New York-based artist Woomin Kim describes Korean street markets with nostalgia, as places to hang out with friends or enjoy snacks. Accordingly, her textile works on view at Chelsea’s Susan Inglett Gallery depict market stalls as colorful and inviting places to buy everyday items or marvel at the abundance and variety of goods. Here, a ribbon store offers towers of stacked wares, alluring in their patterns and possibilities. (On view through July 29th.)
Growing up in Kabul and in Central Asia, recent Yale grad Hangama Amiri was drawn to bazaars and their abundance of textiles, as well as her uncle’s tailor shop. Now in the US, Amiri has sourced similar materials from Afghan-owned businesses to create cloth collages picturing products and places in South Asian diasporic communities now on view at Albertz Benda Gallery. “Fabric as a medium really is associated with memory,” she explains in a statement released by the gallery, “…fabric captures smell, and time, lot of bodily attachments – we are all wearing fabrics. It is also a fragile medium, so it really touches and resembles all those notions of memory I am talking about and it really reconnects with what I am trying to convey in my art”.
Aiming to send messages of “optimism, healing and love” the Art 2 Heart’s SoHo mural project has transformed SoHo’s boarded up storefronts. Here, on the corner of Spring and Greene Streets on panels over the John Varvatos store windows, artists remember those who’ve lost their lives to police violence and insist that Black lives matter. (On view until businesses reopen).
Chicago-based artist and professor Jan Tichy found an outlet for his ‘socially conscious formalism’ in the context of the Lower East Side’s lighting district, where he made work in and in response to the neighborhood’s dwindling number of lighting fixture stores. Layering images shot in the lighting stores, their bright wares hung enticingly from the ceiling, with exposures of actual fixtures on light sensitive paper in the darkroom, Tichy created this frenetic print which mirrors the pace of change in the city. (On view at Fridman Gallery through Feb 23rd).
