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DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20260226
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20260405
DTSTAMP:20260417T132759
CREATED:20260210T204436Z
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SUMMARY:Martine Gutierrez: Lottery
DESCRIPTION:RYAN LEE is pleased to announce Lottery\, an exhibition of photographs and video installation by Martine Gutierrez. Arising out of a recent performance in Paris that took inspiration from 1970s feminist performance art\, Gutierrez incorporates her tool of choice\, the camera\, to subvert hierarchies of power and explore notions of control and access.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/martine-gutierrez-lottery/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
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DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20260108
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20260215
DTSTAMP:20260417T132759
CREATED:20260105T214327Z
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SUMMARY:Hung Liu: Shaping\, Pouring\, Layering
DESCRIPTION:RYAN LEE is pleased to announce Shaping\, Pouring\, Layering\, an exhibition of paintings\, mixed media resin works\, and works on paper by Hung Liu (b. Changchun\, China\, 1948 – d. Oakland\, California\, 2021). This show explores the inventive processes that Liu employed to outmaneuver the limitations of media\, merging painting and sculpture as she brought historical images to life. “I create and destroy an image concurrently by working freely – being both careful and careless at the same time\,” Liu said.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/hung-liu-shaping-pouring-layering/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
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DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20251113
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20251224
DTSTAMP:20260417T132759
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SUMMARY:Vivian Browne: The Trees Speak\, Painting 1964-1992
DESCRIPTION:RYAN LEE is pleased to announce The Trees Speak\, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Vivian Browne (b. 1929 Laurel\, FL – d. 1993 New York\, NY) inspired by the intersection of humans and nature that she observed in the California landscape. Ranging from small paintings to grand triptychs\, some of the works on view were included in the 2025 museum retrospective Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest\, but many of them haven’t been exhibited for 30 years. This is RYAN LEE’s third solo exhibition of Browne’s work. \nThese paintings\, created between 1964 and 1992\, reveal Browne’s heightened awareness of man’s impact on nature. In a 1988 artist statement\, Browne wrote\, “As a child growing up in Queens\, NY\, when it was still possible to walk through open fields and small orchards\, I became fascinated with trees. That compelling attraction combined with a growing concern for environmental issues has led to references to plant life in much of my work of the past ten years.” \nCurator Lowery Stokes Sims concurred\, noting that Browne “captured the wonderment of a child’s first infatuation with trees encapsulated in the dramatic upsweep of the perspective in many of these paintings.” This is epitomized in the monumental painting Kings Canyon (1992)\, named after Kings Canyon National Park which contains some of the world’s largest stands of sequoia trees. Creating a patchwork of abstracted elements\, Browne plays with perspective and color. The works in this exhibition\, pulsing with energy and repeated patterns\, are studies of light and space and the ways that humans intervene in nature. \nIn 1964\, Browne traveled to California for the first time when she received a six-month Huntington Hartford fellowship\, dedicating herself to art full time and finding inspiration in the local topography. During this time\, she created Pacific Palisades (1964-65)\, which foreshadowed both her interest in painting trees as well as the color palette she would favor throughout her career. \nBrowne returned to California in the 1980s and became captivated with the monumental trees that she encountered in places like Yosemite National Park. Her studio overlooked a “bunch of tangled trees\,” as her friend Emma Amos described it. She photographed power lines and transmission towers and began to visually juxtapose the linearity of tree branches and trunks with the metal bars of the pylons. Later\, she began to superimpose these natural and manmade shapes\, considering them as competing sources of energy. Browne said\, “In a world fast becoming stripped of its natural resources\, forms of the big trees seemed to me to be symbolic of power\, strength and endurance.” The painting titled Global Warming (1987) represents Browne’s prescient anxiety about the environment as she used what was\, at the time\, a newly popular term for climate change. \nEmbedded in the abstract patterns of the trees in paintings such as All Trace (c. 1987) are encoded words by Black female writers – in this case\, a quote from Toni Morrison’s acclaimed 1987 novel Beloved. Browne faced decades of pressure to paint “Black art” – meaning figurative art about Black themes. In an act of defiance and celebration\, she made her trees “Black” by imbuing them with writing by Black female authors.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/vivian-browne-the-trees-speak-painting-1964-1992/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20251009
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20251109
DTSTAMP:20260417T132759
CREATED:20250925T202444Z
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SUMMARY:Katy Stone: Terrains
DESCRIPTION:RYAN LEE is pleased to announce Terrains\, a new body of work by artist Katy Stone\, which contemplates the natural world as both a literal and poetic landscape. Through large-scale installations of layered forms\, Stone reimagines forests\, ponds\, and rich-hued terrains as metaphors for emotional states and collective experience in the present age.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/katy-stone-terrains/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20250904
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20251005
DTSTAMP:20260417T132759
CREATED:20250805T184537Z
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SUMMARY:Alcatraz is an Idea
DESCRIPTION:RYAN LEE Gallery is pleased to announce Alcatraz is an Idea\, an exhibition of work across media including video\, lightboxes\, and an acrylic pigment print on wood. Making its East Coast debut\, the centerpiece two-channel video with vinyl mural is a collaboration between Kota Ezawa and Julian Brave NoiseCat that depicts the 2019 Alcatraz Canoe Journey that commemorated 50 years since the Alcatraz Occupation.  \nEzawa used hand-drawn animation to re-interpret footage of the canoes traversing San Francisco Bay. Co-organized by NoiseCat\, the event invited Indigenous peoples from across the West Coast and beyond to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island by the activist group Indians of All Tribes. The video installation was exhibited earlier this year at Ezawa’s landmark solo exhibition at the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture in San Francisco\, Kota Ezawa: Here and There — Now and Then.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/alcatraz-is-an-idea/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20250626
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20250816
DTSTAMP:20260417T132759
CREATED:20250612T211424Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250612T211424Z
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SUMMARY:Victory Over the Sun
DESCRIPTION:CFGNY\, Phil Chang\, Barnett Cohen\, Bethany Collins\, Liz Deschenes\, Kota Ezawa\, Corinne Jones\, Gina Osterloh\, Stephanie Syjuco\, Stewart Uoo\, and Anicka Yi \nRYAN LEE Gallery is pleased to present Victory Over the Sun\, inspired by the 1913 Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun in which Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square debuted. The black square represented a repudiation of all past images in order to start anew to forge a utopian vision and society. In a time when we have become enslaved to images fed to us via the digital infrastructures that dictate how and what we consume visually\, this exhibition celebrates contemporary works that rebel against the generation of images created to serve the endless demand for content. It will feature a selection of work in a variety of mediums by contemporary artists exploring ideas of negation\, interpretation\, voids\, spirituality\, physicality\, and impermanence\, all of which refuse to be captured as an image. \nThe absurdist opera depicted allegorical strongmen\, bolstered by new technologies like airplanes\, who fought a battle with the sun to repudiate old values and make a new world. Malevich wrote\, “The black square is the antithesis of the sun\, the anti-sun. It swallows the light\, but it seems to be charged with energy.” \nThroughout history\, artists have often sought to create new forms of expression as a way to challenge the society in which they lived. In the early twentieth century\, we saw the birth of Dadaism\, Suprematism\, Constructivism and then conceptual practices in the 1960s\, such as Minimalism\, land art\, institutional critique and later on\, relational aesthetics\, all of which addressed the inadequacies of the dominant art forms at the time. Lucy Lippard wrote that conceptual artists used “the power of imagination” to “escape from cultural confinement.” Each of these moments were times of unrest that pushed artists to think of new ways to express their desire for social change. \nToday\, our contemporary capitalist society has been overpowered with digital technology bombarding our every second of existence with images\, whether advertisements\, TV shows\, video content\, photos of everything imaginable available on our phones\, tablets\, and monitors. This exhibition proposes that we step back and think about how to harness our humanity and our capacity to imagine as well as engage our physical human presence and attention. The works on view refuse to contend with the onslaught of images we are faced with\, and cannot be easily reproduced via social media. We invite viewers to experience the work in person\, to slow down and contemplate new possibilities.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/victory-over-the-sun/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20250417
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20250615
DTSTAMP:20260417T132759
CREATED:20250327T200844Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250327T200844Z
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SUMMARY:The Garden Reveals Me
DESCRIPTION:The Garden Reveals Me\nApril 17 – June 14\, 2025\nOpening reception: Thursday\, April 17\, 2025\, 6:00-8:00 pm\nIncluding work by Tim Braden\, Samella Lewis\, Cathy Lu\, Michael Mazur\, and Andrew Raftery \n  \nRYAN LEE Gallery is pleased to present The Garden Reveals Me. This group exhibition explores the ways in which artists use depictions of nature – from seeds to leaves to flowers – as a form of self-expression that reveals their desires\, history\, ancestry\, and culture. In a way\, an artist is like a gardener as they choose colors\, lines\, and textures and arrange them in a precise composition. The cyclical nature of the four seasons is explored in the works on view here through various mediums including painting\, ceramics\, engraving\, and sculpture. Just like the interconnected\, interdependent ecosystem of plants\, insects\, and animals that live in a garden\, the works in this exhibition exist in symbiotic harmony. \nIn Michael Mazur’s Seasons by a Pond (2000)\, he depicts images of nature that verge into abstraction. The paintings transition from white and blue-gray ice\, to the soft chartreuse hues of spring\, to the vibrant red and purple blooms of summer\, and finally the brown decay seen in autumn. Influenced by elements of Impressionist art\, abstract expressionism\, and traditional Chinese landscape scroll painting\, Mazur combines aspects of several periods of art history separated by nearly seven centuries to create lush and luminous work. A larger set of the Seasons paintings can be found in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts\, Boston. \nCathy Lu reimagines garden creation myths like the Garden of Eden and the Immortal Peach Garden as a way to think about the United States as both a utopian and dystopian space for historically excluded communities struggling to belong. Incorporating images of peach pits\, Lu references the Chinese symbology of peaches as signifying immortality as well as the creation myth of the mother goddess Nüwa\, who hand-sculpted humankind from the soil. \nThe title of the show derives from a quote by artist Andrew Raftery\, writing about his series of twelve engraved plates that explore the life cycle of a backyard garden. Inspired by nineteenth century transferware\, Raftery created unique designs for each ceramic plate that depict the artist working in his garden. With these works\, Raftery sought a different approach to autobiography – revealing himself selectively through the narrow lens of garden imagery. \nIn the early 1960s\, Samella Lewis became deeply engaged with Chinese studies\, traveling to Taiwan and China to study Chinese art\, language\, and history. Her painting The Garden (1962) is an expressionistic\, abstract portrayal of a flower garden\, bursting with exuberant color. Individual blossoms merge together into a mass of vivid\, swirling brushstrokes. Lewis described the marks in this work as “calligraphic\,” inspired by her time in Taiwan. \nTim Braden’s paintings verge into abstraction while still conveying a specificity of place. An abundance of shapes and colors makes these works as bountiful as a well-tended garden. Braden says\, “I have always been interested in color charts\, how colors affect and change depending on what is put next to them\, and how my mood can be altered by certain color combinations.” Braden’s work\, based on keen observation with a painter’s eye\, translates a saturated color palette into a light-filled vision. \n  \nTim Braden (b. 1975) is an artist who uses different types of paint\, support\, and application to explore subtle shifts in space\, mood and tone. Braden’s work is ultimately drawn from a close reading of his environment and an attempt to depict the act of looking. He often combines patches of color and light to produce scenes that recall both the specificity of personal experience and nostalgia for another time and place. \nSamella Lewis (b. 1924 – d. 2022) was an artist who studied with Elizabeth Catlett and later became an art historian\, writer\, curator\, and activist. Through her artwork\, she sought to uplift the Black community and portray them as beautiful. Perhaps best known for figurative works on paper\, she also created paintings and sculptures. \nCathy Lu (b. 1984) creates ceramic sculptures and installations that manipulate traditional Chinese imagery and presentation as a way to deconstruct assumptions about Chinese diasporic identity and cultural authenticity. Unpacking how experiences of immigration\, cultural hybridity\, and cultural assimilation become part of American identity is central to her work. \nMichael Mazur (b. 1935 – d. 2009) is known for his use of abstract and figurative visual vocabulary across a wide range of media\, including painting\, drawing\, pastels and printmaking. Influenced by elements of Impressionist art\, abstract expressionism and traditional Chinese landscape scroll painting\, Mazur uniquely combines aspects of several periods of art history separated by nearly seven centuries to create lush and luminous work. \nAndrew Raftery (b. 1962) is an artist whose work explores both observational and autobiographic narratives of contemporary American life. His artistic practice rests upon a deep expertise and appreciation for the antique medium of engraving\, and his precise and labor-intensive works demonstrate the enduring relevance—and efficiency—of this medium’s application on contemporary subjects to disseminate images that are universally accessible. \n  \nAbout RYAN LEE\nCelebrating emerging and established artists and estates\, RYAN LEE presents innovative and scholarly exhibitions across all spectrums of art practices\, including painting\, photography\, video\, sculpture\, and performance. The gallery takes chances on a wide variety of boundary-pushing artists; their work consistently transcends political\, cultural\, material\, or technical boundaries. In addition\, RYAN LEE has\, throughout its history\, demonstrated its long-standing interest and dedication to feminist\, Black and Asian American\, as well as queer narratives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Founded in 2013 by Mary Ryan and Jeffrey Lee\, the gallery is led by partners of different generations and backgrounds with over six decades of combined experiences informing its unique approach.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/the-garden-reveals-me/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20250220
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20250413
DTSTAMP:20260417T132759
CREATED:20250121T213502Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250220T212323Z
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SUMMARY:May Stevens: When the Waters Break
DESCRIPTION:May Stevens\nWhen the Waters Break\nFebruary 20 – April 12\, 2025 \n  \nRYAN LEE Gallery is pleased to announce When the Waters Break\, an exhibition of five paintings and eleven works on paper by May Stevens (b. 1924 Quincy\, MA – d. 2019 Santa Fe\, NM)\, made between 1994 and 2009. These works derive from Stevens’s final body of work and most have not been exhibited in New York for nearly twenty years; some will be exhibited for the first time ever. Rooted in her enduring connection to rivers and oceans\, these works depict bodies of water — both real and imagined — that were important to Stevens throughout her life. Stevens often added words to the surface of the water\, drawing inspiration from women’s writings including passages from Virginia Woolf and Julia Kristeva. \nThe title of this exhibition comes from a 2006 lecture Stevens gave at Rutgers University that focused on the creative process\, relating the struggle of an artist as she works and the sudden realization that the artwork is complete. Stevens explained\, “You realize that this has been a dialogue between you and the living organism that is a work of art. It is beyond you\, outside of you. You are its handmaiden\, its doula.” \nStevens used a wide array of colors in these works\, depicting the swirling and rippling movement of water in blues\, greens\, grays\, and purples and adding text in eye-catching gold and silver to approximate the reflection of light on water. Ruminating on the introspective power of words\, these works combine the impact of water and writing as a way to harness and process her grief following the death of her husband\, artist Rudolf Baranik\, and son\, Steven Baranik\, as well as celebrating the beauty and fullness of life. These paintings extend to the edges of their unstretched canvas\, which Stevens felt gave the work an expansive openness to envelop the viewer into the painting. \nThe title of This Is Not Landscape (2004) gives us perhaps the clearest instruction on how to interpret this body of work\, clarifying that they are not merely what they appear to be on the surface. Inspired by Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Irish Cliffs of Moher\,” which examines the relationship between nature and one’s family history\, the watery drips of this painting evoke a mystical\, abstract space. \nIn Her Boats (1996)\, the viewer is placed below the water\, gazing up at the golden sunlight from the murky\, mysterious depths. Women in boats float on the surface. Stevens said\, “I became annoyed with the fact that if you ever wanted to represent a human\, you have to use a man. I didn’t see why that had to be the case. So these are women\, but they are not specifically to be thought of as women because they are humans\, people.” \nAmong the last prints Stevens created\, Into the Night (2009) depicts a solitary boat drifting on the water\, where atmospheric color washes blur the boundary between water and sky. Deep greens and rich blues evoke a nighttime scene that\, while mysterious\, is more promising than ominous. Stevens’s characteristic metallic script shimmers on the water’s surface surrounding the boat\, accompanying it into the night. \nSome of the text in these works is legible but much of it is asemic writing that cannot be deciphered\, adding to the sense of mystery evoked by these paintings and works on paper. \nStevens said\, “These words create color\, texture\, movement\, an articulation of the surface of the canvas\, making it breathe\, giving it life\, light\, a changing inflection; the possibility of seeing the work differently at different moments; of surprise\, of finding new things in it\, of more than meets the first encounter\, of suggesting depths of feeling and connection. The canvas hangs like tapestry\, like cloth; the color flows like water\, its paths apparent. Water is life.” \n  \nMay Stevens (b. 1924 Quincy\, MA – d. 2019 Santa Fe\, NM) came to prominence during the 1960s for her politically charged Big Daddy paintings and drawings. She was a founding member of Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics (1976)\, and an original Guerilla Girl following the feminist group’s founding in 1985. “Political activity does not interfere with my work\, it feeds it\,” Stevens said. “It feeds it because I don’t think of art as this sacred thing that you do in this sacred place that nobody else and no other thing can ever come in. It’s part of the world.” \nIn 2023\, Stevens was the focus of My Mothers\, a solo exhibition at the MassArt Art Museum\, MA. In 2021\, Lucy Lippard and Brandee Caoba co-curated a solo exhibition\, May Stevens: Mysteries\, Politics\, and Seas of Words\, at SITE Santa Fe\, NM. In 2005\, she had an important solo exhibition that traveled from the Springfield Museum of Art\, MO; to the Minneapolis Institute of Art\, MN; and the National Museum of Women in the Arts\, DC. In 1999\, Stevens had a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts\, Boston\, entitled Images of Women Near and Far 1983-1997\, the museum’s first exhibition of its kind for a living female artist. Her work has also been included in exhibitions at the National Museum of Women in the Arts\, DC (2024); Brooklyn Museum\, NY (2023); Blanton Museum of Art\, TX (2023); Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art\, NY (2023); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth\, TX (2022); Jewish Museum\, NY (2022); Telfair Museums\, GA (2022); Museum of Modern Art\, NY (2021); Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts\, PA (2020); Smithsonian American Art Museum\, DC (2019); Detroit Institute of Arts\, MI (2019); Whitney Museum of American Art\, NY (2017); and British Museum\, UK (2017)\, among others. \nStevens’s work is in numerous prominent museum collections\, including the British Museum\, UK; Brooklyn Museum\, NY; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum\, MA; Hood Museum of Art\, NH; Metropolitan Museum of Art\, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Fine Arts\, MO; Museum of Contemporary Art\, Los Angeles\, CA; Museum of Fine Arts\, Boston\, MA; Museum of Modern Art\, NY; National Museum of Women in the Arts\, Washington\, DC; New Museum of Contemporary Art\, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art\, CA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art\, NY\, among others. \n  \nAbout RYAN LEE\nCelebrating emerging and established artists and estates\, RYAN LEE presents innovative and scholarly exhibitions across all spectrums of art practices\, including painting\, photography\, video\, sculpture\, and performance. The gallery takes chances on a wide variety of boundary-pushing artists; their work consistently transcends political\, cultural\, material\, or technical boundaries. In addition\, RYAN LEE has\, throughout its history\, demonstrated its long-standing interest and dedication to feminist\, Black and Asian American\, as well as queer narratives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Founded in 2013 by Mary Ryan and Jeffrey Lee\, the gallery is led by partners of different generations and backgrounds with over six decades of combined experiences informing its unique approach.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/may-stevens-when-the-waters-break/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
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DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20250109
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20250216
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CREATED:20241219T212638Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20241219T212638Z
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SUMMARY:go to the limits of your longing
DESCRIPTION:go to the limits of your longing \nJanuary 9 – February 15\, 2025 \nOpening reception: Thursday\, January 9\, 2025\, 6:00-8:00 pm \nIncluding work by Sadie Benning\, Tiffany Chung\, Martine Gutierrez\, \nLibby Heaney\, Annie Lapin\, Hung Liu\, Masako Miki\, Andrés Monzón-Aguirre\, Vian Sora\, Kathia St. Hilaire\, Katy Stone\, and Stephanie Syjuco \nRYAN LEE is pleased to present go to the limits of your longing. Taking its title from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke\, this exhibition focuses on the idea of passages—moving towards something or somewhere\, through both time and space. This theme can encompass transformation\, migration\, spiritual rituals\, aging\, and family history\, among others. Voyages of this kind take place in a liminal space in between origin and destination\, a place with fuzzy\, slippery borders. Many of the works in this show lean into the playful side of the concept\, finding child-like joy in the messiness of the journey. \nA Chinese-born artist who lived in the United States\, Hung Liu’s painting Unit Cohesion (1993) touches on rituals of childhood but also references the military concept of “unit cohesion\,” which refers to the ways in which soldiers build trust in order to achieve their goals. In depicting children who are participating in grown-up military activities\, Liu also explores her own dual identity. She said\, “I am not really Chinese anymore but I am not one hundred percent American. I cannot get close to my own history\, but I cannot get rid of it.” \nKathia St. Hilaire’s work portrays tender images of family gatherings\, children at play\, celestial bodies\, scenes of death\, and distinct Haitian iconography. St. Hilaire grapples with histories that have been forgotten or actively suppressed. In recounting them\, she blends established facts with the larger-than-life legends of Haiti’s leaders in a manner she describes as “magical realist.” Contained within these vibrant\, dreamlike pictures are the past\, present\, and suggestions of possible futures. \nSome of the artists in this show focus on migration\, a difficult yet familiar journey that many families embark upon. The “migrants” in Stephanie Syjuco’s passport-style photos have covered their faces with fabric\, perhaps afraid that exposing their identities might be dangerous. This gesture\, while potentially protecting those pictured\, also serves to render them part of a faceless mass\, which is how migrants and refugees are often seen\, rather than as individual human beings. \nTiffany Chung’s map paintings layer different periods in the history of devastated topographies\, reflecting the impossibility of accurately creating cartographic representations of most places. Transgressing space and time\, these works unveil the connection between imperialist ideologies and visions of modernity. Her maps interweave historical and geologic events—and spatial and sociopolitical changes—with future predictions\, revealing cartography as a discipline that draws on the realms of perception and fantasy as much as geography. \nMasako Miki’s exploration of fluid identities is rooted in the Shinto animism of yōkai\, or “shape-shifters\,”—a pantheon of millions of deities that define a world of shifting boundaries and identities. Miki says\, “I want to emphasize that things are interrelated rather than disconnected. Shapeshifters manifest the idea of fluidity and transitional space. They are both animate and inanimate beings\, and also they can cross boundaries of both material and spiritual realms.” \nLibby Heaney’s Jellyfish out of water (2022) focuses on uncanny similarities between glass and quantum particles\, such as electrons. The sculpture explores a state of in-between\, where the glass assumes a slimy quality\, becoming a tactile\, ever-changing intervention in the gallery space. Slime is a recurring motif in Heaney’s practice symbolizing the unstable nature of reality and the monstrous nature of self. \nChallenging the construction of binaries through the blurring of their borders\, Martine Gutierrez insists that gender\, like all things\, is entangled—and argues against the linear framework of oppositional thinking. Her malleable\, ever-evolving self-image catalogs the confluence of seemingly disparate modes\, conveying limitless potential for reinvention and reinterpretation. Gutierrez says\, “My authenticity has never been to exist singularly\, whether in regard to my gender\, my ethnicity\, or my sexual orientation. My truth thrives in the grey area.” \nRooted in the material culture of the Northern Andes\, Andrés Monzón-Aguirre fuses traditional methods with modern elements and regional iconography\, creating culturally specific artworks that invite viewers to engage with narratives of memory and representation. The space between these cultural histories and the artist’s scattered lineage suggests a rupture of relations\, in which wandering yields fruitful possibilities of self-determining one’s own relationship to complex systems and histories. \nVian Sora’s painting process reflects a search for harmony and transcendence. While her canvases begin in a chaotic swirl of spray paint\, acrylics and pigments covering the canvas\, Sora wrests control creating specific forms and balance from the visual confusion. Though Sora’s paintings are largely abstract\, upon closer inspection\, they reveal half-hidden figures and suggest landscapes of lush fertility and terrible decay\, cycles of life and death\, yet infused with hope. \nKaty Stone’s work balances a sense of monumentality and durability with motion and fragility. Each layered\, cascading work consists of scores of drawn and hand-painted gestures that seem frozen in a moment of falling\, fluttering\, waving\, crashing or exhaling. Over her career\, she has developed an intricate vocabulary of line\, shape\, form and mark-making that blurs the boundaries between traditional techniques of drawing\, painting and sculpture. \nAnnie Lapin is known for her genre-bending paintings that draw from art history to examine a world overwhelmed by data\, divergent histories\, and conflicting truths. Drawing from a wide range of visual sources\, including the artist’s own photo archive\, online visual media\, and well-known paintings and photographs from throughout art history\, Lapin’s paintings merge fragmented cultural allusions with a gestural painterly intuition. \nSadie Benning incorporates sculptural elements into their paintings; often\, wood is cut into pieces\, coated with colored resin\, sanded\, then fit back together like a jigsaw puzzle. Unlike a jigsaw puzzle in which pieces fit perfectly together\, there is a gap between the pieces in Benning’s work—the original line becomes a space between the pieces where the blade has cut. The line is there and also not there; a space for light to move that speaks to the body and its continual state of flux. \nSadie Benning (b. 1973) has spent the last thirty years investigating cultural influences\, specifically in relation to identity\, language and memory. Benning has been creating experimental videos since their youth in the late 1980s and has expanded their rigorous practice in a fusion of painting\, sculpture\, installation\, and photography\, formed with both found and original objects. Concurrent layers exist within their sculptural paintings as transparencies\, analogue photos\, digital prints\, resin\, enamel\, and spray paint\, coated on wall-based panels. \nTiffany Chung (b. 1969) is noted for her cartographic drawings\, sculptures\, videos\, photographs\, and theater performances that examine conflict\, migration\, displacement\, urban progress and transformation in relation to history and cultural memory. Chung’s interest in imposed political borders and their traumatic impacts on different groups of human populations has underpinned her commitment to conducting an ongoing comparative study of forced migration—through both the current Syrian humanitarian crisis and the post-1975 mass exodus of Vietnamese refugees\, of which she herself was a part. \nMartine Gutierrez (b. 1989) is a transdisciplinary artist\, utilizing photography and video to subvert various performances of pop-cultural tropes in the exploration of identity—both personally and collectively intersectional to the ideologies of power\, beauty\, and heritage. Her amass of media—ranging from billboards to episodic films\, music videos and renowned magazine\, Indigenous Woman—produce the very conduits of advertising that sell the identities she disassembles. \nLibby Heaney is an artist with a PhD and a professional research background in quantum information science. She is widely known as the first artist to work with quantum computing as a functioning artistic medium. Heaney’s practice explores inherently magical\, queer\, non-local and hybrid concepts from quantum science to disrupt binary categories and hierarchies and foster radical interconnectedness. \nAnnie Lapin (b. 1978) creates paintings that reside in a world of multiplicities; digital histories and analog mark making come together to form landscapes that abide neither to the rules of the virtual nor to the physical. Initiating each painting with generous pours of paint and liquid graphite\, Lapin’s abstract marks become the armature around which pictorial space is built. Punched with trompe l’oeil forms\, photographic blur\, and references to the sublime imagery of Western landscape painting and photography\, the polyvalent scenes conjure a sense of mystery and fervor. \nHung Liu (b. 1948 – d. 2021) was a groundbreaking contemporary artist known for her powerful paintings based primarily on historical Chinese photographs\, and her installations addressing the racial and cultural complexities she witnessed upon immigrating to the United States at the age of 36. Interested in the political tensions between the so-called objective truths reflected in a photograph versus the mediated vision in a painting\, Liu began using photography in her painting practice in the mid-1980s. \nMasako Miki (b. 1973) is a multimedia artist whose work ranges from installation and large-scale sculpture to printmaking\, watercolor and felting. She bases her narrative on her own experiences of becoming bicultural in the United States at the age of eighteen. The artist frequently delves into the psychological aspects of how one processes new environments and cultures; ultimately her work merges two existing cultures into a new one. \nAndrés Monzón-Aguirre (b. 1987) is an artist working between New York City and Medellín who translates displacement and ancestral memory into ceramics\, sculpture and painting. Referencing specific indigenous iconographies of Colombia\, Monzón-Aguirre abstracts personal and collective imagery as an act of remembrance and an opportunity for healing. \nVian Sora (b. 1976) creates intensely autobiographical paintings filled with emotional complexity and tension\, bustling with a dynamic energy and struggle that reflect the artist’s personal journey to move beyond the collective trauma of violence and destruction that she experienced firsthand during decades of conflicts in Iraq. \nInformed by her experience growing up in Caribbean and African American neighborhoods in South Florida\, Kathia St. Hilaire (b. 1995) seeks to memorialize the communities that she has been a part of through innovative techniques and nontraditional materials. Through an interdisciplinary process\, her work affirms and memorializes historic and political issues that deal with both marginalized and privileged communities of neo-diaspora. \nKaty Stone (b. 1969) is best known for her large-scale installations and wall sculptures. Working primarily in aluminum\, Dura-Lar and plexiglass\, Stone creates hybrids of sculpture and painting that combine the visual language of organic forms with synthetic materials. From the cellular to the cosmic\, the artist draws from a wide range of natural bodies and conceptual source material that frequently lead to an artistic mediation on transience and permanence\, nature and artifice. \nStephanie Syjuco (b. 1974) is known for her investigative\, research-based practice encompassing photography\, sculpture\, and installation. Progressing from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations\, her work employs open-source systems\, shareware logic\, and capital flows to scrutinize issues related to economies and empire. Syjuco’s multimedia social practice ties pedagogy and research to study and highlight the tension between the authentic and the counterfeit across a wide range of media\, thus problematizing long-held assumptions about history\, race\, and labor. \n  \n  \nAbout RYAN LEE \nCelebrating emerging and established artists and estates\, RYAN LEE presents innovative and scholarly exhibitions across all spectrums of art practices\, including painting\, photography\, video\, sculpture\, and performance. The gallery takes chances on a wide variety of boundary-pushing artists; their work consistently transcends political\, cultural\, material\, or technical boundaries. In addition\, RYAN LEE has\, throughout its history\, demonstrated its long-standing interest and dedication to feminist\, Black and Asian American\, as well as queer narratives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Founded in 2013 by Mary Ryan and Jeffrey Lee\, the gallery is led by partners of different generations and backgrounds with over six decades of combined experiences informing its unique approach.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/go-to-the-limits-of-your-longing/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
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DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20250109
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20250216
DTSTAMP:20260417T132759
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LAST-MODIFIED:20241211T193249Z
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SUMMARY:Mariam Ghani: Counting\, Accounting\, Recounting
DESCRIPTION:RYAN LEE Gallery is pleased to announce Counting\, Accounting\, Recounting\, an exhibition by the artist\, writer\, and filmmaker Mariam Ghani (b. 1978). Centering around Ghani’s short film There’s a Hole in the World Where You Used to Be (2024) with accompanying sculptures\, the works in this exhibition translate the process of mourning people and places into tangible form as the artist seeks to account for loss and reckon with impermanence. By weaving together personal artifacts with cultural iconography\, Ghani’s work engages with the ways in which grief\, absence\, and the passage of time inform our perceptions of the world around us. Ghani says\, “There’s a Hole in the World Where You Used to Be is concerned with the way grief can feel simultaneously personal and political\, individual and collective; each absence felt as both a wound in the heart and a hole in the world.”
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/mariam-ghani-counting-accounting-recounting/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
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DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20240905
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20241020
DTSTAMP:20260417T132759
CREATED:20240809T193411Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240809T193411Z
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SUMMARY:Gabriel Lester: Dig It
DESCRIPTION:RYAN LEE is pleased to announce Dig It\, an exhibition by artist\, inventor and filmmaker Gabriel Lester (b. 1972). The multimedia installation assembles an interconnected series of works that pay tribute to the pioneering American jazz legend Thelonious Monk and his longtime friendship with jazz patron Pannonica “Nica” de Koenigswarter. This is Lester’s third exhibition at the gallery. \nApproximately 20 minutes long\, Dig It (2023) presents a fictionalized retelling of the relationship between Nica and Monk\, as he lived with her in his final years. In the film\, Nica leads us through a nostalgic collage of shared memories with the musician. Represented in the dazed state that overcame him later in life\, the film chronicles Monk’s final “dream” (a state which recalls Monk’s Dream\, one of his most famous albums; and the onset of his likely undiagnosed mental illness). Referring to the film as “sculptural cinema\,” Lester engages elements from his broader art practice – for example utilizing animation and computer-generated images\, or filming models to re-create larger-scale scenes – and incorporates multiple interpretations of Monk’s original jazz standard “Pannonica.”  \nIn the series of three inkjet prints\, Lester’s tightly cropped compositions depict a record player whose cartridge and stylus have been replaced by a Bucculatrix pannonica moth\, from which Nica’s name was derived. By adding a layer of velvet through the process of silk screening with flocking (powdered felt)\, Lester embellishes the surface with a sensuous texture alluding to the tactile experience of petting a cat or pinning a moth. \nA continuation of his earlier cucoloris works\, Lester also presents a series of six images printed on aluminum. Lester was able to look through the family’s personal archives in Paris and source Nica’s original photographs of jazz pioneers from the 1950s through the 70s. Creating manipulated reproductions with overlaid shadows\, Lester employs the cucoloris technique used in cinema\, which projects light through cut-out cardboard\, branches or fronds to simulate shadows. Reminiscent of leaves\, Lester’s “shadows” evoke a sense of viewership from amongst vegetation\, subtly conveying the presence of nature in each scene. Lester says\, “There is an inherent jazz within actual nature – with insects\, shadows and trees. In a way\, I’m projecting the elements of the film back onto Pannonica’s photographs. It is as if nature has cast itself over her images and her life.”  \nAlongside the two-dimensional works is an illuminated installation of custom-made Edison bulbs\, each communicating a message through the cursive twirls of its filament. The bulbs\, presented in small clusters\, depict various wishes  from some of jazz’s most iconic musicians. Throughout her lifetime\, Nica met nearly every acclaimed jazz artist and famously asked each of them the same question: what were the three wishes they had for life? These wishes are collected in her posthumous book Three Wishes: An Intimate Look at Jazz Greats\, a text which catalyzed Lester’s fascination with Nica and her deep engagement in the jazz scene. When reading the book\, Lester was touched by the repetition of simple\, human wishes such as those for health and happiness\, and felt inspired to share this beauty and love with his viewers. \nFrom an imaginative narration of Thelonious Monk’s final days\, to cinematic imagery made tactile\, to recreated vintage imagery and new-media light texts\, Dig It coalesces shared dreams into evocative and diverse poetic forms. Lester’s overarching narrative captures not only the arc of a mythologized friendship\, but also the energy of the familiar\, nostalgic rhythms of jazz. \nGabriel Lester (b. 1972 Amsterdam\, NL) is a multimedia artist and inventor\, internationally recognized for his conceptual films\, sculptures and installations. Drawing on music\, experimental cinema\, literature\, and architecture\, Lester produces immersive environments or experiences that  reject categorization or narrative resolution. His work is concerned with challenging our preconceptions of who artists are and what art looks like. \nLester attended Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunst\, Amsterdam. His work has been included in important international events such as the Momentum 10 Biennial\, Norway; the Quebec City Biennial\, QC; Busan Biennial\, Korea; Sculpture in the City\, UK; Groninger Museum\, Netherlands; Marrakesh Biennale\, Morocco; Sydney Biennial\, Australia; Venice Biennale\, Italy; documenta 13\, Germany; and São Paulo International Art Biennial\, Brazil\, among many others. In 2024\, Lester’s work was the focus of a major solo exhibition\, Gabriel Lester: Odeon\, at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston\, TX. Recently\, his work has also been featured in group and solo exhibitions at the Bonn Bundeskunsthalle\, Germany (2024); National Holocaust Museum\, the Netherlands (2024); Stedelijk Museum\, Alkmaar\, the Netherlands (2023); Graz Neue Galerie\, Austria (2022); Electricity Factory\, Netherlands (2021); and SCHIRN Kunsthalle Frankfurt\, Germany (2020)\, among others. Lester’s work is held in the collections of 21CMuseum\, KY; 798 Art Zone\, China; Centraal Museum\, Netherlands; CitizenM\, Netherlands; MUDAM\, Fondation Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean\, Luxembourg; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen\, Netherlands; Museum De Paviljoens\, Netherlands; Stedelijk Museum\, Netherlands; and the Rabobank Art Collection\, Netherlands.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/gabriel-lester-dig-it/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
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DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20240905
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20241020
DTSTAMP:20260417T132759
CREATED:20240809T193411Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240809T193411Z
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SUMMARY:Ayahuasca Notebook Paintings: Journeys and Returns
DESCRIPTION:RYAN LEE Gallery is pleased to present Ayahuasca Notebook Paintings: Journeys and Returns\, the gallery’s second exhibition of works by George Nelson Preston. This new body of paintings were all created in the past two years. Ayahuasca is a part of Preston’s practice\, entwined with his deep exploration of his own family and ancestral heritage connecting to native peoples of the United States\, Africa and Brazil. Preston has deep ties to Brazil\, and it has been an important place in his life and imagination since he first traveled there in the 1980s. \nThe subtitle “Journeys and Returns” mirrors the trajectory of an ayahuasca experience. Preston explains\, “When you ‘travel’ by ayahuasca you metaphorically climb a mountain\, ‘repair’ at the summit and come back down to earth accompanied by native guardians\, spoken words and music. As you journey\, if you do not resist or fear you will go through many states of mind that take away fear\, hate and all the anti-humanist instincts.” \nPreston began painting as a teenager in the 1950s while at the same time beginning a spiritual journey. He continued this path of discovery in the 1960s through reading anthropologist Weston La Barre’s The Peyote Cult and experimenting with psychotropic drugs in conjunction with researchers Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass) and Timothy Leary. (In a twist of fate\, Preston would go on to marry La Barre’s niece.) The works in this show were inspired by Preston’s travels in Brazil from the 1980s onwards\, where he embarked on painting\, curatorial\, writing\, and teaching projects before eventually becoming acquainted with ayahuasca as well as native peoples such as the Huni Kuin (whose word for ayahuasca is “nixi pei”). \nMany of these paintings use Preston’s distinctive color palette of grays\, blues\, and purples. He achieves a transparent and luminous paint quality through grinding pastel chalk with linseed oil. Some works in the exhibit reference specific locations — such as Arpoador Beach and Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon in Rio de Janeiro — and specific people — such as indigenous shamans who guide the ayahuasca process — while others portray imagined spaces in the land of the Huni Kuin. \nThe evocation of water is a recurring theme for Preston\, along with his focus on spirituality and the history of the Atlantic region connecting the United States\, South America\, and Africa. With How I Introduced Shaman Txai Kuin and Okomfo Yaa Fosia\, Preston makes explicit the connection between Africa and Brazil in Preston’s work. The diptych brings together two important figures in his life: an okomfo (a priest from Ghana) and a shaman. The work incorporates collaged paper to create vines\, referencing the clinging lianas used to prepare ayahuasca.  \nGeorge Nelson Preston (b. 1938\, New York\, NY) is an artist whose mixed-media\, abstracted paintings are anchored by his profound scholarship in African art\, years in Lower Manhattan’s avant-garde art scene\, and extensive travels across the Atlantic world as an art historian\, essayist\, and curator. Preston’s recent output has focused on capturing the common spirit of the cultures he has encountered in his circumnavigation of the Atlantic. The artist sees the ocean as an “aqueous continent\,” with its shores along the Caribbean\, Brazil\, Africa\, and Europe serving as its borders. Building on the sweeping\, expressionistic linework and daring paint drips of his earlier work\, Preston delves into his own family history as well as themes of memory\, historical trauma\, and the complex legacy of the African diaspora. His simultaneous use of paper cut-outs\, spliced and pasted quotations of European portraits\, and African mask imagery reflects his extensive scholarship and travels. \nPreston’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at David Zwirner Gallery\, London (2023); Pinacoteca de São Paulo\, São Paulo\, Brazil (2022); Nina Johnson Gallery\, FL (2022); Karl and Helen Burger Gallery at Kean University\, NJ (2019); Grey Art Museum at New York University\, NY (2017); Wilmer Jennings Gallery at Kenkeleba House\, NY (2016); Merton D. Simpson Gallery\, NY (2015); LeRoy Neiman Gallery\, NY (2012); and gallery onetwentyeight\, NY (2002); as well as the Museu Afro Brasil\, among others.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/ayahuasca-notebook-paintings-journeys-and-returns/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
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DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20240627
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20240817
DTSTAMP:20260417T132759
CREATED:20240628T154332Z
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SUMMARY:Self (Contained)
DESCRIPTION:Self (Contained) \nCurated by Elizabeth Denny and Katie Alice Fitz Gerald \nJune 27 – August 16\, 2024 \nOpening reception: Thursday\, June 27\, 6:00-8:00pm \nIncluding work by Paul Anagnostopoulos\, Camille Billops\, Brian Bress\, \nFrancesca DiMattio\, Damien H. Ding\, Lizzie Gill\, Hannah Lim\, Holton Rower\, \nStephanie Syjuco\, Gabriela Vainsencher\, Amanda Valdez\, Paula Wilson \nRYAN LEE is pleased to present Self (Contained)\, a group exhibition of twelve artists gravitating towards the concept of the vessel as a metaphor for self and all of the meanings that the term holds. Spanning different generations and mediums\, the exhibition is co-curated by Elizabeth Denny and Katie Alice Fitz Gerald. \nThe word vessel is derived from the Latin word vascellum which has a direct meaning of “urn” or “vase.” The Latin also has associative meaning with ships and arteries or veins—both of which contain and transport. The latter brings the vessel to have corporeal association. Our bodies are a larger container not only for physical matter but also ideas\, opinions\, emotions: a sense of self.  \nSelf (Contained) pays attention to the concept of containment\, to the vessel\, and the breadth of meanings to which this term can refer. Stemming from the language and associations of the word vessel in Ancient Greek culture and mythology\, the exhibition tackles the different shapes and objects taken from this cultural history. For artists such as Paula Wilson\, Lizzie Gill\, Paul Anagnostopoulos\, Camille Billops\, and Gabriela Vainsencher\, for example\, the Greek amphora itself serves as a way to visually represent mythological stories. In their work\, its shape mimics or conceptually references bodies as containers. The self can be thought of as a homogenous vessel carrying a nuanced interior. Through this prism the artists investigate their own selves and archetypes: the mother\, the hypermasculine queer male\, the female as object.  \nFor some artists in the exhibition such as Amanda Valdez\, the vessel is a carrier of female histories and mythologies. For others\, it is a conceptual trope to conceive of what contains the world around us\, or what contains ourselves and the emotional life we embody and carry around. The artists themselves become vessels for their own work\, thus reflecting on authorship\, on artmarking and creative ownership. Several artists explore both the physicality and concept of this: Brian Bress\, Damien H. Ding\, Francesca DiMattio.  \nArtists Stephanie Syjuco\, Hannah Lim\, and Holton Rower look at the histories of such vessels which have gone from functional objects to prized art pieces through institutions—appropriated for different purposes. Through their practice\, they examine the need to acquire\, and to collect. Their work underlines how the ownership and acquisition of objects reflects one’s own culture and self. \nSelf (Contained) looks to question art as a container both in terms of the physical object—which artists fill with different media and narratives—and a conceptual holder of ideas and intangible reflections. Each work on view is filled with meaning by its maker\, each is a reflection of the diverse group of artists’ particular vision of the world.  \nAbout RYAN LEE \nCelebrating emerging and established artists and estates\, RYAN LEE presents innovative and scholarly exhibitions across all spectrums of art practices\, including painting\, photography\, video\, sculpture\, and performance. The gallery takes chances on a wide variety of boundary-pushing artists; their work consistently transcends political\, cultural\, material\, or technical boundaries. In addition\, RYAN LEE has\, throughout its history\, demonstrated its long-standing interest and dedication to feminist\, Black and Asian American\, as well as queer narratives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Founded in 2013 by Mary Ryan and Jeffrey Lee\, the gallery is led by partners of different generations and backgrounds with over six decades of combined experiences informing its unique approach.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/self-contained/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240430T100000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240430T100000
DTSTAMP:20260417T132759
CREATED:20240429T143249Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240429T143249Z
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SUMMARY:Hung Liu: Pulse\, 1989-1996
DESCRIPTION:With a focus on 1989 through 1996\, Pulse honors Hung Liu’s complex responses to the Tiananmen Square massacre through a presentation of paintings and prints by the celebrated Chinese-American artist.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/hung-liu-pulse-1989-1996/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20240314
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20240428
DTSTAMP:20260417T132759
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SUMMARY:Ina Gerken: A swirl of dust\, a shift of sound
DESCRIPTION:Ina Gerken\nA swirl of dust\, a shift of sound\nMarch 14 – April 27\, 2024\nOpening Reception: Thursday\, March 14\, 6:00-8:00pm \n \nRYAN LEE is pleased to announce A swirl of dust\, a shift of sound\, an exhibition of new abstract gestural paintings by German artist Ina Gerken (b. 1987). Her process is one that yields to artistic instincts\, often expressed through a method of heavily layered brush strokes\, splatters\, and streaks. This sense of movement embodies Gerken’s tendency toward an itinerant nature\, wherein moving her studio from place to place can at times become a part of her practice. The five evocative paintings in A swirl of dust were produced in New York City in 2023\, to which she traveled after being awarded the prestigious Pollock-Krasner grant. Large-scale and full of activity\, her paintings collectively represent an homage to the city’s vibrant\, unique sensory elements. This is Gerken’s first major solo presentation in New York.  \nGerken’s paintings are a dialogue between her subconscious and her mediums. She begins with a deliberately undefined end goal\, allowing primordial approaches of observation and discovery to take the lead. “I try to absorb everything like a sponge or a container\, and let it come to life in the works\,” she says. The past five years have taken her from Berlin to London to Los Angeles to Maine to New York\, where each scene is a blank canvas to explore. “I discover my own themes that may have been lying dormant inside me\,” she says\, citing the power of each new environment to function like a mirror\, reflecting ideas and feelings back to her\, to in turn respond to through painting. \nIn each vivid piece for A swirl of dust\, Gerken manipulates the sounds and sensations of New York City through expressive shades of blues\, greens\, and violets\, splaying them across the canvas with intense brush strokes\, raw stipples\, and impasto details. These works allude to concrete shapes but ultimately exist as abstractions\, suggesting moods and temperaments\, the timbre of a city street\, or the momentary tumult of an inner landscape.   \nDespite their reliance on energetic versus tangible subject matter\, Gerken acknowledges the influence of specific characteristics of her locations. Inspired by the sounds of NYC as well as the “dust” of energy the city emits\, she employs the visual motif of very small dots. By applying and then scaling the shape\, Gerken offers an impression that mimics the transience of the city itself\, rendering indecipherable whether the small and large forms are all dissolving apart\, or are just coming together. \nThe surreal effects of Gerken’s approach are intensified by the scale of this series of artworks\, which allows her to literally immerse herself in the meditative process of creating. Painting on the floor\, she is enabled to actually “be in the painting” and\, conversely\, is granted the dual vantage point of then stepping out and away from it to survey the experience and impact afresh. Evading ideas or ideals of the end result\, she loses herself in the physical and psychological act of painting\, lettering herself  “drift\, circle around something unknown\, and discover how the invisible becomes visible.” Though in a sense spatially methodical\, her process is fully reliant on intuition\, and culminates in an un-anticipatable moment of recognition. “The picture emerges\,” Gerken says\, “and it exists out of itself.”  \nThe gestural energy of each painting invites viewers into the same physicalized\, almost hypnotic sense of participation\, finding their own recognitions or senses of meaning within it. Built on layers of exploration\, action\, and reaction\, the artworks exist as testaments to the fluidity between reality and imagination\, between rationale and intuition\, between person and place. \n\nIna Gerken (b. 1987\, Speyer\, Germany) is a painter whose process-based practice is rooted in intuition and spontaneity. Relinquishing control\, Gerken allows her paintings to unfold autonomously and follow their own logic. To keep her process alive and exciting\, she embraces the rapidly drying medium of acrylic paint\, modifying content quickly and at will. Her work has been exhibited at museums and galleries around the world\, including Logomo\, Turku\, Finland (2023); Green Family Art Foundation\, Dallas\, TX (2023); Stiftelsen Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium\, Vestfossen\, Norway (2022); Deictorhallen Hamburg\, Hamburg\, Germany (2020); Museum Wiesbaden\, Wiesbaden\, Germany (2020); and Bonn Museum of Modern Art\, Bonn\, Germany (2019)\, among others. Gerken studied art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and is currently based in Düsseldorf\, Germany.  \n\nAbout RYAN LEE\nCelebrating emerging and established artists and estates\, RYAN LEE takes a multi-generational approach to its programming\, presenting innovative and scholarly exhibitions across all spectrums of art practices\, including painting\, photography\, video\, sculpture\, and performance. The gallery takes chances on a wide variety of boundary-pushing artists; their work consistently transcends political\, cultural\, material\, or technical boundaries. In addition\, RYAN LEE has\, throughout its history\, demonstrated its long-standing interest and dedication to feminist\, Black and Asian American\, as well as queer narratives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Founded in 2013 by Mary Ryan and Jeffrey Lee\, the gallery is led by partners of different generations and backgrounds with over six decades of combined experiences informing its unique approach.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/ina-gerken-a-swirl-of-dust-a-shift-of-sound/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20240125
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20240310
DTSTAMP:20260417T132759
CREATED:20240103T214211Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240112T214518Z
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SUMMARY:Richmond Barthé and Christopher Udemezue: in this moisture between us where the guinep peels lay
DESCRIPTION:Richmond Barthé and Christopher Udemezue\nin this moisture between us where the guinep peels lay\nJanuary 25 – March 9\, 2024\nOpening reception: Thursday\, January 25\, 6:00-8:00pm \n\nRYAN LEE is pleased to announce in this moisture between us where the guinep peels lay\, an exhibition of sculptures by American modernist Richmond Barthé (1901-1989) alongside images by multimedia artist Christopher Udemezue (b. 1986). The two bodies of work\, created by artists of vastly different generations\, explore figural representation through myth and movement\, engage respective ties to Jamaica\, and invoke evolutions of the queer Black perspective.  \nThrough their distinct mediums\, both artists capture the eternal beauty and mysticism of the human body. Barthé\, who was most prolific during the early-to-mid twentieth century\, depicted the dynamism\, energy\, and movement of his subjects\, often sculpting from memory. His figures\, such as African Boy Dancing (1937) and Black Narcissus (1929) are characterized by their graceful\, elongated forms\, spiritual emotion\, and delicate sense of motion.  \nIn dialogue with these sculptures\, Udemezue’s photographs offer a striking and intimate meditation on the body from a contemporary perspective. “The scenes and stories depicted traverse historical and geographic borders\,” Udemezue says\, at the same time “addressing questions of African queerness\, Caribbean spirituality and oral storytelling.” The artists’ bodies of work\, when paired\, highlight intergenerational possibilities for the queer Black perspective through expression and visual storytelling; while also calling upon their deep\, yet differently rooted\, ties to Jamaica.  \nUdemezue’s photographs are directly inspired by trips to his ancestral homeland of  Bickersteth\, Jamaica\, each staged portrait responding to the folklore and oral stories of his imagined queer ancestors. “a tenderness when I was low and a touch on the side of my waist on days like today. a voice? something brought us to this space” embodies these perspectives. Lighted in the hot colors of passion\, Udemezue’s portrait captures affection and longing\, depicting queer bodies entwined among the lush throes of island foliage. A hand emerges into frame\, suggesting a tension between possibilities of being “beckoned away”\, and consenting approval for the embrace. Together\, Udemezue’s photographs are a rebuttal of and reclamation from Western myopia\, its artistic and literary canon\, and its historical misappropriations of Jamaican culture\, spirituality\, and identity.  \nBarthé’s relationship to Jamaica\, in contrast to Udemezue’s\, was less linear. “I’ve always identified myself with a certain shade of blue-green\,” Barthé relayed to fellow artist Camille Billops in a 1975 interview. “When I saw the water there [in Jamaica] it was like coming back home. I stayed for over twenty years because of the color of the water.” Despite not being genealogically connected to the island\, its coasts\, colors\, and way of life had a profound impact on his work. Moved by its character\, Barthé’s time there imbued into his sculptures the vitality and spirituality he observed around him. Simultaneously\, although he never explicitly revealed his sexuality to the public\, his sculptures over the years returned to themes of homoeroticism\, engaging subject matters of the male body in particular. \nAligned with their thematic conversions\, both artists’ work also shares a preoccupation with figural representation\, and a clear fascination with the body’s forms\, movements and expressions. “This show\, for me\, acts as a conversation through time\,” Udemezue says\, “connecting present day pain and triumphs to those who came before me.” Through this lens\, Barthé’s figures may be interpreted as predecessors to the younger artist’s work\, and engaged with along the same representational spectrum of experiences.  \nBarthé and Udemezue are united by the enduring timeliness of these subject matters. With in this moisture between us where the guinep peels lay\, the invitation is to both contemplate and contextualize the evolution – but also the tenacity – of queer Black perspectives across era\, geography\, and medium. The gallery is working with the estate of Samella Lewis\, who was instrumental in continuing Richmond Barthé’s legacy and creating later lifetime casts. \n\nRichmond Barthé (b. 1901\, Bay St. Louis\, MS – d. 1989\, Pasadena\, CA) was an American artist known for his sculptures of Black performers\, athletes\, dancers\, and historical figures. While attending the Art Institute of Chicago\, Barthé took up sculpture at the suggestion of one of his professors. Barthé began sculpting figures that expressed his sitters’ emotions through their gestures and movements. Shortly after graduating in 1928\, the artist relocated to New York City\, where he became a vital participant of the Harlem Renaissance. Over the next two decades\, Barthé exhibited widely and gained considerable acclaim as one of the first modern artists to depict African Americans in his work. In the 1940s\, Barthé became the first African American artist to be represented—together with painter Jacob Lawrence—in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s and Whitney Museum of American Art’s collections. By the late-1940s\, Barthé moved to Jamaica and lived there for two decades. \nIn 2015\, Barthé’s work was featured in America Is Hard to See\, the inaugural exhibition at the new Whitney Museum of American Art. Recently\, his work has been featured in exhibitions at the Telfair Museums\, GA (2023); Kunsthal KAdE\, Amersfoort\, Netherlands (2020); and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art\, CT (2019)\, among others. His work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago\, IL; Los Angeles County Museum of Art\, CA; Museum of Fine Arts\, Boston\, MA; and Smithsonian American Art Museum\, DC\, among others. \n\nChristopher Udemezue (b. 1986\, Long Island\, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in his Jamaican heritage\, healing\, personal mythologies\, and the desire for connection. Udemezue’s concentration has recently expanded to recounting and visualizing the effects of his mother’s immigration from Jamaica. He is the founder of RAGGA NYC\, a collective platform that connects a growing network of queer Caribbean artists and allies through online storytelling and events. In 2017\, Udemezue completed a residency at the New Museum that culminated in an exhibition on the platform\, titled RAGGA NYC: All the threatened and delicious things joining one another. \nIn 2018\, his work was featured in the New Museum’s 40 year anniversary show\, Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon. In 2019\, Udemezue participated in The Shed’s inaugural Open Call grant and group show. He has also been included in exhibitions at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art\, MO; Künstlerhaus\, Vienna\, Austria; Mercer Union\, Toronto\, Canada; MoMA PS1\, NY; New Museum\, NY; and Queens Museum of Art\, NY\, among others. Udemezue received his BFA from Parsons School of Design in 2008. He lives and works in New York\, NY. \n\nAbout RYAN LEE\nCelebrating emerging and established artists and estates\, RYAN LEE takes a multi-generational approach to its programming\, presenting innovative and scholarly exhibitions across all spectrums of art practices\, including painting\, photography\, video\, sculpture\, and performance. The gallery takes chances on a wide variety of boundary-pushing artists; their work consistently transcends political\, cultural\, material\, or technical boundaries. In addition\, RYAN LEE has\, throughout its history\, demonstrated its long-standing interest and dedication to feminist\, Black and Asian American\, as well as queer narratives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Founded in 2013 by Mary Ryan and Jeffrey Lee\, the gallery is led by partners of different generations and backgrounds with over six decades of combined experiences informing its unique approach.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/richmond-barthe-and-christopher-udemezue-in-this-moisture-between-us-where-the-guinep-peels-lay/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20231130T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20231130T200000
DTSTAMP:20260417T132759
CREATED:20231106T154140Z
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SUMMARY:Opening reception of Anne-Karin Furunes: ALL MOST
DESCRIPTION:Anne-Karin Furunes\nALL MOST\nNovember 30\, 2023 – January 20\, 2024\nOpening Reception: Thursday\, November 30\, 6:00-8:00pm \nRYAN LEE is pleased to announce ALL MOST\, an exhibition of new paintings by leading Norwegian artist Anne-Karin Furunes. Meditating on the natural world\, its sublime beauty\, and the current environmental threats imperiling it\, Furunes’ series addresses the catastrophic consequences of global warming and the ephemera of nature through monumental depictions of calving icebergs and various transient states of precipitation. This is Furunes’s fourth exhibition at the gallery. \nThe emphasis of the show is on works that capture the moment when chunks of ice ablate\, melt\, or break from larger bergs; the exhibition also includes portrayals of clouds pregnant with rain\, alongside other powerful interferences of water. Each painting\, some of which are up to thirteen feet long\, offers an expansion upon the artist’s signature perforation technique. This meticulous method involves applying tiny\, hand-made holes to canvas\, which is then layered with pointillist-like spots of color that\, upon stepping back\, mimic the look of halftone printing. Manipulations of light\, scale and color deploy slight optical illusions that adjust a viewer’s perception\, based on where they’re standing. The immersion in both scene and detail invites proximity and empathy toward the glacial trauma\, and its suggestions of imminent climate tragedies. \nEmploying her long-time engagement with archival photographs\, these new paintings are inspired by the ongoing documentation of calving icebergs in the remote archipelago of Svalbard\, Norway that have been compiled by glaciologists at the Norwegian Polar Institute. The original images\, which depict the dramatic changes in our environment caused by climate change\, served as the impetus for Furunes to revisit the subject of the calving iceberg\, one which she first explored in her early work over two decades ago. \nFurunes also finds inspiration in the wonder and mystery of the transformations that take shape in the natural world at large. From the changing states of climate\, to the different speeds at which bodies of water move in waterfalls or maelstroms\, “We see spectacular moments of nature’s force that are awe-inspiring\,” she says. “As an artist\, I want to remind people of the beauty of nature\, [but also that it] will be lost forever unless we change our habits of consuming.”  \nConcepts of slow consumption are imbued not only in each artwork’s invocations\, but also in their production. Each painting in ALL MOST is composed manually\, laboriously\, and lovingly\, as Furunes hand-punctures every perforation. Through this process she is literally shedding light on the ongoing destruction of the natural world. Adding dotted layers of indigo\, cyan\, magenta\, and yellow ink to the canvases\, Furunes intensifies and deepens the optical effect of each scene: from up close\, the pointillist details are entirely abstract\, while from afar\, the human eye joins red\, blue and yellow to create the clarified image. Furunes’ gestures with these dots considers multiple scales and experiences in her compositions\, at once creating friction and unity through her precise and astute manipulation of pattern and color. The works\, both tragic and captivating\, beckon viewers to become re-enchanted by our ecologies. They ignite Furunes’ belief in “a possible future where we can continue to admire life in its manifold shapes and ways\,” and in a world where we can more truly “live in harmony with other living beings.” \nWhile Furunes’s previous works have powerfully presented human victims of history – particularly her evocative depictions of Norway’s colonized native Sámi people – she now focuses her gaze on the global state of a victimized ecosystem. She reminds us that “nothing is guaranteed unless we all drastically change our way of living\,” and in her works offers us agency and the opportunity to ally with the natural world through its appreciation\, by understanding its traumas and indulging in a more empathetic cohabitation. \n \nAnne-Karin Furunes (b. 1961\, Ørland\, Norway) is a leading Scandinavian artist in painting and public commissions. Since 1992\, Furunes has developed a signature technique of perforating canvas or metal to consider photographic and digital elements of space\, light and material. The punctured holes in her canvases mimic the halftone process\, most popularly used in periodicals. Furunes does not employ a computer to create her images\, instead she composes them manually. Substituting ink for light\, she creates a star pattern on a diagonal grid\, cutting each hole by hand to create an image through the way the human eye perceives light. Furunes works from archival photographs. She departs from the original images by adjusting color\, cropping\, light and perspective. This method of removing in order to reveal complements Furunes’s research-based practice that frequently focuses on forgotten histories and people. \nTrained as an artist and architect\, Furunes received her degree from the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art in Norway. In 2021\, she was nominated for the ARS Fennica Award in Finland. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at Hå Gamle Prestegard\, Nærbø\, Norway (2023); Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum\, Trondheim\, Norway (2022); Paul Robeson Galleries\, Rutgers University\, NJ (2018); Fondazione Musei Civica\, Palazzo Ducale\, Venice\, Italy (2017); Trondheim Kunstmuseum\, Tronheim\, Norway (2017); Palazzo Fortuny\, in conjunction with the 56th Venice Biennale\, Venice\, Italy (2015);  Espoo  Museum  of  Modern Art\, Espoo\, Finland (2014); International Print Center\, NY (2013); Katonah Museum\, NY (2013). She is represented in prominent public collections worldwide including Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art\, Helsinki\, Finland; Kistefos Museum\, Jevnaker\, Norway; Museum of Arts and Design\, New York\, NY; National Museum\, Beijing\, China; National Museum of Contemporary Art\, Oslo\, Norway; and Trondheim Kunstmuseum\, Trondheim\, Norway\, among others. Furunes lives and works in Stjørdal\, Norway.  \n  \nAbout RYAN LEE\nCelebrating emerging and established artists and estates\, RYAN LEE takes a multi-generational approach to its programming\, presenting innovative and scholarly exhibitions across all spectrums of art practices\, including painting\, photography\, video\, sculpture\, and performance. The gallery takes chances on a wide variety of boundary-pushing artists; their work consistently transcends political\, cultural\, material\, or technical boundaries. In addition\, RYAN LEE has\, throughout its history\, demonstrated its long-standing interest and dedication to feminist\, Black and Asian American\, as well as queer narratives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Founded in 2013 by Mary Ryan and Jeffrey Lee\, the gallery is led by partners of different generations and backgrounds with over six decades of combined experiences informing its unique approach.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/opening-reception-of-anne-karin-furunes-all-most/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20231130
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20240121
DTSTAMP:20260417T132759
CREATED:20231106T154141Z
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SUMMARY:Anne-Karin Furunes: ALL MOST
DESCRIPTION:Anne-Karin Furunes\nALL MOST\nNovember 30\, 2023 – January 20\, 2024\nOpening Reception: Thursday\, November 30\, 6:00-8:00pm \nRYAN LEE is pleased to announce ALL MOST\, an exhibition of new paintings by leading Norwegian artist Anne-Karin Furunes. Meditating on the natural world\, its sublime beauty\, and the current environmental threats imperiling it\, Furunes’ series addresses the catastrophic consequences of global warming and the ephemera of nature through monumental depictions of calving icebergs and various transient states of precipitation. This is Furunes’s fourth exhibition at the gallery. \nThe emphasis of the show is on works that capture the moment when chunks of ice ablate\, melt\, or break from larger bergs; the exhibition also includes portrayals of clouds pregnant with rain\, alongside other powerful interferences of water. Each painting\, some of which are up to thirteen feet long\, offers an expansion upon the artist’s signature perforation technique. This meticulous method involves applying tiny\, hand-made holes to canvas\, which is then layered with pointillist-like spots of color that\, upon stepping back\, mimic the look of halftone printing. Manipulations of light\, scale and color deploy slight optical illusions that adjust a viewer’s perception\, based on where they’re standing. The immersion in both scene and detail invites proximity and empathy toward the glacial trauma\, and its suggestions of imminent climate tragedies. \nEmploying her long-time engagement with archival photographs\, these new paintings are inspired by the ongoing documentation of calving icebergs in the remote archipelago of Svalbard\, Norway that have been compiled by glaciologists at the Norwegian Polar Institute. The original images\, which depict the dramatic changes in our environment caused by climate change\, served as the impetus for Furunes to revisit the subject of the calving iceberg\, one which she first explored in her early work over two decades ago. \nFurunes also finds inspiration in the wonder and mystery of the transformations that take shape in the natural world at large. From the changing states of climate\, to the different speeds at which bodies of water move in waterfalls or maelstroms\, “We see spectacular moments of nature’s force that are awe-inspiring\,” she says. “As an artist\, I want to remind people of the beauty of nature\, [but also that it] will be lost forever unless we change our habits of consuming.”  \nConcepts of slow consumption are imbued not only in each artwork’s invocations\, but also in their production. Each painting in ALL MOST is composed manually\, laboriously\, and lovingly\, as Furunes hand-punctures every perforation. Through this process she is literally shedding light on the ongoing destruction of the natural world. Adding dotted layers of indigo\, cyan\, magenta\, and yellow ink to the canvases\, Furunes intensifies and deepens the optical effect of each scene: from up close\, the pointillist details are entirely abstract\, while from afar\, the human eye joins red\, blue and yellow to create the clarified image. Furunes’ gestures with these dots considers multiple scales and experiences in her compositions\, at once creating friction and unity through her precise and astute manipulation of pattern and color. The works\, both tragic and captivating\, beckon viewers to become re-enchanted by our ecologies. They ignite Furunes’ belief in “a possible future where we can continue to admire life in its manifold shapes and ways\,” and in a world where we can more truly “live in harmony with other living beings.” \nWhile Furunes’s previous works have powerfully presented human victims of history – particularly her evocative depictions of Norway’s colonized native Sámi people – she now focuses her gaze on the global state of a victimized ecosystem. She reminds us that “nothing is guaranteed unless we all drastically change our way of living\,” and in her works offers us agency and the opportunity to ally with the natural world through its appreciation\, by understanding its traumas and indulging in a more empathetic cohabitation.  \n  \nAnne-Karin Furunes (b. 1961\, Ørland\, Norway) is a leading Scandinavian artist in painting and public commissions. Since 1992\, Furunes has developed a signature technique of perforating canvas or metal to consider photographic and digital elements of space\, light and material. The punctured holes in her canvases mimic the halftone process\, most popularly used in periodicals. Furunes does not employ a computer to create her images\, instead she composes them manually. Substituting ink for light\, she creates a star pattern on a diagonal grid\, cutting each hole by hand to create an image through the way the human eye perceives light. Furunes works from archival photographs. She departs from the original images by adjusting color\, cropping\, light and perspective. This method of removing in order to reveal complements Furunes’s research-based practice that frequently focuses on forgotten histories and people. \nTrained as an artist and architect\, Furunes received her degree from the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art in Norway. In 2021\, she was nominated for the ARS Fennica Award in Finland. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at Hå Gamle Prestegard\, Nærbø\, Norway (2023); Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum\, Trondheim\, Norway (2022); Paul Robeson Galleries\, Rutgers University\, NJ (2018); Fondazione Musei Civica\, Palazzo Ducale\, Venice\, Italy (2017); Trondheim Kunstmuseum\, Tronheim\, Norway (2017); Palazzo Fortuny\, in conjunction with the 56th Venice Biennale\, Venice\, Italy (2015);  Espoo  Museum  of  Modern Art\, Espoo\, Finland (2014); International Print Center\, NY (2013); Katonah Museum\, NY (2013). She is represented in prominent public collections worldwide including Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art\, Helsinki\, Finland; Kistefos Museum\, Jevnaker\, Norway; Museum of Arts and Design\, New York\, NY; National Museum\, Beijing\, China; National Museum of Contemporary Art\, Oslo\, Norway; and Trondheim Kunstmuseum\, Trondheim\, Norway\, among others. Furunes lives and works in Stjørdal\, Norway.  \n  \nAbout RYAN LEE\nCelebrating emerging and established artists and estates\, RYAN LEE takes a multi-generational approach to its programming\, presenting innovative and scholarly exhibitions across all spectrums of art practices\, including painting\, photography\, video\, sculpture\, and performance. The gallery takes chances on a wide variety of boundary-pushing artists; their work consistently transcends political\, cultural\, material\, or technical boundaries. In addition\, RYAN LEE has\, throughout its history\, demonstrated its long-standing interest and dedication to feminist\, Black and Asian American\, as well as queer narratives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Founded in 2013 by Mary Ryan and Jeffrey Lee\, the gallery is led by partners of different generations and backgrounds with over six decades of combined experiences informing its unique approach.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/anne-karin-furunes-all-most/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20231025
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20231126
DTSTAMP:20260417T132759
CREATED:20231009T142250Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20231017T191117Z
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SUMMARY:Michael Mazur: Wakeby Islands
DESCRIPTION:RYAN LEE Gallery is pleased to present Michael Mazur: Wakeby Islands\, the artist’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition celebrates the artist’s most famous Wakeby series (1982)\, a remarkable study of landscape and memory that follows Wakeby Pond’s full cycle of birth\, life\, death\, and renewal—a subject Mazur would return to for years to come. The exhibition includes two monoprints (including some of the largest monotypes to date)\, an oil painting\, and three pastels—all of which display his multidisciplinary dexterity across mediums to create a stunning variance in mood and technique.  \nWakeby Pond\, an idyllic body of water landlocked on Cape Cod\, was where Mazur and his wife\, poet Gail Mazur\, spent much of their time from the 1970s on. Working from a long-time art studio on the bay\, Mazur created prints and paintings of the pond\, exploring shifts in perception and time through multiple horizon lines and inclusions of cut-outs of previous Wakeby landscapes\, creating ‘picture-within-picture’ compositions. These details disrupt the seemingly linear timeline of a landscape and offer an exciting tension to the composition. \nIn Gail’s Garden\, Wakeby (1983)\, gentle purple and white flowers convey a patient study of nature and its overgrowth. There are psychological undertones to the loose and gestural flowers overtaking the garden scene\, conveying metamorphosis through their sprawl. A series of pastel-on-paper Wakeby studies also approaches the subject with softness\, albeit with suggestions of capriciousness. Mazur pays particular attention to creating a nimble horizon line\, interrupted by treetops and shrubbery against a colorful\, cloudy sky.  \nLayering\, of both subject and content\, plays prominently in Mazur’s work. Originally discovering monotype through an exhibition of Edgar Degas’s works in the medium\, Mazur was encouraged to explore its capacities. In practice\, Mazur worked with master printmaker Robert Townsend in choreographic motions to achieve the extremely experimental and painterly washes in the Wakeby sessions. He eventually began incorporating simulacra through “ghost” impressions of print-over-print layering\, and employing the technique of chine-collé\, which effects diaphanous backdrops to each print.  \nBeyond the technical aptitudes underlying each artwork on view\, the content itself speaks of a serene\, somewhat mystic place. In the Wakeby Night triptychs from 1983 and 1984\, we see oversized flowers loitering over a moonlit lake. In the earlier work\, the moon glows in green tones\, with flora exploding in the foreground; in the later iteration of the scene\, while the sunflowers beam yellow\, the night light casts a deep blue haze over the more subdued plant life\, evoking an entirely different feeling of the placid pond.  \nEach panel in the original Wakeby Day/Wakeby Night series represented the single largest monotype ever printed at that time\, placing the works themselves squarely into the realm of canonical\, art historical touchpoints. Not only have the works been produced on massive scales\, such as a grand in situ commission in 1982 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology\, but they also now belong to the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum\, DC and Brooklyn Museum\, NY.  \nThe masterful range of technical nuances used to make these works – like the use of a roller to offset an image on one plate to another\, the use of solvents to create painterly drips and layers\, and the artist’s uses of his own fingers and rags to create impressionistic\, tactile landscape portraiture – are not only iconic to Mazur’s career and œuvre\, but to the evolution of the medium and art form of monotype at large.  \n  \nMichael Mazur (b. 1935 New York\, NY – d. 2009 Cambridge\, MA) is known for his use of abstract and figurative visual vocabulary across a wide range of media\, including painting\, drawing\, pastels\, and printmaking. Influenced by elements of Impressionist art\, Abstract Expressionism\, and traditional Chinese landscape scroll painting\, Mazur uniquely combines aspects of several periods of art history separated by nearly seven centuries to create lush and luminous work. Mazur’s career is marked by an inventive use of various media and a wide range of interests\, alternating between psychological portraits\, celebrations of nature\, and political engagement\, among other themes.  \nMazur received numerous awards throughout his illustrious career\, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship  (1964); American Academy of Arts and Letters Fellowship (1964); and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant (1962)\, among others.  \nHis work has been included in several notable solo exhibitions\, including the Museum of Fine Arts\, Boston’s 2006 exhibition Michael Mazur: The Art of the Print and Zimmerli Art Museum’s 2000 exhibition Michael Mazur: A Print Retrospective\, which travelled to the Museum of Fine Arts\, Boston\, MA; the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts\, Stanford University\, CA; and Minneapolis Institute of Art\, MN. Recently\, his work has also been included in exhibitions at RISD Museum\, RI (2022); deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum\, MA (2021); Springfield Art Museum\, MO (2021); Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts\, Nagoya\, Japan (2018); Mead Art Museum\, MA (2017); and International Print Center of New York\, NY (2015)\, among others. Mazur’s work can be found in numerous prominent museum collections\, including the British Museum\, UK; Los Angeles County Museum of Art\, CA; Art Institute of Chicago\, IL; Metropolitan Museum of Art\, NY; Museum of Modern Art\, NY; National Gallery of Art\, DC; and Whitney Museum of American Art\, NY\, among others. \n  \nAbout RYAN LEE\nCelebrating emerging and established artists and estates\, RYAN LEE takes a multi-generational approach to its programming\, presenting innovative and scholarly exhibitions across all spectrums of art practices\, including painting\, photography\, video\, sculpture\, and performance. The gallery takes chances on a wide variety of boundary-pushing artists; their work consistently transcends political\, cultural\, material\, or technical boundaries. In addition\, RYAN LEE has\, throughout its history\, demonstrated its long-standing interest and dedication to feminist\, Black and Asian American\, as well as queer narratives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Founded in 2013 by Mary Ryan and Jeffrey Lee\, the gallery is led by partners of different generations and backgrounds with over six decades of combined experiences informing its unique approach.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/michael-mazur-wakeby-islands/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
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DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20231025
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20231126
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SUMMARY:Scenic Microcosms: Wallpapered Rooms Painted by Andrew Raftery
DESCRIPTION:RYAN LEE is pleased to announce Scenic Microcosms: Wallpapered Rooms Painted by Andrew Raftery. The solo exhibition features ten penetrating views of landmark wallpapers\, represented in watercolor. Each work depicts a scene of real-life interiors from across New England whose ornate\, ornamental wallpapers inspire questions about the colonialist roots of their creation\, installation\, and ongoing appreciation. Raftery’s watercolors balance his genuine admiration and deference to the allure and precision of the wallpaper’s artistry\, while engaging with contemporary cultural criticism. \nKnown for his expressions of contemporary conditions through the use of seemingly archaic mediums\, for example copperplate engraving and ceramic transfer\, Raftery’s fascination with wallpapers carries forth his interest in marrying ancient art-making processes with the conditions and vantage points of today. A fine artist but also a scholar\, he contextualizes each of his ten scenes in an extensive catalog photo-essay\, published as a complement to the exhibition.  \nThe paintings in Scenic Microcosms zoom-in on the refined interiors of stately houses and public buildings. Their subtexts\, however\, carry the heavier cultural weight of specific antique wall-arts\, made in late 18th- and early 19th-century China and in 19th-century colonial-era France\, as installed to this day in contemporary sites. “Much of my time is spent reveling in the brilliant achievements of the artists and craftspeople who preceded me\,” Raftery says. “But the seductiveness of their achievements does not hide those images in the wallpapers that sit uncomfortably at this point in history.” \nProduced from 2021 – the earliest site visit was on Raftery’s first road trip since the start of Covid\, taken in February 2021 to the Baltimore Drinking Room at the Winterthur Museum\, Garden and Library in Delaware – to this year\, Raftery takes us on a journey with him across historical New England and into some of its most esteemed architectural interiors. Situating himself through immediate and intimate presence within a room and in front of a walls’ artistry – each a multitude of scenes and fables ripe for interpretation with a contemporary historian’s lens – Raftery not only illustrates the scenes with his own hand but also offers us\, through both his written catalog narrative and discerningly contextualized recreations\, requisite criticism of the century/ies-old subject matter through the eyes of our current era. \n“Contemplating these works in the rooms and recreating them in the studio counters the impulse to elide or gloss over what was there to be seen ever since the first magnificent (and problematic) scenic paper\, Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique was released by [19th-century French wallpaper artisans] Dufour in 1804.”  –  Andrew Raftery \nWith the watercolors on view in Scenic Microcosms\, Raftery spent years studying or considering the composition\, structure\, and geography of every wallpaper depicted. The scenes enamored him\, and he cites the artworks as “some of the most ambitious prints ever made.” Each of his illustrative reenactments is the result of countless hours of attentive in-person sketching\, leading to dozens of preliminary pencil drawings\, then to a lithographic drawing and grisaille for each work before its realization in final\, painted form. The complexity of his process reveals the complexity of the questions the works are posing: how may we handle these objects of awe-inspiring beauty\, at once a relic of colonialist thought and a legitimately rare and precious artifact of art history?  \nRaftery’s journey\, his perceptive contextualizations\, and his fastidiously composed scenic re-presentations at once grant us guidance\, and open the doors for us to step into these questions and through the thresholds of each ornamented space\, to discover the wonder on our own. \n  \nAbout RYAN LEE\nCelebrating emerging and established artists and estates\, RYAN LEE takes a multi-generational approach to its programming\, presenting innovative and scholarly exhibitions across all spectrums of art practices\, including painting\, photography\, video\, sculpture\, and performance. The gallery takes chances on a wide variety of boundary-pushing artists; their work consistently transcends political\, cultural\, material\, or technical boundaries. In addition\, RYAN LEE has\, throughout its history\, demonstrated its long-standing interest and dedication to feminist\, Black and Asian American\, as well as queer narratives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Founded in 2013 by Mary Ryan and Jeffrey Lee\, the gallery is led by partners of different generations and backgrounds with over six decades of combined experiences informing its unique approach.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/scenic-microcosms-wallpapered-rooms-painted-by-andrew-raftery/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
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DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20230914
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20231022
DTSTAMP:20260417T132759
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SUMMARY:Can You See Me Now? Painting the Aging Body
DESCRIPTION: RYAN LEE is pleased to present Can You See Me Now? Painting the Aging Body\, a group exhibition co-curated by Jeffrey Lee and artist Clarity Haynes. Featuring select works from an expansive and esteemed roster of painters who are women-identifying\, the show represents a shared exploration of the aging body across generations. From Samantha Nye’s sexy portrait series of four older women at their most bodacious\, to Beverly McIver’s intimate self-portrait holding a doll\, the artworks both individually and collectively celebrate the immense grace\, grandeur and fortitude of aging. 
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/can-you-see-me-now-painting-the-aging-body/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20230710
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20230910
DTSTAMP:20260417T132759
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SUMMARY:Emma Amos: Classical Legacies
DESCRIPTION:Emma Amos\nClassical Legacies\nJuly 10 – September 9\, 2023 \nRYAN LEE is pleased to announce Emma Amos: Classical Legacies\, an exhibition of three paintings\, six prints\, and one cycle of epic monoprints by Emma Amos. The fourth solo presentation of Amos’s work—and sixth overall—at the gallery\, the exhibition will focus on the classicist influence on Amos’s œuvre\, a fresh take on her substantial body of work. \nThe exhibition will feature works ranging from 1966 to 2001 that demonstrate Amos’s longstanding interest in the antiquities. Amos would visit Rome as a child with her family\, and her early exposure to Roman ruins and epics translated in her work\, in which she frequently explored themes of longevity and deep histories within shifting times. Across the works presented at RYAN LEE this summer\, Amos displays her deep interest in history\, longevity and memory. By implementing themes from Greek and Roman antiquity in her work\, Amos marries the wide and converging interests that informed her art for decades and reflected the breadth of her culture. Her incorporation of the ancient West in her work coopted the built-in pedigree connoted with these motifs\, which she claimed as her own by right. \nThis will be the first time that Amos’s landmark Odyssey prints will be exhibited to the public in twenty years. Valerie J. Mercer wrote in an essay accompanying Amos’s major 1995 exhibition Emma Amos: Paintings and Prints\, 1982-1992: “Because of the monumental scale of the prints\, Odyssey can take up the spaces of a whole room when it is shown. The series focused on 100 years of the history of the artist’s family in Atlanta\, from the period shortly after slavery up to the 1960s. It was inspired by the splendid collection of family photographs belonging to Amos’s parents and represents pride in her family and in their achievements.”  \nThe exhibition starts with Pompeii\, made in 1960: a pivotal year for Amos. This marks her departure from her hometown of Atlanta for New York City\, which is coincidentally the event that later capped her landmark\, 10-panel Odyssey (1988). Equipped with the etching skills she learned at the Central School of Art in London\, Pompeii exemplifies Amos’s early interest in rooting her works in ancient traditions.  \nThis interest resurfaces with her important Falling Figures paintings: a series that reverberates with anxiety\, which Amos described as a response to a sense of “the impending loss of history\, place\, and people” among African Americans. This important work is capped by the monumental Flying Circus\, in which Amos’s multi-toned figures are catapulted down a gesturally vivid background. Plummeting along with her are a wealth of Greek and Roman references: with the frightful loss of African American stories\, along goes the Temple Mount in Jerusalem\, the Coliseum\, and the Circus Maximus. The resulting composition is an energetic meditation on memory\, legends\, and dissipating histories. \nBy incorporating her own weaving and African fabric in her paintings referencing Greek and Roman antiquity\, Amos marries her converging interest in Black history and classical literature. In Way Away (1996)\, ancient Western symbolism becomes Black symbolism as well. Framed by the African fabrics that Amos frequently uses in her work\, she carves herself a place within the Western canon: a mixed-race\, Black minority within the Western world\, she is just as much an inheritor of Homer\, Hercules\, and Circe as any of her peers. \nInspired by Homer’s epic poem\, Odyssey serves as a counterbalance to Amos’s anxious Falling Figures series by unflinchingly inscribing her own family history in the ranks of the legendary. With this series of ten hand-painted monoprints\, the artist and her proud Georgian heritage is never to be forgotten. \nEmma Amos: Classical Legacies will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Michele Valerie Ronnick\, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages\, Literatures\, and Cultures at Wayne State University; and Gabriella Shypula\, PhD Candidate in Art History and Criticism at Stony Brook University.  \n  \nEmma Amos (b. 1937 Atlanta\, GA – d. 2020 Bedford\, NH) was a pioneering artist\, educator\, and activist. A dynamic painter and masterful colorist\, her commitment to interrogating the art-historical status quo yielded a body of vibrant and intellectually rigorous work. Influenced by modern Western European art\, Abstract Expressionism\, the Civil Rights movement and feminism\, Amos was drawn to exploring the politics of culture and issues of racism\, sexism and ethnocentrism in her art. “It’s always been my contention\,” Amos once said\, “that for me\, a black woman artist\, to walk into the studio is a political act.” Amos was the youngest and only woman member of Spiral\, the historic African American collective founded in 1963\, as well as a member of the feminist collective and publication\, Heresies\, established in the 1980s.  \nAmos graduated from Antioch College in Ohio in 1958 and the Central School of Art in London in 1960. She subsequently moved to New York and became active in the downtown arts scene\, working alongside prominent Spiral artists such as Romare Bearden\, Hale Woodruff\, Norman Lewis\, Alvin Hollingsworth and Charles Alston. In 1965\, she earned her Masters in Arts from New York University and taught art at the Dalton School in New York. She is a former Professor and Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University where she taught for 28 years. \nAmos’s work is currently exhibited in It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadbsy at the Brooklyn Museum\, NY\, and in 2021\, Emma Amos: Color Odyssey\, a major retrospective of Amos’s work\, traveled from the Georgia Museum of Art to the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute and Philadelphia Museum of Art. She has also been included in exhibitions at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo\, Brazil (2022); Modern Art Museum at Fort Worth\, TX (2022); Minneapolis Institute of Art\, MN (2019); National Portrait Gallery\, UK (2018); de Young Museum\, CA (2017); Whitney Museum of American Art (2017); British Museum (2017); Tate Modern\, UK (2017); and Musée du Quai Branly\, France (2016)\, among others. Her work is held in over 40 museum collections\, including the British Museum\, UK; Detroit Institute of Arts\, MI; Museo de las Artes\, Mexico; Metropolitan Museum of Art\, NY; Museum of Modern Art\, NY; National Gallery of Art\, DC; Whitney Museum of American Art\, NY; and Yale University Art Gallery\, CT\, among others. \n  \nAbout RYAN LEE\nCelebrating emerging and established artists and estates\, RYAN LEE takes a multi-generational approach to its programming\, presenting innovative and scholarly exhibitions across all spectrums of art practices\, including painting\, photography\, video\, sculpture\, and performance. The gallery takes chances on a wide variety of boundary-pushing artists; their work consistently transcends political\, cultural\, material\, or technical boundaries. In addition\, RYAN LEE has\, throughout its history\, demonstrated its long-standing interest and dedication to feminist\, Black and Asian American\, as well as queer narratives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Founded in 2013 by Mary Ryan and Jeffrey Lee\, the gallery is led by partners of different generations and backgrounds with over six decades of combined experiences informing its unique approach.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/emma-amos-classical-legacies/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20230518T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20230518T200000
DTSTAMP:20260417T132759
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SUMMARY:Opening Reception for Martine Gutierrez | ANTI-ICON: APOKALYPSIS
DESCRIPTION:Martine Gutierrez\nANTI-ICON: APOKALYPSIS\nMay 18 – June 30\, 2023\nOpening reception: Thursday\, May 18\, 2023\, 6:00-8:00 pm \nStill a patriarchal language\, a determinative frame. Still a divisional boundary of womanhood\, a categorization of the icon\, a spiritual reality in mass production. The same face of currency made over and over again. What is an icon\, a cult image? Rather\, what is an image? What brings a symbol to power? Culture is history’s political influence\, a pendulum of domination. What is power without resistance? The historical moment\, and the figure that stands in opposition. Icon as fact\, a perceived understanding of truth in the world\, teaching us how to see. Image as instruction; see\, when an aspiration finds meaning it exceeds its boundaries\, it becomes momentous. Larger than life or death\, but rather the cycle between lives. Not a vision\, but the place we are at now\, the inevitable new\, the next civilization we are going to become. In refusal of deception\, an encounter with unobfuscated femininity is revealed. If the icon shows humanity’s spiritual ideal\, it is the anti-icon who refuses the delusion of man\, his inflated self-conception. For the icon makes real the image\, anti-icon must break through to reveal reality. What is a revelation? A proclamation of clarity\, a veneer stripped away\, a shattering. It feels like the world is ending\, because it did; it has before\, and it will again end. What is the world? In the progress of nihilism\, creation becomes resistance; a new image of what the world was all along.\n– Martine Gutierrez \nRYAN LEE is pleased to present ANTI-ICON: APOKALYPSIS\, a daring new body of work by artist Martine Gutierrez. The series continues her exploration of identity across the cultural landscapes of gender\, race and celebrity. In 17 new works\, Gutierrez has transformed herself into a multitude of idols. Costumed by the barest of essentials\, Gutierrez’s figure is the catalyst\, reflecting dystopian futurism upon the symbols of our past. Through each metamorphosis\, Gutierrez re-envisions a diverse canon of radical heroines who have achieved legendary cultural influence over thousands of years in both art history and pop culture. \nThe project’s cult following began in 2021 when it was commissioned by the Public Art Fund\, exhibited on bus shelters normally used for advertising. Only 10 images from the original series were chosen to circulate.  In response to societal censors\, Gutierrez had the nude forms veiled thus further interrogating the public restrictions placed on the female body in the United States. The larger-than-life portraits were encountered by pedestrians on their daily commutes\, reproduced in 300 locations throughout New York\, Chicago\, and Boston. \nThis summer\, Gutierrez will reveal ANTI-ICON: APOKALYPSIS in three distinct selections set to preview across three venues: RYAN LEE Gallery\, New York; Fraenkel Gallery\, San Francisco; and Josh Lilley\, London. The three-gallery exhibition will be accompanied by a new artist book\, published by RYAN LEE\, entitled APOKALYPSIS. The full collection of 17 portraits will be presented in its entirety for the first time in a traveling museum show\, organized by Polygon Gallery\, Vancouver slated for 2024. \nGutierrez is the sole performer in the series\, portraying all 17 groundbreaking figures: Aphrodite\, ancient Greek goddess of love\, desire and beauty\, identified by the Romans as ‘Venus’; Ardhanarishvara\, composite male-female figure of the Hindu god Shiva together with his consort Parvati; Atargatis\, Syrian mother goddess of fertility and the moon; Cleopatra\, Egyptian ruler famed for her influence on Roman politics; Queen Elizabeth I\, England’s second female monarch when the country asserted itself as a major power in politics\, commerce and the arts in the 16th century; Gabriel\, angel in the Abrahamic religions believed by many to be able to take on any physical form; Helen of Troy\, Greek beauty seen as the cause of the Trojan war; Joan of Arc\, sainted heroine of France\, revered as a holy person for her faithfulness and bravery in battle\, burned at the stake by the church; Judith The Slayer\, courageous biblical widow who used her charm to save her people from an Assyrian general; Lady Godiva\, bold noblewoman from the Medieval period who fought for justice for everyday people; Our Lady of Guadalupe\, Mesoamerican Catholic title of Mary\, who appeared to the Indigenous man Juan Diego and imprinted herself on his cloak as proof of her visitation; Mary Magdalene\, ‘Magdalene’ means tower\, as she is an early tower of the Christian faith\, cited in the four canonical gospels as a follower and companion of Jesus Christ\, a witness to his crucifixion and resurrection; The Virgin Mary\, a young Jewish virgin from Nazareth\, chosen by God to conceive Jesus through the Holy Spirit; La Madonna\, Italian for ‘Lady\, Virgin Mary’\, central figure of Christianity\, celebrated as the ‘Virgin Queen’ in processions of Semana Santa\, throughout Spain and Latin America; Hua Mulan\, famed warrior of Chinese folklore who disguised herself as a man to fight in battle; Sacagawea\, Shoshone interpreter and guide of the expedition to discover routes through pre-colonial America\, journaled by Lewis and Clark; Queen of Sheba\, Ethiopian queen\, known for her wit\, power and wealth\, her romance with King Solomon is documented in the Kebra Nagast. \nMartine Gutierrez (b. 1989 Berkeley\, CA) is a transdisciplinary artist\, performing\, writing\, composing and directing elaborate narrative scenes to subvert pop-cultural tropes in the exploration of identity—both personally and collectively intersectional to race\, gender\, class and nationality. Her amass of media—ranging from billboards to episodic films\, music videos and renowned magazine\, Indigenous Woman—produce the very conduits of advertising that sell the identities she disassembles. Challenging binaries through the blurring of their borders\, Gutierrez insists that gender\, like all things\, is entangled—and argues against the linear framework of oppositional thinking. These complicated intersections are innate to Gutierrez’s own multicultural upbringing. Her malleable\, ever-evolving self-image catalogs the confluence of seemingly disparate modes\, conveying limitless potential for reinvention and reinterpretation. \nGutierrez received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2012. She is also a published musician and has produced several commercial videos. Gutierrez lives and works in New York\, NY. \nHer work has been the focus of solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2022); Philbrook Museum of Art\, OK (2022); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis\, MO (2022); Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College\, IL (2021); Rockwell Museum\, NY (2020); Australian Centre for Photography\, Australia (2020); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth\, TX (2019); and CAM Raleigh\, NC (2016)\, among others. She has been included in group exhibitions at the Eretz Israel Museum\, Israel (2022); Vincent Price Art Museum\, CA (2022); Museum of Sex\, NY (2021); Colegio de San Ildefonso\, Mexico (2021); OÖ Kulturquartier\, Austria (2021); POLYGON Gallery\, Canada (2021); Huis Marseille Museum voor Fotografie\, The Netherlands (2021); Sprengel Museum\, Hannover\, Germany (2021); McNay Art Museum\, TX (2021); Minneapolis Institute of Art\, MN (2021); Wadsworth  Atheneum  Museum  of Art\, CT (2019); New Museum\, NY (2018); and Museum  of  Contemporary Art\, GA (2017)\, among others. Her work has been acquired by the Cantor Arts Center\, Stanford University\, CA; Huis Marseille Museum voor Fotografie\, The Netherlands; McNay Art Museum\, TX; Milwaukee Art Museum\, WI; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth\, TX; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego\, CA; Museum of Modern Art\, NY; New Britain Museum of American Art\, CT; Rockwell Museum\, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art\, NY\, among others.  \nAbout RYAN LEE\nCelebrating emerging and established artists and estates\, RYAN LEE takes a multi-generational approach to its programming\, presenting innovative and scholarly exhibitions across all spectrums of art practices\, including painting\, photography\, video\, sculpture\, and performance. The gallery takes chances on a wide variety of boundary-pushing artists; their work consistently transcends political\, cultural\, material\, or technical boundaries. In addition\, RYAN LEE has\, throughout its history\, demonstrated its long-standing interest and dedication to feminist\, Black and Asian American\, as well as queer narratives in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Founded in 2013 by Mary Ryan and Jeffrey Lee\, the gallery is led by partners of different generations and backgrounds with over six decades of combined experiences informing its unique approach.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/opening-reception-for-martine-gutierrez-anti-icon-apokalypsis/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Event
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20230518T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20230518T200000
DTSTAMP:20260417T132759
CREATED:20230420T161159Z
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SUMMARY:Opening Reception for Masako Miki: Empathy Lab
DESCRIPTION:Masako Miki\nEmpaty Lab\nMay 18 – June 30\, 2023\nOpening reception: Thursday\, May 18\, 2023\, 6:00-8:00 pm \nRYAN LEE is pleased to announce Empathy Lab\, the first major exhibition of a debut body of work by Bay Area-based Japanese contemporary artist Masako Miki. The landmark solo show proudly introduces new works to her Shapeshifters series\, which roots its expressions in the animistic polytheism of Shinto traditions. Conceiving of the gallery as a home\, Miki constructs various spaces for casual connection and contemplation\, from an engawa deck to an open garden-scape dotted with deity-inspired bronze and felt creatures\, objects\, and forms\, alongside vibrant drawings that convey the outside world.  \nEmpathy Lab ignites the artist’s common theme of questioning how tradition and folklore offer grounds for exploring bicultural identity. In her characters—whose designs are rooted in deep histories of animistic mythology—sacredness is implied\, regardless of diversity in form\, texture\, surface or material make-up. “Normalcy” is supplanted by a divine plurality of identity\, significant and celebrated in each unique sense of selfhood.  \nIn their exaltation\, some of the characters are literally uplifted. Inspired by the engawa element characteristic of Japanese architecture—a transitional wood-deck bridging residential interior and exterior spaces—Miki elevates a portion of the gallery to invite and welcome interaction with the art\, and perhaps most importantly with one another.   \nHolistically responding to the gallery’s layout\, she envisioned tokonoma spaces too\, another architectural element common in Japanese housing. This area showcases Miki’s Shapeshifters in a deliberately homey\, communal setting inspired by the everyday engagement that passersby may have with friends and neighbors\, or even with houses of deities (shrines) in Japan. “This casual socialization can lead to meaningful connections\, and shared experience is the first step to building communities\,” says Miki. In Shinto folklore\, “there are a myriad of gods in this universe\, yet they can only fulfill their duties as a collective. I resonate these ideas in my work as a reminder of how we endeavor our challenges together.” \nThe exhibition\, as such\, offers more than just its physical experience—it suggests multiple vibrant entry points into exploring the junctures of tradition and modernity\, and the cultural marriages that they often signal. The cast bronze pieces express the “synthesis of combining two finishes of century-old patina with the modern invention of automotive paint\,” which is an extremely complex color application process; while the similarly involved process of creating the felt characters utilizes wool\, activating multitudes of design phases before reaching final form. \nThis presentation of new works is ultimately about reclaiming the power of myth-making. We are told and we succumb to stories that punctuate our shared histories with painful and unresolved tensions.“Our lives are filled with mythologies\, manipulated ideologies\, and fear-driven narratives that deepen chasms among us\,” says Miki. Her work proposes resolution through creative and communal agency\, exhibiting through her characters and environments the optimistic reality of the power of imagination to drive the future. “I am convinced that we need new mythologies to question old myths. We can update the myths.” \nMasako Miki (b. 1974 Osaka\, Japan) is a multimedia artist whose work ranges installation and large-scale sculpture\, printmaking\, watercolor and felting. A native of Japan\, she now lives and works in Berkeley\, CA. Her work frequently explores the idea of synthesis—manipulating contradicting spatial elements to suggest a disoriented context and space. The artist bases her narrative on her own experiences of becoming bicultural in the United States at the age of eighteen. Strongly influenced by craft and folk art of different cultures\, she remains close to her ancestral traditions\, frequently considering motifs and ideologies that arise from her association with Buddhism\, Shintoism\, and traditional Japanese folklore. The artist’s practice is further rooted in the belief that art can foster social contexts in which contemporary and universally relevant mythologies and social narratives can be generated—replacing or fixing harmful misconceptions and mythologies of the past that have previously sparked social injustices.  \nMiki has been included in solo and group exhibitions at the ICA San Jose\, CA (2022); Katonah Museum of Art\, NY (2022); Marin Museum of Contemporary Art\, CA (2022); Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive\, CA (2019); and de Young  Museum\, CA (2016)\, among others. Her large-scale sculptures were recently commissioned as a permanent installation at the Uber Technologies headquarters in Mission Bay\, San Francisco. Her work is included in the collections of The Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation\, NY and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive\, CA. She received her MFA from San Jose State University. \nAbout RYAN LEE\nCelebrating emerging and established artists and estates\, RYAN LEE takes a multi-generational approach to its programming\, presenting innovative and scholarly exhibitions across all spectrums of art practices\, including painting\, photography\, video\, sculpture\, and performance. The gallery takes chances on a wide variety of boundary-pushing artists; their work consistently transcends political\, cultural\, material\, or technical boundaries. In addition\, RYAN LEE has\, throughout its history\, demonstrated its long-standing interest and dedication to feminist\, Black and Asian American\, as well as queer narratives in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Founded in 2013 by Mary Ryan and Jeffrey Lee\, the gallery is led by partners of different generations and backgrounds with over six decades of combined experiences informing its unique approach.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/opening-reception-for-masako-miki-empathy-lab/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Event
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DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20230518
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20230701
DTSTAMP:20260417T132759
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SUMMARY:Martine Gutierrez | ANTI-ICON: APOKALYPSIS
DESCRIPTION:Martine Gutierrez\nANTI-ICON: APOKALYPSIS\nMay 18 – June 30\, 2023\nOpening reception: Thursday\, May 18\, 2023\, 6:00-8:00 pm \nStill a patriarchal language\, a determinative frame. Still a divisional boundary of womanhood\, a categorization of the icon\, a spiritual reality in mass production. The same face of currency made over and over again. What is an icon\, a cult image? Rather\, what is an image? What brings a symbol to power? Culture is history’s political influence\, a pendulum of domination. What is power without resistance? The historical moment\, and the figure that stands in opposition. Icon as fact\, a perceived understanding of truth in the world\, teaching us how to see. Image as instruction; see\, when an aspiration finds meaning it exceeds its boundaries\, it becomes momentous. Larger than life or death\, but rather the cycle between lives. Not a vision\, but the place we are at now\, the inevitable new\, the next civilization we are going to become. In refusal of deception\, an encounter with unobfuscated femininity is revealed. If the icon shows humanity’s spiritual ideal\, it is the anti-icon who refuses the delusion of man\, his inflated self-conception. For the icon makes real the image\, anti-icon must break through to reveal reality. What is a revelation? A proclamation of clarity\, a veneer stripped away\, a shattering. It feels like the world is ending\, because it did; it has before\, and it will again end. What is the world? In the progress of nihilism\, creation becomes resistance; a new image of what the world was all along.\n– Martine Gutierrez \nRYAN LEE is pleased to present ANTI-ICON: APOKALYPSIS\, a daring new body of work by artist Martine Gutierrez. The series continues her exploration of identity across the cultural landscapes of gender\, race and celebrity. In 17 new works\, Gutierrez has transformed herself into a multitude of idols. Costumed by the barest of essentials\, Gutierrez’s figure is the catalyst\, reflecting dystopian futurism upon the symbols of our past. Through each metamorphosis\, Gutierrez re-envisions a diverse canon of radical heroines who have achieved legendary cultural influence over thousands of years in both art history and pop culture. \nThe project’s cult following began in 2021 when it was commissioned by the Public Art Fund\, exhibited on bus shelters normally used for advertising. Only 10 images from the original series were chosen to circulate.  In response to societal censors\, Gutierrez had the nude forms veiled thus further interrogating the public restrictions placed on the female body in the United States. The larger-than-life portraits were encountered by pedestrians on their daily commutes\, reproduced in 300 locations throughout New York\, Chicago\, and Boston.  \nThis summer\, Gutierrez will reveal ANTI-ICON: APOKALYPSIS in three distinct selections set to preview across three venues: RYAN LEE Gallery\, New York; Fraenkel Gallery\, San Francisco; and Josh Lilley\, London. The three-gallery exhibition will be accompanied by a new artist book\, published by RYAN LEE\, entitled APOKALYPSIS. The full collection of 17 portraits will be presented in its entirety for the first time in a traveling museum show\, organized by Polygon Gallery\, Vancouver slated for 2024. \nGutierrez is the sole performer in the series\, portraying all 17 groundbreaking figures: Aphrodite\, ancient Greek goddess of love\, desire and beauty\, identified by the Romans as ‘Venus’; Ardhanarishvara\, composite male-female figure of the Hindu god Shiva together with his consort Parvati; Atargatis\, Syrian mother goddess of fertility and the moon; Cleopatra\, Egyptian ruler famed for her influence on Roman politics; Queen Elizabeth I\, England’s second female monarch when the country asserted itself as a major power in politics\, commerce and the arts in the 16th century; Gabriel\, angel in the Abrahamic religions believed by many to be able to take on any physical form; Helen of Troy\, Greek beauty seen as the cause of the Trojan war; Joan of Arc\, sainted heroine of France\, revered as a holy person for her faithfulness and bravery in battle\, burned at the stake by the church; Judith The Slayer\, courageous biblical widow who used her charm to save her people from an Assyrian general; Lady Godiva\, bold noblewoman from the Medieval period who fought for justice for everyday people; Our Lady of Guadalupe\, Mesoamerican Catholic title of Mary\, who appeared to the Indigenous man Juan Diego and imprinted herself on his cloak as proof of her visitation; Mary Magdalene\, ‘Magdalene’ means tower\, as she is an early tower of the Christian faith\, cited in the four canonical gospels as a follower and companion of Jesus Christ\, a witness to his crucifixion and resurrection; The Virgin Mary\, a young Jewish virgin from Nazareth\, chosen by God to conceive Jesus through the Holy Spirit; La Madonna\, Italian for ‘Lady\, Virgin Mary’\, central figure of Christianity\, celebrated as the ‘Virgin Queen’ in processions of Semana Santa\, throughout Spain and Latin America; Hua Mulan\, famed warrior of Chinese folklore who disguised herself as a man to fight in battle; Sacagawea\, Shoshone interpreter and guide of the expedition to discover routes through pre-colonial America\, journaled by Lewis and Clark; Queen of Sheba\, Ethiopian queen\, known for her wit\, power and wealth\, her romance with King Solomon is documented in the Kebra Nagast. \nMartine Gutierrez (b. 1989 Berkeley\, CA) is a transdisciplinary artist\, performing\, writing\, composing and directing elaborate narrative scenes to subvert pop-cultural tropes in the exploration of identity—both personally and collectively intersectional to race\, gender\, class and nationality. Her amass of media—ranging from billboards to episodic films\, music videos and renowned magazine\, Indigenous Woman—produce the very conduits of advertising that sell the identities she disassembles. Challenging binaries through the blurring of their borders\, Gutierrez insists that gender\, like all things\, is entangled—and argues against the linear framework of oppositional thinking. These complicated intersections are innate to Gutierrez’s own multicultural upbringing. Her malleable\, ever-evolving self-image catalogs the confluence of seemingly disparate modes\, conveying limitless potential for reinvention and reinterpretation. \nGutierrez received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2012. She is also a published musician and has produced several commercial videos. Gutierrez lives and works in New York\, NY. \nHer work has been the focus of solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2022); Philbrook Museum of Art\, OK (2022); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis\, MO (2022); Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College\, IL (2021); Rockwell Museum\, NY (2020); Australian Centre for Photography\, Australia (2020); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth\, TX (2019); and CAM Raleigh\, NC (2016)\, among others. She has been included in group exhibitions at the Eretz Israel Museum\, Israel (2022); Vincent Price Art Museum\, CA (2022); Museum of Sex\, NY (2021); Colegio de San Ildefonso\, Mexico (2021); OÖ Kulturquartier\, Austria (2021); POLYGON Gallery\, Canada (2021); Huis Marseille Museum voor Fotografie\, The Netherlands (2021); Sprengel Museum\, Hannover\, Germany (2021); McNay Art Museum\, TX (2021); Minneapolis Institute of Art\, MN (2021); Wadsworth  Atheneum  Museum  of Art\, CT (2019); New Museum\, NY (2018); and Museum  of  Contemporary Art\, GA (2017)\, among others. Her work has been acquired by the Cantor Arts Center\, Stanford University\, CA; Huis Marseille Museum voor Fotografie\, The Netherlands; McNay Art Museum\, TX; Milwaukee Art Museum\, WI; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth\, TX; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego\, CA; Museum of Modern Art\, NY; New Britain Museum of American Art\, CT; Rockwell Museum\, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art\, NY\, among others.  \nAbout RYAN LEE\nCelebrating emerging and established artists and estates\, RYAN LEE takes a multi-generational approach to its programming\, presenting innovative and scholarly exhibitions across all spectrums of art practices\, including painting\, photography\, video\, sculpture\, and performance. The gallery takes chances on a wide variety of boundary-pushing artists; their work consistently transcends political\, cultural\, material\, or technical boundaries. In addition\, RYAN LEE has\, throughout its history\, demonstrated its long-standing interest and dedication to feminist\, Black and Asian American\, as well as queer narratives in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Founded in 2013 by Mary Ryan and Jeffrey Lee\, the gallery is led by partners of different generations and backgrounds with over six decades of combined experiences informing its unique approach.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/martine-gutierrez-anti-icon-apokalypsis/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
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DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20230518
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20230701
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SUMMARY:Masako Miki: Empathy Lab
DESCRIPTION:Masako Miki\nEmpathy Lab\nMay 18 – June 30\, 2023\nOpening reception: Thursday\, May 18\, 2023\, 6:00-8:00 pm \nRYAN LEE is pleased to announce Empathy Lab\, the first major exhibition of a debut body of work by Bay Area-based Japanese contemporary artist Masako Miki. The landmark solo show proudly introduces new works to her Shapeshifters series\, which roots its expressions in the animistic polytheism of Shinto traditions. Conceiving of the gallery as a home\, Miki constructs various spaces for casual connection and contemplation\, from an engawa deck to an open garden-scape dotted with deity-inspired bronze and felt creatures\, objects\, and forms\, alongside vibrant drawings that convey the outside world. \nEmpathy Lab ignites the artist’s common theme of questioning how tradition and folklore offer grounds for exploring bicultural identity. In her characters—whose designs are rooted in deep histories of animistic mythology—sacredness is implied\, regardless of diversity in form\, texture\, surface or material make-up. “Normalcy” is supplanted by a divine plurality of identity\, significant and celebrated in each unique sense of selfhood. \nIn their exaltation\, some of the characters are literally uplifted. Inspired by the engawa element characteristic of Japanese architecture—a transitional wood-deck bridging residential interior and exterior spaces—Miki elevates a portion of the gallery to invite and welcome interaction with the art\, and perhaps most importantly with one another. \nHolistically responding to the gallery’s layout\, she envisioned tokonoma spaces too\, another architectural element common in Japanese housing. This area showcases Miki’s Shapeshifters in a deliberately homey\, communal setting inspired by the everyday engagement that passersby may have with friends and neighbors\, or even with houses of deities (shrines) in Japan. “This casual socialization can lead to meaningful connections\, and shared experience is the first step to building communities\,” says Miki. In Shinto folklore\, “there are a myriad of gods in this universe\, yet they can only fulfill their duties as a collective. I resonate these ideas in my work as a reminder of how we endeavor our challenges together.” \nThe exhibition\, as such\, offers more than just its physical experience—it suggests multiple vibrant entry points into exploring the junctures of tradition and modernity\, and the cultural marriages that they often signal. The cast bronze pieces express the “synthesis of combining two finishes of century-old patina with the modern invention of automotive paint\,” which is an extremely complex color application process; while the similarly involved process of creating the felt characters utilizes wool\, activating multitudes of design phases before reaching final form. \nThis presentation of new works is ultimately about reclaiming the power of myth-making. We are told and we succumb to stories that punctuate our shared histories with painful and unresolved tensions.“Our lives are filled with mythologies\, manipulated ideologies\, and fear-driven narratives that deepen chasms among us\,” says Miki. Her work proposes resolution through creative and communal agency\, exhibiting through her characters and environments the optimistic reality of the power of imagination to drive the future. “I am convinced that we need new mythologies to question old myths. We can update the myths.” \nMasako Miki (b. 1973 Osaka\, Japan) is a multimedia artist whose work ranges installation and large-scale sculpture\, printmaking\, watercolor and felting. A native of Japan\, she now lives and works in Berkeley\, CA. Her work frequently explores the idea of synthesis—manipulating contradicting spatial elements to suggest a disoriented context and space. The artist bases her narrative on her own experiences of becoming bicultural in the United States at the age of eighteen. Strongly influenced by craft and folk art of different cultures\, she remains close to her ancestral traditions\, frequently considering motifs and ideologies that arise from her association with Buddhism\, Shintoism\, and traditional Japanese folklore. The artist’s practice is further rooted in the belief that art can foster social contexts in which contemporary and universally relevant mythologies and social narratives can be generated—replacing or fixing harmful misconceptions and mythologies of the past that have previously sparked social injustices. \nMiki has been included in solo and group exhibitions at the ICA San Jose\, CA (2022); Katonah Museum of Art\, NY (2022); Marin Museum of Contemporary Art\, CA (2022); Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive\, CA (2019); and de Young  Museum\, CA (2016)\, among others. Her large-scale sculptures were recently commissioned as a permanent installation at the Uber Technologies headquarters in Mission Bay\, San Francisco. Her work is included in the collections of The Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation\, NY and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive\, CA. She received her MFA from San Jose State University. \nAbout RYAN LEE\nCelebrating emerging and established artists and estates\, RYAN LEE takes a multi-generational approach to its programming\, presenting innovative and scholarly exhibitions across all spectrums of art practices\, including painting\, photography\, video\, sculpture\, and performance. The gallery takes chances on a wide variety of boundary-pushing artists; their work consistently transcends political\, cultural\, material\, or technical boundaries. In addition\, RYAN LEE has\, throughout its history\, demonstrated its long-standing interest and dedication to feminist\, Black and Asian American\, as well as queer narratives in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Founded in 2013 by Mary Ryan and Jeffrey Lee\, the gallery is led by partners of different generations and backgrounds with over six decades of combined experiences informing its unique approach.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/masako-miki-empathy-lab/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
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DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20230514
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SUMMARY:Tim Braden: El Universal
DESCRIPTION:Tim Braden\nEl Universal\nMarch 30 – May 13\, 2023\nOpening reception: Thursday\, March 30\, 2023\, 6:00-8:00 pm \n  \n\n\n\nRYAN LEE is pleased to announce El Universal\, the gallery’s fourth solo show of paintings by British artist Tim Braden. Inspired by travel – an idea of it\, a critique of it\, others’ and his own – Braden’s scenes evoke his characteristic style\, wavering between the dreamily figurative and the purely abstract. \nTwo iconic artists’ sojourns in Mexico served as particular inspiration for this series: the first was Robert Smithson’s experience at Palenque\, the site of ancient Mayan ruins in Chiapas\, during which he was ironically more fascinated with its urban surrounds. The second was Josef and Anni Albers’ visits\, particularly throughout the 1950s\, to various pre-Columbian sites of artistic\, architectural\, and archaeological import\, and their teaching and artwork that resulted. \n“What do we expect when we go off in search of inspiration or discovery?” asks Braden. “Surprise? Disappointment?” His paintings transport us through several vantage points rendered abstract once the memories reached the canvas at his London studio. In Blue Mountain Bus (Tehuacan)\, “incidental views of figures half-seen from a passing bus are rebuilt into landscape studies;” and El Universal is a slice-of-life perspective on a woman reading at a bistro table\, its gently placed details conjuring a quotidian nostalgia. \nDespite the untainted poeticism of these travel paintings\, Braden is in fact inspired by what he deems “the failures” of expedition. For example\, Smithson’s wayward interest\, in 1969\, in Palenque’s neighboring civic spaces\, which he found to be in their own curious senses of ruin; or\, four decades prior\, Henri Matisse’s unexpected creative preference for the vitality of America over the so-called “lethargy” of his original destination\, Tahiti. \nThe multiplicities of enthusiasm experienced by traveling artists and tourists alike may range from critical to celebratory. It is from both ends of this spectrum of response that Braden pulls inspiration\, enjoying the irony that\, though wholly related to the country\, “Most of the work was made before I had even been to Mexico\,” he says. “The trip itself became an exercise in matching expectations.” \nThe Albers\, whose influential trips Braden in part credits to his own expectations\, documented immense deference to the styles\, culture and experiences of Mexico. Spurred on by a fascination for their intimacy with the country and its impact on them\, Braden dedicated part of the pandemic lockdown to researching and painting it. Rendered in a vast set of colors\, Anni in Mexico 2 is directly based on a black-and-white photograph that Josef had taken of her at the steps of the Oaxacan archaeological site Monte Albán. Other works\, Braden says\, are “large abstract paintings infected by the colours and shapes from archaeology and textile books\,” illustrating Mexico’s allure through rich renditions of its landscapes\, artistic inheritances\, history\, and people. \nThe Albers\, from the 1930s through the 60s\, carried their Mexico field visits into their artwork and into the classroom at Black Mountain College in Asheville\, North Carolina\, where they both taught. Invested in their presence and impact there\, Braden’s Lake Eden depicts the campus’s dining building\, while other works in this series are based on photographs of its students. \nFrom the Carolinas to Chichén Itzá\, Braden’s paintings reinterpret not only sites and spaces\, but also the looking-at those sites and spaces. They carry us through firsthand and secondhand time and place\, creating a layer of experiences that resist their pin-pointed provenance in favor of open-ended\, universally resonant portrayals. \n\n\n\n\n  \nTim Braden (b. 1975 Perth\, Scotland) is a British artist whose practice centers on a deep exploration of looking and what that means\, shifting between abstract and figurative painting to explore how one mode operates within the other. He works in both painting and sculpture\, incorporating various different techniques and materials across media. In these experimentations with different types of paint\, support\, and application to explore subtle shifts in space\, mood and tone\, Braden’s work is ultimately drawn from a close reading of his environment and an attempt to depict the act of looking at things. He is continuously looking and re-evaluating his own work in progress to align these observations\, and he often combines patches of color and light to produce scenes that recall both the specificity of personal experience and nostalgia for another time and place. \nIn 2018\, Art/Books published Looking and Painting\, a fully illustrated monograph on Braden. The book featured work created over the past decade\, including many never-before-seen paintings and new texts by Jennifer Higgie (editor of Frieze magazine)\, Christopher Bedford (director of the Baltimore Museum of Art) and Dominic Molon (contemporary art curator at RISD). \nBraden received his MA from Ruskin School of Fine Art at Oxford University and attended Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Braden has exhibited at Baibakov Art Projects\, Moscow; Gemeentemuseum\, The Hague; the Goethe Institute\, New York; Hamburger Bahnhof\, Museum für Gegenwart\, Berlin; Kunstnernes Hus\, Oslo; Museum Van Loon\, Amsterdam; Van Gogh Museum\, Amsterdam. His work is featured in the collections of Ashmolean Museum\, UK; Nederlandse Bank\, Amsterdam; Pembroke College\, UK; Walsall Museum and Art Gallery\, UK; and Zabludowicz Collection\, UK. He lives and works in London\, UK. \n  \n\n\n\n\nAbout RYAN LEE\nFounded in 2013 by Mary Ryan and Jeffrey Lee\, RYAN LEE has established itself as a welcoming place of discovery and dialogue for art ranging from postwar to contemporary. Led by two partners of different generations and backgrounds with over six decades of combined experience\, RYAN LEE is committed to presenting innovative and unexpected exhibitions across all spectrums of art practices\, including painting\, video\, sculpture\, and performance. The gallery takes chances on a wide variety of boundary-pushing artists; their work is inherently experimental and pushes political\, cultural\, material\, and technical boundaries. In addition\, RYAN LEE has\, throughout its history\, demonstrated its long-standing interest and dedication to feminist\, Black\, and Asian American\, as well as queer narratives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/tim-braden-el-universal/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
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DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20230216T200000
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SUMMARY:Opening Reception | Camille Billops: Mirror\, Mirror
DESCRIPTION:Camille Billops\nMirror\, Mirror\nFebruary 16 – March 25\, 2023\nOpening reception: February 16\, 2023\, 6:00-8:00 pm \nRYAN LEE is pleased to announce Mirror\, Mirror\, a solo exhibition of works by the multidisciplinary artist\, filmmaker\, and activist Camille Billops. Featuring a series of ceramic mirrors\, etchings\, and drawings\, this is the first significant solo presentation of Billops’s later work. \nInfused with experiences of travels abroad\, including globally informed artistic practices\, Billops first began forging space for her art and activism in the 1960s in New York. A pioneering member of the emerging black artists movement\, her work and activism were entwined\, engaging with civil rights alongside exclusionary systems of the art industry at large.  Throughout her life\, her artwork drew from these themes\, from the ever-presence of racism to gender dynamics\, black culture\, and personal narrative and history. \n “All my work is about the celebration of family\, my private stories and personal vision\,” shared Billops in a 1985 interview published in ISSUE\, A Journal for Artists. Referencing the Kaohsiung drawings – originally made in Kaohsiung\, Taiwan\, three of which are featured in this exhibition – she shares that the characters are in fact her and her husband\, James V. Hatch\, after a “magnificent fight.” \nBillops was not only comfortable turning the intimate outward\, she was strategic about it\, using exposé as a tactic to confront the follies and failures of life\, and resolutely unafraid to include her own. For a 2012 show\, Billops had commented that her art is “about ‘victory over obscurity and ignorance\, and confirmation of herself.’” In this sense\, we are able to grasp a fuller picture of the artist\, whose activism and committed preservation of black arts and culture is as large a part of her legacy and impact as her work is. Her output\, holistically\, is perseverance – at once personal and collective. \nBillops’s sense of self-confirmation through self-portraiture\, refrained in the Kaohsiung drawings\, is inherent to the nature of her later mirror series. Begun in the early 2000s and completed in 2011\, these metaphorically reflective works are likewise literal presentations of the viewer\, placing us squarely within the contexts of the frame. \n In some\, the mirrors’ ceramic-frame illustrations are figurative\, as in Untitled (Checkered) (2003)\, where cartoonish characters engage in a mock-Americana tableau evoking a realm of behaviors from suspicious to blithe. In White Woman with US Flags (2011)\, the denotation may be more literal\, but the style breaks molds with its looseness of form\, as variously proportioned pieces of ceramic dance across the frame. The artwork is detailed with American flags placed amidst the other ceramic pieces\, each painted with a shadowy fist raised in silhouette against the stripes. \nAlso included are her Mondo Negro series of lithographs. This presentation of works\, shown together for the first time\, honors Billops’s canonical output as an artist-activist. In five variations\, Billops portrays in bold\, slanting lines\, characters and snakes at times falling and at times burning in abstracted landscapes portraying a “black world.”  The series continues to bring her perceptive artwork into conversation not only with its own multimedia contexts\, but also with those broader contexts that are presciently resonant within them. 
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/opening-reception-camille-billops-mirror-mirror/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Event
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SUMMARY:Camille Billops: Mirror\, Mirror
DESCRIPTION:Camille Billops\nMirror\, Mirror\nFebruary 16 – March 25\, 2023\nOpening reception: February 16\, 2023\, 6:00-8:00 pm \nRYAN LEE is pleased to announce Mirror\, Mirror\, a solo exhibition of works by the multidisciplinary artist\, filmmaker\, and activist Camille Billops. Featuring a series of ceramic mirrors\, etchings\, and drawings\, this is the first significant solo presentation of Billops’s later work.  \nInfused with experiences of travels abroad\, including globally informed artistic practices\, Billops first began forging space for her art and activism in the 1960s in New York. A pioneering member of the emerging black artists movement\, her work and activism were entwined\, engaging with civil rights alongside exclusionary systems of the art industry at large.  Throughout her life\, her artwork drew from these themes\, from the ever-presence of racism to gender dynamics\, black culture\, and personal narrative and history. \n“All my work is about the celebration of family\, my private stories and personal vision\,” shared Billops in a 1985 interview published in ISSUE\, A Journal for Artists. Referencing the Kaohsiung drawings – originally made in Kaohsiung\, Taiwan\, three of which are featured in this exhibition – she shares that the characters are in fact her and her husband\, James V. Hatch\, after a “magnificent fight.” \nBillops was not only comfortable turning the intimate outward\, she was strategic about it\, using exposé as a tactic to confront the follies and failures of life\, and resolutely unafraid to include her own. For a 2012 show\, Billops had commented that her art is “about ‘victory over obscurity and ignorance\, and confirmation of herself.’” In this sense\, we are able to grasp a fuller picture of the artist\, whose activism and committed preservation of black arts and culture is as large a part of her legacy and impact as her work is. Her output\, holistically\, is perseverance – at once personal and collective. \nBillops’s sense of self-confirmation through self-portraiture\, refrained in the Kaohsiung drawings\, is inherent to the nature of her later mirror series. Begun in the early 2000s and completed in 2011\, these metaphorically reflective works are likewise literal presentations of the viewer\, placing us squarely within the contexts of the frame. \nIn some\, the mirrors’ ceramic-frame illustrations are figurative\, as in Untitled (Checkered) (2003)\, where cartoonish characters engage in a mock-Americana tableau evoking a realm of behaviors from suspicious to blithe. In White Woman with US Flags (2011)\, the denotation may be more literal\, but the style breaks molds with its looseness of form\, as variously proportioned pieces of ceramic dance across the frame. The artwork is detailed with American flags placed amidst the other ceramic pieces\, each painted with a shadowy fist raised in silhouette against the stripes. \nAlso included are her Mondo Negro series of lithographs. This presentation of works\, shown together for the first time\, honors Billops’s canonical output as an artist-activist. In five variations\, Billops portrays in bold\, slanting lines\, characters and snakes at times falling and at times burning in abstracted landscapes portraying a “black world.”  The series continues to bring her perceptive artwork into conversation not only with its own multimedia contexts\, but also with those broader contexts that are presciently resonant within them.  \n  \n  \nCamille Billops (b. 1933\, Los Angeles\, CA – d. 2019\, New York\, NY) was an influential artist and filmmaker whose staunch activism and profound belief in the power of memory and representation made her a pillar of the Black New York-based artist community from the 1960s until her death in 2019. As an artist\, Billops came into her own within the converging contexts of the 1960s civil rights movement and New York’s emerging Black artists movement. She has unapologetically drawn from her life experiences\, family histoy\, and community to carve out a space for her voice to be heard. Her work primarily touches upon themes of racism—which she considered ever present throughout society—gender dynamics\, Black culture\, and personal narrative. \nIn 2022\, Billops was included in the landmark group exhibition Just Above Midtown\, 1974 to the Present at the Museum of Modern Art\, NY\, a retrospective focusing on the historic Just Above Midtown gallery. Billops’s and her husband James Hatch’s documentary filmmaking is currently the subject of a major solo retrospective A String of Pearls: The Films of Camille Billops & James Hatch at the Brooklyn Academy of Music\, organized by Third World Newsreel. Billops’s work has also been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions at Featherstone Center for the Arts\, PA (2022); Georgia Museum of Art\, GA (2019); Brooklyn Museum\, NY (2017); and Institute of Contemporary Art\, MA (2017)\, among other institutions. Billops’s work is in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts\, MA; Cleveland Museum of Art\, OH; Detroit Institute of Arts\, MI; Georgia Museum of Art\, GA;  Library of Congress\, DC; Minneapolis Institute of Art\, MN; Museum of Modern Art\, NY; Das Schubladenmuseum\, Bern; Studio Museum in Harlem\, NY; and Yale University Art Gallery\, CT\, among others.  \n  \n  \nAbout RYAN LEE\nFounded in 2013 by Mary Ryan and Jeffrey Lee\, RYAN LEE has established itself as a welcoming place of discovery and dialogue for art ranging from postwar to contemporary. Led by two partners of different generations and backgrounds with over six decades of combined experience\, RYAN LEE is committed to presenting innovative and unexpected exhibitions across all spectrums of art practices\, including painting\, video\, sculpture\, and performance. The gallery takes chances on a wide variety of boundary-pushing artists; their work is inherently experimental and pushes political\, cultural\, material\, and technical boundaries. In addition\, RYAN LEE has\, throughout its history\, demonstrated its long-standing interest and dedication to feminist\, Black\, and Asian American\, as well as queer narratives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/camille-billops-mirror-mirror/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
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SUMMARY:Josh Dorman: Idyll ~ Idol
DESCRIPTION:RYAN LEE is pleased to announce Josh Dorman: Idyll ~ Idol  a solo exhibition of recent works which are an investigation of the artist’s longstanding interest in creating multi-layered and self-contained universes of antique collage material\, acrylic and resin. Dorman’s two new bodies of work\, the Being series and the Wallpaper series\, take a new approach to the allegorical world building for which he is known.  \nTo create his complex and visually rich paintings\, Dorman culls old textbooks\, maps\, diagrams\, and\, for the first time\, introduces antique wallpaper to his compositions. By starting off with a base of material from another time\, Dorman dislocates the physicality of his paintings from our contemporary era and creates an ethereal\, almost other-wordly dimension\, which often serve as allegories addressing contemporaneous issues. The initial collage of archival material — some over one hundred years old — gives the artist a visual noise to react to: “It’s like gathering a pile of stuff then excavating the image from within” the artist explains. Dorman’s delicate and time-intensive process involves successive layering of collage\, acrylic and ink\, at times pouring resin or sanding down his surfaces\, sealing in or obliterating the previous layers.  \nNeither portraits nor landscapes\, the paintings in Dorman’s recent Being series\, on view at RYAN LEE\, are subjects in and of themselves. With his endlessly intricate\, multi-layered compositions\, Dorman brings to “flesh” a being with each of his paintings. “Each Being looks back at us\, with many sets of eyes\, through the air of their own dreams\,” Dorman explains. “We feel their presence and wonder about our own. Each porous\, without boundary. Assembled of eyes and visions\, ears and sounds\, brains and minds\, teeth\, and voices. We are memories\, calculations\, histories\, cells\, roots\, beauty\, fear\, love\, and joy. The paintings are assembled\, found\, constructed\, and excavated\, evolving in layers over months and years.” \nThe paintings in Dorman’s Wallpaper series—which he refers to as Idylls—makes further use of this concept of dislocating time: using antique wallpaper from the 1930 to 1950s\, Dorman roots his Idylls in the false nostalgia conjured by sentimental\, idealized Americana landscape scenes. The wallpapers—which the paintings are simultaneously rooted in and a commentary upon  —offer “a strange vision of America\,” one that does not correspond with its historical past or daily realities. Indeed\, Dorman began incorporating these anachronistic visions of a genteel\, pastoral America during the pandemic\, in the midst of political strife\, racial tension and a mounting climate change crisis. The Idylls strive to find beauty\, peace\, and joy in darkly humorous illusions of/allusions to an imagined past. \nBoth series on view at the gallery represent a complete surrender to the artist’s internal world and vision. “All are completely discovered in the making\,” Dorman explains. “My goal was not to force or even will images into being but to layer\, labor\, and carve forms until the beings or the idyllic worlds earned their existence.”
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/josh-dorman-idyll-idol/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
CATEGORIES:Exhibition
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