Concrete embraces nature in this painting of a ‘disprized’ location by New York artist Rackstraw Downes at Betty Cuningham Gallery. From a seemingly unremarkable spot under a u-turn ramp, Downes considers what and how the eye really sees and how a ‘forgotten’ place might yield a bit of wonder. (On view on the Lower East Side through Oct 14th).
From a couple of everyday guys to this fabulously coiffed model, Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s characters astound and intrigue as layers of personality come together to make a disjointed but coherent whole. Inspired by real characters from his life and Brooklyn neighborhood, Quinn’s paintings acknowledge human complexity while celebrating individuality. (On view at Salon94 Bowery on the Lower East Side through Oct 27th).
Over the past four decades, Brooklyn painter and art professor Julie Heffernan has questioned traditional roles for women in fantastical works that channel art history and champion female agency. Her latest body of work lauds women who have stood up to power in portraits that hang alongside framed paintings that reverse typical art historical power relations. In the background here, Heffernan’s reworks Rubens’ ‘Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus,’ by replacing a man with a woman on horseback, making her rescuer rather than perpetrator. (On view at PPOW Gallery in Chelsea through Oct 6th).
Wealth is a provocative topic for Nigerian-American artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, who depicts two well-heeled fictional Nigerian families in her latest charcoal, pastel and pencil drawings at Chelsea’s Jack Shainman Gallery. Vibrant and moody, the portraits ask – as Ojih Odutola puts it – ‘what would wealth look like’ had colonialism not happened? (On view at both Jack Shainman Gallery locations through Oct 27th).
Southern Indian sculptor Ranjani Shettar’s concern for threatened rural Indian ecosystems informed her dramatic mezzanine installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ‘Seven ponds and a few raindrops.’ Crafted from organic muslin and bound to a welded and molded steel base with tamarind paste, the piece’s floating organic shapes conjure 3-D scientific models, intricate plant life or alien life. (On view on the Upper East Side through Sept 16th).
