide
Preview Exhibition

Elizabeth Osborne, Consummate Painter by Donald Kuspit

Elizabeth Osborne: A Retrospective
Berry Campbell
September 8 through October 15, 2022
By DONALD KUSPIT, September 2022

Born in Philadelphia in 1936, and now 86 still living there, the retrospective of Elizabeth Osborne's paintings at Berry Campbell gallery shows the range of her subject matter—she moves effortlessly from figuration to landscape,  each work subtly perfected by a deft, nuanced touch, and perhaps above all by her aesthetic mastery of color, but what the retrospective fails to make clear is the psychodynamic import of her paintings, signaled at the beginning of her career by her self-portrait in Black Doorway I, 1966.  Standing between a ruthlessly flat plane, its larger upper part pitch black, its somewhat softer, less intimidating lower part oddly greenish, and a canvas, pitch black but with blue paint dripping at its bottom, Osborne conveys a fundamental psychic conflict:  between the death instinct, symbolized by the ruthless blackness, and the life instinct, symbolized, however hesitantly, by the green and blue.  Osborne herself wears a blue blouse or shirt and black sweater or coat, epitomizing her inner conflict.  She stands in a doorway, as the exquisite trompe l’oeil handle suggests, indecisive which door to open—the door to pure abstraction, more or less color field, or the door to figurative painting which she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art in Philadelphia, a bastion of figuration since its founding in the 19^th century.  One might say that Black Doorway I shows her faced with a choice between avant-garde purity and traditional representation.  The triumph of her painting, testifying to her creative ingenuity, was their subtle fusion in her paintings after nature, among them the relatively serene—for the redundant streaks of black horizon seem to suggest an impending storm, not to say the death that haunts nature that Poussin famously painted--early watercolor Dana Island Series, 1989 to the rhapsodic, elated Garden Tea Hill 3, 2019, a grandly gestural painting, its colors filled with light.

But to me the painting most telling of Osborne’s mentality, all the more so because she has mastered the personal psychological conflict evident in Black Doorway I without resolving it by projecting it into social space, which neutralizes it by implying that it is universal, even as her presence in The Visit (Two Sisters), 1967 shows that it remains an undecidable dilemma for her.  We see her, the white mistress of a house, comfortably reclining on an old-fashioned settee, staring at a young black girl, staring at the spectator rather than Osborne.  She may be the painter’s model—the painting resonates with ironical art historical allusions, Manet’s Olympia, 1863 among them, and, perhaps more obliquely and insidiously, seems to allude to photographs of African slaves put up for auction sale—but the social and emotional difference seems the main point of the painting.  The painter—for I presume the white woman is Osborne, for her dress is a wonderfully abstract painting, full of the green and brown of nature—seems to be staring at the black woman’s dress—which is white, blue, and pink—as though at another painting, rather than at her brown face.  She stands on a green carpet, suggesting she is a creature of nature, like the dog who also stands on it, staring at the spectator.  The eyes of the white woman—the artist—and the model—the black woman—and the dog (implicitly the spectator staring at the painting?) do not meet.  Connected, they form an oblique triangle, confirming the incommensurateness of their positions and with that their social position, not to say their nature.

The settee is on a bright red carpet, a grand plane that almost encompasses the small green plane—the carpet on which the “native” woman strands, precariously it seems as the fact that she stands on its edge, suggesting the “edginess” of the situation.  The two women are hardly sisters, and the visit is not exactly a social call:  the native woman is there to serve the artist as a passive model, her arms frozen beside her, fixed to her sides, their inertness and the inertness of her body contrasting sharply with the relaxed, wide open arms, they seem ready to move, and the relaxed pose of the artist, studying her appearance but otherwise not relating to her, not treating her as an intimate friend, but some sort of interesting object.  Osborne has sublimated the dilemma, not to say emotional and artistic problem, in Black Doorway I, into a social problem, but the opposites remain, if now in higher, more ingenious aesthetic form, as well as in all too human form.  Osborne has mastered the conflict by brilliantly aestheticizing and elaborating and humanizing it, but she states it rather than resolves it, which is to her credit, for it is artistically as well as psychosocially inevitable.  What Hegel called the unresolved dialectic of master and slave (or servant)—the unbridgeable difference between one’s (superior) self and the (inferior) Other, as it is called today--is brilliantly rendered, in exquisitely good artistic taste, by Osborne, in effect rationalizing its irrationality, justifying a social injustice.

Osborne has painted the female nude again and again, de-sensualizing, de-sexualizing, and de-naturalizing it by treating it as an abstract form, a sum of curves, a sort of arabesque, suggesting the influence of Matisse’s schematic renderings of the female nude—Osborne’s Nude in Blue and Brown, 1989, Nude with Pillow and Nude with Palette, both 2002 are typical—but she seems most at home with nature.  Its spreading expanse is more of a challenge because of its variety of forms, nominally together but not holding together, similar but not integrated, the suggestion of disintegration in such works as Floating Islands, 1972-2019, the Dana Island Series, 1989, and Catalina, 2021 more of a challenge than the integrated human body, especially the female body, which has an air of self-sufficiency, self-containment, hermetic insularity.  Osborne’s female models are young, beautiful, slim, refined, proudly exhibiting their naked bodies—in sharp contrast to the erratic shapes of the rugged islands, nature uncompromisingly raw and indifferent to the spectator—simply there, more radically naked than Osborne’s female nudes, certainly not appealing to the so-called male gaze as they are, deliberately I would argue because of their exhibitionism.  The scattering of islands in the sea, raw forms shaped by it, rising out of it, seemingly spontaneously like the biomorphic Floating Islands, and slowly but surely sinking back into it, as the time-worn Dana Islands seem to be doing, are another symbolic representation of the life instinct and the death instinct, the growing, expanding Floating Islands emblematic of the former, the rotting, shrinking Dana Islands of the latter.  Their difference has been Osborne’s theme since Black Doorway I.  I think she is more at home with it in her seascapes than in The Visit (Two Sisters), where natural reality is masked and displaced by social reality, however much the artist--the relaxed white woman, full of natural life, as her dress—a sort of artistic second skin--- indicates, while the passive—and impassive--black woman is black as death.  They are opposite sides of the same existential coin, reminding me, however obliquely, of the female Fates in classical mythology.

The difference between the Dana Islands and the Floating Islands is as unresolvable as the difference between the resolute abstraction and the uncertain self in Osborne’s Black Doorway I.  Her vision of the unresolvable difference—conflict--between life and death has matured, has become more artistically sophisticated—more aesthetically masked--and with that more emotionally manageable than in it is in Black Doorway I, where we see it in all its starkness and rawness.  Osborne projects her conflicted self—and conflicted art--into nature, generalizing it as an inescapable truth of being, mastering it by gaining perspective on it—the perspective in her seascapes, in contrast to the lack of perspective in Black Doorway I, where we are confronted by the flat plane and Osborne’s self-representation, both on the picture plane.  The seascapes are less upfront, physically and emotionally detached; she is no longer crushed between the Scylla of abstraction and the Charybdis of representation but integrated them in a kind of compromise formation.  Osborne’s seascapes are oddly manneristic, for like all manneristic works they make the formal best of a contradiction by bizarrely integrating its terms:  her sea is absurdly abstract and absurdly realistic at once, indicating that her art is no longer divided against itself—which is a sign of maturity--as it is in Black Doorway I.  WM

The third installation of the Prints & Drawings gallery in the Nancy and Rich Kinder building opened to the public on January 7, 2022. This gallery highlights modern and contemporary works from the Prints & Drawings collection.

The Nancy and Rich Kinder Building is dedicated to the Museum’s international collections of modern and contemporary art. The soaring spaces feature displays that span media encompassing painting and sculpture, craft and design, video, and immersive installations. The wide-ranging collection of Prints & Drawings are on view in gallery 207, split into four sections. Objects in the first section, “After Dark: Night at the Turn of the Century,” show artists’ responses to the aesthetic possibilities and shifting cultural connotations of night; those in the second, “Drawn to Color,” represent works on paper by Color Field artists and others who explore the expressive potential of color. The last two sections include “Meticulous,” which highlights works featuring repetitive, accumulative mark-making, and “Celebrating Tamarind Institute at 62,” and installation of lithographs produced by women artists at this important workshop from the 1960s to today.

The second section showcases works on paper by twentieth-century Color Field artists, as well as contemporary artists influenced by the movement’s embrace of pure color as a vehicle for expression. Using a diverse array of media, including oil, acrylic, watercolor, ink, and pastel, the artists in “Drawn to Color” produce abstract compositions that engage in varied ways with color’s evocative potential. Works by seminal figures such as Mark Rothko, Sam Francis, and Helen Frankenthaler hang alongside ones by living artists like Terrell James and Emmi Whitehorse, illustrating the continuing legacy of the Color Field movement and expanding the scope of its canon.

After nine successful years on West 24th Street in Chelsea, Berry Campbell is excited to announce that we will be moving two blocks north to a new expanded gallery space on West 26th Street. 

Berry Campbell will begin the transition to its new space at 524 West 26th Street on September 1, 2022. We are honored to be moving to this pedigreed location that has previously been the home of the prestigious Paula Cooper Gallery and Robert Miller Gallery. 

The new Berry Campbell, which will boast a total of 9,000 square feet, will support the continued expansion of our exhibition program and allow us to better serve the evolving needs of both our clients and the artists and estates whom we are fortunate to represent.

Our new location houses 4,500 square feet of exhibition space, including a skylit main gallery and four smaller galleries, as well as two private viewing areas, a full-sized library, executive offices, and substantial on-site storage space. 

We first launched Berry Campbell in 2013 with a collaborative vision to emphasize the contributions of the many postwar and contemporary artists who had been left behind due to race, gender, and/or geography. In 2015, we doubled our exhibition space to its current size of 2,000 square feet.

Reflecting upon these past nine years has left us tremendously grateful. We maintain a well-curated roster of thirty-four represented artists and estates with a rich secondary market program.

Over the years, Berry Campbell has held eighty-one exhibitions and countless focus shows as well as collaborated with museums and curators both domestically and internationally. Further, Berry Campbell has successfully placed works in private, corporate, and museum collections, and has fostered relationships with collectors, curators, educators, institutions, press, other galleries, and the general public.

We are also proud to have been recognized and reviewed in many respected publications such as Architectural Digest, Art & Antiques, Art in America, Artforum, ArtNews, The Brooklyn Rail, The Hopkins Review, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, East Hampton Star, Luxe Magazine, The New Criterion, The New York Times, Vogue, Wall Street Journal, and Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art.

Berry Campbell is pleased to announce that it will inaugurate its new space with a retrospective exhibition of paintings by Elizabeth Osborne, opening with a reception on Thursday, September 8, 2022, 6 to 8 p.m.

The final exhibition at our current West 24th Street gallery will feature recent paintings by Eric Dever. The opening reception is scheduled for Thursday, September 15, 2022, 6 to 8 p.m. 

We are excited to be able to share this news and begin this new chapter of the gallery. We look forward to welcoming you to our new space this fall.

With gratitude, 
Christine and Martha

This week, we sat down with Bentley Brown, artist, curator, and art historian, for an intimate perspective on the work of his father, Frederick J. Brown (1945–2012), whose art joined the MFA's collection earlier this year. We loved Brown’s wide-ranging, galaxy-inflected paintings when we saw them in New York at Berry Campbell gallery last fall and we’re thrilled to share with you a little about his art here.

The acquisition of Brown’s work formed an integral part of an initiative to broaden the narratives of abstract painting the MFA's collection can tell, made possible by Elizabeth and Woody Ives and in recognition of their critical contributions to the contemporary collection over decades. We are indebted to their support and generosity.

---

We know and admire Frederick J. Brown’s practice, but how would you describe it in around three sentences or so?
Fred Brown is an American painter whose work included abstraction, figurative expressionism, and portraiture. Born in Greensboro, Georgia and raised in Chicago, he drew from sources rooted in African-American culture in a practice of visual storytelling that sought to highlight mastery present in the Black communities in which he was raised. A lot of his motivation stemmed from the desire to see Black culture be venerated as a foundational part of American culture and the avant-garde. Brown came to prominence as a pioneer of New York’s downtown art scene of the 1970s and ’80s; his loft at 120 Wooster Street was a center for that scene, modeling itself after loft jazz alternative spaces.

The MFA recently acquired Brown's painting, Untitled (1972). Could you share a little about its place in your father’s work?
When my father was making this piece he was living on the Bowery, having lived at jazz musician Ornette Coleman’s loft for a brief period. During this time he was exploring techniques in enriching color, creating depth through staining, and creating textural and sculptural qualities. My father was developing this work alongside fellow painters Frank Bowling and Daniel LaRue Johnson, who were exploring similar questions to push the boundaries of abstraction. They and others working in this vein wanted to see how far you could push the materials, to create work that was all-encompassing, that could reflect feeling and tell a story.

Our team was fascinated to learn about Brown’s work for the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. Could you tell us a little about that?
In 1971, my father began a correspondence with the Adler Planetarium. He wanted to create depictions of the Milky Way galaxy and wanted images as a reference point; the image of the galaxy remained a constant throughout his abstract work. He and the Planetarium staff stayed in contact throughout the 1970s; his painting Milky Way (1977) is on view there today. An important part of this was that the Adler Planetarium pictured the stars from the perspective of Chicago’s night sky. Today in Chicago it's almost impossible to see the stars, and that's a huge part of this series, my father as a young man in Chicago (and New York) imagining, dreaming of and for stars. 

Anything we missed?
I’d like to expand a little on my father’s influences. In Chicago he was in the middle of all of these incredible focal points of Black music: blues, gospel, avant-garde jazz. Music was really a vector through which my father created his work. It was the musicians that brought my father to the Downtown New York scene.

Family influences shaped his aesthetic sensibilities, too. He cited my grandmother’s work as a Venetian pastry chef as a great influence. He would say that the paint had to be thick like the frosting my grandmother would make. The steel mill was another influence: his stepfather worked there, and my father did too for a period of time, as a safety inspector. The bright oranges and yellows of the smoldering metal and ingots appeared in so many of his works including the Untitled work acquired by the MFA. 

Are there any artists, writers, or others working in the arts –– past or present –– whose work you would like to share and make readers aware of?
I’d like to list the creatives who were a part of the 120 Wooster Street Collective my father founded and its milieu. It is my duty to share this knowledge, to continue to say my father’s name and the names of all of those he labored with, because so easily we forget the immense contribution of Black artists in forging new points of access for creation and creativity.

Visual artists
Daniel LaRue Johnson, Virginia Jaramillo, Anthony Ramos, Frank Bowling, Bill Hutson, Gregoire Muller, Edvins Strautmanis, Algernon Miller, Ellsworth Ausby, Joe Overstreet, Al Loving, Ed Clark, Peter Bradley, Gerald Jackson, Jack Whitten, Romare Bearden, Willem De Kooning, Kapo, Milton George, Anthony Barboza, LeRoy Woodson, Ralph Gibson, Frosty Myers

Multidisciplinary artists
Malcolm Mooney, Megan Brown, Felipe Luciano, Gylan Kain, Claude Lawrence, Jean-Claude Samuel 

Musicians
Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Kunle Mwanga, Ornette Coleman, James Jordan, Revolutionary Ensemble, James “Blood” Ulmer, Charlie Haden, Sam Rivers

Chelsea to Springs

Chelsea’s Berry Campbell Gallery takes over Ashawagh Hall in Springs from today through Sunday with a large group exhibition of artists, past and present, with strong East End connections.

The show includes works by Mary Abbott, Alice Baber, Nanette Carter, Dan Christensen, Eric Dever, Elaine de Kooning, Perle Fine, Grace Hartigan, Raymond Hendler, John Opper, Charlotte Park, Betty Parsons, Mike Solomon, Syd Solomon, Hedda Sterne, Susan Vecsey, Lucia Wilcox, Frank Wimberley, and Larry Zox.

Gallery hours are today through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and noon to 6 on Sunday.

Berry Campbell: Community
August 11 - 14, 2022
Berry Campbell at Ashawagh hall
780 Springs Fireplace Road
 East Hampton, New York 11937

Preview Exhibiton

Nanette Carter: Destabilizing #3, 2022. Oil on Mylar, 61 x 71 1/2 in. (154.9 x 181.6 cm)


Excerpt from "At the Galleries by Karen Wilkin"

Also in Chelsea, Berry Campbell Gallery showed “Nanette Carter: Shape Shifting,” recent works that, like Loving’s mixed-media collages, ignore the traditional rectangle and traditional materials, while making their physicality and material presence crucial to their meaning. That similarity is not surprising. Loving was the much younger Carter’s close friend and a mentor. Yet despite her clear connection to the vibrant tradition of African American abstract art—she shares with Loving and Gilliam, for example, a faith in the expressive possibilities of process—Carter investigates terrain all her own. Her stubbornly abstract images are highly charged, like metaphors for things we can’t quite grasp. She exploits the way oil paint sits up on Mylar to invent seductive striations and scrapings, creating a distinctive palette of textures that modulates a range of blacks, greys, off-greens and blues, sparked with ochre and occasional hits of ultramarine. The most ambitious, largest works on view, Destabilizing #1 (2021) and Destabilizing #3 (2022), appeared to hover, unconstrained, against the wall, their overlapped shapes and bars seemingly coalescing only momentarily. We saw through parts of their configurations, so that the wall itself became part of the equation. In Destabilizing #1, a stack of emphatic black bars floated free of the piled image to claim new visual and spatial territory and pose interesting questions about illusion and object. Other recent wall-mounted works depended on openwork structures, like constructed sculptures or ritual objects, unhampered by concerns about support. Loving’s and Carter’s exhibitions briefly coincided, offering a fortuitous opportunity to explore the evidence of both resonance and independence in the work of these inventive colleagues and friends. Continue Reading

Walter Darby Bannard at Berry Campbell

Berry Campbell presents the work of Walter Darby Bannard, a leading figure in color field painting in the 1950s. In “Vanadium,” Bannard emphasized the opticality of the painted surface, applying gesso with a squeegee leaving fine ridges. Thin layers of light green and ochre were poured and allowed to settle in the creases.

In “Glass Mountain Fireball,” Bannard’s liquid paint technique sees orange and yellow tints wash over green underpainting. While many artists are secretive about their methods, Berry says that Bannard freely explained his process, confident that other artists “aren’t going to be able to do it.” Having been the head of the painting department at the University of Miami, we can assume his claim was accurate.

Jill Nathanson
Breath Woven 11, 2019
Acrylic and polymers on Yupo paper
24 12 x 18 inches
Collection of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

View Works by Jill Nathanson

Judith Godwin
Seated Figure, 1955
Oil on canvas
83 x 47 inches
Collection of National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

View Works by Judith Godwin

The Biggest Lie About Abstract Expressionism
Max Lunn
July 11, 2022

We were told that women were on the peripheries of the artistic movement, while in fact they were driving it forward, energetically engaging in this radical pictorial language.

Abstract Expressionism is a storied movement continually re-told at blockbuster museums: We think we know it so well. The story, however, is still wrong. There are no women in it. The most recent show in the United Kingdom was at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2017. The exhibition projected an outdated image of the swaggering machismo the movement has come to be known for. Lee Krasner was the only woman exhibited. 

More recently, a bold exhibition at Huxley-Parlour Gallery in London entitled Women and the Void, hoped to correct this. It showed works from some of the better-known and under-appreciated women artists, including Jay Defoe, Mary Abbott, and Michael West.

Now is the time to examine this exclusion, given the work done by writers like Mary Gabriel to understand these artists; her 2018 book Ninth Street Women chronicled their art and lives.

There has been no major group show of women Abstract Expressionists in the UK, and only one elsewhere at the Denver Art Museum. Huxley Parlour’s exhibition demonstrated that women were not only present, but central, to the movement’s origins. By focusing on works on paper and including work from beyond the bigger names, the show affirmed the polyvalent output women have made — take Anne Ryan’s layered 1951 collage. Other highlights included striking work by Perle Fine and Alma Thomas, the latter of whose inclusion evidences another major absence: Black artists.

Both the 2019 Barbican Centre retrospective of Lee Krasner’s work and Dulwich Picture Gallery’s exhibition of Helen Frankenthaler’s printmaking career are further indicators of interest, as is the current Joan Mitchell retrospective currently at the Baltimore Museum of Art. 

These three women, however, are exceptions and still not valued to the extent their male equivalents are. Although a crude metric, the auction market gives some idea: Rothko’s record stands at $86.9 million, whilst leading the women is Lee Krasner at $11.7 million. 

Institutional recognition at a group level is arguably little better: The Whitney Museum’s recent show Labyrinth of Forms: Women and Abstraction is indicative of museums’ willingness to invest in these women. Or rather, lack of willingness: The exhibition was criticized for its small footprint and handful of works, despite the museum’s extensive archive holdings. This speaks of a wider tension between museum-as-artist-champion and museum-as-business. 

This exclusion matters because it is a lie. Women weren’t working on the peripheries, they were driving the movement forward, energetically engaging in this radical pictorial language.

Before Abstract Expressionism was cast as the familiar macho movement in the mid-1950s — guided by the vernacular of critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg — a democratic spirit pervaded US abstraction. This was in part due to the withering attitude taken towards abstract art which meant artists were not competing, but collaborating. 

Out of this spirit, the collaborative organizations American Abstract Artists (AAA) and Atelier 17 emerged to champion abstraction, the latter with a focus on works on paper. A notable 40% of Atelier 17 members were women. Members included artists who became associated with Abstract Expressionism: Perle Fine, Jackson Pollock, and Willem De Kooning. Abstraction crucially offered women aesthetic liberty: Perle Fine commented it allowed her to escape from the “oppressive particularities” of realism. 

This is not to say it was all plain sailing. Some women artists changed their names to avoid bias: “Dorris” to “Dorr” Bothwell, and the oft-recounted comments from Hans Hofmann that Elaine de Kooning and Lee Krasner’s work being “so good that you would not know it was done by a woman” speak volumes. 

While factors such as the male-only requirement for “the club” — the East 8th Street spot in Manhattan where artists met — played a role, art historians have generally pinpointed the rise of the abstract art market as being the moment women were pushed out. As Mary Gabriel puts it: “When art became a ‘business’ in the turbocharged consumer economy of the late 1950s, work by women artists wasn’t considered as valuable … which meant dealers didn’t show it, collectors didn’t buy it, and art history courses failed to mention it.” The previous plurality of styles was replaced by a handful of male “masters,” befitting of the Cold War politics of the day. 

But we know these women were there: The now-famous 1951 Ninth Street Show, considered the debut of Abstract Expressionism, had three women on its committee: Fine, Mitchell, and Elaine de Kooning. Why are museums such as the Royal Academy still getting it wrong?

There are tedious reasons such as the need to guarantee ticket sales. But there are also relevant ideas about artistic value. The Denver exhibition and the Frankenthaler exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery argue that these women deserve attention because they were innovators: Jane Findlay, curator of the Dulwich exhibition, said she put innovation “front and centre.”

Huxley-Parlour hosted a panel talk, where the Barbican curator Eleanor Nairne questioned why so much emphasis is placed on innovation as a metric when valuing artists, and if this helps achieves parity. She commented it’s inherently market-driven: “If someone has a singular style, then they are uniquely identifiable for their imagery, and so we feel more comfortable championing them as a ‘master’”. She explained society has been more lenient allowing male artists to cycle through different styles before landing on a single identifiable one: Think of Rothko, whose biomorphs are seen as the preamble to his signature multiforms. 

Nairne broadened out the idea, considered innovation in conjunction with Hilma af Klint, who she says was only canonized because she created abstract work a year before Kandinsky — what would have happened if it was the next year? Maybe, therefore, we shouldn’t ask what these women were doing “differently,” but simply what they were doing. 

The scholarship has been tirelessly corrected, the books have been re-written: It’s clear that women were front and center of Abstract Expressionism. But the power of a simple narrative of a few great men still stands in the way of experiencing the richness of mid-century abstraction. It’s time to flesh the story out.

Ida Kohlmeyer, Monolith #1B, 1979, mixed media on canvas, 60 x 52 1/2 inches.

Hard-Edged Geometric Abstraction
Upsilon Gallery, New York
June 24 - July 30, 2022

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Intersect Aspen
July 31 - August 4, 2022
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Here I am, back in the land of the living. Still not sure whether or not I'll be able to maintain my previous pace, but meanwhile here's a review of the current & frankly beautiful show at Berry Campbell – which is "Walter Darby Bannard: See First, Name Later: Paintings 1972-1976" (through July 1).

The middle part of this tripartite title is a quotation from a slender book by Bannard recently published by Signature 16, an imprint of Letter 16 Press of Miami The book is "Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art," and I plan to review it on another occasion, but this review is about Bannard's show, whose 16 pictures are both stunning and classically serene.

MORE BACKGROUND THAN YOU REALLY NEED
Before these paintings were made, Bannard (1934-2016) had been reasonably well-known within the art world, having appeared in two of the biggest and best-publicized group shows of abstract art in the '60s: "Post-Painterly Abstraction" (1964), organized by Clement Greenberg for the Los Angeles County Museum, and "The Responsive Eye" (1965), organized by William Seitz for the Museum of Modern Art.

However, the Greenberg show didn't include only those younger and/or lesser-known '60s painters – like Kenneth Noland and Jack Bush – whom the critic had made a point of celebrating.  Rather, it was a huge grab bag of '60s abstract painters of every kind whose sole common denominator was that instead of using the loose brushwork that had been employed by most (if not all) of the first-generation abstract expressionist painters in the '40s and '50s they were creating "hard-edged" images. 

(This trait they shared with figurative pop artists of the '60s like Warhol and Lichtenstein, who were getting far more publicity. I have long suspected that this show was Greenberg's way of showing that abstract artists of the '60s were as radical stylistically as pop – hence deserving the same attention.  "Style" to him was always the key element. "Subject matter' -- or lack of it -- was beside the point. But I digress.)

Similarly, the Seitz exhibition was a grab bag. It was intended to feature '60s paintings so "hard-edged" that they played tricks with the vision of their viewers, but only some work in the show was truly tricksy. Bridget Riley and Richard Anuszkiewicz, whose work did fit that category, soon became known as "op artists" ("op" being a term coined by my predecessor as writer on art for Time, Jon Borgzinner). But the show also included artists like Noland and Bannard whose work wasn't tricksy at all, and would go down in history as "color-field" painters or "modernists" instead.

THE MOMENT OF TRUTH
During the '60s, though, Bannard's paintings had been minimalist, not "modernist," bland in color and not only hard-edge but also geometric in composition.  Only in the early '70s did he loosen up and create more fluid, painterly and coloristically close-valued pictures.  

Such pictures would make him one of the top artists most intimately associated with Greenberg.  They would also make him a leader among the far larger number of yet younger painters who shared Greenberg's taste for the again-painterly and -- more importantly, coloristically close-valued --- pictures of Jules Olitski.

This meant that Bannard became better and better known within the Greenbergian community -- while slipping from the sight of all those "trendier" observers who couldn't see beyond the charms of pop and its intimate ally, the more familiar minimal.

It's in this context that the paintings of the current show were created – a context in which Bannard was abandoning the relatively popular and familiar in order to strike out in a new and more perilous direction.  This must have taken courage – a lot of courage – and I think that's what's incorporated into "See First; Name Later."

Although I didn't become acquainted with Bannard's paintings until the 1980s, his work from the '70s and that of the '80s form a continuum that made me feel at ease with the work in this show. I have never felt that way with Bannard's earlier minimalist work – but with this show, I had a feeling of at last coming home.

NOVEL TECHNIQUES
At the beginning of this most revolutionary period of his career, Bannard was applying paint using diapers instead of brushes and/or closing off areas of his canvases with masking tape.  So says Franklin Einspruch, former student from Bannard's later years at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, keeper of the online archive of writings by and about Bannard, and editor of Aphorisms for Artists, in his "Afterword" to that book.

Three of these very experimental works from 1972 are on view here: the still somewhat-tentative "Sampson" and "Westminster," hanging at the very back of the gallery, in a small area seemingly devoted to the thrill of discovery, and "Sometime," a miniature symphony of off-whites measuring only 14 x 10 inches and hanging on the outside wall, just to the left of the door leading to the street.

By the mid '70s, though, Bannard had discovered the joys of applying paint (and occasionally gel) with squeegees.  Especially the paintings here from the later '70s display his mastery of this humble tool. (Lisa N. Peters, in her catalogue essay to this show, says only that he used "squeegee-like tools," but Einspruch, himself a painter, says flat-out that these were squeegees.

(Although squeegees may be more often associated with garden-variety housekeeping --as workmen's tools for window-washing and floor-scraping, they come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes and forms, and are part of many artists' toolkits -- as they are widely used in studios in the making of screen prints).

THE SHOW ITSELF
Regardless of their actual dates and the actual tools employed, almost all of the paintings in this show hang together in seamless collegiality.  They are grouped together in ways that show common sweeps and coils of shape as well as contrasts in dominant and close-valued color.

This canny juxtaposition continues throughout the show. The first large gallery space is devoted to three fine pictures in a paler spectrum.  Facing the street is the vertical, putty-colored "Morning in Detroit" (1974); on the west wall is the large, nearly square and reddish yellowy "Yucatan" (1973), and with its back to the street is the grayish vertical "Vanadium" (1976), with turquoise and purple accents.

The space adjoining this space has mostly darker, mellower pictures, among them "Calico Bend" *1976), "Dakota Run" (1976), and the small but monumental "California Rambler" (1976).

Still, the most significant layout is the one that first greets the visitor upon entering from the street. In addition to "Sometime," with its startlingly early date, two other paintings share this area: "Dover Down" (1973), on the east wall, to the left of the entry, and "Cairo Passing" (1975), facing the entry. The former is built around pale, buttery browns and tans, and the latter, around vaguely grays and blues.

If, however, the visitor makes a hard right, s/he sees the mostly-light-red "Glass Mountain Fireball" (1975).

Hanging high and highly visible over the receptionist's desk, this painting indeed glows: its fundamental red ornamented with accents of green and yellow.  One can see how the image resembles a ball of fire. Yet I don't for a moment believe that the artist was trying to depict such a subject.

Like all passionate abstractionists, he had no subject at all in mind when he started to paint this picture. Only dafter it was finished did he ask himself what he was reminded of by it. In other words, he was following the dictum laid down by this moving exhibition's aphoristic title: "See First, Name Later."

Order/Reorder: Experiments with Collections
Hudson River Museum, New York
June 17, 2022–September 3, 2023
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Frederick J. Brown, The First Time Around, 1985, oil and pencil on paper, 42 x 29 3/4 inches.

Art as both creative output and curated object is in constant dialogue with the past and the present. It is this never-ending conversation that pushes art into its future, forcing us to continually reimagine the ways in which we project a vision of ourselves and the world around us. Order / Reorder: Experiments with Collections explores approaches to looking at American art that consider expressions of American identity from new perspectives.

The works on view range across genres: portraiture, figural studies, still life, landscape, and abstraction. Recent additions to the Museum’s collection and other artworks on view for the first time are joined by visitor favorites, paired with special loans from the Joslyn Art Museum and contributions from regional artists. Rather than structured chronologically, the installation is designed to spark discussion through juxtapositions of styles, outlooks, and eras. Works by renowned artists are in conversation with those now emerging.

Christine Berry and Martha Campbell

After nine successful years on West 24th Street in Chelsea, Berry Campbell is excited to announce that we will be moving two blocks north to a new expanded gallery space on West 26th Street. 

Berry Campbell will begin the transition to its new space at 524 West 26th Street on September 1, 2022. We are honored to be moving to this pedigreed location that has previously been the home of the prestigious Paula Cooper Gallery and Robert Miller Gallery. 

The new Berry Campbell, which will boast a total of 9,000 square feet, will support the continued expansion of our exhibition program and allow us to better serve the evolving needs of both our clients and the artists and estates whom we are fortunate to represent.

Our new location houses 4,500 square feet of exhibition space, including a skylit main gallery and four smaller galleries, as well as two private viewing areas, a full-sized library, executive offices, and substantial on-site storage space. 

We first launched Berry Campbell in 2013 with a collaborative vision to emphasize the contributions of the many postwar and contemporary artists who had been left behind due to race, gender, and/or geography. In 2015, we doubled our exhibition space to its current size of 2,000 square feet.

Reflecting upon these past nine years has left us tremendously grateful. We maintain a well-curated roster of thirty-four represented artists and estates with a rich secondary market program.

Over the years, Berry Campbell has held eighty-one exhibitions and countless focus shows as well as collaborated with museums and curators both domestically and internationally. Further, Berry Campbell has successfully placed works in private, corporate, and museum collections, and has fostered relationships with collectors, curators, educators, institutions, press, other galleries, and the general public.

We are also proud to have been recognized and reviewed in many respected publications such as Architectural Digest, Art & Antiques, Art in America, Artforum, ArtNews, The Brooklyn Rail, The Hopkins Review, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, East Hampton Star, Luxe Magazine, The New Criterion, The New York Times, Vogue, Wall Street Journal, and Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art.

Berry Campbell is pleased to announce that it will inaugurate its new space with a retrospective exhibition of paintings by Elizabeth Osborne, opening with a reception on Thursday, September 8, 2022, 6 to 8 p.m.

The final exhibition at our current West 24th Street gallery will feature recent paintings by Eric Dever. The opening reception is scheduled for Thursday, September 15, 2022, 6 to 8 p.m. 

We are excited to be able to share this news and begin this new chapter of the gallery. We look forward to welcoming you to our new space this fall.

With gratitude, 
Christine and Martha

Christine Berry, Phyllis Hollis, and Martha Campbell attend the Black Arts Council Gala

In Conversation with Daniel Zamani and Jennifer Higgie
Perle Fine: A Retrospective | Rediscovery of Perle Fine
Gazelli Art House

Tuesday, July 21, 2022
6 - 8 pm (BST)
Register

Active as a painter for over six decades, John Opper's intriguing canvases are distinguised by large, dynamically-interlocking planes of color. Continue Reading


Modernist Collection Website
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Listen to Episode 108

Delaware Art Museum, Louisa du Pont Copeland Memorial Fund, partial gift from the artist, and purchased with funds donated by Doug Schaller and David Barquist, Brad Greenwood and Anne M. Lampe, 2022.

This Upper East Side Apartment Shows How To Decorate A Bedroom Of Dreams

Eric Winnick of E. Lawrence Design has curated a tailored yet comfortable space for a downsizing fifty-something couple


Photo: Reid Rolls

Tell us about a standout artwork.
There’s a piece in the bedroom by Long-Island-based artist Susan Vecsey which adds to the tranquility of the space. She’s known for paintings that evoke a sunrise type of setting, but in a very abstract way.

What’s your approach to using colour and pattern?
I like to use colour with restraint.  My palettes tend to be very neutral with pops of colour. I’m drawn to cooler neutrals; I always feel the palette should be warm with touches of vibrancy. The walls throughout this space are a taupe that gives off a cloud like texture, which allows for statement artworks and a rug that grounds the living room and also serves as its own work of art. Continue Reading

Jill Nathanson in conversation with Thu Nhat Pham, THR Editorial Assistant


Jill Nathanson, Light Wrestle, 2020, 45 1/2 x 95 1/2 inches. Private Collection.

How did the paintings [in the folio] come to be?

It’s hard to know where to start. I think abstract painting, for any serious painter, is a manifestation of a whole understanding of what painting is about and what abstract painting might do. The paintings manifest something about painting and about abstract painting: I’ll leave that to the side.

I’ll say that the paintings in the folio are painted with thick poured acrylic polymer paints, and they’re very transparent. All the paint is absolutely transparent, and it’s poured onto a wood panel that’s been prepared and painted white so that the light reflects off of it. This is a very unforgiving process: pouring thick plastic onto wood and letting it dry and then pouring more thick transparent plastic on top of it. There’s no room for a mistakes or corrections really.

And so, I worked from studies. I worked from transparent plastic studies, which take me a very long time to create. So, a lot of the creative process goes on a small scale and the paintings are enlarged versions of these color studies. There are certain things that I want each color study to accomplish visually, and I want that visual experience to call forth all kinds of other intellectual, emotional, spiritual kinds of responses. But it all really starts with a small six by nine inch plastic study.

Really, it also goes back to discoveries that I made when I was an undergraduate at Bennington College. I discovered what was then a really important art movement: Color Field painting. I fell in love with it, and I was encouraged to be experimental. I experimented with acrylic paint and discovered that I just loved thick transparent color and that working with thick transparent colors, sometimes in relationship to opaque color, I felt that I could make discoveries that I hadn’t seen anybody else work with.

A lot of my life as a painter, over almost 50 years, has been about pure color relationships, color in fields, transparency, and materiality.

So that’s sort of an intro to how things get going.

What are the oppositions that you try to balance in your painting process?

What are the oppositions that I try to balance in my painting process? You initially asked me if there were three words that I could choose to describe my painting process and my approach to painting. I kind of bristled or pulled back from that because I don’t think that there are descriptive words that I’d like to use. I feel like there are challenges or oppositions that my painting is involved with and that my whole painting life has been involved with trying to engage.

One of them would be “Shape Versus Field.” This probably sounds very meaningless and like “what’s the difference between shape and field?” But, in fact, it has a very important position in the history of abstraction and particularly abstraction over the last, say 50 years. At a certain point in high modernism in America there was a quality of field in painting that was very important, I would say, from Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock. And then into the pure color painting of color field painters, there was a sense of the painting as being kind of a field of energy or maybe opposing energies or moving energies. But it was kind of anti-shape. It was polyphonic painting where every part of the surface was equally important. It became kind of allover painting (that’s one way to talk about it). But I would say painting as a field that transmits a kind of energy was very important in high modernism.

Then that really fell out of fashion.

Now, some of my favorite painters, let’s say Amy Sillman who is a very wonderful contemporary painter, are very focused on shape and discovering new ways of thinking about shape: shape that’s flat, shape that kind of pushes and pulls in space, etcetera. There’s kind of been a re-emergence of a focus on shape. And I love a lot of that painting. It’s so exciting to me. I think it’s a wonderful moment in abstract painting. There are so many people I could mention who were involved with creating a new feeling of shape, kind of funky, a little bit troubling, a little bit awkward, kind of anti-heroic. I love this painting, but I would say that for me: I’m involved with kind of negotiating that opposition between field and shape and not having one take over from the other. So, “Field and Shape,” and when I say “Field,” I mean color as an energy field, and how do you have an energy field that also has a shape. They don’t really work together, but that’s kind of the ambition and the process and the way of thinking or hoping or approaching a painting or the story I tell myself about what I’m doing. Whether it’s overstated or not, that’s how I talk about it to myself.

Another one is “Color as light / color as matter.” Paint color has two realities. It’s gloppy, expensive stuff you get in jars or tubes or whatever. You mix it and it’s totally material. It’s glop but it’s also light. You put colors together, they vibrate, and you have a quality of light that you can create in a painting. The opposition between those two things, I think, is so key to the magic of painting throughout history and really is a focus of abstract painting. How do you find your way to really give that experience of the material of paint, simultaneously the light quality of paint, and simultaneously the object of a painting, which is a big, heavy thing that’s stuck on a wall. It costs money and takes up space, and it’s very, very material, and how do you have it feel like it is this transcendent light kind of a thing at the same time as you’re not making an illusion? So, that material light thing is a big biggie for me.

A third opposition that I was thinking about: a range of abstract painting as an image because everything, every painting, has an image, and abstract painting as a process of looking, a kind of meditation. I think every painting that’s worth its salt is both: there’s an image that you look at (“Oh yeah! I see that image, I like that image!”), but it’s also a process that engages you in putting it together, as in time with your optical nerves or muscles or whatever works in your eyes, which I don’t really know that much about. It’s a process and it’s also an image.

So those are the things: “Shape versus Field,” “Color in paint versus Material in paint,” and “Image versus Process.” They’re all kind of interrelated, but I think it’s worth it to kind of tease them out.

Arising from one man’s collection, the Ogden Museum strives to serve a broad audience while showing that Southern art is not merely regional.

NEW ORLEANS — A signature work at a recent exhibit at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art is a photograph of a cellphone showing on its screen the framed image of an antebellum mansion.

It is a photograph within a photograph. But what makes it an eye-catcher is that the pictured iPhone is clearly in the hand of a Black man, RaMell Ross.

Mr. Ross, an Oscar-nominated filmmaker, artist and photographer, often documents the people and land of Hale County, Ala.

Over the decades, some of the giants of Southern photography — Walker Evans, William Eggleston and William Christenberry — have made Hale County their subject. They are, of course, white men. By featuring this particular image, Mr. Ross and the curators of the Ogden are demonstrating their determination to show this place in a new way.

...

Mr. Ogden’s collection was broad. And huge. It documented almost every aspect of Southern art, from the colonial period through the present day. By the 1990s, he said, he owned at least 1,000 paintings, sculptures and photographs.

Among his treasures was a room-size work, a mural really, by the abstract expressionist Ida Kohlmeyer; vibrant scenes from Clementine Hunter, who spent her whole life on a plantation; a Sam Gilliam drape painting, and a work by Julian Onderdonk, a Texas landscape artist famous for his depictions of fields of bluebonnets. There were canvasses rolled up under the beds; the cupboards were full of Sophie Newcomb vases and George Ohr pottery. Continue Reading

Frederick J. Brown: Acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Frederick J. Brown
Dr. Leon Banks (Study for Last Supper), 1982
Oil on linen
32 x 24 1/4 inches
Signed, dated and titled on verso

When you ask art historians and gallerists where the heart of the Abstract Expressionist movement lived, they'll mention New York City a bit, but also point you a bit further east. The quaint East Hampton enclave of Springs is often regarded as a creativity incubator for artists, but one integral spot to the Abstract movement has been long overlooked: the Brooks-Park Arts and Nature Center.

Art couple James Brooks and Charlotte Park settled onto the idyllic, 11-acre parcel in 1954, deeming it as an artistic escape for all, and built a series of studios for creatives to work their magic. In a matter of months, it became the meeting spot for renowned artists such as Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Willem de Kooning. Today, the National Trust for Historic Preservation listed the Brooks-Park Arts and Nature Center as one of America's Most Endangered Places in 2022.

For nearly a decade, local activists and art enthusiasts have been fighting to save Brooks' and Park's original home and studios from demolition while raising enough funds to preserve the location as a community landmark. Marietta Gavaris, an activist and painter who currently resides in Springs, believes the restoration of the arts and nature center would both help solidify Springs's mark on the art world and give the residents a place to feel inspired.

"It's one thing to see art hanging in a museum, but when you can explore where it was actually created and how artists interacted with nature, it's an indescribable experience," says Gavaris. "With its 11 acres and the adjoining hiking trails, we want art and nature enthusiasts alike to come to the site and enjoy not only the historic artist impact but just its environment."

Christine Berry, one of the founders of the Berry Campbell Gallery, adds that the site is also crucial in helping to tell the stories of female Expressionists, including that of Charlotte Park. A student of Yale's School of Fine Art and member of the prestigious New York School, Park was instrumental in shaping abstract art as we know it today with her ability to translate lush landscapes into forceful, painterly works. However, as with many other women of the time, her contributions were overshadowed by her male counterparts.

"On paper, Charlotte [Park] had almost the same exact resume as her husband, James [Brooks], and yet, so few people knew about her work," says Berry. "It's only as of late that her name is becoming part of the canon of art history. Her work was not representational in any way, but rather conceptual interpretations of every single day from her beautiful property in the spring."

Her studio at the Brooks-Park Arts and Nature Center stands as an exhibition of her artistic process and solidifies the importance women have in the art world. Though as the years go on, Park's studio—along with the other structures on the campus—deteriorates more and more. Echoes of the site's demolition began in 2013 after the city of East Hampton purchased the land. However, the residents of Springs lobbied together to designate it a town historic landmark in 2014. Since then, Gavaris along with Preservation Long Island and other activists have been actively working with the members of the East Hampton town board to devise a plan that preserves the property and helps it reach its full potential.

Gavaris notes that the major roadblock currently in the town's way of preserving the site is the funding and support. The Brooks-Park Arts and Nature Center asks advocates to sign a petition on their site in support of the restoration of the home and studios of artists James Brooks and Charlotte Park.

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Martha Campbell and Christine Berry at the 2022 New York School of Interior Design Gala honoring Jamie Drake. 

Your Concise New York Art Guide for May 2022

Your list of must-see, fun, insightful, and very New York art events this month, including Willie Cole, Hélio Oiticica, Nanette Carter, and more.

When: through May 27
Where: Berry Campbell (530 West 24th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan)

Nanette Carter first encountered Mylar in architectural drawings in the mid-1980s. Since then, frosted Mylar sheets have become the artist’s medium of choice, as she constructs cantilevered collages by painting and printing directly onto irregular shapes cut from the material. This show of recent collages, including sweeping examples from the artist’s Destabilizing and Shifting Perspectives series, hammers home that Carter is not only a painter concerned with color, texture, and dynamism but also a builder with an interest in balance, weight, and gravity.

Farnsworth Forward: The Collection
Curated by Suzette McAvoy
Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine
Through December 31, 2022

Featuring work by Stephen Pace, Lynne Mapp Drexler, George Bellows, Lois Dodd, Winslow Homer, Daniel Minter, and Marguerite Zorach.

View Works by Stephen Pace
Lynne Mapp Drexler: Solo Exhibition Forthcoming at Berry Campbell, New York

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Susan Isaacs interviews artist Nanette Carter, whose journey includes years as an art educator, as well as 17 years as a full time professional artist sustaining herself through sales of her work. An amazing story. Nanette Carter is featured in a 2-person exhibit at Towson University now through April 23. Be sure to catch it is you’re in the Baltimore area.

Master artist Nanette Carter focuses on contemporary issues with an abstract vocabulary of form, line, color, and texture that explore the impact of social media, social injustice, and the balancing of life responsibilities in the 21st century through painted mylar collages. Her recent retirement from teaching has given her time to make much new work and have three exhibitions in 2022 following on a major survey of 30 years of work in 2021 at the N’Namdi Contemporary in Detroit, MI.

Nanette Carter: I went to Pratt for my graduate degree, and I majored in printmaking and minored in drawing. And so, a lot of that, of course, is still reflected in the work. I taught for 20 years at Pratt and enjoyed it immensely. The students are smart. They’re talented. I would always tell them “I probably learned, just as much from you, as you have from me.” They come from all over the world; it’s quite international so it made for a wonderful experience, I think, for everyone in the classroom.

I received several faculty grants during the course of that time. One of the grants, in fact, was able to send me to Cuba in 2018. I had a solo show there and we actually created a catalog with that money. I brought art materials and taught a class. The year before I left Pratt, I received what they call the Sienna Art Institute Residency, which is a collaboration with the Institute in Italy and Pratt. Because of Covid the year that I was supposed to go had to be pushed to the next year, so my very last year at Pratt I went to Sienna for six weeks. It was there that I heard that I was up for the Anonymous was a Woman, and they asked me to please send my images and I had to write a little piece on my work and what it’s been like the last 40-50 years. What I think is so amazing about this grant is that it is really aimed at artists who’ve been out here for some time, but maybe have not been acknowledged or recognized in the fashion that they should be. And so I applied and then I heard that I received that grant. The timing couldn’t have been better to receive the money when I was retiring. And I felt very good leaving and I had great memories, and I learned so much from the faculty. They are amazing artists. I am still in contact with them, and probably will be for the rest of my life. We get together and go to each other studios, which is always so much fun and very helpful.

SI: You are now with the Berry Campbell Gallery.

NC: Berry Campbell approached me, which is always nice, you know when someone wants you. I love the two women running the space—Christine Berry and Martha Campbell. They are a force to be reckoned with. These women are working hard; there are an awful lot of women artists with the gallery.

SI: In fact, the gallery has a bit of a connection to Philadelphia because they represent the Elizabeth Osborne estate now, and she was a teacher of mine at PAFA and a very well-known artist from Philadelphia. A lot of artists are teachers. Did you always want to teach or was teaching a way to make a living?

NC: Well, you know when I went to Oberlin College for my undergraduate studies, I knew then that I was going to teach. And I in fact took some education classes. I had done some teaching in the summer. I used to have the summer job working at the parks in Montclair, New Jersey, and I would do the arts and crafts. I did that in the summer, while I was at Oberlin College, and so I knew I wanted to teach. I come from a home of teachers. My mother taught first grade where of course reading is so important. She ended becoming a reading specialist, and she went back to school and ended up becoming a vice principal. My father got his doctorate in divinity. He never had a church, but I can tell you, for Black men, if you wanted to get into politics, you almost had to go through the Church. We can think of Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, and Ralph Abernathy. Several of these men ended up going into politics, via the Church. The Baptist Church, in particular. So Dad got into politics. But as a preacher politician, you are also teaching and helping others. It’s that kind of service, that public service, that I think is so important.

I can recall when I went off to Oberlin a lot of my parents’ friends said “Oh my gosh you’re letting your daughter major in art. How is she going to make a living?” My mother would always reply, “Oh no she will teach.” When I went to prepare for my MFA I understood then, okay now I can possibly even teach on the college level. Continue Reading

Christine Berry and Martha Campbell at the 2022 ARTTABLE Annual Benefit & Award Ceremony honoring Carol Cole Levin and Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood. 

Drexler sold art to tourists for $50. Earlier this month, one of her paintings fetched over $1 million at Christie's.

What is going on there?

That’s the question market observers asked after a vibrant abstract canvas painted six decades ago by little-known artist Lynne Drexler soared to $1.2 million at a Christie’s off-season auction last month. More than 16 bidders propelled the work to 12 times its presale estimate of $40,000 to $60,000. 

The price was mind-boggling for an artist who lived most of her life in obscurity, overshadowed, like many women of her generation, by a husband. She never had much of a career, showing here and there but rarely in New York City, whose hustle and bustle she eventually traded for the austere beauty of Monhegan, a small, rocky island off the coast of Maine. 

There, amid harsh winters and touristy summers, Drexler spent her last 16 years painting daily, listening to the opera on the radio, and holding court at Jack Daniels-fueled salons. In the process, she filled her rickety white house with countless canvases. Her most inventive body of work—ecstatic abstracts created from torrents of vibrant brushstrokes, small and precise—was only discovered after her death, in 1999.

A second-generation Abstract Expressionist, Drexler’s star is rising as the contribution of female artists is being written back into the mainstream canon of art history (and the art market). The past few years have seen new records for Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Alma Thomas, and Helen Frankenthaler, as well as Yayoi Kusama and Agnes Martin. 

Drexler’s posthumous rise serves as a riposte to the idea that there are no more artists left to “rediscover.” Those who knew her just wish she could have been here to see it.

Before 2020, none of Drexler’s paintings had sold at auction for $10,000, let alone $1 million. 

Something started to change that year, when a 1966 green painting fetched a quadruple-estimate $26,000 at Barridoff Auction in Portland, Maine. Since then, her work has consistently fetched five- and six-figure sums; most recently, $150,000 for PinKing 1970 at Barridoff on March 19. One of her paintings is now in the collection of John Legend and Chrissy Teigen.

“These women of the 20th century, who are related to the second movement of Abstract Expressionism, were so undervalued and under-circulated that it almost became a tempest when they started to be recognized,” said Michael Rancourt, who manages the Drexler estate, who has never before spoken to the press. Along with figures like Grace Hartigan and Yvonne Thomas, “Lynne is fortunate to be part of it.”

The record-setting Christie’s painting, Flowered Hundred (1962), was deaccessioned by the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine. “It’s terrific that she’s finally getting her due,” said Christopher Brownawell, the museum’s director. 

Drexler was born in 1928 in Newport News, Virginia and remained a Southern lady until her death. “She could curse like a pirate, but she judged people by their manners,’’ a friend recalled in a catalogue essay.

After attending the College of William and Mary, she came to New York in the 1950s to study with Robert Motherwell at Hunter College. She also took studio art classes with Hans Hofmann. She lived in the Chelsea Hotel and shared her downtown studio with painter Seymour Boardman. 

In the early 1960s, she married fellow artist John Hultberg, whose large-scale Surrealist compositions won him the support of legendary gallerist Martha Jackson. She placed his works in top museums, paid for his (and Drexler’s) art supplies, and bought him a house on Monhegan Island, according to curator Tralice Bracy. 

Jackson wasn’t particularly interested in Drexler’s work. “She wasn’t acknowledged as a painter, certainly not as a great painter,” Rancourt said. “She was the child in the corner, basically.”  

Anita Shapolsky, a veteran New York art dealer, met Drexler while visiting Hultberg on the island in the early 1980s. She was unaware of Drexler’s Ab Ex phase. “She was a little angry at life,” Shapolsky recalled. “There were marital problems. At the time she was doing small paper pictures of nature for the tourists who came to the island.” Continue Reading

Nanette Carter: Almond's Artist and Writers Dinner 
Almond Restaurant, Bridgehampton, New York
View Works by Nanette Carter

Architect Max Strang will guide a tour of Leedy’s architecture and share intimate stories about his time with the legendary architect

Gene Leedy, a founding father of the Sarasota School of Architecture, led a long and decorated career in midcentury modern architecture and beyond. He’ll be celebrated with a weekend tour of his work which will also kick off a three-week-long Leedy-focused exhibition. The event is led by Architecture Sarasota, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the Sarasota School of Architecture style.

Although the bulk of Leedy’s work is in Winter Haven, Florida, where, in 1954, he moved his practice, Leedy started his career in Sarasota and left a lasting legacy.

At just 16 years old, he enrolled at the University of Florida and graduated with a degree in architecture. He then moved to Sarasota and worked under the tutelage of Paul Rudolph, an internationally acclaimed architect and a founder of the Sarasota School of Architecture style that emerged in the 1940s. Also called Sarasota Modern, the style is known for its Florida-sensitive design that often incorporates what were at the time avant-garde elements, like sliding floor-to-ceiling glass doors, roof overhangs to increase shade and expansive living areas that encouraged air circulation before many homes had air conditioning. It was a mindset that nurtured innovations in engineering, displayed in Leedy’s approach to his projects.

He’s best known for his use of precast concrete and double-T shaped beams, at the time engineering marvels that allowed for strong, lofty, large spaces like the 9,000-square-foot president’s residence at the University of South Florida in Tampa he designed in 1990. Leedy applied the same new wave of thinking when it came to his residential works.

“He designed modular and scalable homes that could easily be added to, so a couple could have a starter home that could grow. Some of his houses are still on Drexel Avenue in Winter Haven,” says Architecture Sarasota executive director Anne-Marie Russell. “Many still don’t have air conditioning  because they worked so well with his passive system for shading and cooling.”

In Sarasota, Leedy designed Brentwood Elementary School in 1958, the House for Contemporary Builders in 1950 and two residential projects. One of them, the Solomon Residence & Studio, on Big Pass on Siesta Key, was built in 1970 and will be highlighted at the exhibition.

Syd Solomon was an abstract painter, and the home served as the site of Sarasota’s “beach culturati,” a subtropical salon where artists, writers, intellectuals, scientists and playwrights gathered. “That house became the location of Sarasota’s brain trust and shows how great architecture can create a platform for creativity,” says Russell. “It did what great architecture always does—inspires new ways of thinking, being and living.” Continue Reading

Martha Campbell with clients at Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary Art Fair. 

James Brooks and his wife, Charlotte Park, once walked to work each day — from the back of their shingled cottage, the screen door of the porch closing behind them, along a 100-yard-long path edged in moss that connected their tiny home in the woods of Springs with a pair of studios where they both painted.

The floor of the 11 acres of scrub oak forest that surrounded them was flecked with bits of grass, dry leaves and more moss, a thick canopy of green overhead in the summer. By winter, the naked limbs of the trees cast abstract shadows on the ground that looked as if they could have leapt off the canvas of one of their paintings.

In the spring and fall, as the seasons changed, Park would have taken note of the evolution of plants and flowers in the landscape, and commented on the birds passing through, nesting or migrating. She made careful and thorough observations of the natural world around her, noted in dozens of journals she kept over the decades she lived in Springs — from walks in the woods, outside her studio, or watching out the windows from the house that had once been a fisherman’s shack, all of it subtly informing her soft and warm canvases.

Meanwhile, on the floor of his self-designed studio — with its jagged roof line and flood of natural light — Brooks worked on his monumental paintings, conjuring lines and forms and pools of color.

Together, he and Park created some of the art that helped define the nascent abstract expressionist movement in America and established Springs as an outpost of creative thought in the wilds of the East End.

But today, those buildings — the house, two studios and another outbuilding used as guest quarters — are boarded up, some with tarps on their roofs to keep out the rain and snow. Parts are in danger of collapsing in on themselves. When the Town of East Hampton acquired the 11 acres as open space back in 2013, the intention was to simply knock down the buildings that stood there. Continue Reading

Noted New York Gallerist Christine Berry Talks About Art

Palm Beach Modern
Chelsea’s Berry Campbell Gallery is attending the Palm Beach Modern and Contemporary art fair from today through Monday with a roster heavy with artists who have worked on the East End.

The gallery’s booth has work by the modern artists Mary Abbott, Alice Baber, Dan Christensen, John Ferren, Perle Fine, Grace Hartigan, Syd Solomon, Theodoros Stamos, and Esteban Vicente, and the contemporary practitioners Eric Dever, Susan Vecsey, and Frank Wimberley.

Preview Booth
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Charlotte Park in Chelsea
"Charlotte Park: Works on Paper From the 1950s" opens Thursday at Berry Campbell Gallery in Chelsea and will continue through April 23. 

For Park, working on paper gave her considerable freedom. Her monochrome palette of the early '50s enabled her to focus on form. She reintroduced color into her art in the middle of the decade, evolving a lyrical style in which suggestions of the natural world appear. 

Park united painting and drawing throughout the decade, creating a vocabulary featuring clustered loops, black curvilinear forms, and anatomical suggestions, but figurative elements were either suppressed or diffused.

In the late '50s, Park and her husband, the painter James Brooks, relocated from Montauk to an 11-acre parcel in Springs that the Town of East Hampton acquired in 2013. A committee of community members is working to have the structures renovated and the site preserved as an art and nature center.

Preview Exhibition
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Eric Dever: Artist in Residence 
Parrish Art Musesum, Water Mill, New York
March 13 - April 24, 2022
View Works by Eric Dever

Center for the Arts Gallery
Towson University
7700 Osler Drive, Towson, Maryland
6:30 - 7:15 pm

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Hauser & Wirth Institute Digitizing the Mary Dill Henry Archive 
View Works by Mary Dill Henry 

Join artist Eric Dever at this Creative Studio for Adults and Teens to create landscapes using mixed media and collage. Artists highlighted will be Peter Campus, Jane Wilson, Jane Freilicher, Fairfield Porter and Robert Dash.

March 5, 2022
1 pm - 3 pm
Register

Frederick J. Brown Featured Artist for Black History Month 
University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada
View Works by Frederick Brown 

Change continues to transform the world of contemporary art, with more and more women – including women of color – launching galleries of their own. Our correspondent Julie Chang Murphy has curated a list of 13 influential contemporary art galleries owned or led by powerful women that you can visit right now in New York, Chicago, Paris and more, including three new galleries in NYC recently opened and either owned or led by Black women.

13 influential contemporary art galleries owned or led by powerful women
The art world — despite a reputation for being inherently counter-culture and progressive — suffers from much of the same gender inequality as other traditionally male-dominated industries. Women remain dramatically underrepresented and undervalued in museums, galleries, and auction houses.

9. Berry Campbell
The co-founders of Chelsea’s Berry Campbell Gallery, Christine Berry and Martha Campbell, are kindred spirits. According to their website, “both studied art history in college, began their careers in the museum world, and later worked together at a major gallery in midtown Manhattan.” They opened their gallery in 2013, later doubling the size of their space.

Their curatorial vision is to shine a light on postwar American modernist artists who were left behind due to race, gender, or geography. And there are many unsung and little-known artists who created brilliant abstractions. Including Syd Solomon, Frederick J. Brown, Lilian Thomas Burwell and Frank Wimberley, all of whom are represented by Berry Campbell.

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Now Representing Elizabeth Osborne (b. 1936)
Solo Exhibition Forthcoming September 2022

View Works by Elizabeth Osborne
View Bio and CV

ABOUT THE ARTIST
A ghostly figure looking out from a doorway; actual windshield wipers positioned over a painted car window; vividly clothed, sensuous figures posed in sparse rooms; land and sky betraying no brushstrokes, horizons to infinity; supernaturally precise still lifes that stop time; charged explorations of the painter’s studio, the past asserting itself in mirrors; vivid bands of light and color echoing the sounds of the cosmos. Few artists of Elizabeth Osborne’s generation have explored as wide a range of subject matter. Driven by curiosity and an unwillingness to repeat herself, Osborne has frequently shifted working methods to support new directions. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Osborne has been at the center of its art world, a critical figure integral to the city’s cultural identity as an educator and as an innovator in her studio. Her art bears the impact of her time in Philadelphia but transcends place, running with multiple streams of modernism and post-war painting.

Osborne had a progressive Quaker education at Friends Central School near the original site of the Barnes Foundation. Two mentors in her childhood, Louis W. Flaccus and Hobson Pittman, supported her early drive and talent in art. Flaccus, a family friend, was a professor of Philosophy and amateur painter; Pittman was a professional artist who taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) and at Friends Central. Both men encouraged Osborne to defy societal expectations of young women and to trust her passion and instincts for a career in art. Osborne took advantage of everything that Philadelphia offered a young artist. She visited galleries, museums, and took additional classes outside of her school week at the Philadelphia Museum College (now University of the Arts) with painter Neil Welliver. Surviving work from this period shows that Osborne was quick to understand observational drawing, grasping the nuances of form and the emotional capacity of line and color.

These relationships grounded Osborne as she endured a series of traumatic losses during childhood and into her teens. Her father Charles died from leukemia in 1945. Three years later her mother, Virginia, killed herself by overdosing on pills. Osborne and her siblings, including an older brother and a twin sister, were left to be raised by Virginia’s brother and wife. In 1954 while painting a portrait of her grandfather, he revealed that her biological father was the architect, Paul Philippe Cret (1876-1945), who had died the same year as Charles Osborne, further illuminating the impact of loss on her mother. In 1955 her twin sister Anne killed herself while Osborne was traveling in France on a fellowship. These tragedies have resurfaced in her work throughout her career in unexpected ways – as figures who seem to be mirages, objects intimately observed but separated from one another as though unknowable. Osborne has reflected on the impact of grief on her work and how it affected her figure paintings:

"My work really was affected for a while by the loss of loved ones, of the presence of death…In the figurative paintings there’s probably this connection with longing and missing my sister in the solitary figures and the darkness with figures emerging and receding…Losing people is imprinted…there is a natural impulse to have these people back. They disappear from your sight, your life but they reappear when you try to go to sleep at night."[1]

By 1954 Osborne had entered PAFA while simultaneously working towards a BFA at the University of Pennsylvania. At the time, PAFA was a mixture of progressive instructors and conservative academics resistant to many modernist developments of the previous half century. Founded in 1805 and the first museum and art school in the United States, it was an immersive experience for art students, offering a rich permanent collection and annual exhibitions of contemporary American art. Among her instructors were experimental figure painter Ben Kamihira, abstract artist Jimmy Leuders, realists Francis Speight and Walter Stuempfig, and traditional modernist Franklin Watkins. Osborne’s training encompassed working from life models, drawing from casts and still life set ups, and other rigorous beaux-arts-based pedagogy. She maintains that her most fruitful relationships and education came through the camaraderie between friends and fellow students including Raymond Saunders. Continue Reading

THE LANGUAGE OF ABSTRACTION
With guest artist Mike Solomon
Thursday, February 10, 4:00-5:00 PM ES

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NATURE INTO ART
With guest artist Eric Dever
Thursday, February 17, 4:00-5:00 PM EST

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Forms Follow Function: The Art of Nanette Carter
The Hunterdon Art Musuem, Clinton, New Jersey
January 23 - April 24, 2022

Line, Color, Shapes, and Other Stories
Abstract Art Selections from the Permanent Collection
January 15 - April 3, 2022

View Exhibition

This exhibition features a selection of works from the museum's collection of modern and contemporary art that explores abstraction as a central theme. Although non-figural, these works contain a multiplicity of stories about art making, each one revealing the artist’s vision, process, experience, and the historical context in which they worked. When considered together, the selection speaks to the heterogeneous approaches to abstraction and their art historical significance. Works by Monir Farmanfarmaian, Carmen Herrera, Doris Leeper, Jakow Telischewski, and Larry Zox, among others, emphasize the universal appeal of the structural elements of representation: line, color, and shape.

The exhibition establishes a dialogue with From Chaos to Order: Greek Geometric Art from the Sol Rabin Collection on view in the adjacent gallery, which examines the idea of geometry and balance as signifiers of beauty and harmony in ancient Greece. Line, Color, Shapes, and Other Stories includes works in various media—paintings, prints, and sculptures; the installation highlights the output of creators who prioritized the non-representational in favor of a pure and direct experience with material and form. This exhibition is organized by the Rollins Museum of Art.

Sometimes it’s easy to overlook the beauty in simplicity. The way the sun slices bright lines through the treetops on a sunny day or looking out the window of an airplane to peer down at the homes standing like soldiers in neat rows and grids. The lines, colors and shapes that turn the world around us into a masterpiece are rarely given more than a glance, but in a new exhibit at the Rollins Museum of Art in Winter Park, these simple phenomena take center stage.

In Line, Color, Shapes, and Other Stories, visitors get the chance to explore the museum’s collection of abstract art spanning from the early 20th century to 2013. The 17 works pulled from the Rollins Museum’s permanent collection all use geometric abstraction to explore the artmaking process. Visitors won’t find any Edgar Degas paintings of ballerinas at the barre or sculptures of Greek gods posing in triumph at this exhibit. In fact, they won’t find any figures at all. Instead, they’ll enter a world dictated by the satisfaction of a straight line, the mingling of shapes and the dueling of colors on canvas, sculptures and prints.

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Syd Solomon: Concealed and Revealed
Berry Campbell, New York

newly discovered materials from the artist’s archive detail how his World War II camouflage designs and other early graphic art skills were key to his unique approach to Abstract Expressionism

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NYC-ARTS Top 5 Picks

NYC-Arts Top Five Picks: January 7 – January 13



Syd Solomon: Concealed and Revealed
Thu, Jan 06, 2022 - Sat, Feb 05, 2022

Encountering the Parrish
“Encounters: Recent Acquisitions to the Permanent Collection,” an exhibition of work by nine contemporary artists with deep connections to the East End, is on view at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill through Feb. 27.

New works by Barthelemy Toguo and Tomashi Jackson were created for their solo shows at the Parrish. Mr. Toguo’s “Homo Planta A” reflects his interest in nature and sustainability, while Ms. Jackson’s “The Three Sisters” was inspired by interviews with members of local indigenous, Black, and Latinx communities.

Darlene Charneco, Esly E. Escobar, Laurie Lambrecht, and Candace Hill Montgomery developed their works for Parrish Road Show exhibitions. Ms. Charneco’s work considered the symbiotic co-evolution of insects and plants, while Mr. Escobar dripped paint on a canvas until a character was revealed.

Ms. Lambrecht’s piece is one of a series of print and fiber works inspired by the Madoo Conservancy in Sagaponack. Ms. Montgomery’s weaving, first shown at the Sag Harbor Whaling Museum, examines the #MeToo movement.

Rachel Feinstein’s interest in the Rococo inspired her plaster sculpture “See You Soon,” while Sara VanDerBeek’s abstract photographs were motivated in part by members of the Bauhaus weaving workshop, quilts, and Pre-Colombian textiles and ceramics.

Frank Wimberley’s “Wrinkles” (1994) is one of his tactile, multilayered abstract paintings, which he has described as “absolutely personal and universal.”

Join art historian Bentley Brown for a walk through African American Art in the 20th Century to discuss the importance of how African American artists have framed the narratives in which they see themselves through medium, context, and storytelling throughout the twentieth century. In the course of this conversational tour, Brown will make a special stop at the signature work, John Henry, an imposing 1979 oil painting by his father, Frederick Brown.

Bentley Brown is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and doctoral student at The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. His research at the Institute explores the pioneering role of Black artists and Black creative spaces within New York City’s contemporary art movements of the late 1960s through the mid 1980s. In his artistic practice, Brown uses the mediums of canvas, found objects, photo-collage, and film to explore themes of Black identity, cosmology, and American interculturalism.

Saturday, December 11, 2021
1pm
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Hudson River Museum, New York | African American Art in the 20th Century

Frederick J. Brown: The Sound of Color

This year, when giving holiday gifts, skip the gift cards, the Amazon Prime products and deals and think way outside that digital, impersonal box, give and share a LIVE experience instead.  Let others jam malls and run around frenzied looking for the “perfect” anything, just dial up a museum, or book timed tickets online, knowing capacity is limited and museums are not jammed just before the holidays.

Accompanying a niece, nephew, cousin, or friend to an exhibit will stay with the giftee. Selfies taken in front of that Mondrian or Chagall, Matisse or Richard Mayhew and Felrath Hines or Sol LeWitt are certain to outlast flashy yoga wear, a tushy spa warmer, or a reinvented shower cap.

A trio of manageable museums are currently exhibiting some of the most talked about work in town: the Hudson River Museum, the Jewish Museum, and the Morgan Library and Museum are three off-the beaten track venues for pint-sized immersions in carefully cultivated and curated shows.

The Hudson River Museum is the fifth and final venue to host this impressive and wide-ranging collection African American Art in the 20th Century, which brings one of the most significant national collections of African American art to Yonkers. Featuring some of the country’s most famous Black artists–it was drawn from the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum–the exhibit features paintings and sculptures by 34 artists who came to prominence during the period bracketed by the Harlem Renaissance starting in the 1920s, the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and beyond.

In addition to Romare Bearden, artists include Frederick Brown, Beauford Delaney, Jacob Lawrence, Loïs Mailou Jones and Renée Stout, whose work ranges in style from portraiture to modern abstraction, to the postmodern assemblage of found objects.

Move from the galleries to the Planetarium or consider the Glenview Holiday Tour, the Gilded Age mansion that abuts the museum featuring Yonkers’ favorite dollhouse, Nybelwyck Hall. For a virtual experience, consider the Studio Tour and Demonstration with Jamel Robinson on Jan. 12 at the artist in his own studio.

https://www.hrm.org/
Open Thursday through Sunday, 12-5 pm

Frederick J. Brown | ArtsNews: Understanding and Appreciating African American Art in the 20th Century
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The Hudson River Museum is presenting an important survey exhibition, “African American Art in the 20th Century,” that was organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and includes 43 objects from their permanent collection. 

The show, on display through Jan. 16, 2022, presents paintings and sculpture by 34 African American artists who became famous in the decades between the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights movement. The works reflect the artists’ responses to the evolving international aesthetic movements of the 20th century, as seen through the lens of race in America. As one of these artists, Jacob Lawrence, said in 1951, “My pictures express my life and experience… the things I have experienced extend to my national, racial and class group. I paint the American scene.”

HRM director and CEO Masha Turchinsky called the Smithsonian’s collection “one of the most significant national collections of African American art. This is a pivotal opportunity for the public to experience powerful works by these American luminaries at the exhibition’s only New York venue.”

The African American experience as shown by these artists embraced both rural and urban life. 

In 1940, William H. Johnson, a native of South Carolina, painted “Sowing” in oil on burlap. He used brilliant colors and the naive style characteristic of many of his paintings of country life in the South in the early 20th century.

But the rural South could also be inhospitable for Black people. At first glance, Norman Lewis’ 1962 “Evening Rendezvous” seems largely abstract. Blink, and a sinister scene appears: a crowd of white-hooded Klansmen milling around a red-hot fire. According to the Smithsonian’s label for this painting, the abstract-art-obsessed critics of the time debated whether Lewis meant to make a political statement with this painting.

Frederick Brown chose John Henry, a freed slave who was a hero of American folklore and protest music, as the subject for his 1979 oil painting. Brown himself grew up near the steel mills of South Chicago, and his portrayal of Henry is a comment on the contemporary concerns of American laborers.

Cities figured prominently in the Black exodus from the South, but life wasn’t always easier there. The artistic trope of the “portrait of an artist in his studio” is turned on its head in Palmer Hayden’s 1930 oil, “The Janitor Who Paints.” A Black janitor, whose basement apartment is strewn with the tools of his maintenance trade, takes a break from that job to don a jaunty beret, as he goes to his easel to work on a portrait of a mother and child. In real life, Hayden had to support himself as a janitor in order to paint, as did a friend and fellow artist, Cloyd Boykin. 

The inner city is also the setting for Beauford Delaney’s 1946 oil painting, “Can Fire in the Park.” Wielding the paintbrush in post-Impressionist style to create a patchwork of vivid colors, he depicts a typical city corner with street lamps, signs, and a manhole cover. Six men, possibly homeless, huddle around a trash can to warm their hands.

Cities continue to fascinate and repel Black artists. But the mood of Charles Searles’ 1975 panoramic acrylic, “Celebration,” is exuberant. It could be a street festival in the artist’s hometown of Philadelphia, but was clearly influenced by the artist’s earlier trip to Nigeria. The canvas is alive with vibrant patterns and textures evoking the textiles of Africa.

A different kind of muralist was Purvis Young, whose 1988 untitled acrylic painting depicts horses surrounded by a frame of abstract rectangular designs. Young, a native of Miami, was a self-taught urban artist who began painting on scrap lumber scavenged from the inner-city neighborhood where he lived, often attaching his paintings to the boarded-up fronts of abandoned buildings.

Thornton Dial’s 1992 mixed-media painting, “Top of the Line,” combines enamel, unbraided canvas roping, and metal on plywood.  This emotional, frenzied work was Dial’s response to the Los Angeles riots of 1992, when looters ran amok after a jury found four white policemen not guilty of beating an unarmed Black motorist, Rodney King.

The exhibition also includes sculpture. Sargent Johnson’s 1930s copper sculpture on a wood base, “Mask,” was one of many masks he created. Some were faithful to old African designs, and others depicted people with contemporary American hairstyles, but all were clearly designed to capture the natural beauty and dignity of his race. One also has to wonder whether his interpretations of African masks was an ironic comment on European artists, such as Picasso, who appropriated native African masks and related imagery for profit.

The exhibition’s catalog, “African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond,” celebrates modern and contemporary artworks in the Smithsonian American Art Museum collection by African American artists. It will be available in the Museum Shop. Extensive biographical information on all the artists in this exhibition can also be accessed by searching for an artist’s name on the website of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The Hudson River Museum is located at 511 Warburton Avenue in Yonkers. Museum hours are Thursday–Sunday, 12–5pm. All visitors 12+ must show proof of full vaccination or a negative PCR test taken within 72 hours of visit; those 18+ must also show proof of identity. Visitors under 12 may enter only if accompanied by an adult who can show proof of full vaccination or a negative PCR test taken within 72 hours of visit.

Though I've reviewed the paintings of Stanley Boxer (1926 – 2000) many times, mostly it has been his work from the '80s and '90s that I discussed, the pictures covered with glittering, glistering accretions of matière. Only occasionally have I glanced at let alone reviewed his work from the early 1970s, but these are the paintings now featured in "Stanley Boxer: The Ribbon Paintings (1971- 1976)" at Berry Campbell in Chelsea (through December 23).  And they form a wonderful chapter in pure painting.

Born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Boxer served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and then studied art at the Art Students League on the G. I. Bill of Rights.  He exhibited at various Manhattan galleries from 1953 onward.  Still, it doesn't seem to have been until he arrived at Tibor de Nagy in 1971 that some observers began calling him a color-field painter (a designation he always denied, scorning affiliation with any group at all).

According to the brochure essay to the present show by Lisa N. Peters, immediately before 1971, Boxer had been making collages with strips of canvas.   A half-way stage may be seen in two of the earlier pictures in this show, most notably "Willowsnowpond" (1972).  This good-sized horizontal oil on linen depicts a few totally opaque matte bands of  beige wiggling across the perimeters of an equally opaque matte field of dark brown.

Still, other paintings done earlier already boast of more transparent --- and painterly -- layers of paint. "Warmfield" (1971), another and larger square oil on linen, has just such a luminous field of medium green, near whose perimeters stroll vertical arched bands of mustard, olive – and a horizontal one of mauve.

There is something very friendly about these paintings: they do not insist; they invite. And particularly this may be seen by the latest and often largest paintings ranged at the front of the gallery and hung near its entrance, with their loose and ever-more-transparent fields of paint.

To be honest, the subtlety of the brushwork in this series of paintings makes them particularly difficult to appreciate in reproduction.  However, the range of tonalities can at least be listed by this correspondent in three cases.

First is the "overmantel" hung above the reception desk. It is titled (in Boxer's characteristic seriocomic portmanteau style) "Seagustglories" (1974), and is a horizontal oil on linen with three horizontal bands, respectively of ocher, lime and mint.

Second is the very tall and narrow "Sunbraid" (1973), also an oil on linen (though there are a few oils on canvas in this show). Hung in the first main gallery space, with its back to the reception desk, "Sunbraid" has a field of mixed orange and lime, upon which is superimposed a soaring, narrow vertical black wiggly line that makes me think of a bird in flight.

Finally and most impressively is "Rainnights" (1973), a large, nearly square vertical oil on linen whose field is a wonderfully mottled raspberry ice. Arched over this field on the top and right-hand side of the canvas wanders a long orange line, while anchoring down the lower left corner are a few short horizontal lines like twigs in cool blues and greens. 

If this isn't a very fresh and different kind of color-field painting, it's a kissing cousin to it – so affectionate it is.

Anonymous Was a Woman (AWAW), a New York–based organization that for two decades has sought to support women-identifying artists over forty, has announced the winners of its 2021 grants. Owing to a dramatic increase in funding provided by two anonymous donors, AWAW is able to provide a dozen more of the unrestricted $25,000 grants than originally expected; the $300,000 windfall will be divided among four artists annually for the next three years, meaning that the group is able to award grants to fourteen winners annually through 2023, rather than the typical ten. Artnews reports that one of the s donations was made through the newly established Meraki Artist Award, founded by an anonymous Boston-based philanthropist.

“I am delighted to congratulate this year’s award recipients—a group of extraordinary artists who represent a multitude of viewpoints, backgrounds, and formal practices,” said founder Susan Unterberg said. “When I started Anonymous Was A Woman, I did so to address a need that I felt personally as a woman artist in the middle of her career. I never dreamed that it could inspire other individuals to join us in advancing our mission.”

Artists were chosen from applicants anonymously recommended by a group of art historians curators, writers, and artists. Among the recipients this year are interdisciplinary artist and activist Coco Fusco, sculptor Anna Sew Hoy, Lakota painter Dyani White Hawk, and light artist Marian Zazeela, a cofounder with LaMonte Young of New York’s Dream House.

Anonymous Was a Woman was established in 1996 by Unterberg, an artist, who initially served as its sole funder; it  gained widespread attention in 2018 when she revealed herself as its founder. The organization’s grants are unique in that they are awarded to midcareer artists, many of whom are underrecognized. Though the sum awarded is modest, an AWAW grant can provide a career boost at a critical juncture. Many recipients of the award have gone on to gain greater recognition.

The full list of 2021 recipients is below.
Nanette Carter
Oletha DeVane
Adama Delphine Fawundu
Anita Fields
Coco Fusco
Renée Green
Judithe Hernández
Suzanne Jackson
Autumn Knight
Adia Millett
Anna Sew Hoy
Julie Tolentino
Dyani White Hawk
Marian Zazeela

The award will give out an additional $300,000 over the next three years thanks to an anonymous donation.

The Anonymous Was a Woman awards are back and better than ever, thanks to new donations—made anonymously, naturally—that will expand the number of annual honorees from 10 to 14 for the next three years. That increases the total amount of grant money to $350,000 each year, with each recipient receiving $25,000 in unrestricted funds.

Since 1996, the organization has presented grants to women-identifying artists over the age of 40, a segment that is frequently overlooked by both the market and museums. Founder Susan Unterberg, an artist herself, only revealed her identity in 2018. The additional funding comes from two donors, one of which is a Boston-based philanthropist who made the gift through a new initiative called the Meraki Artist Award, according to ARTnews.

The 2021 winners, who are between the ages of 41 and 81, are: Nanette Carter, Oletha DeVane, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Anita Fields, Coco Fusco, Renée Green, Judithe Hernández, Suzanne Jackson, Autumn Knight, Adia Millett, Anna Sew Hoy, Julie Tolentino, Dyani White Hawk, and Marian Zazeela.

“I am delighted to congratulate this year’s award recipients—a group of extraordinary artists who represent a multitude of viewpoints, backgrounds, and formal practices,” Unterberg said in a statement. “When I started Anonymous Was A Woman, I did so to address a need that I felt personally as a woman artist in the middle of her career. I never dreamed that it could inspire other individuals to join us in advancing our mission.” Continue Reading

The New York–based organization Anonymous Was a Woman has revealed the winners of its 2021 awards, each of which carries a $25,000 purse. For two decades, the awards have been given annually to women-identifying artists over the age of 40.

Now, for the first time, Anonymous Was a Woman is dramatically growing its program. Thanks to two anonymous donors, the organization will give out an additional $300,000 in funding to 12 artists. Through the donors’ gifts—one of which was made through the Meraki Artist Award, a new initiative from an anonymous Boston-based philanthropist—the awards program will be able to recognize four more artists annually for the next three years, bringing the total amount of people recognized to 14 instead of the typical 10.

The 2021 awardees range in age from 41 to 81, and include Nanette Carter, a New York–based educator and mixed media artist known for her abstract paintings on sheaths of frosted Mylar; Anita Fields, a ceramic and textile artist of Osage heritage; and Suzanne Jackson, a visual artist and poet, and director of the now-defunct Gallery 32, one of the first commercial spaces to promote emerging African American artists in Los Angeles in the late 1960s. Also awarded is performance artist, dancer, and activist Julie Tolentino, who last year received Queer|Art’s annual $10,000 award for Sustained Achievement.

“It is an unexpected honor to finally receive recognition for my work as a painter and sculptor,” Jackson told ARTnews. “I have known about the Anonymous Was A Woman award for years, though I never thought that I would be a recipient. I plan to use the award funds to continue my work exploring new aspects of integrating drawing, painting, and sculptured forms as related to various American relationships to our natural and urban environments.” Continue Reading