Leigh Blanchard: "Meet Me Underwater"

Sarah Sense: Land, Line, Blood, Memory, on view at Bannister Gallery at Rhode Island College from March 26 to April 24, 2026, presents a deeply layered exploration of landscape, ancestry, and the ways histories are constructed and preserved. Drawing from her heritage as a Chitimacha and Choctaw artist, Sense approaches photography not as a fixed record, but as a material that can be reworked, challenged, and transformed. At the center of the exhibition are her intricate photoweavings, where images of U.S. National Parks intertwine with archival maps, land deeds, and historical documents. These elements, often associated with authority and ownership, are physically cut and reassembled through a weaving process rooted in Indigenous traditions. The gesture is both formal and symbolic: it disrupts the illusion of neutrality embedded in photographs and cartography, revealing instead a layered and contested understanding of place. Sense’s method draws directly from techniques passed through generations, particularly from the basketry practices of her grandmothers. By translating these patterns into photographic form, she bridges past and present, craft and image, memory and lived experience. The resulting works extend beyond the flat surface, folding and rising into sculptural forms that echo natural rhythms—cascading like water, branching like trees, or tightening into dense, tactile knots. These physical transformations emphasize that land itself carries stories that cannot be contained within a single viewpoint. The exhibition also reflects a sustained engagement with archives and sites historically shaped by displacement. By photographing and reworking official records, Sense questions the narratives that have long defined these landscapes, offering instead a perspective grounded in continuity and cultural resilience. Her work insists that memory is not static, but constantly woven through acts of care, interpretation, and return. Land, Line, Blood, Memory stands as both a visual and conceptual reclamation, where the act of making becomes inseparable from the act of remembering. Image: Sarah Sense, Land, Line, Blood, Memory 5, 2025, woven archival inkjet prints on Hahnemuhle bamboo paper and Hahnemuhle rice paper, wax, Arches watercolor paper, cotton thread, artist tape, 36" x 44.5" © Sarah Sense, courtesy of Bruce Silverstein Gallery

Between Borders is on view from March 6 through April 24, 2026 at Cultural Center Our Texas, located on Bissonnet Street in Houston. Presented as part of FotoFest, the exhibition coincides with the festival’s fortieth anniversary, underscoring the city’s long-standing engagement with international documentary photography. Admission is free, inviting the broader community to encounter a body of work shaped by urgency and lived experience. Created by Ukrainian documentary artist Alena Grom, Between Borders traces the fragile terrain between homeland and exile. Grom photographs civilians repairing homes scarred by shelling, families navigating evacuation routes, and elderly individuals confronting the return of violence they once believed consigned to history. Children appear in moments of uneasy pause—waiting at checkpoints, clutching small belongings, standing in landscapes altered by destruction. These scenes do not sensationalize conflict; instead, they attend to gestures of care, fatigue, and resolve that persist amid instability. Born in Ukraine and displaced by the ongoing war, Grom works in proximity to the events she documents. Her images blend the directness of reportage with a measured compositional awareness, allowing light, color, and framing to deepen the emotional register without diminishing factual clarity. Each photograph suggests multiple crossings: of national boundaries, of private grief into public witness, of ordinary life into crisis. The camera becomes both record and bridge, carrying stories beyond the limits imposed by geography. Installed within a center devoted to cultural dialogue, the exhibition resonates with Houston’s own history as a city shaped by migration. Between Borders affirms photography’s capacity to hold testimony with dignity. In these portraits and documentary scenes, resilience does not appear as abstraction but as daily practice—quiet, persistent, and profoundly human. Image: © Alena Grom

From 21 February to 25 April 2026, Marian Goodman Gallery in Los Angeles presents Trial of the Finger, an exhibition that reaffirms Tacita Dean’s unwavering commitment to the physical realities of image-making. Working across 16mm and 35mm film, slate, glass, and Polaroid, Dean continues to defend the tactile and the handmade in an age increasingly dominated by the virtual. The exhibition’s title borrows from Dr. Samuel Johnson’s critique of the Metaphysical poets, invoking the “trial of the finger” as a measure of counting and touch. For Dean, the phrase becomes a meditation on how the body—through fingers, thumbs, and even the span of a hand—remains our oldest instrument of reckoning and description. In the Seward Gallery, newly completed slate drawings and the blackboard tondo In Montem (he fell) (2026) emerge from surfaces that dictate their own terms. Found school slates, some oxidized to a fragile green bloom, required a recalibration of touch. Their imagery traces back to an eclipse witnessed in Eagle Pass, Texas, where Dean’s refusal to document paradoxically resulted in luminous solar loops—photographic drawings made by instinct rather than intention. These gestures extend into works on glass fashioned from 19th-century locomotive windows, inherited from her father and painted in enamel through a meticulous reverse process developed with German artisans. The Hudson Gallery debuts Sidney Felsen decorates an Envelope (2026), a 16mm portrait of the late co-founder of Gemini G.E.L.. Felsen, who collaborated with figures from Robert Rauschenberg to Julie Mehretu, is observed performing a modest ritual: embellishing an envelope with stamps and care. In the Main Gallery, the 35mm installations Paradise (2021) and Geography Biography (2023) unfold as lyrical testaments to photochemical film. The former, born from The Dante Project at Royal Opera House with music by Thomas Adès, bathes Dante’s cosmos in anamorphic color. The latter, an “accidental self-portrait,” layers gauges and postcards into a fragile archive of memory. Across the exhibition, Dean upholds film not as nostalgia, but as inheritance—something to be practiced, protected, and passed on. Image: Tacita Dean, oh god, 2025 (Detail). 3 Polaroids. 4 1/5 x 3 1/2 in. (10.7 x 8.8 cm) (each). Courtesy the artist. © Tacita Dean. Photo: Studio Tacita Dean/Simon Hanzer

Steven Arnold: Cocktails in Heaven, on view at Del Vaz Projects from February 25 to April 25, 2026, offers an immersive return to the ecstatic, theatrical universe of a singular visionary. Oakland-born and later based in Los Angeles, Steven Arnold built a body of work that blurred art, ritual, performance, and devotion. This exhibition centers on Zanzabar, the decaying house Arnold transformed into an opulent, otherworldly studio, where found objects, costume jewelry, and improvised luxury became the raw materials for elaborate tableaux vivants. Within these interiors, fantasy was not escapism but a mode of survival and self-definition. Restaged within the gallery, Zanzabar reappears as both environment and archive. Photographs, sculptures, furniture, posters, and intimate ephemera trace Arnold’s devotion to cinema as a spiritual force and to queerness as something radiant and sacred. His baroque aesthetic—excessive, humorous, and deeply felt—hosted a vibrant social network of artists, performers, and countercultural figures, collapsing distinctions between celebrity and community. Arnold’s work embraced masquerade and artifice, yet always pointed toward emotional truth, vulnerability, and longing. Throughout the run of the exhibition, the space functions not as a static display but as a living container. Contemporary artists, thinkers, and organizers are invited to respond to Arnold’s legacy through programs that activate dialogue, collaboration, and imagination. In this setting, the gallery becomes a site of world-building, echoing Arnold’s own practice of turning domestic space into a stage for transformation and communion. His work, shaped by joy and loss, speaks powerfully to ongoing conversations around visibility, care, and chosen family. Created in collaboration with photography, moving-image, and queer-focused institutions and archives across the United States, Cocktails in Heaven foregrounds Arnold’s enduring influence while introducing his lesser-known contributions to new audiences. More than a retrospective, the exhibition is an invitation to dwell inside a cosmology where spirituality is surreal, art is devotional, and creativity becomes an act of defiance. In revisiting Arnold’s world, the project affirms his vision as urgently resonant—then, now, and still unfolding. Image: Steven Arnold Connecting to the Infinite (1), 1985. © Courtesy The Steven Arnold Museum & Archives.

Lewis Wickes Hine: Compassionate Documentarian of Work and Workers, presented at the Atrium Gallery of the Jane Lutnick Fine Arts Center, opens the 2026 exhibition season with a focused tribute to one of the defining figures of American photography. Born in 1874, Lewis Wickes Hine transformed the camera into a civic instrument, using clarity and precision to illuminate the realities of modern labor. His images remain steady in their gaze and resolute in their purpose, bridging artistry and reform. Trained in sociology before turning fully to photography, Hine brought a researcher’s discipline to his practice. While teaching at the Ethical Culture School in New York, he began using the camera as an educational tool, eventually recognizing its broader social power. His portraits of child laborers in mills and mines, immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, and steelworkers balanced on towering girders offered an unvarnished account of industrial America. These photographs were not sensational; they were measured, direct, and profoundly human. They helped shape public opinion and informed early twentieth-century labor legislation, underscoring the cost of progress on vulnerable lives. Hine’s influence extended beyond activism. Among his students was Paul Strand, whom he introduced to Alfred Stieglitz and the circle of the Photo-Secession. That encounter proved pivotal, linking documentary clarity with the emerging language of modernist photography. Works by Strand and August Sander accompany Hine’s photographs in the exhibition, placing his social commitment within a broader international dialogue about representation, typology, and truth. As one of the early practitioners to create images specifically for magazines and mass circulation, Hine understood the printed page as a powerful platform. His photographs traveled widely, entering homes and shaping conversations. In revisiting his work today, the exhibition highlights a tradition in which photography serves both conscience and craft. Hine’s legacy endures not only in policy reforms he helped inspire, but in the enduring belief that careful observation and empathy can still alter the course of public life. Image: Lewis Wickes Hine. Richard Pierce, Western Union Messenger, Wilmington Del., 1910

Torbjørn Rødland: Bones in the Canal and Other Photographs, on view from March 12 through April 25, 2026 at David Kordansky Gallery, marks the artist’s first solo gallery exhibition in New York in nearly a decade. Bringing together two distinct bodies of work, the exhibition reveals both a return and a departure: a renewed engagement with the formal traditions of twentieth-century art photography alongside a notable shift in method and scale. Known for images that unsettle as much as they seduce, Torbjørn Rødland continues to test the medium’s capacity to conjure meaning from ambiguity. The front gallery features a suite of smaller-format photographs made with ultra-compact 35mm viewfinder cameras. Embracing the constraints of these tools, Rødland positions figures within expansive surroundings—forests, waterways, quiet streets—allowing landscape and atmosphere to carry equal weight. The effect recalls strains of Northern European romanticism, yet the mood is not nostalgic. Instead, these works suggest that archetypal imagery, long dismissed as sentimental or overdetermined, can be reactivated. References to composers such as Arvo Pärt and John Tavener evoke a pared-down spiritual intensity, where simplicity becomes a conduit for mystery rather than certainty. Deeper in the gallery, larger-format photographs stage charged encounters between bodies and objects. Hands, skin, fabric, and sculptural fragments meet in scenes that feel at once intimate and estranged. Power dynamics—sexual, religious, psychological—surface without settling into fixed interpretations. In works like Awkward Seat, a precarious interaction with a devotional figure becomes a metaphor for contact itself: between subject and world, artist and material, viewer and image. Rødland’s choreography balances improvisation with precision, foregrounding the alchemy of light, shadow, and chemical process that underpins analogue photography. Throughout his career, which has included presentations at institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Serpentine, Rødland has explored how photography can render the familiar uncanny. Here, “bones in the canal” suggests remnants—forms emptied by time—yet the images insist on their latent vitality. Drawing from cultural memory while resisting cynicism, Rødland crafts pictures that feel suspended between knowledge and doubt, inviting viewers into a space where meaning remains open, provisional, and vividly alive. Image: Torbjørn Rødland: The First Curtain, 2024 - 2026 © Torbjørn Rødland, courtesy of the David Kordansky Gallery

Locomotion of Light & Time: Moira McDonald brings together a new body of cameraless photographs at Chung 24 Gallery from March 4 through April 25, 2026. In this contemplative exhibition, light itself becomes both subject and collaborator. Sheets of silver-coated paper are placed directly into the landscape for days, weeks, sometimes months, allowing the elements to inscribe their own slow gestures across the surface. What emerges are not depictions of place in any conventional sense, but quiet accumulations of duration—records of time made visible. Working without a camera, Moira McDonald embraces extended exposure as a form of communion with the natural world. Fog drifts, coastal winds shift, winter light thins and deepens; each atmospheric fluctuation leaves a trace. The resulting images feel at once elemental and intimate, as if the troposphere itself had leaned close to whisper. These works resist fixed detail, instead offering tonal fields and subtle gradients shaped by long breaths of weather and season. The landscape is not framed—it acts. An Australian-American artist based in the Bay Area, McDonald holds a BFA from California College of the Arts and an MFA from San Jose State University. Her practice draws from a rich lineage of experimental photography while remaining distinctly personal. By relinquishing mechanical control and inviting contingency, she extends the tradition of analog process into a meditation on presence and impermanence. Each piece stands as a singular artifact of shared time between artist, material, and environment. The exhibition is accompanied by a public conversation moderated by Allison Railo of New Museum Los Gatos, whose longstanding engagement with alternative photographic practices provides thoughtful context. Together, the dialogue and the works on view propose photography not simply as image-making, but as a patient act of witnessing—where light travels, settles, and finally reveals the quiet architecture of time itself. Image: © Moira McDonald

Two Takes on Jazz is on view at the PhotoMidwest Gallery from February 28 through April 25, 2026, bringing together two distinct yet harmonious perspectives on live music. Featuring Meditation on Jazz Musicians by George Roesch Johnson and Mostly Madison Music by Ken Halfmann, the exhibition explores how photography interprets rhythm, improvisation, and atmosphere. Each artist approaches performance not merely as spectacle, but as a lived exchange between musician and audience. Johnson’s relationship with jazz begins in 1960s New York, where he hears transformative sets by artists such as Ornette Coleman at Slugs’ Saloon and John Coltrane at the Five Spot. Those formative nights shape his visual sensibility decades later in Madison, Wisconsin. At Café Coda on Willy Street, under the stewardship of saxophonist Hanah Jon Taylor, Johnson finds an echo of the intensity and intimacy he once experienced in Manhattan clubs. His photographs dwell in shadow and spotlight, isolating gestures—a horn lifted mid-phrase, fingers suspended above piano keys, a bowed head lost in concentration. The images function as quiet studies of immersion, attentive to the spiritual and communal dimensions of jazz. Halfmann’s contribution widens the frame. A devoted music enthusiast since his college days in the 1970s, he turns his camera toward an array of genres, from bluegrass gatherings to blues bars and jazz stages. His photographs chart decades of regional concerts, preserving fleeting alignments of sound and crowd. Where Johnson meditates, Halfmann celebrates variety, capturing performers in motion and audiences caught in shared delight. Together, these bodies of work underscore photography’s kinship with improvisation. Both artists rely on timing, instinct, and patience—qualities jazz musicians themselves prize. In this dialogue of images, music becomes visible, and the pulse of Madison’s performance culture resonates far beyond the gallery walls. Image: Hanah Jon Taylor, owner Cafe Coda © George Roesch Johnso, courtesy of the PhotoMidwest Gallery

Emmet Gowin | Baldwin Street: Photographs 1966–1994 is on view at Pace Gallery from March 12 through April 25, 2026. Installed at the gallery’s West 25th Street space, the exhibition coincides with the release of a new publication by Princeton University Press devoted to this deeply personal body of work. The presentation unfolds alongside the annual gathering of the photography world during AIPAD’s Photography Show in New York, situating Gowin’s early vision within a broader contemporary dialogue. The Baldwin Street series centers on the family of Gowin’s wife, Edith Morris, in Danville, Virginia. Named after the quiet dead-end street where many relatives lived, the photographs trace decades of shared experience—children at play, sisters in conversation, figures resting in yards or framed by modest interiors. Edith appears often: seated in a bedroom suffused with soft light, balanced on a ladder outdoors, absorbed in thought. Reva Booher Morris and extended family members inhabit the images with an ease born of trust. These works reveal not spectacle but familiarity, an intimacy that shaped Gowin’s artistic coming of age. Drawn from the artist’s archive and printed for the first time in recent years, many of the photographs remained unseen for decades. Their rediscovery underscores the continuity within Gowin’s six-decade career. Though later celebrated for aerial views of nuclear test sites, volcanic landscapes such as Mount St. Helens, and environmental studies across Europe and the American West, his practice begins with sustained attention to home. Baldwin Street stands as a spiritual and emotional center from which his broader meditations on humanity and the natural world unfold. Gowin’s photographs reside in major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Canada. Yet within this exhibition, the focus returns to a small Virginia street, where gesture, light, and kinship coalesce into images of enduring tenderness and quiet gravity. Image: Emmet Gowin, Reva and Edith, Danville, Virginia, 1970 © Emmet Gowin

Devaki Murch: My Name Is Mimosa unfolds as both an intimate excavation and a collective act of remembrance. Presented at East Window gallery from April 4 to 25, 2026, the exhibition traces a life shaped not by family albums or official documents, but by fragments of public record and historical rupture. The date of April 4, 1975 echoes throughout the work, marking the tragic crash of the first evacuation flight of Operation Babylift, a moment suspended between loss and survival. From this event emerges a voice that has taken decades to fully form, now expressed through a careful weaving of image, text, and recovered memory. Murch’s practice navigates the unstable terrain between personal history and institutional archives. Newspaper clippings, flight manifests, and bureaucratic traces become visual anchors, yet they never settle into certainty. Instead, they flicker with absence, suggesting the many lives and identities left undocumented or misrecorded. In this space of ambiguity, Murch positions herself not only as a subject but also as a custodian, reassembling narratives that were once scattered across continents and systems. Her work invites viewers to consider how identity is constructed when origins remain obscured or mediated by external forces. Beyond autobiography, the exhibition resonates as a broader call to reconnect a dispersed community. Through research and participatory storytelling, Murch extends her inquiry outward, creating encounters that bridge individual memory and shared experience. The materials on display do not merely recount the past; they activate it, allowing stories to circulate מחדש among those who carry similar histories. The exhibition becomes a living archive, one that acknowledges both the fragility and resilience of memory. Situated between artistic expression and ethical responsibility, Murch’s work reflects a sustained engagement with the politics of care, representation, and historical accountability. My Name Is Mimosa stands as a testament to the enduring power of storytelling when silence finally gives way to articulation, and when the act of looking back becomes a way of moving forward. Image: © Devaki Murch

JR: Horizons, presented at Perrotin Los Angeles from March 12 through April 25, 2026, brings together a selection of photographic works by the French artist JR created across California. The exhibition reflects the artist’s long-standing interest in the horizon as both a visual and social concept. In JR’s work, the horizon is less a distant line than a point of encounter—an ever-shifting boundary where landscapes, communities, and histories intersect. Through photography installed at monumental scale, the artist transforms everyday environments into spaces of visibility and dialogue. JR’s practice begins with portraiture and personal encounters. Individuals from different walks of life participate in projects that extend beyond the gallery into public space. Enlarged photographs appear on building façades, streets, and infrastructure, allowing the faces of residents to become part of the architecture itself. In the series The Wrinkles of the City, portraits of older inhabitants spread across neighborhoods of Los Angeles, their expressions stretching across rooftops and walls. These images reveal the accumulated experiences of the city through its people, suggesting that urban identity emerges from lived memory rather than monumental landmarks. Several works in the exhibition also revisit JR’s interventions near the border between the United States and Mexico. One of the most widely known images from this project depicts a young child named Kikito gazing playfully over the towering barrier near Tecate. Installed at enormous scale, the portrait introduces a disarming sense of innocence into a heavily politicized landscape. The installation becomes a temporary gathering point as communities from both sides of the border share a meal along the wall, transforming a site of division into a place of encounter. The exhibition further includes documentation from the artist’s collaborative work inside the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi. There, JR works with incarcerated participants to create collective images installed directly within the prison yard. Portraits, narratives, and visual illusions combine to reshape the architecture of confinement, if only briefly. Across these projects, the horizon operates as a metaphor for perspective itself—an invitation to reconsider distance, proximity, and the relationships that connect people within shared space. Image: JR, Migrants, Mayra, Picnic across the border, General View, Tecate, Mexico - U.S.A., 2017. Colour photograph, matte plexiglass, aluminium, wood (framed behind glass). 40 3/4 x 59 5/8 in. ©JR. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.

Karen Knorr: Scavi is on view at Danziger Gallery from February 26 through April 17, 2026. This ongoing series takes its title from the Italian word for “excavations,” signaling a sustained meditation on what lies beneath the surface of history. Karen Knorr began the project after extended visits to the archaeological sites surrounding Naples, where layers of ash and time preserved entire cities in suspended animation. The exhibition brings these encounters into the photographic realm, weaving antiquity into the present through a language that is at once meticulous and imaginative. In 79 AD, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius engulfed the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, preserving frescoed walls, domestic objects, and even the contours of human and animal bodies beneath volcanic debris. Today these sites hold designation as UNESCO World Heritage landmarks, their painted surfaces revealing scenes of daily life alongside episodes drawn from Greek mythology. Banquets, gardens, and household rituals share space with tales such as Leda and the Swan or the flight of Frisso and Elle. Knorr engages directly with these visual narratives, reanimating them through carefully constructed photographic tableaux. Animals occupy a central position in Scavi, as they have throughout Knorr’s career. In the ancient world, exotic creatures signaled wealth and imperial reach; monkeys, parrots, leopards, and lions inhabited villas as emblems of status. Archaeological casts also attest to their vulnerability, uncovered alongside their human counterparts. Knorr inserts animals into her compositions with deliberate poise, positioning them within frescoed interiors as both witnesses and protagonists. Their presence collapses temporal distance, suggesting continuity between mythic past and contemporary consciousness. Through digital precision and art historical reference, Knorr constructs images that feel excavated rather than merely staged. Scavi reflects on fragility, spectacle, and endurance, reminding viewers that civilizations rise, flourish, and vanish, yet stories persist—etched into walls, carried by animals, and reimagined through the lens. Image: Karen Knorr. Bacchus in Attendance, House of Neptune and Amphitrite, Herculaneum, 2024 © Karen Knorr.