Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection @ The Whitney Museum of American Art In New York

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection offers new perspectives on one of art’s oldest genres. Drawn entirely from the Museum’s holdings, the more than two hundred works in the exhibition show changing approaches to portraiture from the early 1900s until today. Bringing iconic works together with lesser-known examples and recent acquisitions in a range of mediums, the exhibition unfolds in eleven thematic sections on the sixth and seventh floors. Some of these groupings concentrate on focused periods of time, while others span the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to forge links between the past and the present. This sense of connection is one of portraiture’s most important aims, whether memorializing famous individuals long gone or calling to mind loved ones near at hand. Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection will be on view until February 12, 2017 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York

Elmgreen and Dragset "Van Gogh's Ear" @ Rockafeller Center in New York

This spring, artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset will transform the Fifth Avenue entrance to the Channel Gardens at Rockefeller Center with a large-scale new work. Van Gogh’s Ear is a sculpture, which takes the form of a swimming pool sitting upright. On view until June 3, 2016 at 5th Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets. photograph by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Dodging a Bullet: Read Jeffrey Deitch's Words On Artist Tom Sachs On The Occasion of His Solo Exhibition →

“How did these get here!?” I was shocked to see a pile of stickers on my gallery reception desk in the Spring of 1996 with the outrageously provocative phrase “Nuke the Swiss” printed above a red cross. “They were left there by that funny guy who comes in here all the time,” my staff explained. A few weeks later, I was there when the culprit walked in, smirking as he handed me a fresh stack of Nuke the Swiss stickers. His engaging manner somehow neutralized the egregious content of his free art. This was my first introduction to Tom Sachs, who twenty years later, still visits during his walks around the neighborhood, and who continues to perfect his fusion of radical conceptual performance, Modernist idealism, bricolage and provocation. Click here to read more. 

Nataal Presents "New African Photography" Group Show At Red Hook Labs in Brooklyn

Nataal presents the group show New African Photography in association with Red Hook Labs. The exhibition features six artists - Atong Atem (Sudan/Australia), Delphine Diaw Diallo (Senegal/France/US), Kristin-Lee Moolman (South Africa), Lakin Ogunbanwo (Nigeria), Namsa Leuba (Guinea/Switzerland) and Owise Abuzaid (Egypt). The work of these selected photographers, both emerging and internationally recognized, express the diversity of narratives informing Africa’s rich visual language today. Encompassing documentary, fashion and portrait photography, the exhibition will explore multiple themes that challenge accepted notions of belonging and identity, the everyday and the fantastical; the past and the future; the public and the private. New African Photography will be on view until May 15, 2016 at Red Hook Labs, 133-135 Imlay St, Brooklyn, New York. photographs by Scout Maceachron. 

Last Chance To Sign Up To Have Your London Airbnb Transformed by Yayoi Kusama

Tate Modern and Airbnb are partnering with world-renowned artist Yayoi Kusama, to transform an Airbnb listing into a living piece of art…and you could be part of it. Airbnb hosts with a private room or entire home located in the Greater London area will have a chance to invite the work of Yayoi Kusama herself into their home, and see their spare bedroom transform into an art installation that will surprise, delight and inspire their guests. This once-in-a-lifetime prize also includes tickets for the winner and a friend to the Tate Modern extension opening party on 16 June 2016. Click here to enter. 

Allen Jones "A Retrospective" @ Michael Werner Gallery in New York

Michael Werner Gallery in New York presents an historical survey exhibition of works by Allen Jones. Organized by Sir Norman Rosenthal, the exhibition includes paintings and sculptures from the 1960s to the present day and is the first comprehensive showing in New York of this celebrated and controversial British artist. Allen Jones "A Retrospective" will be on view until June 4, 2016 at Michael Werner Gallery, 4 East 77th St, New York. 

Jean-Michel Basquiat "Words Are All We Have" @ Nahmad Contemporary In New York

Nahmad Contemporary presents its first exhibition dedicated solely to Jean-Michel Basquiat, organized by guest curator and preeminent Basquiat scholar Dr. Dieter Buchhart. Centering on the critical function of language in the work of Basquiat, this comprehensive exhibition will illuminate the artist’s pioneering incorporation of literary and musical elements into his work. Most often identified with both the formal and stylistic aspects of Neo-Expressionism, Basquiat’s linguistically complex paintings place him within the trajectory of the Beat Generation writers and the evolution of jazz and hip-hop. Jean-Michel Basquiat "Words Are All We Have" will be on view until June 11, 2016 at Nahmad Contemporary, 980 Madison Avenue

Love Is Something Heavy: Read Our Interview With Multimedia Artist Sara Rahbar Before Her Presentation of New Work During the NADA Art Fair →

Sara Rahbar is an artist who bravely transverses borders and permeates boundaries. Though often labeled an “Iranian American artist” (her family fled Iran in 1982 during the beginning of the Revolution), she prefers to relocate herself in a collective humanity. Transcending genre, her work ranges from photography and paint to textiles and sculpture. Rahbar’s work reflects this permeability, combining seemingly antithetical ideas – American flags sewn together with traditional Persian fabrics, hearts made out of military backpacks – in a beautiful and generative juxtaposition. Click here to read more. 

Nick Waplington "A Display of Panic at a Moment of Absolute Certainty" @ These Days Gallery In Los Angeles

These Days and Thomas Solomon Art Advisory present A Display of Panic at a Moment of Absolute Certainty, an exhibition of paintings by Nick Waplington. Over the last thirty years Waplington has developed an extensive body of work marked by eclecticism and juxtaposition. While best known as a photographer, Waplington also works extensively with painting, video, computer-generated imagery, sculpture, and found material.  Over the past year Waplington has been living in Los Angeles, devoting his art practice entirely to painting. This show features a number of large semi-abstract canvases rendering the city’s urban psycho-geography as well as its light and landscape. Once again, his work explores themes of chaos and volatility on a number of levels; in these paintings, Waplington evokes the constantly changing light and weather of Southern California in a time of climate instability, the city’s fragile existence on the edge of the San Andreas fault, and the desperate existence of the many men and women living precarious lives on the fringes of Los Angeles’s prosperity. Click here to read our interview with Nick Waplington. A Display of Panic at a Moment of Absolute Certainty will be on view until June 5, 2016 at These Days, 118 Winston Street, 2nd FL Los Angeles, CA

Chaos Theory: An Interview With The Legendary Nick Waplington On Photography, Painting, Skate Culture and the West Bank →

Talking with photographer and painter Nick Waplington is akin to viewing and pondering his work. There is a lot of information to sort through. But if you can find some order in the onslaught of ideas, or the “chaos” as he likes to call it, you will find a perspective wildly and almost enviably unique. The subjects of his conversation are as varied as those within his photographs and his paintings. While Waplington’s work has dealt with environmental concerns, rave culture, the creative processes and inner struggles of the late Alexander McQueen, and (as in his paintings) his own inner monologue, a 40-minute conversation with Waplington darts around discussions about his creative process, international politics, the contemporary art world and the business surrounding it, and even skateboarding. Click here to read more. 

James Georgopoulos "The Earth Is Flat" @ MAMA Gallery In Los Angeles

MAMA Gallery presents The Earth Is Flat, James Georgopoulos’ second solo exhibition at the gallery. Buoyed by four new video sculptures that the artist created out of found, fabricated, and handmade materials, The Earth Is Flat is an interrogation of artificial intelligence (AI) and the values and hazards implicit to autonomous computing. The artist‘s four sculptures themselves are superficially interconnected to insinuate that technology has inculcated itself as an indissoluble event in human history. James Georgopoulos "The Earth Is Flat" will be on view until June 11, 2016 at MAMA Gallery, 1242 Palmetto Street, Los Angeles, CA.