Nancy Littlejohn Fine Art - Houston, Texas

For Observer, I had the chance to speak with artist Lyle Ashton Harris, who was featured in the film particularly for his work in the “Black Male” exhibit shown at the Whitney Museum from 1994-1995, and with director Sam Pollard, about what nuanced Black art is and what this film means in looking towards the direction of Black art in the future.

It’s been over a year since Covid-19 has been hitting the headlines but it’s about this time in 2020 when our lives started getting directly affected by what was coming up. Whether it’s technical issues, supply problems, mobility concerns, or even the lack of motivation, the new state of things forced or encourage a shift of focus for a lot of creatives from the standard field of interest to the new horizons. And one of such people is Deborah Brown whose debut show with Anna Zorina Gallery is on view until February 13th. Things As They Are marks a year in which the Brooklyn-based artist started reconstructing her own experience of reality, celebrating the here and now through a series of quotidian scenes while putting herself as the main protagonist to some extent.

Perhaps the kindest description for the almost 11 months of COVID-19 is calling its effects “unusual.” So why not have one of its most unusual shows at The Grace Museum? Margo Sawyer’s show “Reflection on Color” is nothing short of … unusual. In a complimentary way, and surprisingly built for our isolated times.

Rendered in minute detail yet with painterly breadth, Iliatova’s paintings are fictional syntheses. Mysterious landscapes and intricate interiors are populated by female protagonists, real and imagined; the inspiration is drawn from disparate sources, including Iliatova’s immediate surroundings, art history, American teleseries and Soviet coming-of-age films, such as “100 Days After Childhood” and “Assa” by Sergei Solovyov. Iliatova integrates these disjointed topographies through a complex and intuitive painting process, and uses preparatory studies as touchstones. Her palette is subtle and particular, with muted compound colours and luscious shades of green.

Deborah Brown was organizing a group show with fellow artist Patty Horing scheduled to open in the summer of 2020 when the deadly pandemic forced New Yorkers into quarantine. “By mid-March (2020) as everything was grinding to a halt, I was struck by the opportunity this afforded me to paint a self-portrait that reflected the profound isolation and fear we all were all experiencing,” said Brown. Looking at a small portrait she created of her holding her late dog, a Jack Russell Terrier named Zeus, Brown found new inspiration.

Each week, we search for the most exciting and thought-provoking shows, screenings, and events. In light of the global health crisis, we are currently highlighting events and digitally, as well as in-person exhibitions open in the New York area.

In 2018, The Grace Museum was privileged to acquire Margo Sawyer’s acclaimed 1998 sculptural installation BLUE through an unprecedented collaboration with The Contemporary Austin and the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas Austin. For this exhibition Sawyer installs BLUE in response to The Grace Museum’s unique historical galleries and creates REFLECT featuring new work as an ongoing conversation with the past and present.

Reed Anderson’s Welcome All For You exhibition at Nancy Littlejohn Fine Art is included in the “Featured Artworks in the Gallery Network” page on Artnet.

Samuel Jablon sits down with Erik Sommer to talk about his background in poetry, Joan Mitchell, feeling optimistically doomed, and taking his work to the next level.

In this year like no other year, it’s often been hard to look on the bright side. But as 2020 winds to a close, many of us are feeling hopeful about the year ahead—with a vaccine and a new president on the horizon, and perhaps the chance to see art regularly in person again.

While there is much to mourn, there is also much to be grateful for in the year that’s almost past. So we asked 23 artists, curators, dealers, and other leading figures in the art world to reflect on what they’re feeling grateful for this Thanksgiving.

Houston artist JooYoung Choi has almost lost track of how many zany characters she is living with during the pandemic. They crowd her home and studio, mostly kept in boxes. Invariably, some hog the furniture and fill her head night and day. Choi has made soft-sculpture creatures of felt, fleece and furry stuff for years now, including puppets that appear alongside her in animated music videos, fill her installations and inspire paintings – all of it based on an alternative fantasy world called the Cosmic Womb.

Like neon itself, Peña’s paintings have an otherworldly quality. Beyond his unsettling imagery, Peña’s technique is intriguing and confounding in equal parts. In his paintings, subtle, airbrush-like gradients play against turbid, painterly strokes. The textures and treatment simultaneously suggest layers and flatness, vibrance and opacity. Peña loves to paint, and his luminous surfaces showcase his ample skill. But really, the neon visuals are a subterfuge. His perplexing light effects draw viewers in long enough, in the artist’s words, to “sit with the imagery of what the work is really about.” And for Peña that means the anxiety of being alive, a decidedly less-glowing motif.