Group Show Summer
What to see in NYC this August.
Hello and welcome to my Substack! For those of you who gave me your emails: thanks, I hope you like it. I will post once a week about whatever interests me—art, fashion, culture, politics, plus some criticism and the occasional photo essay. Subscribers will also get access to my archive of unreleased interviews from past artist profiles. Who knows how it will evolve, but we will grow together.
To kick it off, here is a so-long-who-will-actually-read-it-all NYC summer group show guide that is definitely my magnum opus of roundups this far (LA version forthcoming). Because isn’t the point of this partially to self-publish what no editor would touch with a stick? And I mean, this has been sitting in my notes for all of last month (leftover from my earlier, shorter July group show roundup for Family Style), growing tentacles and then losing them as closing dates come and go. You can think of it as a primer of who to watch this year, a window into each gallery’s roster, or simply an excuse to maximize the artists you discover in a single outing (or online viewing room).
Nothing says summer in New York like a group show with what seems like an endless stream of names piled one after another. You know the kind: a less precious time when the playing field is leveled and all artists, big and small, get one (or two) spots on the wall. Openings with readings and canned alcohol and the kind of people you only see at openings or online. Themes touch on all the basics (besides anything overtly political), and two shows are dedicated to Yale MFA graduates.. Exhibition texts cite domestic spaces, the body, Landscapes, unconventional materials, and one-word concepts so confusing you wonder: Is that the point? Hints at the next Big Thing poke out from every corner.
So as the first wave of summer shows close, a final batch opens its doors to those resigned to enduring the city’s hottest time rather than escaping to the Hamptons or Provincetown—or Europe. August in New York is a liminal month that is both overripe with summer and germinating with fall. It was pouring yesterday, but all everyone can talk about is how nice out it is today. Either way, a nicely air conditioned white cube is the perfect refuge from late summer’s extremes. So now as I finish my gallery guide, back in town from Los Angeles, it is time once and for all that I must kill the monster by putting it out there for you, dear readers, to scroll and skim and maybe go see irl—or else let it die quietly in my drafts.
Now let's get into it…
“Yours Truly” at Nahmad Contemporary
On view through September 14, 2024
The award for most big names in a group show goes to Nahmad Contemporary, where even a shortlist ends up a little under half. Recent self-portraits of 55 living artists including Rita Ackermann, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Isa Genzken, Sasha Gordon, Tishan Hsu, Arthur Jafa, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Martine Syms, Henry Taylor, Wolfgang Tillmans, Salman Toor, Jordan Wolfson, Issy Wood, the list goes on. Dozens of familiar faces hang next to each other, entering into unexpected dialogues. The exhibition, by breadth alone, provokes interesting questions around selfhood, where each artist sees themself within the greater social and cultural context, and what it means to even paint a self-portrait in the first place.
“Soft Fantasy/Hard Reality” at Silverlens
Runs through August 24, 2024
Binaries begin in the title and are broken and Frankensteined throughout. Gender and sexuality become a jumping off point for alternate realities, more tender and fluid. Sculptures by Yasue Maetake invite closer looks, like 水引 [mizuhiki], 2023, which looks something between a stick bug and a coat stand—and is made from oxidized copper, polymer coated found tree branches, crustacean shells, and quartz, among other materials that rest between natural and synthetic. Also on view are works by Tosh Basco (who has a solo show opening at Company Gallery on Sept 13). Basco’s 2023 blue body-drawing series captures a poignant and tangible sense of motion, a characteristic of the performance and visual artist’s approach to art. Other artists included are Geraldine Javier, Eisa Jocson, Citra Sasmita, Sin Wai Kin, and Ming Wong. Want to learn more? The show received a fab writeup by Qingyuan Deng in Flash Art, in which Deng uncovers “evocations of gender and sexuality and their constitution as a mere drag.”
“Crawlspace at Anonymous Gallery”
Runs through August 16, 2024
This group exhibition, curated by Elle Pérez, features work by the Yale MFA Photography class of 2024. While the works undulate tender and unnerving, varied and pointed, a through line of interiority coalesces around the age-old push and pull between fact and fiction within photography. Each of the 10 artists explore their own ambitions, both institutional and private, in pursuits of photographic truth that range from imaginative to unflinching. (The West Coast companion show ‘Heat Index” at Webber Gallery curated by Awol Erizku runs through August 17.) The exhibition is an ode to MoMA’s 1991 seminal photography exhibit ‘Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort,” which gathered everyone from William Eggleston to Carrie Mae Weems to probe and portray the current state of the American dream as seen through life at home. Today, August 10, also kicks off Anonymous’ first of seven Gardens Symposiums with a conversation between artist, musician, and filmmaker G.B. Jones and writer David Rimanelli moderated by writer Taylor Lewandowski.
“A Thousand Plateaus” at Shrine
Runs through August 16, 2024
A cohort of emerging artists from Yale’s MFA Sculpture Class of 2024 employ a range of materials from porcelain to iron sourced from sinks and bathtubs to hair pins to a traditional Korean skirt. Standouts are Y. Malik Jalal’s keloidal ridge push, 2023—in which a large glacial stone is strapped to the ground by stainless steel watch bands—and Andrew Ordonez’s repurposed trampoline, orb 2, 2024, that appears to have been excavated from a bygone era, dirt and debris still clinging to its frame.
“Meet me by the lake” at C l e a r i n g
Runs through September 7, 2024
As you might expect with an exhibition featuring over 30 artists, the connections between the art on view are varied and contradictory, making for an exciting job of connecting the dots. Some works capture the doldrums of late summer, like Perch, 2024, in which Clayton Schiff zooms in on an unsuspecting, nude balcony dweller whose upper body is concealed by the morning newspaper, feet propped up on the fence. Others hint at a nature getaway, like Marécage, 2024, Coco Young's dirt path that snakes through a field of red flowers—and Thom Trojanowski’s Sticks of rock gleam high in stacks, 2024.
Runs through August 17, 2024
At Shelter, works by members of New York’s Women’s Sculptor Group present a strong and expansive window into the medium and its practitioners. Works stand on the floor, are hung on the wall. Sculpture is many things, but always tactile, and those on view are made from everything from ceramic, hand-dyed leather, thermoplastic fabric, resin and cardboard. Heidi Norton’s Colours are Light’s Suffering and Joy, 2024, sheets of annealed glass and resin contain prisms, plants, a candle, a mirror, and a crab claw, all propped up on aluminum stand.
“Like a Nightingale with a Toothache” at Off Paradise
Runs through August 17, 2024
At Off Paradise, this stacked lineup of artists dead and alive is both heady and immediately satisfying, intricate textures and color patterns of painterly works balance out the more conceptual pieces. Standouts include paintings by Maaike Schoorel and Marlon Mullen, two abstract anthropomorphic blobs bound together by Ross Knight and Matthieu Laurette’s coke-bottle-as-self-portrait and paperwork to sell his studio rental bills to a collector—any takers?
“Swim Hole” and “Chadwick Rantanen, Eli Coplan, Hana Miletić, Rachel Fäth” at Magenta Plains
Runs through August 16, 2024
This group show is a splash of cold water on a hot summer day, featuring works from artists such as Alex Kwartler, Peter Nagy, and Martha Diamond. In the print Bathers (from Terrace), 2016/2019, Barbara Ess peeks through the branches of a pine tree, focusing her eye on a group wading in uninhibited bliss through a body of water. Alexis Rockman’s effervescent watercolors of poppies and daisies poke into the sky. Upstairs, fewer artists present more challenging works that latch onto a door frame and extend past the walls in political renderings of industrial materials. Made from fiberglass, resin, wood, urethane, pvc, and sand, the mauve shape of Chadwick Rantanen’s Weightable Cutaway, 2023, is hard to place, but tilt your head just so, and the red knob in its center looks like an eye.
Honorable mention:
“Mama’s in the Kitchen” at Anat Ebgi unpacks the underpinnings of domestic labor through food. In Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled 2010 (BBQ corner), 2010, stainless steel appliances are staged and atop mirrored chrome panels—the opposite of another work on view by Tiravanija, Untitled (lunch box), 1996, in which Thai takeout from a local restaurant is staged font-and-center. “Sacred Screenshots” at HEART is a delightful round up of “uncropped, unedited screenshots from the phones of 26 NYC-based artists” recalls the great Richard Prince-Emily Ratajkowski-Instagram-post drama that added fuel to the growing fire around precious art and private domains. Parent Company inaugurates its new basement location on East Broadway with a show that explores the body and various ways we care for or neglect it.
"Growing Sideways: Performing Childhood” at Columbia’s Wallach Art Gallery explores how adult artists engage with and depict childhood in their art. There are paintings of a maze and a judge (sourced from children’s coloring book about courtrooms) by Sable Elyse Smith, colorful kites by Joan Jonas, and a still-provocative 1996 photo by Aura Rosenberg’s daughter Carmen Miller striking a pose with sunglasses on in goth-glam drag, made in collaboration with the artist and Mike Kelley. The Hole rounds up depictions of the men in various states of undress in a show aptly titled “Twinks, Twinks, Hunks & Dad Bods.” There’s sure to be something for everyone! “Livingroom Rhapsody” at Allen Street Gallery exhibition reimagines the traditional art space as a space that can be, as the title suggests, lived in, with a selection of functional art and design objects.
Plus five women artists working in glass at HB381. Deconstructed takes on pattern studies at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery. Clamp’s “Sharp Cuts: Queer Collage” exhibition is a timely and inspiring look at just how evocative the oft-overlooked medium can be. A survey of Asian-American abstraction past and present at Hollis Taggart. An ethereal and revisionist show dedicated to the Garden of Eden at Jane Lombard Gallery. Gagosian’s “Icons from a Half Century of Art,” which is precisely that, although “in American Art” would be a more apt description. Forum Gallery’s “Out of Town,” a study of the human desire to escape our city life for nature is extra relatable when it is hot and wet and stinky outside. And next week, the summer’s final wave of group shows includes not-to-miss ones from Brigitte Donahue and Situations.
Closing this weekend:
A show that gathers pointy tips that extrapolate pointed ideas at Thomas VanDyke Gallery. In “Social Practice” at Amanita, eight painters who all live and work in Brooklyn, including Robert Nava and Marco Pariani offer love letters to everyday life in the sprawling borough. There is the endearingly quirky concept-show by Flux Factory billed as “a speculative retirement home for artists” on Governors’ Island. Amalia Ulman’s alluringly unconventional, Upper West Side vacant-apartment-turned-gallery “MiCasa” may have already closed but it is still worth looking up for its enterprise (19 artists including Louis Osmosis) and its taste-maker certified success.
If you made it this far: congrats, and I love you!
Drop a comment if I missed anything, and let me know what you want to hear about next