Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light)

London-based artist Isaac Julien CBE RA is a multimedia filmmaker and photographer known for bringing history to life with a nuanced and thought-provoking visual language that critically addresses the politics of race and gender. His film installation Lessons of the Hour features actor Ray Fearon in the role of Frederick Douglass, the nineteenth-century abolitionist, writer, and freed slave. Open-ended narrative vignettes set in Washington, DC, London, and Edinburgh portray Douglass with various influential women of his time—including Susan B. Anthony and Ottilie Assing—dramatizing ideas of racial and gender equality. Julien’s work reiterates Douglass’s belief in the importance and power of photography and picture-making in advocating for social justice. Julien conjures Douglass’s role in the abolitionist movement, powerfully emphasizing its relevance to contemporary social justice struggles. Lessons of the Hour features ten screens of varying dimensions hung salon-style—referencing a popular nineteenth-century method of arranging a group of images. The vibrant colors of the film have a modern aesthetic that, in conjunction with the period set, costumes, and salon-style screens, unites past and present. Isaac Julien CBE RA, born in London in 1960, makes work that focuses on themes of remembrance and social justice in contemporary and historical cultural narratives. His previous films include the 1989 documentary-drama Looking For Langston and his 1991 feature-film debut, Young Soul Rebels, which won the Cannes Film Festival’s Semaine de la Critique prize. His films and photography have been shown worldwide in solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums, including Victoria Miro Gallery, London; Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town; and the 57th Venice Biennale at the inaugural Diaspora Pavilion, Venice. Julien has received numerous awards for his work, including the Charles Wollaston Award for his work in the 2017 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, an annual show at the Royal Academy of Arts, where he was named a Royal Academician. In addition to creating film, photography, and installation art, Julien has taught at the University of the Arts London and Staatliche Hoscschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe. He is currently a professor of digital arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Image: The North Star (Lessons of the Hour), 2019 © Isaac Julien

Alexey Brodovitch (American, born Russia, 1898–1971) was a graphic designer, instructor, illustrator, and photographer who spent formative periods of his career in Paris, Philadelphia, and New York. His artistic pursuits were surprising and diverse, in an era when creatives were free to experiment across media. Brodovitch is perhaps known best for being the art director of the US fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar for nearly a quarter century (1934–58). There, he ushered in a bold new aesthetic, drawing on European modernism and making photography the cornerstone of the magazine’s identity. Through his work at Bazaar and his legendary design classes in Philadelphia and New York, Brodovitch influenced a generation of American and emigré photographers, including Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Lillian Bassman, and Eve Arnold. Though distinct in style, they are unified by their embrace of Brodovitch’s dictum: “Astonish me.” Alexey Brodovitch: Astonish Me, presented in the Roberts Gallery, follows the trajectory of Brodovitch’s career and influence through personal stories and case studies. Featuring original and collaborative works by Brodovitch and his protégés, it illuminates the breadth of his impact on print culture today and shows that his legacy is all around us. The Barnes is proud to present the first major US exhibition devoted to Brodovitch, who, like Dr. Albert Barnes, played a vital role in introducing modern European art to American audiences. Image: Alexey Brodovitch reviewing page layouts for Richard Avedon’s Observations, 1959. Photo by Hiro. © 2024 Estate of Y. Hiro Wakabayashi

The career of Brooklyn-born photographer, sculptor, and arts activist Walter Weissman developed in tandem with the founding and early years of Kingsborough Community College. Currently celebrating its 60th Anniversary, Kingsborough pays tribute to its “first art student” in a month-long exhibition, Born in Brooklyn: Photographs, Sculptures, and Drawings by Walter Weissman, which opens April 17 and runs through May 22, 2024 at the Kingsborough Art Museum (KAM). An opening reception will be held on April 17 from 3:00-7:00 PM. A member of the pioneering Class of 1966, Weissman was there when the college first opened its doors in September, 1964. He would spend his first year at the college’s annex location, the former P.S. 98 in Sheepshead Bay, until the current Manhattan Beach campus was ready for occupancy in fall 1965. Already interested in photography, Weissman documented his neighborhood in his Brighton Beach/Coney Island Portfolio series (such as Ticket Office, Fig. 1), and also captured images of Kingsborough’s campus as it transitioned from a former Maritime Service Training Station to an academic institution. He also designed the first issue of Antheon, Kingsborough’s art and literary journal, for which he also contributed photographs and poetry. While at Kingsborough he had the good fortune to study with the artist and critic Gregory Battcock, who not only introduced him to contemporary art practice but also to some of the art world’s leading luminaries, such as Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns. After Kingsborough, Weissman would study with the equally-renowned conceptual artist Robert Morris at Hunter College. His sculptural work soon went from small conceptual pieces to larger architectural sculptures/environments that address the ways that architecture can often insidiously direct or misdirect human behavior and thought. The current exhibition documents several of these ephemeral works, including Written Trough: Entrance/Non-Entrance (1980); The Navigator (1983); and The Interrogator (1984), as well as an earlier work, Information Window (1977, Fig. 2), created as part of his residency at the art space PS1 (now MoMA PS1). Weissman was a member of the famed 14 Sculptors Gallery, an early artist’s co-op that sought to rewrite the rules of the gallery system by reclaiming control over exhibitions, promotion, and artistic freedom. A number of drawings, some related to these and other projects, will be on view, as well as a series of six experimental Vaseline Drawings from 1976. Also highlighted will be Weissman’s contribution to the history of arts activism in NYC. Always interested in politics, he was active in Art Workers News, a newspaper published by the Foundation for the Community of Artists, as well as the group Artists Meeting for Cultural Change; this latter activist organization, whose members included critic and curator Lucy Lippard and artists Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, and Claes Oldenburg, created a stir in 1975 with its protest of the Whitney’s Bicentennial survey of American Art, which had neglected to feature contemporary trends and artists of color throughout the nation’s history. Moreover, Weissman has had a remarkable career as a portrait photographer, having captured insightful images of Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Elaine de Kooning, Gilbert and George, Richard Serra, and many other artists and writers, including his wife, the feminist painter Eunice Golden. Beginning in 1995, he worked for over twenty years as a photojournalist for agencies such as Globe Photos, Zuma Press, Star Max, and Corbis. Through Walter Weissman’s photographs, sculptures, drawings, and activist projects, this retrospective will provide an overview of his many contributions to the world of contemporary art. Image: Walter Weissman, Ticket Office, 1965. © Walter Weissman

signs and symbols is a contemporary art gallery grounded in performance. Operating nomadically since 2012, signs and symbols presented performances in New York and internationally. Our first physical space in the Lower East Side on Forsyth Street (2018) served as a curatorial platform and multi-disciplinary incubator bringing together diverse mediums to stimulate dialogue and creative connections. In the fall of 2021, the gallery relocated to its current location at 249 East Houston Street. signs and symbols' curatorial vision is rooted in performance and time-based media, informed and anchored by the work of three important art historical figures — Ulay, VALIE EXPORT and Vito Acconci — and thus encompasses performance, photography and architecture, with a focus on site-specific and performative practices with an emphasis on the body in performance, painting and other time-based media. signs and symbols’ experimental ethos is artist-centric, offering a place for experimentation and the development of new work. The gallery represents an international group of critically acclaimed and emerging contemporary artists working in a variety of media. Direct collaboration with the artist is central to each exhibition, allowing the gallery to present new original programming. The gallery is curated, programmed and directed by Mitra Khorasheh, an independent curator and educator. signs and symbols is a proud member of the New Art Dealers Alliance. In 2020, we launched Artists & Allies Berlin, an artist-run signs and symbols outpost in a former church in Kreuzberg organized by our Berlin-based artists in collaboration with the gallery here in New York. The project space, which was an extension of our annual artists & allies program, hosted performances, artist talks, workshops and communal dinners during the pandemic. In 2022, we began our experimental exhibition program 89 Greene, curated by Dr. Kathy Battista. Hosted within the gallery's location at 249 Houston, this project is an ode to the underground of 1960s, 70s and 80s New York City. In that spirit of community and collaboration, artists are invited to show works just for the sake of it and to forge new relationships in New York. Image: Maxie in the Pool, 2024 © Rachel Libeskind

In 2016, Anastasia Samoylova (American, b. Soviet Union, b. 1984) moved to Miami, Florida. As she familiarized herself with the city through photography, a larger story began to unfold. The resulting body of work, FloodZone, explores what it looks like to live in the southern United States at a time when rising sea levels and hurricanes threaten the most prized locations with storm surges and coastal erosion. Samoylova’s lyrical photographs are deceptive, drawing us in with a seemingly documentary promise of a palm-treed paradise. Their alluring color palette—filled with lush greens, azure blues, and pastel pinks—gives way to minute details that reveal decaying infrastructure, encroaching flora, and displaced fauna. Both seductive and eerie, Samoylova’s images show us what it is to live at the edge of a climate crisis, a space where palm trees topple over onto buildings, where the patina of constant moisture results in dank mold on a freeway overpass, where the sky fills with golden hues after the storm. Somewhere between the artifice and the sobering reality lies the melancholy of living with the constant burden of climate anxiety. Image: Anastasia Samoylova, Gator, 2017. From FloodZone © Anastasia Samoylova

Fotografiska New York is proud to present rising-star French artist Josèfa Ntjam’s solo U.S. museum show debut. Through a multi-sensory video experience, biomorphic sculptures and photomontages printed on plexiglass and aluminum, the exhibition explores the artist’s deep interest and research into African mythology, biological processes, science fiction, and the ingrained but outdated ideas about origin, identity and race that rule our world. Throughout her work, Ntjam blends memory with historical fact and speculative fiction (from Battlestar Galactica to the novels of Octavia E. Butler) to produce new interpretations of radical liberation movements around the world, from the battle against white supremacy led by the Black Panther Party in the U.S., to the fights in Cameroon and Nigeria against colonial rule. Ntjam is best known for her work blending science fiction, history, and fantasy to present alternative narratives of African diasporic experiences. Across multiple mediums, her practice deconstructs mainstream discourses on origin, identity, and race. The artist, who earned a degree from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art, has been featured in exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Barbican Art Gallery in London.

Gitterman Gallery proudly presents Jackie Robinson and the Color Line, an exhibition of the collection of Paul Reiferson, which uses photographs and artifacts to vividly narrate the story of baseball’s journey toward integration. The exhibition opens on Monday, April 15th in honor of Major League Baseball’s Jackie Robinson Day from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and runs through Friday, May 24th. Jackie Robinson, a trailblazing figure in civil rights, shattered baseball’s color line when Martin Luther King, Jr. was still in college, earning praise from King as “a sit-inner before the sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides.” The exhibition frames Robinson’s odyssey within a larger one that had begun sixty years earlier, when men like Fleet and Weldy Walker, Sol White, Robert Higgins,and Javan Emory played for integrated teams in the late 19th century. Paul Reiferson is a dedicated collector driven by a passion for preserving American stories. “I saw that the color line transcended baseball, that it was about America struggling to solve a terrible problem, and that the stories of the people in that fight were extraordinary,” Reiferson explained. This exhibition of photographs, complemented by historic artifacts, illuminates the pervasive racism and the fervent aspirations for integration during that era. We hope everyone from collectors to students and families with children can visit this exhibition. By experiencing these powerful images together, we hope to help foster a deeper appreciation for photography as a medium of storytelling. Nearly 500 prints from Reiferson’s collection of photographs by Charles M. Conlon have been gifted or promised to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Many others have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, American Folk Art Museum, and Tampa Museum of Art, among others.



Eli Klein Gallery is thrilled to present Order out of Chaos, Liu Bolin’s ninth solo show at the gallery. The exhibition will debut the artist’s much anticipated new sculpture series Chaos - marking an important evolution of the “invisible man” who now transforms others “invisible.” The exhibition will also present Liu’s recent photographs, continuing the development of his world-renowned Hiding in the City series. Running through May 25, 2024, this show is the artist's response to the increasingly digitized society. For the first time, Liu’s performance of “concealing” becomes an act of “sensing,” with him holding a 3D scanner performing the action of scanning his subjects, whether they be a woman holding a cat, a man texting on a smartphone, or the artist himself. The subject is always in a meditative state. When the scanning process begins, the target completely releases him/herself (disappearing) from his/her physical state, and only communicates with his/her inner self. Liu Bolin is the observer and sensor throughout the performance: he deliberately uses an out-dated 3D scanner due to its unique capability to create a fragmented and torn aesthetic when the sculptures were produced, hinting at the impossibility of disappearing completely in the digital world. The out-dated scanner and computer program create a system of colors that are applied arbitrarily as per the different layers of scans. Liu did not attempt to alter these color patterns upon painting the sculptures, an act of yielding power to the machine. Trained professionally as a sculptor, Liu Bolin surprisingly sourced his inspiration of Chaos from Rondanini Pietà - Michelangelo’s final unfinished work. Even though Michelango’s work had been completed 450 years prior to Chaos, Liu views this sculpture as the grand master’s most contemporary work which actually depicts multiple faces and out-of-the-body limbs. Liu believes that Rondanini Pietà, which seems eerily modern, hints at the inevitability of machine-produced imagery taking over contemporary visual culture. Chaos - Me, the largest scale sculpture in the exhibition, shows Liu Bolin’s own body, and is hollow so as to permit inspection inside out. This is because Liu believes the process of self-inspection creates a “fourth dimension,” which is illustrated by the fact that this sculpture comes in numerous parts and can be assembled at varying distances In the Hiding in the City series, Liu Bolin continues to explore the possibility of his body’s disappearance in a physical sense by concealing himself. This selection of photos showcases his acute observations and questioning of global cultural, social, and political issues. Central Park is a collaboration between Liu Bolin and Annie Leibovitz, capturing the autumn scenery of New York's Central Park. Liu is performing in this photograph, of which Annie Leibovitz is the photographer. HK Message Wall is displayed to the public for the first time since its creation, documenting Liu Bolin's reflections on the proposed Anti-Extradition Law Amendment in Hong Kong in 2019. Liu Bolin blends into the wall of the Tai Po Market station in the Hong Kong subway, which is covered with slogans, drawings, and graffiti. Hidden within these writings and images, which were quickly removed by the authorities, are the voices of some courageous Hong Kong people advocating for their rights and interests through non-verbal resistance. Hiding in Italy - Fruit Juices was shot by Liu Bolin in the suburb of Verona, Italy. Liu Bolin hides among the colorful and vibrant fruit juice shelves to demonstrate the connection between commodities and consumer life, furthering his critique on the global inequality in food access.

AdeY’s identity is unknown, but the photographs speak for themselves. The art is in the borderland of photography and performance and depicts the naked body in playful formations and in minimalistic rooms and empty landscapes. On May 16, the exhibition Uncensored by AdeY opens at CLAMP in New York and will continue through May 25. This is the final stop in AdeY's Uncensored world tour which has been exhibited in Los Angeles (Galerie XII), London (The Little Black Gallery), Stockholm (Fotografiska), and Falsterbo, Sweden (Falsterbo Photo Art Museum). No one really knows who AdeY is. The British-Swedish artist’s real name, age and place of residence are still unknown. AdeY left a career as a professional dancer, something evident in the photographs which combine photography, choreography, and performance. They have published a series of poetic photobooks and exhibited in several of the world’s best known galleries and museums, including in London, Los Angeles, Helsinki and Stockholm. ''I began taking photographs when I worked as a professional dancer and felt the need to erase what I had done before to be taken seriously. People doubt you when you change art forms. I also do not want people to focus on my background but rather my body of work,'' says AdeY. The forms of the exhibition Uncensored began to take shape in 2015–2016, when AdeY, during a period of intense travel, was struck by the sexualization of bodies in advertising images. Then and there, a desire was awoken to show the body just as “only” a body, without reducing it into a sexualized symbol. The images in the exhibit are playful and experimental, with bodies often depicted in choreographed poses or formations. The viewer is given the right to interpret the images, which is an important part of AdeY’s artistry.

Susan Wood is an internationally published photographer and journalist. The winner of many Art Director and Clio awards, her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. Throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, Susan's editorial and advertising work could be seen in magazines such as Vogue, Look, Life, People, and New York. Susan was a regular contributor to Look, most notably for a cover story on John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Susan also worked for 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, and United Artists, and was the stills photographer on the set of Easy Rider.Mademoiselle named Susan as one of their 10 Women Of The Year in 1961. Susan was also a founding member of the Women’s Forum. Her investigative reportage on medical malfeasance titled “Dr. Feelgood”, appeared as a cover article in New York magazine. Susan is the author of Women: Portraits 1960-2000 and the co-author of Hampton Style. Susan's work is represented in the Library of Congress and by Getty Images. A native New Yorker, she attended the City’s High School of Music and Art, went on to receive her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and did graduate work at Yale University School of Art and Architecture. Susan is 92 years old and presently resides in New York. Image: © Susan Wood

Personal art collections are always a form of self portraiture and our new exhibition, The Paula Tognarelli collection is no exception. It’s prodigious; about wonder, wit, moments, connections to individual artists, and they all have a dreamy and whimsical perspective. The romanticism of the collector shines through. The images also speak about the process of making art and the breadth or modes of expression in contemporary photography. The viewer will notice that there is an optimism throughout the compilation that makes spending time with these photographs delightful. It speaks to Tognarelli’s heart and eye. We appreciate the opportunity to share this exhibit with you and our investigations into collectors and collections. This exhibition is the beginning of our 2024 season. We’ve decided to start each new season with a collector’s collection. We want to celebrate the individuals who keep us making, exhibiting and responding to our ideas. These connoisseurs think enough of our process and its outcome to want to take home our creative product. We as viewers get to peek at the piles of works that were stashed, hoarded, acquired intuitively or incredibly decisively- ultimately representing the journey and the intent of the collector. The money these things cost, and their value over time is of interest. How do they store their works and what will they do with all this accumulation? What makes a collector and why do institutions collect in a post digital age? We will have talks and a new program, Print Night on the first Wednesday of every month to investigate these topics. — Denise Froehlich, Director of MMPA. Image: Irene Klench, 2016 © Asia Kepka

Systems of belief concerning the medicinal, magical and spiritual uses of plant materials were well established in the lives of European forest, nomadic and ancient peoples. However, these beliefs were forcibly supplanted as pagan practices were displaced across Europe and other continents in the wake of Christianity and the rise of capitalism. The consequences of the suppression and attempted erasure of this plant-based belief system continue to be profound. Knowledge, often held by women, of the healing and spiritual effects of plants has been replaced by a significantly more limited emphasis on their predominantly aesthetic qualities. This separation informs our contemporary relationship to plants as being primarily one of commodification. The images in worm, root, wort…& bane are part of the re-assemblage of fragments of this old knowledge and, in their ontology, invoke the persecution of wise women, witches and wortcunners who kept this knowledge safe but whose understanding of plants and their connection with reproduction, in particular, represented a threat to the new order. This body of work asks that we reconsider this complex nexus of lost understanding; that we re-examine the continuing persecution of women, their gender roles and physical bodies, and honour the position they have held in this long-contested space. Worm, root, wort…& bane engages with botanical knowledge as a sphere in which politics have been played out then and now, continuing to effect Western attitudes to women, to nature and to privilege. Put in the context of ecopolitics and intersectional feminisms, the current environmental emergency and the many impacts of this high capitalist moment, these works signal a rupture that has taken place. This has distanced us economically and spiritually from our environment and ultimately led to our current crisis. THIS EXHIBITION IS SUPPORTED BY the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Richmond County Savings Foundation, Ruth Foundation For the Arts, Lily Auchincloss Foundation, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.