ARTRA VIDEO | 即将再次一画难求-你还在等什么？| A Private Visit to Berry Campbell Gallery: Lynne Drexler: The Later Works

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Register

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.

Continue Reading

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.

Listen

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.
Register

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 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.

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

Artforum
View Exhibition

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.
More Information

ARTRA VIDEO | 艾瑞克·戴弗：繁花一瞬 | A Private Visit to Berry Campbell Gallery: Eric Dever "To Look at Things in Bloom"

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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. 

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.

"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

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

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.

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.

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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

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

Preview Exhibiton

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.

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

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

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
Modernist Collection Instagram

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.

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

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

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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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.

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

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

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

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

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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Noted New York Gallerist Christine Berry Talks About Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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 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

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 work and struggle by Jamel Robinson and other artists is part of the “African American Art in the 20th Century” exhibition at the Hudson River Museum.

“Fighting for Change: Fist Full of Tears,” the title of one of the five works Jamel Robinson is showing at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, N.Y., encapsulates the artist’s love of wordplay as well as philosophy about what it means to be a Black man making art in America.

The piece is a pair of boxing gloves covered in black paint and pennies mounted on a large black, green and white canvas.

“As Black people we’re fighting for change, and as a Black artist, we’re always trying to move forward — it always feels like we’re fighting for change and sometimes literally for change,” said Mr. Robinson, 42, who was born and raised in Harlem.

He is the teaching artist-in-residence at the museum in conjunction with the “African American Art in the 20th Century” exhibition, which includes 43 works by some of the country’s most famous Black artists. Mr. Robinson’s first museum show and the 20th Century exhibition will run concurrently from Oct. 15 through Jan. 16. Continue Reading

Sheldon Museum of Art will a conversation with artist Jill Nathanson and curator and critic Karen Wilkin on Oct. 26 at 5:30 p.m. via on Zoom. Nathanson’s painting “Cantabile” is a new acquisition on view at Sheldon in the exhibition, “Point of Departure: Abstraction 1958–Present.”

Registration is required for the free event.

Nathanson completed her undergraduate studies at Bennington College in Vermont, where she worked in the artistic orbit once occupied by Helen Frankenthaler. Although both artists are known for reducing painting to its physical essence, Nathanson’s immersive and sensual paintings stand in a category of their own. Consisting of unusual hues of overlapping layers of variable translucency, they create emotionally nuanced experiences with yet enough tension to engage the viewer’s contemplation. Her most recent solo show was “Jill Nathanson: Light Phrase” at Berry Campbell Gallery, New York, in January 2021.

Wilkin is a New York-based curator and critic. Educated at Barnard College and Columbia University, she is the author of monographs on Stuart Davis, David Smith, Anthony Caro, Isaac Witkin, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Giorgio Morandi, Georges Braque, Wayne Thiebaud and Hans Hofmann, and has organized international exhibitions of their work. She was a juror for the American Pavilion of the 2009 Venice Biennale and a contributing editor of the Stuart Davis and Hans Hofmann paintings catalogues raisonné. The contributing editor for art for the Hudson Review and a regular contributor to The New Criterion, Hopkins Review, and the Wall Street Journal, Wilkin teaches in the New York Studio School’s MFA program.

This online event is part of the museum’s CollectionTalk series, which features live discussions about artwork and exhibitions with artists, curators, and historians. On Nov. 11, the series continues with artist Odili Donald Odita in conversation with Tyler Green, host of the Modern Art Notes Podcast. For more information on Sheldon Museum of Art and its programming, visit its website.

This past summer, the Art Students League of New York held the first historic exhibition dedicated to Cinque Gallery, an artist-led nonprofit that operated between 1969 and 2004. The brainchild of Romare Bearden, Ernest Crichlow, and Norman Lewis, Cinque was founded to exhibit and promote the work of marginalized, primarily Black artists, while also serving as a training ground for young arts administrators of color. Cinque was to some extent an outgrowth of the Spiral group, which met regularly from 1963 to 1965 to debate the role of Black artists in the struggle for civil rights. The gallery was named in honor of Sengbe Pieh—also known as Joseph Cinqué, the Mende man who led the rebellion aboard the Spanish slave ship La Amistad in 1839—and emerged in lockstep with the Black Power movement amid a push for cultural and economic autonomy in the arts. Continue Reading

Drawn from the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, these works range in style from modern abstraction to stained color to the postmodern assemblage of found objects, and their subjects are diverse. Benny Andrews, Ellis Wilson, and William H. Johnson speak to the dignity and resilience of people who work the land. Jacob Lawrence and Thornton Dial, Sr. acknowledge the struggle for economic and civil rights. Sargent Johnson, Loïs Mailou Jones, and Melvin Edwards address the heritage of Africa, and images by Romare Bearden celebrate jazz musicians. Sam Gilliam and Felrath Hines conduct innovative experiments with color and form. This will be the only New York venue for the exhibition.

The featured artworks were created at significant social and political moments in America. Words of Howard University philosophy professor Alain Locke, novelist James Baldwin, Civil Rights leader Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and their contemporaries provided insight and inspiration. In response, these artists created an image of America that recognizes individuals and community and acknowledges the role of art in celebrating the complex and diverse nature of American society. As featured artist Jacob Lawrence stated 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.”

The related 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. The book, co-published with Skira Rizzoli in New York, is written by Richard J. Powell, the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University; and Virginia Mecklenburg, chief curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum; with contributions from Maricia Battle, curator in the prints and drawings division at the Library of Congress.

African American Art in the 20th Century is organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The C.F. Foundation in Atlanta supports the museum’s traveling exhibition program, Treasures to Go. The William R. Kenan Jr. Endowment Fund provided financial suppor

Labyrinth of Forms: Women and Abstraction, 1930–1950
Oct 9, 2021–Mar 2022
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During the 1930s and 1940s, abstraction began to gain momentum as an exciting, fresh approach to modern artmaking in the United States, and a small contingent of American artists dedicated themselves to it. Labyrinth of Forms, a title inspired by an Alice Trumbull Mason work in the exhibition, alludes to the sense of discovery that drove these artists to establish a visual language reflecting the advances of the twentieth century.

A significant number of American abstractionists were women, and their efforts propelled the formal, technical, and conceptual evolution of abstract art in this country. A few, such as Lee Krasner and Louise Nevelson, have been duly recognized, but most remain overlooked despite their contributions. With over thirty works by twenty-seven artists drawn almost entirely from the Whitney’s collection, Labyrinth of Forms highlights both the achievements of these artists and the ways in which works on paper served as sites for important exploration and innovation.

While abstraction would prevail in the United States after World War II, in the preceding decades American abstractionists were vastly outnumbered by realist practitioners. Maligned by critics, and largely ignored by museums and galleries, these artists nevertheless saw themselves as aesthetic revolutionaries. In contrast to their European counterparts, who were often involved with movements defined by manifestos, they felt free to experiment, harnessing a broad range of styles to express the mood of the modern United States.

Buoyed by modernist art courses and new venues for viewing European avant-garde art, they forged a network of overlapping communities, organizations, and creative spaces—including the American Abstract Artists and the Atelier 17 print studio—that allowed them to support one another, exchange ideas, and exhibit their work. Women were key figures in such groups, often taking on leadership roles. They also wrote and lectured on abstraction and advanced methods of making, particularly in print media. Though many of these artists still deserve wider acclaim, their influence and ideas resonate even today.

This exhibition is organized by Sarah Humphreville, Senior Curatorial Assistant.

Exuberance: Dialogues in African-American Abstract Painting
Curated by Susan Zurbrigg and Beth Hinderlitter
Duke Hall Gallery of Fine Art, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia
October 26 - December 10, 2021

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The upcoming exhibition at Duke Hall Gallery of Fine Art, Exuberance: Dialogues in African American Abstract Painting, celebrates African American painters and challenges received narratives about abstract art and who makes it. Abstract paintings by African American artists have often been overlooked and omitted from the history of art presented by white scholars and white dominated art institutions, yet their works have contributed powerfully to the field of painting. This focused presentation of paintings will feature works from the 1950s to present day, forging cross-generational dialogues about racial identity, dynamics of color and pattern, as well as rhythm, movement, and breath.

Featured artists include Charles Burwell, Nanette Carter, Lisa Corinne Davis, Lamerol Gatewood, Rico Gatson, Felrath Hines, Norman Lewis, Erika Ranee, Ronald Walton, Benjamin Wigfall and Susan Zurbrigg. Lenders to the exhibition include the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, the Ackland Museum of Art at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Berry Campbell Gallery, Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Jenkins Johnson Gallery New York and San Francisco, Miles McEnery Gallery and Walton Gallery.

Public programming will include a discussion on November 10, 5p of the history and politics of African American painting led by Dr. Jordana Saggese, Associate Professor at the University of Maryland and award-winning author of Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art. Contributing artist Lisa Corinne Davis will offer an online artist talk on Nov. 16 at 5pm. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue, with scholarly essays and selected bibliography.

Exuberance is co-curated by Susan Zurbrigg and Beth Hinderliter. Susan Zurbrigg is a nationally exhibited artist, educator and activist. She is Assistant Dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at JMU as well as a Professor of Art. Dr. Beth Hinderliter is Director of the Duke Hall Gallery of Fine Art and an Associate Professor of Art History.  Her book, More Than Our Pain: Affect and Emotion in the Era of Black Lives Matter, was published by SUNY Press in 2021.

Contact Beth Hinderliter, director of the Duke Hall Gallery of Fine Art, at (540) 568-6407 or by email at hindersb@jmu.edu for more information or to schedule a group visit.

CollectionTalk: Jill Nathanson and Karen Wilkin
October 26, 2021
5:30 pm CT

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Comparisons between color-field painters Jill Nathanson (born 1955 and Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) come naturall, although each is undeniably her own person—and her artwork is uniquely remarkable.

Save the date October 26th at 5:30 pm CT for a cocktail-hour zoom with Jill nathanson and author, curator, and historian Karen Wilkin. Join us for a discussion that will surely cover Sheldon's recent acquisition of Nathanson's painting, Cantabile, and the common ground she shared with Helen Frankenthaler.

To attend, RSVP to Laurel Ybarra at laurel.ybarra@unl.edu or 402.472.1454

Sunday, October 10, 2021
2 - 3 pm

Register

Inspired by the powerful works of artists John Sims, Mike Solomon, and Kirk Ke Wang on view in Skyway 20/21: A Contemporary Collaboration, the museum is proud to host this meaningful community discussion on the impact current and historical racial trauma.

Interior designer and art advisor Elena Frampton is the founder and principal of Frampton Co. With locations in New York City and Bridgehampton, the firm designs and creates interior experiences, specializing in interior architecture, design and art advisement. Elena’s design approach is instinctual from the get-go. She reads a client’s latent desires for their space, bringing to life environments that they themselves didn’t yet know they wanted. Elena’s work gives shape and feeling to visions for where and how we live

5. Berry Campbell
One of my go-to galleries in New York City is Berry Campbell – great art works, friendly atmosphere and an inspiring robust program! The gallery champions female painters like Yvonne Thomas, Perle Fine and Judith Godwin, giving women artists long overdue consideration on the market. They also represent a diverse range of works with something for everyone: from minimalist Walter Darby Bannard, to the more expressive William Perehudoff, to the very geometric Ken Greenleaf. I can also spend forever perusing their online inventory – a convenience especially now.

"Point of Departure,” the fall’s major exhibition at Sheldon Museum of Art, takes its name from a 1964 album by jazz pianist Andrew Hill, a recording that reaches back toward Bach, but nearly 60 years after it was recorded, continues to point to the future.

In similar fashion, the paintings that fill Sheldon’s north galleries reach back to a point just after abstraction’s mid-20th century peak and take non-objective painting forward for six decades, pointing toward what is yet to come.

Impressively, the visually striking, intellectually and historically rich exhibition is primarily drawn from Sheldon’s collection of 20th and 21st century art that is unmatched by any other university museum in the country.

“We have so much abstraction and we’re well known for abstraction, starting in 1910,” said Wally Mason, Sheldon’s director and chief curator. “We shifted from abstract painting to abstract sculpture during George's (Neubert) tenure. But we always acquired some. In my time, this is something we’re continuing to do.”

In using 1958 as its starting date, Mason, who curated the exhibition, ensured that “Point of Departure” would include little work from the “first generation” of abstract expressionists, excluding oft-seen Sheldon gems by Mark Rothko, Willem deKooning, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still and Robert Motherwell. Read More

The absence of most in-person art fairs in the past year and a half appears to be making the white-hot art market even hotter. That’s the takeaway from the opening day of the pop-up Intersect Aspen art fair, which takes place in a city overrun with billionaires. The fair, which features 30 galleries from 26 cities and was described by one fairgoer as “tiny but exquisite,” attracted a bevy of collectors, including Andrea and John Stark, Janna Bullock, and heiress Elizabeth Esteve.

Sales were fast and furious, organizers said. Galerie Gmurzynska, whose director Isabelle Bscher made a concerted effort not to presell works (as galleries often do at major fairs), sold a Joan Miró painting, Tête (1979), for $2 million in the first hour of the opening day. Two days later, Gmurzynska reported selling another work, a small Picasso titled Compotier avec raisin (Pigeons) (1927) for over $1.5 million.

“Where better to be than Aspen?” asked Christine Berry of New York’s Berry Campbell Gallery. “We have a renewed appreciation for being at an art fair in person.”

Seattle dealer Greg Kucera reported selling work by Chris Engman for $5,000 and by Humaira Abid for $8,000. The gallery is also showing two new works by Deborah Butterfield that were made specifically for Intersect Aspen, and are on view for the first time.

“The fair opened on Sunday morning at 10 with a bang,” New York dealer Nancy Hoffman said. “Starting with energy is key to the success of the event, and this is a success. This is our first in-person fair since the pandemic, and it has been great so far, positive on all levels. The right size, the right place, the right audience, the right fair director and organization.”

Hoffman said responses have been strong to the gallery’s booth theme of wild flowers, which is inspired by Aspen’s floral landscape. With prices for works ranging from $1,800 to $75,000, she said the gallery sold works priced from $5,000 to $30,000.

Half Gallery sold out a booth of works by Hiejin Yoo (prices ranged from $12,000 to $20,000), Young Lim Lee (priced around $8,000), and Umar Rashid (priced around $25,000). Director Erin Goldberger said she was using the opportunity to meet new clients, see old clients, and talk about the artists on view with visitors.

Goldberger said many of the collectors at the fair have not been back to New York since the start of COVID, so this is the first time many are seeing artworks from galleries they work with in person. Emmanuel Perrotin sold works by Daniel Arsham from two different series, including one featured prominently in the booth, Quartz Eroded Basketball Hoop (2021), which sold for a price in the range of $60,000 to $90,000.

Edward Cella Art and Architecture gallery sold a painting by Wosene Worke Kosrof, House Full of Words (2014), for $46,000, with strong interest from buyers in additional works. “I’m pleasantly surprised by the quality and intelligence of the collectors, who are geographically dispersed throughout the country,” said gallery owner Edward Cella.

Frank Wimberley
Tourquoise, 2012
Acrylic on canvas
62 x 48 inches

View works by Frank Wimberley

Last Wednesday, a mixed-media collage by the late Abstract Expressionist artist Grace Hartigan sold for $75,000 at a Christie’s online auction, achieving five times its high estimate and breaking the auction record for works on paper by the artist. Hartigan, who was lauded as “the most celebrated of the young American women painters” by Life magazine in 1958, has seen a steady surge in demand for her trailblazing work in recent years. This is partly due to a growing wave of market interest in female Abstract Expressionists from collectors looking to correct their omission from art history.

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Featured Work: Sundancer, 1988

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The annual contemporary art fair in the Aspen Ice Garden is back for an in-person experience Aug. 1-5. With a new owner and new producer, it’ll look different than it did pre-pandemic, when it was known as ArtAspen, but the new Intersect Aspen is still offering a curated selection of international galleries showing and selling postwar art and blue-chip artists.

The new Intersect Aspen is hosting 30 exhibitors from 26 cities, filling the ice rink with a sampling of works from some of the leading contemporary art galleries and also a glimpse of the insane heights of the pandemic’s commercial art market. Intersect Art and Design acquired ArtAspen in April 2020 and hosted a virtual version of the fair last summer.

The new version of the fair hits as the international art world descends on the resort for the Aspen Art Museum’s annual ArtCrush gala, which has its main events running Aug. 4-6, and as a bumper crop of leading multi-national galleries have opened seasonal pop-ups in Aspen.

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Hoffman spoke heartily about the exhibitions that will be on view, ­especially when discussing TOTAH’s interesting presentation of Alex Sewell’s paintings in conversation with Saul Steinberg’s drawings to explore the concept of text through art, Berry Campbell Gallery’s group exhibition featuring underrepresented women artists of the Postwar movement and a monumental Clyfford Still oil painting, “PH-568, 1965,” which will be featured in Sélavy by Di Donna’s art and design exhibition.

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Berry Campbell at Intersect Aspen:
Women of Abstract Expressionism
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These symbols [in Ida Kohlmeyer’s work] exist as a kind of pictographic code, inviting us to try to decipher their meaning, but always evading any clear reference or easy interpretation...Her work feels like a code that we are never quite meant to crack.”⁠
—Katie A. Pfohl, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art⁠

This month, Ida Kohlmeyer’s painted aluminum sculpture Rebus 3D-89-3 returns to the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden, newly refreshed from structural repairs and brandishing a brand new coat of paint. The expert restoration—undertaken by Kohlmeyer’s longtime fabricator G. Paul Lucas of Lucas Limited in Louisburg, Kansas—brings the work back to its intended brilliancy and allows us to appreciate the work of one of Louisiana’s most influential and enigmatic abstract artists anew.

Kohlmeyer, a native New Orleanian, is nationally recognized for her vibrant abstract paintings and sculptures, which are among the most vanguard works of modern art made in New Orleans during the twentieth century. She is best known for her signature “cluster” compositions: large painted canvases divided into loose grids filled with vibrantly colored abstract shapes and forms that are at once abstract, linguistic, and deeply personal.

These symbols—either gridded on canvas or presented as freestanding sculptures—exist as a kind of pictographic code, inviting us to try to decipher their meaning, but always evading any clear reference or easy interpretation. Often titling her sculptures Rebus, a term that refers to a type of puzzle or “picture riddle” in which words are represented by combinations of pictures and letters, her work feels like a code that we are never quite meant to crack.

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Mason Lane Art Advisory
Raymond by Raymond (Paintings 1957-1967)

Eric Dever
Trout Pond-Summer
Oil on canvas
36 x 48 inches
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New York, NY, June 9, 2020—Intersect Art and Design announces a pop-up edition of Intersect Aspen, an art and design fair taking place in person at the Aspen Ice Garden from August 1-5, 2021. The show will open with a VIP Preview Brunch on Sunday, August 1 from 10am to 11am, followed by a Public Opening Reception from 11am to 12pm, and will be open to the public daily from 11am to 5pm. The fair will also be presented online at Artsy.net from August 1-19, 2021.

Becca Hoffman, Managing Director of Intersect Art and Design says, “We are so pleased to be returning to Aspen this summer for what promises to be a dynamic and exciting time in the mountains. As our first in-person event since the pandemic, the curated selection of galleries highlights a thoughtful mix of established and younger galleries from around the country showcasing art, design, and photography.”

Tim von Gal, CEO of Intersect Art and Design adds, “As in-person events return, there is a palpable momentum and excitement to be in Aspen this summer, which is a sentiment that is shared by the local community, and so many galleries and collectors who are coming from out of town. This pop-up edition of Intersect Aspen will be a vibrant destination for people who can’t wait to get back to seeing art, and each other, in person.”

Paul Laster, Curatorial Advisor for Intersect Art and Design, comments, “An invitation-only, intimate art and design fair, Intersect Aspen has been selectively curated to stimulate an already 2 art-savvy audience in Aspen. Presenting a lively array of works newly made by artists in isolation and historical pieces from the postwar era, Intersect Aspen’s exhibitors are excited to engage the public, share their passions, and find new followers for the artists and designers they truly admire.” Regional cultural partners include Carbondale Arts, Red Brick Center for the Arts, and The Art Base, with others to be announced.

Exhibiting cultural partners include Aspen Film, presenting four acclaimed animated short films from its 2020 and 2021 Oscar®-qualifying Shortsfests; and STONELEAF RETREAT presenting a large-scale fiber work by Liz Collins, and a digital pigment print by Keisha Scarville who are both alumni residents of STONELEAF.

WHEN THE ARTIST Judith Godwin died on May 29 in her ninety-second year, the art world lost the last living member of a generation of women Abstract Expressionists, a group of artists largely overlooked in favor of their male peers. I lost a dear friend. 

My connection with Judith came about through our mutual friend Julie Lawson, a London art-world personality and assistant to Sir Roland Penrose, one of the founders of the city’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. Years later, when I was living in New York, Julie introduced me to Judith, who struck me as a delightful and irreverent Southern lady. What I didn’t recognize at first was how strong a character she was under that lighthearted gentility. At the time, she was celebrating her victory in a court case against a restaurant that was encroaching on her Greenwich Village property. There, in her beautifully tended garden, resplendent with plants she had known and loved in Virginia—including fine camellias and an extraordinary Lady Banks climbing rose—Franz Kline and Ruth Kligman’s cat was a constant presence (they lived nearby). Judith said she was in the habit of giving Kligman a sandwich whenever she stopped by to fetch the animal. Judith also said she had learned a great deal from Kline, especially his late works in color.

Judith was born in 1930 in Suffolk, Virginia, into a distinguished family tracing ancestors back to the state’s first colonial settlers. This was a background she mostly rejected, leaving Virginia after graduating from Mary Baldwin College and what is now Virginia Commonwealth University to become an artist.

With the reluctant blessing of her parents, she moved to New York, where she studied at the Art Students League and later with Hans Hoffmann at his School of Fine Arts and struggled to establish herself. In addition to being a dedicated painter, Judith, to earn a living, had to learn carpentry, stonemasonry, plastering, interior decoration, and landscaping. She was always a welcome and helpful guest in my home, walking around, tools in hand, checking fittings and hinges. In her studio on West Thirteenth Street, she stretched her own canvases and made the frames for her paintings, which were stacked in partitions she constructed and installed. Independence, improvisation, and self-reliance were fundamental to her character.

Judith often spoke to me of the opportunities she had missed as a woman in New York’s 1950s and ’60s art world. She never felt welcome at the Cedar Tavern, that fabled AbEx stomping ground. Once, at a gallery opening early in her career, she was abruptly sidelined by Ellsworth Kelly while trying to speak to Betty Parsons. However, in 1957, she was in the inaugural Betty Parsons Section Eleven Gallery show, and a year later in a group show at Stable Gallery. She went on to be represented by Marisa del Re Gallery, Spanierman Gallery, and, most recently, Berry Campbell Gallery. Her powerful gestural abstractions are in many private collections and have been acquired by the nation’s leading contemporary-art museums.

Still, it always rankled her that her paintings weren’t more widely known or appreciated, especially in comparison to those of her male contemporaries. But she gained recognition for her place in the canon in 2016 with the Denver Art Museum’s groundbreaking “Women of Abstract Expressionism,” which highlighted twelve women artists, Judith among them. It pleased her to know that a major reassessment of her work and life had begun—and now it will be ongoing.

Anthony Korner is publisher of Artforum.

Eric Dever: The Warhol Montauk Project
June 8 - August 20, 2021

Online Exhibition

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In 2020, Eric Dever was considered to be a project artist at The Andy Warhol Preserve Visual Arts Program in Montauk, New York. The artist created a series of works related to the landscape and the natural world. This opportunity allowed Eric Dever to have a private place to escape the pandemic world. As a result, the artist created this important group of 18 paintings.

Midpoint through the project, Dever turned his attention from Amsterdam Beach to the greater Montauk area. Upon exploration, Dever found a brochure distributed at the Montauk Lighthouse appropriately titled, “The Explorer’s Club,” originally published in the 1950s. Dever learned about the Montauketts, the land, and the people of Eastern Long Island.

In the Warhol Montauk Project series, Eric Dever takes cues from Warhol’s Self-Portrait (1966) pairing primary and secondary colors, as well as employing the use of different shades of the same color on coarse linen and canvas. Dever applies paint on surfaces rubbed into the support, a process known as decalcomania. Decalcomania was explored by the surrealists and a hallmark of Dever’s painting process. Coupled with ample unpainted surface or negative space the paintings themselves at times resemble serigraphy.

Light sensitivity, shadow, temperature and sound are experiences the artist explores, palpable in these new paintings. The paintings can be viewed online at Artsy or at Berry Campbell Gallery, New York.

James Steward 
Princeton University Art Museum
Walter Darby Bannard, By the River (1967). © 1967 Walter Darby Bannard.

One of the paintings I love living with in my office is Darby Bannard’s 1967 painting By the River. Bannard graduated from Princeton in 1957, one year ahead of Frank Stella, with whom he experimented with hard-edge abstraction while they were undergraduates. The painting fills the wall, enveloping us in its sunlit colors. —James Steward

Part of the Abstract Expressionist movement, Godwin was challenged by the male-dominated art world in the ‘50s

“Images generated by the female experience can be a powerful and creative expression for all humanity.”

Gender gap
That was painter Judith Godwin talking at Northern Michigan University in 1978. She died on May 29, 2021, at age 91. But it’s unclear why she believed her images were confined to the female experience because they so plainly transcend gender.

As an Abstract Expressionist, Godwin’s thrusting swaths of paint recall the big, bold paintings of Franz Kline, who favored vertical, horizontal, and diagonal slashes. Her work showed a similar pattern at times, Epic, Epic 2, Black Pillar, and Black Support.

I also recognize elements of Robert Motherwell’s pictures in hers.

Lessons learned
The connection between Godwin’s Abstract Expressionism and that of her male colleagues may stem from having studied with the same teachers. Including Hans Hoffman, of whom she said, “I think the main thing with Hofmann was that I felt completely free to do whatever I wanted to do.”

And what she wanted to do was be bold. According to the Johnson Collection Gallery, which carries some of her work, Hoffman’s use of bold colors “significantly influenced Godwin’s future work."

But finding her place in the male-dominated art world remained an issue for Godwin. An obituary from Berry Campbell Gallery, representing her work for the last ten years, reflected this by noting her “well-deserved place in the male-dominated world.”

The same point was made by the Johnson Collection, saying that because the Abstract Expressionist movement was so full of men, not many women got known.

Come to think of it, even when Lee Krasner became known, and she may have benefited from being Jackson Pollock’s wife.

Female experience
Female artists in other art movements besides Abstract Expressionism faced the same predicament. Underscoring the point that the art world was a men’s club, Sotheby’s just reported its most successful sale in an all-female art auction was a portrait by Francois Gilot of her daughter - one of two children she had with Pablo Picasso.

One can’t help wondering if the record sale had something to do with that relationship.

Lisa Stevens, head of Sotheby’s modern art online, seemed to confirm the point by telling ARTnews, “It isn’t commonly known that Gilot’s commitment to art was present long before her relationship with Pablo Picasso, and she was sadly often left in his shadow.”

Weaker sex?
So, it’s not surprising that Berry Campbell Gallery would place Godwin in a “contingency of strong female practitioners.” There wouldn’t be a need to invoke the words “strong female” unless being a female artist suggested weakness.

Godwin admitted that she felt pressured to create powerful, turbulent work to compete with her male counterparts for critical and commercial attention. The Johnson Collection quotes her saying, “If you were a [woman] painter in that period, you felt you had to paint as strongly, as violently as the men did.” 

The first exhibition of the abstract expressionist painter’s works since his death, in 1993, “Mandarin (Paintings from the 1950s)” showcases how Zutrau blended precepts of the New York School with a strong physicality—geometric spatial divisions and strong gestural marks—to draw viewers into both the feeling and contemplation of movement. 

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We are deeply saddened to announce the passing of Judith Godwin (1930 - 2021). Godwin was an innovative artist, who fought hard for her well-deserved place in the male dominated world of Abstract Expressionism. A painter for over seventy years, collectors, curators, and museums increasingly have acknowledged Godwin’s achievements in the past five years. She was among twelve artists included in the groundbreaking exhibition, Women of Abstract Expressionism, held at the Denver Art Museum, curated by University of Denver professor Gwen F. Chanzit. Included in numerous major museum collections, recently her works have been acquired by countless museums such as the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Mougins Museum of Classical Art, France; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; and the Sheldon Art Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska, among many others. Godwin was a playful raconteur and a passionate advocate for women in the arts. We feel fortunate to have worked closely with Judith Godwin for over ten years, and we will miss her sharp wit, her friendship, and her boundless energy and creativity.

Latest News in Black Art features regular news updates and developments in the world of art and related cultur



Representation
New York gallery Berry Campbell announced its representation of Nanette Carter on May 12. Active since the mid-1970s, Carter “creates abstract collages expressive of her sensitivity to injustice and humanity in the context of contemporary life and her responses to the drama of nature.” Her work is currently featured in two group exhibitions: “Affinities for Abstraction: Women Artists on Eastern Long Island, 1950-2020” at Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, N.Y., and “Creating Community. Cinque Gallery Artists” at The Art Students League of New York. Cinque Gallery was founded by Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Ernest Crichlow in 1969 and operated until 2004. Carter was the first artist-in-residence at Cinque and she co-organized “Creating Community” alongside guest curator Susan Stedman. Since 2001, Carter has been a professor of art at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her first solo exhibition with Berry Campbell is scheduled for spring 2022.

Now Representing Nanette Carter
Exhibition Forthcoming 2022

View Works by Nanette Carter

ABOUT THE ARTIST
An artist who has been exhibiting her work nationally and internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions since the mid-1970s, Nanette Carter creates abstract collages expressive of her sensitivity to injustice and humanity in the context of contemporary life and her responses to the drama of nature. Her shaped works, produced in multimedia on Mylar since 1997, are evocative of concepts in the history of abstract art and reflect the African American abstract art tradition, exemplified in the works of Alma Thomas, Sam Gilliam, William T. Williams, Howardina Pindell, Romare Bearden, and Alvin Loving Jr. In fact, Loving (1935–2005) was Carter’s mentor. A close friend, he inspired her in his view of invention in art as the result of process, in a manner akin to how jazz musicians create something new by riffing off of a melody.

In her art, Carter combines rectilinear structures with animated gestures, forming constructions that recall the lineage of African American quilt-making, while drawing on jazz, Japanese prints, Russian Constructivism, Abstract Expressionism, and other sources. She describes herself as a “builder, fascinated by the act of bringing pieces together to create a work of art,” while noting that “building is one of civilizations’ oldest endeavors.” In 2013 she began her Cantilevered series, metaphorically using an architectural term referring to structures anchored by a plinth at one end that extend horizontally—almost defying gravity—as a paradigm for the balancing act in all our lives in the twenty-first century. Her series, The Weight, begun in 2015, speaks to the weight “compounded on us as we reflect on our history and aspire to move forward to better ourselves.” Continue Reading

"On a completely different line of exploration:" Artist Lilian Thomas Burwell

Any other serious artist would have leapt — lock, smock, and easel — at the opportunity: a solo show at a leading private art gallery in the trendy Chelsea section of Manhattan. But at 94, and having just entertained emissaries from the Smithsonian Institutions asking about the future of her archives, Lilian Thomas Burwell, M.F.A. 1975, was comfortable taking her time.

"Well, I didn't know who they were," says Burwell of Christine Berry and Martha Campbell, owners and purveyors of the eight-year-old Berry Campbell Gallery on W. 24th Street, in the shadow of the city's popular High Line. Despite a long and productive career as both a two-dimensional painter and, for roughly the past two decades, creator of innovative three-dimensional "wall sculptures," the longtime Maryland-based artist had never before had an exhibition of her work in New York City. (Although her paintings have been exhibited at The National Museum of Women in the Arts and are included in the permanent collections of prestigious museums such as the Phillips Collection, America's first museum of modern art, both located in Washington, D.C.)

"I never had an orientation to working [at art] to make money, and I knew that I was limited in terms of experience in the market," confides Burwell, who her made her living as an art teacher while living out another "spiritual" experience as an artist. "So, I needed to know who are these people and what were they trying to do. Can I trust them?

"And at this age, I have to be realistic about what happens to my work. I may have never thought of it as a way to make money, but I don't believe in just throwing it all away, either," adds Burwell with a sly chuckle. She "absolutely" agreed to donate her records to the Smithsonian. Contained in that history are her then-design of Washington, D.C.'s public school pre-secondary art curriculum and papers from her subsequent time as a member of the visual arts faculty at Duke Ellington School of the Arts. She also served as a board member of the Smithsonian Institution Renwick Alliance and the Arlington Arts Center, founded the Alma Thomas Memorial Gallery, and was curatorial director of the Sumner Museum and Archives in Washington, D.C., from 1981 to 1984.

On the other hand, the extent and future of Burwell's personal art collection is (as every artist and art dealer knows) not a topic for public conversation.

Soaring
What she and her partner are trying to do, Christine Berry was finally able to convince a hesitant Burwell, is represent post-war American artists that they consider overlooked or neglected, often because they are women and other times due to race or geography. Earlier this year, the gallery's presentation of works by Louisiana painter and sculptor Ida Kohlmeyer (1912-1997) was reviewed by The New York Times. Berry Campbell's curatorial vision also has sparked fruitful relationships with senior curators at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, and Houston's Museum of Fine Arts, among others.

"It's shocking to say and hard to believe for me, but when I first saw Lilian's work, I did not who she was, either," says Berry, an Upstate New Yorker who earned her undergraduate degree from Baylor University and a master's in art history and criticism from the University of North Texas. Her introduction to Burwell came in 2017 via the artist's inclusion in the acclaimed Magnetic Fields touring exhibition curated by Melissa Messina, the first U.S. presentation dedicated exclusively to "the formal and historical dialogue of abstraction by women artists of color."

"Really spurring me on, though, was this collector — a client of mine," Berry says. "He collects mostly African American art and had actually purchased a work from the show, and he said, 'You've got to see this woman. No one knows who she is and she does these fabulous wall sculptures.'"

What followed was a roughly yearlong courtship of Burwell by Berry Campbell, with help from Messina, who had established a relationship with the artist through Magnetic Fields. What resulted is Soaring, also curated by Messina, showcasing 15 examples from Burwell's portfolio and continuing at the gallery through May 28, 2021. The exhibition centers on the pivotal painting Skybound (1984), which marks the first time the artist cut into her canvas to create positive and negative space, and eventually leading to her now signature style of three-dimensional, painted wall sculpture.

The show's title also is an homage to the late David Driskell (1931-2020), Burwell's friend and contemporary and fellow Catholic University alum, who for many years served as Distinguished University Professor of Art at the University of Maryland. In 1997, on the occasion of Burwell’s survey exhibition at Hampton University Museum in Virginia, Driskell wrote the essay "Soaring with a Painterly Voice," in which he described Burwell's work as "transcendental in showing stylistic diversity of earthly beauty and cosmic vision."

Widely heralded for bringing African American art into greater public exposure and appreciation globally during the latter half of the 20th century, Driskell received the National Humanities Medal from President Bill Clinton in 2000. He died from coronavirus in April 2020 at the age of 88.

Got to be starting something

Asked whether her New York debut and growing reputation as an important voice in American abstract art is a "Better late than never" or "It's about time" story, Lilian Burwell looks patiently at her inquisitor through eyes that first opened in 1927 and indicates that she doesn't much care for the question, because it presumes the end of something when she has always been more interested in starting something.

"My whole motivation is I'm more of a teacher and preacher than anything else," says the grandchild of a Baptist minister, who married a Catholic and actually first arrived at CatholicU in order to study the foundations of catechism.

"If I can bring something out in you that you didn't know existed before, that's like I'm throwing a pebble in the water," she says. "It's starting something I have no idea where it's going to go. But to this day I hear things from [former] students that I had decades ago telling me one or two things I taught them that started them on a completely different line of exploration. That's worth 200 paintings to me."

Asked the same question about Burwell's ultimate arrival on the contemporary art scene, Berry says, "I think Lilian could have been a full-blown professional artist 100 percent. But, she loves teaching. So, for that reason, I don't think her work was included in as many shows, exhibitions over her life, and I think she was simply overlooked."

At the same time, says Berry, "I don't feel that there's any missed opportunity here. Lilian is somebody who, thankfully right now people are looking back at shows like Magnetic Fields and are opened to seeing beyond what is just in the canon of art history. As a woman, as a sculptor, as an African American, she fits in a lot of categories, and we have people walking in here saying to us, 'Who is this artist? Why have I never heard of her? These are fantastic!'

"I think this is the right time for her."

Saturday, May 8, 2021
1 - 5 pm

Watch Here
(Link will be live Saturday, May 8, 2021 1 - 5 pm)

The show explores the gallery's ties to the Art Students League of New York.

In 1969, tired of the lack of exhibition opportunities for Black artists, Romare Bearden, Ernest Crichlow, and Norman Lewis took matters into their own hands and opened Cinque Gallery, a nonprofit exhibition space on Astor Place in New York’s East Village.

Cinque—named for Joseph Cinque, who led the 1839 revolt on the Amistad slave ship after being kidnapped in Sierra Leone—quickly became a thriving community of young and mid-career artists.

Over its 35-year existence at various spaces across the city, the organization showcased the work of some 450 artists of color, including Emma Amos, Dawoud Bey, Sam Gilliam, and Whitfield Lovell—all of whom are featured in the first-ever exhibition celebrating the legacy of Cinque Gallery at the Art Students League of New York.

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With Eric Dever
May 2, 1 pm - 2:30 pm

Field of Dreams: Objects in Space

Join artist Eric Dever for this Creative Studio for Adults and Teens. This month we will paint outdoors; experience scale and proportion as a means of interpreting the Museum meadow and sculpture exhibition, Field of Dreams.

Everyone will have their own workspace and materials. Materials will be provided.

Preregistration is required. Space is limited.

$35 Non-members | $25 Members

Wednesday, April 28, 2021 
4 pm - 10 pm

Watch Here
(Link will be live April 28, 2021 4 pm - 10 pm)

Next Screening:
Saturday, May 8, 2021
1 pm - 5 pm

We Know What We Like is an entertaining conversation featuring three experts in contemporary art discussing some of the most exciting artwork being made today by Triangle alumni and others.

FREE
Tuesday, May 18 at 7 PM EST
On Zoom
Afterparty 8:30 PM

Register

Frederick J. Brown
South Chicago, 1976

View works by Frederick J. Brown

Frank Wimberley: Collage
March 18 - April 17, 2021

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Frank Wimberley at Berry Campbell, New York


Frank Wimberley, Untitled (Collage) (1977). Courtesy of Berry Campbell.

At 94 years old, Frank Wimberley has been working, mostly under the radar, since the 1960s, creating dynamic, layered, abstract paintings. Over the decades, the artist has attracted a devoted set of followers on the East End of Long Island, where he has a home, while his importance as a Black artist working in the tradition of Abstract Expressionism has increasingly been recognized (his art was included in Hunter College’s important 2018 exhibition revisiting the 1971 exhibition “Rebuttal to the Whitney Museum Exhibition: Black Artists in Rebuttal”). Wimberly likens his process to a controlled accident, and creates his paintings with equal parts intention and improvisation, citing the traditions of jazz.

STILL PUSHING HER PRACTICE to new heights, Lilian Thomas Burwell will have her first New York solo exhibition at age 93. “Lilian Thomas Burwell: Soaring” opens April 22 at Berry Campbell Gallery.

An abstract artist, Burwell makes nature-inspired paintings and sculpture. She was featured in “Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today,” a groundbreaking exhibition presenting works by 21 Black female artists that originated at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City and traveled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Fla., from 2017 to 2018. Burwell is also the subject of a recent documentary, “Kindred Spirits: Artists Hilda Wilkinson Brown and Lilian Thomas Burwell.”

Guest curated by Melissa Messina, “Soaring” explores a pivotal period in Burwell’s creative development. The exhibition “highlights the dynamic transition in Burwell’s abstract visual language from two-dimensional painterly planes to three-dimensional sculptural forms. Burwell’s paintings from the late 1970s and early 1980s employ a distinctly bold palette and reference organic forms found in natural floral and earthly phenomena,” according to the gallery.

“The exhibition centers on the painting Skybound (1984), which marks the first time that the artist cut into her canvas, creating positive and negative space. This pivotal act gave way to Burwell’s examination of form, bringing forth Burwell’s signature style of three-dimensional, painted wall sculpture. These wall sculptures would become the artist’s signature focus for more than two decades.”

“Burwell’s paintings from the late 1970s and early 1980s employ a distinctly bold palette and reference organic forms found in natural floral and earthly phenomena.” — Berry Campbell Gallery

BORN IN WASHINGTON, D.C., Burwell grew up in Harlem and attended New York’s High School of Music and Art. Still struggling to recover from the Depression, her family returned to the nation’s capital and she graduated from segregated Dunbar High School.

Burwell attended Pratt in New York City and later earned an MFA from Catholic University in Washington (1975). After working as a publications and exhibits specialist at the Department of Commerce, she became a master teacher of art in the D.C. public schools. She taught from 1967-1980, the last five years at Duke Ellington School of the Arts.

The documentary “Kindred Spirits” focuses on Burwell and her aunt, her mother’s oldest sister, Hilda Wilkinson Brown. Based in Washington, Brown was a teacher and an artist who made modernist paintings with local scenes as her subject. Burwell said Brown was like a mother to her. She supported her desire to become an artist and convinced her parents to let her pursue it.

New York -- In 2005, on the eve of a solo show of his work in Southampton, N.Y., the abstract artist Frank Wimberley explained that he often viewed his artwork as living things. Giving a painting “time to breathe,” was an important part of the creative process, he said, adding that it wasn’t uncommon for him to step away from a work in progress. “Then you can return to it, just like with any living, breathing thing, and find a few surprises.”

At 94 years old, Wimberley is still uncovering surprises in an expanding body of work infused with bold colors and dramatic, gestural strokes. In a career that has spanned more than 50 years, and that includes paintings, sculptures, and ceramics, he’s managed to embrace the creative process as a continuous adventure.

This month Berry Campbell Gallery in New York’s Chelsea district is hosting a survey exhibition of collage works by Wimberley that will feature both paintings with collage elements as well as traditional collage works on paper.

(Take a gallery tour of the artwork with Frank Wimberley here.)

The show, to be held March 18 to April 17, will also highlight some of the artist’s most important collages to date, including several examples going back to the early 1970s, says gallery co-owner, Christine Berry. She opened the 2,000 square-foot ground floor gallery and exhibition space with Martha Campbell in 2013 with a focus on Postwar Modern and Contemporary Art.

Mary Dill Henry (1913 - 2009)

Mary Dill Henry’s most notable works are in large oil paintings, alongside acrylics and prints; they are characterized by geometric abstraction. Henry built a signature style, synthesizing past and present art movements into bold and striking compositions.

A rare exhibition of paintings from 1965 to 1970 is on show at Berry Campbell Gallery, New York, titled Mary Dill Henry: Love Jazz (Feb 11 - Mar 13, 2021). Works from this period include oscillating shapes form kinetic patterns and Op Art illusions. This qulity can be seen in works such as Love Jazz (1965), same title as the exhibition, which represents two abstract hearts that seem to beat together in rhythmic unison with the variously striped patterns that both unite and divide them; that daringly juxtaposed colors arrest the eye with the immediacy of Pop Art.

The most significant influence on her practice occurred in the mid-1940s, while studying at the Institute of Design in Chicago with the Bauhaus teacher and visionary, László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946). Studying under Moholy-Nagy exposed Henry to the illustrious history of the Bauhaus and its many manifestations. At the Institute, she pursued the full Bauhaus curriculum, receiving training in photography, architecture, and design.

After receiving an MA at the Institute of Design in Chicago, Henry was offered technical positions from several schools. However, the cultural atmosphere at the time normalized women to follow men’s career over their own; so Henry moved whenever her husband’s work required them to relocate. Although Henry was a serious artist and had regular exhibitions, she kept a low profile. In 1966, liberation from the marriage enabled Henry to focus on her art, although it meant she had to deal with financial struggles to a certain extent.

“It was as if, after 20 years of fulfilling conventional expectations as a wife, worker, and mother, she was released into a constant stream of creative production, capturing the exuberant hedonism of Northern California, while reined in by the consummate formal control she had assimilated as an American Constructivist in Chicago.” 
- from Matthew Kangas’ review of Mary Dill Henry’s first solo exhibition at Arleigh Gallery, San Francisco (Artforum, 1969)

Through her artworks, Henry showed the utopian ideals associated with Constructivism, as well the principle behind de Stijl movement; that art and life are inseparable. Although influenced by these movements, Henry expressed more idiosyncratic and humorous constructive patterns in her works. She achieved a beauty of form that transcends the ordinary and gave joy and surprise to the eye. Henry’s consideration of contemplative spaces speaks to the viewer with energy and insight, while her sense of humor is also evident. 

“Art sustains us when the chaos of the world with its wars and depressions engulf us. And the bright hope of humanity to know that even in the midst of such hopelessness, we can and do create art that can lift and inspire.” 
- Mary Dill Henry

Mary Dill Henry: Love Jazz at Berry Campbell Gallery, New York (Feb 11 - Mar 13, 2021)

Starting from her first solo exhibition in 1967, Henry participated in hundreds of shows. Since 1980, seven retrospective exhibitions have been held in California, including several museum shows. Among many honors, she received a Flintridge Award for Visual Artists in 2001 and the Twining Humber Award for Lifetime Achievement, from the Artist Trust, in Seattle, in 2006.

Henry’s paintings belong to many public collections, including the Seattle Art Museum; the Frye Art Museum, Seattle; the Whatcom Museum, Bellingham, Washington; the Tacoma Art Museum; the University of Puget Sound, Tacoma; the Portland Art Museum, Oregon; the Sheldon Art Museum, University of Nebraska, Lincoln; and the Institute of Design, Chicago, as well as corporate art collections, including Microsoft, Safeco, Ampex, Varian Associates, and Hewlett-Packard. 

The Fairfield University Art Museum has received a major gift of more than 130 paintings, watercolors, drawings, prints, and sketchbooks from the Stephen and Palmina Pace Foundation.

The Fairfield University Art Museum is pleased to announce that the Stephen and Palmina Pace Foundation has gifted more than 132 works by Stephen Pace (American, 1918-2010) to the museum, with outstanding examples from across the artist’s oeuvre.

Stephen Pace was born in Missouri in 1918 to a farming family. He began his formal art training at the age of 17, studying drawing and watercolor with WPA artist and illustrator Robert Lahr. He continued to hone his skills while serving abroad during World War II, painting views of European landscapes. Pace’s early works are represented in this gift by a very early and accomplished watercolor of a farm scene from his childhood in Missouri. After WWII, Pace studied art on the GI Bill at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel Allende, Mexico before he made his way to New York City. This period is represented by a lovely oil painting of the Mexican desert landscape looking towards San Miguel Allende.

In 1947, Pace moved to New York City where he continued his art studies on the GI Bill at the Art Students League and developed important friendships with members of the New York School of Abstract Expressionist. Still lifes, nudes, and early abstractions are among the works included in the gift from this period. Pace used the last of his GI bill funds to study with the renowned abstract expressionist artist and teacher Hans Hofmann, in New York and then in Provincetown, Mass. Hofmann had an immediately visible influence on Pace’s work in the 1950s, particularly in Pace’s use of color planes to describe volume.

During the 1950s, Stephen was singled out by Hofmann as one of the finest painters to emerge from the second generation of abstract expressionists. During his long career, Pace made important contributions to the tradition of Abstract Expressionism. This period of abstract expressionism is represented by several important paintings, as well as numerous watercolors, prints, and drawings.

In 1960, Pace returned to painting more figural subjects in a style characterized by simplified forms and imaginative colors, and this remained the focus of his artistic practice for the remainder of his career. Returning to his rural roots, Pace’s work begins to depict subjects ranging from gardening and nudes, to horses and lobstermen. The gift to Fairfield includes all of these subjects, and is particularly strong in paintings of horses — one of Pace’s favorite subjects.

The donated works collectively are very important because they demonstrate Pace’s process in moving from studies to finished works. Pace's artwork will be well-used in teaching across disciplines, especially in Studio Art and Art History classes.

Three of the gifted works by Pace are among those in the current Fairfield University Art Museum (FUAM) exhibition in Bellarmine Hall Galleries, The Birds of the Northeast: Gulls to Great Auks: an ink drawing of a Great Blue Heron, and a watercolor and a lithograph of Herring Gulls. A full exhibition of Pace’s work is in the planning stages.

The 20th-century artist Mary Dill Henry (1913–2009) flouted expectation with great seriousness. She left her role as a housewife to focus on her art, even if that meant being short on cash. She lived in Mendocino, a sleepy northern-California town with little culture but plenty of visual inspiration. She was influenced by the work of the Bauhaus visionary Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, as well as by Piet Mondrian. She was touched by Constructivism and Op art. But she painted in a style of exuberant precision that was completely her own. “Love Jazz” brings Henry’s bright, joyous pieces into focus after many decades spent out of the public eye. —J.V.

ST. PETERSBURG — The Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg’s major renovation of their permanent collection galleries last fall made the museum feel like a new place.

Now, through a yearlong sharing collaboration, four paintings from the Art Bridges Collection by celebrated 20th century American artists are on display in the museum’s Modern and Post War galleries.

Works by Jacob Lawrence, Hughie Lee-Smith, Norman Wilfred Lewis and Lee Krasner will remain on display through February 2022. A fifth painting by Marsden Hartley will arrive in June and remain on view through August 2022.

The loans expand the museum’s inclusivity with works by Black, female and LGBTQ artists.

I love, love, love this Ida Kohlmeyer painting! The colors, the brush strokes and most of all the meditative, serene feeling I experience while looking at it.

Ida Kohlmeyer was an American painter and sculptor who lived and worked in Louisiana. She took up painting in her 30’s and achieved wide recognition for her art in museums and galleries throughout the United States.

After receiving her MFA from Tulane University in 1956, she taught for seven years and was a portrait painter of children. Wanting more inspiration and a deeper meaning in life, she became a student during a summer at Hans Hofmann’s Abstract Expressive Arts School in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She was also a student and friend of Mark Rothko. In her words, she came to realize “Painting need not be a painting of something, not an imitation, but should be a revelation to the viewer and artist. It need not be instructional or socially critical. The support, (in this case, masonite) is flat, so a little bit of depth may be needed, misty/atmospheric usually - not perspective wise. Work progresses by unconscious impulses, one color calling for another, one shape after another.”

Why are we attracted to non-representational or object free art? Expressive Abstract art frees our brain from the dominance of reality, enabling the brain to flow within its inner states, create new emotional and cognitive associations and activate brain-states that are otherwise harder to access. This process is rewarding as it enables the exploration of yet undiscovered inner territories of the viewer’s brain.

Kohlmeyer’s painting is part of Brahm’s permanent collection and is currently on the upper level. Come relax, restore and rejuvenate!

This Docent’s Corner is brought to you by Kat Leahey

Join Eric Dever live from the Parrish studio in this online workshop for adults and teens.

This month we will create drawings and paintings that explore the dual means of representation and abstraction.

Contact Information:
Cara Conklin-Wingfield
631-283-2118
Children@parrishart.org

Where:
Parrish Art Museum
279 Montauk Hwy
Water Mill

Website:
www.parrishart.org

Jill Nathanson, a lifelong advocate of Color Field abstraction, wields a bright turn of phrase in her third Berry Campbell exhibition, expressing important feelings about color, proximity, and concord. Noticing the disruption of my fingers, an additional element, through Nathanson’s painting thumbnails on a checklist printed on thin paper was enough to convince me of the sheer power of the work exhibited here in which all layers on flat wooden panels sum to a fully multi-dimensional space. The acoustic quality of the paintings, hinted at by select titles (Harp, Chordzephyr, Woodwind), is heard as a result of this spatial illusion. The painter’s biographical information, and particularly her upbringing in a musical household, furthers this reading of her work. 

The paintings reach deep rhythms and rich harmonies with their expansive palettes and chiffon likeness. In Only a Friend, Nathanson mixes a platonic ideal of bleached apricot and buttery daffodil shades in the center with flanks of bubbly gray-blue and still sea-glass. If briefly considered a landscape, the viewer is unable to differentiate between window and curtains, resulting in pleasing surface tension, each edge becoming a true crevice rather than a point of delineation. An oily olive ribbon to the right, likely applied post-pour, suggests a moment of organic activity, such as the drag of a wave onto coast. 

Nathanson’s implemented notion of “color desire” similarly tugs on the viewer as one’s gaze travels across each work; the painter is uniquely aware of the somatic effects of art and its relationship to pulse. Flexing works such as Light Wrestle provoke a push-and-pull response. This active relationship with the panels is determined by the immaterial energy itself of each field, as well as the muscle required by the artist to physically handle and manipulate the materials. 

The depth created is also, in part, due to the predetermined clarity of color. Hardly ever in these paintings is there muddying despite the elaborate entanglement and overlap. Nathanson’s distinct style of color mixing yields results such as in Sparkshift, where an overlay of Baldwin apple red and powder blue does not produce purple, but instead each color remains true to itself, fulfilling the tall order of being two things at once. This technique recalls Walter Benjamin’s fragment “A Child’s View of Color,” translated by Rodney Livingstone, wherein he writes, “Color is single, not as a lifeless thing and a rigid individuality but as a winged creature that flits from one form to the next.” What is the putty pink on the right side of the panel if not a pure mood? Color in Nathanson’s work, animate, playful, pure, is described well by this Benjamin text. 

One of several paintings whose phrase-titles fall within the realm of magic is Elixir, which blends something like a magnetic binary composition with one blue tail crossing the center near the bottom. A potion of improbability and convergence, symmetry despite asymmetry, the planes in this painting stretch beyond the viewer’s belief. rising to an exercise in spirit. 

As a series, these works play with doubling. Trickster color combinations improbably defy form similarity among like-forms. Elixir and Sway Chorus, Light Wrestle and Sparkshift, & Going Goya and Harp are among these form-doubles. Unexpectedly, the expert color manipulation by the artist increases visible relationality between palettes rather than forms, forcing kinship between, for example, the cool palettes of Only a Friend and Getting Light.  

Getting Light is more reminiscent of earlier Nathanson works such as those shown at MOCA Jacksonville in 2016: kaleidoscopic, radial, and gathered in a single, sometimes centered, origin point. The language of graphs is handily applied to this work as each panel undulates and crests according to its respective lightwaves. Tan Transpose, citrusy and dappled, mathematical in title and form, shades in the gaps between two plotted lines on a Y-axis. The “sine” curves here, and in many of the compositions shown, distinguish this series, mapping a rate of color and, ultimately, gaining momentum.  

In one interview, Nathanson refers to her practice as “pseudo-spontaneous,” as she realizes and tapes off the shape of each color before it is poured, then waits a full day for each color to dry. The gradual and rewarding viewing experience of the paintings is owed to this process, sloping and seeping at its own willful, radiant pace. WM

When documentary filmmaker Cintia Cabib was showcasing two films at the Historical Society of Washington, D.C.’s 2014 conference on local history, she spotted an intriguing painting of the corner of Rhode Island Avenue and 3rd Street NW while perusing a small brochure. The modernist, geometric red hues of homes lining the LeDroit Park street and a gleaming, leafless tree bisecting the frame compelled Cabib to explore the work of the artist, Hilda Wilkinson Brown.

Years of research culminated in a new documentary produced and directed by Cabib called Kindred Spirits: Artists Hilda Wilkinson Brown and Lilian Thomas Burwell. The short film is being broadcast locally by PBS stations WHUT and MPT on Feb. 4 and by WETA’s World Channel on Feb. 10. PBS stations around the country have scheduled airings of the film for Black History Month programming

A veteran of more than 20 solo exhibitions in New York since her 1982 debut, and nearly 30 group shows since 1980 from Massachusetts to Florida, Jill Nathanson is entitled to be counted as a heavyweight in the art scene. Ironic, therefore, that her latest show is so striking for its light, airy, almost translucent qualities, its diaphanous veils of color rooted in both science and imagination.

She learned the ABC’s of color from Kenneth Noland and Larry Poons on an informal basis in the late 1970s and early 1980s when an undergraduate at Bennington College, Vermont. Neither of these painters was on the faculty, however, and Nathanson once told me that many and maybe most of her fellow Bennington art students were making paintings that looked more like Helen Frankenthaler – Bennington’s most famous alumna – with whom Nathanson wanted her paintings to have nothing to do. And although there may be some remote similarities, the glossier-looking finish of Nathanson’s paintings and the distinctive shapes in them have long stamped them with an artistic personality entirely her own.

Nathanson’s technique differs from those used by color-field painters in the 1960s, though it employs “modelli” (preparatory studies) and in this somewhat resembles the “modelli” that Friedel Dzubas employed in the later 1970s and ‘80s. But Dzubas didn’t invent modelli. Their use goes back to the Renaissance, if not earlier. And the materials that Nathanson employs are right up to the minute – as is her abstract idiom.

“Jill Nathanson: Light Phrase,” at Berry Campbell Gallery, New York (through February 6): Anyone who has ever mixed colorful paints will notice that the results are not brighter colors but duller murkiness. That’s color theory 101. In her alchemical experiments with pigments and polymers, Jill Nathanson looks for ways to prove color theory wrong. Through abstractions created of translucent layers of acrylic, polymers, and oil, which she pours onto panels, Nathanson brings out the light of her color-filled combinations. In “Light Phrase,” her latest exhibition at Berry Campbell Gallery, in Chelsea, Nathanson looks to enlarge and refine her fluid forms. The artist Christina Kee provides an essay for the online catalogue that further explains Nathanson’s unusual process. —JP

Frederick J. Brown had an incredibly prolific career throughout which he moved fluently between abstraction, figurative painting (particularly portraiture), landscape painting, ceramics and collage. Particularly in his early career many of his vivid and evocative brushstrokes recall de Kooning: Brown’s longtime mentor. In fact, Brown famously painted de Kooning, depicting him in bold swaths of primary color that recall de Kooning’s own style and eclectic personality. Early on in Brown’s career he was particularly influenced by de Kooning and the German school of Abstract Expressionism. After his early abstract works in the 1970s, Brown began to introduce figuration into his work in the 1980s. While most of his career did have a largely figurative focus, the emotive influence of Abstract Expressionism carries through the body of his works.  

Brown was born in Georgia on February 6th, 1945 and grew up on the South Side of Chicago. He credited his family for surrounding him with color; his uncle repainted cars (Brown would help him mix the paints) and his mother was a baker who specialized in cake decorating. His mother’s influence in particular caused Brown to have quite a tactile relationship with color and he claimed that painters were “people who love paint” particularly the feeling of paint. Another formative influence was the community of jazz musicians that Brown met through his father. Brown’s relationship with music cannot be overstated; his bold, vigorous works often produce synesthetic experiences and Brown listened to music while he painted, citing it as a creative catalyst for his painting process. He attended Southern Illinois University where he studied art and psychology.  

In 1970, Brown moved to SoHo to pursue his painting career. At this point he was focused on musical and abstract influences. In 1977 he collaborated with the Adler Planetarium to produce his wonderful work Milky Way that exemplified the galaxy as it was understood in the late 70s. He hints at the spiral shapes of the galaxy while imploring the viewer to imagine other aspects of the Milky Way. This work and several of the studies leading up to it showcase his aforementioned tactile relationship with paint and color. Dabs of paint throughout Milky Way almost inspire a visual sense of touch. Another painting of his, Elephant Skin was actually painted so that the paint itself would feel like an elephant’s skin. Brown’s idea that anyone could even feel one of his paintings was indicative of his egalitarian approach to art. In 1985, Brown taught in China at the Central College of Fine Arts and Crafts - during his teaching he sought to embody what he considered to be an authentic American experience. He imported his entire studio and would work for 13 hours at a time to give his students an idea of the intensity of his process. His teaching experience was followed by an exhibition of his works in 1988 at the Museum of the Revolution in Beijing. He was one of the earliest Western artists to exhibit in China and at the time he was the largest exhibition of a Western artist to date. He was commended for the moving sense of his works and was an exemplar of cross-cultural relations at the time. 

In the late 1980s, Brown began a series of portraits of jazz musicians. This series was significant in the sense that it exemplified the excellence of Black musicians and demonstrated Brown’s own excellence as a Black painter. It was on Brown’s part, an effort to make sure these artists were appropriately memorialized. Brown would listen to the artist’s music as he painted their portrait and this influenced the visuals of the painting. In his work Duke Ellington, Duke’s large and soulful eyes are the immediate striking characteristic. But if one takes into account the surprising pockets of color (the blue tones at the base of his eye, the red across one cheek, and the dash of yellow on his bottom lip) and the erratic curves that constitute his face, both these elements are reflective of the erratic and surprising nature of Ellington’s compositions. Another portrait Brown painted, Sarah Vaughan is a contrast to Ellington’s portrait. Vaughan’s face is all vibrant color and smooth elegant lines that recall the cadence of her voice. In her rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” it is quite clear how her voice translates to her portrait.  

Beyond these projects, Brown worked on a number of spiritual and religious works and reworked common themes like the Last Judgement and the Virgin and Child. He painted a number of bright folklore-like works that were simply meant to inspire joy after his experience in a drab hospital - it showed his propensity to use art as a vehicle for an emotional experience in the viewer. Another notable work of his, History of Art is a series of over 100 canvases representing important paintings in Art History. The series effectively recasts the monochrome canon of Art History into a vibrant and diverse set of new subjects. Many of the works are either infused with new vigor or feature people of color in portraiture. Brown said once in an interview to the Smithsonian: “I think my heritage has a great significance to the images I produce, but you can limit people with a name or a title to only serve one group. When you see my work, you can tell it is done by someone who is Black. But, I want to provide as many beautiful things to the world as I possibly can.” Indeed, Brown’s wide artistic achievements left a legacy of accessibility and facilitated a democratization of art. Frederick J. Brown died of cancer in 2012 and is survived by his wife Megan and his two children. 

Collector Christian Levett has filled his Italian palazzo with a world-class assembly of works by female Abstract Expressionists.

Spread over two floors of a palazzo beside the River Arno in Florence, amid the treasures of the Italian Renaissance, is perhaps the world’s largest private collection of art by modern female abstractionists.

Walking down the street you would never know it was there. Even if you knew the name of the collector, former hedge-fund manager Christian Levett, you would have to squint long and hard to find it in the cluster of little brass name plates alongside the palazzo’s massive door. But once across the threshold you are surrounded by paintings by Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and other Abstract Expressionists who helped revolutionize art after World War II, turning New York City into the capital of Western culture for the first time.

In 1938 Thomas studied fine art at the Art Students League of New York as well as with Amédée Ozenfant in his atelier. She began to associate with the abstract expressionists, joining discussions at The Club (where she was one of the few members who were women) and at the short-lived school called The Subjects of the Artist. She also studied in Provincetown with Hans Hofmann and exhibited at the renowned Ninth Street Exhibition in 1951. Throughout her work, she combined the gestural language of the New York School painters with sensitive brushstrokes and a lyrical sense of color. In Portrait, the ghostly figurative suggestions and tinted grays evoke an image coming into focus. The painting resonates with works by Judith Godwin, Jack Tworkov, and Frank Lobdell in the Gallery’s collection.

In The Abstract
Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland, Maine
January 15 - April 24, 2021
More Information

Jill Nathanson, Light's Cover, 2019, acrylic and polymers with oil on panel, 38 1/4 x 74 inches

Jill Nathanson: Light Phrase
Thu, Jan 07, 2021 - Sat, Feb 06, 2021

More Information

The art game has many unwritten rules. It’s a good thing that nobody wrote them down.

COVID-19 trashed the artistic rulebook as it has nearly everything else in contemporary life. Artists and visual arts institutions have been flying by the seat of their pants since the pandemic hit last year. While strange changes are far from over in the art game, here are some of the new ad hoc rules area artists and arts leaders have invented to keep playing. We’ll start with a few individual artists.

Mike Solomon: Honor the Heroes

The bulk of Mike Solomon’s work is nonrepresentational. But his latest series of colored pencil drawings holds a mirror to the real world.

“Scenes from the Pandemic” has a journalistic feel to it. The title tells you exactly what to expect. There are a few scenes of wounded journalists and protestors of all ethnic origins. But most of Solomon’s drawings celebrate Black doctors, nurses and front-line caregivers dealing with the collateral damage of the battle against COVID-19.

These heroes include Dr. James A Mahoney – a Brooklyn pulmonologist who pulled all-nighters fighting the virus, and then became a victim himself; Dr. Armen Henderson, a Miami internist who was handcuffed and detained by police outside his home; and Dr. Lisa Merritt, the founder and director of the Multicultural Health Institute in Sarasota.

“I made a connection with Lisa at the beginning of this year,” Solomon says. “She enlightened me a lot about what was going on in the African American community. Thanks to her, I became fascinated with the Black doctors and first responders serving on the front lines during the pandemic. Like all doctors, they risk their own lives to save the lives of others. But if these doctors take off their scrubs and walk outside the hospital – they’re taking a risk just because of the color of their skin. It takes an amazing amount of courage to do what they do. I wanted to find a way to honor it.”

Berry Campbell is pleased to announce the representation of the Estate of Frederick J. Brown (1945-2012)

Exhibition formcoming September 9 - October 9, 2021
Curated by Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims

View Works by Frederick J. Brown

100 Standout Works from Miami Art Fairs

From Kehinde Wiley’s newest portrait to a playful sculpture by Austin Lee, browse a curated selection of 100 new-to-market works from your favorite artists, on view now during Miami Fair Week. For more from the Miami fairs, browse the online catalogues of Art Miami and CONTEXT Art Miami—hosted exclusively on Artsy—as well as Art Basel Miami Beach, PRIZM, and UNTITLED, ART.

THE TRANSPORT BUSINESS

Frank Wimberley’s military engagement began as a private assigned to the 3384th Quartermaster Truck Company. Said Wimberly, "I never did any fighting. I did a lot of transporting troops and shipping supplies to areas where there was fighting." Because Black men could only serve in segregated units of the military, many were assigned to labor and service units.

Wimberley was happy with his assignment, however. "I liked that job; I liked being in a foreign country," he said. "We were very much liked by the Germans because we were Black; they liked the fact that they were meeting a different kind of American."

He said he suffered some of the hostility directed at Blacks by some whites, "even in the U.S. military," Wimberley remarked.

"The Black soldiers in my unit were always segregated from the whites. White soldiers would show animosity to us."

"You’re always going to find some problem makers, especially in the service," he said, "but I enjoyed my stay over there."

Encounters between Blacks and Germans were mostly social, Wimberley said. "A lot of the guys had German girlfriends," he said. "Everybody was poor because of the war; they would fix dinners for us. They had to go on the farms and steal food."

He described how a shared love of music fostered camaraderie among the Black soldiers. "We would form little groups," said Wimberley, who played the trumpet. "There were others who played other instruments; we would get together and play; it was always jazz."

Learning that Wimberley had an interest in art, German soldiers who were artists themselves "made portraits of us," Wimberley said. "We gave them cigarettes; they’d rather have that than money. We didn’t like the Germans because of Hitler, but some of them became my very good friends," he said.

After 18 months in the service, Wimberley was discharged. "I was so glad to get back home," he said. "I wanted to come home and see my mother in the kitchen."

His latent bent toward art spurred Wimberley to pursue studies in painting, sculpture and pottery at Howard University. From a family of musicians and artists, "I’ve always been some kind of an artist, but I got better," said Wimberley, who is represented by the prestigious Berry Campbell Gallery in Manhattan. Christine Berry, a co-owner of the gallery with Martha Campbell, said his abstract paintings are highly sought-after around the nation.

Some of Wimberley’s works are included in "Color and Absence," a show at the Southampton Arts Center through Dec. 27. He is usually busy, dividing his time between his home in Sag Harbor, his studio in Corona, Queens, and Berry Campbell. Wimberley is married. He and his wife, Juanita, have a son, Walden, a musician.

Eazel Presents: Ann Purcell: Kali Poem Series

Spinning Figure, 1949
Oil on canvas
42 3/4 × 13 7/8 inches
Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust

"I just hope people see what's there," says Mike Solomon of the portraits comprising his latest exhibition, Scenes from the Pandemic, showing online this November through the Sarasota Art Museum. Drawn in colored pencil, the series captures, in part, the long terrible arc of that period in 2020, beginning as a tribute to black doctors and essential workers but ultimately spiraling into an emotional account of protesters and journalists under assault in a world caught on fire and an artist coming to terms with what he sees. Though isolated from his studio while caring for his mother during the pandemic, he couldn’t ignore the images on TV, the photographs arriving daily on the doorstep or his artist’s instinct gnawing at his inactivity.

“A dissatisfaction with being more remote than I wanted to be in terms of activism,” Solomon says. “I didn’t want to be outside of it looking in.” And in those photographs, he found himself struck by a particular aspect of the social unrest unfolding before him. “There are black doctors helping anyone who walks through the door,” he says. “Yet they take their scrubs off and walk outside and they might get shot. Can you imagine that?” So the renowned abstract artist picked up a colored pencil and tried something he hadn’t done in near 50 years: draw from a photograph. And as he did, he embarked on both an artistic and emotional journey.

Solomon admits to a certain “philosophical prejudice” against drawing from photo references, saying that he never quite understood why an artist would spend their time on such a pursuit when the photograph already exists. “Now I do,” he says. Not only did Solomon find the exercise an artistic challenge, more engaging and difficult than he had previously supposed, but he also found that, in forcing himself to absorb each image in minute detail and re-create it from his own hand, it awakened greater compassion for his subjects.

“I go down into this little world and the empathy emerges,” he says. “It’s a way of digesting it in an empathetic way you wouldn’t normally.” It’s an empathy that Solomon hopes his audience can partake in, if they just take a moment to stop and really see what has happened on their and his collective watch. And if the images in the papers didn’t get the point across, maybe seeing them in a different context will. “As soon as it becomes a ‘work of art,’ people stop a lot longer,” Solomon says. “That’s just the magic of art—it slows the moment down.” SRQ

Edward Avedisian: Reverberations
Berry Campbell
Reviewed by Franklin Einspruch

Too sloppy to be hard-edge but too crisp to be painterly - could we call them medium-edge? - the 1965 paintings of Edward Avedisian infuse Pop irreverence into a mode of painting that Darby Bannard called presentational abstraction, as if the art object "was staring right back at you like it was another person."

The compositional motif throughout the series is a striped ball or two sailing through the eighty-inch-plus color field. I was once an avid juggler and I am all but helpless with glee in front of these paintings. Nevertheless a few examples stand out. The orange and blue ball on the green background (all are untitled) hits an especially good color balance, with both the orange and the green reading as light. The orange and yellow ball on the burgundy background gets great mileage out of the staining effect of the acrylic. The "medium" of "medium-edge" would work as a double entendre, as the spill of paint past the drawn lines creates transparencies of color that turn these simple arrangements into pictures. Are they staring back, or am I?

In the 1930s, a group of trailblazing African-Americans bought plots for themselves in Sag Harbor, establishing a close-knit community that’s spanned multiple generations.

By: Sandra E. Garcia

Continuum
ERIC DEVER | MIKE SOLOMON | SUSAN VECSEY | FRANK WIMBERLEY
October 9 - 12, 2020

AVEDISIAN AT BERRY CAMPBELL: JUST WHAT THE DOCTOR ORDERED
September 26, 2020
By: Piri Halasz

Edward Avedisian (1936-2007) wasn't in "Post-Painterly Abstraction," the landmark show organized by Clement Greenberg in 1962.  He is, however, included in "Clement Greenberg: A Critic's Collection," the catalogue of work owned by the late critic and acquired by the Portland Art Museum in 2000. And, like other, better-known color-field painters, Avedisian evidently understood the importance of making beautiful art that can offer balm to the wounded soul even –or perhaps especially -- in the most trying times.

The twelve paintings in this show date from 1963 to 1965. This was a period wracked by Vietnam, the first upheavals of the civil rights movement, and the assassination of JFK.    And so this show comes like just what the doctor ordered in this equally if not more messed-up, politically toxic and disease-ridden New York moment of 2020. 

Go and feast your eyes on "Edward Avedisian: Reverberations" at Berry Campbell (through October 10). It will let you take a trip for a few brief moments out of the here and now..and will therefore allow you to return, refreshed & reinvigorated, to do whatever you think may need to be done with redoubled zeal.

I confess that Avedisian's name wasn't familiar to me when I walked into this show.  With the aid of the gallery's literature (as well as a bit of help from the web) I can report that he was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, and studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. After having had at least one show in the Boston area, he moved to New York in the late '50s.

There he studied a bit more (at the School of Visual Arts), and became involved with the adult New York art scene.  He was part of a whole younger generation of abstract artists: near-contemporaries included Darby Bannard (1934-2016), Frank Stella (b. 1936), and Larry Poons (b. 1937). From what l can tell, it seems that Avedisian's initial abstractions were painterly, in the tradition of first-generation abstract expressionism, and only became post-painterly later on.

He had a show in 1958 at the short-lived Hansa Gallery. Though it's not clear to me what kind of work he showed, the gallery was under the direction of Richard Bellamy & Ivan Karp, two live wires on the neo-Dada, pop-art front.

The Berry Campbell literature suggests that Avedisian combined the "hot" colors of pop with the "cool, more analytical qualities of Color Field painting."  Certainly, Avedisian's colors are bright, but I don't see any further analogies with the limited and coloristically obvious palette of the likes of Warhol, Wesselman, Rosenquist or Lichtenstein. 

Rather, I find most of Avedisian's colors far more varied & sophisticated than pop-art colors—fortunately (as far as I'm concerned).

All of these paintings are about circles, and of course circles are richly allusive: they are reminiscent of everything from suns, moon and stars to faces and bouncing balls – even (to be a little anachronistic) emojis.

 These shapes are not only allusive but also wonderfully cheerful.

And there seems to be a sort of progression in this show from paintings with two, three or five little balls – decorated in various ways --- to paintings with just one. 

The balls in the paintings with one ball in them are striped, like beach balls.   The biggest canvas, a majestic horizontal in deep purple, has only a small ball floating near its lower edge – this ball is striped with a lighter purple and orange.  It is a very impressive work.

But I guess my real favorites are the ones where the balls grow big, big and bigger, until they outgrow the canvas and only a portion of them can be shown---like the moon coming over a mountain.

There are five of these paintings in all, including one right at the entrance, one in the first gallery space, one (a smaller watercolor) in the central space, and two at the very back of the gallery.

The one I have chosen to reproduce hangs on the southernmost gallery wall. Here the circle has grown so big that only a quarter of it can be shown.  The circle has navy blue and lime green vertical stripes, while the field that it dominates is a rich cinnamon brown.  And the stripes descend from the top of the painting, making the ball look impossibly large and imposing.

But what is it, really?  The moon seen through a powerful telescope?  Or the ocean seen through a periscope? The magic of abstraction is it can be all of these – or none.

Christine Berry and Martha Campbell, the founders of Berry Campbell gallery in New York, seek to spotlight oft-overlooked artists who played pivotal roles in popular movements.

Christine Berry and Martha Campbell often finish each other’s sentences—and why wouldn’t they? The art dealers have worked together for nearly a decade, and decided to strike out on their own in 2013, founding Berry Campbell gallery in Chelsea, New York. Exhibiting postwar and contemporary work, the gallery seeks to showcase underrepresented artists who still played key roles in the popular movements. But, as Campbell notes, they don’t just stay in one lane: “We don’t have any real parameters—Christine and I have similar taste in terms of what we like.” On the occasion of the gallery’s latest show, “Edward Avedisian: Reverberations,” Surface caught up with the pair to discuss their role in the Chelsea gallery scene, the role of physical spaces in an increasingly digital world, and more. 

Tell me about the origins of Berry Campbell. What did you feel was missing in the Chelsea gallery community that you wanted to become? 

Campbell: Seven or eight years ago, Christine and I worked together at a large Midtown gallery specializing in American paintings and abstract expressionism, notably painters from from the East End of Long Island. We absolutely loved working together, and she had been in the business for about 15 years longer than I had, so I always felt she was a great mentor and confidante. When that gallery closed, I didn’t want to find a job working for “the man” at another gallery, so Christine and I talked. We discovered a gap in the Chelsea art scene: a few galleries showed artists that were well-respected back in their day, but for whatever reason—whether it was race, gender, or geography—they had fallen off the map. We felt that our role could be bringing these postwar and abstract expressionist artists back to the forefront by telling their stories and showcasing their contributions to the movement. 

What kinds of artists does the gallery represent, or seek to represent? You’ve been vocal about championing female artists. What kind of work speaks to you and adds to your roster?
Berry: Recently we’ve had some critical acclaim by featuring women artists from the 1950s who were part of the group of artists that you know, like Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Elaine de Kooning, but maybe didn’t have as wild of lives or as much written about them. We’ve done exhibitions of Perle Fine, who was part of the Ninth Street Show. She’s recently been exhibited at the Guggenheim, and we’ve represented her for more than eight years, so she’s finally getting her due. Yvonne Thomas is another artist from the 1950s whom we’ve shown twice. We’re trying to get the word out there.

You’re both so steeped in gallery and museum worlds, and have deep art historical backgrounds. What makes Berry Campbell different from your past ventures?

Campbell: It’s a true collaboration. Taking on artists and estates is truly personal because not only are you showing the artist’s work, you’re honoring their life. You have to truly believe in the wholeness of the artist and the people you work with. We’re always open to hearing ideas and seeing bodies of work that haven’t been seen before. Christine embraces my ideas, and I embrace Christine’s ideas. All of us work together. 

Has Berry Campbell added any exciting new artists to its roster recently?Campbell: Our most recent addition was Ida Kohlmeyer. We showed her work in the spring—it was supposed to only last a month, but lasted through the pandemic. 

Berry: She’s a New Orleans artist and is really wonderful. She started out as an abstract expressionist and then shifted her style to these great kind of hieroglyphic paintings. 

It’s exciting that you’ve reopened after months of online viewing rooms. How has Covid-19 impacted your programming? Has it made you reconsider the gallery’s role? 

Berry: We have a beautiful ground space on West 24th Street in Chelsea across from Gagosian and Matthew Marks. And before the pandemic, we used to have a hundred people come in on a Saturday afternoon, and then the gallery closed. We switched to having viewing rooms on our website, but I still believe that people need to see art in person. That’s why we’ll always go to museums and art galleries—you have to see a painting to experience it or see a sculpture outside to be a part of it. While the digital market is growing, you have to see something in person to get the true feeling and sense of scale.

Artists and Scholars on "blue." A Virtual Talk with Artist Susan Vecsey 
This is a virtual program through ZOOM
Thursday, September 10
4 pm
$10 members, $20 non-members

Now a rising star in the Hamptons art community, Susan Vecsey was a student of Graham Nickson at the New York Studio School and a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome in 2012. With solo museum and gallery shows, she has garnered such critical raves in the arts press for her “virtuoso painting.” Grab a favorite cocktail and join us for this lively and informative session in the comfort of your home.

At the same time, quarantine has compelled artists to connect with their communities in new ways. Jeremy Dennis, a tribal member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, is known for his photographs exploring issues of Indigenous identity and cultural assimilation. With exhibits and photoshoots cancelled, he now works with his father to restore the family’s house on the Shinnecock reservation. It will serve as his home, studio and as a communal art space for an artist residency. Roz Dimon works with the Children’s Museum of the East End to bring art to kids within the Latin American community, Zooming with them, and encouraging them to express their fears and joys. But unlike these artists, Mike Solomon had to leave town in February and head to Florida to care for his 102-year-old mom. While there, he met first responders at the Multicultural Health Institute, an organization dedicated to health care for African Americans. The gripping reality of Black physicians risking their lives—first on the pandemic’s front lines, and then again, walking along the street as people of color—moved Solomon to honor them. In a departure from his abstract paintings and sculpture, he has produced a compelling series of pencil drawings, portraits of Black physicians that unfurl the disturbing personal and political imperatives underlying this coronavirus saga.

This evolving archival project hanging on a video grid invites us into artists’ studios, to glimpse their stuff amidst their artworks, to glean the curator’s response to today’s predicament for artists and museums, and to preserve an intimate anthology of artists’ stories during the pandemic.

The New York Academy of Art is taking up a five-month residency at the Southampton Arts Center, where it will present 2020 Vision, a spectacular exhibition featuring over 60 artists and writers. Co-curated by Academy President David Kratz and Stephanie Roach of the FLAG Art Foundation, and edited by Emma Gilbey Keller, 2020 Vision will be on display from Saturday, July 25 through Sunday, December 27.

"The pain, loss and uncertainty of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The awakening cry for social justice following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery and many others. The unnerving possibility of global recession. 2020 has already experienced seismic events that are shifting values and shaping our choices as citizens and as creators," Kratz and Roach noted. "Artists and writers are always the antennae of our society, all the more so at a time as challenging as this one.  They have an opportunity—some might say, a duty—to interpret this moment and imagine the world not only as it is, but also as it could be."

2020 Vision will encompass visual artworks from art students and rising stars to contemporary icons, as well as a myriad of texts, such as poetry and essays, and video diaries.

"This is the guiding challenge of the group exhibition, 2020 Vision.  We asked artists, writers, and creative thinkers to consider three questions of critical importance: Our lives will never be the same, but what will change look like? What do we want to keep as we rebuild? And what must we guard against?" they said.

Christine Berry appointed as part of the Awards Committee for the New York Studio School 2020 Alumni Exhibition: Mercedes Matter Awards Announcement & Discussion

“In Between,” the title of Susan Vecsey’s show, refers both to the strange period of quarantine we currently find ourselves living in, as well as the double nature of the painter’s work, in which she floats an acquaintance with artists such as Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler and their landscape-influenced abstractions with her own experience of non-objective art in response to the natural world (Vecsey lives part of the time in East Hampton). The work is subtle, deliberately beautiful, and historically cognizant of the New York School and its history during the past half-century, in particular the ongoing perceptions of a Color Field predilection. If one felt compelled to make a choice, it can be said that the works tend to lean in the direction of landscape; their simplicity makes them strong in an abstract sense, but we never lose the implication that we are close to land, to water, and to the sky. Individually, the paintings are attractive, but there is also a cumulative effect, in which the paintings work a sympathetic magic by creating a pastel-like mood and atmosphere, in which both the beauty of nature and also of art are handled with a notable measure and restraint.

The condition of being in between needs to be remarked upon; much of good painting today plays with the idea that an imagery can share aspects of stylistic genres that play off of difference in their essence. Yet it can be noted that nothing is purely abstract nor entirely figurative. Elements or parts of the painting can flow in and out of meanings that take on both styles. It is hard to see both approaches occurring in the same moment; we remember those visual paradoxes where, looked at one way, the image represents one kind of object; and then, when the mental intelligence shifts, another image comes into being--but both images cannot be processed at the same time. Perhaps Vecsey’s general achievement is to render a visual system that jumps from a particular manner of looking into another. While this process is not new--we have the extraordinary achievement of Rothko, mentioned above--its innate complexity and willingness to occupy different ways of seeing within the same composition make it wonderfully current, not to mention extraordinarily interesting as art.

 
Frank Wimberley
All About Ronnie

Susan Vecsey
Untitled (Yellow / Lavender)

Sam Gilliam, Ribboned II, featured on Widewalls newsletter

In this video, Jill Nathanson gives a tour of her studio in Hoboken, New Jersey, featuring some of her paintings in progress.

Writing in 1981 of paintings made between 1955 and 1962, critic Theodore F. Wolff claimed that the work of Abstract Expressionist painter Yvonne Thomas (1913–2009) “reminds us that good painting is good painting regardless of the form it takes.”1 Wolff’s assertion must make the sober and disinterested scholar a little queasy, but it is typical, if somewhat strident, of criticism of Thomas’s work, in that it combines an appeal to quality with an acknowledgement of historical contingency. In this way it demonstrates the problem that Thomas’s work poses for educated viewers. Criticism of the last half century has tended to homogenize and dismiss gestural abstraction as an embodiment of inadvisably idealistic values, and as a foil to or baseline for the performative, sculptural, or photographic work that repudiated or grew from this kind of painting—consider for example the work of Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019). While painting itself currently enjoys wide and varied manifestations, and claims about Thomas’s sheer quality proliferate, a certain familiar aspect to her abstraction, as is evident in Summer Fantasy (1954; Pl. 1), was noticed in published criticism as early as 1956. This did not prevent Dore Ashton from attributing to her “genuinely fresh insights,” nor Donald Judd from excepting her from his nearuniversal condemnation of gestural abstraction with a positive review in 1960. 2

Born Yvonne Navello in Nice, France, in 1913, she moved to Boston with her family in 1926. She showed an interest and aptitude for art from an early age, and following studies at the Cooper Union began a career in commercial art in the 1930s. She married Leonard Thomas in 1938 (they lived in Newport, Rhode Island, during the war), and maintained close ties with the New York art world throughout her life (Fig. 1). She attended the Art Students League in 1940, and studied with Vaclav Vytacil. She also had private lessons with Dimitri Romanovsky (a Russian artist specializing in nudes and portraiture), and attended the Ozenfant School of Art. Nearly every published account of Thomas’s work mentions her participation in the innovative and short-lived painting workshop entitled “The Subjects of the Artists,” which ran from 1948 to 1949 and was initiated but abandoned by Clyfford Still and taken up by Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, and David Hare. Barnett Newman joined in the second year. These sessions were an avenue for the five burgeoning Abstract Expressionists to share with an equal number of interested students, Thomas among them, their incipient methods of free painting, bidden by one’s  inclinations in the face of the materials and presumably conditioned by the subconscious mind. Ten years later and throughout her life, this sense of freedom remained in her paintings and works on paper, as a small but expansive gouache shows (Fig. 2; 1959).The aim, as Robert Hobbs and Barbara Cavaliere have shown in their landmark 1977 article, “Against a Newer Laocoon,” was to allow a less literary, less illustrative surrealism to take root. 3

In 1950 she enrolled in one of Hans Hofmann’s summer classes, and in the next decade was included in group exhibitions of artists identified with Abstract Expressionism, including those at New York’s Stable Gallery, from 1953 to 1957. The—only relative—belatedness with which Thomas came to Abstract Expressionism, the stylistic variety she pursued, and the nuanced and revealing critical account that exists, together resonate with contemporary concerns about painting’s viability that are rooted in midcentury abstraction and its reception. Continue Reading

This exhibition titled "Cloistered" by Ida Kohlmeyer at the Berry Campbell Gallery consists of paintings and sculptures from the late 1960s, before she turned to the hieratic abstractions of her later career. In some ways the paintings on show relate to abstract elements found in the art of Georgia O’Keeffe and Hilma af Klint (the early 20th century Swedish abstractionist); they consist of mostly diamond-shaped patterns, with a couple of circular compositions. Kohlmeyer was educated and taught at Tulane University in New Orleans; she studied in Provincetown in the middle Fifties with the German-born teacher and abstract painter Hans Hofmann. In the paintings available to us, we see distinguished, soft-edged nonobjective imagery, in which geometric forms become vehicles for understated emotion. The colors are softly muted, communicating the artist’s ability to transmit feeling through simple designs and quite hues.

While not exactly a serial art, this kind of abstraction builds its effects through repetition of forms from one painting to the next. The diamond-shaped designs hold our interest by building a narrowing focus into the very center of the paintings, which can contain different shapes often circles, but also crosses and slits. They offer a kind of artist’s vernacular; the shapes repeat themselves and create links joining one painting to another. As a result, the body of work joins individual voices to a communal process that asks Kohlmeyer’s audience to appreciate their cumulative effect. Thus, a particularly successful variation within unity occurs, full in keeping with a lot of painting being done at the time these works were made. The larger question, Does such repetitiveness add or detract from the experience of the work? This can be considered as something more theoretical--in the case of Kohlmeyer, the accomplishments brought about by such an approach are genuine, in part because the differences from one painting to the next which are large enough to enable us to see the works as individual efforts rather than as nearly identical compositions.

In “Cloistered” (1969), Kohlmeyer has painted a thin, mostly brown diamond with a thinner dark purple stripe re-enforcing the overall shape, inside of which is another diamond, outlined in white and surrounded by a haze of the same dark-purple color. Inside the confines of the white diamond is a thin, yellow-brown, vertically aligned lozenge, flanked on either side by purple and then dark-brown stripes--the same colors used to define the outer diamond. The title might well refer to the oval deep in the center of the painting; it might even convey something of the spiritual mood that exists in the work. Whatever the motivation for the painting is, the experience of Kohlmeyer’s effort is fully satisfying. It suggests, in abstract fashion, a place of refuge and solace. An untitled work, circa 1969, consists of a five-pointed star shape, within which is a white diamond with a circle in the middle. Outside this puzzle of shapes are found a pentangle of red paint, along with a pink area, following the form of the pentangle in a rough manner, linearly contained by a dark-brown line. Certainly, the star is abstract enough, but the image conveys a primal feeling not unaligned with the spirit.

Kohlmeyer’s shapes can hardly be seen as devotional, yet they are so basic as to be archetypal reworking of forms that may have had spiritual meaning in other, earlier cultures. In “Black Insert” (1968), we see a black diamond shape, in the middle of which is the vertical lozenge; this amalgam of forms is supported by quadrants of off white, defined by green stripes of middling width that outline the diamond. The green lines create a cross behind the diamond that does not in any way evoke a Christian aura. 

The possibility of external reference, beyond the abstract form, cannot be entirely dismissed. It would be a major mistake to see the works of art as intimating an atmosphere of piety. It is just that the forms in these completely abstract paintings are so archaic as to raise questions about their origins beyond the intentions of the artist. This happens inevitably. In “Suspended” (1968), we meet more rounded forms: a curving hourglass shape dominates the painting, with rows of undulating, differently colored lines embellishing the upper and lower register of the form. Outside this hourglass is a background of whitish, slate blue curved like a circle. Beyond that, there exists a green diamond, with four pinkish mauve triangles, one in each of the cardinal directions. Finally, a smudged light-yellow band follows the edge of the green diamond.

Think of all the meanings, nuances, and implications embedded in the word “cloistered,” and they reside here in Ida Kohlmeyer’s series of that title, executed in the late 1960s and now on virtual view at Berry Campbell Gallery through May 23. The earliest of these works were produced in 1968, the same year Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey came out, and many of them have the wary and watchful quality of the monotonic computer HAL, which loses faith in its human chaperones in Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film.

In Kohlmeyer’s paintings, there is a protected conceptual space lying just below the surface of the canvas, under a layer of sparingly applied oil paint and graphite. This is the imaginary volumetric structure for most of Kohlmeyer’s imagery in this series: a somber interior zone peeks out through a central oculus, or blossoms in an undulating vegetal sprout. The relationship of painting to the viewer is reversed as the spectator is surveilled by an alien eye. Kohlmeyer paints this cloistered presence into her works with varying degrees of directness. Black Insert” (1968) simply presents a black diamond with a lightly incised rectilinear form floating, shadowy, within it. By contrast, the final painting in the show, Cloistered (1969), stares out obsessively from the back of the gallery. A cross is carefully etched on the lozenge of the eye, a detail that makes the viewer feel as if the painting broodingly judges them. Kohlmeyer's reclusive entities carry with them all the accompanying angst, sadness, concealment, and, at times, anger, that arise from an unwilling sequestration.

There’s also a more immediate structural interpretation: most of the works are geometric, but with relaxed hand-drawn lines, and play on the symmetry and proportion of medieval walled gardens—the literal cloister. The picture plane is quartered or in some cases halved, and has a central element that serves as a point of arrival for the vectors of the painting and attracts the eye of the viewer. In this central position, Kohlmeyer typically substitutes something dark and glowering for the babbling fountains and cheerful plantings most of us know from the Cloisters museum in Fort Tryon Park. Of the paintings on view, the most Kubrickian watcher of all is the bisected black cornea and dilated pupil of Cloister #5 (1968). But there are exceptions, and Kohlmeyer does occasionally traffic in less emotionally fraught effects. Cloistered #12 (c. 1969) culminates in a colorful black/blue and pink/yellow floret, while Suspended (1968), with its palette of bright grass greens, iris, and greenish yellow, is very upbeat, and seemingly Easter-themed, including a central egg-shaped form decorated with arcs and bands. Kohlmeyer’s sculptures are variations on the theme of the paintings, but play with the idea of multiplicity. Canvas stretched over wood, they are paintings moved off the wall and placed in space, toying with a front and back in three dimensions. Stacked #1 (1969), is a tower of three cubes, with fecund buds centered on each surface: the painting now overlooks the entire room like a cyborg lighthouse.

There are obvious relationships that can be drawn between Kohlmeyer’s paintings and human anatomy—eyes and other organs are most obvious. But the repetitive crosses and ecclesiastically-specific architectural titles reiterate a spiritual and symbolic subtext that moves beyond mere floral or organic models. It is hard to say what the message is—the works themselves, juxtaposing bright colors with a forlorn presence, may not have decided for themselves. Before she created the works on view at Berry Campbell, Kohlmeyer’s style was Abstract Expressionist, influenced by Rothko and Gorky. The artist also studied under Hans Hofmann in Provincetown in the mid-fifties. Her later work would go on to explore ideas of pattern and multiplicity—Berry Campbell offers a striking example of this period in Color Stripes (1980). The Cloister series and its auxiliary works seem to represent an interlude of sorts, during which the artist explored a closer, but riskier, engagement with the viewer. These paintings have a pathos to them, but never veer into the outright horror or fury of Lee Bontecou’s dark blank lacunae from the late 1950s and early 1960s. As with all series carried out over just a few years, it’s impossible to tell if Kohlmeyer could have continued to walk the fine line between gripping emotional connectedness and over-the-top sentimentality, but for this short span, she certainly pulled it off.

In this video, Christine Berry speaks on Abstract Expressionist, Syd Solomon.

The outdoor exhibition on Long Island featured works installed at properties from Hampton Bays to Montauk, with social isolation as just one theme.

No one was supposed to get too close to each other over the weekend during a drive-by exhibition of works by 52 artists on the South Fork of Long Island — a dose of culture amid the sterile isolation imposed by the pandemic. But some people couldn’t help themselves...

There was spontaneous interaction. The artist Bastienne Schmidt, dressed in a bright blue pea coat and red pants, waved to those who checked out her installation of canvas-wrapped posts set six feet apart at the Bridgehampton home she shares with her husband, the photographer Philippe Cheng. Kathryn McGraw Berry, an architect sampling the tour in a champagne-colored Audi, chatted with Eric Dever, who was checking the wind resistance of his 12 paintings mounted on posts at his 18th-century Water Mill home.

"#meansformakers Please join us for raising COVID19 relief funds for @cerfplus by sharing a favorite artist or artisan that inspires you. @arteriorshome will donate funds for each of our posts to @cerfplus who will in turn support the skilled artists of the artisans society. Just post your favorite maker’s work and tag @arteriors home and #meansformakers I am sharing several projects showcasing custom pieces done by some of the incredible artisans we continually work with. The work of each of these artisans truly makes each of our projects shine."

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Artist's Choice: Interconnected
May 7 - June 7, 2020
View Exhibition

Berry Campbell is pleased to announce Artist’s Choice: Interconnected, an exclusive online exhibition of works from gallery’s inventory chosen by Berry Campbell’s represented contemporary artists. Eric Dever, Judith Godwin, Ken Greenleaf, Jill Nathanson, Ann Purcell, Mike Solomon, Susan Vecsey, James Walsh, Joyce Weinstein, and Frank Wimberley have thoughtfully selected one work from our gallery inventory that they associate with their own creative process and artistic journey. This artist-curated exhibition is an inquiry into the lines of influence and connections within our Berry Campbell artist community. Artist’s Choice: Interconnected launches digitally May 7, 2020.

The choices are sometimes expected, and at other times, surprising.  Some artists were inspired by a painting from an artist they had never met, and others paid tribute to old friends or mentors.  Judith Godwin recalls good times with her old friend and art dealer, Betty Parsons.  James Walsh remembers a painting by Walter Darby Bannard from a 1981 show at Knoedler Gallery.  Mike Solomon pays homage to the perseverance of abstract painter and dear friend, Frank Wimberley saying: “The quiet intermingling of his experience, with the purity of painting, gives his abstractions an authenticity and delicacy that is profound to witness.”  Ken Greenleaf favorite is Cloistered #5 (1968) by Ida Kohlmeyer, delighting in the pure abstraction.  Jill Nathanson picked a color-field forerunner, Dan Christensen.  Ann Purcell admitted to being picky but found true inspiration after visiting our Yvonne Thomas show repeatedly.  Eric Dever ruminates about Charlotte Park: “Like a favorite poem, novel or even film, a painting can be a touchstone, something one returns to with certain regularity; perhaps a gauge of some kind, beginning with personal happiness on the occasion of discovery and new revelation as our lives unfold.”  Joyce Weinstein finds parallels with John Opper.  Susan Vecsey loves the “stillness and movement” of Elaine de Kooning’s Six Horses, Blue Wall (1987).  No coincidence that Vecsey lives down the road from the Elaine de Kooning house in the Hamptons. Frank Wimberley recalls of Herman Cherry: “He was one of the East End artists who wished to me to succeed.”

ABOUT BERRY CAMPBELL
Christine Berry and Martha Campbell have many parallels in their backgrounds and interests. Both studied art history in college, began their careers in the museum world, and later worked together at a major gallery in midtown Manhattan. Most importantly, however, Berry and Campbell share a curatorial vision.

Both art dealers developed a strong emphasis on research and networking with artists and scholars during their art world years. They decided to work together, opening Berry Campbell Gallery in 2013 in the heart of New York's Chelsea art district, at 530 West 24th Street on the ground floor. In 2015, the gallery expanded, doubling its size with an additional 2,000 square feet of exhibition space.

Highlighting a selection of postwar and contemporary artists, the gallery fulfills an important gap in the art world, revealing a depth within American modernism that is just beginning to be understood, encompassing the many artists who were left behind due to race, gender, or geography-beyond such legendary figures as Pollock and de Kooning. Since its inception, the gallery has been especially instrumental in giving women artists long overdue consideration, an effort that museums have only just begun to take up, such as in the 2016 traveling exhibition, Women of Abstract Expressionism, curated by University of Denver professor Gwen F. Chanzit. This show featured work by Perle Fine and Judith Godwin, both represented by Berry Campbell, along with that of Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, and Joan Mitchell. In 2019, Berry Campbell's exhibition, Yvonne Thomas: Windows and Variations (Paintings 1963 - 1965) was reviewed by Roberta Smith for the New York Times, in which Smith wrote that Thomas, "... kept her hand in, adding a fresh directness of touch, and the results give her a place in the still-emerging saga of postwar American abstraction.”

In addition to Perle Fine and Judith Godwin, artists whose work is represented by the gallery include Edward Avedisian, Walter Darby Bannard, Stanley Boxer, Dan Christensen, Eric Dever, John Goodyear, Ken Greenleaf, Raymond Hendler, Ida Kohlmeyer, Jill Nathanson, John Opper, Stephen Pace, Charlotte Park, William Perehudoff, Ann Purcell, Mike Solomon, Syd Solomon, Albert Stadler, Yvonne Thomas, Susan Vecsey, James Walsh, Joyce Weinstein, Frank Wimberley, Larry Zox, and Edward Zutrau. The gallery has helped promote many of these artists' careers in museum shows including that of Bannard at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2018-19); Syd Solomon, in a traveling museum show which culminates at the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota and has been extended through 2021; Stephen Pace at The McCutchan Art Center/Pace Galleries at the University of Southern Indiana (2018) and at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (2019); and Vecsey and Mike Solomon at the Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina (2017 and 2019, respectively); and Eric Dever at the Suffolk Community College, Riverhead, New York (2020). In an April 3, 2020 New York Times review of Berry Campbell's exhibition of Ida Kohlmeyer's Cloistered paintings, Roberta Smith stated: “These paintings stunningly sum up a moment when Minimalism was giving way to or being complicated by something more emotionally challenging and implicitly feminine and feminist. They could hang in any museum.”

Collaboration is an important aspect of the gallery. With the widened inquiries and understandings that have resulted from their ongoing discussions about the art world canon, the dealers feel a continual sense of excitement in the discoveries of artists and research still to be made.

Berry Campbell is located in the heart of the Chelsea Arts District at 530 West 24th Street, Ground Floor, New York, NY 10011.  For further information, contact us at 212.924.2178, info@berrycampbell.com or www.berrycampbell.com.

During this time of quarantine, we have witnessed an unprecedented amount of creative output online, ranging from internationally acclaimed artists performing on stage, to cozy living room concerts. As Guild Hall continues to release our own new and historic virtual programming, we want to make it easier for you to find arts and cultural resources from the artists and places we love in a single aggregate list. 

Below you will find creative resources for artists, families, children and adults. Please note: This is a living document, growing daily. Check back often, and feel free to suggest additions by emailing info@guildhall.org with the Subject: Monster List.

VIRTUAL ACCESS TO ARTS & CULTURE INSTITUTIONS

Berry Campbell | Ida Kohlmeyer: Cloistered

Gallery hop from Sydney to Miami at any time of day with these shows.

“Cloistered” at Berry Campbell, New York

Ida Kohlmeyer, Cloistered #5 (1968). Courtesy of Berry Campbell Gallery.

Philip Pavia (1911-2005), the pioneering first-generation son of an Italian stone carver, "turned rocks into art." The Times of London called Pavia "arguably more of an original than some of his better-known contemporaries." He was rare among his peers for sculpting abstract and figurative art, and he took full advantage of a lengthy 74-year career to develop his reach. Although he started his career as a draftsman and watercolorist, Pavia ultimately made his mark with a body of work that spanned all-abstract bronzes, black-and-white abstractions in Carrara marble and, just prior to his death in 2005, at aged 94, a dozen monumental terracotta heads.

In this video, Christine Berry speaks about Ida Kohlmeyer and Berry Campbell's current exhibition, Ida Kohlmeyer: Cloistered.

Here are eight of the most memorable works from the Dallas Art Fair's virtual edition.

Chelsea dealers Christine Berry and Martha Campbell did not spend quite so much time on the quiddities of the online format, instead relying on old-fashioned connoisseurship, curation, and an eye for sourcing work that looks better over time to put together an excellent display anchored by female artists from the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. Some, like Mary Abbott, Perle Fine, Judith Godwin, and Ninth Street Women star Grace Hartigan were undervalued during their lifetime. Others, like Charlotte Park, Sally Michel Avery, and Elaine de Kooning were overshadowed by their artist husbands. One, Betty Parsons, was overshadowed by herself—with her painting career long seen as secondary to her illustrious run as one of New York’s top dealers of Abstract Expressionist art.

This witty painting of a solitary red moth against a brushy blue background plays against the pieties of AbEx orthodoxy, being at once an abstract all-over composition that emphasizes the picture plane and a not-very-abstract-at-all (though Fauvist) portrait of a bug on a wall.

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Betty Parsons: The Moth, 1969, at Berry Campbell, New York – price on application

Although known primarily as a gallerist who championed Abstract Expressionism, Betty Parsons (1900-1982) has recently been gaining increased recognition for her own art, including a solo show at Alison Jacques in London. This is certainly a radical way of tackling figure / ground issues, and one which we can now see presents an unimpeachable degree of social distancing.

9. “Ida Kohlmeyer: Cloistered” at Berry Campbell Gallery

During her lifetime, the New Orleans painter Ida Kohlmeyer won acclaim in her native Louisiana for her abstract, often jubilantly colored canvases that hovered between gridded arrangements of Rothko-esque fields of color (in fact, she counted the AbEx giant as a friend and mentor) and the mark-making lyricism of Cy Twombly. 

A much different and little-known set of her early works can be glimpsed in “Cloistered,” a new online exhibition at Berry Campbell. Made in 1968–69, these paintings almost have the appearance of aerial maps of ancient citadels with concentric bands of geometric shapes surrounding a point of central focus. While showing the influences of Georgia O’Keeffe in places and contemporaries like Kenneth Noland in others, the works also speak to the artist’s fascination with interest in Mesoamerican art (which she voraciously collected) and in cultivating a vocabulary of hieroglyphs, emblems, and ritual meaning, which here collide into a feminine vision of Abstract Expressionism. 

—Katie White

Berry Campbell Celebrates Women's History Month

Ida Kohlmeyer
VIDEO: Virtual Exhibition Walkthrough

Women of Abstract Expressionism 
Inventory Highlights
View Exhibition

Ann Purcell
Upcoming Exhibition: Kali Poems
View Works by Ann Purcell

Judith Godwin
Forbes Magazine: Add to Your list of '5 Women Artists' at These Museums Around The United States
by Chadd Scott

Charlotte Park
Client Testimonial: 
"Extremely gratifying to see Paul Kasmin Gallery's eye-opening summer show, Painters of the East End reviewed by Erin Kimmel in this month's Art in America . And smiled extra wide that AbEx talent Charlotte Park is written up in the same paragraph as — and holds her own with— Joan Mitchell. 'Park's virtuosic oil and crayon compositions (ca. 1965 and 1967) feature dendrite-like configurations in a palette of bright pinks, yellows and blues that appear frozen mid twist.' Ten years ago Christine Berry, owner of one of the most engaging and provocative galleries in Chelsea, Berry Campbell, thankfully introduced me to the work of Charlotte Park, who died in 2010 at age 92 in Montauk, where she lived and painted. She was the wife of artist James Brooks, supporting his career at the expense of her own, and dear friends and neighbors of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner." 
-Adam Beckerman
View Works by Charlotte Park 

Yvonne Thomas
Eazel Interactive Exhibition | Yvonne Thomas: Windows and Variations (1963-1965) 

Susan Vecsey
blue. 
Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, New York
View Works by Susan Vecsey

Jill Nathanson
LINEA: Studio Notes from the Art Students League of New York
Artist Snapshot: Jill Nathanson 

Perle Fine
What We See, How We See
Through April 2021
Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York
View Works by Perle Fine

Joyce Weinstein
Postwar Women
Curated by William Corwin
The Art Students League, New York
View Works by Joyce Weinstein

In this video, James Walsh gives an artist talk for his exhibition, James Walsh: THE ELEMENTAL.

March 14 - July 5, 2020
Nassau County Museum of Art
Roslyn Harbor, New York

What color means more to us than blue? Even among the primaries, the color of the sky and sea commands a privileged place, by far the most popular hue in the spectrum according to surveys on every continent. Blue casts its spell, pushing beyond symbolism to a deeper emotional level, drawing us into its pure and distant mysteries. Every artist goes through a “blue period,” from the Mediterranean blues of Matisse and Yves Klein to the haunting auras of Redon. Blue has been holy to Egyptian, Hindu, Chinese and Western traditions. Its physical sources (cobalt, ultramarine, cerulean, indigo, lapis lazuli, cyan) are a catalogue of valued materials that rival gold itself. As this exhibition exuberantly proves, the power of blue transcends art history. Poets, filmmakers, musicians and designers have tapped its resonant appeal. The most original music in America (home of bluejeans, “democracy in fashion”) is the blues. We are turning the entire museum over to the multi-media exploration of blue in many incarnations. It spans history and geography, from the precious lapis lazuli of antiquity to paintings, photographs, sculpture, ceramics, cyanotypes, and fashion. As Miró said, “This is the color of my dreams.”

Contributed by Kim Uchiyama / “Specific Forms” at Loretta Howard Gallery illuminates a particular moment in 20th century art history where works created by a variety of artists occupied the space between the then diverging ideologies of a young Donald Judd and those of the older critic Clement Greenberg. Saul Ostrow has curated a finely-tuned exhibit that demonstrates the highly individual modes of thought that were at play during this transitional time, ideas distinct from the critical positions of Minimalism, Pop and Color-field.

The movement known as Abstract Expressionism – a “movement” itself comprised of highly individualistic artists – can be seen in retrospect as the physical and psychological response to the global tensions of World War II. Mary Gabriel, in Ninth Street Women, her invaluable contribution to understanding the full scope of this era, emphasizes the war – and the lead up to war – as the underpinning for the formation of a new American art which would reflect the exigencies of the moment. The works in “Specific Forms” came about because these times had changed. Post-war America lacked the angst of the 1940s and 1950s, and was increasingly replaced in the 1960s and 1970s by an art that sought to look to itself reflexively, on its own terms – the thing being the thing itself.

 In an era characterized by an implicit questioning of authority and established norms, these fourteen artists sought to break the mold of existing “-isms” and are seemingly preoccupied in creating a new consciousness via their art. The resulting works are highly specific unto themselves and characterized by strikingly individualistic terms for their existence.

Perle Fine | The Accordment Series 
February 13 - March 14, 2020

In this video, Eric Dever is interviewed by Patrick Christiano.

The success of an exhibition, or any work of art for that matter, is its ability to engage the viewer. Engagement can be a bit more difficult to achieve when you eliminate any sort of representation, as with the current exhibition at the Hofstra Museum of Art, Uncharted: American Abstraction in the Information Age. The fact that this show truly connects with the viewer – in this instance, partly through the use and influence of technology – illustrates the more thought provoking side of abstract art. Organized by Karen T. Albert, Acting Director and Chief Curator, with essays by Laurie Fendrich and Creighton Michael, Uncharted quickly draws you in through a variety of means that include everything from hi-tech contraptions to mesmerizing optics. When curiosity is piqued and perceptions are expanded, the viewer becomes part of the expression – a key difference between completely spelled out narrative representational art and non-representational abstraction. That unavoidable brain activity that is prompted by something new or visually foreign is very different than the comfort that straight representation brings.

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The kinetic sculptures of James Seawright add a strong technological component to the exhibition. Using various sensors, Twins (1992) can be a bit sensitive to the movements in its immediate environment adding to its already palpable creepiness. Gemini (2004) and Lyra (2006) movements and lights are completely preprogrammed. As objects, they give the impression of designs for futuristic theater or movie sets. Despite the fact that all these works are between 14 and 28 years old, they maintain their immediacy and freshness. Like Lynne Harlow’s All Above the Moon, John Goodyear offers another aspect of physical participation for the viewer. By carefully swaying the picket fence-like apparatus in front of his two paintings, the art immediately becomes animated with short bursts of movement. Figurative Abstraction (2015) has an almost hypnotic effect on the viewer when it is activated – something like fabric billowing in the wind. The result with Diving Board (1983) is quite different. It shows a person’s feet continually being propelled by a very springy board, while offering much needed humor to the omnipresence of more elusive technology.

“If you have a minute, can I read you a poem quickly?”

With ample encouragement, artist Eric Dever clears his throat and begins. “Forever – is composed of Nows – / ‘Tis not a different time,” he recites. “Except for Infiniteness – / And Latitude of Home.”

He continues, the last two verses of the celebrated Emily Dickinson poem haunting as ever as they teach a crucial lesson: Every moment that has ever existed was, is or will be a present moment, a “now,” and the infinite is composed of them.
And forever stops for no one. It is with Dickinson’s words in mind that, last year, Dever began a new series of work. Each painting would be inspired by sequential lines of “Forever – Is Composed of Nows –,” the next canvas evolving from the previous.

And not long after he started, Dever cast the idea aside, out of sheer frustration — until recently. “Not too long ago, I realized the way to approach it is not to try to illustrate the poem, but to just select certain paintings and put them together, and that could very much hold the idea,” he said. “For me, I think an artist’s entire oeuvre, if we look at it, it really is a collection of ‘nows,’ and it’s not just ‘nows’ that are in the past. When I engage with my work over time, it’s almost as if that time or that place was in crystal. It’s very clear, the whole thing.”

Dever’s newest body of work, “A Thousand Nows” — on view at The Lyceum Gallery on Suffolk County Community College’s Eastern Campus in Riverhead — is a study in compressed time, the 22 exuberant oils layered with colors that span the artist’s lifetime, from his earliest memories growing up in California.

Not necessarily spiked, each painting by New York artist James (familiarly Jim) Walsh instead crests like an eggy spire of Pavlova meringue; is viewed head-on as the subtle terrain of a human face. Painted on canvas then mounted, the pure paint impressively lifts off without the assistance of plaster or other molding material. Walsh’s work is distinct from other Modernist abstraction by its textural quality. His life-long professional experience with Golden Paints has rendered him an expert technician and master of patience. The paintings on view at Berry Campbell forego major scale in favor of a very concentrated surface, apprehending the viewer’s eye from an intimate distance. The show’s title "The Elemental," might allude to Robert Rauschenberg’s Elemental Paintings, which gave agency to both the vibrant life and eventual degradation of materials used, or feel back further to Renaissance elemental conception. Questions of alchemy, preservation, handling, and drying time are all brought to light by the reliefs of Walsh.

The compositions themselves range from tufted and pouty to petri dish to epic mixing bowl. There are obvious clusters of like-minded pieces, sharing color or arrangement. For example, BLEND, NATURAL, and MAGENTA MAJOR are unified by a lippy palette and quenelle bulge. CRIN CRIN and Untitled both utilize a radioactive green, smeared and smattered, respectively. On one wall, a pod of miniatures express continuity with crinkly white-on-black contrast, blue wash, and confetti drippage. 

Pieces like SAND SOUND align themselves in the lineage of Color Field painter Jules Olitski. SAND SOUND, as well as POSITIVE VENUS, resemble slick sea glass. These pieces recall Olitski’s Plexiglas, 1986 show at KASMIN, particularly Dream Time (1986). Olitski’s hovering color—manifested by the illusion of the depth of glass—is taken up materially by Walsh. SAND SOUND, largely gray and green, achieves a texture that is at once sludge and mist, appearing wet almost. 

Featured Artworks in Gallery Network

James Walsh, Untitled, 2018, featured on Artnet.