"More Than A Muse" Group Show Featuring Larry Clark, Sandy Kim, Ryan Mcginley, and Dash Snow @ 65 Ludlow in New York

“More Than A Muse” aims to explore those relationships between artist and subject that exceed creative companionship and are based on inextricable, emotional ties. These relationships are those of parents, lovers, siblings and friends- those who have a visceral and often complex connection to the artist. The photographs then are more than standard depictions of beauty or intrigue but unfiltered glimpses into the intimate lives of two beings through the eyes of someone emotionally invested. The subjects are shown in their rawest form as they are photographed intuitively by the artist. This show is unique in that both photographer and muse will be recognized as artists. This is to further show the muse as more than simply the vision. They are the vehicles by which it comes to life. The symbiotic relationship is the basis of the work; it would not exist without the other. More Than A Muse will be on view until September 18 at 65 Ludlow in New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer

Artist Keith Mayerson's Meta-Narrative of Appropriated Americana Explored In "My American Dream" At Marlborough Chelsea in New York

My American Dream is a large installation and body of work by artist Keith Mayerson created over the last decade. Various incarnations of this project, or “chapters”, first appeared in exhibitions in New York, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Houston, and Brussels, most recently culminating in his 42-painting installation, curated by Stuart Comer into the 2014 Whitney Biennial. My American Dream is a meta-narrative, consisting of more recent personal images from photographs—of his husband and himself, his family, and world—and also from a long career of painting from appropriated imagery and abstraction. This particular body of work began in 2005, building on the hope that one day the cosmology would be exhibited in a site-specific composition. Marlborough Chelsea presents the large cosmology of the work (accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog) to inspire and promote a progressive, positive view of America’s past in the hope to help make a better future. My American Dream will be on view until December 23, 2015 at Marlborough Chelsea, 545 West 25th Street, New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer

Last Week To Check Out Dana Schutz's "Fight in an Elevator" @ Petzel Gallery In New York

This is your last chance to check out Fight in an Elevator at Petzel Gallery—a solo exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Dana Schutz. As Fight in an Elevator, the title of Dana Schutz’s second exhibition at Petzel Gallery suggests, Schutz’s figures are placed within compressed interiors where they are forced to struggle against the boundaries of their painted environments and up onto the physical edge of the canvas. Her characters find themselves helpless in the mouth of a lion, exchanging blows in a mirrored elevator, or somnambulating down a narrow staircase. These highly structured spaces, which are both intensely public and utterly private, point to how Schutz tackles the subject of interiority—rather than offering a voyeuristic view, her frontal facing subjects stare directly back at the viewer, seemingly with the desire to extend outside of themselves. Fight in an Elevator will be on view until October 24, 2015 at Petzel Gallery, 456 W. 18th Street, in New York. photographs by Tenlie Mourning

Queen of No Wave Lydia Lunch @ Howl! Happening in New York

Legendary No Wave musician (Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Queen of Siam), writer, spoken word artist, and actress Lydia Lunch makes her return to New York with a new photographic exhibition and installation called "So Real It Hurts" on view for on more week at Howl! Happening in New York. This Friday, to close the exhibition, she will be performing her spoken word piece "Conspiracy on Women." The piece will be also be reissued on Other People.

Michael Heizer 'Altars' @ Gagosian Gallery in New York

Gagosian presents the work of legendary sculptor Michael Heizer. Heizer's first exhibition with the gallery comprises rarely or never-before-seen early paintings, the Altar series of new monumental steel sculptures, and negative wall sculptures featuring metamorphic and igneous rocks. Working largely outside the confines of gallery and museum, Heizer has redefined sculpture in terms of size, mass, gesture, and process. In the late 1960s, he relocated to New York, while continuing to travel and live in the open terrain of the American West, where he has since created awe-inspiring land artworks. Michael Heizer 'Altars' will be on view until July 9, 2015 at Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, New York. photographs by Eric Minh Swenson

Brian Kokoska's Collaborative Show With Chloe Seibert Is A Pepto-Bismol Shade of Pink and Full of Strange Artifacts

Johannes Vogt Gallery presents Night Cage, a two-person exhibition by Brian Kokoska and Chloe Seibert. Kokoska has altered the gallery space entirely in a Peto-Bismol shade of baby pink. Brian Kokoska's paintings explore sensibilities of a post-human "face" in which each composition is built from a series of gestures and recognizable iconography and symbols. His new monochromatic sculptures are built up from various acquired objects including snakes, Droopy the dog (an anthropomorphic cartoon dog introduced in 1943), rare collectible teddy bears, blankets, caskets and furniture. Each sculpture is intentionally altered and rearranged to induce a sort of hyper sentimentality or overwhelming sadness. Additionally, Kokoska is exhibiting a new work that is a selection from his collection of acquired prison drawings. Their intimate scale, cute subject matter and loving text is both personal to the artists childhood and to his current practice. Chloe Seibert uses scale and expression to evoke psychological and physical responses. In this selection of her work, gestural and aggressive mark making creates vague facial representations out of pedestrian materials and a bland palette. The works are decisively haphazard and familiarly disgruntled. She will be presenting two wall sculptures and a large head statue. Night Cage will be on view until June 20, 2015 at Johannes Vogt Gallery, 526 W 26th St., New York

Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties

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How did American artists represent the Jazz Age? The exhibition Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties at the Brooklyn Museum brings together for the first time the work of sixty-eight painters, sculptors, and photographers who explored a new mode of modern realism in the years bounded by the aftermath of the Great War and the onset of the Great Depression. Throughout the 1920s, artists created images of liberated modern bodies and the changing urban-industrial environment with an eye toward ideal form and ordered clarity—qualities seemingly at odds with a riotous decade best remembered for its flappers and Fords. Artists took as their subjects uninhibited nudes and close-up portraits that celebrated sexual freedom and visual intimacy, as if in defiance of the restrictive routines of automated labor and the stresses of modern urban life. Reserving judgment on the ultimate effects of machine culture on the individual, they distilled cities and factories into pristine geometric compositions that appear silent and uninhabited. American artists of the Jazz Age struggled to express the experience of a dramatically remade modern world, demonstrating their faith in the potentiality of youth and in the sustaining value of beauty. Youth and Beauty will present 140 works by artists including Thomas Hart Benton, Imogen Cunningham, Charles Demuth, Aaron Douglas, Edward Hopper, Gaston Lachaise, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Luigi Lucioni, Gerald Murphy, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston.  Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties is on view until January 29, 2012 at the Brooklyn Museum. 

Objet d’Art: Dr. Lakra

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Presented in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, this will be the first solo exhibition in New York by Mexican tattoo artist Dr. Lakra (b. 1972, Mexico). For this exhibition, Lakra will create a site-specific wall drawing spanning 360 degrees of the gallery, shown alongside works on paper and selections from the artist’s collections of found objects. In these works, Lakra uses drawing as the most immediate artistic impulse to invoke fundamental human urges like sex and violence. Using a range of source material, from anatomy textbooks to magazine pin-ups and comic strips, Lakra looks to Mexican and international art historical traditions, as well as the contemporary iconography of tattoo art and borrows a rich sense of satire from his early interest in cartooning. Creating a transformative visual overload, Lakra merges representation with an invented universe, as works transcend categorization and challenge social norms. Dr. Lakra is on view from February 25 – April 24, 2011 at the Drawing Center in NYC.