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.