On June 29, the collaborative project Condo, which invites galleries to stage exhibitions outside their home city, opened its second New York iteration. Founded in London in 2016, Condo has since expanded to host cities across the world, including Mexico City, Shanghai, and São Paulo. This year’s New York roster of 47 galleries across 21 spaces is similarly international, engaging participants from Cairo to Dubai to Auckland with particularly robust domestic and Western European representation.
Art Galleries & Museums
This week the Museum of Modern Art debuted the first major US exhibition devoted to the architecture of Yugoslavia. Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980, uses over 400 objects related to architecture and design to examine this critical period in the nation's history.
An array of optical illusions, trompe l’oeil, and hyperrealism are on display in Chicago Works: Mika Horibuchi, now at the MCA Chicago. Horibuchi’s work plays with the nature of reality, upending viewers expectations. One of her pieces references an ambiguous 19th Century duck/rabbit illustration; her deceptively simple painting could be either a bunny or a duckling in repose, depending on the viewer's perception.
On July 10th, Fred Wilson: Afro Kismet opened at Pace Gallery, New York after a four week run at Pace London this past Spring. Wilson was catapulted into notoriety with his revolutionary Mining the Museum exhibition (1992), a storage raid-cum-excavation that destabilized the politics of display at the Maryland Historical Society.
"Heliotrope," showcasing new work by Pard Morrison, is now at San Francisco’s Brian Gross Fine Art. This is Morrison’s fourth solo show at the venue. Featuring three monolithic, freestanding sculptures, multi-colored paintings and a number of smaller wall-mounted sculpture, Heliotrope is a study in brightly colored geometric patterns.
At Frederic Church’s Olana estate, for the first time in a new exhibition, the artist’s paintings and the historic costume collection that inspired them are reunited.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition, Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, sprawls across the Fifth Avenue location’s Medieval, Byzantine, and Lehman galleries and its Anna Wintour Costume Center, as well as the Met Cloisters further uptown.
Currently at Seattle’s Frye Art Museum, Juventino Aranda’s Pocket Full of Posies explores how everyday objects become symbols of identity and social strata. Aranda grew up in Walla Walla, Washington, the child of Mexican immigrant workers, and was the first in his family to get a University degree. His work reflects the mixed cultural heritage of immigrants in the US. As an activist and artist, Aranda uses his installations to draw attention to socioeconomic, political and cultural issues.
An innovative photography exhibition at New York’s Waterhouse & Dodds Gallery, Kim Keever: Water Colors showcases the artist’s first series of completely abstract explorations of color in motion. Keever’s earlier photographs involved intricately constructed miniature landscapes that he photographed submerged in a 200-gallon water tank. Lit with colored lights and using dispersed pigment for cloud effects, Keever created dramatic foreign landscapes. Intrigued by the dispersal patterns, Keever began focusing solely on photographing the colors moving through water.
The Art Institute of Chicago has brought together a stunning collection of works by one of America’s greatest portraitists. The recently opened John Singer Sargent and Chicago’s Gilded Age includes over 100 objects, both borrowed and from the museum’s collection, highlighting the connections the painter had with the city of Chicago. Though Sargent is best known for his portraits, his artistic practice was wide-ranging, and this exhibition covers all of his output, including the en plein air landscapes of his late career, sketches, and watercolors.
