Hannah Smith Allen: On Broken Ground

Gottfried Jäger and the Founders of the Generative Photography, presented at Sous les Étoiles Gallery from January 21 to April 10, 2026, offers a rare opportunity to revisit a pivotal chapter in the history of photographic abstraction. The exhibition traces the emergence of generative photography as a radical alternative to the expressive traditions that long dominated the medium. Rather than privileging intuition or the singular moment, these artists embraced systems, repetition, and rules, allowing images to unfold through carefully designed processes. An opening reception on January 24 invites viewers to engage directly with this foundational approach to photographic thinking. At the center of the exhibition stands Gottfried Jäger, whose theoretical and artistic contributions gave generative photography its name and conceptual clarity. His seminal series Pinhole Structures exemplifies this method with remarkable precision. Using simple optical devices and predefined parameters, Jäger produced images that seem at once rigorous and poetic, revealing how minimal interventions can generate complex visual results. These works emphasize photography not as a mirror of reality, but as a system capable of constructing its own visual logic through light, time, and repetition. Surrounding Jäger’s work are key contributions by earlier pioneers including Roger Humbert, Carl Strüwe, Heinrich Heidersberger, Peter Keetman, Hein Gravenhorst, and Karl Martin Holzhäuser. Working exclusively with analog tools, these photographers explored serial production, mechanical movement, and abstraction decades before digital technologies made such approaches commonplace. Their images, often derived from industrial forms, architectural rhythms, or experimental camera techniques, demonstrate how structure and variation can replace traditional composition while remaining deeply rooted in photographic materiality. Seen today, these works resonate strongly with contemporary image-making practices driven by algorithms, code, and artificial intelligence. Yet the exhibition underscores that generative thinking in photography did not originate with computers. Instead, it emerged from a disciplined engagement with process and constraint, where creativity was embedded in the design of systems rather than in spontaneous gestures. By revisiting these foundational experiments, Gottfried Jäger and the Founders of the Generative Photography reminds us that many of today’s most advanced visual strategies are grounded in ideas patiently developed long before the digital era.

From February 20 to April 11, 2026, Charlie James Gallery presents Homegrown, an exhibition curated by Patrick Martinez that turns inward to trace a lineage of artistic practice within his own family. Bringing together works by Eliseo Martinez, Eliseo Martinez JR., Daniel Martinez, Ismael Martinez, Ruben Martinez, Rayvan Martinez, Chris Martinez, and Patrick Martinez himself, the exhibition reveals a shared visual language shaped by Los Angeles and sustained across generations. What emerges is less a survey than a conversation—between fathers and sons, cousins and brothers—about craft, labor, and the city that formed them. In assembling these works for the first time, Martinez discovered striking formal affinities. The bold graphic sensibility of his cousin Rayvan Valdez Martinez (Gonzales), who worked at La Raza Silkscreen/Graphic Center between 1977 and 1982, resonates with the crisp linework of Patrick’s own Pee Chee folder series and his recent Home Depot drawings. Activism, design, and printmaking converge in these pieces, suggesting that political urgency and visual clarity have long traveled together in the family’s history. Photographs by his father and sculptures by his grandfather further underscore a deep engagement with the Southern California landscape—its light, its signage, its vernacular architecture—handled with patience and technical care. Running concurrently is Patrick Martinez: Left in Ruins, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Created over the past two years, these new paintings, drawings, sculptures, and neon works distill nearly a decade of formal experimentation. Martinez works at the scale of the street, transforming the visual debris of Los Angeles—hand-painted signs, chain-link fences, lush flora—into layered meditations on migration, displacement, and civic identity. His neons, in particular, evoke both the promise and precarity of the city’s mythology. At the same time, Martinez will unveil a site-specific installation at Frieze Los Angeles, installing six neon works in the fair’s entrance hall that confront recent ICE kidnappings across the country. Together, these projects affirm that what is homegrown is not merely inherited—it is cultivated, challenged, and carried forward with purpose.

The Lost Beauty of Humankind: Robert Bergman’s Portraits in the Hill Collection brings together photography and painting to reconsider one of art’s oldest questions: who deserves to be seen. Presented at the Hill Art Foundation, this exhibition offers a rare opportunity to encounter Robert Bergman’s large-scale portraits alongside works drawn from centuries of portraiture, creating a dialogue that spans time, medium, and tradition. Robert Bergman’s photographs, made on American streets between the mid-1980s and early 1990s, depict people encountered by chance—individuals whose lives are often overlooked or unrecorded. Rendered in rich color and close framing, these portraits possess a quiet intensity that recalls the gravity of Old Master painting. Faces emerge from dark grounds with clarity and restraint, inviting sustained attention rather than quick consumption. Each subject appears suspended outside of a specific moment, anchored instead in presence and inner life. By placing Bergman’s work in conversation with paintings by artists such as Rubens and Bassano, as well as modern figures including Warhol and Auerbach, the exhibition reveals a shared commitment to human dignity. Across centuries, these artists approach portraiture not as idealization, but as recognition. Like earlier painters who turned to people from the margins as models for sacred or monumental works, Bergman directs his lens toward those rarely afforded the honor of being closely observed. What distinguishes Bergman’s portraits is their insistence on engagement. The viewer is not positioned as a distant observer but as an active participant in an encounter. The subjects meet our gaze with openness, reserve, or quiet resolve, creating a charged space of empathy and reflection. These images do not offer narratives or explanations; instead, they ask for patience, humility, and attention. The Lost Beauty of Humankind ultimately proposes that beauty is neither fashionable nor idealized, but rooted in presence, vulnerability, and shared humanity. Through Bergman’s unwavering gaze and the historical echoes surrounding it, the exhibition reminds us that portraiture can still function as a meeting point between the visible and the unseen—where recognition becomes an ethical act and looking becomes a form of care. Image: Robert Bergman. [untitled], 1987 Archival pigment print © Robert Bergman

Talamh: Contemporary Irish Photography, presented at Momentum Gallery Miami, offers a nuanced and contemporary meditation on Ireland as a land shaped by continuity and contradiction. Bringing together works by members of the Dublin-based Island Photographers alongside invited artist Linda Brownlee, the exhibition reflects a collective inquiry into place, memory, and transformation. Supported by Culture Ireland and the Consulate General of Ireland in Miami, Talamh extends an ongoing dialogue about Irish identity into an international context. Translated from the Gaelic word for land, Talamh examines Ireland as a terrain marked by tension—between myth and material reality, extraction and renewal, permanence and flux. Across diverse photographic approaches, the artists consider how landscapes absorb human presence over time. Quarries, rural expanses, urban edges, and altered terrains appear not as static backdrops, but as active participants in cultural and psychological life. The land is shown as something worked, inhabited, remembered, and imagined all at once. These photographs move fluidly between inner and outer worlds. Traces of folklore and inherited narratives quietly surface alongside contemporary infrastructures shaped by economic and political forces. Roads, housing developments, and scarred earth speak to the realities of modern living, while echoes of deep time remind viewers that today’s Ireland is built—literally and symbolically—upon ancient ground. The result is an Ireland that resists simplification, revealing itself as layered, restless, and alive. Rather than presenting a singular vision, Talamh invites multiple ways of seeing. The works explore the psychogeography of place, asking how land carries emotion, belief, and collective memory. Human presence is often implied rather than explicit, embedded in gestures of use, absence, and transformation. This subtlety encourages reflection on how ideas of nationhood and belonging are continually shaped by movement through space. As an artist-led collective, Island Photographers plays a vital role in fostering critical engagement with contemporary photography in Ireland. Through exhibitions, talks, and education, the group strengthens photography’s position within Irish visual culture. Talamh stands as an extension of this mission, presenting Ireland as a lived and embodied landscape—poised between history and the unfolding present.

Analog unfolds at Anton Kern Gallery as a vivid reflection on thirty years of artistic dialogue, intuition, and risk. Marking the gallery’s anniversary, the exhibition traces a path back to 1996, when its first press release framed art as a proposition—an open-ended gesture rather than a conclusion. That spirit resonates throughout the show, where each work carries the texture of its time while resisting fixed interpretation. The analog era evoked here is not simply technological; it suggests a slower, tactile engagement with making and looking, where uncertainty becomes a method and discovery remains central. At the core of this exhibition stands Anton Kern himself, whose approach to art revolves around a deep, almost personal connection to artists and their processes. Raised in a painter’s environment, he gravitates toward works that feel alive—surfaces that reveal hesitation, revision, and play. There is a palpable sense that the gallery operates less as a polished container and more as an extension of the studio. Colors clash and harmonize, gestures remain visible, and forms appear suspended between completion and possibility. This sensibility aligns with a broader history of postwar and contemporary art, where imperfection and spontaneity challenge traditional ideas of finish and mastery. The exhibition gathers an expansive network of artists whose practices span generations and geographies, from figures like Andy Warhol and Georg Baselitz to more contemporary voices such as Alvaro Barrington and Julie Curtiss. Their works do not seek uniformity; instead, they form a loose constellation of attitudes toward image-making, materiality, and meaning. Humor, irony, and conceptual play weave throughout, echoing the irreverent tone of Maurizio Cattelan’s words that punctuate the exhibition’s framework. Here, the idea and its execution fold into one another, blurring distinctions between thinking and making. Analog ultimately proposes art as an ongoing conversation shaped by friendship, curiosity, and a willingness to embrace the unresolved. Even the gesture of distributing VHS tapes and stickers evokes a sense of shared culture rooted in memory and exchange. Within this space, every artwork feels like a beginning—an invitation to look again, to question, and to remain open to what emerges next. Image: Nobuyoshi Araki Untitled (Erotos), 1993 © Nobuyoshi Araki, Courtesy of Anton Kern Gallery

Paula Cooper Gallery presents a focused yet expansive exhibition of works by Ralph Lemon: From Out of Space, on view from February 26 through April 11, 2026, at 521 West 21st Street. Bringing together pieces created between 2001 and 2025, the exhibition spans drawing, painting, photography, and video, offering a rare opportunity to encounter the visual dimensions of an artist best known for reshaping the language of performance. This presentation marks Lemon’s first solo exhibition at the gallery and follows the wide acclaim of his 2024 survey at MoMA PS1, which reaffirmed the breadth and urgency of his practice. Born in 1952, Lemon emerged from New York’s postmodern dance scene as a choreographer and founder of the Ralph Lemon Dance Company, active from the mid-1980s through the 1990s. Over time, his work expanded decisively beyond the stage, dissolving boundaries between movement, image, and text. The works in this exhibition reflect that evolution, revealing how gesture, repetition, and silence migrate from the body into drawing and image-making. Even in still form, Lemon’s compositions retain a sense of duration and embodied thought, echoing the rhythms of performance. Central to Lemon’s artistic legacy is an ongoing engagement with history, race, and the fragile workings of memory. His landmark Geography Trilogy traced these concerns across continents through performances, writings, scores, and photographs, establishing a model for interdisciplinary inquiry that continues to resonate. The visual works on view here extend that inquiry inward, often appearing spare or intimate, yet charged with layers of personal and collective reference. Photography and video function not as documentation, but as parallel modes of thinking, where presence and absence are carefully held in tension. Paula Cooper Gallery, long recognized for championing artists who challenge formal and conceptual conventions, provides a fitting context for this presentation. Seen together, these works affirm Ralph Lemon’s position as a singular figure whose practice resists easy classification. Rooted in performance yet fully at home within the visual arts, his work reminds viewers that meaning often emerges in the spaces between disciplines, where memory, movement, and image quietly converge. Image: Ralph Lemon, Duck with Headless Belle, 2001, gelatin silver print, 5 x 7 inches. © Ralph Lemon. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery.

Pello Irazu: Matter marks a new chapter in the Spanish artist’s ongoing investigation into the physical and conceptual weight of images. Presented at Yancey Richardson Gallery from March 5 through April 11, 2026, the exhibition brings together recent photographic and sculptural works that press against the traditional boundaries separating image, object, and space. Long recognized as a key figure in the renewal of Basque sculpture since the 1980s, Irazu extends his formal language by intensifying the dialogue between photography and three-dimensional form. Working within the studio as both subject and laboratory, Irazu constructs sculptures from everyday materials—cardboard, wood blocks, provisional supports—casting and painting them before reassembling the elements into spare, architectonic structures. He then photographs these arrangements and intervenes directly on the prints with painted lines and textured fields of color. In Matter, these interventions expand into complex lattices that evoke woodgrain, metal, and plastic, partially concealing the underlying studio scenes. The photograph no longer functions as a transparent window but as a dense surface where representation and material presence collide. The accompanying wall sculptures echo this vocabulary of layered planes and intersecting angles. Painted to mirror the textures embedded in the photographs, they destabilize the viewer’s sense of orientation, shifting according to perspective and light. Rather than offering a fixed form, the works suggest an image in flux—something constructed, deconstructed, and reassembled before our eyes. In several new pieces, Irazu incorporates silkscreened photographs of his own hands at work onto acrylic elements integrated into the sculptures, foregrounding the act of making as both subject and structure. By dramatizing the mechanics of creation, Irazu questions whether an image can possess mass and occupy the same experiential space as the viewer. Matter ultimately proposes that images are not immaterial illusions but composite forms—built, fractured, and reconstituted—capable of embodying both physical substance and conceptual depth. Image: Pello Irazu, Demolition Strategies 2, 2025. Acrylic paint on photograph, 25 1/2 x 17 3/4 inches. © Pello Irazu, courtesy of the Yancey Richardson Gallery

Ana González: RÍO, presented at Sean Kelly Gallery, marks the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery and unfolds as a poetic journey through water, memory, and transformation. Conceived as a river in motion, the exhibition guides visitors through shifting terrains—dense forests, cascading streams, and humid tropical air—using textiles, painting, porcelain, and video to evoke both sensual immersion and ecological urgency. An opening reception with the artist invites audiences to enter this contemplative current from the very first encounter. At the heart of the exhibition are new works from González’s Devastations series, constructed from sublimated photographic images of rivers flowing from the Amazon basin and the Andes Mountains. Drawing inspiration from Indigenous cosmologies that regard rivers and forests as living beings, González physically unravels her textile surfaces thread by thread. This deliberate act of deconstruction mirrors the gradual erosion of fragile ecosystems under the weight of extraction and industrial expansion. Newly introduced hues deepen the metaphor: a rose tone recalling the luminous haze of Amazonian dusk, and a radiant gold referencing El Dorado—here reimagined as a symbol of nature’s true wealth rather than colonial ambition. Verdant greens evoke both lush vegetation and the language of global finance, underscoring the tension between sacred land and commodified resource. González’s paintings and works on paper appear to hover between emergence and dissolution, as though suspended in mist. Forms blur, drip, and evaporate, suggesting landscapes remembered as much as observed. In these gestures, painting becomes an act of preservation—an insistence on holding space for environments at risk of disappearance. Porcelain sculptures, crafted in Limoges and suspended like cascading heliconias and orchids, extend this meditation into three dimensions. Their luminous white surfaces convey refinement and delicacy while quietly alluding to vulnerability and fracture. A newly created video piece completes the immersive experience, capturing ambient rainforest sounds recorded during the artist’s travels by boat. The exhibition concludes with a vitrine of journals, sketches, and small porcelain forms, assembling a personal archive of pilgrimage. Through RÍO, González invites reflection on interconnectedness and responsibility, urging a renewed reverence for the waterways and forests that sustain both ecological balance and collective imagination. Image: © Ana González, courtesy of the Sean Kelly Gallery

Family Forms, presented in the Winter Gallery at the Tang Museum from November 15, 2025 through April 12, 2026, brings together art and archival photography to consider one of the most intimate and enduring structures of human life: the family. Drawing largely from the museum’s own holdings, the exhibition reflects on kinship, caregiving, and belonging, inviting visitors to look beyond convention and recognize the many ways people come together to create support systems and shared histories. While the nuclear household has long dominated American cultural narratives, the works assembled here propose a broader and more nuanced understanding. Photographs by artists such as Milton Rogovin and Mike Disfarmer capture multigenerational bonds and working-class resilience, emphasizing continuity across time. In contrast, staged and conceptual approaches by Laurie Simmons and Yinka Shonibare CBE probe the constructed nature of domestic ideals, revealing how identity, race, gender, and power shape the image of family in both subtle and overt ways. The exhibition also highlights collaborative and collective practices. Works by For Freedoms underscore the political dimensions of care and community, while projects by Jesse Freidin foreground chosen families and LGBTQ+ kinship networks. Historical materials, including pieces by the mid-century collective PaJaMa, situate contemporary conversations within a longer lineage of artists who have reimagined domestic space as a site of experimentation and solidarity. Curated by Corinne Moss-Racusin, Skidmore Professor of Psychology, alongside Rebecca McNamara, the Frances Young Tang ’61 Associate Curator, Family Forms bridges scholarship and visual culture. By placing documentary images, vernacular photographs, and contemporary artworks in dialogue, the exhibition encourages reflection on how families are shaped—by choice, by circumstance, and by care—and how these evolving forms continue to define personal and collective experience. Image: contributors: Stanley Acosta ’27, Unrecorded artist, title unknown, 1970. This photograph shows a very quiet yet powerful moment. A Black newly married couple’s closeness, matching outfits, and casual attitude draw the audience into the private moment of two people who are just about to start their lives together. The image seems to be simple, but it also gives the opportunity to think more deeply about the concepts of place and belonging. In the 1970s, towns with the name Stillwater were, for the most part, inhabited by White people and thus this couple and their home take on a greater significance. They may have faced hardships in building a stable life in a neighborhood where daily life could be determined by race or class barriers both visible and hidden. The living room is no longer just a setting; it is proof of strength, pride, and silent persistence in the struggle to create a life in an area that might have been discriminatory. Psychological studies on social justice tell us that family life has the power to shield people from discriminatory stress, but, at the same time, social boundaries can have great influence on daily life. The couple’s love story may be one such case. Their apparent bond implies emotional stabilization and assistance while the environment (Stillwater) drives us to think about how families cope with racially segregated places and assert their right of belonging there. The photograph does not provide one unambiguous meaning, however: in what ways does this scene reflect on the interplay of love, home, and identity within the world of social inequality?

60 Miles East: Riverside’s Underground Punk Rock, Hardcore & Ska Scene, from the late 1980s to early 2000, on view at the Riverside Art Museum from November 1, 2025 through April 12, 2026, revisits a fiercely independent chapter in Southern California music history. Set against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding suburb at the edge of open land, the exhibition captures a community that thrived just beyond the dominant pull of Los Angeles and Orange County’s celebrated scenes. Riverside, sixty miles east, cultivated its own sound and identity—unpolished, urgent, and defiantly local. In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, the region’s punk, hardcore, and ska bands forged a culture rooted in self-reliance. Shows were organized in modest venues and improvised spaces. Photocopied flyers circulated by hand. Music traveled through cassette tapes, record দোক, and stapled fanzines. Long before digital platforms reshaped promotion and distribution, discovery depended on word of mouth and physical presence. The photographs gathered here echo that immediacy: grainy stages, crowded rooms, bodies in motion, moments seized rather than staged. Distance played a defining role. Close enough to feel the influence of larger metropolitan scenes yet far enough to remain distinct, Riverside embraced its outsider status. The images reveal not only performances but friendships, skate culture, and the everyday rituals that sustained the scene. Faces glow under dim lights; amplifiers tower in tight spaces; audiences press forward with collective intensity. The camera becomes witness to a self-contained ecosystem built on loyalty and shared passion. Curated by Zach Cordner and Ken Crawford—former Riverside Poly High School classmates who later reconnected through Riversider Magazine—the exhibition is both historical record and personal homage. Drawing on decades-old connections and archives, they reconstruct a world defined by energy and commitment. 60 Miles East stands as a testament to a time before algorithms and feeds, when community was forged in garages, small clubs, and late-night drives, and when being sixty miles away meant building something entirely your own. Image: Travis Barker at his original Famous Stars & Straps store in Riverside, 1999, Photo by Zach Cordner. © Zach Cordner

Soft Spaces, on view from February 20 to April 12, 2026, brings together installation works by alumni of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art Fellowship, an international and intergenerational program dedicated to centering LGBTQIA+ artists of color. Conceived as an evolving exhibition, the project reflects the Fellowship’s ethos of collective learning, care, and experimentation. Rather than presenting a single narrative, Soft Spaces unfolds as a constellation of voices shaped by mentorship, dialogue, and the shared pursuit of sustainable, self-determined artistic practices. The notion of “softness” here is not synonymous with fragility, but with intention. It points to environments where vulnerability is possible and where process is valued as much as outcome. Across works by 38 artists from the 2019–20, 2020–21, and 2021–22 cohorts, the exhibition foregrounds practices that resist rigidity and fixed identity. Painting, photography, performance, film, digital media, and installation intersect to create spaces that invite pause, reflection, and emotional attunement. These works offer shelter while remaining politically and socially engaged. Within this session, the work of photographer and visual artist Sarp Kerem Yavuz stands out for its incisive engagement with gender, power, religion, and violence. Born in Paris and raised in Istanbul, Yavuz brings a transnational sensibility to his practice, working across photography, neon, projection, and video. His images often balance beauty and unease, using light and symbolism to explore how bodies and beliefs are shaped by cultural and political forces. His presence within Soft Spaces underscores the exhibition’s commitment to complexity rather than comfort alone. Collectively, Soft Spaces proposes softness as a radical strategy. It suggests that care, slowness, and mutual support can be modes of resistance in a world that often demands hardness and speed. By foregrounding process, community, and lived experience, the exhibition affirms art-making as both a personal and communal act. These installations do not seek to resolve tension, but to hold it—creating room for identities, histories, and futures to exist with nuance, dignity, and openness. Image: Sarp Kerem Yavuz, Şefik, 2023. AI-Generated image on Polaroid film, 9 x 9 in. (framed). Collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. Museum purchase, O’Neal Fund, 2023.20.3. © Sarp Kerem Yavuz

How to Be a Guerrilla Girl offers an unprecedented look inside one of the most influential and enduring feminist art collectives of the past four decades. Presented by the Getty Research Institute, the exhibition reveals both the process and the purpose behind the Guerrilla Girls’ unmistakable blend of activism, humor, and design. Drawing from the group’s extensive archive, it reconstructs the behind-the-scenes methods that fueled their iconic posters and public campaigns—works that continue to challenge gender and racial inequality across the cultural landscape. Founded in 1985, the Guerrilla Girls emerged at a moment of deep frustration within the art world, when women and artists of color were systematically excluded from exhibitions, collections, and critical discourse. By adopting anonymity and gorilla masks, the collective transformed protest into performance, blending wit and statistics to expose the biases of major institutions. This exhibition situates their most recognizable works—posters, billboards, and flyers—within the broader ecosystem of their practice: data gathering, direct action, and inventive modes of distribution that redefined how art could intervene in public life. The archival materials on view trace the evolution of the group’s voice from early campaigns targeting museum inequities to their later engagements with global politics, media culture, and theater. Drafts, notes, and correspondence reveal a complex collaborative process marked by debate, dissent, and solidarity. Each poster was not only a statement but also the outcome of collective authorship and shared conviction. Coinciding with the Guerrilla Girls’ 40th anniversary, How to Be a Guerrilla Girl celebrates their enduring commitment to truth-telling through satire and resistance. It illuminates how their work, born in protest, has become part of the very history it critiques—reminding viewers that art can still be a mask, a weapon, and a call to action all at once. Image: Overleaf, foreground: Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into The Met Museum? (detail), 1989, Offset print; background: Contact Sheets (details), ca. 1987, Gelatin silver prints. Guerrilla Girls (American, active since 1985). Getty Research Institute, 2008.M.14. Courtesy Guerrilla Girls. © Guerrilla Girls. Design © 2025 J. Paul Getty Trust