The Move
Your weekly NYC Art & Culture Guide from Jaz Arts — April 12–19
It’s another week at The Move and there’s a lot going on. The Whitney Biennial is back, a year delayed, and it’s absolutely required viewing (you have until September 5). There’s also a Basquiat survey at Nahmad Contemporary, but that’s not really my purview. This week I’m excited to share The Move’s inaugural Artist Spotlight — exceptional artist, teacher, and language inventor Nate Flagg!
Here’s your The Move April 12–19 Google maps. See you out and about!
FINE ART
- BROOKLYN & QUEENS
BREYER P-ORRIDGE: We Are But One at Pioneer Works at Red Hook Labs, 133 Imlay St, Brooklyn (Opening April 15 7–10pm, Wednesday-Sunday 1PM-8PM)
The world lost celebrated artist, occultist, and writer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge in 2020. This exhibition by Pioneer Works at Red Hook Labs could not come soon enough. The artist’s Pandrogyne project will be on view; a 20 year effort to extricate love from gender. This show is for grownups, so leave the kids at home. I’ll be at the opening on April 15th. Let’s go to Sunny’s and get a beer afterwards.
Deana Lawson at MoMA PS1, 22–25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City Queens (until September 5, Thursday-Monday 12PM-6PM)
Deana Lawson’s photographs derive their aesthetic language from family albums, studio portraiture, and documentary images of Black life. I’m continually struck by the weirdness and humanity she finds in her subjects, as well as her wholly unmanicured settings. This is her first museum survey. I actually took a class with her on the Haitian Revolution at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She was absolutely brilliant (I was mostly silent).
Nate Flagg: CWACACAMINSHIN / SONGS at Elma, 216 Plymouth St Brooklyn (until May 1, Wednesday, Saturday, Sunday 11AM-6PM)
Go see Nate Flagg’s meticulously drawn constructions at Elma, in one of the last remaining art studio buildings on the Brooklyn waterfront. More on him below, but I just wanted to note that I see a lot of alien architecture and hieroglyphics in his work. Also figuration. These reward the long look.
- CHELSEA
Articulating Activism: Works from the Shelley and Donald Rubin Private Collection at the 8th Floor, 17 West 17th Street (until June 18, Thursday-Saturday 11AM-6PM
The foundation started their art and social justice collection in 2015, which is a little late in my view, but the exhibition gives a good overview of explicitly activist art of the last 40 or so years. Some personal favorites on view are Shaun Leonardo, Betty Tompkins, Michael Rakowitz, Dread Scott and Edgar Heap of Birds. Side Note — these are the same Rubin’s who founded The Rubin Museum, focused on Himalayan and SE Asian art.
Dorthea Tanning: Doesn’t The Paint Say it All? at Kasmin Gallery, 509 West 27th St. (until April 16, Tuesday-Saturday 10AM-6PM)
In most Dorothea Tanning exhibitions, you either see her early surrealist work OR the later abstractions. In this show, you get to see it all. Spanning forty years if the artist’s career (1947–1987), this exhibition of drawings and paintings revels in her various epochs — from early formalism to her post-1950s “breaking of the mirror.” Read her essay “To Paint” to learn more.
- DOWNTOWN
Xiao Wang: Liminal Blue at Deanna Evans Projects, 373 Broadway, E15 (Opening April 15 6PM-8PM; Wednesday-Saturday 12PM-6PM)
Huge vegetal arrangements obscure figures in these jewel-toned paintings. A sense of disorientation is definitely pervasive, but also sweet melancholy. Loving the purples and blues.
Yi To: When the Pebble Hits the Water at Someday, 120 Walker St #3R (until May 7, Thursday-Saturday 11AM-6PM)
These paintings truly surprised me, and I’m a cynical elder-millennial art obsessive. Barely out of art school, Yi To builds complex canvases with diluted oil paint and marble dust, in a restrained, geologic palate. Shoutout to The Move MVP Lily for taking me to this show.
ARTIST SPOTLIGHT
Nate Flagg (b. 1989, NY). Brooklyn-based artist.
Nate’s sculptural drawings speak to you in changing patterns that look like runes on stone. On first inspection, you’d think that these works are about architecture, but they’re really about language. Then again, isn’t language itself a kind of architecture? One built between people, breaking down on occasion, but forging new connections too.
My artwork is founded in my enchantment with the capacity to alter one’s perception through experiments with invented language. I use drawing to explore language’s continuous, mysterious mutation as it travels between sound, space and the minds of its speakers and interpreters. — Nate Flagg 2022
Nate Flagg (b. 1989; New York, NY) is an artist and educator living and working in New York City. MFA Painting/Printmaking at Yale School of Art (2016); BA Anthropology Reed College (2011). Recent solo exhibitions: Yiawwiyi / 风物 / Current Matter, Galerie Dengyun (Shanghai, China). Group exhibitions: “So Close, Yet So Far” Printed Matter/Swiss Institute (New York, NY), C.H.A.D., Ashes/Ashes (New York, NY), and The Language Invention Workshop, Foxy Production (New York, NY).
GOSSIP CORNER
There’s some fun art world gossip floating about this week: a villa featuring Caravaggio’s only ceiling mural has failed to sell for a second time; “enfant terrible” Jordan Wolfson is now being represented by three mega galleries (but who is buying?); and collectors are clamoring for “Soho Scammer” Anna Delvey’s artwork. Yet the thing that interests me the most at the moment is a recent report about the British Museum’s NFT program. The venerable institution started selling NFT versions of its most famous artworks last September for who knows what reason (money). Art Historian Bendor Grosvenor reported to the Art Newspaper that in the last seven months, the program has generated 315 tons of CO2 — enough to power a US home for at least 57 years. The British Museum has long had sustainability issues — their most prominent sponsor is BP. But this headline-making news does open up important questions about the tensions between art sustainability AND accessibility. I’m still mulling it all over. Feel free to email me your thoughts.
And that’s The Move for this week! Tell your friends about it, seriously.
xoxo
Jazia
