Out of Town

Out of Town

Letter from Venice 

Contributed by Michael Brennan / The 60th Venice Biennale runs through the fall. This storied, much imitated global event, like an Olympics or World’s Fair, consists of individual national pavilions and topical exhibitions. They occupy Venice’s Giardini and Arsenale. The Biennale generates numerous collateral exhibitions in palazzos, churches, and former warehouse spaces citywide. In addition to the officially sanctioned shows, there are a myriad unaffiliated exhibitions that try to pass themselves off as part of the Biennale by insinuation. It’s a lot to take in.

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Museum Exhibitions Out of Town

Guillaume Lethière’s historical resonance

Contributed by David Carrier / Guillaume Lethière (1760–1832) was a very good French neoclassical painter. Respected and honored in the French art world, he served as director of the French Academy in Rome and was admired as a teacher. Consistent with this stature, the eponymous exhibition currently on view at The Clark Art Institute is robustly curated. In addition to abundantly contextualizing Lethière’s work, the exhibition materials document a life that embodied much of France’s complicated colonial history. 

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Out of Town Solo Shows

Sara Garden Armstrong: Immersively curved space

Contributed by Brett Levine / “A nonobjective idiom; unexpected surfaces; a synthesis of primary structures with surrealism.” That’s Lucy Lippard, in 1966, writing on the group sculpture show “Eccentric Abstraction” at the Fischbach Gallery in New York. Robert Pincus-Witten wouldn’t coin the term post-Minimalism until five years later, but that idea tracked with Lippard’s description and is arguably the strongest conceptual foundation for Sara Garden Armstrong’s “Environment: Structure/Sound III.” First exhibited in 1979, this 2024 incarnation at the Alabama Center for Architecture is a poignant reanimation and re-imagination of post-Minimalism as a practice. Accompanying the work are contextualizing process sketches, the original score, and new risograph prints.  

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Out of Town

Recommended exhibitions + events: Upstate Art Weekend, July 18-21, 2024

Contributed by Karlyn Benson / The Fifth edition of Upstate Art Weekend includes over 145 participants and spans ten counties from the Hudson Valley to the Catskill Mountains. There are too many art spaces and events to mention here, so this list primarily focuses on exhibitions and programs that take place exclusively during July 18-21. Check out the Upstate Art Weekend map for additional venues in the area including museums, galleries, and non-profit spaces.

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Gallery shows Out of Town

Ying Li and Susan Jane Walp: Innovative traditionalists

Contributed by Elizabeth Whalley / Ying Li and Susan Jane Walp’s paintings on paper, on view in concurrent solo exhibitions at Pamela Salisbury Gallery, initially seemed to me to have little to do with each other given the differences in subject matter, its presentation, paint handling, and color. As I thought more about them, though, virtuous similarities emerged in my mind.

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Gallery shows Out of Town

Catherine Haggarty and Dan Gunn: Cerebrally humble and vice-versa

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The direct and unpretentious title of Brooklyn artist Catherine Haggarty’s solo show “Just Drawing,” now up at Geary in Millerton, NY, conveys modest intent: to record on paper the inertial power of everyday life without much prior conceptual mediation. Just draw it. Cats by turns prowling a pyramid and emulating sphynxes on a starry night feature in a couple of drawings, which are meticulous without being fussy, and two others unobtrusively reference Haggarty’s art practice. Together these works and others essay a day in a life grounded by a comforting pet, reveries of icons, an enduring vocation, a familiar room, and scrappy clothing – nothing inherently grand, perhaps, but nothing remotely dismissible, either.

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Museum Exhibitions Out of Town

Christina Ramberg’s powerfully personal eroticism

Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / The erotically charged art of Chicago Imagist painter Christina Ramberg (1946–1995), whose retrospective is currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, aligns chronologically with the second-wave feminism of the 1970s and 80s. Today’s third-wave feminists (some say it’s now fourth-wave) frequently disparage that incarnation of the movement for privileging white women’s worries, and worse, for its obliviousness to institutional misogyny. Fortunately, Art Institute curators Mark Pascale and Thea Liberty Nichols don’t try to pigeonhole Ramberg’s work into that framework. Although she considered herself a feminist, an aggrieved one she was not. Her art was personal, not political, and it doesn’t fit neatly into standardized versions of feminism. Remarkably, the artist found a way to mix together sharp and provocative subject matter about women’s desires with a classical, pristine aesthetic.

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Museum Exhibitions Out of Town

Caroline Burton’s compelling in-betweenness

Contributed by Michael Brennan / I took the train to Trenton, New Jersey – TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES, the old slogan goes – to see Caroline Burton’s painting exhibition “Way Finding” at the Riverside Gallery in the New Jersey State Museum, which also includes a freestanding library, planetarium, theater, a natural history exhibit, an indigenous peoples’ exhibit, and the obligatory outdoor Calder. The complex, originally designed by Frank Grad and Sons of Newark and constructed in 1965, is a classic example of the liberal utopian/modernist cultural center typically frowned upon these days. But I’m happy to report that the campus, self-contained like Lincoln Center, was teeming with visitors from all walks of life. It is very much a living museum, and ideal for Burton, a reconstructed modernist, who in fact depicts its architecture in some of the works on view.

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Out of Town Solo Shows

Nicole Wittenberg’s vacationland

Contributed by Katy Crowe / Upon entering Fernberger Gallery, a welcome transplant from New York, the faint smell of oil paint introduces Nicole Wittenberg’s “Jumpin’ at the Woodside,” the gallery’s inaugural show in Los Angeles. The title references a Count Basie composition, and the work does have the freewheeling feel of jazz. 

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Out of Town Solo Shows

Altoon Sultan’s big little paintings

Contributed by Katy Crowe / The quiet revelation in Altoon Sultan’s current show at Chris Sharp Gallery in Los Angeles is that small can be big. The paintings are compact and jewel-like. They also embody detailed images of large farm implements and machinery, and resonate, in a calm but assertive way, the power wielded by these massive machines.

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Out of Town Solo Shows

Mary Jones: Layered histories

Contributed by Katy Crowe / “Significant Properties,” the title of Mary Jones’s current exhibition at as-is.la and her first in Los Angeles in some years, aptly suggests real estate worth seeing. Los Angeles is rich in such properties, and the cinematic allusions in her paintings are also broadly resonant of Tinsel Town, where Jones lived, worked, and showed before she moved to New York.

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Out of Town

Stockholm’s art scene: Gracefully forward

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / A sense of continuity and integration permeates Stockholm’s grand state museums, its smaller konsthalls, its bountiful old salons, its stylish established galleries, and even its hipster-ish artists’ spaces. Just as consistently, though, contemporary assertiveness challenges tradition. At least on the evidence of an unavoidably incomplete late September visit to the city, the net result is contained vibrancy, exciting and inventive but also richly contextualized and sensibly progressive.

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