Light on Context, Heavy on Imagery
A taste of NYC gallery-hopping
It’s been a hell of a few weeks, and I bet you’re as exhausted as I am from tracking the ongoing collapse of our nation. If you’re not doing so already, I suggest you follow Heather Cox Richardson, Steve Brodner, John Ganz, Timothy Snyder, Hamilton Nolan, Paul Krugman, Ryan Broderick, and Rusty Foster before you continue reading here.
Done? Okay. As a corrective to all that depth and insight, I hope you’ll enjoy a brief visual recess in lieu of my customary prattle.
Over the past month or so, I’ve managed to get out and take advantage of NYC by visiting a bunch of gallery and museum exhibits that were about to close. Since I’ll be focused on a few other projects in the near term - particularly the first issue of slips slips - I’ll use the opportunity to share some images from thee visits over the next few weeks. May it provide a flicker of enjoyment amidst the dark slog of the days to come.
The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection, The Drawing Center
I’m not a huge fan of the street artist KAWS, so I missed his retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum a few years back - but it turns out he and I have very similar tastes. This exhibit focused not his own work, but on work by others that he’s collected over the years. It was a world-class assemblage of pieces from the fringes of the “art world,” with an emphasis on outsider artists, comics creators, and other hard to categorize characters.
Pippa Garner, Misc. Pippa, Matthew Brown Gallery
Pippa Garner just passed away last month, not long after I first heard about her and her work. A trailblazing trans artist and an inveterate prankster, her work in drawing, painting, and sculpture foregrounds humor and subverts expectations at every turn.
Hunter Reynolds, Promiscuous Rage, PPOW Gallery
This gallery was right next door to the Pippa Garner exhibit, so we stopped in without knowing anything about the featured artists. Reynolds was represented by a display of quilts that consisted of dozens of photographs hand-sewn together, creating gorgeously delicate postmodern tapestries.
Unknown artist, PPOW Gallery
I’m bummed I can’t track down who this artist was! I really thought I’d snapped a pic of the placard, and there’s no info on the gallery website. I adored these collage-drawings that interspersed paint streaks, photos of classical sculpture, and handwritten glyphs to create their own loose, playful visual language.
There’s plenty more where this came from, so I’ll save some for next week. Anything here you especially liked?