Telfar Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary Not With Spectacle But With Substance

Two decades after its quiet beginnings in Queens, Telfar turned the streets of New York into a runway and the community into the main event. This was not just a fashion show; it was a reminder that independence, creativity, and cultural impact are what fashion is all about.

Courtesy of Jason Nocito

What began twenty years ago in a Queens apartment by a teenage Telfar Clemens has evolved into the largest Black-owned fashion brand in the world, and likely the longest-running genderless brand in history. The brand has charted its own path entirely, remaining 100% independent, without investors and little entanglement with the fashion industry. Yet, with its captivating DNA, Telfar managed to build a loyal following of over three million customers along the way.

Telfar has long stood out as a brand that simply gets it right. It’s visionary, equitable, and deeply in tune with its audience. From the beginning, it gained a loyal community drawn to its commitment to cultural storytelling, accessible pricing, and customer-first values. This integrity helped elevate the iconic “T” bag into one of the most sought-after accessories of the past decade, carried by A-listers and aspirational shoppers alike.

Over the weekend, following a five-year hiatus, Clemens took to the streets of New York City to make his return to the runway.

 

Courtesy of Telfar

 

At the show, the support and love were undeniable. Fans, friends, family, and industry insiders all came crowding to the street behind the Telfar store, fittingly on Juneteenth weekend. Among them were familiar faces like Luar’s Raul Lopez and Solange Knowles, who’s often cited as the one who promoted the brand in its early years. Her sister, Beyoncé echoed that same support in her 2022 Renaisssance album, closing it with a shoutout to the brand: “This Telfar bag imported, Birkins them shit’s in storage,” encapsulating everything the brand is all about.

As always, Telfar did things their own way. Instead of a traditional runway cast, the show featured people directly from the brand’s community. Through a series of open castings at the Telfar store called New Models, anyone could take part. The final lineup was chosen not by insiders but by the public, who voted live during the first episode of New Models, streamed on Telfar’s own platform on June 19. Friends, family, and longtime collaborators all walked the show, making it a true celebration of the people who have shaped the brand.

Telfar’s Spring/Summer 2025 collection was a bold celebration of community and creativity, and every look was met with cheers and applause. It opened with reimagined suiting and shirting, crafted from deconstructed jersey T-shirts that honored the brand’s twenty-year history. Loose-fitting jackets, flared trousers, and relaxed silhouettes offered a fresh take on fashion staples; easy streetwear, and polished tailoring—echoing the brand’s ability to capture New York’s forward-looking vibe. The collection continued with khaki in tones of beige, black, and camo as a foundation, denim spanning vintage to futuristic rib knit dresses, and logo jelly sandals in various colors, just in time for the minimalist footwear wave.

Courtesy of Jason Nocito

Accessories took center stage as much as the clothing did, proving once more why Telfar changed the way the industry thinks about “it” bags. The debut of the Tie Bag—an evolution of the Telfar shopper as a slouchy hobo tote—is available in three colors and one perfect size. Of course, the legendary Shopping Bag was also present in spirit, reminding everyone just how Telfar became the brand known as Bushwick Birkin. Together, these pieces underscored Telfar’s core message that quality design and cultural resonance need not break the bank.

Twenty years in, Telfar has proven that good things are worth the wait. The fashion industry constantly demands speed and instant reinvention, often leaving creatives forced to accumulate. But Telfar Clemens has built an empire that allows him to listen to a slower, more authentic rhythm, and he understands the value of risk in fashion. As he celebrates the brand’s platinum anniversary, it’s never been more clear that Clemens is still winning the game, with rules he made himself.

Read Our Interview of Matthieu Humery, Curator of Diane Arbus' Constellation @ The Armory →

Diane Arbus, Constellation, 2023–2024, The Tower, Main Gallery, LUMA Arles, France. All artworks © The Estate of Diane Arbus Collection Maja Hoffmann/LUMA Foundation. Installation Photo © Adrian Deweerdt

Diane Arbus’s photography has long unsettled and fascinated viewers, defying easy interpretation. In Constellation, the newly opened exhibition at The Armory, curator Matthieu Humery brings a second life to her work; not to explain or categorize, but to invite quiet, intimate dialogue between the viewer and the photographs. Featuring 454 photographs from the artist’s archive, including many rarely seen, the exhibition defers any chronological or thematic structure, favoring a layout without linear direction, making every encounter entirely unique and unpredictable. The experience is haunting, dissociating the viewer from the fact that they’re in an art show, and instead allowing them to sink into provoked emotions, completely immersed in an entirely human experience, dissolving the distance between audience and the subjects.

In our conversation, Humery shares what it means to curate with restraint, how working with a posthumous body of work introduces both freedom and distance and what it felt like to place each image by hand in the space, listening for their rhythm. Read more

The Weight of Lightness: Miya Ando’s “Mono no aware” at Saint Laurent Rive Droite, Los Angeles

In a city so often obsessed with permanence—ageless faces, endless summers, architecture designed to defy time—Mono no aware, Miya Ando’s luminous exhibition at Saint Laurent Rive Droite in Los Angeles, arrives like a soft exhale. Curated with elegant restraint by Anthony Vaccarello, the exhibition runs from April 8 through May 28, 2025, and offers visitors a meditative encounter with the ineffable: beauty that doesn’t last, and thus becomes more precious.

Ando, a Japanese-American artist based in New York, brings to Los Angeles a body of work that is both austere and poetic. Her materials—steel, redwood, washi paper, glass—are not chosen for comfort or ease. These are tough, elemental substances, but in her hands, they seem to sigh. Steel oxidizes. Wood is scorched. Silver nitrate glistens briefly before tarnishing into shadow. Every piece seems to exist in the act of becoming something else, caught in a slow dance between creation and decay.

It is this delicate tension—between the enduring and the fleeting, the seen and the sensed—that defines Mono no aware. The title, a Japanese philosophical term, loosely translates to “the pathos of things.” But it's not sorrow in the Western sense; it’s a tender, almost reverent awareness of the impermanence of all things. The falling cherry blossom, the shifting moonlight, the flicker of memory—Ando translates these moments not as loss but as sublime presence.

This exhibition is less a gallery show than a sensorial field. Ando’s paintings, with their subtle gradations and vaporous textures, resemble atmospheres more than images. One large piece—steel treated with silver nitrate—glows as if lit from within, a silver dusk caught in mid-fade. Stand before it long enough and you may find yourself breathing slower, drawn into its quietude. The light changes as you move. It is not just the painting that shimmers, but your own perception, altered.

Nearby, sculptures made of redwood anchor the space with a different kind of gravity. Ando uses the traditional Japanese shou-sugi-ban technique to char the surface of the wood, preserving it through fire. The result is a deep, inky black that isn’t void but presence. The carbonized surface absorbs light instead of reflecting it. Touch, were it allowed, would surely reveal unexpected warmth beneath the charcoal. These works feel ancient and future-facing at once—artifacts of a time out of time.

Silkscreen prints—subtler, perhaps quieter still—offer a more intimate scale, drawing viewers close. They echo the motifs of moonlight, fog, and celestial transience that recur throughout Ando’s work. There is a consistent language at play, not in symbols or icons, but in atmosphere. What binds the pieces together is not a narrative, but a rhythm, a kind of visual breath.

Ando’s training is as multidisciplinary as her art. With a background in East Asian calligraphy and metal patination, she bridges traditions with innovation. Her American upbringing meets her Japanese lineage in a hybrid that never feels forced. Instead, her work pulses with the complexity of in-between identities—cultural, material, temporal. The result is a deeply personal, spiritual vision, one that invites viewers not just to look, but to dwell in a different register of time.

Vaccarello’s curatorial touch is light but essential. The space at Saint Laurent Rive Droite—typically known for its sleek fashion displays and curated chaos—has been transformed into a vessel for contemplation. The works are given room to breathe, and the minimalist setting amplifies their quiet power. The collaboration between the house of Saint Laurent and Ando is more than aesthetic alignment—it’s an act of mutual recognition. Both traffic in forms of elegance that resist explanation, both seek out the sacred in style and silence.

It is tempting to categorize Mono no aware as environmental art or spiritual abstraction. But to do so would be to contain it too tightly. What Ando offers here isn’t doctrine—it’s sensation. It’s the way silver catches dusk. The scent of scorched wood. The hush that falls when you realize something beautiful is slipping away. And yet, Mono no aware does not mourn. It honors. In every oxidized panel, every blackened beam, every fading gradient, there is a kind of stillness that feels like acceptance. Not resignation, but reverence.

In a world constantly refreshing itself, where we swipe and scroll in pursuit of the next, the now, the new, Miya Ando’s work asks us to pause. To notice. To feel, just for a moment, the immensity of impermanence. And maybe, in doing so, to find a strange and fragile peace.

Mother Daughter Holy Spirit Throws a Star-Studded Trans Rights Fundraiser

photography by Fernando Palafox
text by Karly Quadros

Last weekend, Mother Daughter Holy Spirit closed out their three-part fundraiser for the Trans Justice Funding Project with a celebrity-filled bash at Gitano NYC. The party was a veritable who’s who of New York City’s queer underground and nightlife royalty, brining together everyone from film stars Chloë Sevigny and Naomi Watts (and her daughter, model Kai Schreiber) to cult favorites Julio Torres and Richie Shazam to art world darling Tourmaline and supermodel Alex Consani.

“It’s funny, we called Holy Spirit the final event, and that’s how we planned it. But being there, in the energy of it all, it didn’t feel like an ending. It felt like a beginning,” said co-founder John Mollet.

The night’s events rounded out a flurry of fundraising events as trans rights are increasingly under attack under this administration. Mother Daughter Holy Spirit, which was co-founded by John Mollet and Bobbi Salvör Menuez, began with a runway show featuring Alex Consani, Richie Shazam, and more stomping the runway in clothing from the likes of Vaquera, Willie Chavaria, and Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen. Next came a pop-up boutique and online store stocked with garments donated from celebrities like Chloë Sevigny and Hari Nef, with some custom artist t-shirts peppered in for good measure.

Holy Spirit was the group’s largest event yet, scaling up from 200 attendees to over 600 dancing the night away in view of the East River. The crowd was largely trans, a mishmash of underground art legends, it girls, theater kids, and militant leftists all dancing under glittering chandeliers and palm trees. Christeene confronted the crowd with her raw, transgressive drag, while Juliana Huxtable and Fashion bumped pounding dance tunes all night long.

“[Gitano] was an unexpected choice for a crowd that often piles into dark and dank Brooklyn warehouses, but we wanted it to feel glamorous, elevated, even a bit reminiscent of the days when the queers and the artists and the yuppies all partied together at Studio 54 — a New York Moment, but this time, with a special focus on celebrating trans people as culture makers, change makers, and invaluable members of our world,” said head of production Lio Mehil.

So far, Mother Daughter Holy Spirit has raised over $50,000 in funds for trans-led grassroots organizations across the country, with additional closet and t-shirt sales scheduled in the coming weeks. In a time when the need for resources and material support for the trans community is more essential than ever, trans joy and self-expression were front and center at Holy Spirit.

“I’m not a trans person, and maybe this sounds selfish, but I truly believe my world, our world, becomes better when trans people have full equality. The trans people I’ve known throughout my life have brought forward a kind of strength, empathy, and clarity that the world desperately needs… I envision a society that seeks trans wisdom more deliberately and more often. I feel so deeply grateful to be part of a project that says to trans people: you are seen, appreciated, and loved,” said Mollet.

Explore the party with exclusive photography from Fernando Palafox.

It's a Real Carnival at Jeffrey Deitch Right Now

Photo by Genevieve Hanson

On May 3, a cavalcade of artists, burlesque stars, magicians, drag queens, sword swallowers, latex fetishists, fan dancers, scenesters, and bright young things stepped right up for the night of all nights, the show of all shows, a spectacle to bring even the stodgiest gallerist to their knees: a carnival. Presiding over the whole thing was master of ceremonies/artist Joe Coleman, who curated the group show and contributed a variety of artifacts from his own personal Odditorium of historic circus curios.

The gallery was packed tight with art and packed even more tightly with people. A glimmering merry-go-round twirled next to a bulging, fleshy sculpture and ornate Coney Island mermaid costumes. The over forty artists invited to participate ranged from big chip favorites like Anne Imhof and Jane Dickson to cult favorites like Kembra Pfahler and Nadia Lee Cohen to contemporary favorites like Raúl de Nieves and Mickalene Thomas to historic figures like Weegee and Johnny Eck. Coleman, a lifelong devotee of the carnival and performing arts, made a point to include and celebrate the work of circus arts performers that have made up his own found family for decades. Read more.

Emma Webster "That Thought Might Think" At Petzel Gallery In New York

Emma Webster, The Material World, 2025. Oil on canvas102 x 190 x 2 in259.1 x 482.6 x 5.1 cm. Photo: Marten Elder. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel,New York

Emma Webster's inaugural solo exhibition at Petzel Gallery, "That Thought Might Think," is a mesmerizing journey into expansive, otherworldly landscapes that challenge our perception of reality. On view from March 7 through April 12, 2025, this exhibition showcases Webster's largest works to date, offering viewers an immersive experience. Central to the exhibition are two monumental paintings: "The Material World" and "Era of Eternity." "The Material World" transports viewers to a primordial realm, where lush foliage thrives under an obscured sun, evoking a sense of ancient majesty. In contrast, "Era of Eternity" captures a celestial spectacle—a spiraling sunburst accompanied by a flock of geese soaring over a canyon—eliciting feelings of awe and contemplation. Webster masterfully manipulates light and atmosphere, leaving us pondering whether we are witnessing the dawn of creation or the quietude of an impending dusk.

What sets Webster's work apart is her innovative fusion of traditional painting techniques with modern technology. By integrating virtual reality, hand-drawn sketches, and scans of handcrafted sculptures, she constructs digital dioramas that serve as the foundation for her paintings. This approach not only pays homage to historical artistic tools like the camera obscura but also propels the genre of still life into the contemporary digital age. The resulting landscapes are immersive and uncanny, blurring the lines between the tangible and the virtual, and prompting reflection on our relationship with nature in the Anthropocene era.

The timing of these works is particularly poignant. Created amidst the Los Angeles fires, Webster's paintings resonate with the urgency of ecological crises. She reflects, "It was surreal to make this work while just outside the studio; the orange, smoky sky was raining ash from the fires." Yet, through her art, she celebrates the resilience and complexity of natural systems, inviting viewers to engage with environments that are both familiar and fantastical. "That Thought Might Think" is not just an exhibition; it's an invitation to explore the delicate interplay between reality and artifice, nature and technology. Emma Webster's visionary landscapes beckon us to reconsider our place within the natural world and the digital constructs we inhabit.

Emma Webster, Era of Eternity , 2025 Oil on canvas 108 x 180 x 2 in 274.3 x 457.2 x 5.1 cm. Photo: Marten Elder. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York

The Long Journey Home: Read Our Interview of Composer Sbusiso Shozi and Fondation Cartier Artistic Director Isabelle Gaudefroy →

Picture © Zivanai Matangi

Before judging someone, walk a mile in their shoes.

It’s an age-old adage. Our shoes carry the weight of our daily lives, our stories, our hardships. They represent the wear and tear of our history but also the tenacity and possibilities of new paths forward. 

For writer, composer, and musical director Sbusiso Shozi, shoes are a way to explore the many pathways of the African diaspora. Blending traditional South African musicality, oral tradition, and contemporary instrumentation, he’s mounting a new performance, African Exodus, for the Centre for the Less Good Idea, in collaboration with Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. 

Founded in 2016 in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Centre for the Less Good Idea is an incubator for experimental and cross-disciplinary art. The “less good idea” is the one that is more marginal, more daring and more ripe for invention and discovery. It also has to do with resourcefulness; a Sechuana proverb advises that ‘when a good doctor won’t cure you, find the less good doctor.’ The Centre for the Less Good Idea is the first organization to be hosted in residence by the Fondation Cartier, beginning with a week-long takeover of Fondation Cartier’s performance spaces in Paris in May 2024. African Exodus continues that partnership at the Perelman Performance Center in New York City, running from February 27 to March 2.

Autre editor-in-chief Oliver Kupper sat down with Sbusiso Shozi and Fondation Cartier artistic director Isabelle Gaudefroy to discuss performance and the two organizations’ ongoing partnership. Read more.

Fuck Art Let's Dance: Read Our Interview of the Iconic Colette Lumiere →

Fuck art, let’s dance.

It’s the attitude that Colette Lumiere had become known for, immortalized in a mural that she painted on the wall of iconic ’70s downtown New York nightclub and art scene haunt Danceteria. She’s celebrated for her bold personas and expansive multimedia projects from street art to installations to fashion collaborations, yet her later evolutions have received less attention. A new show at Company Gallery, Everything She Touches Turns to Gold, running until March 1, explores the artist’s career in the ’80s as she ventured off to Berlin under the guise of a new persona, the mysterious Mata Hari and the Stolen Potatoes.

Lumiere always had a surprisingly contemporary attitude toward blurring the boundaries between the public and the private, between art and commerce. She began by painting cryptic sigils on the SoHo pavement at night and has shown art everywhere from the MoMA to Fiorucci shop windows to German nunneries to nightclubs. Her longest running piece was a 24/7 installation in her own apartment, stuffed from floor to ceiling with champagne and blush-ruched fabrics, a polymorphous punk rock Versailles. Lumiere took that louche crinkling of fabric from her Living Environment and translated it into harlequin frocks that she wore like a uniform. Her influence reverberates widely from Vivienne Westwood and Madonna’s ragged, spunky takes on period clothing to the elaborately staged personas of Cindy Sherman and Nadia Lee Cohen.

Growing frustrated with the limitations put on a young female artist, in 1978 Lumiere staged her own death in a performance at the Whitney Museum. She emerged a few days later at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, beginning an ongoing dynasty of artistic personas and eras. Everything She Touches Turns to Gold features the artist’s under-celebrated paintings, mostly from the early ’80s, “metaphysical portraits” exploring herself, her friends, and the subconscious. While her ’70s works recall historical reclining nudes including staged photos and durational performances in which she napped in poses modeled after classical paintings such as Manet’s Olympia. Her Berlin period, instead, foregrounded motion. The figures in her portraits wave. They evade. They drift and dream and run away.

I recently met up with Lumiere at Company Gallery to explore the new collection. Now in her  seventies, Lumiere is as true to herself as ever in a ruffled white blouse beneath a hot pink Victorian riding coat. Tunisian-born and French-raised, her accent is caught somewhere between her native French and a dry German lilt. We spoke about Berlin before the wall came down, resisting categorization, and, of course, potatoes. Read more.

Cocktail Celebration and Signing For Autre's Fall/Winter Citizen Issue At The Stone Island Flagship In NYC

November 7th, Autre Magazine took over the Stone Island flagship in Manhattan to celebrate our FW24 “CITIZEN” Issue and a 166-page supplement by @sicknethi generously supported by the cult luxury outerwear brand. Sethi signed copies and two large lightboxes of the covers greeted guests at the door.

Devon DeJardin "Echoes Of The Past" Opens This Week @ Albertz Benda In New York

Albertz Benda presents the second solo exhibition with the gallery by Los Angeles based artist Devon DeJardin. In this exhibition entitled Echoes of the Past, the artist has reimagined Old Master  portrait paintings, redefining a visual language for the traditional genre. DeJardin’s new paintings are the culmination of five years of his exploration into what the artist terms secular ‘guardians,’ who appear as central figures in his compositions. Comprised of geometric shapes assembled into  anthropomorphic forms, the guardians have a distinctly modernist feel in their tenuous balance between figure and abstraction: 20th century artists from diverse contexts including Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Yves Tanguy come to mind as significant inspiration.  

In Echoes of the Past, the artist delves further back across art historical eras, interpreting his portraits through the lens of Flemish Primitive and Italian Renaissance artists to the Dutch Golden Age and Spanish Romantic  masters. While classical portraiture throughout these epochs focused primarily on royalty and pinnacles of  society, DeJardin’s paintings conjure imaginary guardians that protect a wounded society.  

The cheerful themes of DeJardin’s earlier work have evolved into a darker, more limited palette, reinterpreting  choices by many of history’s greatest artists, including Goya, van Eyck, and Rembrandt. They are conceptual reflections of the era in which the artist has lived as DeJardin’s generation has never known life in a world without war—from the Gulf War and the War on Terror to the ongoing conflicts in the Ukraine and the Middle East. DeJardin metaphorically and physically mines the darkness in society to create his work, using shading and light to subtly tease figures from abstract shapes. The orb-like eyes of his figures appear lighter in tone, signifying a purity of spirit and hope for the future.

As always, his paintings are notable for their meticulous rendering. His figures are so sculptural that they almost seem to emerge from the wall. DeJardin goes straight to the canvas, working without a maquette to depict the figure and background in an organic, liberatory process. In recent years the artist has experimented with framing devices for these figures, including floral, architectural, or landscape imagery. In each of the new canvases, the background corresponds to the era from which the artist reimagined the imagery: six smaller works reflect the intimate and domestic scale of Dutch Golden Age paintings, while two larger vertical works lean on an Italian Renaissance tradition, complete with landscape and drapery surrounding the figures. The show serves as a testament to the enduring power of portraiture as a genre of storytelling, with each painting offering a glimpse into shared human experience across centuries. 

On view from March 7 to April 13 at Albertz Benda NYC. 515 W. 26th Street, New York, New York

Pipenco Lorena's Knitted Gowns Are A Delicate Homage to Her Mother's Post-Communist Immigration


photography by Kelli McGuire
creative direction and styling by Neptune Quek
set design by Lane Vineyard
makeup by Shoko Kodama
styling assistance by Madison Lynn
talent Millie Dunstan & Emma Deegan

The maternal determination to provide a life of opportunity for her post-Communist kin is woven with care into every stitch of Pipen Colorena’s knitwear gowns and slippers. Her newest collection is a delicate transmogrification of her family’s lived experience of immigrating from Romania to London, a push and pull between the pride and struggle of embracing a new chapter while mourning all that’s left behind.

Colorena takes inspiration from the creative exercises her grandmother developed for her as a child while her mother was away at work. After drawing a row of women in dresses on the page, her grandmother would challenge the young designer-to-be to find inventive ways of coloring and elaborating on them based on the various women within their community. Harkening those early mental souvenirs, a coquettish play with the memory of their softness, kindness, and flamboyant nature gives shape and dimension to each and every piece.

There is also a heavy dose of Romanian cinema and art from the 1970s imbued in the gowns, giving them a very personal sense of romantic nostalgia. Finally, to complement the elegant construction of finely knitted fabric, there are moments of conspicuous unraveling—a candid omission of subjection to struggle, the hardship inherent in the process of immigration and assimilation. It is an ode to the fortitude of a mother and a future generation made stronger by the crucible of passion and hardship.

 
 

Read Our Interview of Puppies Puppies on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition @ The New Museum →

Puppies Puppies stands against a pu

Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo, known by the pseudonym Puppies Puppies, is revolutionizing trans and Indigenous visibility through her critically-acclaimed conceptual works of sculpture and performance art. Despite a very genuine and personal embodiment within the work, an air of mystery once shrouded her identity as she initially insisted on a level of anonymity rarely exhibited by artists, particularly of her generation. In late 2017, however, this shifted with the very first reference to the artist’s gender transition taking place in her Green (Ghosts) installation at Overduin & Co. in Los Angeles. Kuriki-Olivo and her then-boyfriend lived in the gallery during the hours it was closed, leaving only traces of their existence during the hours it was open. Here, she taped two estrogen pills to the wall, pointing toward her gender-affirming course of hormone therapy—a subtle gesture that gently opened the door of visibility. Employing the mundane, everyday objects that surround her life is a hallmark of Puppies Puppies’ practice and readymades are one of her favorite ways to reference the art historical canon. An initial easter egg of visibility has since swung the door open to a state of consensual voyeurism in Nothing New, her current solo exhibition at the New Museum where the artist is occupying the Lobby Gallery with nearly constant access to her comings and goings via video surveillance, live stream access, and glass walls overlooking a recreation of her bedroom. Puppies Puppies also points to elements of her multi-ethnic indigeneity—Taíno on her father’s side and Japanese on her mother’s—with the inclusion of objects and spiritual practices that connect her disparate lineages in a form of what the exhibition’s curator, Vivian Crockett, refers to as a memoryscape. Crockett got cozy in bed for her interview of Puppies Puppies on the eve of the exhibition’s inauguration to discuss their creative collaboration. Read more.

Aryana Minai's Roses in a Garden of Ruins @ Allen & Eldridge in New York

 
 


text by Hannah Sage Kay

Pulped paper bricks chart a haptic course between Aryana Minai’s eight Life Forms (all 2023) on view at James Fuentes’ lower-level project space. This rather soft, somewhat squishy pathway opens onto the wall under each Life Form for a reflective pause—during which their material simplicity and repeated compositional structure nevertheless conjure a mysterious world of color, and texture, that enshrines, within decay, seeds of new life. 

When pressed into a thick mess of pulped paper on a wire screen, a discarded textile woodblock from Tehran produces the architectural configuration undergirding Minai’s intimately scaled vignettes. In a rich array of browns, oranges, muddy blues, purples, and an unexpected chartreuse, the water-based dyes that Minai mixes with recycled paper in a blender to create pulp rise to the surface with an effervescent luminosity that remains even after the water has evaporated and the paper dried. Amongst the low-relief pattern left behind by the woodblock, a central archway frames the translucent skeleton of a rubber plant leaf from the artist’s mother’s garden. In the hollow pocket of this orifice are remnants of torn paper collected from the floor of Minai’s studio—the veritable seeds of her work; predicated on use and reuse, growth and decay, they take on a dual significance. Not only reflective of the binary cycles of her material processes, the seeds also allude, however subtly, to family, home, and the charged state of women’s rights in her native Iran. The exhibition’s title similarly speaks to a slogan adopted by the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement: You may have burned our gardens but we kept the seeds! 

These visual and metaphorical allusions may be evident to some and obtuse to others, so it is rather Minai’s poetic material configurations, her imbrication of architectural and illusionistic space, her threading through of specific cultural morphologies into broadly accessible and yet deeply personal terrain that proffer an ensnaring mystery and, as such, sustained investigation.

Roses In A Garden of Ruins is on view through October 14 at Allen & Eldridge (James Fuentes project space).

Martyna Szczęsna Addresses the Challenge of Creating Art in An Ever-Gentrifying Urban Landscape @ Open Source Gallery in New York

In Martyna Szczęsna’s Spectre at Open Source Gallery, the artist has manipulated over 500 feet of nylon construction netting into an oversized ruched curtain, winding it through the KoKo NYC lot space. A playful embodiment of drama, opera and the challenges of securing hospitable space for art and creative expression in the ever-gentrifying urban landscape of this city. The blazing orange work will be on view all summer.

Martyna Szczęsna (b. Olsztyn, Poland) is a multi-disciplinary artist working with photography and sculpture. She is a graduate of the Cooper Union and completed her MFA studies at UCLA. Szczesna lives and works in Brooklyn. Select exhibitions include: ARRAY at Penumbra Foundation, If Rittenhouse– at Callicoon Fine Arts, Portrait of a Landscape at the Museo Sivori, BsAs, and Bronx Calling: The Third Bronx Biennial. Szczesna’s work has been supported by residencies at Yucca Valley Material Lab, Franconia Sculpture Park, HDTS Wagonstations, and The Watermill Center.

Spectre is on view through August 31st at Open Source KoKo NYC Lot at 440 19th Street, Brooklyn NY 11215.

Read Our Interview of Wynnie Mynerva On the Occasion of Their Inaugural US Solo Exhibition @ The New Museum →

Wynnie Mynerva looks into the camera wearing Heaven by Marc Jacobs

top and earrings: Heaven by Marc Jacobs

The question of original sin has no relevance in Lima-based artist Wynnie Mynerva’s Book of Genesis. For their inaugural American solo exhibition curated by Bernardo Mosqueira, the artist will be presenting The Original Riot, opening tomorrow (June 29) at the New Museum with a site-specific installation that constitutes the largest painting ever to be presented by the institution, as well as a sculptural element that was surgically removed from the artist’s own body. The readaptation of both mythology and anatomy is central to Mynerva’s quintessentially plastic life and practice; one that finds itself in a constant state of radical change. Painting and performance are a fluent oscillation of being as demonstrated in their 2021 exhibition Closing to Open at Ginsberg Gallery in Madrid when the artist had their vagina sutured three quarters of the way shut, allowing only for the flow of their bodily fluids to function as necessary. The corporeal roles of masculine and feminine are constantly being subverted and abstracted in works that bleed, scratch, beguile, and thrust their way through the patriarchal canon with an air of wanton ecstasy. The binary creation myth was recently addressed in Mynerva’s first UK solo exhibition Bone of My Bones Flesh of My Flesh at Gathering London earlier this year, introducing many for the first time to the role of Lilith in Judaic and Mesopotamian folklore as Adam’s first wife who was created from the same clay (equal in nature) as her husband. Her pitiable fate varies from one myth to the next, but the creation of a second wife (Eve) from his rib remains consistent. The artist’s decision to remove Adam’s body from their own for The Original Riot demonstrates the power to readapt our personal realities at will. It is a reflection of the agency that we unwittingly deny ourselves when we allow allegory to shape our internalized perspectives. The following interview was conducted in Spanish and is presented here in its original form, followed by its English translation. Read more.

Lanise Howard and Robert Peterson Present "Reflections" @ albertz benda New York

 
Robert Peterson [American, b. 1981]. Soulful, 2023. Oil on canvas. 72 x 54 inches | 183 x 137 cm. Image courtesy the artist and albertz benda, New York | Los Angeles. Photo by Thomas Müller.

Robert Peterson [American, b. 1981]. Soulful, 2023. Oil on canvas. 72 x 54 inches | 183 x 137 cm. Image courtesy the artist and albertz benda, New York | Los Angeles. Photo by Thomas Müller.

 

Albertz benda New York is presenting Lanise Howard and Robert Peterson’s Reflections. Both artists are known for their exquisite paintings of people of color. Given the lacuna of positive representations of people of color in the history of art, both artists contribute to remedying this historical erasure, creating works that reveal their sitters as beautiful, strong and complex beings. The American painter Barclay L. Hendricks (1945 – 2017) is acknowledged as an inspiration to both artists and their work may be read in this lineage of figurative painting.

 
 

Howard creates open calls for models to pose for photographs as source material, and often constructs scenarios in which her sitters wear specific garments in staged poses. Her work positions contemporary African American people as protagonists in paintings that can be read as allegorical and that are often set in ethereal landscapes that imagined a world without colonialization. Howard’s backgrounds range from ombre amber or stormy dark skies to verdant green flora, presenting the earth as a magical protagonist.

Peterson is known for his depictions of young men seen in the reality of their daily lives: do-rags, white tanks, and low-slung jeans, which are often described in pejorative terms in popular culture, are elevated in his work. He focuses, as he says, “on the beautiful thing that is black life”. Working from short photo shoots—he keeps them brief so that they feel natural rather than staged—he uses people from his local area as sitters to create poignant and confident portraits of contemporary black life.

Reflections is on view through July 8 at albertz benda, 515 West 26th Street New York, NY 10001

Seonna Hong Presents MURMURATIONS @ Hashimoto Contemporary in New York

Seonna Hong, Super Position, 2023. All images courtesy of Hashimoto Contemporary.

Seonna Hong, Super Position, 2023. All images courtesy of Hashimoto Contemporary.

On June 10, Hashimoto Gallery is set to present Murmurations, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Seonna Hong.

In her latest body of work, Hong revisits larger figurative themes, relational dynamics and human connection. Looking to these themes as a way of understanding how people are emerging from the pandemic, Hong seeks to reconnect with the world around her.

Finding inspiration in murmurations (defined both as the way in which birds flock together, as well as the utterance of low continuous sounds) and its two distinct meanings, the artist is searching to find ways to connect and communicate. Through this journey, Hong came to understand that human connection is needed not only for contentment, but also for mental and physical well-being. The paintings in Murmurations reflect Hong’s attempt to connect with forgotten landscapes, encouraging us to rediscover the world around us.

Murmurations is on view through July 1 @ Hashimoto Contemporary, 54 Ludlow Street New York

 
 

Highlights from Frieze New York Celebrate Politically & Historically Centered Artworks

NAN GOLDIN Gold, 2016 Archival pigment print, in frame60 1/4 x 116 1/4 x 2 1/2 inches (153 x 295.3 x 6.4 cm)Ed. 1/3© Nan Goldin Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

NAN GOLDIN
Gold, 2016
Archival pigment print, in frame
60 1/4 x 116 1/4 x 2 1/2 inches (153 x 295.3 x 6.4 cm)
Ed. 1/3
© Nan Goldin
Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

text by Jennifer Pjieko

“It’s a lot of work, but I’m free now. I’m free!” Artist ektor garcia gestures to the logo on the T-shirt he’s wearing—a black staffer shirt with FRIEZE spelled out in white letters across the middle. garcia had taken some artistic liberty with the art fair-and magazine-branded top, blacking out the letters I and Z with marker, leaving only FREE legible. 

 
ektor garcia, cadenas perpetuas, 2023 (detail)Welded steel, hand bent, handmade steel hooks, found metal, glazed ceramic with copper wire, horseshoe nails, and crochet leather. Dimensions variable.

ektor garcia, cadenas perpetuas, 2023 (detail)
Welded steel, hand bent, handmade steel hooks, found metal, glazed ceramic with copper wire, horseshoe nails, and crochet leather.
Dimensions variable.

 

We were standing around inside Cedric’s, the top-floor café of Frieze New York, underneath garcia’s installation la llorona, a hanging mobile of mixed-metal woven teardrops that illustrated the indigenous Mexican mythical figure of La Llorona: The “weeping woman” drowned her hungry children after their father, a wealthy Spanish man, abandoned the family, and she sheds tears of mourning for them for eternity. Here, as part of Frieze’s curated program, her shimmering, coppery chains gathered into teardrops evade the heavy, matte black net that is there to catch them and float over us as we get together for cocktail hour (we’re not sure which one we are part of at that moment; the restaurant, like Day 1 of any VIP preview day of an art fair, hosts a cluster of many overlapping celebrations at once, bringing cheers and the pop of champagne bottles to crowds from opening to closing hours. 

garcia’s literal self-expressive wardrobe let everyone know his state of mind: After opening three concurrent presentations across New York City (here at Frieze; at the nearby NADA art fair, at the San Francisco gallery Rebecca Camacho Presents’s booth, and at Artists Space in Tribeca, as part of the group exhibition Clocking Out: Time Beyond Management in addition to the recently closed solo exhibition esfuerzo at James Fuentes on the Lower East Side, the artist was finally free to rest for a little bit. la llorona also comes into the fair along with a wave of other politically and historically centered artworks featured—and celebrated—in the commercial context of having lots of very expensive work on offer (or, even more likely, no longer available). While the past several years of global art fairs have been characterized by glossy abstraction and mirrorlike installations, the booths on view inside The Shed on the West Side’s High Line made space for more nuanced, sensitive forms of art. Company Gallery presented a trio of abstract paintings by Tosh Basco, which could have been an element of the artist’s poetic, fragile movement performance at the new Water Street Projects, a curatorial initiative in the Financial District, a few nights earlier; Michael Rosenfeld dedicated his gallery’s entire booth to works made in 1973, the seminal year when Roe v. Wade made its way through the U.S. Supreme Court; we are now living through the devastating consequences of its reversal. At Alexander Gray’s booth, Bethany Collins’s Antigone: 1998 / 2015 (2023), is a diptych of works on paper, which looks at race and language through handwritten parts of Sophocles’s ancient play. Tehran’s Dastan Gallery presents a survey of the past century of Iranian women artists, across a variety of challenging mediums and forms; Gagosian devotes its entire booth to Nan Goldin, who recently signed with the mega gallery; her heartbreaking images recall pain and loss as much as the golden sunlight that bathes her figures. Playful works, such as Jean-Michel Othoniel’s lustrous strands of pearls of every color at Perrotin offer moments of flirtation and light. 

As the sun started to give a little bit in the late afternoon-to-early evening hours, the multi-floored crowd began to contract up and down inside The Shed; soon it would be time for happy hour everywhere. ektor took a couple of Dobel-stamped poker chips (clever objects to be “cashed” as free-drink tickets) for his friends and collaborators outside the party. It was time to celebrate together. 

FRIEZE NEW YORK 2023, installation view Artwork © Nan GoldinPhoto: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano Courtesy Gagosian

FRIEZE NEW YORK
2023, installation view
Artwork © Nan Goldin
Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano
Courtesy Gagosian

Tim Brawner Presents "Glad Tidings" @ Management in New York

 
A close-up portrait of a blue, blurry face, panicked behind a steering wheel. Tim Brawner, The Escape III, 2023 © Management, New York City

Tim Brawner, The Escape III, 2023 © Management, New York City

Tim Brawner’s Glad Tidings —featured at Management— is equally motivated by a documentarian impulse and the submission to the fantastic and weird, where saturated psychedelia defamiliarizes the compositional playing field.

Brawner’s extreme interest in portraiture yields exaggerated, almost humorous depictions of faces and objects alike, through which affect is pushed to the point of alienation.

When discussing the content of his paintings, Brawner refers to concepts of “the weird” and “the eerie,” specifically in the way Mark Fisher invokes Lacanian jouissance in his discussion of H.P. Lovecraft’s brand of weirdness, where the sublimation of negativity is accomplished through the transformation of “an ordinary object [which causes] displeasure into a Thing which is both terrible and alluring, which can no longer be libidinally classified as either positive or negative.” This serves as a basis for Brawner’s subjects as he pursues content with ongoing consideration for the failure of empathy. 

These images pulsate, stirring a bizarre drama where the audience confronts painted subjects that almost become real. There are passages where Brawner selectively pushes maximalist details, overexplaining the formal aspects so that they become hypnotic.

Text by Reilly Davidson

Glad Tidings is on view through June 18 at Management 39 E Broadway, 404

 

Nicodim Gallery Presents DISEMBODIED Group Show in New York

DISEMBODIED, curated by Ben Lee Ritchie Handler, builds and continues conversations around the violence, ecstasy, and epiphany within out-out-body experiences as-seen from the perspective of those on the ground—the leaps of faith we take to believe those who say their souls depart while their bodies remain. The works in the exhibition cover a wide swath of allegorical and tangible disembodied states, including the spiritual, the telegraphic, the psychedelic, the dissociative-induced, artificial intelligences, and alien encounters. The exhibition includes works by Jeanine Brito, Joshua Hagler, Ho Jae Kim, Rae Klein, Yoora Lee, Laurens Legiers, Tali Lennox, Jorge Peris, Mosie Romney, Nicola Samori, Krista-Louise Smith, and Nadia Waheed.

DISEMBODIED is on view through March 9 @ Nicodim Gallery 15 Greene Street New York