With spring right around the corner, art in New York City is already in full bloom. And after the long-awaited return of daylight saving time on March 12, gallery hopping will become much more pleasant. So without further ado, here’s a list of shows that touched us and ones that we look forward to seeing this March, including Hew Locke, Saif Azzuz, Miyoko Ito, Asia Week New York, and more.
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Asia Week New York
Celebrating its 14th anniversary, this week-long event sprawls across 26 galleries and six auction houses exhibiting art and artifacts from across Asia. Offerings range from the ancient and sacred to the contemporary. Highlights include 19th-century Japanese paintings and prints at Sebastian Izzard LLC Asian Art, Qajar-period Persian paintings at Art Passages, Tang Dynasty Chinese ceramics at Zetterquist Galleries, an online exhibition by Kolkata-based artist Ganesh Halo with Akar Prakar, and much more.— Hakim Bishara
Locations around the city (asiaweekny.com)
March 14–16
Saif Azzuz: Says Who
Saif Azzuz is a Bay Area-based Libyan-Yurok artist who certainly deserves more attention. In his first solo exhibition in New York, he looks into the colonial history of Lower Manhattan’s Collect Pond Park, located just two blocks from the gallery. Lushly painted acrylics evoke a freshwater pond in the park that once sustained the nearby Lenape village of Werpoes. Other works, including an arabesque made from police handcuffs and a prison toilet turned into a planter, address the carceral system that White colonialism constructed on Indigenous land. —HB
Nicelle Beauchene Gallery (nicellebeauchene.com)
7 Franklin Place, Tribeca, Manhattan
Through March 25
Perspective Redefined
Perspective is overused as a buzzword. Therefore, an exhibition devoted to perspective at the Painting Center might at first read like more of the same. But it’s not. It’s actually one of those rare group shows with an actual thesis. It’s pertinent because, as much as this point might reek of old-school formalism and raise the zombie of Clement Greenburg, the lived reality is that today’s painters still have to reckon with perspective. Don’t miss this chance to dig deeper into perspective at the Painting Center. — Daniel Larkin
Painting Center (thepaintingcenter.org)
547 West 27th Street, Suite 500, 5th Floor, Chelsea, Manhattan
Through March 25
The Eyes of the City
For three decades beginning in the 1970s, Richard Sandler captured the tenderness of New York City — the pensive woman visible through the window of a speeding subway car; the quiet silhouettes of travelers like shadow puppets in Grand Central Station. The street photographer and Queens native is known for paying special attention to the edges of his compositions, filling them with the kind of detail reserved for the focal point of a picture. His first major retrospective includes never-before-seen prints and iconic works from Sandler’s 2016 monograph The Eyes of the City. It reads like a love letter to New York; bring any of your friends who are threatening to move to the West Coast. — Valentina Di Liscia
Bronx Documentary Center (bronxdoc.org)
614 Courtlandt Avenue, Melrose, Bronx
Through March 26
Elena Damiani: One Earth, After Another
Elena Damiani’s floor sculpture “Blind ll” (2022), the centerpiece of her exhibition, consists of 37 thin copper beams lined up on a marble plinth. Stone cylinders of varying sizes intercept the rods like beads on an abacus, placed at different heights so they create a vaguely recognizable image — a mountain range, perhaps, or the visual representation of sound waves. The piece, like others in the show, has an uncanny presence: Damiani’s use of stone conjures sedimentary layers, jagged edges, and other naturally occurring textural and visual phenomena, but the inclusion of inorganic materials reminds us of our human footprint. — VD
Revolver Galeria (revolvergaleria.com)
88 Eldridge Street, 5th Floor, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through April 1
Shona McAndrew: Rose-Tinted Glasses
Spanning ten new paintings — all in earthy pink hues, as the exhibition’s title suggests — and a 74-inch-long paper mâchée sculpture of a woman leaning back placidly in a bathtub, Shona McAndrew’s latest exhibition celebrates the indulgence of simply being. Several works portray the artist and her partner, adding another layer of intimacy to compositions like “Bedtime” (2023), a more relatable take on art history’s ever-present reclining nude, or “Hold You” (2023), which captures the unique satisfaction of grabbing a handful of booty. Far from commodified, mediagenic expressions of so-called “self-care,” McAndrew’s vision of rest is soft and compassionate. — VD
Chart Gallery (chart-gallery.com)
74 Franklin Street, Tribeca, Manhattan
Through April 1
Hew Locke: Listening to the Land
When you hear there’s a new Hew Locke exhibition coming, you know it’s going to be good. This one doesn’t disappoint. Upon entering the gallery, you’ll see two wooden ships suspended from the ceiling and wonder in which oceans and rivers they were supposed to sail. You’ll see a haunted plantation house, crumbling stilt homes, land certificates, and relics of colonial might and crushed nations. And as you look deeper into these wonderful works, truths begin to unfold. —HB
PPOW Gallery (ppowgallery.com)
392 Broadway,
Through April 1
Miyoko Ito
Building up the abstract surfaces of her canvases in blocky stripes and juicy color gradients, Miyoko Ito crafts images reminiscent of setting suns, Surrealist-esque landscapes, and abstract places culled from fragments of a dream. Ito and her husband were sent to a Japanese internment camp in 1942, and while most of the paintings on view in this show were created many years later, one wonders how the experience influenced her, whether she was inspired to create vistas she could escape into. To look at her work is to experience visual freedom: I get the sense that there is no correct interpretation or single reading, just an endless expanse of light and air unfurling in front of me like an open road. — VD
Matthew Marks Gallery (matthewmarks.com)
522 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
Through April 15
Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined
Intertwined is an invitation to get lost in Wangechi Mutu’s world. In her characteristic paintings and collages, androgynous creatures with sprawling wings, human-like figure with giant eyes and hyena ears and snake-patterned limbs, and nude women reposing languidly on tree trunks inhabit fantastic settings evocative of mystical roller discos. Her surfaces are built up of magazine cut-outs, glitter, shells, ink, and even soil, but these are almost impossible to identify; Mutu’s magic lies in her masterful, seamless cohesion of disparate elements — and in her incisive criticism of the ways in which images of Black women are misrepresented and exploited. — VD
New Museum (newmuseum.org)
235 Bowery, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through June 4
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Black Power to Black People
The Poster House in Manhattan is a young, niche museum still struggling to get art-world recognition. But it’s got ambitious programming that will only get better if more people frequent it. This exhibition about posters of the Black Panther Party, exploring the visual language of the revolutionary movement, is a good place to start. —HB
Poster House (posterhouse.org)
119 West 23rd Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
Through September 10
More Recommendations From Our Spring 2023 New York Art Guide
- Craft & Conceptual Art: Reshaping the Legacy of Artists’ Books, Center for Book Arts, through March 25
- Juan Francisco Elso: Por América, El Museo del Barrio, through March 26
- Gordon Matta-Clark & Pope.L: Impossible Failures, 52 Walker, through April 1
- “I’ll Have What She’s Having”: The Jewish Deli, New-York Historical Society, through April 2
- Abigail DeVille: Bronx Heavens, Bronx Museum, through April 9
Source: Hyperallergic.com