8 Not-To-Be-Missed Gallery Exhibitions in June 2022

Paul Laster

Alexis Rockman at Nancy Littlejohn Fine Art, Houston

Through July 2

A New York painter celebrated for his monumental landscapes portraying the negative impact of climate change, evolutionary problems, and the genetic engineering, Alexis Rockman has traveled the world studying and documenting environmental concerns since the mid-1980s. Widely exhibited and collected, he first started making field drawings about the plants and animals related to the site in Guyana in 1994. Monochromatic studies of the flora and fauna in such far-off places as Madagascar, Tasmania, and Antarctica, his drawings have depicted everything from a coyote rendered in soil from the Lake in Central Park to a Smilodon (an extinct saber-toothed tiger) with tar from the pits at La Brea.

The works in his “Field Drawings” exhibition at Nancy Littlejohn Fine Art, his first solo show with the gallery, are part of his “Great Lakes Cycle,” a project related to the five North American lakes, that traveled to museums in the Midwest from 2018 to 2020. The artist’s 2017 drawing, Raccoon, was made in the studio with sand from Cuyahoga River mixed with acrylic polymer, with other works from the series representing animals, insects, bacteria and plants that are here today but could be gone tomorrow.