Hey folks-
After ten frustrating years on this platform I’ve decided to migrate the whole thing to Substack.
It will continue to be free, so please join me there. Hopefully the platform will be less cranky and I will post more often and about new and different topics.
Note- All of you Russian bots who have been trying to hack this site. Please stay here.
see ya round campus-
Melissa
I have been going to the Outsider Art Fair almost every year since it first opened at The Puck Building in 1993. As with most aspects of the art world, much has changed in the field of outsider art and at the fair, its leading annual exhibition. Long gone are the giddy days of discovering artists such as Howard Finster, Adolf Wolfli, Mary T. Smith, and Judith Scott (to name a few). These are now blue-chip outsider or self-taught artists whose work is collected by major institutions and collectors, and rightly so. “Outsider” has become insider and the genre a mainstay of the art world, A kind of artistic oxymoron, some of the most “established outsider artists” command major prices.
So, as the field changes and matures, what are galleries and the Outsider Art Fair to do to keep providing fresh work to the public? Of course, there are always new artists to discover in the world. How galleries that show this genre of work find and define those artists is an interesting question. Increasingly, the OAF attracts galleries from outside of the US, and that provides an influx of new faces. This year, there were several galleries from France as well as an increased number from Canada. This season, with the world and international trade in turmoil, I was not surprised that several of the Asian galleries that had participated in the past few shows were not here.
Joshua Nazario Lugo, Pit Stop, acrylic on concrete, figure: 19 x 10 x 4 in., wheel: 7 1/2 x 7 1/2 x 3 1/2 in., presented by Chozick Family Art Gallery, New York, on view at Outsider Art Fair 2026. Photo by Melissa Stern.
In addition to the growing international outsider presence, I find some of the most inspired work comes out of the U.S.-based non- profits that exhibit at the show. These organizations present truly outsider or self-taught artists. The work often feels fresh and vital in powerful ways. These non-profits gain recognition for their artists and their therapeutic programs, as well as some much-needed money. A win for everyone.
Creativity Explored, from SF, CA. brought beautiful drawings by Gerald Wiggins, among other terrific artists.
Gerald Wiggins, Untitled, colored pencil on paper, 31 x 18 in., presented by Creativity Explored, San Francisco, CA, on view at Outsider Art Fair 2026. Photo by Melissa Stern.
Olin Johnson, Head of a Man, gouache on paper, 18 x 20 in., 2017, presented by Center for Creative Works, Wynnewood, PA, on view at Outsider Art Fair 2026. Photo by Melissa Stern.
Among the great treats of this year’s fair were the two galleries that presented full installations in their booths. The marvelous, The Gallery of Everything, from London, brought the work of Sam Doyle and created a huge wooden room with rough-cut board walls and dark hardwood floors to display the work.
Installation view of The Gallery of Everything booth, featuring work by Sam Doyle, on view at Outsider Art Fair 2026. Photo by Melissa Stern.
New York’s Shrine Gallery recreated the working studio of artist Jon Serle, who lived and worked in CA, a brilliant recreation. Seeing the room where Serle lived and his work provides insight into his complex universe. The installation includes detritus on the floor, old furniture, and the artist’s studio door, covered in names and numbers.
Installation view of Shrine Gallery booth, recreating the studio of Jon Serl, on view at Outsider Art Fair 2026. Photo by Melissa Stern.
The two times that I visited the Fair, it was packed, and I hope that everyone made money. As always, there are gems to be found here: Metalworker Frans Lotz painstakingly cut and crafted this working stairway and ladder from steel. It is an extraordinary piece of sculpture.
Frans Lotz- Uptown Coldscroll. Painted steel. 21 x 24 x 5. Gallery Jones, Vancouver,BC
I fell in love with the three large graphite drawings by Lee Brozgol, exhibited by Powers/Lowenfels Gallery. They consistently bring some of the most original and startling work to the fair.
The “weekend painter” has long been a staple of the Outsider/self-taught genre. It’s one for which I have great affection. Having taught continuing education for 16 years in NYC, I was and am always blown away by the commitment of artists who have other full regular careers and yet feel so driven to express themselves that they create only for themselves. No fame or fortune, gallery shows or art stardom- they create because they are compelled to express themselves. Pulp Gallery brought a wall of paintings (all sold by the end of the press preview) by trained lawyer and self-taught artist Earle T. Merchant. Merchant died in 1997, but Jim Messineo brought together a large collection of these touching portraits of Merchant’s neighbors.
Installation view of work by Earle T. Merchant, oil on canvas panel, 16 x 12 in., 1961–1978, presented by Pulp Gallery, Holyoke, MA, on view at Outsider Art Fair 2026. Photo by Melissa Stern.
By its very presence, the Outsider Art Fair, and the genre of outsider/self-taught art more broadly, raise questions of when and why someone is an “outsider.” Perhaps more than any other genre in the art world, there is no definitive answer to who remains an outsider once embraced by the mainstream. The Outsider Art Fair keeps this question fresh and vital.
It will be interesting to watch how the fair, its artists, and its exhibitors continue to evolve. I am grateful that the fair remains a vital force. Over the years, it has shed light on thousands of artists whose work might never have been seen. The fair remains a place of discovery in a sometimes-jaded New York art world.
Athena Parella, Bedtime Story, Charcoal on paper, 17.5 x 22, 2025
“Childhood” has always been a fertile source for artists in all disciplines. We all had a childhood and, for better or worse, we all carry memories that often haunt us throughout our lifetimes. Ruby/Dakota, a scrappy young gallery in the East Village is presenting a two- person show entitled What The House Dreams Of that brings together two young artists with memories to share.
Though the artists did not know each other before being curated into this show, they both share a similar dreamy sensibility, making two-dimensional works that capture snippets of memory and still moments in the world.
Athena Parella creates exquisite drawings using charcoal powder, graphite, and pastel. Small, slightly ominous still life scenes evoke still moments from disturbing dreams. Presented in soft focus shades of grey that gracefully mask the often-disturbing dreams they capture. The monochromatic color scheme allows her very gentle and subtle renderings to resonate in a powerful way. They are haunting.
Athena Parella, Mud Cake, Graphite and pencil on paper, 18 x 18, 2024
Athena Parella, Shoe Shadows, Graphite on paper, 18 x 15, 2022
In Shoe Shadows, we see every possible type of doll shoe pinned on what could be a specimen board, casting long shadows behind them. Is it a child’s toy, a sample board, or a fragment of a lost dream?
Cassidy Argo, the second artist in the show, presents small oil paintings that, to me, convey a deep loneliness. Again, small moments, this time captured in oil paint, that are evocative of the images that stick in our minds, and we’re not quite sure why. They are gentle portraits of time and place. Thoughtful and delicate, they portend of long days and nights spent in chilly locales.
Cassidy Argo, Stay, Oil on panel. 9 x 11, 2024
Cassidy Argo, Scrim, Oil on panel, 15 x 15.5, 2025
This is an elegant, quiet little show. The two bodies of work are nicely tied together by a giant dollhouse perched in the center of the gallery. A great touch, it acts as a fulcrum around which these dreams and memories swirl. This is a lovely introduction to two artists at the beginning of their careers and foretells of interesting work to follow.
The dollhouse is owned by the artist Athena Parella
What The House Dreams Of- Ruby/Dakota Gallery. Through Nov. 30. 155 East Second Street. @ruby_dakota.ny Featuring: Cassidy Argo @cassidy.argo and Athena Parella @athenakp
Totally Unique Thing. AI generated image, glazed ceramic. Installed on bespoke wallpaper, designed by Perry and produced by Liberty of London
The Wallace Collection, a storied historic mansion in London that houses an extraordinary, far-ranging collection of art and objects, invited the artist Grayson Perry to embed and create an exhibition that responds to their collections. Collected during the18th and 19th Centuries, the museum is dripping in Rococo, houses breathtaking Old Master paintings, amour, ceramics, medieval relics and sculpture. It would be, for a lesser artist, a daunting assignment.
Grayson Perry, affectionately referred to as a “National Treasure” in the UK was unquestionably the right person to choose for this creative residency. Perry burst onto the art world in the 1980’s as a potter making vessels imbued with deep and complex psycho-sexual content. He has a transvestite alter ego named “Claire” who was his partner in forays into photography and textiles. Awarded the Turner Prize in 2003 , elected to the Royal Academy in 2011, and received a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honors List in 2013; and finally-knighted in 2023, Perry has bloomed into one of the most acclaimed British artists working today, although strangely underrated and under-known in the United States.
Perry has worked on monumental tapestries– most notably The Vanity of Small Differences inspired by Hogarth’s The Rakes Progress. He has worked in film/television, hosted radio shows, architecture, written and illustrated graphic novels, as well as continuing his work in ceramics . He was the perfect person to work in and with the eclectic Wallace Collection.
Perry also wrote all of the labels for the exhibition; while omitting typical information such as dimensions, materials and dates, he provides a different approach to museum labels. The image below is the label for the tapestry pictured above. It is flanked by two ceramic busts entitled “Serious People.”
Serious People- Glazed ceramic
Perry’s brings to his work with the Wallace Collection a deep and committed understanding of the work of untrained and outsider artists. His own work, and his curation, reflect his exploration of mental illness, born of personal, family experience. Perry discovered that, during World War II, a self-taught artist named Madge Gill had shown her work at The Wallace Collection. A marginalized and somewhat tragic figure, Gill made elaborate embroidered tapestries, many of which greet the viewer in the first room of the Perry exhibition. It was a fluke that her work was shown at the storied Wallace Collection. It was an inspiration for Perry.
Against this backdrop, Perry created an imaginary personage named Shirley Smith whose “Delusions Of Grandeur” led her to believe that she was the rightful heir to The Wallace Collection. The exhibition is built loosely around her life. Shirley’s presence is woven throughout the exhibition, appearing in ceramic narratives, tapestries, photographs, furniture, and her own small exhibition of drawing and collage.
Drawing by Shirley Smith
If this all sounds overly complicated, it’s not. If you give yourself over to the premise of the exhibition, it all makes perfect sense. Perry’s exhibition riffs on the notions of collecting, obsession, colonialism, gender, mental illness and beauty. I urge that you take the audio headsets when entering the show. Ordinarily I loathe the audio museum tours, but Perry not only wrote all the narrative, he recorded the audio. He narrates his process of both the making of the work and the underlying psychological motivations and process. The narration is funny, devoid of pretense or self-importance, and crystal clear in its intent. Perry’s comfort with making himself vulnerable, and the clarity with which he tells his own stories, draws the listener in and helps immerse us into his world.
Detail of glazed ceramic vase entitled- Eighteenth Century French
Best known for his ceramic work, Grayson Perry has collaborated with master metalsmiths to create stunning sculpture in steel and brass that refer to both the Wallace’s amour collection and Perry’s interest in symbols of masculinity and aggression. While not my favorite works in the show, they are a virtuoso foray into yet another medium. Fabricated by master UK metalworkers, they could have stepped right out of the Wallace collections.
Sissy’s Helmet- Iron, brass
Perry’s ceramics and textiles are sublime. In some of his narrative pots, Perry introduces Shirely to both Claire and to Alan Measels, another alter ego. As always, he tweaks our notions of gender and sexuality, using layer upon layer of glazed and ceramic decals, imagery that echo the complexities of his and our own psyches. Perry uses the gloss beauty of glaze in the most sensuous ways. Rarely has an artist managed to tackle the weighty challenges of the human condition while making such gloriously beautiful work. Too often it seems that contemporary artists tack in one direction or the other, perhaps in the view that “beauty” undercuts their important message or that beauty must stand on its own without broader message or resonance. Perry worships playfully at dual alters– humor and humanity, meaning and mastery.
Alan Measels and Claire Meet Shirley Smith and the Honorable Millicent Wallace (detail) Glazed Ceramic
In this body of work, Perry has also played gently with Artificial Intelligence and computer-generated imagery. He has seamlessly integrated new technologies into his work, never losing the sense of human touch. It is fascinating to watch an artist venture far outside of his comfort zone and use technology in such an effective way.
Sexual Fantasies in the Olden Days. Glazed ceramic (detail)
Woven throughout this expansive array of objects is the sad, imagined narrative of Shirley Smith. Note: she refers to herself throughout the exhibition as “The Honorable Millicent Wallace”. Shirley’s lonely life of mental illness stands as a secondary structure to the exhibition and one with a political narrative. Her delusion is that she is the rightful heir the Wallace Collection, but she seeks a nurturing home more than the collection’s riches; all she wants is to be able to live there in peace. Her fanciful pencil drawings are of happy young girls and she longs to be one of them. Perry, a transvestite, has always identified strongly with women and their fate at the hands of men. As Shirely shuffles through life and Perry imagines her making copies of art in the collection in her search for peace and safety.
Left- Francoise Boucher- Madame de Pompadour. Oil on canvas.1759; Right- Hospital Queen Embroidery and mixed media (Shirley Smith)
Yes, this is indeed a very high-concept exhibition. To fall in love with it, as I did, you must abandon your art world “cool” at the door and give yourself up to the objects and the stories they tell. Grayson Perry is a profoundly gifted storyteller, a master of this most ancient and most contemporary art form.
The Great Beauty. Oak, brass, ceramic. A shrine to friendship
Delusions of Grandeur- Grayson Perry at The Wallace Collection thru Oct. 26. Booking in advance is necessary.
Posted on May 5, 2025 by Melissa Stern
On The Spot is a terrific new web series that seeks to document the histories of women artists in NYC from the 1950s to the 2000s. The ambitious mission is to document and present in three-minute videos the history of later 20th-century artists who have often been overlooked and underrepresented in the larger art world. They call themselves “a feminist art history nonprofit.” There are 40 videos so far produced, with plans for a great many more. The videos are a free public resource, accessible on the organization’s website.
According to an Artnet News and In Other Words study, as of 2008, less than 30,000 out of a total of over a quarter of a million artworks that entered U.S. museum permanent collections were works by women. Last week The Art Newspaper published a story about how underserved women artists remain in the U.S. “A new survey of 1,263 female artists, commissioned by the US grant-giving body Anonymous Was A Woman and written by the journalists Charlotte Burns and Julia Halperin, disclosed that nearly two thirds (63%) of respondents say that a lack of museum or institutional backing hinders their career, while 59% feel the same about galleries. Access for female artists is an issue that has changed only incrementally over time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLpgAlUF0iI&t=7s
Numbers like these led gallerist Loretta Howard to found On The Spot. She, along with Producer Tony Ganz, had long wondered why NYC didn’t have some sort of public acknowledgment commemorating where women artists had lived and worked in the city. We are a city that prides itself on being an incubator of many seminal art movements in many media. Women artists have always gotten short shrift throughout art history. Thus, the project was born. Partnering with non-profit organizations, the New York Public Library, The Public Art Fund, as well as foundations including Bloomberg Connects, has helped ensure the very high quality of both the group’s research and its visual content. The organization’s website lists the full complement of collaborators and funders. At three-minutes each, the first groups of videos are delectable bite-sized nuggets of art history.
Often this type of historic documentation is organized by time– year, decade, etc. On the Spot (OTS) takes a novel and New York-specific approach– it is organized by neighborhood. We are obsessed by neighborhoods in NYC, their naming (SoHo, TriBeCa, NoLita, NoMad), their boundaries (where the East Village ends and SoHo begins). their changing character. We all have these idiosyncratic maps of the city in our heads. We are a city of neighborhoods, so it’s a perfect construct by which to organize the female history of late 20th Century New York art.
Flying under the radar, the OTS series had its debut in May of 2023 and continues with bimonthly events that celebrate the drop of new videos. Appropriately, the series started with the Village, then moved on to SoHo. This year’s focus is the Lower East Side after which the series will progress through the map of the city. Tribeca will be the focus next year. And then the series will travel uptown to Harlem, along the way highlighting artist collectives and significant locations as well as the lives of individual artists.
For me some of the most enlightening OTS videos are about artist-founded organizations like Herisies in Soho, led by artists and intellectuals such as Lucy Lippard, Joyce Kozloff, Mary Beth Eddleson, May Stevens, and Harmony Hammond. Kenkekeba House, in the West Village is featured, a pioneering arts space for women and underrepresented groups that has shown over 7,000 artists since its founding in the early 1980’s, including notables such as Ana Mendiata, Augusta Savage, Athena LaTocha and Faith Ringold. The exhaustive research that has gone into ferreting out these important places in art history is truly impressive.
The portraits of individual artists are thoughtfully distilled into short-video format. They manage succinctly and accessibly to capture the essence of each artist. Fascinated by each, I would of course like them to be a little longer, but the format is designed for the social-media age where a three-minute video has been deemed the perfect length for our modern attention spans.
https://https://www.onthisspotnyc.org/#videos;t=7s
The series now turns to the Lower East Side. The beautifully designed interactive map on the organization’s website shows the various spots that are/will be covered with color-coded dots. As each section of the city is posted, the dots will be activated so you hover over them and link to the corresponding address and video. Each historic era is a different color, and the Lower East Side is dominated by dots related to the 1990s. I look forward to revisiting the who, what, when, and where of this neighborhood.
On The Spot is an ambitious and thoughtful project. It fills a meaningful gap in our histories and should be applauded for undertaking its mission. The next tranche of videos premieres on May 6 at The Anthology Film Archives, appropriately in the East Village. The event is currently sold out, but there is a waitlist that one can join for admission. It should be an evening of enlightenment and fun– a blast from the past and an investment in the future.
ON THIS SPOT CAN BE ACCESSED THROUGH THE WEB SITE– https://www.onthisspotnyc.org/#videos
This past weekend New York saw the latest iteration of the Outsider Art Fair. Started in 1993, it has become a NYC institution and seems to be thriving after a few lean pandemic years. The Fair serves a field that has evolved a great deal over the past 30 years, and I really felt that this year more than in the past. As the number of now “blue chip” or “Old Master Self-Taught” artists dwindle, there’s been an influx of both younger artists and some who push against the definitions of self-taught in the first place. It’s a sticky subject and one that I have no answer to.
The Fair was packed to the gills with both art tourists and serious collectors. Sales seemed vibrant, and most dealers were smiling through their exhaustion. These shows are grueling: load in on Wednesday, open to the public on Thursday, close on Sunday, and load out on Monday. One can forgive the glazed expressions that take over exhibitors’ faces as they try to cover their expenses and make money/connections for their galleries and artists. It’s a six-day sprint.
Over the years I have found some of the most moving works at the show are presented by the non-profits that run art therapy programs for people in need. The Center for Creative Works in Wynnewood, PA, brought wonderful paintings by Eric Stewart. Acrylic on canvas, they are beautifully composed snapshots of urban life.
Peninsula Gallery was at the fair for the first time. Director Eric Fallen explained that self-taught artists are not typically part of his program. He was introduced to Adhemar Ahmad, a bookseller and streetside chess player who has been on the street in Morningside Heights for decades and was immediately smitten by Ahmad’s work. It’s easy to understand why. Ahmad’s art was some of the most subtle and stunning work I have seen all weekend. Sophisticated compositions with an emotional resonance that was captivating. I hope and trust that all of Ahmad’s pieces went home with buyers. Truly unusual work.
In addition to the work of self-taught artists, the Fair always has dealers who show historical works of art whose makers’ identities are impossible to know due to the passage of time and the personal nature of the work. These pieces were never intended to be for sale, and thus, the makers’ names were never recorded. There is something mysterious and potent about these works that record moments and histories of the past. We are detectives, tasked with making up our own stories about the who/what/when and where of the artworks. Keith De Lellis Gallery brought a number of these anonymous works, including this arresting hand-colored photo.
Many booths seemed overhung and crowded this year. I understand that the economics of an art fair are tight, and the dealers need to show and sell a lot in a short period. But this year the fair walls felt especially cramped, not always to the advantage of the artwork.
Shrine Gallery always brings a single artist and devotes their booth to an immersive experience with that maker. This year, they brought the work of Arstanda Billy White, a self-taught artist from Richmond, CA. White describes his biggest influence as an artist is Van Gogh, saying “I’m the guy who is going to draw a picture of Van Gogh. In the painting, he’s yellow because that’s how Van Gogh wanted it, but I put him in black. I’m going to draw the whole thing, and then I’m going to draw my dad, the Golden Gloves Champion.” His paintings are bold, with vibrant gestural swaths of color, the figures pulsing with energy. The gallery showed his very droll ceramic sculptures as well.
It will be interesting to see how the Outsider Art Fair continues to evolve over the next few years. The show has expanded geographically. I will never tire of finding extraordinary art from around the world there. Increasingly, there’s been a welcome influx of art from other countries: India, the UK, Haiti, Japan, and Iran were all represented this year in what was at least initially a largely U.S.-centered fair.
The scope and definition of outsider art continue to expand perhaps better defined by what it is not than what it is. Whatever the boundaries of the genre, it is refreshing that work characterized as “outsider” continues to so compellingly invite us in.
All photos courtesy of Melissa Stern
Posted on January 6, 2025 by Melissa Stern
“She was weird,” said the Columbus Museum of Art curator affectionately of artist Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson at the press preview celebrating the late artist’s work. She went on to explain that Robinson made her own art supplies, lived an unconventional and rich life, making art in many mediums and acted as an informal archivist and raconteur of her community. “Weird,” in this context is a high compliment. Fort Gansevoort, an eccentric gallery in New York’s Meatpacking District announced its representation of Robinson’s estate (1940-2015) in collaboration with the Columbus Museum, to which Robinson bequeathed her work and archives. It’s a perfect match between artist and gallery.
A highly recognized artist (she was named a MacArthur fellow in 2004), Robinson was nonetheless lesser known in the mainstream art world. She inhabited an important role in Black community in Ohio. She was a storyteller and story collector, a self-taught archivist of her community’s history and a tireless supporter of the Civil Rights movement. She wrote children’s books, music and made work in many mediums. She left over 200 notebooks to the museum along with the full contents of her house. Fittingly, the exhibition at Fort Gansevoort will help to fund her legacy project, which will award fellowships to Black writers and artists as well as to aid in the conservation of her home and archives.
Robinson’s drawings often incorporate found objects and collage, as in the piece Grinding Rice with Mortar and Pestle. An energetic drawing that captures both the gesture of women grinding and their concentration on the task, their eyes cast downwards as they focus on their movements. Petals of fabric fan out around the figure as well as form her hair. You can feel the rhythmic energy of their task in the strong shapes and gestures with which Robinson has sketched them. This is typical of most of her works on paper. They all speak in the same visual language and gesture. And they all have a story to tell.
Robinson’s skill as a storyteller is paramount to the power of her work. The walls are speaking, shouting out the stories and histories that Robinson collected throughout her life. Fort Gansevoort has hung several of the walls with a mass of her work. They look wonderful all hung together on the newly painted, brilliant red gallery walls, reportedly Robinson’s favorite color.
I am slightly less enamored with the sculptures. They are less skilled in conveying the stories that Robinson tells and appear a little stiff and mannered to me, lacking the grace and lyricism of the wall pieces. Nonetheless, it’s always interesting to see an artist not content to be contained by one medium or dimension. They are ambitious and funny and worthy.
The show runs through Jan. 25 and it’s worth trekking over to the overly hip and fashionable Meatpacking District to this wonderful little historic building to enter Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson’s world. You will be transported.
Llyn Foulkes is a 90-year-old painter, jazz musician, troublemaker and visionary. After making a splash entrée on the American art scene in 1961, he hopscotched around the artworld, changing genres and styles as his restless mind embraced new ideas. He has been “consistently inconsistent” (from his website), wonderful for an artist, but not always strategic for a career. The commercial art world can be somewhat conservative, preferring that an artist find a groove and stick to it. As a result, though brilliant, Foulkes has not yet achieved the wide recognition that he deserves.
Perhaps that will change after the career retrospective currently at A Hug From the Art World in Chelsea. Spanning 1949 to 2024, the show is a beautifully curated view into the Foulkes Universe. The exhibition is divided loosely into three parts, conveniently arrayed over three floors of the gallery.
The ten cartoon drawings from 1949 portray the foibles of us humans with an irreverent dry wit. Some of them recall early R. Crumb works or the cartoons from American Cartoonist Magazine, founded in the 1940’s. Caricatures of typical American men leer at women and one another. The human comedy is depicted in a droll and loosely drawn way– very much of an era and very much an example of Foulkes worldview. These brilliant drawings were made when Foulkes was just 15 years old.
Union of Hypnotists, 1949. Ink and pencil on paper. 8 1/2 x 11 inches
Part of a series labeled Outtakes, these are works that have never been shown in a gallery space. This part of the exhibit includes a facsimile of two walls of Foulke’s studio in Los Angeles. A delightful accumulation of “stuff” that gives us insight into Foulkes’s wicked sense of humor and interests. Vintage photographs mingle with road signs, animal bones, industrial objects, and knick-knacks, the detritus of a peripetia life, mind, and artist.
Cabinets and studio wall installation, 1976-2024. Mixed media
The most current work which is on the first floor is ruthlessly honest, political, biting, funny and frightening. Foulkes is unflinching, His references to racism, Trump and war in the Ukraine are especially fierce. This is angry and urgent artwork. Not always easy, but immensely satisfying for those who have watched the changes in America since 2016, the start date for this body of work. Referencing pop and political icons such as Micky Mouse, Teddy Roosevelt, Pat and Richard Nixon and the Trumps in his work Foulkes magnifies the psychological dissonance we all experience in our daily media bombardment.
In Surrender (2022), Foulkes uses found media and paint collaged over giclee prints to present us with a formal portrait of a young man. His bloodied face partially covered by a Ukrainian flag, he nonetheless holds tight to a harvest sickle; wheat being a major export of the Ukraine. He breaks the traditional picture frame, symbolizing the violence and resilience of those fighting to stay free. It’s a chilling portrait.
Surrender, 2022. Giclee, acrylic, and found media on panel.62 1/2 x 29 1/2 inches
Many of the works incorporate found objects and found media. Foulkes has a keen eye for how to tweak a photograph and make it his own. A wall of these images on the lower level of the gallery is hilarious, delightful and more than a little alarming.
Wall installation of various small pieces.
Uncle Sharkley, 2022. Giclee and oil on panel. 16 x 11 inches
Uncle Sharkley (2022) is a portrait of a man both benevolent and creepy looking. His vaguely retro outfit is a little too big for the overly-orange head that gazes cheerfully into the distance. And his teeth are weird. The thick and vigorous brush strokes surround the photographic image and seem perhaps on the verge of smothering him.
This is a show that will get your heart beating a little faster and both fuel and channel your moral outrage. It’s also darkly funny, and we could all use a little more humor these days.
Martin Wilner’s compelling new show at BravinLee Projects is both conceptually and visually complex, the work of an intellect working on several intersecting planes. Wilner is a practicing Freudian psychoanalyst, a scholar, and mentor to analysts in training. He is a self-taught artist whose work reflects his involvement with the human psyche, popular culture, and comic strip art. His artistic practice is intertwined deeply with his psychoanalytic work and comes with an interesting twist; Wilner the therapist invites the public to engage deeply with the world of Wilner the artist via social media.
Wilner has been working for decades on conceptual and visual projects following this singular artistic path. The work with which I am most familiar is entitled The Case Studies. Each month, a “subject” enters into a “journey” with Wilner. The subject communicates with him each morning either through email or text, telling Wilner whatever is on their mind. It could be a dream, a worry, a victory, a poem, whatever comes to mind. Each subject expresses themself to Wilner in a manner of their choosing. Wilner responds to this missive and turns it in an Instagram/Facebook post. By the end of the day, he posts a drawing of his own that reflects the post.
At the end of each month, these drawings are composited into one large piece that traces the month’s episodic journey. One can “read” the archive of these on Wilner’s Instagram page. It is a unique and fascinating use of social media, and if one engages, it becomes a little addictive, much like social media itself. The participants are always anonymous. The patient/therapist relationship is both private and public, and we are voyeurs into it.
Most of the work being shown at BravinLee Projects is based on Wilner’s 2015-16 artist-in-residency at SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), a research organization closely affiliated with NASA. While the description is complex, it involves a deeper dive into the nature of consciousness, the possibility of communicating with extraterrestrial life, and A.I. This project relates totally to his previous bodies of work but takes the investigation into consciousness in entirely new directions. The description on the gallery website explains the conceptual foundation of the project in detail. I prefer to focus on the drawings themselves because they work beautifully in their own right.
A collage of different people Description automatically generated
Oct. 2015- Friedmann Freund, front. Pen and ink on Bristol board. 16 ½ x 17 1/8
A collage of different images Description automatically generated
Oct. 2015 -Friedmann Freund, verso
The exhibition consists of a series of double-sided, wall-mounted drawings as well as a few conventional one-sided pieces. The double-sided drawings are mounted on the wall on hinges so that the viewer can swivel them. The images are astounding. Wilner has created his own idiosyncratic visual vocabulary that draws from many sources but remains firmly rooted in 20th century culture. A cacophony of imagery from Alfred E. Neuman, the icon of MAD Magazine, to images from astrology, cartography, comic books and typography are all woven together into intricate narratives. The pieces are rendered painstakingly in pen and ink. The gallery provides magnifying glasses for those who wish to use them. One side of each drawing is in color, the other in stark black and white. The narratives flow up and down and across the pages, much like the meandering of the mind at work. The stories are not linear, yet they are coherent. The relationship between the two sides is not immediately apparent and adds to the general sense of mystery and investigation that pervades Wilner’s work.
Much like the therapeutic relationship, we, the viewers, are asked to puzzle out or bring our own meaning to Wilner’s drawings. They are narrative, but that narrative is open to the viewer’s interpretation, transference, and projection. We become the therapist and the drawings the subject. Like the children’s game of whisper down the lane, the story changes over time and retelling. Wilner draws his version of the reality presented to him by his “subject.” We then interpret the artist’s version through reading his version. Each visual and verbal story contains an array of possible outcomes.
Perhaps I am projecting, but I think that Wilner understands that reality is slippery and ever evolving. This is what the project with SETI is about . But of course Wilner’s work as a psychoanalyst would have perhaps already shown him this fact of human nature. .His drawings present a world view that like the therapist/patient relationship entice us to dive deeply into a universe of possible narratives. It’s a fascinating construct that has given bloom to a unique and compelling vision.
Posted on June 7, 2024 by Melissa Stern
Rarely has there been a group of people as uniformly elegant and graceful as those who inhabit Lubaina Himid’s paintings, currently on view at Greene Naftali in Chelsea. Entitled Street Sellers, Himid has created a group of large, figurative paintings that pulse with vibrant color and life. These graceful, solo figures proudly present their wares to us–eggs, birds, musical instruments, and fish, as they move through the landscape.
Himid, who is of English and Zanzibari parentage, has frequently reached back into her African heritage to present stories from the history of colonization and slavery. Her retrospective at The Tate in 2021 featured a multi-painting retelling of the story of a slave ship called The Rodeur. In 1819, there was an outbreak of a highly contagious eye disease called ophthalmia. Slaves and crew members were stricken with blindness. To receive the full insurance value of the now “unsalable” slaves, 36 of them were thrown overboard.
Himid retold this story through a series of paintings that metaphorically reflect an underlying anxiety rather than solely the horrific events. The paintings are genteel and elegant. She transferred the setting to a loosely defined vintage ocean liner populated by beautifully outfitted Black people. It’s impossible to tell what era this is, though it is definitely the 20th century. The sense of mystery that compels the viewer to “read” this story is deeply compelling. The horror only comes when the viewer knows the story behind the drama.
Rather than portray historical events, Himid prefers to evoke them. This sense of the fluidity of time and place suffuses the current exhibition. It’s hard to really place the people in these paintings. Some of the outfits look vaguely 18th-century English or generic European; they certainly aren’t contemporary. Himid has made ten eight-foot-tall full-length figures, a painting format traditionally associated with aristocrats and royalty. Perhaps she is suggesting that these hard-working class people ARE true royalty.
They could be characters in a story rather than individualized portraits. I scanned the walls to see if there indeed was an overarching story, as there was with the Rodeur series. Himid has a background in set design, and many of her pieces over the years and in this show reflect that. There is a formality and theatricality to these paintings. The street sellers show off their wares, cavort and present themselves to us as if in the prologue to a play. I don’t consider the choice to not individualize the figures as a detriment to the work, rather, I feel like the entire exhibition is a magic show waiting to start.
Himid’s painting has become much looser than I had seen previously, atmospheric gestures and veils of color define the landscape within which each figure lives. She has always been a brilliant colorist, and these paintings pulse with gorgeous and rich color combinations. These deep jewel tones, not found in nature, evoke the imagined world of the Street Sellers. As always, bits and pieces of patterning appear in the paintings. These both define the space and jar the viewer’s expectations of the landscape and architecture.
The one off-note for me in the exhibition is the inclusion of uniquely made street signs. They appear to be cardboard, but according to the gallery notes they are on archival paper mounted on wood free-standing frames throughout the gallery. Each of the large paintings has a companion sign. One side of each sign is a crudely drawn cartoon of what is being sold in the larger work and a phonetic or made-up language advertisement for that item. The verso is a hidden message that I think is what we are meant to believe that the seller is thinking. It feels forced. The signs occupy an odd mid-point; they aren’t painted well enough to match the paintings, and at the same time, they aren’t rough enough to push the concept of contrast between inner and outer worlds. It’s a collaboration between Himid and her partner, Magda Stawarska, who has previously produced luscious soundscapes to accompany Himid’s work.
Nonetheless, it’s a treat to see paintings as glorious as these. The Universe that Himid creates is both Joyful, colorful, delightful, and elegiac. The Street Sellers are a poetic portrayal of an imagined world of the past, yet one that feels completely contemporary.
All photo courtesy of Melissa Stern