"What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in May by Holland Cotter"

"Nightlife, Kinship, and Queer Identity Collide in Oscar Yi Hou’s New Exhibition"

"The Bold Elegance of Actor and Artist Geoffrey Holder: A Style Icon Through the Decades"

"Giant Women On New York feels like a call to the past, a point of reflection in a time of turmoil. There is work to be done and work to protect regarding women's rights. The works of these “giant women” provide us with opportunity to ruminate on the complexity of the female experience, and encourage introspection. "

"One lesson of this compact, extraordinary exhibition of feminist art is that if you’re being ignored, you can do whatever you want — so take up space."

"Hundreds of film and art lovers convened at James Fuentes Gallery to celebrate the opening of “Some More Collages,” Jim Jarmusch’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles."

"I love newsprint, because when I was very young, my parents gave me a microscope and the first thing I looked at was the edge of a torn newspaper. It was a jungle of thread. It was very striking, and I still have the image in my head. The fragility of newsprint appeals to me as a tactile substance."

There is a current lazy disposition to address representational painting merely to decode its political import, underscoring a belief that painting’s only value is its social currency. Halvorson’s exhibition reminded us that the way an image is painted is a form of content, that the world of images has a symbolic dimension, and seeing and perceiving are ultimately different acts altogether.

While most artists’ works are shown in groups at venues such as Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the Contemporary Arts Center, a few participants have sites entirely dedicated to their work. Didier William occupies a gallery at The Historic New Orleans Collection, in the heart of the city’s bustling historic French Quarter.

“I have always known who I am. I keep it real. And I have had the privilege to express this in my practice in a multitude of ways, academic and artistic.”

Talk about signs and wonders. With his latest solo show, The beat of life, artist Oscar yi Hou presents an electrifying new body of work that, by the sheer vitality of the ideas it contains and the urgency of its subject matter, enthralls and eludes in the same breath.

For Prospect.6 New Orleans, Didier William crafts a vision of the Haitian diaspora through the history and resilience of Louisiana’s ancient cypress trees. Over the last decade, William has developed a vocabulary of figures and motifs to describe his energetic concept of immigrant life: warbling silhouettes, spangled with eyes, carved into the wooden panel so densely that they resemble cells or particles charged with sight.

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“The beauty of Surrealism is looking at things in a different way,” Jarmusch said. “It’s about juxtaposing the mundane and fantastical.”

In The beat of life, Oscar yi Hou reconfigures the recognizable.

Historically, New Orleans has been regarded as a city deeply rooted in its past. For Prospect.6, Co-Artistic Directors Miranda Lash and Ebony G. Patterson will posit New Orleans as a globally relevant point of departure for examining our collective future as it relates to climate change, legacies of colonialism, and definitions of belonging and home.

In this lightly curated assemblage of haunting fragments and found objects, the artist-musician traces the life (and death) of a performing persona—perhaps herself or a projected alter ego. Sculptures made with distressed dancing shoes and tortured instruments serve as symbolic anchors, evoking gifts for a spectral afterlife: both bewitching and unsettling.

A highlight of the week was a special series of guided tours of the artist’s former apartment, “Mansion Echeverri,” that the gallery set up with his estate. Echeverri’s residence was a true extension of his art and the apartment was like stepping in to a habitable art installation.

Edges of Ailey, opening at the Whitney Museum of American Art on September 25, is the first large-scale museum exhibition to celebrate the life, dances, influences, and enduring legacy of visionary artist and choreographer Alvin Ailey (b. 1931, Rogers, Texas; d. 1989, New York, New York). This dynamic showcase—described as an “extravaganza” by curator Adrienne Edwards—brings together visual art, live performance, music, a range of archival materials, and a multi-screen video installation drawn from recordings of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT) repertory to explore the full range of Ailey’s personal and creative life.

From May 18 to July 7, 2024, the St. Matthäus Foundation, Cultural Foundation of the Evangelical Church of Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia (EKBO), is showing the exhibition "FULIMIDRON" by Berlin artist Berta Fischer in St. Matthäus Church.

When James Fuentes opened his storefront on Delancey Street on New York’s Lower East Side in 2010, he intended to pay homage to the big players in Chelsea when the neighborhood was in its heyday. He chose a forest green shade for his façade to salute two influential 24th Street galleries, Luhring Augustine and Andrea Rosen Gallery.

The retrospective of this extraordinary artist presents the extensive work of Alison Knowles from her earliest works to the present day. The exhibition takes a look at the ideational aspects of the Fluxus movement and the ideas of that zeitgeist, but above all emphasizes Alison Knowles' sensitive and poetic art and her view of the world.

The exhibition feels like an ode to the end of summer, through sunny landscapes and outdoor settings, and how these physical things change over time. Featuring ten new paintings, and over sixty related polaroids, New Hours is Halvorson’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability is the first exhibition to survey themes of illness and impairment in American art from the 1960s up to the COVID-19 era. For Dear Life narrates the history of recent art through the lens of disability—a term used inclusively—recognizing the vulnerable body to be a crucial throughline for art in the United States amid the upheavals and transformations of past decades.

The first retrospective of the American artist shows no unknown: the Fluxus Festival, which founded a new art movement, started in the state capital in 1962, and Alison Knowles was the only woman there at the time

Folkwang is presenting the exhibition Grow It, Show It! A look at hair from Diane Arbus to TikTok. The show highlights the role of hairstyles in society, politics and everyday life through a wide selection of historical and contemporary photographs, videos and film clips from art, fashion and social media.

The exhibition Key Operators: Weaving and coding as languages of feminist historiography and its accompanying program of events focus on the links between feminized labor, technological advancements, and their associated languages. Knowles' The House of Dust Edition (1967) will be on view.

Set on canvases the color of beach sand are fleshy, even voluptuous, figures posing as rock formations. A subtle sensuality hovers around what might, at first, seem to be bodies made of stone.

"It’s really about an immersive physical experience of inhabiting the body. It’s like you’re at a mountain experiencing the landscape and you say, I want to remember this forever."—Juan Eduardo Gómez

A unique exhibition at Victoria Miro’s north London outpost juxtaposes the woefully under-recognized painting practices of brothers Boscoe and Geoffrey Holder, both born in Trinidad in 1921 and 1930 respectively.

Galerie Peter Kilchmann presents Fire Flight, Didier William's first solo exhibition in our gallery, on view June 7–July 26, 2024.

Victoria Miro presents an exhibition of work by Geoffrey Holder in London, on view June 1–July 27, 2024. Shown in tandem for the first time, exhibitions by Boscoe Holder (1921-2007) and his younger brother Geoffrey Holder (1930-2014) foreground the siblings as painters in light of their significant their achievements in theatre, dance, and film.

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The Lo-Down Culture Cast host Traven Rice spoke with Fuentes about how growing up on the Lower East Side influenced his creative aesthetics and the intention behind the gallery, which he opened in a live/work space on St. James Place in 2007. Those were the early days when the Lower East Side was just beginning to be recognized as an art gallery neighborhood.

"I often begin a bike ride at sunrise and conclude it at sunset, doing this throughout every season. It cultivates a keen awareness of the changing world. You, the rider, become like the hands of a clock, circling the Earth’s dial. The light’s unique qualities shift as our position in the solar system changes."—John McAllister

The visual artist and experimental musician opens up about an assemblage made from stained vintage tea towels, and what she has termed the “absurdist stage” created by its frame.

McCallister’s shocking palette renders even familiar scenes—forest vignettes, nature’s “perpetual rot and rebirth”—anew.

Never the Same Song, an exhibition dedicated to Lizzi Bougatsos and Lonnie Holley will be on view May 18–September 15, 2024 at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida.

"Parris’s paintings have an energy that could knock you out."

New York City and its artistic past always speak to unusual excitement, one that is synonymous with the norms of everyday city life. Happy to say, we are experiencing that very renaissance again which made the downtown art scene unique from the 60’s onto the present. Kikuo Saito: Color Codes – on display at the newly inaugurated James Fuentes Gallery and presented by noted independent curator Christopher Y. Lew – brings forth one of the scene’s most prolific and endearing painters, and a pioneer in his own right.

The importance of Holder as an artist is beginning to come into focus, in no small part due to two exhibitions mounted by James Fuentes gallery—one in New York in 2022 curated by critic Hilton Als, the other in 2024 in Los Angeles curated by Erica Moiah James, an art historian who focuses on the Caribbean and African diasporas. But these shows are really just scratching the surface of an oeuvre belonging to an artist who has, ironically, been famous for everything except his art.

"If some of his painterly peers found respite in pared-down abstraction—recall Ad Reinhardt’s obsession with 'purity' as the finest form of aesthetics—Saito was interested in intentionally muddying his expansive planes of color."

Fuentes says, “We’ve always embraced being on the margins. But this neighborhood has always been predisposed to high-level conversations of art. It has a 50-year legacy of live-work spaces for artists."

After 17 years on the Lower East Side, the New York gallerist holds forth on his move to “the middle of the conversation.”

“He and his generation were very much recognized and embraced by the generation of the Harlem Renaissance,” shared Holder's son, Léo. “And not for nothing, but the main players of the Harlem Renaissance were alive until the 1960’s and 70s. The Harlem Renaissance never really went away. It just progressed. And it progressed into this.”

The New York native made his name in the Lower East Side. 17 years later, he’s moving his
eponymous gallery to New York’s rising art-market epicenter.

This week on the podcast, senior reporter Eileen Kinsella caught up with Fuentes to talk about growing up in New York City during the heyday of hip hop and graffiti art, and his unique approach to the art business, alongside the broader growth and changes in the art world at large.

Lower East Side gallery James Fuentes will inaugurate its new Tribeca space this Friday with a Kikuo Saito solo exhibition. The show, titled Color Codes, will run from March 8th to April 20th at the gallery’s new location at 52 White Street.

Color Codes focuses on a riot of bright and deep hues peppered with scribbled text and tacked-on lettering. Organized by former Whitney Museum and MoMA PS1 curator Christopher Y. Lew, the show epitomizes downtown art culture in New York City.

The disparate yet parallel legacies of Geoffrey Holder and Kikuo Saito are woven together in James Fuentes’s carefully curated booth, showcasing five works by Holder and one work from Saito. These painters shared a lifelong dedication to theater, a practice that informed their art—albeit in vastly different ways.

Frieze Los Angeles is smaller this year, but dealers are doing big business.

To accompany a splendid solo show dedicated to the late Geoffrey Holder, James Fuentes has also dedicated his Frieze LA booth to the larger-than-life artist and actor.

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"The gallery’s expansion to Los Angeles represents more than geographic growth; it signifies Fuentes’s ambition to embed the gallery within the cultural fabric of another major U.S. art capital, fostering a bicoastal dialogue that enriches both communities."—Maxwell Rabb

The 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia: Foreigners Everywhere is curated by Adriano Pedrosa and will be on view April 20–November 24, 2024.

Prospect.6: the future is present, the harbinger is home continues its legacy as the longest-running, citywide contemporary art triennial. On view November 2, 2024—February 2, 2025

This gallery of ceramic figures is most interesting when the imagery starts to bleed and morph into something less recognizable. Some images feel like snapshots of moments, while others seem to wander through an art museum and its familiar poses.

Brazilian artist Dalton Paula works in a variety of mediums and formats, but is best known for his portraits, a tradition in Western painting where the enslaved and colonized have largely been absent. Paula researches significant figures in Brazilian history whose lives are documented, but for whom there is no visual record and creates imagined portraits, giving them visibility and recognition.

Perhaps most known for a painting that depicted her own harrowing abortion, her work has seen a resurgence over the past few years in light of the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States. McNeely never shied away from painting the experiences of women, including the difficulty of childbirth, monthly menstruation, and raw sexuality.

The 13 ceramic figures in Cynthia Lahti’s Little Storms—many of them missing a head or limb—strike various poses on their white plinths, each animated female form elevated to meet the viewer’s eye.

There’s a contrary beauty to Cynthia Lahti’s gloopy ceramic figures, like some romantic ideal chewed on and emerging gnarled, but more emotionally recognizable for it. Her figures appear like dazed Meissen porcelains, jolted from their lives of leisure into messier, more honest ones.

Paula's multidisciplinary conceptual practice is a powerful nexus of visual representation, historical preservation, and racial justice. His central concern is the African Diaspora in Brazil and understanding its history through the lens of its people.

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Fifteen artists reflect on 2023: "In Moving Through, 1975, the exhibition’s central piece, McNeely uses elements of German Expressionism to portray violent scenes of female mutilation and physical confinement. The images are graphic, disturbing, yet the show is also dense with beauty. In the two paintings that flank that central work, she flings bodies through voided backgrounds with richly applied pigment and deliberate brushwork. Though austere in composition and color, these canvases give the exhibition important balance. The show will haunt me for a long time."—Adam Alessi

In Breakthrough, a recent group exhibition at James Fuentes in New York, a trio of Calleja’s paintings was featured alongside works by other artists who examine interiors, whether of the mind or the home. In Calleja’s work, the former is tied up in the latter: There is a psychological undercurrent to her subjects, often giving off hints of anxiety, anticipation, or listlessness.

Oscar yi Hou showed a yearlong solo exhibition of figurative paintings at the Brooklyn Museum, making him one of the youngest artists to ever have a solo show at a major New York museum. A graduate of Columbia University, yi Hou won the annual UOVO Prize and was named an Artsy Vanguard in 2022. Earlier this year, he received the Philip Pearlstein Painter Distinction at Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program.

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Little Storms marks the artist’s debut solo exhibition in New York. Straying from her work across metal, glass, plaster, and collage, Lahti here sculpts out of clay, which provides greater opportunity for spontaneity, a theme present throughout the show. Also apparent is the push and pull between perfection and imperfection, intentionality and organic creation.

In Oscar yi Hou's poem paintings, a private lexicon of hieroglyphs—cranes, the yin and yang symbol, Western spurs—serve as stand-ins for the artist. “It’s the universe of the paintings, and it’s up to the viewer if they want to decipher it or not,” the New York-based, Liverpool-born painter says of the works, which have served as a means to document his relationships with loved ones over the years.

The Haitian American artist reflects on his recent work and MoMA’s collection of Haitian art.

When curating the exhibition, Ball considered her own archive of artists whose work has inspired her over the years. “Co-curating Young Elder was my opportunity to pull from this archive and bring forward artists who are making exciting work and are specifically tied to their communities and contributing to their living cultures,” says Ball. “These artists are culture carriers, and I believe they are important in framing how we understand Indigenous art.”

Ms. McNeely’s interest, from beginning to end, was in the body, particularly the female body and what it could do. If it was suppressed, mistreated or callously acted upon, her canvases filled with rage and the color of blood; when it moved freely under the direction of its inhabitant, however, her depictions captured a winsome, evasive pleasure.

Through it all, McNeely never faltered in her dedication to painting the world as she saw it—the world as many women see it—full of a range of experiences, including ones that polite society would rather they not talk about. As she once said, “Many times, life’s forces are more powerful than we are, and yet we can face them if we have a standing ground that is our own, that we’ve set for ourselves.”

“When we presented Juanita's work for the first time in 2020, I don't think there had ever been a show that we'd done that had such a visibly visceral impact on everyone who came into the gallery to see it,” says James Fuentes. “Rarely are there artists who can visually articulate psychology, trauma and other intangible aspects of life.”

Pulped paper bricks chart a haptic course between Aryana Minai’s eight Life Forms (all 2023) on view at James Fuentes’ lower-level project space. This rather soft, somewhat squishy pathway opens onto the wall under each Life Form for a reflective pause...

Years before the first iPhone hit the market, Echeverri wittily predicted the pervasiveness of our current era of digital self-representation, filled with artificial images of ourselves captured “casually” or “on the go.” Echeverri never seemed to take himself too seriously—but he was an obsessively maniacal worker, and once described his diaristic practice as being “like an addiction, I guess,” blithely adding that “if I smoke, I smoke.”

The gallery nods to an episode of Reservation Dogs, a TV series about the lives of Native American teenagers in rural Oklahoma, for its “Young Elder” show. When two self-righteous influencers are invited to a community center for a Native American Reclamation and Decolonization Symposium, one of the speakers refers to himself as a “young elder”—an oxymoron that inspires a communal eye roll from the audience. The gallery’s exhibition of four emerging and mid-career Indigenous artists borrows the scene’s satire inviting the question: what does it mean to express the wisdom of millennia through a contemporary practice?

A group show of contemporary Native and Indigenous artists is not something you see every day in New York City. That’s a bitter truth, sweetened for just a few weeks by this show, curated by Natalie Ball (Klamath/Modoc) and Zach Feuer.

“I think that [the artists in the exhibition] are rooted in community, and they’re rooted in ancestral knowledge. And that was my preface for wanting them to be in this show. It’s a lot of work to stay rooted in your community and to maintain that connection to community and to maintain ancestral knowledge. I really respect those artists who maintain that sort of connection.”—co-curator Natalie Ball

Young Elder showcases four emerging and mid-career artists who reference Indigenous materials and traditions as they are carried on in the current day.

A booth brimming with buoyant watercolors by the late Ed Baynard evoked still lifes by Matisse and Cézanne, though the artist is best known as a designer who worked closely with musicians like the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix.

American artist Ed Baynard (1940-2016) is experiencing a market resurgence, and a quick glance at the decades-spanning group of acrylics and watercolors gathered here makes the why obvious.

Her whole approach to art speaks to the idea that these were things that she—and other women—experienced, and that visualizing life’s discomforts and anguish is powerful, and necessary.

Will Heinrich reviews an expansive art history at the Independent Art Fair.

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Juanita McNeely bares it all in her debut L.A. solo show.

The raw sexual power of yi Hou's subjects refutes stereotypes of Asian masculinity while offering a fantasy about how the Chinese men who literally built the West might have explored their own desires.

Independent 20th Century gives a space for overlooked artists.

Moving Through, the 87-year-old artist’s first solo show in Los Angeles, features three multi-panel works from the mid-1970s, offering Angelenos a long-overdue introduction to her captivating intensity.

Opening reception Wednesday 20 September, 6:30 - 9 pm. There will be a performance by Florence Peake. All welcome.

Tadić rode the D train back and forth for a year, retracing the route countless times in search of scenes for his series of New York cityscapes.

The monumental multi-panel piece Moving Through (1975) will span the full length of the gallery’s longest wall, enjoying the regal presence that this pioneer of feminist art and thought deserves.

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Earlier this summer, Leong Leong unveiled James Fuentes gallery’s long-awaited new location in Los Angeles. The space occupies a 1920s-era commercial building on Melrose Avenue; the 3,700-square-foot interior is organized by a series of 14-foot walls that meet the exposed wood of its bow-truss ceiling.

The Croatian born artist is taking a fresh, and critical, approach to the changes impacting New York City's infrastructure across the last few years.

Is the world ready for the chameleonic, virtuosic legacy of artist Juan Pablo Echeverri?

Chromazones is on view July 21-September 10, 2023 at 1154 North Ave, Beacon, NY 12508

The show features a series of large-scale paintings inspired by relatable memories from Jo’s personal life — from love triangles and family tensions to pressures of gender performance. Her expressive brushstrokes craft a mesmerizing portrait of dark hues.

Wohl recently embarked on perhaps her most significant project yet, curating a two-part exhibition of art and poetry, A Study in Form, at downtown gallery James Fuentes. “Though predominantly a collection of visual art,” she writes, “this exhibition beats with the heart of a poet.”

"To understand Oscar yi Hou’s practice, you have to see it through its rhythm of language—the edges that are formed by words, and the way that they are able to perpetuate the invisible but real architectures of alterity."—Andrew Woolbright

Oscar yi Hou joins curator Eugenie Tsai on NPR to discuss the artist's Brooklyn Museum show which is on display until September 17.

Artist Juanita McNeely and curator Jane Panetta reflect on the artist's 1969 painting Is it Real? Yes, It Is!, one of the first works regarding her abortion experience. In her work, McNeely has been driven by the need to “make the ugly and the terrible beautiful for myself.”

The show’s apt title translates as “Lost Identity,” and the Colombian artist specialized in consciously losing his, gleefully hopscotching between personas. The centerpiece is a portion of miss fotojapon, Echeverri’s 24-years-in-the-making opus, a daily self-portrait series that began in a photo booth and later segued to digital camera documentation.

“Superficiality, for him, was not a flaw but a quality, a human characteristic to be dissected and harvested for joy and transcultural understanding.” For Juan, our chameleonic tendencies are cause for humour as well as introspection, and he balances both with an unmistakable lust for life.

Starting in 1998, the Colombian artist photographed himself every day for 24 years, using first a photobooth, then a phone. He planned each snap meticulously, considering composition and costume, as well as how the image would work in a grid.

The artist joins Rail Editor-at-Large Andrew Woolbright, concluding with a poetry reading by Morgan Võ.

"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

Friends and family of the late Colombian visual artist to toast his legacy and the opening of Identidad Perdida at James Fuentes.

“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.

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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.

Highlights from Frieze New York celebrate politically and historically centered artworks

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.

"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.”

Melrose Hill is the city's latest hot neighborhood for galleries as the local art ecosystem continues to stretch and strengthen.

Shows to See in the US this January

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.

Washington, D.C.’s New Rubell Museum Offers a Bracing Vision of Contemporary Art Right Now.

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.

New York Dealer James Fuentes Has Big Plans for L.A.

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.