"Each time I’ve run into William’s paintings, I’ve been floored — not only by the ways he uses imagery but also by the careful crafting of his pieces. The exhibition at James Fuentes, which inaugurated the New York-based gallerist’s L.A. space early last month and is now in its final days, provides an opportunity to soak up a number of his works in a single setting on the West Coast."—Carolina A. Miranda

“He certainly had no idea to what extent the production of the self for the camera lens would be the dominating activity of hundreds of millions of youth around the planet today,” says Tillmans.

The anthropologist Marcela Echeverri has been working alongside some of her late brother’s friends and former collaborators, including the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, to curate a posthumous survey of his work. “I think of Juan Pablo as the anthropologist of the modern world,” she tells me. “He liked observing, analysing and capturing people in our society.”

"What I love about Echeverri’s work is its exuberance, its embrace of imprecision and indecision. These two latter qualities open the work to the left-field possibility that the prism of the self might explode the governing norms of identity – something drag once promised before reality television stole its thunderous adventurism."—Andrew Durbin

Cooper’s work centers around themes drawn from his upbringing. “I want to show a more modern version of Black Southern culture,” he has said. At James Fuentes, Cooper presented lyrically abstract works that alluded to themes of spirituality, sports, cookouts, hip-hop, and more.

James Fuentes is presenting Juan Pablo Echeverri's Identidad Perdida, a solo exhibition in two parts that displays the Colombian artist's prolific body of work, often read as a continuous self-portrait that began in adolescence.

The show brings together work by an eclectic mix of artists, from postwar figures like Robert Rauschenberg, Rosemary Mayer, and Marcel Broodthaers to emerging stars such as Martine Syms and Melissa Joseph. Wohl has also published a zine of poetry to be paired with the works in the exhibition; contributors include David Rimanelli, Kyle Dacuyan, Patricia Spears Jones, and more.

When the artist Juan Pablo Echeverri died at the age of 43 last year, he left behind more than 8,000 self-portraits taken in passport photo booths around the world. What had started as a diary of hair styles and piercings grew into a conceptual art project as Echeverri evolved as an artist.

Up close, the tactile, intricate quality of William’s works add movement to his scenes, and the overall effect is an alluring inaugural exhibition for the gallery’s new LA space.

Gallerist James Fuentes sets up shop in L.A. and takes us behind the scenes of painter Didier William’s opening show

In his art, garcia aims to channel, rather than control, that sense of divinity as a way to tap into the mysterious and automatic that undergirds so much of human experience.

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The roving artist’s wondrous new installation combines materials old and new to embody circularity and teardrops from the haunting tale of “la llorona.”

Didier William's new body of work combining personal narratives and mythology take over James Fuentes

Dancers’ Voices Across Time, in the Things Left Behind: In an art form that leaves few tangible traces, performers often become collectors of mementos from their careers. A lucky few find an archival home for their treasures.

In conjunction with his solo show, Things Like This Don’t Happen Here, at the new James Fuentes space in Los Angeles, Didier William is the subject of today's A Portfolio.

For the debut exhibition of the gallery’s West Coast outpost, Didier William merges painting and printmaking in one ethereal body of work. Scenic underwater tableaus depict a world unconstrained by gravity.

The artist Didier William carves out memories from his youth growing up in an immigrant household—albeit not exactly as they happened.

We see an ensemble of mythological characters cast by Didier William to portray scenes from personal and familial histories, with all the gaps and mysteries inherent to recollection. Looking back, he's seeking to be surprised, or reminded, of forgotten details. "That is the fairest role of the artwork," he says. "To expect it to heal me is unfair."

James Fuentes is opening the doors of his new LA-based gallery on May 6, a revamped 1920s-era building on Melrose Avenue, for its inaugural exhibition showcasing new work by Didier William.

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"For twenty-two years, every day, wherever he was in the world, Juan Pablo Echeverri took a self-portrait. A moment of action, followed by five minutes of waiting. His life was active, restless, multifarious—but the daily ritual of facing himself in a photo booth, this constant thread, was never skipped."

James Fuentes inaugurates the gallery’s new Los Angeles location with a solo exhibition of new work by Didier William.

James Fuentes’ new gallery in Melrose Hill will be presenting Didier William’s Things Like This Don’t Happen Here, a solo exhibition that combines personal narratives with mythology through works that utilize painting, printmaking, and collage techniques.

Curated by Wolfgang Tillmans with some of Echeverri’s closest friends and family, it’s now open at Tillmans’ Between Bridges gallery in Berlin and is coming soon to the James Fuentes gallery in New York. The two-site exhibition gathers work made by Echeverri over the last three decades, and is both a tribute to the artist and a chance to get his work more widely seen – work that, says Tillmans, still hasn’t received its due.

A two-part exhibition curated by Arden Wohl that touches upon various intersections, relationships, dialogues, and companionships between poetry and art; poets and artists, is opening at James Fuentes

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Sensibility and care are the coating on all the variety of raw materials brought together in the space, tied together in small clever knots. garcia not only creates objects made to be incredibly touching, but also uses the space in its entirety leaving no element untouched or unexamined.

In this exhibition, ektor cedes control of his medium, an act of vulnerability yet one that establishes his collaborative relationship with the universe around him. It is in this relationship that his work shines, encouraging curiosity in the viewer and humility within himself.

"It is worth noting that William is queer, but his art is closer in spirit to the word’s use as a verb rather than a noun. The artist’s works destabilize, rather than reinforce, a singular identity and function in the interstices between race, sexuality, and nationality as both objects of fantastical narrative and documents of Black life."—Alpesh Kantilal Patel

One of the most important contemporary Polish artists, Jakub Julian Ziółkowski's exhibition at MOCAK is the first comprehensive presentation of his work—with 100 works on display including large-format paintings, elaborate installations, precise drawings and monotypes, small sculptures, and ceramic objects

Yi Hou's illuminations contextualize their sitters as much as they obfuscate them, pointing to the rich complexity of the painter’s relationship with each subject and the ways in which constructed, long-standing identities may be adopted and rebuffed.

"I think in a way it doesn’t matter where you live; it matters where you look or who you involve, how you awaken yourself even in the same environment. Artists are very flexible..."—Si On

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"William makes intensely layered and detailed work that pairs the precise crafts of printmaking and carving into wood, with painting in richly hued acrylics and oils. It mingles the legacies of western art movements, from romanticism to Post-Impressionism, with his own jagged, restless aesthetic. No one and nothing is at rest here. It really packs a punch."

"The sculptures in her Tramps exhibition, Idolize the Burn, an Ode to Performance, refer to her recovery after she self-immolated during a 2001 show. Trailing assemblages of chains and undergarments and burn suits set a romantic, gothic mood. There’s been violence, but the aftermath is poised, inert, a little nostalgic."—Travis Diehl

Presented on the occasion of the Brooklyn Museum’s current exhibition Oscar yi Hou: East of sun, west of moon, yi Hou joins curator Eugenie Tsai in a conversation moderated by Catherine Quan Damman.

New York gallerist James Fuentes is opening a location in Los Angeles this spring. The 3,700-square-foot space will host a solo show of Didier William‘s mesmerizing and mystical paintings of figures submerged in water, caught in forests and lifted by clouds.

Several gallerists are adding to their square footage with new spaces in Los Angeles this season, but New York’s James Fuentes is of a different mould to the international set. With only one space on the Lower East Side since 2007, his expansion into 3,700 sq ft in Los Angeles’ Melrose Hill area this spring (and to Tribeca later in the year) marks a step change.

The Honorable Alix Desulmé, Mayor of North Miami, presents Didier William with a key to the City of North Miami, the very city where the artist grew up, in recognition of William’s outstanding contribution to the world of the arts.

"Haiti is a hyperreal, physical, geographic and historical place, a memoried place for immigrants, a conceptual idea and part of a global diasporic re-imaginary all at the very same time." In tandem with Didier William's solo exhibition at MOCA North Miami, Jerry Philogene moderates a conversation with three notable diasporic Haitians whose work draws on their complex relationship to the place of their birth from the perspective of diaspora, Michelle Lisa Polissaint, Mark Fleuridor, and Morel Doucet.

On view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, February 12–July 2, 2023

“I wanted a discrete object to do the temporal work of reading a body in space. And I trusted that painting could do that work.”

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Idolize the Burn, An Ode to Performance is on view January 13–March 22, 2023 at 39 1/2 Washington Square South, lower ground floor

The artist joins Rail Managing Editor Charles Schultz for a conversation, concluding with a poetry reading by Ugochi Egonu.

Bougatsos, an international experimental musician, lyricist, and visual artist living and working in Brooklyn, is an artist not afraid to play with fire.

By Alison Knowles smartly pushes the exhibition catalogue towards the form of artists’ book, a fitting push for the work of such a seminal figure in the field.

"I would feel uncomfortable painting a stranger. I don’t have any kind of relationship to them. What kind of mandate do I have to represent and depict this person?"—Oscar yi Hou speaks to Russell Tovey about his exhibition East of Sun, West of Moon at the Brooklyn Museum, featuring 11 original portraits by yi Hou of lovers, friends, and himself.

Curated by Erica Moiah James, the exhibition features new paintings among the more than forty mixed media pieces, some of which refer with great sensitivity to William’s personal experiences in the last few years.

Embedded in a largely immigrant community and a longtime anchor for contemporary art backed by hefty scholarship, MOCA North Miami now is giving its spotlight to an artist from the museum's own backyard.

William makes work that sits at the boundary of abstraction and figuration, delving into Afro-Caribbean history to retell stories of the Black diaspora through a potent mix of myth and memory. A common motif is the mango leaf, in a nod to Haiti’s native tropical fruits. The MOCA North Miami show will feature 40 paintings as well as William’s first monumental sculpture, a 12-foot-tall wooden form inspired by columns used in traditional Haitian religious rituals.

Replete with Chinese motifs and symbols of Americana, the portraits in ‘East of sun, west of moon’ [on view at the Brooklyn Museum] examine the performance of ethnicity and race in art.

The Haitian American artist returns to Miami for his first museum solo exhibition at MOCA North Miami, painting a watchful gaze on Black queer life.

At first glance, the frames that hold these works might appear to belong to another era. That, however, was Holder’s point. He was fascinated with gold borders, and even collaborated with a local Downtown New York framer to make them specially for his pieces. The portraits on view here, not of actual sitters but subjects culled from his imagination, envision elegant Black women, New Yorkers with impeccable fashion and glamorous accessories.

Geoffrey Holder at James Fuentes, curated by Hilton Als, offers a look at a Trinidadian-American dancer, actor and designer (among other things), who also painted sultry portraits.

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Oscar yi Hou’s Paintings Lend New Frames to Queer, Asian Identity: “I think by creating symbolic densities, you’re able to invite the viewer to pay more attention to the works,” said Mr. yi Hou. “I try to honor the opacity of the subject.”

Often overlooked in canonical art historical discourses during his lifetime, Saito’s work is rooted in the tradition of American Color Field Painting after Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland, as well as Abstract Expressionism and Lyrical Abstraction. Significantly informed by his personal experience with experimental theater and his own inter and intracultural biography, Saito’s gestural works reflect the dialogic relationship between painting and performance while exploring ways in which painting, similar to theater, can solidify action and emotion.

“Instead of painting a person, I painted the button on their shirt. This also became the functioning metaphor of the work: the idea of focusing on details, looking at something closely until it gives way to abstraction.”

For 90 years of its existence, the Whitney Museum of American Art did not own a single painting that explicitly deals with abortion. But that has changed. The museum recently purchased Juanita McNeely’s “Is it Real? Yes It Is!” (1969), a mural-sized painting that recounts, in a fragmented narrative spanning nine separate panels, her harrowing experience of having an abortion in the early ’60s, when the procedure was illegal. The painting will make its museum debut on Sept. 20, when the Whitney rehangs its permanent collection.

A veteran gallery of New York’s Lower East Side is joining the exodus to Tribeca. James Fuentes Gallery will soon open at 52 White Street, in a column-free, ground-floor space that measures around 3,000 square feet.

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A founder of Fluxus, and one of the few Fluxus artists still alive today, Knowles has only recently begun to receive attention for her work at a level that collaborators such as George Brecht have enjoyed for decades. This month the recognition reaches a climax with an expansive retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).

Ahead of her retrospective in Berkeley, Calif., the artist Alison Knowles talks about her Fluxus roots, the appeal of
beans and the power of interactive artworks.

Few titles encapsulate an exhibition’s argument as succinctly as “by Alison Knowles: A Retrospective (1960–2022).” [...] The preposition’s pliability is the point. Most obviously, “by” denotes authorship, as in a corpus of texts written by Alison Knowles, yet it also suggests facilitation, a process brought about by means of Alison Knowles, or proximity, i.e., close by Alison Knowles. In a work by Alison Knowles, agency is more a function of adjacency, attachment, or intimacy than of ownership.