As the blooms of spring emerge, so does a fresh wave of artistic brilliance in the heart of New York City. This season, the cultural landscape is filled with groundbreaking exhibitions that not only captivate the senses but also honor the remarkable contributions of female artists.
Art Galleries & Museums
In the immortal words of The Doors frontman Jim Morrison: “People are strange.” It’s a song that George Condo happened to be listening to in his studio one day and it became the title of his latest show inaugurating Hauser & Wirth’s new West Hollywood location.
What could be more charming and ridiculous than a show that situates itself at the intersection between opulence and buttocks? This inventive gathering pulls together unlikely paintings, sculptures, and even video to intermingle and invite visual and verbal puns.
I graduated college in the early 1970s and wrote my Master’s thesis on Carlos Castaneda and Moksha as a form of Liberation. At that time, I was reading Alan Watts and Joseph Campbell, attending Sufi dance performances, going through Jungian therapy, studying William Blake, and even contemplating a trip to Lindisfarne.
With, “Entrance to the Mind: Drawings by George Condo,” The Morgan Library offers a modest, but impactful, survey of the artist’s works on paper dating as far back as the mid-1970s.
On Monday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced the latest on their agenda: Nairy Baghramian will premiere work for the building’s facade commission, and Jacolby Satterwhite will be featured in the Great Hall beginning this September
Thematically and stylistically, Wangechi Mutu’s art is a bubbling stew of ingredients that don’t always cohere. Part Afro-Futurism, part cyber-punk, and part body horror, Mutu’s sculptures, collages, and mixed-media paintings cover a lot of ground.
Greater attention is often paid to the causes of wars than to their aftermath. The Boston Tea Party of 1773 is immortalized in paintings, but the resettlement of defeated American Loyalists after 1783 is not.
In the hotly contested battleground of Gender Studies, art historian Jonathan D. Katz is a trailblazer. He was the first tenured faculty in Gay and Lesbian Studies in the United States and has curated more queer-related art exhibitions than anyone else worldwide.
The Gordon Parks Foundation recently opened Bisa Butler: Materfamilias, an exhibition of new textile based works by Bisa Butler. This show, the culmination of Butler’s 2022 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship, fuses Butler’s quilt-making practice with the photography of Gordon Park
