Jordan Castle at the Hill Art Foundation

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Known for painted portraits of family, friends, her students, fellow subway riders, and people she meets on the street in New York, Jordan Casteel pictures her subjects as they choose to be presented.  In this tender portrait from a private collection in Casteel’s solo show at the Hill Art Foundation, the family pictured wanted to be in their garden, so they waited half a year to take the photo that would lead to this painting.  Planted after the parents, Deon and Kym, lost their daughter Naima due to miscarriage, they planned the garden as a gift to her and a way of honoring life. (On view in Chelsea through Nov 23rd).

Jordan Casteel, Naima’s Gift (Deon, Kym and Noah), oil on canvas, 94 x 80 inches, 2023.

Ai Wei Wei at Vito Schnabel Gallery

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Since creating portraits of political prisoners for a 2014 exhibition at the former Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in San Francisco, iconic Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei has used LEGO or Woma bricks to make pixelated reproductions of politically charged images. Now on view at Vito Schnabel Gallery in Chelsea, a selection of toy-brick built artworks picture famous paintings and news photographs with telling alterations.  Ai’s version of Andrew Wyeth’s ‘Christina’s World’ substitutes farmhouses in the work’s background with the artist’s newly built studio in Portugal, a replica of one destroyed by the Chinese authorities. Elsewhere, he adds President Biden to a reproduction of a news photo of the US Navy collecting debris from the Chinese surveillance balloon shot down near South Carolina in 2023.  Here, he adds a dark area in the left of a version of Monet’s Water Lilies, representing the dugout where his exiled family was forced to live during the Cultural Revolution.  (On view through Feb 22nd).

Ai Wei Wei, Water Lilies #4, toy bricks mounted on aluminum, 94 ½ x 472 ½ inches, 2022.

Sarah Sense at Bruce Silverstein Gallery

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Descended from Chitimacha and Choctaw artisans, Sarah Sense employs family basket-making knowledge to dynamically woven photo collages on view at Silverstein Gallery in Chelsea.  Colonial documents, maps and her own contemporary landscape photographs are the material from which Sense weaves patterns inspired by specific baskets created by Chitimacha makers that were once part of the dispersed McIlhenny family’s collection, now housed in the Montclair Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum of Art and Worcester Art Museum.  The trauma represented by these baskets – produced for collectors as Chitimacha land was continually encroached upon and the community threatened – is not their end message, however.  Rather Sense explains that she intends her work as a healing gesture pointing to time’s cyclical nature. (On view through Nov 23rd.)

Sarah Sense, Montclair Rabbit Study, woven archival pigment prints on Hahnemuhle bamboo paper and Hahnemuhle rice paper, tape, 23 ¾ x 23 ¾ inches, 2024.

Olafur Eliasson at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

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From his legendary 2003 installation of a sun in the Tate Modern (made with a semi-circle of lights and a mirror) to more intimate light environments and sculptures of colored glass, Olafur Eliasson creates transformative artworks using deceptively simple means. The centerpiece of the artist’s latest solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Chelsea, ‘Your psychoacoustic light ensemble,’ challenges viewers to rethink how we perceive color, light and other natural phenomena while this time including sound.  In the gallery’s darkened central room, low frequency vibrations can be heard, felt and seen as projected lights respond to the sound waves.  Inviting us to sit and be immersed in the various stimuli, Eliasson describes our experience as ‘seeing ourselves hearing.’ (On view through Dec 19th).

Olafur Eliasson, Your psychoacoustic light ensemble, spotlight, glass lens, mirror foil, tripod, transducer, embedded computer system, dimensions variable, 2024.

Martha Jackson Jarvis at Susan Inglett Gallery

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With their lively, textured surfaces and bold striped patterns, Martha Jackson Jarvis’ large abstract paintings have a strong presence at Chelsea’s Inglett Gallery, but it’s their relationship to the artist’s family history that is most remarkable.  Inspired by research into her great-great-great-great grandfather’s service in the Revolutionary War as a free Black militiaman, Jackson Jarvis juxtaposes lines with abstraction to contrast straight paths of travel with the difficulties of navigating the landscape.  Circular forms point to abundant life, waving pieces of material suggest topography and lush colors juxtaposed with darker tones speak to the rich variety of the natural world.  (On view through Nov 30th).

Martha Jackson Jarvis, South of the North Star, black walnut ink, oil, acrylic, watercolor, arches cold press 300lb paper, and canvas, 99 x 44 x 3 inches, 2020.
Martha Jackson Jarvis, (detail) South of the North Star, black walnut ink, oil, acrylic, watercolor, arches cold press 300lb paper, and canvas, 99 x 44 x 3 inches, 2020.